THE HOLLOW MAN, by John Roeburt

Copyright © 1954 by John Roeburt.

CHAPTER ONE

Part 1.

There was a great hush, and then the red button flashed on the big studio clock. It was eight o’clock in the evening, show time, and the whole complex of men and gadgets went into motion.

The Number One camera dollied in to hold a medium shot of Johnny Devereaux. On Director’s cue, a Youth with a pulsing muscle in his neck spoke into a standing microphone. His opening announcement was cold; there was no musical backing. What he said was reproduced on show cards on the Monitor’s screen. The Youth said: “The Star Television Playhouse Presents Crack-Up, an Authentic Crime Series from Confidential Files!”

A man with a spray of whiskers under his chin crooked a finger at his galaxy, and there was a crash of music. The fanfare, the several bars of melody that had become the familiar signature of this television show. The Youth with the pulsing neck muscle said, “And now, here is your Host, Tough Cop Johnny Devereaux!”

The face of Johnny Devereaux appeared on the Monitor’s screen, and simultaneously too, on some twenty-two million American screens, as estimated in the last audience survey.

The Host wore a dark blue shirt to insure a better picture, a more subtle harmony of photographic light. The powder was thick on his forehead and on his opaque cheeks. There were round beads of sweat on the powder, like agates of light. He sat at a desk, in a setting that suggested a luxurious office, perhaps truly his own. There was a terra cotta figure of a leaping dancer in prominent arrangement on the desk. The objet d’art, somewhat mystifying to the studio personnel and to Johnny Devereaux, marked the difference between the set designer, Julian, and other men. Against the back wall were rows of books. Crime books, all of them; the precis of this quasi-documentary entertainment. The bookcases were plywood, and not the customary cardboard. A fixed property this, to be used every week. The show was popular, even great, and the happy augury was that it would outlast all others.

The Host moved to a case and found a book. He was awkward, a stranger to his own feet, very nervous about the chalk marks on the floor below him. Coming back, he overstepped a chalk mark, and half of him was momentarily lost to the frame. He fixed a smile on his mouth, while his brow furled in stormy concentration. When he spoke, it was by rote, a mechanical and efforted talk utterly without the sincerity and syrup of the standard-brand Narrator. Here and there in the eighty-odd word narration that advertised the promise of this evening’s tale of blood, greed, and the Furies, Devereaux paused, fumbling, and his eyes were frantic as they consulted the giant script on the off-stage cue cards.

The heraldry done, there was a screen dissolve, and the Number Two camera filled the screen with a medium close shot of a man of prodigious amiability. He was holding a bottle in his hand. His eyes were lighted and his voice fervent, and for sixty seconds now the frame was a tabernacle, and the bromide in his hand was God’s Own Remedy for aches and pains, any and all.

The amiability over, the drama unfolded. It was a brooding tale, part authentic, and the most taken from the Scripter’s imaginary file. The story was a compote of larceny and little people, a small misdeed that inexorably pushed its perpetrator into the greatest of all crimes. An ironic surprise in the O. Henry manner closed the story. After an appropriate musical comment taken from the Peer Gynt Suite, Johnny Devereaux returned on-screen for a didactic minute that pointed up the moral of this and every story, to wit: Crime Does Not Pay. This done, the man of prodigious amiability came back, looking even rosier than before, and with an even greater piety.

Soon a red button flashed the half-hour on the big clock. The show was now in limbo; a cadaver ready for critical dissection by the Agency Men. A burst of grips and electricians spilled onto the studio floor, to dismantle the sets, inventory and store the props. The actors hurried to the dressing rooms. Up in the Control Room, the tired technical crew and Director moved somnambulistically, like men who found creation akin to nightmare. In a back row of guest chairs, two Account Men looked significantly to each other, in the sign talk of espionage.

On an end chair, a guest who looked alien to it all was groaning back into his shoes. He had one foot aloft indecorously, exposing a great toe through a hole in his sock. This man was moon-faced, with thin, long strands of white hair that threaded over a glossy bald dome and pressed into the nape of his neck. He was Sam Solowey, of the Solowey Detective Agency. An amused Solowey, as his expression showed; the indulgent elder who had given thirty minutes to the carnival antics of children.

His feet encased again, Solowey started for the winding steel staircase that led to the lower studio floor and Devereaux’s dressing room. But he changed his mind before the steep descent. He could abide Devereaux the cop, the tough cop. But Devereaux the actor, the wroth actor chafing in the thralldom of grease paint, make-believe and nostrums, was too much of a tax. An hour with this new Devereaux was an annihilation.

Solowey hurried across the floor to the elevator.

Part 2.

She was at his side, across the wide floor, weaving through the pack, matching his great steps. In the labyrinth where the dressing rooms were, he felt her fingers in his arm. They were urgent in his flesh, and Devereaux didn’t have to guess their message. Help, the fingers were a cry for help. Through the sixteen network weeks, the Crime File series up to now, this actress had sought to engage him as Devereaux the cop.

She was stuffed into corsets, big-bosomed and top-heavy, splashed with paint, a dowdy demimonde. But this was only stage illusion; the make-up she still wore from the character role just completed. Nina Troy was a lady with a figure more in womanly balance, perhaps thirty, with the chaste appeal that stings men into egotism and exhibition. Devereaux knew; he’d many times watched Nina Troy and roving males, in the Artist Lounge, in theatrical cafes. And he’d thought of her for himself, in his lonely corner; a cocktail and laughing talk. But there never was laughter in her look at him, never the promise of casual moments and the relaxed man-woman raillery between colleagues in a profession. Always only this seeking need of him, the fingers in his arm. He was always Devereaux the cop to Nina Troy, he told himself irritably. A faceless automaton, a police badge, and a legend.

He freed his arm, not gently, then paused, grasping the knob of his dressing room door to look squarely at her. He imagined her ghostly behind the bright paint; he saw the constriction in her throat, the dark hells in her eyes. He stared hard and long, and the world careened to a grinding halt. He was going back in time, to a time ago that was only yesterday. The face turned up to him, and the begging eyes, was someone else. A younger face, sensitively etched and incomparable. The face of Jennifer Phillips.

* * * *

It had begun like this, like now, the grave still in his heart. The girl, and the outcry. Help me, Johnny Devereaux; you, only you. Only Johnny Devereaux, tough cop, great man of legend.

Devereaux pressed his lips tightly. The reminiscence made him sick, he was sick with it. Great Man of Legend! The legend of his twenty years as a policeman was his trap. He was victim to his own legend. The pulsing beauty of Jennifer Phillips, the outcry and the open countenance, but behind it and beneath it, the cancer eating her away, transmuting her into something gross, and chicane, and murderous. His emotions had been caught, and his heart too in the web. But in the end, in the end revelation, he had remained a cop, a tough cop. He had survived his own death, that more than one death, and had remained a cop. He had turned his back to Jennifer Phillips, and walked away. He had left her poised on the edge of the world, and walked straight away.

Sixteen stories to the ground, and a spiked iron railing in the Pit. I see her now, in my mind’s eye. I see her impaled on the iron railing spikes.

* * * *

Devereaux’s look narrowed. A remembered situation this, so poignantly remembered. Tough Cop and Cavalier; the congenital male grateful for the touch of feminine fingers, fashioning his own crown of thorns. It could happen again to a lonely bachelor in his forties, a man of gland and muscle, yet unloved, celibate. The feel of his flesh could close his eyes. He could be mobilized as a strong man, but made the dupe. Told half-truths that covered motive, used, and jackassed. Women were enigmas to him, their viewpoint elusive, and their reality. They were an ideal to him, perhaps too much. He could not see them finally as beings, only human, touched with sin, and folly, and frailty.

The image of Nina Troy, washed and in her own clothes, on the arm of an escort in the lounges and the cafes, flitted before him again. Svelte, with a body that had found its true season, and a curve to her mouth. Devereaux nodded to himself. He could be made the fool, even again. The situation was the same as that earlier one, and worse luck, the outcome could be too! The apprehension made him shiver. Where was wisdom and insight, he wondered, and the leaven of experience, when a man took sum only of a face and a figure, and his own melancholia.

He opened the door to his dressing room, and regarded Nina Troy for a solemn moment. Then a slow smile played on his mouth. It was something less than fellowship, but Nina Troy warmed to it.

“I’m terribly sorry to be such a pest,” she said.

Devereaux said quietly, “Devereaux the cop. Maybe all this time your approach was wrong, Nina.”

She didn’t understand it. It had no meaning on its face, and anyhow her mind was stunned by its own burden.

She said, “An idea takes hold of you, and it grows crazily.”

Devereaux said presciently, “Your idea that in the whole world, I was the fellow to tell it to.”

“Yes,” she said. “Only you. I became obsessed with it. I couldn’t help embarrassing you, as I have.” Her look seemed genuine to Devereaux. “It is something you radiate, Mr. Devereaux. No, not Mr. Devereaux. Johnny. A force, a sureness.”

“I’ve got keys to the Riddle of the Universe.”

The irony was lost on her. “Concerning you tonight, so shamelessly, I couldn’t help myself. I tried to, but I just couldn’t. My fear; I’m so frightened!”

Devereaux said, “Not now. Not here. Let’s first get out of the make-up.” He smiled. “The way we look, I’ll get it all confused with fiction. Especially with an actress of your talents.”

She smiled to this, and then said self-consciously, “Don’t think me the fool. I’m not always so foolish, so compelled.”

Devereaux said, “A highball and sandwiches, after we’re dressed. I know a lonely corner. I’ve got a lease on it.”

It made no sense to her. Her thoughts were on one track, racing with a speed that already wearied Devereaux. Talk, in a leaping torrent, was the tableau for the evening ahead. Her talk, self-centered, and woeful; he would only be the instrument, the acoustics. A moody tale told to Devereaux the cop. Devereaux the man would still be in his lonely corner, munching his sandwich and sipping his drink, utterly alone.

He watched her hurry down the corridor to her dressing room. Her walk had grace, and poetry—or was it only the mote in his eye, he wondered.

* * * *

Inside his room, he grimaced into a square mirror set with electric bulbs. The face grimacing back was a paste of sweat and powder. The eyes were abnormally deep and gutted; an effect wrought by the shadows painted on for maximum picture quality.

Devereaux glowered at himself. Eye shadow and powder, public self-caricature and odium—at one thousand dollars a week. He disliked the work, despised it in fact, but the money held him. It was the horn of plenty for a detective, first-grade, now retired. It was insurance against wind and drought and old age, and the open sesame to a life he coveted. Books, and travel, white sands, and infinity. And the time also, long postponed, when he could leisurely read Tolstoi’s War and Peace. A whimsical notion, but the symbol of his self-dissatisfaction. He’d abandoned the book at twenty, with a vow one day to resume with it. Between then and now, bulked a busy quarter-century of detectiving.

Devereaux sighed and filled his fingers with cold cream. He looked at his reflection again, before applying the cream, and had a sadistic moment with himself.

Eye shadow and powder, he was thinking. And pristine bachelorhood. How much more did it need to complete his emasculation!

He threw the blob of cold cream at his image, and watched it slide down his cheeks to his chin.

CHAPTER TWO

Part 1.

Devereaux sat in his lonely corner. There was talk, in a relentless assault, that gave him the sensations of the whiplash. He heard her, but his mind was slow to it. He heard her, substantially enough, but with a Third Ear, in an analytical inspection of the welter.

Her story, in its substance, sounded improbable, counterfeit, too glib; a piece of fakery nicely fabricated by a supreme actress. Or was he allowing his own abiding skepticism to get in the way, Devereaux wondered.

He stared at her. The actress paint was gone; she wore her own face. There was beauty of a kind, in the small hollows of cheek, the tight clear skin, the wide brow and the large eyes. The social make-up that he could see, wasn’t much. Lip rouge, a thin trifle only, a trace of powder, and no more. A shade austere, even to a detective who liked naturalism in women. She looked colorless to his eye; there were no facial artifices to bemuse him in this hour of sound and travail. Even her dress slighted him, slighted Devereaux the man. It was severe at the neck, unfeminine in its fall, and drab in color. He’d seen her other times, here in this same café, in more vivid decoration.

She said, “Not for myself. I’m anxious for my son. It’s for him, his future. His pride and self-respect, Johnny. I don’t want him hurt!”

It was a summary to all her talk, and by her persuasion, the nub of it all. This last was said believably, with a correct measure of emotion. The Mother holding her child in innocence and in close shelter. Suffer the blow, but not one hair of my boy’s head!

Devereaux looked at her. There was a flame in her eyes now; the fear was gone. The mouth and jaw had a faintly comical set to them. But her self-characterization had sudden solidity, and the figure captured Devereaux. She was the great lady in bronze, the Mother of Sons, with a great belly and breasts and giant thighs. She stood majestically on a high pedestal, high over the head of Man, in a Museum. On a buttock, like a brand, was the sculptor’s name, Lachaise.

Now it was Devereaux’s time to talk. He began tentatively, with only incidental point. Later, the core of her problem. Right now it awed him, for its size, and for its impact on him. And for its portent too.

“About your son,” the detective said.

“His name is Barry. He’s five. And sweet!”

“Where is he now?” Devereaux asked.

“Away. In boarding school. In Wilton, Connecticut.” There was stress in her tone, and she added, “Home’s the place, I know. With me. For his needs, his great needs. But it’s a fine school, the very best. A progressive curriculum, teachers with understanding.”

Devereaux smiled. “You don’t really need to justify…”

Her gaze was level, and her eyes were dry. “There are costs, and I work to meet them. Plays, rehearsal time—I’m on roller skates. I do TV, and I also have a running part in a radio soap opera. Living with me, Barry’d have no life; so very little of me, of my time. He’d hate it; he’d be bored. But I have a sense of guilt nevertheless. The awful separation!” Her eyes moistened just a little. “I visit Sundays. I try to make the one day do for seven.”

“It’s rough, I can understand,” Devereaux said, settling closer to her problem. “I think I’ve got the picture; what eats you.”

“Destroys me, Johnny!”

Devereaux nodded. “Your son’s legitimacy. The question of how legal was your marriage.”

“My son’s legitimacy. I only care about that.”

“They go together,” the detective smiled. “If your marriage can be proved, then…”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “I’m a ninny. Prove the marriage, and there can be no question!”

Devereaux thought for a while. “You have the marriage certificate?”

She nodded and then said impressively, “Locked away. In my safety box.”

“I’ll want it,” Devereaux said.

A waiter came over to dally aimlessly for a moment. The toasted chicken sandwiches were uneaten, and the drinks were high in the glasses.

Devereaux said, “Another round of the same.” The waiter showed a small perplexity, and then went off with a look that said he was long inured to eccentrics.

The detective’s tone was solemn, as if more nearly oriented to the crisis that now engaged them mutually. A marriage in question, questionable legitimacy of a boy-child, and a missing father. A marriage done in haste, shadowed by certain ceremonial improprieties, and now threatening to stigmatize a child. Stigmatize the Mother too, Devereaux reflected. A bastard child…then an unwed Mother.

Devereaux said, “This job of finding the man you married. It’s nothing simple, Nina. It’s been tried before.”

“I know,” she said in a lost voice. “I know, Johnny.”

“The Tiger Man.” Now the detective was distant, his mind hard on details that had not been told in Nina’s story. The Tiger Man, Rocky Star, was a thorny police problem of long standing. A police problem in Metropolitan New York, and in the world around. A champion pugilist, at the pinnacle of fame, and vanished from sight. A total disappearance, as if The Tiger Man had blown away into the atmosphere. A fevered police search, but no eventuality, or even a clue. Case unsolved; and then the acrimony of the press, and the barbs of the consecrated who had idolatrized their champion.

A shadow crossed Devereaux’s face. The memory had dimmed, and the file had fallen into dust, but the sense memory was even now acute. Never his assignment or case, yet the blow to police morale had cost him too. Every success of the Department, and every failure, had been his sun and frost, and his only life.

His gaze fixed on Nina again, in the great preoccupation of a clairvoyant wishing into a deeper dimension than ordinary surface. Find The Tiger Man, was what she wanted of him. Find a man who could not be found; this wraith in the Universe, this man of mist. Find The Tiger Man; do the impossible!

Devereaux returned to the things she had told him. They were assembled in his mind now, in orderly catalogue. He could remark on them.

“I have a predecessor, you said.” There was a slight curve to the detective’s mouth. “Your champion before my conscription tonight. I didn’t get his name?”

“Brett Carter. Brett’s a friend, a good friend.”

“He was mysteriously beaten, you said.”

She nodded gloomily. “Last night. Morning, I mean—4:00 A.M.” The fear was back in her eyes. “What happened to Brett was on my account. Brett swears no, that he has any number of personal enemies, but I know the brutality was on my account! For what he was attempting to do for me.”

“Find The Tiger Man.”

“Yes.”

“Brett Carter, he’s a newspaperman.”

“A sportswriter, Johnny. He has a column on the Times-Herald.” She touched Devereaux’s hand; a long tapering nail like a pointing spear. It gave the detective an uncanny feeling. He could imagine a ritualistic bloodletting, and then his own oath in blood. To serve her, and shield her, unto death.

He heard her say, “Brett Carter did not involve me, Johnny. He was sensitive to my situation. He was clever! He reopened the question of The Tiger Man, in his column, but not in reference to me. I was never mentioned!”

Devereaux nodded in automatic understanding. Notoriety; the union of The Tiger Man and Nina Troy in the public press—It could only scandalize the mother and the boy. He thought for a long moment. “How badly beaten was he? You didn’t elaborate before.”

“Savagely. There was a concussion, and…a damaged ear.” She looked green and sick and hollow. “After recovery, Brett will need plastic surgery. His face…” The detective regarded her intently. “Other than the merely intuitive, what makes you suppose your sports-writer friend was beaten as a warning to you?”

There was no immediate answer. She was busy pulling a sleeve up above the elbow.

She made a sign, and Devereaux looked. There were discolorations on the arm, brown and black blotches with a mottled purplish overlay.

“And my other arm too,” she said. “And on my back and chest.” Her mouth twisted to form a smile, but her eyes brimmed. “I have an unfortunate skin. The smallest bruise, I’m discolored for weeks.”

“Who beat you?” Devereaux asked.

“I don’t know.”

The detective raised his brows, and she said, “There was a blow from behind. On the ground, I was kicked over and over. I recovered consciousness in a neighborhood drug store.”

“Where did the assault take place?”

“On East Forty-ninth Street, at the turn into Beekman Place. One door from where I live. I’d walked home from CBS. It was ten in the evening.”

“The police?”

“I let them interpret it, when they came to question me.” A look flickered. “Assailant Unknown. A psychopathic sadist, a mugger. The police had a ready answer.”

Now her eyes were a shade odd as they held Devereaux. Her voice had a strange quality, like a shrill child’s at the very limits of imagination. “I’m not to find Rocky Star, or even look for him. That is the meaning of the beatings. Old ghosts, Johnny; I’m not to stir them. Nor is Brett Carter to stir them. There is something deep in Rocky Star’s disappearance. Deep, and dark, and horrible! More than is known, or suspected; more than has ever been known. Rocky Star concerns me, as a missing husband, but I’m just a small figure, the smallest thread. This is my feeling…”

The detective said, “Pull the thread, and the cloth unravels.”

“Yes! I’ve come to understand that, Johnny. The irony of my situation, and the unimaginable peril. I married a man named Peter Black. But to find Peter Black, I must also find Rocky Star. The two names are the same man.” Her mouth quivered. “This simple thing I must establish, isn’t so simple. It’s complex, and tortured. It’s not only alias Peter Black, a missing husband and father. It’s The Tiger Man, a celebrated disappearance, with its whisperings of foul play and foul crimes. With its sordid secret and Shadow Men who beat you on darkened streets. It’s…” Her voice broke, and the tears Devereaux watched scalded him too.

After a while, Devereaux said, “It does have its irony. Your situation, a small figure you represent in a Case that stands high with the great puzzles of the last decade.”

She said, “I must know. It’s my life!”

“When did you become aware that Rocky Star was the man you married as alias Peter Black?”

She said surprisingly, “I knew it at once. He made no secret of it.” She anticipated Devereaux’s next question. “I accepted his explanation for the assumed name. I was in love; I imagined myself to be in love! A secret marriage, secret from the press, and the world. But for a little while only, I was told. There were problems, of a delicate, personal nature. But not my concern. I must not burden myself with them. I must place blind faith.”

Devereaux said, “You entered the marriage contract, knowing the irregularity.”

She said, “I was dazzled, I was delirious, I was young. A great champion and me: a car-hop in a uniform apron. I was flattered by the flirtation. I built a fantasy for myself. Clothes, and furs, and the moon. Rocky Star would furnish a penthouse on the moon.”

Devereaux laughed, eager for this new vein. “Prince Charming with cauliflower ears.”

She said, “I thought him beautiful. I was so grateful to him! I didn’t think to examine, or dissect, my beau. I didn’t pry into his mind, to look for ideas.” Her eyes on Devereaux were wise and candid. “At twenty, you’re something formless, Johnny. You have no idea of what the woman will be, will some day be.”

Devereaux thought he understood it. “Rocky Star alias Peter Black was over your head then. You never dreamed you’d someday be over his head.”

She nodded. “I never dreamed it for a minute. I was frantic, and seeking. I had no skills, or fine schooling, or opportunity. I found menial jobs, and lost them. I had inferiority feelings. I thought myself ugly. I had nightmares about my skin, my impossible nose. In my daydreams, I wanted to act, I was always the actress. I was nothing, less than nothing, and never too far from suicide. When Rocky came along, to single me out, to want me, he was God. I let him pick me up. I let him marry me, in his own way, on his own terms.”

It was light-veined, purposely, as if by frivolity she could disown the young girl she described. But there were currents underneath, and Devereaux was swept up in them.

“And so it went,” the detective said. “And then, the intervening years. But tell me, I’m curious…” Devereaux hesitated.

“Yes?” she prompted.

“Your looks, as I see you. That ugly duckling you described. Where did she go?”

Nina laughed and said, “Wisdom obliterated her. I grew up, and my face was suddenly something I knew I could live with, manage with.” She touched the tip of her nose. “Here where it tilts. The ski jump, as my adolescent dates used to call it. I came to understand its difference from other noses. I came to be proud of it, proud of the difference, and show it off boldly.”

Devereaux nodded to this, and Nina touched a hollow in her cheek. “These hollows, and the symmetry it gives the face.” She flashed a satirical look. “The mystery it suggests, and the intrigue. But the cheeks were grubby once; I was the fat-cheeked barmaid. I remodeled the face. I sculpted it into what you see. By diet, by starvation, by determination.” She smiled across to Devereaux. “Shall I go on and tell you how I redesigned my brow and hairline?”

Devereaux smiled. “I can guess. But tell me how you took on all the maturity. And in five or so short years. Your style of talk, the language and polish. The high intelligence; I’ve been impressed with it all evening.”

Her eyes thanked him. “You grow, or you wither. Five short years can be a lifetime, for the results you can get. Books, and classes, and museums. Lessons in diction, in phonetics, your own daily practice. If you’re desperate enough, Johnny. And a discriminating use of your time. Only people who can further you. Sharpen your ear, sharpen your wits. People with ideas, and good talk.”

A silence fell, then Devereaux said, “Rocky Star alias Peter Black. If he turns up, alive and well, what will you do?”

The answer was quick. “Divorce him.”

“Just the legality of the marriage. That’s your one objective.”

“Just the legitimacy of my son. So it can never be disputed. So my son can assume his father’s name. His father’s real name.”

“How about the boy’s rights generally? The boy’s equity in property, money?”

She knew the answer to that at once. “My son’s rights of course. His father, and property—I don’t want my son deprived of anything.”

Devereaux looked at her. It was a look of liking. She had qualities he admired; a sophistication and candor that beguiled him. His skepticism of before, as much as it was, had fallen. Devereaux the cop; she wanted only Devereaux the cop. But that was all right too. The problem was a fascinating challenge. The mysterious disappearance of Rocky Star, The Tiger Man. In a way, he had a stake in it too. Every cop had. Even an ex-cop.

Devereaux asked, “The sportswriter, Brett Carter. Where is he hospitalized?”

“The Le Grand,” she said, and her great heaving sigh was a live thing. Relief; she had won over Devereaux the cop.

Devereaux smiled. “I’m your man. I didn’t think I would be, but I’m your man.”

Now there was a glow radiating from her. Pride in Devereaux the cop, faith in his method, in his invincibility.

The other Devereaux sat in his lonely corner, looking on.

Part 2.

The face was mummified, and the body lay rigid. The white hospital sheet lay limp as a shroud. There was no rise or flutter, as if the heart it covered had stopped. Standing beside, in an upside-down jar and ready for emergency use, was a plasma jug. At the head of the bed, but behind it, was an oxygen tank and its cone-shaped applicator. Overhead, like a futuristic mobile, was a container of glucose, for intravenous feeding of the patient.

The name line on the hospital card clipped to the bed read: Brett Carter, 38.

The man in the white doctor’s coat looked gravely at Devereaux. It was a Mourner’s look, as if the sorrows of the world lay heavily inside him.

Devereaux turned and quit the room.

CHAPTER THREE

Part 1.

The night was sparkling clear, and the moon low. His eyes were on the stars, and Devereaux had the sensation of telescopic vision. His stride quitting the hospital was first brisk, and then slow as he neared the corner. He was alone on the street, lost in vast spaces.

This street in the East Sixties between Lexington and Park had none of the tumult of the City around. It held the Le Grand Hospital, a Consulate, the Ecole Française, and residences pressed narrowly into plots that were eighteen feet wide. The residences were mainly Stevens Red, thickly painted over the natural brick like a pastiche, and sedate brownstone. Some few were pretentious in their masonry, with scrollwork and sculpted figures across the facade, and vaulted cathedral windows. There were stone lions on some stoop-fronts, aged and hoary and amiable in mien, as if glad for the doldrums of this concrete jungle. These latter buildings were sandstoned to the glinting gray and washed look of mausoleums. Its ghosts were an era; the time of Rectors, the plumed hat and high button shoes, and a nouveau-riche with diamond-set teeth.

The street and the detective were in attunement. The quiet was good, and soothing, like quick sedation in the first premonitory throb of a giant headache. He could meander, unhurried, and think. Think cautiously, in the first whining labors of a long unoiled machine. It had been two years of retirement now, a span of time away from the scheme of crime, and its schemers. His mind had lost its charge; that sharp, sharp-edged, instinctive and special set of responses that distinguished a veteran detective, first grade, from the run of people.

He had reached the corner, to stare distractedly across the sidewalk to his parked Buick. The Buick, vintage 1949, was pointed south, to the midtown hub of Manhattan, to the noise and the rowdy blare of a City that had filled the pages of his young manhood and prime, a City that had keyed him to its reflexes, that had made him wise without wisdom.

The blow when it came sent him crashing as if from a height. It came from behind, to strike the base of his skull. His eyes went blind, and his feet and hands were immediately dead. On the sidewalk, he was one with the cement. Impaled on it, and fusing into it too. There was no dream. He had no mind to dream.

Part 2.

The bare light-bulb hung from a long cord suspended from the ceiling. Vibrations from the street, the cross-town busses on Forty-second Street and on Sixth Avenue that bisected each other’s paths, shook the cord. The sway of the bulb made patterns that did an eerie dance on the walls and ceiling.

The walls were gray-drab; the old paint was a harsh crust on the plaster. The room was a box; it was sparsely furnished. It had a steel cabinet with a convex look from the dents in it, a great desk with a missing drawer, an old leather heart-chair whose springs seemed to rise from the flooring. The walls sported an old show poster advertising Guy Gillette, and a chromo of a man in sideburns whose bony smile and general contentment suggested high governmental position in some earlier time.

The insinuation of the room was one-dimensional. Stare hard at it, and it was a flat canvas with odd surface pinnings; a collage or dadaism, but of a somber and disquieting sort.

There was a legend on the plate glass of the door, inverted from the inside of the room and to be read backwards. It read: Sam Solowey, Detective Agency.

The shoeless man sat uncomfortably on the straight chair. But his eyes were fond, and they were given to the man who lay mathematically and exact on the leather heart-chair. This man was expressionless, his breathing tentative, like a convalescent still unsure of his pulse, loins, brain, and life-force. His head on the upper rest of the heart-chair was arched to form an “L” with his shoulders, keeping the base of his skull from settling against the chair. There were bandages and tape around the skull, white and immaculate and antiseptic. There was a seepage around the edges of the bandages and tape, bubbling like tiny beads of oil on water. More than an hour had passed since the assault on Devereaux, but the blood had not yet coagulated.

Devereaux spoke in snatches of talk. Snatches, then long silences in which he appeared to drowse. It was a slow monologue; the facts and figments in the story of Nina Troy and The Tiger Man. Solowey made no comment on what he was hearing. He just listened, engrossed, his eyes on Johnny Devereaux in a nice radiation of warmth.

A clock somewhere in the City chimed the midnight hour, and it was another vibration in the cardboard room. The building itself was a thing of cardboard, a fabrication of paper and glue and bits of wire that sat whimsically in the bosom of a towering futurism of iron, mortar, and steel. But three storeys high, an anachronism in a crossroads of fantastic realty and land costs, the building housed a check-cashing service, a gypsy tea room, a marriage broker, an unanointed distributor of ecclesiastical pamphlets, a tailor, a provider of wigs and chignons, and Sam Solowey’s solely owned and operated Investigating Service. The great unifying thread that wove this odd and amorphous galaxy into a group that could decently share the small elevator, the single washroom and the littered hallways, was the miraculously low rent.

Long, long after, there was coffee. A portable burner that plugged into a wall socket, and a blackened kettle. Instant coffee with a cereal taste, a spoonful to the individual cup.

Devereaux made a face. He was a connoisseur of coffee, jealous of this one taste if no other, and inclined to disgusted outbursts in restaurants.

“The coffee tastes like rotgut, Solowey,” Devereaux said.

Solowey shrugged amiably. Obese though he was, it was a glandular phenomenon and not a gourmand result. He had little zest for food, or taste. The filet mignon or the frankfurter found him equally disposed. Eat, cram fodder, and get it over with. Food was a mechanical need, the squirt of an oil can. And coffee was universally brackish, all brands and preparations, by virtue of its essence. Fetishists of the coffee bean, tasters and samplers and connoisseurs, were anathema to Solowey. He had his own stubborn notions about culture and the civilized human. And in this account, there was no acceptance of the lowly stomach as index or gauge. Mind, and heart—These were Solowey’s concern and yardstick.

He watched Devereaux sip coffee and fill with torment. He broke into a chuckle when a nauseated and violent Devereaux spilled his coffee into a spittoon.

“You’re back in the land of the living,” Solowey said. “The positive Devereaux, who will never do as the Romans, or compromise his own dogma.”

“The coffee stinks,” Devereaux said. “I’ve tasted better in hobo jungles.” He smiled slightly in a sudden thought. “But I get it. It’s a spoof. You’ve fed me that same poison before, for a laugh.”

Solowey laughed outright. “It’s a brand I keep specially for Devereaux. For these rare and enchanted moments.”

“The gag’s a tired one. Time you gave it up.”

Solowey’s eyes twinkled. “A man who has a conviction about coffee. Coffee, when there is Spinoza! I am eternally incredulous. I must have the proposition demonstrated over and over again.”

“The things that amuse some people,” Devereaux said. “Let’s get down to it now. I’ve given you the story, all there is.”

Solowey nodded, and his brow creased seriously. “The assault on you. You are sure it connects with the case of this Nina Troy?”

“What else could it be?”

“Assault on the streets,” Solowey motioned a palm. “An everyday commonplace.”

“I wasn’t robbed. A hundred dollars in cash and a gold watch; I woke up with it. Except for the beating, my person wasn’t molested.”

“The blow then, for its own sake? In a great City there are barbarians…”

Devereaux’s look rejected it. “Let’s not get psychiatric. We’ll theorize a whole textbook, but only jackass ourselves. I was struck down, then kicked in the head. Someone knew Nina Troy had been talking to me, soliciting my help. It was a warning to me. To butt out, not to interfere, tell Nina Troy to take her troubles elsewhere.”

Devereaux got on his feet restlessly and then sat down to touch fingers tenderly to the base of his skull. “It will hurt for a month!” His look hardened, and an uneven row of upper teeth flashed in a characteristic expression. “Beatings are the style of this Case, from what I know so far. Sneak assaults by a specialist in mayhem. Brett Carter in Le Grand Hospital. And Nina Troy herself. She can’t show her neck or arms.”

There was a silent moment. Devereaux’s stare waited on Solowey. The latter was deep in a meditative calm, his eyes half closed, the moon face curiously Oriental in this cast. He had this way of thinking, akin to trance, and it exasperated Devereaux. Devereaux’s nerves were close to his skin, his speech rapid and fretful and telegraphic, his thinking quick, perhaps too quick. The deliberateness and depth that was Solowey pushed him to the edge of temper.

“Come out of it, Solowey, for Christ’s sake,” Devereaux fumed. He found a cigarette, and a match, but broke the weed between his fingers and tossed it into a corner of the room.

The hour chimed somewhere in the City again, and the light-bulb began its undulation. A bus on the street below coughed into the autumn cold, and the light-bulb began to spin.

Solowey spoke with shadows moving from his left cheek, to the right, to his left. “You weren’t too coherent on your bed of pain, Devereaux.” A shadow cut his smile in half. “A man with a broken head. The babble required reformulation, and editing.”

“I told you everything, exactly as Nina Troy told it to me. If you didn’t get it right, it’s senility taking over!” Devereaux added irritably, “The trance you drop off into. I don’t think it’s cerebration. I think it’s your gimmick, to steal forty winks!” Solowey laughed and said, “It is 1:00 A.M.”

* * * *

“Let’s organize it then, so we can both go to sleep.” Solowey nodded. “The Tiger Man. We are to find him, on behalf of a distraught wife and mother.”

“Find The Tiger Man, or find out what happened to him. Where did he disappear to; was it the amnesia pugs with softened heads develop—Or was he murdered?”

Solowey looked at Devereaux keenly, “You are sure you want the activity?”

“I’m stuck with it,” Devereaux said. He added wryly, “People keep remembering I’m a cop. I mean, was.”

Solowey studied Devereaux for some moments, like a man reading secret writing. “People keep remembering, and you remember too.” He nodded as if he had drawn some private conclusion from his study. “Perhaps it is for the good, before the machine falls into rust.”

“We’re back to psychiatry,” Devereaux said.

“Before the man falls away,” Solowey persisted.

Devereaux grinned, to deflect the barb. “Okay, so I’m bored. I’m an actor who can’t act. But let’s not overcapitalize it. A colleague in distress got to my ear. I kept her away for months, but tonight she caught me with my ennui showing. So okay. A missing fight champ, a genuine celebrity—Where did he go, who did him in? It has its fascination, the puzzle provokes, I don’t deny it. It’s back to the salt mines, for a last fling with the shovel. A kind of refresher for Devereaux, to see how flabby is the muscle. A last fling, and then maybe I won’t be so bored.”

Solowey said, “You are a detective, my good Devereaux. You wear your retirement as a Cross. But—that is your quarrel with yourself. Let the rationalization stand. A last fling with the shovel. Now, how do you expect to operate?”

Devereaux frowned. “Expect to operate? Oh. You mean, where’s my authority?” He thought for a moment. “You operate, Solowey. Your license. I’ll work out of your office, representing you, as your associate. As your helper. If there’s a fuss, I’ll file for a private license.”

“File, Devereaux.” A sly look hovered on Solowey’s face. “Inevitably, so why not now? The actor who cannot act. A tough cop selling headache remedies! But I am pillorying a man with a broken head.”

“The assault for its own sake.” Devereaux smiled. “In a great City, there are barbarians!” He reached into his pocket and produced a wallet. “These are your instructions, your immediate stint. And bright and early in the morning—Don’t hound the pillow! Everything you can dig up about The Tiger Man. Every living fact and dead. His people, background, associates and friends. And of course, his enemies. His habits, virtues, vices, and did he beat his mother. The stories of his disappearance, the versions of it. Facts, theories, rumors. All the gossip, all the scandal. A portrait of the man, as complete as you can assemble.”

Devereaux extracted some bills from the wallet. “Spend and spend. Buy any secret for sale. Get out of your miserly habit. I’m a rich actor, I’m not spending wages. So don’t identify with my money! Wave the green around, so tongues will loosen up. Action, Solowey, as fast as you can get it. So we can find some orientation.”

Devereaux crossed the room to the door. His good night was barely audible.

CHAPTER FOUR

The eyes were behind glass, extra-thick lenses, and they gave Devereaux the sensation of watching fish. He waited quietly for the man he had come to examine to adjust to the surprise of this moment.

The man looked the characteristically absent kind, slow in movement and vague. The man made fussing motions with a senile hand: a book closed here, some crumbs brushed into a heap on a tablecloth with a checkerboard pattern, a burning cigarette stub moved from its precarious tilt on the ledge of a small ash-tray. Then the eyes magnified grotesquely against the glass, to peer at the detective as if sight had required all this time Devereaux had been in the room.

“Devereaux, the detective,” the man said familiarly.

The detective said, “We’ve met before, Hobie. We’re strangers, and we’re not. In the Broadway swim, you make circles. After a lifetime of it, you’ve touched everybody in the pond at least once.”

Furrows that fell to the chin deepened, as if Hobie in some reverie of his own, was adding scope to the detective’s observation.

“You’ve come to ask me about The Tiger Man.”

It was said wearily, a bloodless speech that conveyed volumes. Manifestly the question had been put to Hobie before, so many times before, it whispered in his head. Devereaux stared closely and intuitively at the fight manager, and found a perspective. This hollow man, Hobie Grimes, far older than the sheer tally of his years, had been pillaged by the event of The Tiger Man. The Tiger Man, in its compass of story and climax, was the sum of the waste and the agony in this shrunken elder who wore eyeglasses as a mask.

Devereaux said, “I don’t know whether it was good or bad. But you were integral to the legend of The Tiger Man, Hobie. I’ve come from a long morning of reading. Periodical stuff, old newspaper clips. You were Manager and Mentor. Over a whole decade. Close, as consanguine as two people can be. Now tell me, what happened to your boy?”

Hobie said, “What happened to my boy? It’s a line on a tombstone, so old you can hardly read it. Why do you waste your time, Mister Devereaux!”

A morose moment passed, and Devereaux said, “It’s probably coming out of your ears by now, I know. But while the mystery holds unsolved, you’re fair game, Hobie. Any time a cop with time on his hands gets to thinking about The Tiger Man.”

“I’ve been nailed to the Cross. A nail a day for five years. Hammer away, Mister Devereaux. I can’t feel a thing.”

“Oh, can’t you,” the detective’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “You’re more of a ghost since I came in. You were white then, you’re green now.”

“I’m sick,” Hobie said. “Low blood pressure, I’m anemic, my heart skips. I’ve got a shelf of medicines. My doctor says no excitement, only peace and quiet. But fellows like you come around to turn me green.”

“You’re sick,” Devereaux said. “No question of it. And I’m sorry, Hobie. But I think I can add to the diagnosis!”

Hobie’s lips formed the curve of a smile. “Sure. You’re analytical. I never met a policeman who wasn’t also an M.D. In his fantasies, I mean. I’ll say it for you. I’m sick over The Tiger Man. I’ve got cancer of the stomach and brain because of The Tiger Man.”

“Yes, I think so,” Devereaux said.

“I’m sick over The Tiger Man. Sure I am,” Hobie said. “I’m sick of being fair game for detectives with time on their hands.”

“You’re a man with a secret, Hobie. The secret’s eating you up alive,” Devereaux said stubbornly.

“You can tell, hah.”

“It’s all over you, Hobie. In neon lights. I’ve seen you around other times, in happier days, in that big Broadway pond. A small man, but wiry. Locomotion on wheels. Life in both fists, and the Racing Form in your teeth. All the time on the go. A dynamo.”

“Leave the snapshot. I want it for my album. I’ll owe you the twenty-five cents.”

“Now you’re fifty like ninety. Bones sticking out, St. Vitus’ dance in your hands, and eyeglasses styled for a blind man because you’ve cried your eyes out.”

The detective held his tongue, and his eyes followed Hobie’s course. The little man had turned away, to walk to a corner cupboard in the measured pacing of an inmate whose only life was his room. The head arched a little, and Hobie took one gulping swallow with his back to the detective. There was a sound of bottle and glass and the cupboard door catch.

Hobie twisted to say, “Another time, Mister Devereaux, if I’m a current entry in your assignment book. I’m tired. I want to take a nap.”

Devereaux said unyielding, “In my long morning of reading, there were Hobie Grimes vignettes. You were good copy in your day. One same word kept popping up in all the accounts. Teetotaler. Abstinence was a religion with you. You made it a rule for everybody. Every boy in your stable, the seconds and trainers. You once gave a business lawyer the toss when you found out he was a rummy.”

The curve of a smile was back on Hobie’s mouth. “I was born in Chautauqua. My father played the Carillon in a tower a mile up in the sky. My Mother sang in the choir. I saw the Devil before I saw God.” The smile widened as if Hobie was enjoying his vein. “I had sin confused with whiskey until I was past forty. I had to taste whiskey to find out my Father was a liar and a dope.”

Devereaux kept to his interrogation. “A blood count right now, and the only thing fueling you is alcohol. I’ll make a wager.”

Hobie shrugged indifferently, and Devereaux said very quietly, “You’ve let it gnaw at you for five years. Now it’s gnawing at the husk. I don’t have to be a self-fancied M.D. for the observation. Why let it kill you? Get rid of it, Hobie. Some secrets don’t square with the costs.”

“Your imagination’s sailing, Devereaux!” There was a first small edge in Hobie’s tone.

Devereaux picked up the gauntlet, eager for the quarrel. He was more at home in quarrel. Subtleties and indirection only up to a point—Tooth and claw had a more satisfying reality for him. It was perhaps the only true reality for him. He could feel his mettle, his muscle too, and his blood. In this familiar pulsation of himself he felt safer, more certain of his skills, and even invincible.

The detective said sharply, “Where is The Tiger Man?”

“I’ve answered that question a hundred times. To as many detectives. It’s all on the record.”

“I’ve seen the record. The question was never answered! Evasions, doubletalk, and plain lies. A hundred plainclothesmen came away with the feeling that you were the kind of actor who wins Oscars, Hobie. You jackassed every one of them.”

The detective narrowed the gap between them and Hobie had a wilting moment. He retreated awkwardly, to sit uncomfortably on a straight chair, his head oddly erect and muscles everywhere in his cheeks and throat.

“A case is marked Unsolved,” Devereaux continued. “But that doesn’t close down on it, Hobie. Not in five years or fifty. All time does for you is postpone an accounting.” His eyes swept the Fight Manager. “Five years, and you’ve clammed up tight, and look at the result of the awful silence. You’re a stick, you’re sick, you’re even one shout away from insanity.” The detective’s mouth pursed unfeelingly in contempt. “A stoic your size and style, I’m unimpressed. One tap and you’ll spout from a thousand holes. The truth, unholy or not, will pour like an almighty flood. So far all these years you’ve only had to suffer talk. The polite formalities of cops with an overdose of etiquette, cops under wraps, cops who confuse their nightsticks with fairy wands. They questioned you, sighed with your lies, made perfunctory notes, and then went away. Nobody yet has been impolite enough to tap you, Hobie!”

Hobie had another wilting moment. His eyes on Devereaux had sudden definition behind the thick lenses. No longer fish with magnified heads. The eyes now had content and depth, and they could be read. The eyes were frightened and supplicating and begging.

The detective continued relentlessly, “Devereaux the detective. I was someone familiar to you when I came in. Then you also know something about how I work.”

An attempt at defiance didn’t come off. Hobie’s eyes failed to light. They continued frightened and begging. “Devereaux the tough cop,” he said. “You hurt people.”

“I make the Law felt,” Devereaux said. “The Law keeps us from being apes.”

“You have no right to lay a hand on me.”

“You have less right to conceal the truth, to keep shut.”

“I can prove my right,” Hobie said.

“Constitutionally, do you mean?” the detective pressed. “Your right to silence on plea of self-incrimination?”

Hobie didn’t reply to it, and there was nothing in him to show that the thrust had perhaps found flesh. He was as he’d been. Silent, his lips clamped into chalk, the eyes begging.

Devereaux sought a new tack. “My morning reading I mentioned before. I was steeped in The Tiger Man; papers as high as my waist. I hadn’t been aware of his size in the world quite. I was never the hysterical fight fan. I never got past World News to the Sports Page.”

It touched something in Hobie. He spoke almost involuntarily, in a voice close to a whisper. “The Tiger Man. Forty-four straight wins, thirty-seven kayoes. It’s in the history books. The Champion of our times.”

It suited Devereaux’s tack. “A figure that size cannot be erased. Oblivion, without a good-by even. More than to his own life, The Tiger Man belongs to everybody. In a very great sense he’s public property, Hobie. And when he disappears, the people want to know how and why!”

Hobie said, “Who stole the statue from the public park?”

The remark sounded odd to Devereaux, and irrelevant, and unexpected. Then it echoed back again for him to try to understand it, and value it. Who stole the statue from the public park. Was there an emotion implicit in the thought, he wondered. A melancholy, perhaps even a tear?

Now Devereaux’s eyes hounded the Fight Manager. “What did that mean, Hobie?”

Hobie shook his head slowly. “Only words. Borrowed words. A line from somewhere, and it fell out of my mouth. I’m a jukebox.”

“It sounded like from your guts,” Devereaux said.

Hobie’s face looked just a little greener, and then the mouth once again formed that shadow of a smile on the little man who was too dead for laughter.

“I’m the kind of an actor who wins Oscars,” Hobie said, and there was soft mockery in his tone that inflamed the detective.

“Where is The Tiger Man?” Devereaux said.

“You’re repeating yourself,” Hobie said.

“Over and over again,” the detective promised. “I’ll be in and out of here day after day. The same question, Hobie. The one question! You’ll live with it, you’ll go to bed with it, you’ll wake up screaming with it. A refrain in your head repeating until it drives everything else out.”

“So I’ll go crazy,” Hobie said.

“I’ll strap you to your bed and take charge of your house key.” The detective’s mouth was the thinnest line, and his eyes were cold. “Keeper of a lunatic. I’m up to it, Hobie, capable of it. Try me and see. You’ll be my secret, until I learn yours. Now, where is The Tiger Man?”

Hobie contracted for a moment in a seizure that passed. Later, when he spoke, Devereaux had the feeling that the little man had sought and found a deep resource in himself, a last vein from which he could mine the fuel it took to contain the assault of a tough cop.

“He’s on an island,” Hobie said. “But don’t ask me which one.”

Devereaux said levelly through his teeth, “What’s he doing on an island?”

“Painting. The Fulton Fish Market from memory. Fish piled higher than the barrels. The Tiger Man always had a yen for painting. Is that a crime? He got very fed up with crowds and the Royal Treatment. So he went away.”

Devereaux said, “Where is The Tiger Man?”

“He’s on a Mountain Top. He’s incognito. He grew a beard and developed a stoop. He’s writing the story of his life. He doesn’t want to be annoyed by people or cops.”

Devereaux said, “For five years?”

“The Tiger Man came off the lower East Side. No chance for education, Devereaux. He was forced to earn an early dollar. He’s illiterate, even by our standards! He has to look up every word. A book can take him forty years. Now you know, so go away and leave me alone.”

Devereaux said, “Where is The Tiger Man?”

Hobie tried to quit the straight chair, but fell back wearily, pushing buttocks deeper into the chair. He spoke in the toneless vogue of his last remarks, “I’m numb, I can’t feel my body. I want to take a nap. Right here in this chair, Devereaux. Wish me pleasant dreams.”

Hobie was suddenly erect, taller than his height and tipped high on his toes in Devereaux’s grasp. The coat pulled to a level with the little man’s ears, and there was the sound of a tear at the armpits.

“You’re small, Hobie, and three-quarters dead,” Devereaux said. “It’s taking physical advantage, and I’m a bully and a savage.” He held Hobie in front of him; a dangling figure on a gibbet. “One tap might cure you, the one tap might kill you.” The detective seemed to hesitate in a small examination of himself. Then he freed a hand and his palm cut hard into the air to free the figure from the gibbet.

Hobie fell, and a spurt of blood from where the mouth hemorrhaged covered the left side of his face. His eyes closed and the face settled oddly, as if sleep were worth the price of escape.

Devereaux closed the door behind him and took the wooden staircase slowly. It was a rooming house in New York’s Chelsea, close to the piers, old-law and derelict, a tinderbox forgotten by the substantial City around, where people could hide and light a flame to the hour, or to yesterday.

Devereaux flattened against a wall to allow a couple to pass in their ascent. A longshoreman whose breath whistled through his nose, and a blonde lady. Much too blonde, the color of straw after too many suns.

They’d long disappeared into the upstairs, but the odor clung to Devereaux. Cologne and whiskey and the stink of undergarments and unwashed bodies.

The air in the street increased his feeling of nausea.

CHAPTER FIVE

Detective Sam Solowey stuffed himself into the narrow dining booth like a man forcing mass into a pressure chamber of volatile gasses. And then, winded from the exercise, he sat waiting for breath. Devereaux was across the table, with food already standing before him.

The room around was a soda fountain-luncheonette-cigar and candy store, all in one. The sandwich specialties were delicatessen meats. A Chef stood on a raised platform wielding a long, gleaming knife. He wore a high white crown and a small penciled mustache whose upturned ends were arrows pointing into his nostrils. It was three in the afternoon, but there were diners for every high fountain stool and all the booths along the wall. They sat in their hats and coats, overheated and filmy from sweat, sucking air greedily between bites, as if fighting strangulation.

Solowey said chidingly, “A discriminating choice of rendezvous, Devereaux.”

Devereaux took one-half of his sandwich and placed it before his companion. “Try to order, you’ll be an hour waiting. This will hold you.” He looked intently at Solowey. “I’ll listen to your report.”

“Not in this Inferno,” Solowey said protestingly. “I have notes, and papers. Where are my elbows, where is the room!”

“Orally,” Devereaux said. “I’ll read the paper work myself later.”

But Solowey looked unconvinced. Bolt upright in the booth, he was a prisoner in the stocks. He shook his head. “The din is too formidable. I can’t hear myself think.”

“Don’t think, just talk,” Devereaux said impatiently.

Solowey’s eyes had the subtlest twinkle. “I have earned Civilization’s right to civilized living, Devereaux. A chair equal to my size, so that my knees respect my stomach. And my voice in my own ears too, so that I may enjoy the quality of my thoughts.”

“Your bovine comforts,” Devereaux said. “Love them! But don’t beat me with them. Now, about The Tiger Man?”

“Rocky Star, born Rocco Starziani. In 1917.” Solowey’s monotone was that of a Court Bailiff. “He was middleweight boxing champion of the world at the time of his disappearance. Some twelve months after the disappearance, the title was ordered vacated by The New York Boxing Commission. An elimination tournament of likely aspirants was launched to decide the succeeding champion.”

“Give me only pertinent stuff,” Devereaux said.

Solowey looked mildly offended. “A man disappears, but totally, everything is pertinent. The least detail, the smallest minutiae. The count of his toes, his vogue in cuff links.” He stopped to smile, but found Devereaux unamused.

“I’ve already done a spate of research myself,” Devereaux said. “Rocky’s biography, some of it. Names in his life and stuff, and a man named Hobie Grimes. I already know the general scheme of Rocky’s public life.”

Solowey had a floundering moment. “All right then, chaos before method,” he said finally, in the mildest rebuke. “Many things have impressed me, and I give you two such. The Tiger Man is gone, but a shrine to his memory stands. Consider what I say, Devereaux! A modest apartment whose windows look across the river to the Palisades. A bachelor’s apartment. The Tiger Man’s last known abode.”

“And it’s a shrine, you say?”

Solowey-nodded. “Five years, and five-times-twelve is sixty. Sixty notices of rent, and each paid promptly, nothing left in arrears.”

“Who’s been paying the rent?”

“A Max Toller. Toller was trainer to The Tiger Man, from Rocky’s first fight to the last. Today Toller is a taxi-driver.” Solowey’s tone made a point. “The apartment rental is two hundred dollars a month.”

“Heavy tariff for a cab-driver,” Devereaux said. “But he lives in it, huh? Toller moved into the apartment?”

Solowey shook his head. “No. A shrine, Devereaux. I chose the word for its literal meaning. The faithful do not molest a shrine.”

Devereaux arched brows. “It’s so crazy?”

“Everything in the exact arrangement it was on the day Rocky disappeared. The furnishings so, the bed linens fresh, The Tiger Man’s clothes still in the closets. The pictures on the wall, where the pugilist liked them. His favorite bourbon stocked in his private bar, his favorite scent in the air, and his monograms everywhere the eye can see. Toller, Max Toller, merely comes to oversee the maid in her weekly visit. He is the caretaker of the shrine.”

“Where did you dig up all this?” Devereaux asked. “From the landlord’s agents, Newberry and Newberry. Having ascertained The Tiger Man’s last home address…” Solowey didn’t complete the obvious. Soon he added, “My description of the interior of the apartment is of course secondhand.”

“Who’d you get it from?”

“The domestic. A sedate Scandinavian lady with a great wart on her nose. Aune Aho, her name.” Solowey chuckled reminiscently. “The shrine is the great drama of her otherwise drab life. She did not need to be coaxed into revelation.”

Devereaux’s eyes followed a sharp animation in the room. A race for a stool, between the genders, and the epithetical fury of the loser.

“Sounds twice as obscene, coming from a woman,” Devereaux said.

“From a man, it’s earthy talk. From a woman, it is blasphemy,” Solowey said.

Devereaux looked critically at his friend. Knowing Solowey, he knew there was a sly intent. He knew too, in some approximation, Solowey’s obscure and analytical vogue in observation.

“It’s because I saw my Mother as a Saint,” Devereaux said wryly. “Now I’m a man with a halo in search of some female head it might fit.”

“There are better styles in ladies’ hats. Far more attractive. Look into shop windows. A halo can only attract another angel, never a man. Women feel their flesh, Devereaux, as a man feels his. The spirit can wait, and the disembodiment. And Heaven can wait too. It has no calendar.”

Devereaux said, “We get into these hassles! But back to Max Toller and the shrine to The Tiger Man. Did any of this come up in the original police investigation?”

Solowey nodded. “The police knew about the shrine. There was a detail stationed outside the apartment for a whole year after The Tiger Man’s disappearance. Another detail was assigned to Max Toller. He was watched, a ceaseless surveillance, day and night.”

“Toller was of course questioned.”

“Questioned, and even remanded to Bellevue for psychiatric examination for a time. Toller suffered the slings in the best style of a martyr.”

“No police result at all?”

“Not the smallest spray of illumination from Toller. The Tiger Man had disappeared and that was all. Toller was woeful, sick with bereavement, mystified, and exasperatingly dumb. He had no knowledge, or information. Only the sorrow in his heart!”

“And the shrine,” Devereaux added somberly. After a moment he said, “Necrophilia, sentiment, or a piece of artifice with a shrewd reason behind it—Which? I’d be interested in reading the report on that psychiatric examination of Toller. To know what species of nut we’re dealing with.”

“I have made the proper overtures,” Solowey said. “A transcript of the psychiatric opinion. We can, however, expect some delay.”

Devereaux nodded understanding, “Channels, I know. Is there a word I detest more! There were two findings that impressed you so far, you said before. What’s the second one?”

“Aldo Starziani. Rocco’s brother. Younger, one year younger. I have his address in my notes.”

“What about Aldo Starziani?”

“Aldo lives with the father. There was a situation between the brothers. The true nature of it, I can only speculate. Sibling rivalry, the traumas of boyhood, Aldo’s jealousy of his brother’s achievement…”

“You’re all over the landscape again,” Devereaux said. “Don’t speculate. Report.”

“There was bad blood,” Solowey said durably. “Estrangement, and hatred. I am not afield now, Devereaux. What I say is an extract from the record in our Magistrate’s Court, the Special Sessions Term.”

Solowey continued, “Aldo Starziani was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. A kitchen knife. The Complainant was The City of New York in concert with the victim.”

“Rocco Starziani.”

“Yes. Rocky Star, our Tiger Man.”

“What outcome?”

“A ten month sentence in the Workhouse for Aldo Starziani.”

“Stiff, sounds to me,” Devereaux said.

“The Public Defender assigned to the penniless Aldo pleaded for a suspension of sentence. On the basis of the very minor wound inflicted on Rocky, and the moral premise of undue cruelty and hardship to an innocent party.”

“What innocent party?”

“The father. Onofrio Starziani, an indigent and invalid. A wheelchair case. The father was dependent on Aldo for care and support.”

“But Aldo went to jail.”

“Rocky was relentless. He wanted full measure of justice.”

“Full measure of revenge,” Devereaux said.

Solowey nodded. “The cut on his arm required six small stitches. The bruise to his ego was undoubtedly infinitely more painful.” He stopped and smiled. “But I am speculating again.”

“Assault with a deadly weapon. We can construe it as Intent To Kill. The kind of passion it takes to do murder was there.” Devereaux lapsed into a small, thoughtful silence. “And ten months in the Workhouse, Solowey. Sometimes it calms a man down, drives a lesson home…”

“Or it adds fuel,” Solowey said. “Now Intent To Kill becomes an absolute need to kill. The cruelty of the sentence raises passion from its depths to the more lofty level of Creed. Now Murder is more than an act of anger, it is an act of honor. An injustice has been done. The victim-to-be is more than a hated enemy. He is a Persecutor, and a Symbol.”

“Whatever wound you up today?” Devereaux said.

Solowey smiled. “You have, Devereaux. By your insistence on the humdrum and the factual only. That I am to compress myself into a clerical recital of memorized research. Too confining, my good friend. You perversely undervalue my size, even as you did in choosing this confounded dining booth.”

“We’ll weigh your ego and you on separate scales someday,” Devereaux said unsmilingly. “To find out which is heavier.”

A pause fell, then Devereaux returned to the matter on hand. “Aldo Starziani. He could have murdered his brother finally. Murdered Rocky, like an obliteration. Corpse done away with.”

“As suspects go, you have a suspect,” Solowey agreed.

“Max Toller, and Hobie Grimes. Add two more pathological personalities,” Devereaux said.

“Hobie Grimes?” Solowey’s brows raised slightly. “What is his disorder?”

“Sudden spasms and seizures, like an epileptic. Bony and emaciated; more than a man can be and live. Something’s eating him alive, Solowey. Guilt, or plain misery, or the medical complaints he claims, I don’t know.” Devereaux looked closely at Solowey. “Describe the Hobie Grimes you remember around town.”

Solowey thought briefly. “A man of nervous agility. A hellion on wheels. Vibrant, astute, extroverted, colorful, tireless. I can tell you anecdotes…”

“Don’t bother to. But there’s my point, in your description. The change in Hobie, the shocking deterioration. Why? What did it?”

“You questioned him?”

“He didn’t tell me a thing.” A corner of Devereaux’s mouth turned up. “The Tiger Man is on an island, and on a mountain top. Places without a name; call them Shangri-La! He’s gone antisocial and native. Hobie’s trotted out the same cute ad fibs with a hundred detectives. To cover up, laugh at us behind his palm.” The detective’s tone hardened. “To cover up Murder. I’m a dunderhead who calls it Murder, until I’m corrected in my mistake. Corrected by facts, and not ad libs and whimsicalities!” Now Devereaux nodded almost surely. “Murder, Solowey. I’m not really looking for The Tiger Man. I’m looking for his corpse.”

Solowey said, “You think Hobie Grimes could murder his own champion?”

Devereaux said equivocally, “Murder brings everybody into suspicion. Particularly when I’m in the dark, in murky waters like now, and reaching at straws. Something in the Manager-Fighter relationship could have produced a killing. Let’s sift that relationship, go to the heart of it, and see if what we find acquits Hobie or condemns him.” He looked significantly to Solowey.

“I’m making due note of the directive,” Solowey said wryly.

“And assign an operative to Hobie. Tell the man to camp on Hobie’s doorstep. And nothing subtle. I want Hobie to know he’ll never know a private moment.” Devereaux looked suddenly fretful. “That’s if Hobie hasn’t bolted already!”

Solowey looked questioningly, and Devereaux said, “I left Hobie three hours ago. I—gave him a rough time.”

The euphemism wasn’t lost on Solowey. “A rough time in the classical Devereaux manner,” he said, and there was reproof in his tone.

“Hobie doesn’t handle with gloves,” Devereaux said.

Solowey shook his head dolefully, as if some image of the battered Hobie was vivid in his mind’s eye.

Devereaux said, “Anyhow, I might have only defeated myself. The scare I threw into Hobie, and then these three hours he’s had in which to react, consider, and do. We may have a second disappearance on our hands.”

Devereaux got to his feet and eased deftly out of the narrow aisle between the booth seat and table. “That hospitalized sportswriter what’s-his-name. You keep in touch with his situation, Solowey. Keep me advised. When he’s up to it, I want a long talk with him.”

Solowey nodded to it, and Devereaux flashed a grateful smile, as if atoning for his contrary manner through their talk. “It’s all still a little new to me after my two-year lay-off, old friend. I’m rough around the edges. Anxious to go, afraid I’ll fail. I’ve got to learn the detective’s trade all over again.”

But Solowey didn’t seem to hear it. He rose, only to fall back. “Get me out of the stocks,” he said in a rare flash of irritation.

CHAPTER SIX

There was a sharp odor of cooking in the tenement hallway. Devereaux conquered a momentary nausea, then resumed his vertical climb. On the third landing, he stepped around a fallen figure whose face was a gray mask of death. The man was shoeless and his trousers were open. The breathing was spasmodic; there were pauses between the sucking gasps as if the heart had stopped pumping its fuel. Devereaux noted the belly swell. The symptoms were unmistakable even without the telltale pint bottle. A wino.

On the fourth landing, a girl with young legs and thickly rouged lips flew past him. He watched the schoolgirl braids disappear down the stairs.

On the fifth landing, Devereaux studied the neat hand-lettered name plate. It was on the door, on the wood below an oblong of beaded glass, and secured by two red thumb tacks. There were two names on separate lines: Onofrio Starziani, and Aldo Starziani. There was no answer to his repeated knocks. Devereaux tried the knob experimentally. The door was unlatched, and it opened to his touch.

He stood just over the threshold, looking into a large, irregularly shaped kitchen. There was linoleum on the floor with a freshly waxed look, and a long bathtub with an enamel cover. There were strong shafts of lights centrally in the room like bars of shimmering gray dust. In a corner of the room, where the natural light was spare, a goose-necked lamp shone over a worktable. A man sat bowed over the table, his back to Devereaux, and oblivious to the detective’s entrance and presence. He was an elderly invalid, a paralytic possibly. He was seated in an invalid’s chair. The upper half of him had the slightest movement; the lower half looked wooden and useless.

Devereaux moved to a position where he could watch the elder’s activity at the worktable. There were toothpicks in a heaping mound to one side of the man. Before him was a structure made of toothpicks; a scale model of some architecture that covered more than half the worktable.

The detective looked for the glue pot, but found none. He looked at the structure again, with new appreciation.

A gust of air was Devereaux’s first awareness of a new presence in the kitchen. A youth in a faded wool bathrobe held secure in front with a length of rope. He was freshly bathed and shaved. His coal-black hair was tousled, and the sweet smell of toilet water clung closely to his skin. Handsome, Devereaux thought. But too delicately; there was too much symmetry to the face, the skin tone was too silken. A handsome face, but for a man an unfortunate one.

The youth had a self-conscious moment. He drew the flaps of his robe into a more careful cover and added a knot to the length of rope.

Devereaux said things to excuse his intrusion, and introduced himself. He watched the youth’s brow darken, and then as if in quick, futile consultation with himself, the youth shrugged and motioned the detective to follow him.

The new room took Devereaux by surprise. The neat drab kitchen they had quitted seemed more remote than the short corridor dividing the two rooms. Here there was color and wood and upholstery, in bizarre and tumultuous scheme. There was no focus or unity; the eye could only absorb it in sequences. The effect, if the eye could estimate it, was of bits and scraps abstracted from one hundred Decorator Showrooms and pressed into a single, savage arrangement.

There were pastels, magenta, and casein white. Fabrics were Pacifica, Regency, and burlap. Woods were hand-rubbed, and bleached; there were gleaming lacquers and the somber grain of mahogany. A plaster figure of a boy, buttocks and genitals and face delicately modeled, was balanced in an agile dancer’s pose on a thick onyx pedestal. The pedestal was cracked, with missing fragments of onyx, and these breaks had been crudely repaired.

The youth eyed Devereaux, as if waiting for the compliment due his decorator’s art. And then, not finding favor, the bare look of pride dropped.

Devereaux said, “It’s like being hit in the eye.” He found a straight chair and sat on the edge of it. The youth crossed the room, as if seeking the refuge of the farthest corner of it. He sat into an enormous gold-painted chair too deep for his size. Dust blew finely from the webbing below.

The youth said, “There is nothing I know to tell about Rocco. Why do the police come here to bother us about Rocco!”

Devereaux said, “He’s still missing. He’s your brother.”

The youth’s look disowned the blood-tie, but he said nothing.

Devereaux said, “The time that’s elapsed transfers the file from Missing Persons to Homicide. That’s my point of view on it.” His eyes fixed intently on Aldo’s face. There was no reaction; the youth accepted the thesis indifferently.

The detective continued, “Today’s questions proceed from a whole new tack. Rocco didn’t disappear as an independent and voluntary act. Something in his nature say, a quirk, a result of something in his private circumstance.” Devereaux shook his head. “There was nothing independent or voluntary about it. He was made to disappear. He was murdered, and his remains done away with.”

Aldo said, “What do you want of me?”

“Rocco’s life. Not the newspaper copy phase of it. But the intimate stuff only a brother and father can know. I want to know too.”

There was a lag in Aldo’s reply, and Devereaux said, “A motive for murder can be money, another motive can be hatred. You hated Rocco.”

There was a slight mocking lift to the brows. The youth said, “That’s never been a secret.”

“No,” Devereaux said. “It’s on record. Your attempt on him with a knife. But there’s no record of why. The why of your hatred for Rocco. The motive behind your violence against your brother. That was never gone into.”

The youth said, “It was gone into. At my arraignment.” A wan smile played. “Only I didn’t answer questions.”

“Answer them now,” Devereaux said. The tone struck the youth and he stared uncomfortably at the detective.

“Be stubborn, Aldo, and in the end you’ll lose. I’ve spent more than twenty years making questions produce answers. You can only cost me time. I won’t right now remark on the cost to you.”

The youth looked momentarily constricted, as if in sudden toils. A great vein broke the olive shine of his wide forehead and perspiration began to form. Devereaux watched it, intuitively seeking a gauge. Men, big men and sheerly masculine, were disturbing to this slight beautiful youth. Men were physical, gross, insensitive, rowdy, oppressive. More than to the sheer instance of Devereaux’s implied threat, the youth was reacting to remembered traumas, other encounters in his time and growth.

The detective watched the youth stamp down and control his emotion. After a while Aldo said, “Rocco was no damned good. He had the hatred; he hated us all. He stole from our mother; her grocery money so we’d go hungry. He struck her. At her burial, he came dressed in a loud sports jacket and a red tie. When the coffin was lowered and we all prayed, Rocco threw me into the grave. He laughed at the sacrilege. He ran at the Mourners laughing like a madman and tore the black bands off their sleeves. Rocco was big and strong, even as a boy, and people were afraid of him.” Aldo stopped, closed his eyes, and opened them again.

“Who had the hatred?” Aldo continued. He motioned a hand. “My father there in the kitchen. He was a bricklayer once. Up and down the scaffold; his legs were his life. Now his legs are sticks of wood. They won’t bend, they won’t move. They’ve been paralyzed for ten years. His spine was injured.”

Devereaux waited for the shocker. He could almost divine what was to come. Aldo said, “My father fell down a long flight of stairs. From our landing, to the fourth floor. An accident; he told the emergency ambulance people that it was an accidental fall. Too much wine, and a careless nearsighted man. My father told them it was an accident, over and over again, to the doctors, and the nurses, and to the police. He made me swear never to say it was anything but an accident. He’d cut me out of his heart, he’d take his life—I must never say anything else! I was made to swear on the Bible.”

Devereaux said, “Rocco was responsible?”

“Rocco threw my father down the stairs. My father had found a loaded gun in Rocco’s clothes. My father was on his way to see a Priest, to ask advice. Rocco was wild with anger.”

Devereaux said, “You make out quite a case against your brother.”

Aldo said, “The Tiger Man, the idol of the ring. People respected him, people worshipped him. What a joke.”

Devereaux studied the youth solemnly for a long moment. “No good marks?” he asked. “No good deeds, no better side to recommend him?”

Aldo said, “He left school at fourteen. He hated books, and people who read them. He tore up every book I brought home. I read by candlelight secretly; in the hall toilet. He was a bully and a thief. From fourteen until he began to box in Amateur Clubs, Rocco did errands for gangsters. He dreamed of becoming one. He idolized killers. He hung their pictures in his room. He stole cars, he drank, he gambled, he beat people for nothing—Any stranger he didn’t happen to like. He was accused of rape twice. The parents of the girls didn’t dare go to the police. They were afraid of Rocco. They came here, to my father, and my father went to the Priest. Rocco made one girl pregnant. He was sixteen then. He forced her to submit to an illegal abortion. Not by a doctor, but by a drunken janitress, a Mrs. Kusack.” Aldo paused, then added quietly, “Good marks, Mister? I’d only be lying.”

Devereaux said, “How about the later story of Rocco? When he found he could fight, when he found himself? He was up on top, a champion. Success, money, and applause—They sometimes change a man, mellow him. Make him want to atone for youthful sins.”

Aldo laughed shortly. “We’re in this tenement, where we’ve always been. My father needs constant medical treatment. I carry him in my arms, down five flights of stairs. I wheel him to the Free Clinic, twice a week. The papers say that Rocco’s purses totaled over a million dollars. We’re still in this tenement, Mister. I still wheel my father.”

“Rocco then never contributed any money?”

The question was superfluous, and there was no answer. Devereaux said, “Now about that assault with a knife six years ago.”

“My father had a fever. He would die, I thought. There wasn’t a penny; I’d lost my job. I sat here night after night with my father. Then I telephoned Rocco, to ask for help. He owed it to my father! Rocco wouldn’t come to the phone. He was packing to leave on an Exhibition Tour, his manager said. I went to Rocco’s apartment.”

“To kill him.”

The youth merely repeated, “I went to Rocco’s apartment. After that, Rocco had his revenge. He had influence, he was The Tiger Man. He pulled wires to get me the limit. I spent ten months in the Workhouse. My father spent ten months in a public hospital.”

Aldo closed his eyes, and then opened them. “You won’t have to beat or persecute me now. I’ve told you all I know to tell.”

Devereaux said, “How much of this is true, I wonder. And how much do you invent or hallucinate. In your characterization of Rocco, I mean.”

The youth looked at Devereaux queerly, but said nothing. The detective asked, “How do you support yourself and your father?”

The youth flushed. “Why do you ask me that?”

Devereaux’s brow drew shrewdly. “If the answer is going to embarrass you…”

Aldo said, “I can’t see where it is any of your business.”

Devereaux didn’t press the matter. He said, “Say Rocco is dead, it turns out that he’s dead. And without heirs, so far as you know. No wife, no progeny. Even no Last Will and Testament perhaps.” The detective’s eyes were close on the youth. “He’s made money; there might be an estate left behind. You and your father are next of kin. The money could pass to both of you. Would you take it?”

Aldo said, “I’d even fight to get it. I’d hire the best lawyer.”

Devereaux smiled coldly. “I like honest, uninhibited answers. Now do the same for this one: did you murder Rocco?”

“No.”

“You had motive. Hatred from the cradle and since. The sacrilege at your mother’s grave. A lady I have no doubt you adored.”

“My mother was an angel, a beautiful angel.”

“And Rocco’s brutality toward you all those years. It had its effect on you, and having heard you talk, I know you’re bright enough to know it, Aldo. And then, the wanton crippling of your father, and leaving you the exclusive burden of it.” Devereaux paused, in a small awe before the motive of his next calculated remark.

“And that Workhouse stretch. The ten months. Rocco wanted justice, in full measure. You’d cut him up. But from what you’ve said today, other impressions I’ve received here, I guess Rocco to have had another idea in driving so hard for justice.”

Aldo seemed to contract and grow smaller in the great chair, as if he would vanish. Devereaux said, “Ten months in close confinement with men who were the dregs. The jokes at your expense, and the humiliation. You’d die every day, and Rocco knew it. He knew your sensitivity, your nature, what sort of an esthete was Aldo Starziani. It kept Rocco laughing out loud. It was probably the most fun he’d ever known. Motive to kill? You had the best!”

“All right, I murdered Rocco!” The vein in the wide forehead seemed to have an incandescent glow. “I dreamed of doing it. One dream, always the same. I decided to make it come true. Everybody has the right to one dream come true!”

Devereaux stared at the youth. It was the expected hysteria; the hour had taken its toll. Old ghosts returned, the sick yesterdays, and the remembered hurts…

The detective said quietly, “If you did murder Rocco, it will come out. But don’t wait on it, or on your luck. Come tell me about it, in a calmer time. You’ll save me time, and yourself pain.”

Devereaux got up to go. “I’m going to solve it, Aldo. The Tiger Man or his corpse—I’ll come up with one or the other.” His eyes held Aldo’s in a long look. “If I have to go the whole route, just to come back to you finally, you won’t find me this considerate. You’ll just be a killer who tried to get away with it. I’ll only think of you like that.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The huge picture window looked up to the Queensboro Bridge and down at the East River. It was twilight, in its infinite melancholia, and there were tints and splashes of purple in the sky like a slow spreading dye. The City was unusually still, as if observing a moment of silence. Automobiles on the bridge overpass drew a rigid line from Manhattan to Queens, as if a great power failure somewhere had stopped the Machine Age.

Devereaux watched a tugboat appear and pass, trailing its silhouette. It seemed to sail with an effortless grace, as if gliding over glass. It was black in the early shadows and his imagination painted it a vivid fireman’s red.

Her voice broke into his reverie. “Your drink, Johnny,” she said.

Devereaux took the glass held out to him. It was a highball. Her brows arched a question, and he took an experimental sip.

“Tastes fine,” the detective said. He smiled. “I wouldn’t know if it didn’t. I’m comparatively new to drink. New to vices generally.”

She looked a bit puzzled, and Devereaux had the sensation of. hanging foolishly on a limb. The lady was of an uncomfortably literal turn; his whimsicalities glanced off her.

She walked into the depths of the room, compact in her sheer hostess gown, ripe of figure, and very tall in platform slippers that had the shine of gold.

Devereaux found a chair across from where she sat. He set his drink down, carefully fixing a coaster under the glass, and turned to the business of his call.

“You’re a client, in a certain sense, Nina. So I’m here to make a progress report.”

She smiled at this. A brilliance of teeth, but her eyes unlaughing and impatient. Devereaux said, “My knowledge was slight, nothing virtually. The Tiger Man was a popular story, but somehow I hadn’t read it. So the best I’ve accomplished so far has been orientation. I know the popular story, I’ve begun to dig at the inside story.”

Devereaux saw her rapt interest and continued, “There’s a Hobie Grimes who managed Rocky Star. Hobie’s a sphinx who dotes on pain. He’s gone to pot, like a man in slow stages of dying. Why, what grief or guilt, I don’t know. I guess it to have to do with Rocky, but then, I’m only guessing.” The detective stopped with his eyes on Nina, straying over her. He was conscious of her flesh, the rich pneumasis, the whiteness of her skin. Her bosom was higher than the line of her gown, as if a hand in her bodice was cupping her breasts so that he could see and admire.

She saw his look, the line of it, and Devereaux had a guilty moment. But she smiled at him congenially, as if concerned more for his composure. There was no writhing of figure and adjustment of gown.

Devereaux continued his talk with the concealed hand in the bodice still cupping the breasts high for him to see and admire. “There’s a Max Toller whom I’ve yet to meet. Toller was The Tiger Man’s trainer. The story so far points up Toller as either very shrewd, or very insane. He’s kept Rocky’s apartment up, all these years The Tiger Man’s been gone. The apartment is as it was, everything in its place, not a pin moved. It’s a shrine, as if The Tiger Man is dead.”

Nina looked frightened, and Devereaux nodded understandingly. “I know. The Tiger Man dead is bad for you. Bad for your son. Verification of your marriage becomes tougher, maybe even goes out the window forever.” He stopped, wondering whether to rally her or speak his thoughts honestly.

She read his indecision and said acutely, “Johnny, don’t fib or equivocate, to spare me. No matter how hopeless it is for me, I want to know.”

“I have no basis for believing Rocky dead. No real basis.”

“But that’s what you think!”

Devereaux nodded slowly. “I do, because a detective must. A missing man is a will-o’-the-wisp, a wraith in the universe, a charade. Especially after five years. No crime’s been committed. Ostensibly, anyhow. There’s no fire under you; no great pressures to get out and do. You ask questions around politely; you say thank you to doubletalkers and liars. You bog down in futility, you put the file away, you move over to a new case.”

The detective continued, “But look for a corpse, and you can make out. There’s a difference, Nina; your investigation has muscle and gut. You shove politeness. You turn people inside out. And people expect it; every last principal in the circle. They act for you, they react for you. They’re disturbed, they’re involved, they’re guilty, they’re scared. You make time, you make headway. The magic word is murder!”

Nina’s eyes were intense. She was staring at him in a close examination. As if she now saw something in Devereaux that compelled her to. A seam had opened, and his deep insides were revealed. His force, the obstinate biting quality of it, and his rage, the remarkably personal nature of it.

Devereaux said, “Two suspects then, for my purposes. And there is a third suspect. Aldo Starziani, a brother of Rocky’s. He’s twenty-three, odd, at odds with the world. He had motive enough to do torture and mayhem, let alone kill. I won’t go into detail; you’d be depressed for weeks. It’s that sordid a story. Anyhow, Aldo did have a go at his brother once. With a knife. One try that failed. There could have been a second try that succeeded.”

A silence ensued and they sipped their drinks slowly, with patent relish, in a pretense at separate relaxation. But they looked at each other now and again, covertly and self-consciously, both of them. And when their eyes met, it was something as close as the first tingling moment of discovery and embrace.

Devereaux finished his drink in a gulping swallow, then stared into the bottom of his glass as if glimpsing tomorrow in the convex illusion of the base. He could hear his heart and feel his blood. He saw her face in the round frame of the glass bottom. The wetness glinted tints of rainbow color, and he was staring into a toy kaleidoscope. He could see her fragmented, like a teasing abstraction, all of her, her face and the brilliant white of her teeth, the cupped breasts, and her flesh, those parts of it he fondled in his mind’s eye…

He set his drink down and smiled across to her. She saw him too, in her own way, and Devereaux knew it. He could tell, by eye, by sense, and by the charge in the room. Their polite formality had been breached; the cold impersonal partnership in the venture they shared.

Devereaux said, “Anything you want to tell?”

She touched fingers to her brow, then closed and opened her eyes as if freeing her vision. She nodded slowly, “Yes, there is something.” A shadow crossed her face. “I’m still being followed. Everywhere I go, I feel eyes on my back. I try to see who. Catch one glimpse! I try to be very clever about it. I run suddenly, for half a block, then stand hidden in doorways. I turn corners, and stop and wait. On Department Store escalators…” She stopped, making a helpless sign.

Devereaux said, “There is somebody following you, on my instructions.” He watched her look of surprise. “An operative, to protect you. The roughing-up you got; those welts and bruises. I don’t want you hurt any more.”

She showed relief, and Devereaux said, “Even right now, there’s a man downstairs.” He smiled. “It’s day and night. You won’t have much privacy.”

Her brow creased and she started with a sudden thought. “Johnny, the cost!”

“Hardly anything,” Devereaux minimized.

“But an operative, day and night.” She looked to Devereaux narrowly. “And from what I know about you now, the thorough person you are—There are other great costs, other operatives, wages to pay.”

Devereaux said, “I’ve got money, gobs of money. I’m a pampered TV star. But don’t make me brag.”

He watched her go to her purse, and find a checkbook. Soon she pushed the check at him insistently. “I’m in the top brackets too, Johnny. Running parts, more calls than I can handle—I’m the pet of a half-dozen directors. And how the money adds up. But don’t make me brag.”

Devereaux glanced over the check. One thousand dollars, signed Nina Troy. Nina smiled brightly, “A retainer. I believe that’s the word?” She took the check from his hand, folded it in half, and thrust it into his pocket. Now there was the smallest catch in her voice. “To want to befriend me, and even carry the costs. It’s…something sensational, Johnny!”

Devereaux rose, as if to a signal. They were closer than the space between them. She stood high on her platform slippers, and the detective felt oddly lower than his real height. Her bosom was in his eye, heaving with the cry that lay muted in her throat. It was white and full, and it grew in his eye until he felt the swell touch him.

She had kissed him, and there was a flame on his lips.

“What for,” he said.

“You’re lonely, Johnny. A lonely man. Lonely people touch me.”

It was less than he’d wished for, but the fires were hotly fit and the swell was engulfing him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Part 1.

The bandages were off the skull and face, and Devereaux had his first actual look at the man. They were sitting on a screened pavilion entered from the private hospital room.

What Devereaux saw, he liked. There were no mannerisms or vanities. Brett Carter was unaffected, real, and direct. He was the newspaperman of hoary myth, in face and in speech. The face was spare, and the chin tapered abortively almost to a point. The teeth were bad, yellow and eroded, too large for the mouth. The pale eyes had a fixed look, like marine agates. But the manner was animated, with a vibrant excitement that held the listener, and the face, chin, teeth and eyes, were somehow integral to the symphony of speech.

“Who slugged me, I don’t know, Devereaux. Whistle along a dark street, and you don’t think to have a camera eye.”

Devereaux said, “What was the weapon used?”

“Can’t say. All of a sudden, my head was sailing into outer gravity. I was unconscious for twelve hours. I came to moaning ‘they’re after me.’ I kept the cry for forty-eight hours, the medics tell me. How’s that for a persecution complex?”

A finger described Carter’s face. “I’m getting a new nose, when I can find the five hundred bucks.” The finger moved again. “And an acousticon, if I keep on finding money.”

Devereaux’s face asked the question, and the newspaperman said, “My right ear. The drum’s punctured or something.” A cheerful grin began at the corners of his lips. “Some people take pride in their work. I got a first-class going over. Nothing omitted.”

Devereaux smiled grimly. “To foreclose your curiosity about The Tiger Man. Scare you off the assignment.” Carter’s teeth skimmed his underlip. “I’ll say yes to that, with a small qualification. Said qualification being that I’m a chump right out of the comic strips. Flash Gordon. I read Frank Merriwell at fourteen, and Lincoln Steffens at sixteen. I’ve been on the kick ever since. Muckraking; I’m a dedicated crusader. I come by it on my mother’s side. I had a grandmother who carried the axe for Carrie Nation. I never pass a garbage can without raising the lid. It’s become a monomania. I never meet a guy that I don’t automatically think how I’m going to expose him. I said think, but it’s practically a reflex. It’s one of the reasons I never got married. I’d only write a piece on indecent exposure, naming names, the morning after my wedding night. Now what bride wouldn’t walk out after that?”

When his laughter was done, Devereaux said, “Your point being, you’ve got enemies.”

Carter held a hand up, fingers parted. “I can count my friends.” His face drew seriously. “That’s why I cannot say yes, positively, I was beaten because of my interest in what happened to The Tiger Man. I receive daily telephone threats. I’ve got a stack of unsigned letters. I’ve had police guards assigned to me twenty times in the last ten years.”

Devereaux said, “Nina Troy was assaulted. And I was too. That makes three of us, Carter. Three assaults, one motive. One assailant.”

Carter nodded, “Okay, I’ll buy the simplification.” He looked wisely at Devereaux. “You’re here to ask me how far I got.”

Devereaux nodded, and Carter said, “I’m a black pessimist by nature. A man disappears, I look for parcels floating in the North River. I rummage through cellars, sniffing for quicklime. Nobody just goes away, I figure. No solid citizen anyhow. They can’t. Habit’s got them, routine’s got them. They’re all snarled up in social red tape. They’re snafued.”

Devereaux interrupted. “You assumed that The Tiger Man was murdered.”

“And proceeding from that premise, I dredged up two suspects for myself.”

Carter grinned at Devereaux’s avid interest, and then continued, “Mind you, I’m not a cop. I’m not even a respecter of evidence. I’m a constitutional headline hunter. The headline for its own sake. I say suspects, but I might be slandering nice people. That’s all right in journalism, not so good in law.”

“Who are the two?” Devereaux asked.

“One of them is a family called Regan. That’s Mamie Regan and all her brothers. Six of them, I think. Rough boys, with truckdriver mentalities. If I’m slandering truck-drivers, mind you it’s intentional. Anyhow, the Regan boys do odd jobs in the cool of the evening, for certain political nabobs on the Jersey side of the Hudson…”

Devereaux waited impatiently. Carter was a man of many words. But suffer the style; each man to his own joy.

Carter continued, “The Regan Freres once formed a posse. To rope and hang a particular wop bastard. Wop bastard is an unedited quote. They stormed Manhattan, and their quarry took cover. The lynching never came off. But don’t ask me why not. I never found out.”

“The Regans were after Rocky Star?”

“After Rocco Starziani. That’s what they preferred to call him. The Tiger Man’s own name fueled their hatred, kept it going. Maybe even justified it nicely, the way some Irish feel about some Italians.”

“Their motive against Rocky Star?”

“A fighter named Kid Coogan. A lad as Irish as The Ould Sod. Coogan was past his prime, but hanging on for the eats. He had a wife and two kids on and off the public relief rolls. He was matched with The Tiger Man, to make a dull season duller. The Tiger Man carried the Kid for six rounds, until the irate customers began to tear up the seats. In the seventh The Tiger Man decided to liven things up a little. He hit Coogan and killed him.”

Carter met Devereaux’s gaze solemnly, “The Kid never recovered consciousness. A brain hemorrhage.”

Devereaux said, “Mamie Regan was Mrs. Kid Coogan.”

Carter nodded. “The Kid had six brothers-in-law named Regan.”

“Where is Mamie Regan now?”

“A gas station in East Paterson. You’ll find her in overalls, running the place.”

“Your other suspect, Carter?”

Carter said, “Take hold of your chair. It will be a jolt. Damon Marco. Or better put: Damon Marco and Company. Have I said enough?”

Devereaux let the name repeat in his brain. Damon Marco. Damon Marco and Company. Company signifying the gangs; the ambitious novices and the fat cats basking in the suns of seniority. A shadow empire, and somewhere in the ruling council of hierarchs, sat Damon Marco.

Devereaux said soberly, “Quite an imposing addition to the cast. But where does he fit?”

The sprightly manner was gone now. It was as if Carter was in some awe of his own findings. “Rocco Starziani had fame in his fists. But he didn’t hold his own destiny in those same fists. Kids in the Ghetto, or Little Italy, or Little Gehenna, never do. Or do I have to tell you?”

Devereaux said, “It’s a long walk away from the tenement. The road’s a little crooked.”

Carter said, “A Marco sees you fight. In the rear of a pool hall, or in the Amateurs. He buys you a suit of clothes and a steak dinner. He owns you forever. Marco likes owning people. It’s food for his soul. And the Discovery doesn’t mind being owned. For a time, anyhow. It means better purses, the build-up, main events. His kayo record is arranged in conference, not in the prize ring. And soon, he’s up there, he’s champion of the world.”

Devereaux said, “Hobie Grimes is the manager of record.”

“Marco kept in the background. The puppet master always does, no? Besides, Marco’s kind shuns the limelight. It’s good policy to. You can understand that, Devereaux. You’re a cop.”

Devereaux nodded. He knew Marco, the fable of Marco. He’d encountered the man, very often in the course of his twenty years as a policeman. And in each encounter, he had known the grinding futility that all men, all men of law, felt in the company of Marco. The man was flawlessly polite, soft-voiced, and obsequious. A small man with a quiet taste in dress that scorned ornamentation. Marco was the good neighbor next door, the mousey bookkeeper, the Sunday gardener and tender of the hollyhocks, a self-effacing and faceless John Doe. The fearful whisperings of narcotics and white slavery, of bribery and game machines, of murder by contract, seemed grotesque slanders. The man to his face was the spotless personification of the Golden Rule.

Carter said, “The theory I was working up, was that there was some falling-out between Marco and Rocky Star. Something serious enough to put The Tiger Man on a spot.”

Devereaux nodded, and Carter continued, “Where I live, there’s a trunk under my bed. I’ve got notes. Stacks of stuff that amplify what I’ve told you here. The paper represents the work of months. It’s all yours to keep, with my compliments.”

The detective looked closely at the newspaperman. “I’m a battle casualty, Devereaux. Maybe even a wiser man. A beating brings you closer to God. I barely wriggled out of His clutch. Too early for me to die, Devereaux. Not that I’m a coward so much. I just haven’t had enough laughs yet to be ready to go. Or kicks. Or even credits. I’ve got a big book yet to write. I want The New York Times Obituary to say ‘author.’ I want my loss felt, and not only by relatives. I want tears, a public display, a long line around my coffin. I’m an egoist.”

Carter grinned at Devereaux, a sober grin. “The case is all yours, Cop. Don’t even consult me about it anymore. Or look me up to talk it over. Somebody might think I’m still a belligerent, and that would be too bad. Too bad for me.”

Devereaux said, “I’ve got an operative assigned to you. Protection, until I wrap things up.”

“Take him off. I’ll feel safer. Freer. The guard might be misinterpreted by somebody. Like I’ve got an ace, and now they’ve got to play trump. Boom, boom. Two shots. I’m under your operative, nicely hidden and snug. Only we’re both dead!” Carter shook his head firmly. “Take him off, Devereaux. I’m screaming it at you.”

Devereaux got up to go. They shook hands and Carter said, “Good luck. Good luck all around.”

Devereaux looked at the newspaperman sharply. There was more in the last speech than its text, more intent, more meaning.

Carter said, “With Nina Troy, I mean. You’re hell for leather for the same reasons I had. You’re on the make. Nina. Gorgeous Nina—Love that girl! Why else would a man knock himself out, get knocked on the head. I dreamed of the payoff, the big cinch. But now I won’t make it. I’ll just go on dreaming. It’s the love story of my life, Mister Devereaux. Empty arms.”

Devereaux said nothing. He’d held Nina Troy in his arms, in a full circle. He could understand Carter’s feeling of loss.

Devereaux quit the pavilion, and crossed the hospital room to the elevator in swift stride.

Part 2.

It was a night like another night on the street outside the hospital. A white round moon in jeweled skies, and the cemetery quiet of the untraversed street in the East Sixties.

Devereaux took his short walk warily, unlike that other night. His senses were keyed and fretful, as if an alarm was sounding subtly inside him. A style of attack, unvaried and repetitious, a second time and even a third. Devereaux nodded to himself surely. There could be a repeat performance. The criminal mind was unimaginatively shackled to its own clichés.

He was aware of two new sounds simultaneously. A hum, like the drone of an exhaust. And a flap, flap, striking the asphalt smartly, like paper adhered to a spinning cylinder. His senses quickly translated the figure. An automobile with oversized tires, moving very slowly, at a stalking pace.

He was on the ground, flat with the surfacing, when the sounds overtook him. The sudden flash of flame was far overhead, but he could see the cloth texture of his coat sleeve in the quick illumination.

He was back on his feet, watching the car hurtle to the corner and vanish in a careening right turn. An old car, more than five years old, and heavy make. It was the most picture Devereaux could achieve. And oversized tires, he quickly reminded himself. Oversized tires; the best clue of all.

He wiped his palms dry of sweat, then slapped the dust off his trousers and coat. He was thinking: the criminal mind unimaginatively shackled to its own clichés. The same circumstances, the same street. Only the smallest variation. A gun for a bludgeon.

Soon, in his own automobile, Devereaux had another thought. The shot had been aimed high, far higher than his head even if he had been a standing target. Was it bad marksmanship, or purpose, he wondered. A warning only, one more in the series. Nerve warfare by a foe yet averse to the outright kill?

He threw the clutch, and the Buick nosed toward the midtown hub. He was due at Sam Solowey’s for a review and report.

Part 3.

His big toe showed through a hole in his sock. Solowey moved it and watched it wriggle, as if some of the answers to the riddle of Man lay in this simple thing. He said briefly, “You were right about Hobie Grimes, Devereaux.”

Devereaux’s brow darkened. “He’s skipped, huh.”

“Without a trace. Motive?—We can only hazard. Guilt, or a sudden penchant for the Azores…” Solowey elevated his toe a notch. “Or perchance, the unholy fear of Devereaux.”

Devereaux said, “Stop making love to your toe, and take notes.” He waited until Solowey was poised to write. “Get me the address of the ex-trainer, Max Toller, or the garage he hacks out of—Or both. And keep after that psychiatric transcript. I still want to know the medical slant, before my brush with Toller. Keep a man on Aldo Starziani, and on Nina Troy. Ditto on Brett Carter. But very discreetly there. Carter must not know.”

Solowey looked his question and Devereaux said, “Carter’s in a kind of funk. The beating made its point with him.” He thought for a moment and then continued, “And check into The Tiger Man’s assets. Property, bank accounts, stuff. It’s hard to do, I know, but give it a really big try. And insurance; be very curious about insurance. And twice as inquisitive about beneficiaries.”

Solowey worked his pencil with the studious diligence of a greengrocer. Some moments later, he referred to scribblings in his notebook, and began his report.

“Gold brings golden results.” The portly detective’s eyes creased at the corners. “I have scattered your largesse with the fine abandon of a Monte Cristo emerged from the Pit. My purchases?…” Solowey glanced briefly at a page. “Item: one Mamie Regan…”

Devereaux said, “I already know about Mamie Regan.”

Solowey’s brows raised slightly. “Then another purchase at prodigal cost. Item: one Damon Marco…”

Devereaux said, “I already know about Damon Marco.”

Solowey’s face fell, and Devereaux laughed. “It happens, old man. Duplicating information. Forget it.”

Solowey said, “I stand mid-air. A whimsical exhibit not worth your cost.”

“Enjoyable show,” Devereaux said.

“One miserable act, when you can endow a circus?” Solowey shook his head. “I suddenly feel my bones. Sixty-year old bones, Devereaux. They clatter; they sound in my soul.”

Devereaux said, “A new side to you, this…” Solowey looked inquiringly. “Self-criticism.”

Solowey said, “An old secret side of me. But today, I have lost the secret. My reserve has been breached.”

“You bought information I already got for free.”

Solowey said wincingly, “The sting of the lash. Mine ego lies bleeding to death.”

Devereaux let the levity die. Knowing Solowey, he knew the comedic frame of their talk was a thin screen. Behind the screen, stood a discomfited Solowey. A Solowey who smarted under a small defeat. At sixty, achievement was a restoration of youth, and failure the confirmation of age. For this moment Solowey, even the wise and durable Solowey, stood full in the shadow of his calendar, at once a small boy and an old man, both of them together.

Soon Solowey said, “Item: Police memoranda in these years of The Tiger Man’s disappearance. He has been seen in places various and remote. I give you a random sampling: On a houseboat anchored in the Mississippi Delta; pelting muskrats in the Canadian Wilds; wenching in Cuernavaca; counting the sands of time in the Great American Desert; riding a sampan on the China Seas; operating a motel in the reaches of Yellowstone Park…”

Devereaux said, “The usual reports and wild rumors that trickle in to confuse a confused situation.”

Solowey nodded, “And reports too, of a grimmer sort. The Tiger Man has been found and tentatively identified, some fourteen times.”

Devereaux smiled knowingly, “A skeleton in the Wisconsin Woods, dug up by an Eagle Scout.”

Solowey said, “And a corpse in a tar pit in Louisiana. Also a torso sans extremities moldering in a New Orleans sewer… But enough.” The portly detective sighed, “I see I have neither informed nor diverted you.”

The big toe raised, and Solowey resumed his omniscient scrutiny of it.

Devereaux stared out the window that looked over Bryant Park. The park was still, with a postcard look, and the City stood massed around. In the night shadows, a block of skyscrapers fused into a single form. Window lights went off, and some on, in a criss-cross too complex for the eye’s scope, and the illusion the form gave was a giant pinball machine.

The detective closed his eyes wearily, and the City vanished into a blue infinity like an obliteration.

But his mind worked steadily, with inner sight, like a factory of the blind.

* * * *

The tangled skein…and could he loom the fabric? The face of Nina Troy looked over his loom…

And the final cloth, Devereaux wondered…would it fit perfectly to her taste?

CHAPTER NINE

Part 1.

The face was small, a child’s size, with petal lips rouged into a Cupid’s bow. It sat perversely upon a great mould of flesh that ballooned her oil-speckled overalls middle and rear. She was Mamie Regan. She spoke with a surge from deep inside like pumping bellows, but the voice outside was thin, with an odd chirping nuance.

Devereaux strained to hear her, and understand. They were close together, as if wedged in a vise front to front, in the cubicle that was the gas station office. Yet her register did not quite carry the distance from tongue to ear.

Outside, the two gasoline pumps stood on a flat of sand and gravel, like an oasis in a desert. Neat ground lines, painted a sunlight white, fenced off Mamie Regan’s business from the outland beyond. This section of the highway was uninhabited and solitary; there were no roadside stands or dwellings, and the macadam ribbon of highway north and south stretched in a gentle roll into a blue infinity of sky.

The detective was staring at her, as if with one eye centered in his forehead, like a boy at a carnival exhibit.

But her look at him was tolerant. As if her disability and freakishness was an ancient pain, as old as birth, and now the scar had healed and the covering over it was hard and tough.

And she smiled, not at herself, but as in some gross and grotesque contentment with her plight as a woman. Her oddity was her identity now, her special and unique personality, and a collateral property, too. It advertised her, raised her to notice. It was a giant outdoor poster on the New Jersey Highway that drew truckdrivers and salesmen and tourists, to stop at her station, to buy gasoline and oil and coca-cola, and to revisit the carnival exhibit.

She said again, “You’re wrong, mister. Your ideas are wrong. Any harm came to Rocky Star, it didn’t come from any Regan.”

Devereaux backed away, to fit himself into a corner of the cubicle like a man at bay. His arms were stiff and severe at his sides, not to jostle the pyramids of sealed oil cans that flanked him now.

The detective said, “The Regans organized a lynching party when Rocky Star killed your husband in the ring.”

He could count the lashes over her eyes. They were straight and standing like bristles, doll-like, with mascara hard and crusted on them. But no sign in the eye, no flame rekindled by his reminder, no remembered emotion. Her round blue eyes were flat; his thrust was a pellet glancing off a sheet of glass.

She shook her head almost vaguely, as if today a stranger to this old chapter of her life. “No Regan laid a hand on Rocky Star.” Now the birdlike speech that made the thinnest sound was suddenly underscored by the massive mould beneath. The body seethed and rose to hold its bulge like a volcano about to break the earth. “One of my brothers did harm Rocky Star, I’d kill him!”

Devereaux frowned in a show of perplexity. The name Rocky Star had been said with a caress. Even more…like the spoken adoration for a Saint. He read her pose again, saw her hands clench in omen against some known or nameless assaulter of Rocky Star, The Tiger Man. If the pose was a true one, it refuted the facts he held against her. The ring death of Kid Coogan, husband to Mamie…and the Regan enmity for Rocky Star, all the Regans. Brett Carter’s report, and Solowey’s. If the pose were a true one…?

Devereaux said, “You talk and act like you’re for Rocky Star…like he counts with you?”

Mamie’s head nodded as if in a fervent and voiceless amen.

The detective said, “You’ll have to make me believe that!”

She nodded again, as if eager to make her case in proof. And then suddenly, with extraordinary agility, she was lost to the cubicle and moving across the flat of sand and gravel.

An automobile Sounding its horn stood before the two gasoline pumps.

Soon she was back in the cubicle, to play the cash register, then to find the stub of a pencil and make some record in an oil-stained notebook.

She turned to resume with Devereaux. “Sorry you had to wait, but I’m here to sell gas. Am I for Rocky Star, you want to know? I’ll kiss his feet in church!”

She waited until the surge from deep inside formed new blades of speech. “My husband Andy, that was Kid Coogan, peace to him, was killed in that fight with The Tiger Man. So he was. And my brothers went after Rocky, so they did. But that was all there ever was to it. I set Father Lennon on my brothers, and they calmed down pretty fast. My husband Andy only took the risks of his trade, and when he died nobody was sorrier than The Tiger Man!”

She saw Devereaux’s dubious look, and continued, “It’s not in my imagination, mister. And it’s a side of The Tiger Man nobody knew. The great wonderful heart of the man!”

Her eyes fixed on the detective, and Devereaux sensed a moment of self-debate in her. “I swore never to tell this. The Tiger Man made me swear.” Now a hand described her surroundings. “Everything you see here. Owned by me, Mamie Regan. Mamie Regan, in the records of the County Office, for anybody to see. This station cost five thousand dollars to build and equip. Five thousand dollars…I used to think that much made a millionaire.”

Devereaux said, “You’re not really going to tell me you owe this to Rocky Star?”

Mamie said, “And five thousand more, in the bank. A cash reserve. I’d need a cash reserve, Rocky said. In case this business was slow in building up.”

“Rocky Star gave you ten thousand dollars.”

“In the dark. He didn’t want it broadcast. He didn’t want any publicity on it. A man like that, mister! He’s in the Good Book. His name is Jesus Christ.”

Devereaux said nothing. A brief here, for Rocky Star. A first good mark in the pugilist’s Life-Book. Reverence for the man Rocky Star, from Mamie Regan, widowed by The Tiger Man’s fists. It taxed his credulity…the surprise of it. And the contradiction of it, after the brother Aldo’s testimony…

The small quiet lengthened, then Devereaux edged around the pyramids of sealed oil cans to the door of the cubicle. They were close for a moment, again wedged in the vise front to front. She moved, scraping against him, dead to the sensation so far from the core of her, yet eager for the passing touch of the male.

Devereaux got out the door in a squirming motion. Behind him, he heard her say, “I hang his picture in my parlor, bless him. The frame is hand-rubbed gold. The Tiger Man in his boxing trunks. The beautiful Tiger Man…”

He had crossed the flat, got into his car and started it. He looked once more. The mammoth structure and the incongruously dainty face with the petal mouth rouged into a Cupid’s bow. She stood immobile on the flat, solid on the earth like a rooted growth, and tapering at the neck. As if the head were only the armature, and the sculptor was refusing it clay and completion as a score in his feud against womankind.

Devereaux notched the car in speed, and the Buick raced away. He could see her in his rear-view mirror. Still on the earth and impaled on the sky, but smaller and diminishing now, and soon lost.

Part 2.

The small man was gentle in speech and retiring, with flawless manners. He was scenting a freshly cut rose, holding the long stem with tender touch. The rose was burgundy red, with the look of velvet to its petals.

He passed the flower to Devereaux. “The Winston Churchill,” he said softly. “I named the rose after Winston Churchill.”

“You breed roses,” Devereaux said perfunctorily. As a question, it was superfluous. Two great greenhouses stood prominently on the estate grounds.

They were seated, Devereaux and his host, on iron garden furniture hammered into a Victorian fruit motif. In the shade of a towering umbrella that was gay with yellow stripes and tassels. The grounds were manicured, and everywhere on the periphery of the lawn proper there were vines and beds of flowers; hollyhocks and roses in dazzling variety, petunias and azaleas, pink and white, and esoteric flowerings with neat celluloid name cards set by them.

The big house directly behind the seated pair was Swiss Chalet in its architecture, with leaded glass windows that refracted green and blue in the afternoon sun. A vaulted stained-glass window with ecclesiastical figures gave one wing of the house a cathedral look. The house was very high on a knoll, pressed to the low sky. The overlook was the Hudson River below a sheer cliff. Across the span of water was the Manhattan shoreline. It lay still, its odd cubism of sky towers half in a haze of smoking clouds.

Around the trim estate, girdling it at its farthest edge, was a high stone wall. On the top ledge of this wall, there was barbed-wire in three separate tiers, with lacings of what appeared to be thick coils of black cord. An electric defense this, against peepers, trespassers, and the uninvited. Devereaux had seen the Danger: High Voltage warning signs on the approach to the high gate.

In the farthest reaches of the grounds, where the high stone fence came to a corner, stood an eighteen-foot extension ladder. On it was an elderly man in working clothes, a gardener, presumably. He was poking with a long stick, to dislodge a creature from the web of barbed-wire and coils. A cat, charred to a crisp and unsightly. The cat had been electrocuted the night before. The barricade had its live electric charge only during the time from night to morning.

This sanctuary in the New Jersey Palisades had long lost its secret. Every policeman, and every reader of tabloids, knew its location, its quarter-million dollar cost, and its tenant. The tenant was Damon Marco, his wife Felice, and his retinue.

A man in a white steward’s coat, with Pickwickian tufts of hair on the sides of his skull, came up with a tray of tall iced drinks. His nose was large and bulbous, with varicose veins in the spatulate spread of the nostrils. The veins were red and they slithered under the skin like live worms with the man’s steady and characteristic sniffing. His eyes were downcast, in servility and shyness, but too patently, as he set the drinks down on separate rests pinned to the earth by a long steel rod. His chore done, he hurried away lightly and rapidly, in a stealth come of long practice and custom.

Devereaux smiled to himself. He well knew the houseman, and could interpret the fellow’s facial twitch and general jumpiness. It was the unnerving shock of Devereaux; the sight of the detective, inside the high gate, sunning on the lawn. Lou “The Flipper” Kogan was not kind or specie to his master, Damon Marco. The Flipper did not have Marco’s deep reserves of strength, the curious fatalism of the gambler who must win. But even more than win, or lose, who must play. The Flipper lacked the iron, the imagination, the ice, and the happy biology. Marco was sound of body, with no illnesses or infirmities of record, an early riser and a good sleeper, and a hearty eater whose ingestion, digestion and elimination had on occasions provoked amused-unamused newspaper editorials.

The Flipper enjoyed none of these fine natural blessings. His strength, when force was required, was his pistol. His calm, that measure of inner equilibrium men must have to stimulate balance and sanity, was heroin. The Flipper was a drug eater, with a long police history of unsustaining cures.

Marco raised his glass and sipped the beverage. “Fruit punch,” he said.

Devereaux said, “I’m waiting for answers.”

Marco said pleasantly, “I welcomed you first as a guest, Devereaux. This is my home. I have a high opinion of you, I enjoy your company. I read your book: Twenty Years A Cop. I have it in my permanent library, with a morocco cover with gold tooling made specially for it. Come inside and see for yourself. I listen to you on the TV. “Crack-Up,” with Tough Cop Johnny Devereaux the Host of the show. I never miss a date. I’m a fan. I admire you.”

The diction was good, pleasant on the ear, with only the barest trace of an earlier semi-literate Marco. Marco had studied phonetics in latter years; had striven mightily to secrete or lose the gross, gruff and unseemly earlier man.

Devereaux watched a woman cross the wide flagstone patio, then move in an arc remote from Marco and the detective. Middle-aged, with gray hair tinted to purple, and nicely braided into a crown. She walked loosely, in a free stride that was young and supple. In the shade of a willow tree, she sat down, to resume with a petit-point needle and a piece of cloth set tightly into a steel ring.

She was Felice Marco, wife of Damon, mother of grown sons, the suburban matron, and lady of grace. Marco’s principled home living, his pride in Felice and his sons, was widely understood, even admired. His paterfamilias, as much as his notorious side, was parcel to his legend. The gun moll or the brightly plumed wench; the ladies in silks and lingerie, with pouting mouths and stenciled faces, with rouged nipples and the thrusting pelvis, the ivory nudes on platform heels; were never Marco’s. Murder, yes; murder by torch and ice-pick. But always the fine moralistic boundary that excluded sex and promiscuity.

A gangland joke, in the time of the earlier, younger Marco, remarked on his manhood. What licks Marco is no balls, so the joke went. But soon after that, the carpers and the scoffers and the jokers were silenced. Thirty-seven murders, all attributed to Marco. Marco had forever scotched the bawdy rumor by this stunning exhibition of himself. He stood raised on a pedestal, nude to the idolater’s inspection. Marco had balls; there was never any question of it.

Devereaux looked Marco over critically. The squat, composed little man was immaculate in white linen trousers, white shirt that fell in fine adjustment to his white-braid trouser belt, and white canvas shoes. There was a scrubbed look to Marco, an antiseptic look. Thirty-seven murders, the detective thought to himself. A butcher in a spotless white apron. Where were the splashings of blood, and how did Marco remove them. By what alchemy…?

The detective said, “I’ve been cozened nicely. Now let’s settle down to my reason for coming. I’m here as a cop.”

Marco said, “I don’t open the gates to cops.”

Devereaux said, “If we’re going to be technical…” He half-rose from his seat. “I’ll go, and then I’ll come back.”

Marco said patiently, “You can bother me with a warrant, or a subpoena. But you’ll bother yourself more.” A hand motioned, and there was a bare smile in his eyes. “Sit down, Devereaux. Anybody but you, I’d throw out. But I’ll talk to you. You can be a cop with me.”

Devereaux pressed his lips into a tight line. It was goading to be patronized. And humiliating. But this was Marco, a superior and insulated man who let paper storms subside outside his gates. Schooled in politics, and bedfellow with politicians, Marco was also a student of law, a supreme tactician in the legal counterblow.

Devereaux said, “Rocky Star. Please stay on the one-track now. Rocky Star, and you.”

Marco said, “How much do you know?”

The detective lifted his brows slightly. There were always surprises to a crossfire with Marco. Marco’s style of battle was never formular.

Devereaux said, “You owned The Tiger Man, by some secret arrangement between you. Hobie Grimes was manager of record, but only a paper front.”

Marco’s look was bemused and reminiscent now. “I saw him fight, a snot-nosed kid in rags. A street fight, Devereaux, down on Cherry Street under the bridge. Four toughs against Rocco. Rocco was knocked cold, but the kid impressed me. You had to kill him, to keep him down.

“I had two boys home, Devereaux. I got a feeling for boys. I had one of my people carry Rocco to a drugstore, to get patched up.” A smile crossed Marco’s face. “I asked Rocco why he fought out on the street. And four against one. He showed me a big gold tooth. Right in front, where it spoiled his smile. A gold tooth, mind you, like this was fifty years ago.”

Marco’s face creased seriously, “A gold tooth like that is bad for an adolescent boy. There’s no aesthetics, he’s a freak. Some lousy dental mechanic had put it into Rocco’s mouth. Not a dentist mind you, but a dental mechanic…”

Devereaux said impatiently, “You’re not telling me a thing.”

Marco said, “It gripes me how cops are unsocial. A tin-badge detective like you who can’t enjoy a good human story.”

Devereaux said, “I’ve been here over an hour. I’ve had all the rides on the carousel I want.”

Marco said, “I made something of Rocco Starziani. But not right away. It wasn’t even in my mind that day. I wasn’t down on Cherry Street shopping for street fighters I could develop into pugilists. I wasn’t even interested in the fight game. I was down to a reunion. Spaghetti Veneziana and good dago wine, to celebrate the old days. I gave Rocco fifty dollars, to buy himself a porcelain tooth. I gave him my private telephone number. He could call up sometime, if he liked. I left it up to him.”

Marco continued, “Rocco telephoned me a week later. He wanted to be a fighter, and would Marco please help him.” There was a small pause, then Marco’s stare fixed solemnly on Devereaux. “He had the stuff, but I don’t have to tell you. It’s in the books. On his way up, I was his Father. He sat at my knee, and took advice. All right, I owned him, and it paid off for me. But it paid off for Rocco too. The crowd followed him, he was Mister Big. He drove a Cadillac, and shook hands with the President of the United States.”

Devereaux said, “Your ownership of Rocky Star was a secret.”

Marco said, “So as not to embarrass good friends of mine.”

Devereaux said, “Meaning the Boxing Commission has regulations against Undesirables in the Prize Game. That’s why you hired Hobie Grimes. He was your screen, your cover.”

Marco shrugged indifferently. The detective said, “When did the row between you and Rocky begin?”

Marco shook his head. “There was never any row.”

Devereaux said, “I won’t believe that, Marco.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too improbable. The purses grew into important money. Gross gate receipts totaling a quarter-million dollars, when The Tiger Man became Champion. Plus that, the other monies that pour in. Testimonials, paid public appearances, and stuff. Money like that breeds dissatisfaction and conflict. And Rocky was a long way from your ragged adolescent with the gold front tooth. He now had an ego as developed as his fists. He could think for himself; he could analyze a column of figures and see where he was being short-changed.”

Devereaux’s eyes were hard on Marco. “Fifty percent of the net, or more, for Marco. And twenty percent say, for Hobie Grimes. And other expenses pared off the balance. The Tiger Man was left with pennies. In a situation like that, a row was inevitable, Marco. A showdown had to come. The Tiger Man had to square off in a big fight to win back possession of himself.”

Marco said, “All right, I won’t insult you with lies. It’s a long time over, and it’s nothing to me now. Rocky came to me to ask for a new deal. I tore up our contract.”

Devereaux said, “Now you are insulting me with lies.”

Marco smiled, “I didn’t finish. I let Rocky go, for a price. One hundred thousand dollars.”

Devereaux said, “A bad bargain for you. You were only surrendering half of the world’s champion! Two bouts, and you’d make that much for yourself.”

Marco shook his head. “It wasn’t as sure as that, Devereaux. Rocky was Champ, but he was going downhill. The crowd didn’t know it, the sportswriters didn’t know it. But I knew it. I kept Rocky under wraps, so it wouldn’t get out. Rocky was a nervous wreck. He wouldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep. He was on the bottle day and night. He wouldn’t work out, he wouldn’t train. Hand him his gloves, he’d scream like a maniac.”

Devereaux said, “Punch-drunk.”

Marco said, “Or he was back with his gold front tooth. I didn’t know, Devereaux. For a time, I thought it was an act. For my benefit. To worry me into freeing him from our contract. Anyhow, the way it looked to me, one hundred thousand dollars was a smart liquidation of a headache. The Tiger Man was taking too much of my time. I was fed up, Devereaux. I had other interests that were more important to me.”

Devereaux said, “Were you paid off?”

Marco said, “People pay me what they owe me.”

The detective said, “How many fights did The Tiger Man have, after he broke with you?”

Marco thought about it. “I can’t be sure. So much time has passed. One fight, two? Or even three? I lost track of Rocky; I lost interest. He was no longer an investment of mine.”

Devereaux said, “What happened to your feeling for boys?”

Marco smiled to it. “Rocky was no longer a boy. I wasn’t so sentimental about a man.”

Devereaux said, “Where is The Tiger Man?”

Marco said, “On that question, I’ll throw you out. You’re in my home, and I want you to behave like you know it.”

The detective said stubbornly, “I’m investigating the disappearance and possible murder of Rocky Star.”

“For that, you came to the wrong place, Devereaux. I told you about Rocky Star, all there is to tell as far as I am concerned. And where I stopped, period, because that was all there was to it. I was frank and open with you. So you wouldn’t be misinformed and confused. So you wouldn’t waste your valuable time in the future…”

Devereaux said, “So I wouldn’t expose Marco to public embarrassment.”

Marco was on his feet. “Another headline more or less, Devereaux. I’m used to headlines. When I don’t make one, the editors invent one. Tin-badge detectives like you invent one. I don’t pay any attention.”

Devereaux said, “The Tiger Man’s life was interwoven with yours. My theory about him is murder. I can’t just thank you for hospitality and good talk, and bow out of your gates. Or cross you off the top of the list of suspects!”

Marco had made a signal in the air. Lou “The Flipper” Kogan was coming toward them.

Marco said, “My apologies, Devereaux. I have a lady coming any minute. A dance teacher, all the way from Camden.” Marco’s smile was just a shade self-conscious. “My wife and me, we’re wallflowers at the Country Club. Every dance is a rhumba or a mambo…”

Devereaux said, “So you’re taking rhumba lessons.” Marco nodded. “So far, I’ve got two wooden legs. My wife, Felice, does better. But we have the best teacher. Estelle Dumont. Like I said, she comes here all the way from Camden. She teaches us right here on the lawn. Twice a week.”

Marco gestured to The Flipper. “Lou here will see you to your car, Devereaux.”

The Flipper started before Devereaux, and Marco came abreast of the detective to touch hands in farewell.

Devereaux refused the handshake, by ignoring Marco’s outstretched hand. Marco said, “My two sons, Devereaux. Frank’s a sophomore in college, and the older one graduates medical school next month. Frank’s like me. He doesn’t get indigestion because the company at the table is unsociable. But Charles, my oldest, is different. He’s sensitive to things. I have a school psychiatrist working with him…”

Marco pressed his point. “Headlines about Marco, I don’t worry. But it upsets Charles. If I worry, it’s because of Charles. Because headlines about Marco give Charles a bad time. With his teachers, with his girls, with his friends…”

Fingers brushed Devereaux’s arm lightly. “This son I’m crazy about, Devereaux. He’s something. He’s got a surgeon’s hands…all trained and ready for the world to use. It took a hundred years to make him, Devereaux. My grandfather in the old country, and my father, and me.”

Marco’s point was made. The soft tones of a father fondling the image of a son, but it penetrated like a blade. A bad time for Charles Marco, a bad time for Johnny Devereaux. Trust Marco to retaliate… Murder by contact. The butcher with the antiseptic look in the spotless white apron…

Outside the high gates, The Flipper opened Devereaux’s car door. He kept his gaze averted, to hide his jumpiness, but the twitch could be read in his cheek. And the characteristic sniffing that happened in set spaces of time, like spasms, was even louder than before.

A car drove up and stopped. A high-tonneaued sedan of some vintage. The door opened and a lady stepped out. Simply dressed, in a jersey skirt that outlined her bottom, as much as there was, and woefully thin legs. She wore spectacles, which she removed and placed carefully and secretively into a case, before passing through the high gate.

Estelle Dumont, the dance teacher from Camden, New Jersey, Devereaux told himself.

The detective got into his car, and The Flipper moved to close the door and depart. But he stood, transfixed and struck to rigidity, by the sight of the gun pointed at him.

“Ride with me, Flipper,” Devereaux ordered.

The Flipper worked his mouth, but speech didn’t come. His twitch rippled his skin and the prominent veins in his spatulate nose were slithering worms that threatened to break their cover.

Devereaux’s arm swung in an abrupt, measured arc, and the smart whack of metal left the Flipper’s outcry coughing and retching in his throat.

The Flipper climbed meekly into the car, to sit beside Devereaux.

Going down the incline, at that point where a fork in the private road connected with a Jersey State Road, the blood began to show on The Flipper’s cheek and jaw where the gun had broken the skin. It oozed, as if the skin were a porous sponge.

CHAPTER TEN

Part 1.

They stood apart, the man and the woman only a foot, but a world. She spoke as if her faculties were asunder.

“And the money…the other people’s money?”

The man in the mariner’s cap who was blanketed with sweat said, “I can’t worry about the morality of it. Not any more. Too much has happened! It’s stealing, sure…but without the money, I’m no good. I’ve got nowhere to go. Without money, freedom is a joke.”

She shook her head, as to an alien tongue. He continued, now with a flame in his voice, to relight fires that had cooled, to image Hope and seize it.

“We’ll travel light. No baggage. Just what’s on our backs. A slow trip away from here…to anywhere. Just away! No panic, nothing hurried. A bus, to wherever it goes. Then another bus. And later a train. And wherever we stop, a slow meal, a quiet hotel, a walk in the sun. We’ll let life flow back into us, slow and easy.”

She shook her head. Not to his speech now, because she hadn’t heard it. She moved trancelike, in the beginnings of suffocation and panic, in a room without doors or windows from which there was no exit.

* * * *

The Number Two Camera dollied in close to frame her face like a postage stamp. A brief emphasis, and then there was a quick teasing dissolve.

Now the monitoring screen showed another face. First full and close, and then smaller as the Number One Camera pulled back to show the rest of him. The Host, Tough Cop Johnny Devereaux, smiled stonily and made his short memorized recitation. Words that enticed, words of heraldic promise, they were.

The quick, suspended scene had been a television trailer, advertising the next week’s drama. Its title: Twist of Fate.

Soon a red button flashed, and the melee of grips and electricians commenced.

Devereaux fell in beside the actress, Nina Troy, to stare at her curiously. Her eyes looked burned out, and she was still asunder. As if the unreal and her own reality were one mixture. As if she could simulate pain only by stern requisition from deep remembered layers in herself.

The detective turned away, to find his own dressing room. He was feeling an irritation he could not smother. Actors and acting confounded him. They made reality a spoof—a canard. He preferred things categorical, hard and true, and clearly indexed…life in one great rational file. A fact was so, and fiction derided truth. The school for drama was a school for liars.

In his policeman’s book anyhow, he told himself.

In his dressing room, his irritation fixed individually on Nina Troy. Who was she, he wondered, and would he ever really know? Could the woman and the actress be separated, and by what miracle of fission?

He filled his fingers with cold cream and stood before the square mirror set with electric bulbs.

And suddenly now, he felt foolish and disordered, and naive, shorn of his ingenuity, as if in this rare moment of self-sight, he felt the limits to himself…the narrow compression of it… Devereaux, the mechanical man, in a solitary and obsessive game called True Or False, in a world without players.

He’d quit this business, he promised himself. And soon, before Devereaux the detective was lost to Devereaux the actor.

Part 2.

The Buick completed a pattern of turns, left, right, then left again, as if finding the center to a jigsaw. The swirling dust in its wake hung in the air like a smokescreen. Soon the car stopped hard on its brakes in the rubble of a driveway.

Devereaux quit the car, to stand at the bottom of a hollow. On a rise, sheerly vertical as if on top of him, was a house. A detached red-brick, with vines of ivy everywhere on its face.

He began to ascend the high stone stoop. Thirty-six steps; he’d counted them another day. The day before it had been, when he had brought his captive to Coventry.

All around the house, as far as the eye’s scope, were weedy plots and the hulks of buildings that had gone, and the signs that promised new buildings to come. In the rear of the house, in its own hollow, were the New York Central Railroad tracks. A vacuum where sounds could collect, later to fuse with the hooting whistle of passing trains.

A vacuum into which The Flipper could pour his travail. The Flipper was in a back room, with sealed windows that looked down to the tracks.

On the wide porch that stood over the thirty-six steps, a familiar figure awaited Devereaux. The latter’s surprise was quick, and then reading Sam Solowey’s face, the storm in it, Devereaux set his jaws in preparation for the wrangle to come.

Solowey said, “I arrived here a half-hour ago. By taxi.”

Devereaux said, “You weren’t personally to come here. I made that point expressly. I didn’t want this moralistic hassle with you, Solowey.”

Solowey said, “Abduction. You’ve forgotten your law, Devereaux!”

“A rat in a trap. I’m expecting results. Answers there’s no other way to get, Solowey. Information about Marco, and The Tiger Man.”

“The Flipper can tell you nothing.”

“He stands close to Marco. Inside the high gate, and a room over the garage. Don’t ask me why. It’s a quirk in Marco. The Flipper of all people, close to the King. And the Flipper knows plenty…his head’s a warehouse of secrets.”

Solowey said, “He’ll kill himself, before he informs on Marco.”

Devereaux shook his head. “He’s not up to such loyalty. A drug-eater never can be. Marco should know that!”

Devereaux produced a fountain pen. “I confiscated this from him. Heroin in the barrel of the pen. Not clever, Solowey. Every cop unscrews fountain pens found on suspected drug addicts.”

Now Devereaux said pointedly, “The craving starts up… The Flipper’s my pigeon. I’ve got the stuff for him. In my pocket, under his nose. He’ll talk. He’ll run at the mouth.”

Solowey said, “Bestiality, Devereaux. I cannot condone it. The degradation of one human being degrades us too.”

Devereaux said, “We’ll go into it some other time.”

Solowey said urgently. “A formal arrest, please Devereaux. On our friendship!”

There was the smallest hesitation in Devereaux. But he said, “We’re looking at the Law from different sights. But it’s as beautiful to me as it is to you. And I’ll serve it, but in my own way.”

Solowey looked intently into Devereaux’s face, then shook his head gloomily. “The Operative in there with The Flipper,” the portly detective said. “I assigned him yesterday, without full knowledge of the situation. Now I want him dismissed.”

Devereaux said, “I’ll send him out to you.”

The Operative closed the door of the cage, and stood in the vestibule to make his report to Devereaux. He was a spare man of ordinary countenance, with no striking look to him. A face the eye could not photograph for future refurbishing.

He said, “The Flipper’s gone crazy. He tried suicide during the night.”

Devereaux said frowningly, “You confiscated his tie and belt.”

The Operative nodded. “And his shoe laces. But he found another way. He shoved an arm through the bars on the back window and began sawing his wrists on the broken glass. I came in, stopped his bleeding, and tied him up. From then on, I kept with him, right in the room.”

The Operative moved a pace toward the corridor. “Nobody slept the night. The Flipper kept banging his head against the wall. Hard, like he was trying to give himself a concussion. After that, he began chewing at the walls. Scraping the paint with his teeth, and swallowing it. I had a time of it! He’s sick in there now. He’s been vomiting all morning.”

Devereaux nodded, saying nothing, and the Operative left to join Solowey on the porch.

Part 3.

Devereaux stood austerely in the frame of the window that looked over the railroad tracks. His silhouette lay on the floor before him, grotesquely misshapen.

The man on the bed was staring down at the silhouette. He was stark naked, covered only by strips of bed-sheet muslin around both his wrists. These rags, once unbleached, were now colored with a red dye that lay on them like a paste.

The Flipper was mumbling, in a gibberish and music that was the after-cry of a descent into Hell.

A long time later, when a train had passed and the room stood still again, The Flipper refined words from his tongue of Christ.

“I’m sick,” he said like a child. “Awfully sick.”

The detective left the frame of the broken window, to stand against a well. Now his silhouette fell across the man on the bed.

The Flipper said, “This big eye in the pitch dark. It flew around the room. I had a paper bag tacked to the end of a broom handle. I caught it on the ceiling, and then I couldn’t get off the bureau. I set up a holler for my father to come get me off the bureau so I could go back to sleep…”

Devereaux wordlessly found The Flipper’s trousers and dropped them on his lap.

The Flipper looked up at Devereaux waveringly, and then his head slowly spun in a half-circle right and a half-circle left, in an examination of the room. He had been out of the room, in some time and event other than here, but now he was back.

Devereaux placed a fountain pen on the flat of a straight chair some feet away. The Flipper stopped the spin of his head to fix on the pen.

Devereaux said, “You can get up and take it. I’ll be looking out the window, watching for trains. Talk to me, and then get up and take it.”

A moment later the detective said, “When we’re all through, I’ll call an ambulance.”

The Flipper fumbled with his trousers, but didn’t put them on. He drew them around his middle, huddling and shivering.

When he began to speak, he showed remarkable retention for the condition he was in. His recollection of Devereaux’s questions of the day before was total.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Part 1.

Devereaux stood to one side of the huge garage, watching the movement of cars and men. He was dressed in a trenchcoat, with the upraised collar stiff against his cheeks. The hat was comfortably battered and damp with the weather, and the angle of the brim shadowed his face.

A big sign behind him on the calcimined wall read: Obscenity Strictly Not Tolerated. Before him, was a line of taxi-cabs, in a single file that spilled into the side street and far down to the corner intersection. They were moving slowly, each in turn, to a gasoline pump. As each taxi-cab was refueled, and the net gallon replenished noted on the individual’s trip card, the car roared into the interior depths. Now a checker made his close physical inspection of the vehicle’s surface, looking for scratches on the paint and broken glass; for fender and body dents, plain to the eye or shrewdly camouflaged, while the driver standing beside him chafed uneasily, in innocence or in guile. This over, the driver was freed, to join the line at the Cashier’s Window, and submit his accounting of passenger receipts on his day shift.

A second line of men, the night shift, stood before a Dispatcher’s Window. These men were fresher in look than the incoming phalanx; their hair brushed and faces firmer, cigars long to the tip and fuming, their epithets sharper and lustier.

It was this line of men Devereaux was mainly watching. And soon, when Max Toller finished at the Dispatcher’s Window, and had climbed into the driver’s booth of an orange and black taxi-cab, the detective hurried over to the car.

Devereaux got into the back of the cab, and the taxi-driver looked inquiringly over his shoulder. There was little reaction to Devereaux’s show of police credentials. Toller’s homely and not unpleasant face held the merest shadow of a smile, as if nothing lay so heavily inside that he must start or fume before the unexpected. He was lean, of medium size, perhaps thirty, long in the face with a small, square chin. His skin was pale, even yellow, and very pockmarked.

Devereaux said, “Drive around, while I talk. All about Rocky Star, and you. When I’m through, you’ll have your turn to talk.” Now there was a boding note. “You can be free of me early, Toller. You can also be stuck with me, really stuck with me.”

The men exchanged looks, each estimating the other, and Devereaux was struck by Toller’s eyes. The iris was brown, and the pupil was yellow. A cat-yellow that shone like night-eyes.

Part 2.

The rain had stopped and the air felt washed, and street lamps threw a triangular beam on the satin walks.

The taxi-cab crept past rows of buildings and shuttered stores in the slow, tortured roll of a mourner’s car in the long processional behind a hearse.

There was a sharp crackle of splintering wood as the taxi-cab ran over a peddler’s empty crate in its path. And soon again, before another block, the small explosion of a glass bottle under the wheels. Toller was guiding the taxi-cab as if blind to the road, with eyes only for the buildings and the stores, and his own conjurations.

At house number 222, the taxi-cab crept even more slowly, and Devereaux looked at the tenement in a reminiscence of his own. The Starzianis, Onofrio and Aldo. The old man in the chromium wheelchair, recreating Notre Dame de Louvre with matchsticks…the young man on his throne of a gold-painted chair…

The first story fire-escape was festooned with patriotic bunting centered around a blown-up photograph of a youth in military dress. A legend over the face read: Welcome Home, Peter.

Toller stopped the taxi-cab abreast of a city pier that was just the turn of one corner from house number 222.

The driver pointed to an inky void. “We used to dive off that dock every July and August, me and Rocco. Rocco was twelve when he made it across to Brooklyn doing the crawl. He didn’t go in for boxing, he could have been a champ swimmer.” There seemed to be pride in Toller’s tone. And even more than pride, love, for Rocco Starziani.

Toller said, “All the garbage in the river, and the dead rats, and the floating condoms full of clap and the syph. Rocco never got sick once. But me, I got dysentery twice, and boils on my behind every summer.”

Devereaux said nothing. It was two hours since they had left the midtown garage. The sentimental tour, and the sentiment, was Toller’s own design. The detective had gone along with it, sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of the man, letting Toller employ his own mode of reply and revelation. Kids on the old block; the memory of fun, and malice; the first long trousers, and the commemorative beer in Crowley’s Tavern; the Saturday dance in the Palermo Club, under a painted moon and twinkling electric stars set into the ceiling, and after that a visit to the yardhouse flat of Olga the Nympho who was married to a Chinee. Toller had rambled through a lifebook, in scrambled chronology. But with vivid re-creation.

Toller said, “And that stuff you heard from the kid brother Aldo. Swallow it, you’re a dope. Aldo had whams in his head, even way back as a kid. He ran around in his old lady’s brassiere, until Rocco beat it off him. He’d make up stories about Rocco, to make Rocco look like a bum… Rocco wasn’t an angel, mind you. He was tough, and he swaggered. But if he didn’t, he’d be dead. It was that kind of a neighborhood. And sure he never gave his own people a dime. Or a hand-out when he made the grade. But it wasn’t because Rocco was tight with a buck. He passed it around like he was Santa Claus and every day was Christmas. Ask me! Or check back on his big fights, mister. Every other fight was Benefit Night. Cerebral Palsy, Milk for Underprivileged Kids, Polio… The Tiger Man never turned down a Cause. He only drew the line where his folks were concerned…and I can’t shed any light there as to why. I ever brought it up, Rocco slapped me down quick.”

Devereaux repressed a mounting impatience. So far, no consequence, nothing that remarked on the overriding question: the end of The Tiger Man. How, who, and why? So far, only nostalgia…the loquacious and misty Toller resurrecting yesterday, and refining it, to build a myth for Rocco Starziani. For Rocky Star, The Tiger Man. This, and the detective’s growing belief that for all his patent clarity, and the nice organization of memory and emotion, yet Toller was not a rational man. Not a rational man, and more than a little unbalanced in his own unique way. Even a lunatic perhaps, simulating sanity, the manners and tone of the sane. And that this night revisitation, to the corners and haunts of a youthful time, was neither tonic nor the food of soul and spirit, but the deeper substance of Toller’s disorder, the mark of his obsessional personality. The night had so far been an interlude with the macabre and the eerie, a journey into Shadowland with a supreme necromancer. Toller was a ghoul searching for carrion in a World of the Dead.

Toller lighted a cigarette, to puff it and expel smoke in snorting blasts. As if he was now hardening himself for graver areas of talk, where cunning must do for candor. A while later, he flipped the butt of his cigarette into the void that bulked beyond the taxi-cab. He said unexpectedly, in the tired sigh of a man who had ground himself into utter exhaustion. “I’ve just about told you all I know to tell, mister.”

Devereaux fought down his own weariness. The two-hour junket and jabber had tired him too. He had hoped for more than the barren result to now. In this hope, Devereaux’s complaisance; his motive in permitting Toller to run unreined with the bit in his teeth. Let him unravel himself…and perhaps end caught in his own snarl.

Devereaux rallied himself to the skirmish. He had only delayed his role of inquisitor. The detective said, “My ears are bent, but I haven’t learned a thing. Except that you and Rocco were once the East Side versions of Penrod and Sam…and that the kid brother Aldo might have told me a few whoppers about his brother. All colorful stuff, but I’m not doing research for a novel. I’m investigating the disappearance of Rocky Star. I’m building a case in proof of his murder. So that I can finally nab the murderer and recover the corpus delicti. Whichever comes first, the murderer and then the body, or vice versa, but the end accomplishment of both.”

Toller said, “Rocco was already a contender for the title, when he set me up as his trainer. I was pushing a hack when he whistled me off the street. A C-note a week, and all I could eat and drink. For old time’s sake, because we buddied as kids.”

Devereaux said, “You’re still picking at the edges, Toller!”

Toller said, “I wasn’t inside Rocco any more, like I was in times on the old block. And I didn’t figure to be, or want to be. Rocco was big time, and I was a mug on his payroll. The closest I got to him was six weeks before a fight. Rubdowns, and roadwork, and a game of checkers. I got him into shape, I relaxed him. Outside of that, Rocco had his own life, and I respected my limits. A fight was over, I didn’t see him for a half year at a time.”

The taxi-driver looked scowlingly at the detective. “What else do you want me to tell you!”

Devereaux said, “About Hobie Grimes.”

“Hobie managed Rocco. Hobie bossed me around. I was green, a hackie learning how to be a fight trainer, and Hobie never took his thumb off me. I never chummed with Hobie, any more than I did with Rocco. Hobie was a big wheel, I wasn’t in his class.” A smile, faintly perceptible in the gloom, touched Toller’s mouth. “Hobie liked them bright, up there with Professor Einstein, and he had me tabbed as a stupe. Hobie had a degree from a mail order college, and he went around slapping people with the diploma. A skull session’d come up, and Hobie would hand me the comic strips and tell me to go find myself a corner somewhere.”

Devereaux said, “About Damon Marco.”

Toller’s answer was slow in coming. He said, “Other than the rumors that went around…that Marco was into Rocco for a piece, I never knew anything about it. I don’t now know anything about it.” Toller paused, then elaborated a little, as if a yarn must have substance for the embroidery alone. “Marco was around the training camp now and then, watching Rocco work out. He’d come for the day, with turkey sandwiches and a thermos jug of coffee, because he wouldn’t trust food his wife hadn’t personally prepared. But I never thought Marco’s coming ever meant anything…not the way the mobs follow the fights.”

Devereaux said acidly, “I told you Marco did have a big piece of Rocky Star.”

Toller said indifferently, “Yeah, you told me. But it’s brand new to me, mister. It’s something I know only as of tonight. And the rest of it—what you said before about The Flipper—his telling you the heat was on for Rocco, for trying to dump his contract with Marco…”

Devereaux interjected sternly, “When Rocky welshed on the hundred thousand dollars he’d agreed to pay Marco!”

“Yeah, that. All over my head, mister. I repeat, it’s something I know only as of tonight, on your say-so. I had a job with Rocky Star, and I had my own crowd to socialize with. I didn’t know Rocky’s troubles, and Rocky never told me anything.”

Devereaux said, “You do fancy footwork for only an ex-trainer.”

“I can’t give you answers I simply do not have.”

Devereaux said, “What happened to Rocky?”

Toller said, “I’ve been asking the same question, for longer than you, mister. What happened to Rocky, where did he go?”

Devereaux said, “Who murdered him?”

Toller said, “I worry about that too. Was Rocky knocked off? I’m gray from worrying about it.” Devereaux said, “Where is Hobie Grimes now?”

“Around, no?”

“No. He’s vanished.”

“Now there’s a note!” The mystification in Toller seemed almost genuine.

Devereaux said, “That Shrine up on the Drive. Talk about that.”

“You mean Rocky’s old apartment? I keep it up, so what? I began doing it figuring Rocky’d come back to it. That he’d thank me for keeping it up.”

“You’ve been paying the rent for it for five years. Twenty-four hundred a year times five. Twelve thousand dollars!”

“Yeah, it has come to a lot of dough.”

“Out of a taxi-driver’s wages!”

“I had savings. The years training Rocky, I kept socking it away. Any time you want to see my bankbooks…” Toller paused, then repeated the figure as if awed by it. “Twelve thousand…imagine that! You do something month by month, you have no idea how it adds up. But I did it for a friend…who I figured took off to work something out for himself. I’m a guy like that, mister. I’m for somebody, I’m for him.”

Devereaux said coldly and critically, “A friend you figured who took off… And what did you figure when a month became a year, and a year two, and five?”

Toller seemed to be formulating a reply. “I said I figured Rocky was off working something out for himself. The true fact is, I was sure of it at first. Rocky was a kid like that, back on the block. He’d be high, up on a cloud, real happy and getting his kicks. Then he’d be low, down in the dumps, hating himself and nasty to his friends. When he was like that for a while, he’d cop a fly. Go away without saying where or good-by. Sometimes he’d come back home on his own, and other times the authorities found him. His old man’d have to go across the country to fetch him back. And when he was back, he was okay again. Back up on that cloud, like he’d settled something for himself. Until the next time, anyhow.”

Toller chuckled with a reminiscence. “He once made it clear to Mexico. He was fourteen, but built like eighteen. He changed his name to Spanish and got lost with a couple of hundred peons working in a fruit orchard. That time Rocky was gone a year. And he could have made it longer, if he hadn’t got himself arrested for slugging somebody.”

Devereaux said, “The Shrine up on the Drive. I insist on the word Shrine, because it fits. It’s a tabernacle, where you come to worship. Your Devotions once a week. You were clocked in and out for years by the police. You’re there like you’re down here tonight. To commune with the dead. Now talk about that!”

Toller said resentfully, “Go take a flying jump, mister.”

Devereaux said, “Those spells you described… Rocky high, and Rocky low. When acute, it’s sometimes called paranoia. An old Bellevue report on you strongly suggests the same.”

Toller said, “Have yourself a ball, mister. I don’t care.”

Devereaux said, “All night you’ve talked about Rocky Star in the past tense. Rocky was, and so forth, as if he were dead and you knew it. You’ve been mourning his passing all night.”

Toller said nothing. But his breathing now was sharp, open-mouthed and labored, as if he were having some involuntary physiological spasms.

The detective continued, “Rocky is dead, and you know it. You’ll have to convince me otherwise! Now I’m asking you how did Rocky die, in what manner, and whom are you protecting by keeping your mouth shut?”

There was no reply to this. Now Devereaux said experimentally, “Was it Marco?—A reprisal murder of Rocky Star? And by silence, you’re protecting yourself first and fundamentally. Run afoul of Marco and his crowd, and you might not survive it. Is that your fear, Toller?”

Toller said, “The way you cops love to make with theories.” He was suddenly, at once, at the edge of temper. His eyes, the cat-yellow pupils, were glaring at Devereaux across the shadowed cab. “You grab a guy like you owned his time. You don’t worry, it’s not your livelihood. The right answers bore you, so you try putting words in his mouth. You’re there with the insults, because you’ve got a badge and you’ve got a gun…”

The cat-yellow pupils grew rounder in the shadows, and then suddenly they were lost. Toller was out of the cab in a whirling motion.

“The hack’s all yours, mister. Break your balls and see how tough a livelihood can be!” The shout re-echoed along the docks, as if repeated over and over by Toller in his flight.

When Devereaux got out of the taxi, Toller was lost in the inky void, impossible to find.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The music started up with a clang, clang of bells. The horses began to move, slowly and then faster, until their ice-cream colors were threads on a huge, gyrating bobbin. There were blowing mists without rain, and a wetness glistened on the green-painted benches.

The little man in neat dress who had come up to the bench placed a handkerchief across the slats before seating himself. His soft tone seemed efforted; the rage it repressed was in his eyes.

“Why do I have to meet you in a public park?”

“Turnabout,” Devereaux said humorlessly. “On my estate this time.” He motioned across the walk. “This carousel ride’s on me. Be my guest.”

Marco said, “I thought you had sense. But you’re a wild man. Where have you got The Flipper?”

Devereaux said, “He’s in prison hospital. Booked for possession of drugs.”

Marco said, “Kidnap, across state lines. You violated federal law. You’re not a cop in Jersey; you’re not a government man. The Flipper has civil rights like everybody. I’ve been talking to a lawyer.”

The detective said, “Nice concern for The Flipper. But in jail, he’s safe from you.” He saw the swift, passing apprehension in Marco. “He tried to die for you, Marco. But I didn’t let him. Now you’ve got to kill him.”

Marco said, “I don’t like the way you talk to me.”

Devereaux said, “I know. The shocking disrespect. A tin-badge like me. You who sit at banquet tables with gold badges.”

Devereaux’s eyes held Marco. “The Flipper talked about you. Very private stuff. Like he lived with an ear to the keyhole.”

Marco said, “He made it all up. You were on top of him; The Flipper could always tell a good story.”

The detective said satirically, “You’re getting away from your Blackstone. You could have said duress, the ravings of a drug-eater being tortured by a cop.”

Marco said, “Thanks for the advice.”

Devereaux said, “You lied to me about Rocky Star.”

Marco said, “Don’t give me the slow needle. You’ve got something to say, say it. Be a man. Hit me with all you’ve got.”

The detective said, “That one hundred thousand dollars, payable to you so The Tiger Man could be free of your contract. Rocky never agreed to the sum. You imposed the sum on him. One hundred thousand dollars or else.”

“That’s what The Flipper told you.”

“You deny it?”

Marco thought briefly. “All right, I admit it. Except for the ‘or else.’ Those are your words, Devereaux.” There was venom in the tone now. “You like to cut me down. Make me out only a goon, make me small.”

Devereaux said, “A dirty little dealer in narcotics and murder. Thirty-seven corpses fertilizing your flowerbeds. But pardon the moral tone.”

Marco said, “I’ll remember that.”

Devereaux said, “Rocky defied you. No further tribute…you’d bled him enough. So you set your dogs on him.”

A small pause fell, then Devereaux said, “I ordered you here. On the theory that if you endured the humiliation, it was a case of wisdom before pride. That you’d guessed what I’d accomplished with The Flipper. That you came to convince me further that you did not murder, or cause the murder of Rocky Star. To convince me, and ward off the headlines you dread.”

Devereaux studied the gangster in a long, close scrutiny, and then said very quietly, “Big headlines, Marco. I’ll see to it with all my resource. Marco and murder. Like this was 1930 again, and you’d never taken a diction lesson or built that high stone wall. Headlines dripping blood, in your country club, in Camden for your rhumba teacher to read, and on the college campuses.”

A time passed before Marco could find words. “You like to cut me down,” he said.

“I don’t really,” the detective said, “You’re not as big to me as you are to yourself.”

Marco said, “I’ll tell you what I left out the other day. I had trouble with Rocky, sure. But not over money…that hundred thousand dollars. It went deeper. For me anyhow…”

Marco’s face brooded as if in recovery of an emotion that still lay close upon him. “It was the way Rocky asked me to release him. Cold…with no feeling for me…no appreciation. This nothing I found in the gutter and gave fifty dollars to for a porcelain tooth. What could he have amounted to without Marco’s help? A crummy barber, or a dockworker. I gave him a home, I introduced him to people. Good people, no riffraff. I saw that he got the best matches. I sent the word around that he was Marco’s protégé. So he’d get the right treatment…so no punk promoter would make a monkey out of him.

“And every fight was on the level, Devereaux. I saw to that too. No set-ups, no tankers, no fixes. He had to win on his ability. I wasn’t blowing up a paper bag, a paper champion. Laugh and call Marco a liar, go ahead. But I’m telling you a fact. Rocky was another son to me… I had that feeling for him. And my own sons are fine boys, like their mother is a fine lady. They don’t lie, they don’t cheat anybody…”

Devereaux said, “We’re not now talking about your sons.”

Marco said, “I’m trying to make you understand something.”

“That you’ve got a feeling for boys,” the detective said. “You don’t corrupt them, or make them into your image. You’ve made that point, for what it’s worth. But don’t work it to death.”

Marco said, “You’re a coldblooded bastard.”

The music had stopped, and the prancing horses. Marco was staring at the still carousel. A play of expressions crowded the diminutive gangster’s face, and for some queerly personal moments he was lost to the detective and to the interrogation.

Soon Marco said apropos nothing, not speaking to Devereaux, or to himself. “In Bologna, that’s in the Old Country… I was born in Sicily, but raised in Bologna… I had a grandfather who used to make carousel horses. By himself, with an old broken saw and by hand. He was a carpenter and an artist, the old man. I used to help him mix the colors and paint them up, I remember. Colors like those over there. Pink, pistachio green…

“Learn a trade, the old man kept telling me. Don’t be a peasant like my dead father had been. He even kept me out of school, so I wouldn’t lose any time learning a trade. But I never learned to work the tools. Only to mix the paint. My grandfather had an accident with the saw. He lost two fingers on his right hand. A month later, they cut off his arm on account of the gangrene. In six months, they buried him. He died of a broken heart, I heard an aunt say…”

Now Marco turned to Devereaux. “Carousel horses. I’ve got one over at my place right now. On the rear lawn. Next time you visit, have a look. I bought it for twenty dollars in a junk shop in Germantown. I paint it every spring myself. I scooped the back out and lined it with copper. I’ve got geraniums growing in it…”

Devereaux said, “The soul of Marco. You keep trying to prove it. But I’m not your priest.”

Marco said deafly, “I saved the payoff on my grandfather for the end. You hate stories, but you’re stuck hearing this one out. It’s something I found out about my grandfather when I got to be twelve. Those horses…he was making them, and stacking them away in an old mill. They weren’t for sale. He earned money by begging in the streets. Money to buy wood and paints, so he could make carousel horses and hide them away. He was crazy, people said. The family kept trying to put him away.”

Devereaux said, “What does all this mean?”

Marco stared and then shook his head. “I don’t know…nothing. Just a memory that came up.” His face shadowed. “After he died, I thought about him. For a long time. My grandfather and me…how we relate. As people, mind you. It took years to get him out of my head. Now you’ve got me here in the Park, and I’m thinking of him again.”

The music resumed with a clang, clang of bells.

“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me…”

Devereaux said, “Rocky Star, Marco. You’ve so far done a beautiful job of talking beside the point.”

Marco said, “Rocky got religion. Only thing, he forgot it was Marco who opened the Bible for him. He came to see me and made a speech. His freedom; he wanted out of our contract. He was respectable, and I was dirt. He was ashamed of his connection with me.” The gangster’s mouth drew into a bitter line. “Mind you, like he’d only just found out I was Marco.”

“He talked to me like you talk to me, Devereaux. To cut me down, to rub my nose in the dirt. No gratitude for what I’d done for him. No human feelings toward me.”

Devereaux said, “What did you do?”

“His freedom for the asking. No strings, and my best wishes. I give you my word, Devereaux! All Rocky had to do was come to me like a man…”

Devereaux said, “I asked what did you do?”

“I showed him I was Marco. I put a price on our contract. One hundred thousand dollars. Cash, in forty-eight hours…” Marco stopped warily before his next disclosure.

Devereaux said, “Don’t shy away from it. I’ve already heard it from The Flipper.”

Marco said, “Rocky thought he held a trump. Our contract was illegal, and I couldn’t enforce payment. He’d put the Boxing Commission on me.”

Devereaux said, “That’s when you really showed him you were Marco.”

“I’ve got feelings, and I’ve got pride.”

Devereaux said, “You keep insisting…” His voice was flat and toneless. “You enforced payment. When your goons called time on their assignment, Rocky had two broken hands.”

Marco said, “I gave him his first fifty dollars. I bought him a porcelain tooth.”

Devereaux said, “Hands mashed like through a wine press. You saw to it that Rocky would never fight again.”

Marco said nothing to it, and the detective said, “Those two sons of yours. What if one of them comes up and makes a speech. The same unsentimental speech you heard from Rocky. You’re dirt to him, and he’s ashamed of his relationship to you. What’s Marco’s remedy for that?”

Marco’s face drew forbiddingly, but Devereaux continued, “That upcoming medical graduate say. The sensitive son with the surgeon’s hands. It can happen, Marco. And the chances are, it must. One son or both makes the speech to you…so they can live with themselves…”

The movement was too quick for the eye to follow. Marco had a small flat automatic in hand. There was a purpling swell to his cheeks like the first throes of a convulsion. His face thrust at the detective and a hand clawed blindly at Devereaux’s throat as if to cut off speech at the source.

“Shut your mouth about my boys. Devereaux, another remark about my sons, I’ll kill you. I can take so much…”

Devereaux drew back, some inches farther down the bench they shared, to watch Marco in stony detachment. He could feel the smarting on his neck where Marco’s nails had torn the skin.

Soon Marco was almost his wonted and orderly self. The facial muscles were controlled again, and the stain of fever gone from his cheeks. The closing of his hands from their talon-like spread came harder: the fingers seemed fixed in their rigidity and beyond Marco’s mastery. From the way it was held, the pistol was oddly aimed now. If fired, it must explode the top of Marco’s own head.

There was no resistance as Devereaux took the pistol from Marco, emptied the barrel and pocketed the bullets, then dropped the automatic in Marco’s coat pocket.

“No use my also confiscating the gun,” Devereaux said. “You’ve no doubt got a license for it. And a deputy sheriff’s commission somewhere to make it twice as legal.”

Marco said morosely, “Twenty years now, and I haven’t lost my head like that.”

Devereaux smiled slightly, “I provoke you, I know. But back on our tack. Vendetta. You really went after Rocky Star. You broke his hands, and later you ordered his murder.”

Marco shook his head almost listlessly, and the detective said, “I’m not rubbing your nose now… I’m making a point. The hurt and the rejection—Rocky turning against you the way he did. It cut deeply you say, and I’m prepared to believe it. Father and son…that feeling you say you had for Rocky. I’ll believe that too. You were vicious with Rocky, because it was a nightmare come true. You’re in fear that your real sons will someday confront you the way Rocky finally did. Call you by your right name, and see you only for your crimes. Call you dirt, call you murderer…”

Devereaux continued, “Rocky said it, but the voice you heard was one of your sons. Rocky was a pre-taste, a trailer for a drama still to be played…”

Marco’s eyes on Devereaux were full of awe. “Kill this thing you fear and dread,” the detective said. “Obliterate it by murder, so it would never happen to you, never happen again… Murder’s been the story of your success. So why not this time, why not one more wonderful success?”

Marco said, “I’d need rocks in my head to think like that.”

Devereaux said, “Rocky Star the victim. Rocky Star the sepulcher. Vendetta against the son who turned in hate. Kill Rocky and spare your own sons. An irrational notion, but you’re not a rational man, Marco. You’re the breeder of roses and the electrocuter of cats. You’re the chameleon with the antiseptic look. You’re the perfect husband and devoted father and the King Butcher of the Universe.”

Marco said, “I didn’t kill Rocky Star.”

Devereaux got up on his feet. “Somebody did.”

Marco said, “The brother Aldo.” Now his mouth trembled in a burst of speech. “I’ll hang him by his toes until he talks. Devereaux, I make you the promise! The brother Aldo…he got Rocky. You can’t get the truth out of him, Marco will. A week, no!—two days. Just give me two days.”

Devereaux said, “A fine old Marco specialty. A fall guy sacrificed to justice.”

“No fall guy. The kid brother’s it—He’s the killer! I’ve been thinking a lot. Since that day you dropped over, I’ve been picking my brains! Who could have killed Rocky Star, I asked myself. Who! Then I remembered the crazy kid brother, and things Rocky used to tell me about him. And the knife Aldo threw into Rocky once. Vendetta was the word you used. The right word, Devereaux—Vendetta. But you used it on the wrong fellow. Throw the word at Aldo Starziani!”

The detective said, “Squirming like you are now and sticking out at the seams…you’re not pretty. I almost prefer the country squire behind his stone wall.”

Marco said, “You’ve got my face in the dirt. Your heel’s on the back of my neck.”

Devereaux said coldly, “You’ve got troubles, I know. But they didn’t begin with me.”

Marco was on his feet. “Devereaux, I laid it on the line. The absolute facts, the God’s honest truth. Now I demand decent consideration.”

Now Marco’s face and hands were frantic. “Devereaux, leave me up in the air like this, I’ll go out of my head!”

Devereaux wrenched an arm free. “Find a high building,” he said.

The detective quit the circle swiftly. A hand in a pocket coiled around the bullets that had been in Marco’s automatic. He grouped them in his palm, a finger feeling each in an involuntary count. Marco in his wake, Marco was his facade fallen and berserk… He could feel the flame in his back. The flame, and the chill.

Devereaux clasped the bullets tightly, glad for them.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Part 1.

They were close, flank to flank, with the warmth of her flowering into him. Her arm was on his thigh, casual and intimate, and arched gracefully at the wrist in a curve that was a swan’s neck, and her tapering fingers that were long and slender and beautiful were drumming lightly on his kneecap.

The recessed lights in the ceiling overhead had the amber pall of perpetual dusk, but Devereaux had the sensation of suns, a calendar of suns penetrating him to thaw the frost inside, to bake the outside that was winter-white and scrofulous, free of its fat. This hard, lean image of himself, nude to his toes and nut-brown, a timeless and unmarred youth, was the sum of Nina Troy to him. It was the effect he wished, even if delusion; his fancy of love, that love he had never known, not early or late, but only forever in a long dream.

They were whispering, close within walls invisibly around them, as if the wide, populous Artists Lounge on the second floor of this Network Building was a booth. Their talk, mainly Devereaux’s detailed review of fact and happening, left them untouched for its violence and portent. It was an artifice with words, an excuse for this closeness and intimacy, a coded talk that was lovemaking to lovers, yet improbable words like murder and insanity to passing ears.

She read her wrist watch and held it for Devereaux to see. He glanced at the watch, and then into the depths of the Lounge where the elevators were, to see Sam Solowey emerge from the box, magnificent in his girth but sausage-tight in a suit that was a bare fit.

Nina quit the sofa, to smooth her dress front and pull the sides down to proximity with her girdle. Devereaux reached beside him, to hand up a decorated shawl, a handbag, and a mimeographed manuscript. He stopped to read the title page of the latter. It was a radio soap opera. Laura Brooks, Public Health Nurse, a five-times-a-week installment tale of the joys and exacerbations of a dedicated career woman with a floundering husband, a foundering marriage, and a foundling child of neglect.

Devereaux flipped the dozen-odd pages, then smiled up to Nina. “Who are you in the cast?”

Nina grimaced, “The lady Laura Brooks. My daily fifteen minutes of acute nausea.”

“So bad?”

“I don’t dare tell the writers. They swear it’s Living Literature. Simple, and unashamed, and as real as the analyst’s couch. They spend hours around the bottle proving Faulkner distorts life, and Hemingway dishonors it.” There was a brilliance of teeth. “But five-times-a-week and a contract. I’m fortunate, I’m envied. It’s money in the bank.”

Devereaux got up. She kissed him quickly and lightly on the cheek, just touching the corner of his mouth. “I’ve got to run,” she said. “Dry reading’s at eleven, sharp. The Director’s a fanatic about promptness. He’s young enough to think every day is the Grand Premiere of a Broadway play. He’s so insecure.”

She read the question in Devereaux’s face. “I’m on roller skates all day, and through the evening. It’s the schedule of your fantasies when you’re a student in the Academy of Dramatic Arts. I play a lady killer at two P.M. Then Sister Kenny in a special documentary at seven. That’s a tie-in with the Polio Fund Appeal. All of these radio. At ten tonight, I’m a television actress. A dramatic excerpt in the middle of a Variety Show. I happen somewhere between the Magician and the Adagio Dancers. Shaw’s Antony and Cleopatra. I wear a rope wig. I’m Queen of the Nile for ten ecstatic minutes.”

She called over her shoulder as an afterthought. “I’ll be home a stroke before midnight, Johnny. Come over if you like. Or anyhow call me.”

Devereaux watched her cross the Lounge and turn into a long, narrow corridor, then turn right and vanish. He was still absorbed and staring, when he felt the tug at him from below.

Solowey was seated on the sofa. He wore a raffish smile, not characteristic to him, modeled only for this moment. “The pang of leave-taking,” the portly detective said. “Your ephemeral lady of mist. And if you never find her again, Devereaux. If you lose her to the storms?”

Devereaux dropped into his seat. “I’ll dig a grave and throw you into it. I’ll be so brokenhearted.”

Solowey laughed outright, then eyed Devereaux keenly. “Another man’s wife, Devereaux.”

“Another man’s widow.” Devereaux frowned in momentary thought. “Wife or widow, Nina’s emotionally free. Has been for years. The Tiger Man happened in another fife for her. She was somebody else, not the Nina Troy of today. Rocky Star magically alive, she’d promptly divorce him. I have her word on that. Her big stake is the legitimacy of her child. But I know The Tiger Man is dead.”

Solowey said, “Love has come to Johnny Devereaux.” He said it as a question.

Devereaux said moodily, “Yes, and no. I feel a wall I can’t climb. Don’t yet know how to climb. I only engage half of her, and she only half of me. The half is great. The years drop off. I can’t remember a care. I go sailing, I’m swinging in the trees. The whole would be sensational.”

Solowey nodded sympathetically, as if somehow really understanding it. After a few politic moments, he got down to the case on hand. “The evolving portrait of The Tiger Man, Devereaux. I’ve come by a new, remarkable detail.”

“Supporting the Saint or Sinner?” Devereaux asked.

“The Saint. A prodigious credit, Devereaux. A stunning repudiation of Rocco Starziani, whelp of the tenements and juvenile delinquent, by Rocky Star, Champion of the World.” Solowey warmed to his theme. “When Rocky found his fists, he also found his strength. And found his soul too. It was good deeds for bad. Expiation without the ostentation of prayer or psychoanalysis. But by positive acts; the fine, noble act of giving…”

Devereaux said drily, “Good you’ve at last found your graven image. I know a certain uptown Shrine you can worship in. You’ll find a taxi-driver there to give you absolution.”

Solowey said seriously, “I’m a lifelong agnostic.”

“Then stop making noises like an Evangel. Saint Rocky—I’m left cold! Theft, pillage, rape—The stuff of his boyhood and youth haunted him. And don’t explain the very precious sociology to me. The insecurities that ravished young Rocco, the grinding pressures of the slums and so forth. It doesn’t move me. I came out of the same dark bedroom. The same rats stood on my chest and woke me out of a sleep. I heard the same tune sing in the plumbing fixtures. At thirteen, a mortician buried my father and proclaimed me a Man. But I didn’t steal my neighbor’s purse, or rape his daughter. I merely went to work.”

A beat later, Devereaux said, “The social worker’s outlook is fine, but for the social worker. The myth he creates gives him tenure on the job, and a nice sense of Christianity with his Friday paycheck. But it accomplishes nothing, confuses everything. Thugs, rapists, and plain killers become simple social unfortunates. We don’t deal with them…we’re too busy reaching for the crying towel. We get up maudlin probation reports on vermin that can make a Warner Brothers movie scenario without the change of a word. The criminal is a dog, but somehow also a hero. Ground down by watered gruel, tattered kitchen linoleum and a hole in his sock—He’s not to blame. Pity him only, let Society take the rap! Let’s be animals in one big cage. Never quarantine the sick, never put him to death for the greater good. Wallow, all of us, in the same pen, until the infection is universal…”

Devereaux paused and his eyes glinted hostilely at Solowey. The portly detective was denying Devereaux’s thesis by shaking his head. Devereaux said, “Saint Rocky! To me, his evolution from scum signifies only one thing. Rocky wanted to buy himself a night’s sleep. The sheer hunger for respectability wasn’t special to Rocky. It’s in all of us, to different degrees. Rocky wasn’t remaking his stamp. He was just making erasures, so his record wouldn’t look so bad.”

Solowey said, “A harsh judgment, Devereaux. In light of the things we’ve discovered about Rocky Star.”

“He bought Mamie Regan a gas station. He’d only widowed her! He walked out on Damon Marco. There I say Rocky merely tried to jettison an exploiter. I don’t see the gates of heaven opening, Solowey.”

“He endowed a Boys’ Club,” Solowey said unexpectedly and impressively. “This is the prodigious life credit I have unearthed! On the lower East Side, Devereaux. For all the Rocco Starzianis, of every race and creed. A fine building, with a gymnasium and a swimming pool.”

Devereaux gaped his absolute surprise and Solowey continued, “It was done covertly, without publicity or fanfare. The anonymous patron, so far as it could be. A one-hundred thousand dollar Foundation, administered by the firm of Gerhardt and Walsh, Attorneys.” Solowey’s gaze now was just a little blurred. A moistening on the eyes, like tears. “One hundred thousand dollars, Devereaux. The sum Rocky could have given Marco, to save his hands. Perhaps even…to save his fife.”

Devereaux asked, “Did the Foundation grant predate Marco’s demand?”

Solowey shook his head. “It postdated it. Rocky had one hundred thousand dollars at the time of his trouble with Marco. The Foundation arrangements were completed three months later.”

After a moment Solowey spoke again, gently taking Devereaux to task. “Sinner and Saint. It is Everyman, Devereaux. The good and the bad in one mixture. But you misjudge this one man, Rocky Star. You stand rooted in your bias. He wasn’t merely buying a night’s sleep, as you say. His wish for himself was greater. It was the wish for health, the health drive. The need to overthrow the bad, and enthrone the good. He found salvation in his fists. He found the power to become a human being.”

“Philanthropy, Solowey. But not a dime to a paralytic father.”

“In time,” Solowey said surely. “This immediate thing was hardest for Rocky to do. But he was already doing it, Devereaux, through these other deeds. In time, Rocky would give directly to his own people. In time, Rocky would not, need to obscure his motives from himself.”

Devereaux came out of a frowning silence. “I don’t give so much of a damn as this heat we’re generating. Who or what was Rocky, is beside the point. Where is Rocky is our job. A Cop becomes a philosopher, he grows fat on the brain. His hands fall off and his eyes go blind. He’s not in this world, he’s in a reverie. Now, are you up to practical talk?”

Solowey smiled for a moment as if savoring his next speech. “Practical enough even perhaps to solve the riddle of The Tiger Man.” He added quickly, “Not the metaphysical riddle, Devereaux, but the police riddle.”

Devereaux said in bridling tones, “If that’s so, why these ten awful minutes of cant? Dammit, Solowey, we’re not boys in the fraternity clubhouse.”

“We wait on time,” Solowey said mysteriously, fumbling in a waist-pocket. “You cannot up and go, no matter how the ants anguish your backside.” He produced a paper and unfolded it methodically. “You must wait at a designated telephone. The zero hour is 3:00 P.M.” He handed the paper to Devereaux.

Devereaux read the note. It said: Hobie Grimes will telephone Devereaux, 3:00 P.M., Corning 9-3400.

Solowey said, “My own handwriting, Devereaux. I got the message, among others, from my Telephone Service.” He read his watch. “A more than three-hour wait.” He smiled slightly. “We can be boys in the fraternity clubhouse, or detectives on tenterhooks. Choose.”

Devereaux stared at his partner. “Maybe solve the riddle of The Tiger Man, you said. Weren’t you wishing out loud?” He waved the paper. “This only means Hobie Grimes wants telephone contact with me.”

Solowey said significantly, “A hysterical Hobie Grimes, even more complicated than that day you descended on him and frightened him into flight. A man who howls into telephones like a dog baying at the moon.”

“How do you know that?”

“Hobie sought contact with you all day yesterday, through an outside person. He was told where to reach you. My telephone number was given.”

Devereaux guessed, “The columnist Brett Carter. Hobie called the Times-Herald. Carter spoke to him, then called you.”

Solowey nodded, and Devereaux said grinningly, “Poor Carter. He’s now probably got the hackles compounding his other miseries. He swore neutrality…to be neither friend nor foe of man or fish.”

Solowey said, “Carter has re-examined questions of personal safety.” He winked to Devereaux. “He now insists a guard be assigned to him. I confessed to him that the guard had never been removed. In thanking us, he called us a pair of double-dealing scoundrels.”

Devereaux fell into silence. He found his watch and wound it vigorously, as if to hurry the afternoon. A three-hour wait, from noon sharp to three. Here or elsewhere, but a three-hour wait. An agony of waiting, he knew. He could tell by the skin pulling unbearably tight at the sides of his temples…

He glanced over to Solowey. The portly detective had materialized a paper-covered book from somewhere, was deep in it, his brow absorbed and his body relaxed. Devereaux read the title. The Writings of Spinoza.

He conquered a need to seize the book and fling it.

He read his watch again. It was 12:01.

Part 2.

They formed a single file in depth. Devereaux inside the wallpapered bedroom, his still frame filling the narrow doorway, and Solowey to the rear of him in the outside hall. Behind Solowey, brushing closely against the massive wall of the detective, was a lady in a house-keeper apron. Her hair was white like silk from the cocoon, and her face was bony without flesh. Old, and frail, but she stood straight and tall. Her eyes sought into the room, as if through the bulk of Solowey, or around him. Then her hands and eyes importuned the detective as the querulous look she wore slowly became a look of dread.

Solowey tried to lead her down the hall, away from the door and the chance to view. And then, finding some resistance, he stood implacably beside her.

Inside the room, before Devereaux, was a Jenny Lind sleigh-bed with a crocheted spread on it. The bed held an occupant in uncanny arrangement. He lay across its width, flat on it bodily, the triangular toes of his shoes touching a wall. His head was off the bed, suspended in space over the floor, and impossibly loose as if his neck was broken. His eyes stood big, and the eyelids could not be seen. The angle of his head threw his mouth to one side, all of it in a line with one cheek. He was fully dressed except for his coat. He was Hobie Grimes. He was dead.

Devereaux craned forward, stooping slightly, with his nostrils scenting. The smell of poison was unmistakable. It reeked from the mouth, it was strong in the atmosphere.

He heard the heavy tread behind him and the whine of the floorboards. From his low position on the springs of his knees, he twisted to see Solowey try to fit into the room and close the door in successive and fluid maneuvers.

The cry in the outside hall was sudden and unnerving. A low cry it was, in the smallest breath, but lingering. As if sent through a long funnel.

The detectives found her prone in the outside hall. Still, with her face turned to the bedroom, and her eyes fixed on the face of Hobie Grimes.

Devereaux tried her pulse, and then other tests known to him. As he worked, his head was shaking from, side to side, telling the inescapable conclusion.

Solowey said in sick tones, “I was afraid for her. Her age. The shock of Hobie. Frail as she was, how strong could her heart be…”

Devereaux said, “She’s dead. A coronary attack. But I’m not a doctor…”

Solowey was on his way down the single flight of stairs. There was a telephone in the main hallway. The telephone stood on a Victorian whatnot. There were Dresden cherubs on the whatnot; And cherubs in Bisque. A gold cherub in aerial pose hung high on a main wall. A bronze cherub on a tall mahogany stand stood at the head of the staircase. There were ancestor portraits in circular gold frames everywhere on the downstairs walls and up the flight of stairs. The house was in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, New York. It was a bare century old. Its owner had been Martha Grimes, age seventy-six, widow and retired librarian. Martha Grimes, mother of Hobie Grimes.

Part 3.

The Buick slid through the streets that had seen and lost an ancient aristocracy of gentlemen and gentlewomen. There were old carriage-houses standing, with broken lanterns on their faces like dead eyes. Red brick they were, like the once fine homes around, but now gray with a mildewed look to them. The streets were asphalt, modern and ribbony smooth under the wheels of the Buick, but the cobblestone that had been was good too, good to remember and even cherish. There were people around, standing and moving on every street, and showing the proprietary airs of residents and owners. But with a new come-lately look to them and even some self-consciousness, as if in some deep and subtle understanding of it, they felt themselves intruders. They were men and the women of today and tomorrow, with chromium faces and assembly dress, with a fabric dream of prefabricated houses. In them to store their own custom and souvenir and memorabilia, from Woolworth’s and Saks and I. J. Fox. Here they were only caretakers of a tradition that was not truly their own.

The Buick quit Brooklyn Heights at its Fulton Street border and Devereaux read the arrow guides that routed traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge for the crossing into Manhattan.

Now in these other environs, talk between the detectives commenced as if the shift of geography had broken the spell of silence between them.

Devereaux said, “Strychnine’s my guess about the kind of poison. But we’ll wait on Chemical Analysis.” A shadow crossed his face. “The question we’ll have to answer for ourselves is tougher. Was the poison self-administered, or forced down Hobie’s throat?”

Solowey said, “The main door to the house secured by an inside lock. And Martha Grimes at the parlor front window. Stationed there as we ourselves found her when we came, Devereaux. No fire-escape in the rear, and no ladder. Ivy vines on the rear wall and a rose trellis too spindly for a footing-. And too far below Hobie’s bedroom window. A roof hatch, also locked from the inside.” He shook his head dubiously. “Only a human fly…”

Devereaux said impatiently, “The locked room is an idiot fancy I leave to fiction writers, Solowey. A killer finds entrances and exits. Like a rat finds a hole. I take that for granted, Solowey. Modus operandi can wait. I don’t make an intellectual exercise of murder. I don’t waste time searching for passageways, secret doors, and sliding panels. I look for the killer.”

“If Hobie Grimes has been murdered.”

“He had something to confess. He made that clear on the phone with me this afternoon. He’d had enough. Enough of hiding out, enough of his secrets. He was in a state. Somebody shut him up.”

Solowey said, “Or Hobie Grimes silenced Hobie Grimes.”

Devereaux said slowly, “That too could be.”

“Sick with something, as you know, Devereaux. And a man who had fallen from a high place, fallen from pride. A drunkard who had once made a passion of abstinence. It is a classical suicide pattern… Solowey stopped and unwrapped a parcel that lay on his lap.

Soon the portly detective resumed, “We can be sure of one thing, Devereaux. Whatever afflicted Hobie Grimes, it was not the guilt of murder.”

Devereaux nodded somberly. “I’m in agreement there. I don’t now think Hobie murdered his Champion.” He glanced over to the article Solowey was holding. It was a wide belt, handsomely ornamented and set with precious stones.

Solowey said, “A diamond championship belt.” He read an inscription, and then generalized it. “Awarded to Rocky Star, Athlete of the Year, by the National Association of Sportswriters.”

Devereaux said, “Hobie had it in a top bureau drawer. Along with a stack of pictures and news clippings.”

“Sentimental keepsakes. Close to his reach. So close to his reach, Devereaux. Like a shirt, or a tie.”

“A daily act of reverence.” Devereaux’s head nodded. “Hobie had his own shrine. A portable one, more compact than Toller’s. The diamond belt, and those snapshots and news clippings. Sentimental keepsakes, just as you say. And it all spells out one thing for sure. That Rocky Star is dead.”

They were in the middle of the bridge now. From below, down on the river, a steam whistle sounded. A tugboat, or a fireboat. It was deep-throated and mournful.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Part 1.

The wall had no summit and she stood on the other side of it. Now even more surely, for the hour they had passed. They were strangers, proving it through intimacy. And the halves of them that could never engage stood apart, looking on in cold examination.

Devereaux raised up on an elbow, sate yet urgent, both at once. She smiled up to him. An outside smile, not from the deep manufactory of her womanhood. And standing on her face for the moments that it did, it became the painted smile of caprice to Devereaux.

The silence grew, and the estrangement, and they drew close again, in a common shield against the embarrassment of it. And then, her mouth was eager, more than before. But not her need now, only her wish. That the whole of them could engage.

As Devereaux wished it too.

For all the things he was pushed to say, he said nothing. The woman close in his arms yet beyond him…the situation was new and old. Now only the urgency left over, to be locked away in reticence. And then back to himself, with the shell hard around him. And all of this forgotten, tomorrow after tomorrow. He had no desire to understand it, or fix the blame.

The self-flagellant finding his psyche with thrusting pins…it was not his style. And finding the woman in her own depths…no to that too. He had no zests for the enigma. Nor talent for the quest. Love cooled in research, talked to death. Don Juan in Bohemia making memoranda on Woman…love compressed into a brochure. Brain, and disembodiment…

The ringing telephone came as a reprieve to both of them. Devereaux found the light cord of a pottery lamp. He watched Nina sit up, pull the sheet to her neck and pick up the telephone on the nightstand beside her. After a moment she passed the receiver over to Devereaux.

“It’s for you, Johnny. It’s Mr. Solowey,” she said.

An expression flickered across the detective’s face. Annoyance, of a degree. And sensitivity, for Nina. It was 1.00 A.M. Solowey was a voyeur with the telephone his device for peeping.

Solowey’s account of the call acquitted him. There had been other calls first, with this one a last resort. The news was great, it could not wait. A corpse in an upstate marsh. The Tiger Man. Purportedly The Tiger Man.

Devereaux got busy with his clothes, glad to resume the role he played best, knew best.

At the door later, in a good-by, there was the merest regret in her look to him. She wore the sheet over her in a loose drape, with a hand holding the opening fast. Her skin was dead white, in an unusual pallor for her. She was in bare feet, low to his eye, and now generally smaller and more like a girl than the womanly photograph of her he carried in his mind.

He could not smile good-by to her. He had a great fear the smile might look cavalier. He instead craned down to kiss her gently on the brow.

Part 2.

Crossbars of searchlights lighted the area. The lights were trained down to the bog from the heights around, and their hard blue light formed moons within moons. In the center of it where the marsh was deep and slimy, a complex of men in boots high to the thigh worked with the handicap of primitive tools and scoops. But they were remarkably efficient, for the improvisation, and their faces in the blue overcast were free of wonder and the eerie horror of it. They were men inured, trained to the job, and dispassionate. Around the rim of the marsh stood the officials, some local to the Catskill township, and others from the Metropolis that was more than one hundred miles away. One man impressed his authority over all. He was Anders, Captain Anders of the Homicide Bureau, Manhattan County, New York City. A short, wiry man with a nasal shout and Napoleonic arms. He stood on a box on the lowest plateau, not braving the marsh, only the splattering.

On a high reach remote from the activity, were Devereaux and Sam Solowey. From this perch, the complex in the distant below looked like a night chorus of zombies in some fearful ritualism.

Solowey said, as if the intelligence bore repetition here at the scene itself, “It was an anonymous tip, phoned in to Captain Anders.”

A moment later, Solowey repeated an earlier caution, “It’s Anders’ show tonight, and we’re outsiders, Devereaux. The Tiger Man’s an old canker with him. Rival with Anders here and now, he’ll explode.”

Devereaux nodded in understanding. The post-midnight police motorcade from Manhattan to Phoenicia proved Anders’ mood and motive. And even malice. Other anonymous tips through the years, across country or in the New York Hinterland, had been duly relayed to the locals in charge. This competition now, as much as it was, was the inevitable result of his, Devereaux’s, revitalization of a case once marked closed. Anders, a good policeman withal, was responding to a most normal human fear. Not to be shaded, or outshone, or overshadowed by a whilom colleague now free-lancing behind the dubious cover of the Sam Solowey private license.

Now they stood silently in the long watch, Devereaux and his partner. The night was good here in their high cloister. The scene far below in the hollow where the marsh was could be dismissed by the mere turning of the eyes. Devereaux turned his eyes momentarily, to the abounding woods with their tall trees and the smell of spruce and pine. He could hear the wind, and the cricket serenade. He could see the fireflies by their bottom light.

And soon, with the bog in his eye again, he said, “The chances are, no corpse. Another prankster tip, somebody having his spoof with the police.”

Solowey said, “Or if a corpse, a new problem raises itself. Proof of identity, positive enough. A cadaver in a marsh, for the time of The Tiger Man’s disappearance—How much can be left?”

Devereaux thought about it. If a corpse, the disintegration must tax laboratory science to the limit. Proof of a sort finally perhaps, but always the remaining doubt. The laboratory could only approximate, or disprove. This could reasonably be The Tiger Man, it could say. Or, this is conclusively not The Tiger Man. The reassembling of identity from the abstract of bone, skeleton and tooth, left many gaps where inductive logic must do for the demonstrably and surely scientific. And in this, the original crime could be compounded by the policeman himself. There were cases such, replete in the records. Approximate identification sufficient to Law and even insurance claims, but a miscarriage of justice.

Solowey knew it first, and nudged Devereaux to attention. Devereaux looked down into the bog. There had been a result. From his stand, he could not see the thing that lay uncovered in the marsh. The men in high boots were around it, like hunters making a fence against other claimants to their game. But it lay there at their feet, Devereaux knew. He could read the charge in their backs. He could hear Anders making nasal cries from his box. Cries of jubilation; a canker had been cut away from his hide, and the soreness that remained would heal with the speed of the dawn now rising in the east.

Solowey started down the path that wound to the highway where their automobile was parked. Devereaux followed behind him, at a slower gait. It had been Anders’ show, and the show was over. For now, anyhow. And for the rest to come, any future event or finding born of this theater in the marsh, he would have to solicit Anders. And modestly, in a wily genuflection, so that the jealous Anders might share his monopoly of information.

On the highway, they drove slowly into the first sun of day. The sun was round, a giant fireball. There were signs everywhere; small signs that were crude and huge signs that captured the eye with their bathing girls and red-letter promise of gourmet delights and tennis and love in the sun. Kraft’s Cosy Cabins and the Paradise Inn, the signs said. And the Seven Lakes Hotel, solarium and casino, the best Broadway entertainment, cuisine par excellence, day counselors for children, at low family prices.

Devereaux said quietly, “Life and death, separated by a few hundred yards. Family hotels…fat mamas and week-end fathers. Hit a tennis ball high over the trees to land in the marsh. Retrieve the ball, and find a corpse.” He smiled at Solowey. “I’ve begun to talk like you.”

The sun was low, as if rising from a crest in the highway. The Buick hurtled toward it, like a carnival driver sending his machine through a flaming hoop.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Part 1.

It was a room in police headquarters, and the seated official seemed to dominate every corner of it in his nervous radiation of personality. He was Caesar, in his eminent domain, with power in his shout. But his look to Devereaux was less severe now than another day, and a wisping smile could even be read on his mouth. As if now, in some long afterthought, his war with an admired ex-colleague seemed a bit foolish.

Devereaux said, “Believe me, no vanity, Anders. Nor am I looking for personal laurels. And in my time as a cop, I put pride in the Department before everything else. Go look in the book.”

Anders made sheepish nod to it, and Devereaux continued, “An ex-cop stands in the public eye, he’s Moses in the desert to people. There’s a pull at his sleeve, a tug at his heart—His ear is bent by the hour. And then suddenly, he’s a cop again.”

Anders said, “Who is your client?”

Devereaux shook his head. “Same answer to that as yesterday, and the day before. I’m not stubborn, Anders…only keeping faith. I can’t decently tell you right now. But I’ve told you everything else, just about. And Solowey is preparing an operational report to really bring you to par with us.”

After a reflective moment, Anders said, “I’m not as small as I’ve been acting. But an old case kicking up, with an army of operatives taking orders from Solowey like he was Commissioner of Police and that fleabag he calls an office was Police Headquarters… It began to get my goat.”

Devereaux smiled, “Of course. And now I make you this promise. Our investigation continues independently, parallel to yours. But where it ends, because say it’s over, we fade out of the picture. The solution is yours, Anders. You write the climax on the police book. You make the arrest.”

Anders read Devereaux’s face, and then nodded in solemn agreement to the bargain. Now Devereaux waited expectantly, hungry for a morsel from Anders’ monopoly and hoard.

The Captain of Homicide began, “To the best of our knowledge so far, that thing out of the marsh could have been Rocky Star. Yes and no, that is. We shipped it to the Harvard Medical Lab. Dr. Kingdon up there, you’ve heard of him?”

Devereaux nodded, and Anders continued, “They crate husks and hair and pieces of bone, and ship them to Dr. Kingdon. The labels on the crates read Copenhagen, Zurich, Havana and Seattle, Washington. That’s Kingdon’s size in his profession, Devereaux! He starts out with nothing-minus and when he’s done his report reads like a medical chart of the victim completed while he lived.” Anders had a boy’s incredulity in his tone. “An ankle tells Kingdon the victim’s height, an arm tells him the weight. A patch of skin tells him the age. And other fantastic stuff. If you get up there, Devereaux, stay a while. Kingdon’s a talker and a natural teacher. He loves educating cops.”

Now Anders’ face drew gloomily. “We handed Dr. Kingdon a sticker. Not so much for the deterioration of that thing out of the marsh, mind you. Kingdon’s struggled with worse samples, much less to go on. But what made Rocky Star over a thousand other fellows of his general size, build, pigmentation and age…we simply do not know. We can’t yet furnish Kingdon with any special and distinguishing characteristics. Like very individual dentistry, or surgical scars say, or bone injuries he may have suffered in his time. The face on that thing out of the marsh, mind you…” Anders stopped, and then made his meaning with a gesture.

Devereaux thought briefly and then said, “I’m thinking out loud, Anders. Face eaten away, okay. But the bone structure of the head remained. A bone injury to distinguish Rocky Star from Joe Blow, you said. How about the nose, the bridge of the nose. And the septum. Remember, Rocky was a pugilist.”

Anders nodded, “A deviated septum, and a break in his nose. That did show up for Dr. Kingdon. The victim could have been a boxer; that’s been pretty well established. And those other measurements: size, build, approximate age and so forth, they check pretty okay too…”

The Captain of Homicide crossed the floor to stand before Devereaux. “I’ve been making cautious statements for policy mainly. I don’t want to sound off, and then later go looking for a hole. But the fact is, I personally believe it is Rocky Star—what’s left of him. I believe it for myself, but not yet for the Department. Enough already checks. Those general measurements, and the fact that the victim could have been a boxer.”

Devereaux said, “Other than clearer proof that this must be Rocky Star and nobody else—what other doubts do you have?”

There was a small hesitation, then Anders said, “The time Rocky Star’s been missing. Five years. Dr. Kingdon agrees to the time. The thing out of the marsh could easily be dead that long a time…”

“But?”

Now Anders seemed to squirm a little. As if reluctant to injure a delicate structure of proof so painfully achieved. “That marsh. Dr. Kingdon isn’t so sure the condition of the victim squares with the marsh. For the time elapsed and the exposure, that is. The deterioration, as much as it is, should be even more. So Kingdon says…”

“You’re not being very clear, Anders. Do I understand you to mean that Dr. Kingdon doesn’t think the victim had been in that marsh for as long as he’s been dead?”

“That’s what I mean. But mind you, Dr. Kingdon is only doubtful—he hasn’t made any positive statement to that effect.” Anders sought to restore the delicate structure of proof and finality. “Even so, there’s a simple explanation. The corpse was secreted in one place, and then some time later on brought to the marsh.”

Devereaux looked very skeptical, and now Anders spoke sharply, like a man resolving a doubt by force of wish. “There are holes, sure. We’ve got to make a few guesses; make a patch here, a patch there. But to have holes, you’ve also got to have fabric. I look at the fabric…” His eyes were on Devereaux’s face, demanding agreement. And then, not finding it, Anders said slowly, “I was going to save this. Tell you only so much, and let you go back to beating the brush.” He went to a desk and unlocked a drawer. “A clincher, Devereaux. Proof that the thing out of the marsh was once The Tiger Man.”

Now Anders set an object on the desk top with the ostentation of a merchant-jeweler showing his wares. It was a heavy ring, a man’s ring, tooled into a cobra with twin rubies where the eyes were.

Devereaux came over to look at the ring, not touching it. He said, “It was there in the marsh?”

Anders nodded to it, and Devereaux said, “What makes you suppose it was Rocky Star’s own ring?”

“It’s been identified as Rocky’s ring.”

“By whom?”

“Two people. Aldo Starziani, and Max Toller. The brother and the ex-trainer. They both knew the ring at once. They’d seen Rocky wear it.”

A silence fell, and the conviction in Anders’ face began to slip noticeably. Troubled lines formed on his brow and in his meaty jowls. Soon he said almost accusingly, “An hour with you, I’m not even sure of my own name. That god-awful skepticism, you exalt it, you foul up the place.”

Devereaux said quietly, “Leap without a long second look, you spill your brains. A cop isn’t a creator of Truth. That structure’s been standing long before the cop happens to the case. A solid edifice of stone and steel, with windows to it, and a whole inner life. It’s only slipped into the fog, so the eye cannot detect it. It’s lost to the eye, it’s something indistinct and ambiguous in a great mist.” The detective joined looks with the Captain of Homicide. “When the fog lifts, Anders, we’ll see the structure, and know it. Build our own Truth, we only build a trap for ourselves. Compel interpretations in our great natural impatience for conclusions and climaxes, and the fog only gets thicker…we’ll never get to see the standing structure.”

Anders looked unenlightened and harassed, as if the concept was an assault against him. Devereaux said, “That ring is a strong pointer, yet a hundred times nothing for that very reason. Ask yourself: can a ring do for identity where bone, tissue and vitals cannot?”

Devereaux continued, “Rings can be two of a kind, fifty of a kind. Identification of a ring can be a ruse, a deliberate lie. Even by two people. Two people acting out of private motives of their own.” He held Anders in a hard stare. “The thing out of the marsh, unidentified and nameless so far as we truly know, is a mere part of that structure hidden in the fog. Like the why and how of Rocky Star’s original disappearance is part of it. Like Hobie Grimes and the fate that he met with is part of it. And like all the others in the frame of this case…”

Anders said, “I’m reeling. Stop with the trip-hammer.”

Devereaux smiled, “I’m been passing my headache on to you.” His brow knit seriously. “What mainly bothers me about the discovery in the marsh, is how it came about.”

Anders said, “I got a phone tip from an anonymous party.”

“That’s my point, and my worry. You were made to perform by an invisible director throwing cues by remote control. To me, the identity of the thing out of the marsh is secondary to the identity of the informant and director.”

“His motive,” Anders said quickly, very eager for status in the exchange. “Why would somebody set it up like he did? Hand up the remains of The Tiger Man at this time? At this late date?”

Devereaux nodded and said, “The skepticism becomes you. There’s a new shine to your badge.”

Anders reddened slightly, but said nothing. Devereaux asked, “The thing out of the marsh—how did he die? Has Dr. Kingdon determined that?”

“Kingdon’s made no commitment on that yet. He so far only indicated the possibility of a brain injury. A concussion, maybe from blows on the skull.”

Devereaux said, “But no clear establishment of foul play?”

Anders said, “No. No clear establishment.” Now Anders made capital of irony. “Your fog’s over the Harvard Medical Lab, like it’s everywhere else.”

Devereaux laughed pleasantly and started to the door. A politic retreat, this; the growl had crept back into Anders’ tone. The good Captain of Homicide was constrained to recover his rights to eminent domain. There was every sign of this in his face now. Devereaux opened the door. His good-by was a nod.

Part 2.

The restaurant in the low East Fifties was CBS’ backyard. A blue room, with show business murals on its walls and signed photographs of the theatrical great and small. The bar was small and cozy, and its few stools held a commingling of the sexes, male, female, and intermediate, in the fine tolerance characteristic of the show world. The tables themselves were separate islands where caste was the denominator of tenancy. The elite, of household name or face, sat apart from the rest.

Off in a corner, remote from the diners and the shop-talkers, sat Devereaux and Sam Solowey. Devereaux was in his costume shirt, the midnight blue of director’s decree. This was the pause in rehearsal time, a time for actor’s breath and renewal. A time for Devereaux to probe his greater fortunes…his fortunate albeit provisional return to the life that suited him best.

Solowey was mulling over his partner’s report: Devereaux’s hour with Captain Anders. The portly detective’s head pressed into the cup of his hands until his face formed three chins. And soon, in the slowest return from infinity, Solowey said, “I am one with your misgivings, Devereaux. The recovery in the marsh is presently significant only for the motive of the anonymous informant.”

Devereaux said, “Even if the identification becomes actual and valid in the next days. All we achieve is a corpus delicti, a finalization to my long assumption anyhow that The Tiger Man had been murdered.” The detective paused briefly, and then continued, “A true corpus delicti is surpassingly important—no question about it. But only for the murder trial to come. So we can indict and convict. Right now, the result of the marsh doesn’t advance us one inch. If anything, it confuses. It tempts us into a nice diversion. Is the thing Rocky Star, or no? We can lollygag along that detour for days…we can lose our focus.”

Solowey said summarily, “Assume then that Rocky Star has been murdered, as we have assumed it. Confine ourselves only to the pursuit of motive and the murderer.” Devereaux nodded to it and said, “When that’s accomplished, we’ll know the answer to why a corpse was handed up to the police. Why the sudden gift. Name the killer, and all questions will fall over at once.” He looked to Solowey in a passing show of affectionate warmth. “So no detours, old friend.”

“My report is ash to your fire,” Solowey began twinklingly. “I am a collector of bits and scraps, a mere arranger of parentheses and addenda…”

“All necessary stuff,” Devereaux smiled.

“Thank you,” Solowey said. “Your magnanimity is water to mine old eyes. The poster reads: They Also Serve, Obituary by accolade. I am warmed, I am depressed.”

“Come off it,” Devereaux ordered. “In ten minutes, the whistle blows for me. I’m back upstairs in the Never-Never Land of Neurosis, Unlimited. We’re having a dress run-through of the show.”

“At one thousand dollars a week. I don’t know whether to pity the man, or envy the bribe.”

“Those bits and scraps,” Devereaux said impatiently.

“Very well. Regarding Rocky Star’s financial resources at the time of his disappearance and presumed murder. A rendering can at long last be given. A circularizing of banks, insurance companies, investment houses, realty lists and sundry repositories of accumulated wealth came to no result. So far as we know, Rocky Star was without a capital asset of any size when he vanished. Excepting of course, his home furnishings and incidental personal possessions.”

“What about that account he drew from to set up Mamie Regan?”

“Barren, but to the penny.” Solowey anticipated Devereaux’s next query. “The one hundred thousand dollar endowment of the Boys’ Club was effected through the transfer of investment stocks and bonds. The account itself no longer exists.”

Devereaux said thoughtfully, “All this would seem to eliminate profit as the motive in the murder of Rocky Star.”

Solowey said, “If we forgive one small potential of profit.”

Devereaux’s brows arched questioningly and Solowey explained, “A small insurance policy. Held by the father, Onofrio Starziani. A paltry two thousand dollars to the father in the event of his son Rocco’s death.” A moment later, Solowey supplemented, “The father holds equal policies on Aldo and Rocco. Premium payments of fifty cents a week. The policies have been in force since the boys’ childhood. Some fifteen years.”

Now the portly detective looked critically at his partner. “You can’t really suppose murder motivated by a two thousand dollar profit!”

Devereaux said slowly, “I can suppose Aldo’s motive in identifying the thing out of the marsh. His brother’s corpse is a gold strike. Two thousand dollars like two hundred thousand. Climb those tenement stairs and see for yourself.”

“Max Toller made similar identification of the ring,” Solowey said pointedly. “And independently…not in concert with Aldo Starziani. Toller even entrained to the Harvard Lab to view the remains.”

“Anders sent him. For what help it might be to Dr. Kingdon. The structural comparison of the thing out of the marsh and Rocky Star. The structure, and the physiology. Anders figured an ex-trainer would know the physical Rocky Star better than anybody else.”

Now a frown settled on Devereaux’s face. “Toller eludes me. I can’t get a perspective on him. He’s a guileless child, he’s a prize psychotic. His explanation for the shrine is pat, incredibly yet believably too. It’s sentiment, quixotic and eccentric and self-abnegating; it’s creature worship of a chum who grew to be his God. Toller even somehow compels you to believe that. He mixes even parts of necrophilia and candor…and when he’s finished, you’re bored, but you’re also brimming at the eyes. He’s set up an irresistible nostalgia. Kids on the old block, the bathos and pathos of it. You’re with him to some extent vicariously…you’ve got the same acute remembrances yourself. It’s ‘Mother Machree’ sung to an Irishman in his cups. It’s your throat choking up over an album in the attic…”

Solowey laughed, “And you said you lacked a perspective on Max Toller!”

Devereaux shook his head. “But he doesn’t add up to anything for me. There’s more to a man than just an oddness. Nor can I finally accept Toller for the caricature he pretends.” The detective saw Solowey’s rapt interest and continued, “Toller has deep-down substance. I have this feeling about him. It takes a substantial and ordered man to meet those staggering rental bills Toller assumed when he decided to keep up Rocky’s apartment. A madman cannot make out hacking New York. Not for long anyhow. The job has stern requirements. It’s competitive, and arduous. A driver needs sharpness, coordination, a strong constitution and a certain calm.” He looked squarely at Solowey. “I’ve checked Toller’s garage record. He’s a steady worker, a top booker, and a responsible driver.”

“He functions,” Solowey commented wryly. “Ergo, he is an integrated man.”

“An unbalanced man cannot function,” Devereaux insisted doggedly. “Please let’s not split philosophical hairs. My simple point is: Toller isn’t all harum-scarum, only a lunatic sentimentalist, as we’ve made ourselves believe. The man has capacities, he has fibre, he has ingenuity…”

A shout came over the restaurant’s loudspeaker. A page system it was, for the personalities lingering in the Network’s backyard.

Solowey made patent translation of the tidings. “Paging Johnny Devereaux.” He smiled. “The whistle has blown, and your Never-Never Land beckons.”

Devereaux arose grimly. “Comes option time, I’ll make history,” he promised with clear meaning.

“Folly and fortune,” Solowey said. “They march together. Men who live by their sights beg alms in the public square.”

“Good I provide you with so much amusement,” Devereaux said. “Now, my formula for you to work off some of that killing fat. The strychnine that dispatched Hobie Grimes. Extend from Brooklyn into the Five Boroughs. Spill over into New Jersey and Connecticut. And into Delaware and Pennsylvania. Druggists, chemists, pharmaceutical supply houses. Find the poison’s source and its buyer… Astonish me with a feat of investigation.”

“Your formula to make me a stick,” Solowey said smilingly. “But the check, in the scope and cost you propose, is even now being made by the New York Police.”

Devereaux said, “We’re functioning independently right up to the finish. Assign all the men it needs. Per diem operatives—a gold doubloon every sundown.” A smile crossed his face. “Squander my theatrical bribe, I’ll get the illusion I’m really routing crime upstairs in Never-Never Land. I’ll be more able to suffer the greasepaint.”

They moved abreast across the restaurant floor. At the cashier’s counter, Devereaux turned off to climb the short staircase that led to the back door of the Network building. Solowey continued straight along, to the door that opened into the side street.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Part 1.

The cat-yellow eyes fixed balefully on Devereaux, and Toller set the large grocery bag down on the stone rest of the building front. The play in his face was of a man waylaid, forced into a ruffian encounter by an outlaw. The A.M. hour was two. A black night, with an oppressive sky that lay heavy and low with no dilution of color. An atmosphere of migraine charge. And a raw, insinuating cold to it, to sting and swell the vessels of the nose, to weight the body with moistures until the joints ached with the overload.

Mid-street, a line of taxi-cabs formed a steel hedge far down to the corner intersection that was Eleventh Avenue. It was the early morning feed-back into the garage that stood across the street. A mummer’s hour, deeply solemn, with the drag of death. The men were one face now, the Pietros, the Cullums, and the Kazmaiers. Papier-mâché, ash in color, and eyeless. Their differences were gone; the novelty of nose, that finer attribute that made a Swede over a Spic, the stiff Presbyterian spine and the round-shouldered Jew. All refined and composed in the ten-hour forage in the City jungle. Only one face now, one man; in a massive equality, in a massive ruin.

Toller said resentfully, “Hound me at my place of work, I’ll tear up my license.”

Devereaux said, “Where else can I find you?” He pressed the question. “Where do you live, by the way? Nobody’s yet been able to find out.”

The mouth formed a bare grin. “Never mind where. I like company by invitation, mister.” Toller stooped as if to recover his grocery bag. “I’ve done a night’s work. My bones hurt and my sinuses are killing me. Let’s make a date for some other time. I’m off Thursdays.”

The detective shook his head. “I’ve been here on the street since 1:00 A.M.” He looked down at the grocery bag. On top were cans of fruit juice, a can of meat, bacon in wax paper, and a carton of eggs. “Take me home for breakfast. Or be my guest.”

“I don’t feel sociable,” Toller said. His head thrust, to see down to the corner. “There’s a beanery open. We’ll have a quick coffee.” The taxi-driver lifted his grocery bag, and then said as if constrained to explain it, “I shop groceries before checking in. All-night dairy up on Columbus Avenue. He lets me owe him. I pay him by the month. Not that I like cooking for myself. I got that kind of stomach. Eat out, I’m dead. I’m swilling Serutan like it was milk. Come on, if we’re going.”

Part 2.

The coffee stood untasted. Devereaux lighted a cigarette and passed the pack to Toller.

“I’ve got my own brand,” the taxi-driver said.

A few minutes later, Toller said, “We stall around here, I’ll fall asleep. Don’t for Chrissakes sit reading me, like I’m a book.”

Devereaux smiled austerely and began his interrogation. “There have been a few happenings since that night we toured your old block.”

“Yeah, there have been,” Toller agreed somberly. He held an arm up for Devereaux to see. A black mourner’s band was sewn to the sleeve.

The detective resumed his study of the taxi-driver. Toller’s long thin face was sallow; the nose seemed larger than it was. The cheeks lumped where the bone was, like raised welts. There were pockets under his eyes as if sleep, if ever sleep, was a troubled time for the taxi-driver.

Devereaux said, “A mourning band for Rocky?”

Toller’s eyes made answer, and the detective said, “Sew one on the other sleeve for Hobie Grimes.”

“Hobie was nothing to me.”

Devereaux said, “Hobie was murdered.” He watched Toller’s eyes, wondering at the lack of surprise.

Toller said, “The newspapers only said dead, mister. Dead by poison. And now you say murdered. But I’m not surprised. Murder’s how I think about it too.”

The detective felt a quick elation. Toller, for the first time, was daring out from a deep retreat. The substantial Toller was moving to one side of the only odd Toller.

Devereaux said eagerly, “Who would murder Hobie Grimes?”

The answer when it came was exasperating. Toller was a cautious deviser of conundrums. “The same party that murdered Rocky,” he said.

“I give up. Who?” A long pause later, Devereaux said, “You’re trying to back away from it now. Why, Toller?”

Toller said slowly, “Maybe I’m taking a lesson from Hobie.”

Devereaux seized upon it. “Hobie telephoned me the afternoon of his death. Something on his mind he finally wanted to tell.” The detective’s stare held Toller. “It’s on your mind too, Toller. You know what Hobie never got to tell. I guess it to be the name of Rocky’s murderer.”

Toller said, “I tell it to you, I’m with Hobie. We weren’t such good company for me to want to look him up.”

“I’ll protect you,” Devereaux promised. “I’ll keep you out of it.”

“Promises are easy.” Now Toller hesitated and his face showed an inner struggle. His lids fell, as if he thought best in his own dark.

When the taxi-driver returned from deep within himself, the hang of his features, and the pallor, was more than before. As if decision had only come of resignation. Toller said, “You find me dead, have the City bill Marco for my burial.” He added quickly, “Don’t pound at me, mister. You’ll get answers without questions.”

Toller sampled his coffee and spit it out. “I don’t know how much Hobie knew. I don’t know as much as Hobie knew. What I do know, Hobie himself told me. And not directly, man to man, like I’m here talking to you now. It was more than a year after Rocky had disappeared. I’d dropped in to see Hobie, to ask my usual question: What did he hear from Rocky? I found Hobie sitting on the floor, with empty whiskey bottles standing around like bowling pins. And Hobie with the screaming meemies, crying and talking to himself. This was Hobie Grimes, remember, the malted-milk man who started camp meals with the Lord’s Prayer.” Toller stopped, to light a cigarette and then stamp it out.

“I found a chair and sat down to watch the show. I listened to Hobie’s talk. I poured myself a drink. I got drunk, and lay down on the floor with Hobie.” The taxi-driver met Devereaux’s gaze steadily, “What I know, I learned that night. Only I could never be sure of it, considering how I learned it. In the morning, I sobered up before Hobie did. I got out before Hobie woke up. If Hobie knew I’d been the night with him, I don’t know. He never mentioned it.”

“What was Hobie’s talk?” Devereaux asked.

“That the word had gone out on Rocky. Murder, by order of Marco. For Rocky’s welshing on the hundred thousand dollar payment. That’s what Rocky’s disappearance meant to Hobie. To Hobie talking out in his cups. And Hobie himself was caught betwixt and between. The watch was on him, and the quietus. He’d already had a sampling of what could happen if he coupled Rocky with Marco out loud.”

“Hobie’d been beaten by Marco’s thugs?”

Toller nodded. “I thought I was saying that. Beaten, and more than once. It was part of Hobie’s nightmare there on the floor.”

Devereaux said thoughtfully, “All this a year or so after Rocky’s disappearance, you say. Then for some years now, you’ve known that Rocky was dead.”

Toller shook his head. “I said I could never be sure of it, considering how I’d heard it. Hobie was talking scared…ranting it.” Now the voice shook a little. “And then, I didn’t want to believe it about Rocky. The heat was on and Rocky ran away somewhere, I told myself. He wasn’t hanging around, a sitting duck for Marco’s boys to shoot. Rocky was smart; he’d fought up out of a sewer… The Champ could take care of himself! I tried to keep Rocky alive in my mind like that. I kept his place up. The Champ would be back, he was taking his time coming back. He’d get word to me someday…”

A moment later, Toller said, “When no body turned up, I was sure Rocky’d won over Marco. I had that hope… Murder, there’s a body. I kept repeating that to myself like a prayer, mister. Murder, there’s a body. Sooner or later, a body turns up. You kill a guy, but you don’t erase him!”

Devereaux waited for the pitch of emotion to subside. Toller was shaking, all through him. The anguish seemed real, but somehow too wild. Too much for tragedy, refurbished by memory. The anodyne of time, and the blessed sublimation—Where was it, Devereaux wondered. Toller’s grief was alive, close upon him now, as if he was standing over the corpse in a first sight.

Devereaux said, “You rationalized it, out of sentiment. Love for a childhood chum. You rejected the truer thing: that Rocky had been murdered. Hallucination and fact, you lived somewhere between the two. All right for so much. But in my gauge of you, you’re withal a shrewd, practical fellow.” The detective smiled slightly. “I’ve thrown away my original dogma about you, Toller. That you are wholly mad. I got that impression the night we rode around. But in later thinking it over, I came to another conclusion. That you were odd, but crafty too. That you’d handled me beautifully. You parried my questions in point, you told me a charming fable of youth. And then when I tried to corner you, you left me to the taxi-cab.”

It brought an involuntary and fleeting grin to Toller’s face. Devereaux continued, “I repeat: a shrewd, practical fellow withal. In that light, I insist that the more reasonable side of you did accept the fact of Rocky’s murder. Early, and at once.”

Toller seemed to think about it. “I accepted it, and I didn’t. I knew it was true, and I wished it wasn’t. I’m a sane man, and I’m-crazy. My head’s hard, and soft. So all right. Why are you making a big thing out of it!”

“Your grief here tonight,” Devereaux said patiently. “No slight intended, but I wonder about it. It’s like the first minutes of bereavement. Yet by your truest knowledge, Rocky’s been a long time dead.”

“I felt about Rocky,” Toller began, but stopped. The show of grief that was so remarkable to Devereaux was there again. Full in Toller’s eyes, everywhere on his face.

Soon Toller said, as if in defense of his display, “I’m one day back from the Harvard Lab, mister. I threw up all last night.”

“You then believe you saw Rocky’s remains?”

Toller said, “That night we rode around, I didn’t tell you a thing. Why do you think I’m talking to you now?” The cat-yellow eyes had a deep inner gleam now. “You guessed it about me, that first time we met. My fright, over what Marco could do to me. I scare, mister, like anybody else. But I’m talking to you tonight. I mean, Rocky’s talking to you through me. Get Marco. Give him what he gave the Champ!”

Devereaux said, “You go around my questions. I’d like a more direct answer. I specifically asked: do you believe you viewed Rocky’s remains in the Harvard Lab?”

“Yes, I do believe it.”

“How could you know? I mean, other than the ring Anders had you identify.”

Toller was hesitant now. His face drew for some moments, and then he said, “How did I know it was Rocky? In my heart I knew it. Then there were measurements the Doc had worked out. They fit the Champ…”

Devereaux said sharply, “Were there special and significant physical markers that could only be Rocky Star?”

“N-no,” Toller conceded.

“Then you cannot say the remains were Rocky Star.” Now a stubborn look came to Toller. “You’re trying to mix me up. And I’m damned if I know why, mister. I talk to you, we take off on tangents. You sit there proving to me how sane I am, and then you pick it over. I don’t understand you.”

Devereaux pressed his lips tightly. His perspective on Toller was unaccountably awry again. The man was ephemeral, with the merest instance of solidity. The detective had a feeling he couldn’t shake that this face look at Toller was only a facet of the man and not the total. That Toller was again only revealing himself just so much before darting away into an inky void. Or was he being overly analytical, Devereaux wondered fretfully.

Now Devereaux felt impelled to say, “You wrap a neat package, Toller. Only thing, I get the feeling I didn’t myself select the merchandise. You don’t let me buy. You sell me.”

Toller looked perplexed. “Whatever that means, mister.”

“You dodge around, Toller. You’re in my camera, but you move out of focus before the click. I keep developing blank negatives.”

Toller said, “Take your thumb off me, mister. I’m squeezed dry.”

Devereaux shook his head to it. “My thumb on you, but your ring in my nose. You pull me around, Toller. On a guided tour. You show me the sights you want me to see.”

The taxi-driver said disgustedly, “You make a puzzle out of something simple. You’ve been a cop too long.”

The detective said, “Something simple. Marco ordered the murder of Rocky Star. Marco ordered Hobie Grimes silenced.”

“Why is that so hard to believe?”

“Perhaps because it is too easy to believe, Toller.” The detective looked steadily at the taxi-driver. “Two events, five years apart. The time lag isn’t Marco’s way. I find it hard to believe Marco would be so careless with his own safety. Hobie alive was a constant threat to Marco. I mean, if Marco had actually done away with The Tiger Man.”

Toller said, “I told you Marco kept on top of Hobie all the time.” He stopped to look hard at Devereaux. “People generally bow down low to Marco. Marco doesn’t always have to kill you to shut you up. Do I really have to tell you! It took five years to crack Hobie. If you hadn’t happened to him, mister, it might have taken fifty.” Now Toller made a gesture, as if impatient with himself. “But here I am selling you again.”

The taxi-driver rose to his feet stormily. “Wrap your own package, mister. The times we’re together, I have a bad experience. I feel slapped around. You slap me around for the hell of it.” The cat-yellow eyes showed red around the rim; Toller was a man worn beyond ordinary fatigue. “For me, the Champ is dead. I’ve quit hoping. I’ve stopped praying.” Now the mouth disfigured and his tone was heavy with dislike. “Comes Friday, the ‘shrine’ is an empty apartment with a For Rent sign on it. Everything in it goes to auction. I came back from the Harvard Lab, and called up an Auction Room. The proceeds from it goes to Rocky’s old man.”

Toller’s eyes were full once more, and grief lay on his face. “I dodge around, you say. I’ve dodged around in Hell for five years, mister. I couldn’t face up to the loss of a guy who’d wrapped himself around my heart. That’s over now. I’ve cut my heart out…” A fist coiled to stand rigidly in the space between them. “Stay away from me, mister. Find another book to read. I want to get lost, I want to forget.”

Devereaux watched Toller walk to the door of the small restaurant. If Toller was a book, he was a blind reader. Toller was a paradox outside his grasp; a seller of facts, and vapor. With vapor in the greater measure of the two.

The detective saw Toller open the door and fling into the inky void of night.

Devereaux rose wearily, to pay the check and depart. It had been a long day and a longer night. His automobile was parked around the corner.

Part 3.

Devereaux fumbled with his car keys, seeking the door lock. His fingers were stiff with cold and insensitive to the mean task. He heard the thud of the mechanism as the lock labored its turn, and then he stood rooted in an intense concentration of his every faculty as his ears picked up other sounds.

Familiar sounds these, stored away in his sensory files. It was away from him, and coming toward him, as once before. A hum, unmuffled with a cough to it…an automobile exhaust. And a flap, flap, striking the asphalt smartly, like paper adhered to a spinning cylinder. An automobile with oversized tires.

The same sounds that had once been heraldry to a bullet fired at him on a hospital street.

The automobile roared by, on the south lane of the two-way avenue, the far side from Devereaux’s cover behind the standing Buick. Devereaux saw the driver, knew his face. A revelation, but the stir in the detective beggared the event. He stood still on the ground, leaden to his feet, with no rise to his pulse and no surge of elation. His face was curiously empty as he stared into the columns of smoke that floated in the wake of the car that had passed.

Max Toller, the driver. Devereaux’s mind made irrevocable record of it. Max Toller it was who had stalked the streets with fist and club and gun. The assaults on Nina Troy, and Brett Carter, and himself, Devereaux. It was Toller who had stood fearsomely against the search for The Tiger Man.

Devereaux got into his car and started the motor. His exhaustion was utter; every fibre of him said no to a frantic chase into the night after Toller. Tomorrow was good time enough to close once more with the supreme salesman of vapor.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Part 1.

The heavy velour draperies hung stiffly from their valances to blot out the window light. The uptown flat that was a shrine was close and unventilated, with that mustiness to it peculiar to places long uninhabited.

Devereaux pushed his prisoner into the room and twisted slightly to work the inside patent lock. He pressed a wall button and lighted the room. He then took off his coat, unbuttoned his shirt collar at the neck and loosened the knot of his tie. There were leather thongs showing on his back and front, and a gun stood formidably in its holster.

The detective paced the room in a quick examination of it. The room was smart, with some showy touches. The broadloom rug was thick and cushiony; the over-stuffed chairs deep and roomy. There were torchères with an aluminum look to them that gave indirect lighting. There was a sleek mahogany bar with a polished brass foot-rest in the corner close to an alcove that divided the living room from a kitchen or bedroom. A broad shelf behind the bar was stocked with a great variety of bottles brimming to the top; the labels on them read Scotch, Bourbon, Rum, and Gin. Over the shelf, on a free space on the wall, hung a portrait painting. A superbly muscled man with gloved fists in a boxer’s stance. The invincible Tiger Man, done in oils; reds and vivid greens, the colors of flame and eternal Spring. Devereaux moved close to it, to read the signature, and then nod to himself. Byron Fellows, the artist; a contemporary great with a penchant for painting Matadors and Admirals.

Devereaux shifted his position warily. Toller was close at his elbow, staring at the hanging portrait.

Toller said huskily, “Get the build on him. A six-inch chest expansion. Fists of steel, and a stomach you could stand a ton on.”

The detective said, “Jump me, I’ll shoot you in both hands and legs.”

Toller said, “You won’t make out, mister. I ever leave here alive, I’ll tell a cop. I wasn’t arrested, I was kidnapped.”

“I don’t have a scruple you can touch, Toller,” the detective said frostily. “Argue, or whine, you’re only wasting breath. Three assaults by fist and bludgeon. One assault by gun. The reckoning is now.”

“Rocks in your head,” Toller said calmly. “My oversized tires. I’ll show you a hundred jalopies with the same.”

The blow caught Toller full on the mouth. He sat down on the floor with an odd angle to his head, and now his eyes showed a first real awareness of his plight.

Devereaux said, “A lady I represent wears high collars and long sleeves. You did quite a job on her.”

Toller said nothing. He dabbed a handkerchief to his lips, then formed two fingers into a wide-pronged fork and reached into his mouth. The fork came away with an upper dental plate. He held it before him, methodically estimating the damage, and then threw it across the floor.

The detective said, “You did an even better job on Brett Carter. You really discouraged him from looking for The Tiger Man.”

Toller said, “I’m the goat. I’m without teeth, because you’re frustrated. But I won’t beg, mister. I’ll take the beating. I ever leave here alive, I’ll tell a cop.”

The detective said, “Your first go at me, I bled all over the sidewalk. The miracle is, my mind didn’t go wandering.”

Devereaux stooped to raise Toller and thrust him into a great chair. The taxi-driver looked squarely at the detective, in an efforted impassivity, as if in this presentation of himself lay his ultimate triumph.

Devereaux said, “It was stupid of you to use your own car while out on a shoot. A cop is sharp about details—You were pushing your luck. But the car alone wasn’t your trap. We’d sooner or later be here in this exact situation anyhow.”

Toller’s eyes narrowed slightly and the detective continued, “The car and its revelation merely sharpened my thinking. All the rest of last night, and into the dawn. Toller: how much does he fit into the general scheme? And how much of the general scheme can stand of itself, away from Toller?”

The detective’s eyes glinted. “There was little I could subtract from Toller. You were the prime mover in the scheme, you dominated it. The disappearance of Rocky Star, the terror on the streets—Toller the agent, Toller the Shadow Man. The silencing of Hobie Grimes—I laid that to you too. You shared a secret with Hobie. You murdered Hobie to stop him from revealing that secret…

“And more Toller, more of the prime mover. The corpse in the bog, purportedly the last remains of The Tiger Man. So purported by Toller.” Devereaux saw the quick objection in the taxi-driver’s face. “Yes, I know. Aldo Starziani identified a ring as Rocky’s along with you. I found a simple explanation for that in my thinking. The ring, say, was actually Rocky’s. Rocky’s own ring planted on the thing in the bog. Planted by you, Toller. Trinkets belonging to The Tiger Man were available to you.” The detective’s hand described the room. “You’ve had exclusive access to all of his personal possessions for five years!”

A moment later, Devereaux spoke into the deep silence. “I used the phrase ‘purportedly the remains of The Tiger Man.’ The implication there is that I do not believe the thing in the bog was Rocky Star.” He sought Toller’s eyes unsuccessfully. “The fact is, I know it to be a hoax.”

There was no reaction. There was a rigidity in Toller’s face as if a glaze lay over it. The detective said, “A shrewd piece of bedevilment, and you rate applause for consummate genius, Toller! The reconstruction of ordinary physical measurements beautifully approximated the structural Rocky Star. Quite a poser at that. And very convincing, even without particular dentistry or surgical scars, or other markers that could describe only The Tiger Man. And for the clincher, there was the time element. The thing in the bog had been dead for about as long as the time of Rocky Star’s disappearance. A pattern of proof so substantial, only an arrant quibbler would continue to refuse the remains as authentically Rocky Star…

“But I refuse it, Toller. I say the remains in the marsh was nothing more than a plant. Like the ring was a plant. And I can prove it! I say that Rocky Star did have particular physical markers at the time of his disappearance. Injuries that you well knew about, but concealed from Captain Anders and Dr. Kingdon. Bone injuries that must prove or disprove the remains. Rocky’s hands, Toller—They were broken by Marco’s goons! More than broken, they were crushed. Marco saw to it that Rocky would never fight again.”

There was the smallest crack in the glaze now. A shadowing, under the eyes. The detective said, “Injuries that can be read easily, even long after a man has perished. I talked to Dr. Kingdon over the telephone this morning. He agreed the remains in his laboratory could not be The Tiger Man, on the basis of what I told him about Rocky’s crushed hands. His fellow had no bone injuries in the hands.”

“Toller the prime mover,” Devereaux said, summing it up. “The thing in the bog was your maneuver. You were the anonymous tipster on the phone with Captain Anders. You hoped to foreclose on our search for Rocky Star by ringing in a proxy corpse. And last night in your talk with me, you patently supplied fuel to my suspicions that perhaps Marco had murdered The Tiger Man. You used every histrionic, every cunning. You told a superb story, with superior emotion—You tied a neat package. There was the corpus delicti, and now remained only Marco’s arrest and arraignment. The case was done; there’d be no further search for Rocky Star. No further molestation of you; your secret was safe forever. That was your hope.”

There was no response. Toller sat stolidly in the void he had found for himself. The glaze was on his face and his eyes told nothing. It was as if Devereaux’s monodrama had been rendered to himself alone. His captive audience had escaped into sightlessness and deafness.

Devereaux said, “I’ve made circles. I’ve been to the moon and back. I’m still asking the original question: Where is Rocky Star?”

A moment later the detective said, “You’ve got the answer, Toller. You’re so far my shining result. I win through you, or I lose because of you.” Devereaux’s brow furled, and a giant vein stood on it. He had a premonition of failure. Toller was a rock; assaults could scar and mutilate the surface, but that was all.

Devereaux said, “Force against a rock. In the end, futile maybe, but I’ve anyhow got to try. A mere arrest…you’d go free. The evidence against you is mainly assertive, and you’re an ingenious fellow. The District Attorney would nod along with my brief against you, and then regretfully order your release. You’d get away with murder; you’d laugh out loud.” The detective paused to wonder at the sense of his remarks. He was defending his assault and the rest to come; pleading expediency, and asking the victim to accept the plea.

Devereaux said restlessly, “We’re in this room anyhow for the reckoning alone. Measure for measure, and it’s certainly due you…” He stopped, again surprised at himself. His talk, and the qualm it suggested was not his wont. But suddenly he was cold, and without that rage that was his spur.

It was this feeling of final futility, Devereaux told himself…the depression of it. Toller would fall, but Toller would not break. Toller was such a man. The beating would be wanton without yield.

His blood lay still so that he could not feel his fingers, when Devereaux began with Max Toller.

The automaton stood cold in its metal and faceless, and the twin pistons before it moved precisely to sound against the abdomen and the kidneys. There were gasps, and then when breath was gone, there were only the sounds of the pistons striking against the flesh.

Part 2.

The underlip of the man who lay prone moved ceaselessly in an incantation that had no sound to it.

The man who stood over him splashed water in his face, and then held a bottle just inside his mouth. The whiskey poured as if into a vat, and then the overflow spilled down Toller’s front.

There was no stir; just the underlip and the incantation that made no words or even sound.

The night had passed and now the dawn outside showed barely through the porous grain of the window draperies. Devereaux fell leadenly into a chair. The sweat was on him and inside his clothes like layers of grease. His head was heavy, and his hands; he saw these as huge molds of wood, balled and knobby with great warts on them like festering sores. His lids dropped and he fell into the dark. The night was Toller’s score, and Devereaux’s pain now was both for Toller’s victory and his own defeat. He closed his eyes tightly to obliterate inner sight, so the screen there would shut down because of mechanical failure.

But the scene showed, as if the illumination and power it wanted now came from the man who lay prone. On the screen, the automaton stood cold in its metal and twin pistons before it moved precisely to strike against the flesh and the spirit.

Now Devereaux stared intensely into his own dark. The man who lay prone was himself. The automaton that stood was Toller, Max Toller.

The rustling movement when it happened was too swift for the detective’s reflexes. He understood it only perceptively, in his dark. Toller; Toller had returned to substance in an improbable resurrection.

The blow caught Devereaux as he was, trapped in his own dark and prone before the automaton. The blow was hard, more than a man’s force.

The second blow struck where the first had, to pulp the side of his skull and damage the ear. On the floor, Devereaux sought the amount of his knees. He was vague, just before oblivion.

The last blow was a missile hurtling through space. A candlestick, flung at him. It struck the back of the detective’s head low to the base where the neck began. It seemed to stay, as if it would adhere, become one with the structure of flesh. Then it dropped off, to the rug.

The detective felt his way blindly, to the door, moving on knees as in a child’s obstacle race. At the door, his hand explored for the knob. Then he pulled himself up, using the knob as a grasp, to stand waveringly as a barrier to Toller. He found his gun, by instinct and feel, and then held it out while he tried to find his eyes.

The crash of window glass seemed more distant than sound contained in the sheer cubic hollow of the flat.

Devereaux made his way to the source, now with sight that distorted things before him and painted them red.

At the bedroom window, he looked down into a courtyard. The asphalt flat below was splashed with the first sun of day. The sun made a jagged pattern of shadows and light, and Toller lay in its center, with the giant teeth of the design touching him on all sides.

Devereaux was slow in calculating the depth to the courtyard from the window. Two stories, and a basement level.

A cat’s leap. Foolhardy for a human.

Part 3.

The taxi-driver placed his palms flat and hard on the stone and then raised upwards in resolute movements that stopped at the line of his hips. His breathing was harsh and the veins swelled unbearably in his face and neck. He fell back to hold on his elbows and stare anxiously at his legs. As his stare held and realization came to him, Toller’s eyes showed fright.

Devereaux said, “Both legs broken, Toller. Two-and-a-half stories, what did you expect.”

Toller looked dumbly to the detective, and then up to the window of the flat.

Devereaux said, “It’s a possible drop for a man in condition. But you had no legs to start with. You overrated your chances.”

Toller said, “Get me up.”

The detective shook his head. “You’re a stretcher case. There may be other less visible injuries. Internal injuries. I’ll call an ambulance.”

Toller begged, “Help me stand up.”

“You’ll only fall right down.”

The taxi-driver placed his palms flat and hard on the stone again, then tipped his weight to roll to a side. Now head down to the ground, he commenced his feverish toil to the yard wall of a building. He moved in heaves powered from his chest, setting his elbows down and lifting on them, to advance an inch or so and then fall spent, but soon resume again.

And then at the building wall, he lay uselessly, his eyes looking frantically for some grasp low enough to his reach.

Devereaux said, “Face up to it, Toller. Keep punishing yourself, you’ll compound your injuries. You’ll only be a longer time recovering.”

“I’ve got to have my legs, mister.” There was a cry in the tone that soon grew into sobs that shook the taxi-driver.

Devereaux said, “I’ll phone for that ambulance.”

“No, mister. No ambulance. I don’t want any ambulance, mister. I just want out of here!” The tone was wild, and it compelled Devereaux. He stared wonderingly at the taxi-driver. Toller’s whole oddness was back; that first quality Devereaux had known…

The detective spoke with his eyes probing the taxi-driver. “You’re helpless, Toller. You can’t even crawl around on your knees. You’ve got less locomotion than a new-born infant. And the pain’s going to get deadlier—any minute you’ll be screaming with it. You need a doctor at once, to dose you up.”

Toller was shaking his head fiercely to the detective’s speech. Devereaux said, “You’ll be on your back with your legs in plaster casts for months. At least months. That’s the shape you’re in. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Toller’s face emptied, and soon the underlip began moving uncontrollably in the rushing prayer that had no sound to it. Now the detective stood rooted to the scene, awed by it and bound to it as if it was one form, one figure, and he, Devereaux, was but one indivisive part of the whole. His eyes sought Toller’s, but now undemandingly, with even some pity, and his face was calm and free of its deep grooves of thought as if the confusion inside had gone in one great and sudden erasure.

The rock that had been only scarred and mutilated on its surface now lay broken. Devereaux saw this and understood it, and he knew with a sure grasp that the secret that was Toller’s would pass to him.

He saw Toller’s sign; a finger that made the least movement. Devereaux crouched low to hear the bare whisper.

“You win,” the taxi-driver said. “Carry me to your car.” The eyes that were deep and lost leaped from their void. “Do as I tell you, mister, or go to hell. You’ll carry me around. You’re my legs now.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Part 1.

The alleyway was refuse-laden and it ran in slender line to the yard in the back. On both sides of it were warehouses no longer in use. Mammoth structures they were, with sheet-tin for windows and fire-escapes pulled perilously from their mooring in the ancient brick. There were gaping holes in the brick; irregular patterns like a child’s building blocks. These showed high up where the roofs were, as if Wreckers had begun on it and then for reasons remote and mysterious, had gone away.

Devereaux picked his way slowly through the narrow foot-pass. The burden he carried in his arms was almost more than his strength, and although alone and safe from watchers, he felt embarrassed and even a little ridiculous.

Toller cautioned, “Stop before you go into the yard. I’ve got a German Police in there. She’ll jump you, unless I call her off.” There was a worried note. “She might anyhow, when she sees you carrying me. She won’t understand it.”

* * * *

The dog stood, graceless and malevolent, quartered by a heavy-linked chain fixed to a drainpipe. The length of chain limited the beast’s mobility to the mouth of the alleyway. The yard was littered with metal and glass. Outstandingly, there was a broken gasoline pump, a bedspring with thick coils of rust, and a large, square box with the word COLA still readable on it.

The small yard-house they entered was a gray clapboard frame of one story, with an exterior bulge to it as if it was water-logged and swollen. In the hallway, there was a whine and movement to the planks underfoot, and the effect on Devereaux was dis-equilibrium; he was in a remembered Coney Island Exhibit, where the floors fell away to the tread and the walls gave the chilling illusion of compression and jeopardy.

Toller said, “Reach into my coat for the key. The left hand pocket.” He added, in the faintest irony, “I’ll open the door. You’ve got your hands full.”

Inside the room, the unlighted gloom had the effect of a blindfold. The air was heavy, and there were overpowering odors. Damp smells, like the accumulation of decades of rain; the reek of fabrics and bedding and oilcloth, the rancid smell of unrefrigerated food.

Toller’s fingers tapped the detective’s shoulder in what had oddly become their code, and Devereaux carefully laid the taxi-driver across a great chair. A side position, with Toller casually disposed; his thighs and legs on the arm-rest, and placed slightly higher than his head.

Devereaux stood, feeling taller than his height for the low ceiling. When his eyes lost the first blur and his focus was truer, he sought out the details of the room. It had the formless and meager arrangement of furnishings and effects that suggested a clubhouse more than a dwelling. A Youths’ clubhouse; the hide-away and rendezvous of nesters in flight from the closeness of their tenement homes and the overseership of their elders. There was a Victrola cabinet, and a checkers table with the red and black squares impressed in the wood. The walls showed sports pictures: boxers, and ball players, and race horses. These were of the newspaper rotogravure sort mainly, and they were fastened to the walls with thumb-tacks.

An iron bed stood in a corner of the room, set by a window that was darkened by a blue-green window shade. On the bed was a man. He was partly clad. He wore an undershirt that left his armpits free, trousers that were unbelted and loose on his hips, and his feet were bare. A thin man of smaller frame than the scant clothes that covered him. His knees were raised to points, and the bones could be read through the trousers he wore. A sick man plainly, and the signs of this were more than his general emaciation. His face was shadowed, and small as if the planes from nose to the sides had no embellishment of flesh. His stare was upward, to the ceiling; a fixed, unfaltering stare, as if he had died.

Devereaux looked to Toller, drawn by the strangled sounds the taxi-driver was making in his throat. Toller was crying, and trying to do it silently.

The detective looked again to the motionless figure on the iron, bed, and then took an involuntary step away from it. He had a small boy’s fright for an instinctive moment; this was a reality beyond him, older than his years; and not of his taste or liking; nor did he want to see and understand it, and so become part of a sophistication and sordidness from which he could never again wrest his youth.

The man on the iron bed was Rocky Star. Devereaux knew it, and then said the name to himself, silently inside himself. The shrunken figure that looked more than sixty years old was The Tiger Man. The detective calculated swiftly in his head. Thirty-one; Rocky’s calendar age was thirty-one.

He heard Max Toller say, “He fell away, bit by bit, to what you see. This last year, it’s gone faster. One month, Rocky shrivels up like ten years.”

The taxi-driver kept talking, as if anticipating Devereaux’s questions. “A bone disease. Malignant and incurable. The same that got Lou Gehrig. All you can do is clock off the time you’ve got left. Rocky was in Europe when he got the diagnosis. He used a made-up name, and the Medic over there never knew he’d examined The Tiger Man. That’s why there was no leak on his condition here in the States. Only three of us know it. Me, Rocky, and Hobie Grimes.”

Toller made a gesture and Devereaux looked with the taxi-driver’s pointing fingers. “In that cabinet there near the bed. There’s a hypodermic and morphine in a bottle. I jab Rocky once a day, so he can make out. That coma he’s in; the jab snaps him out of it. He can move around for an hour, eat, and play a little checkers.” The taxi-driver moved slightly and painfully. “The way I am now, I can’t do the trick for Rocky. You’ll have to do it for me, mister.” The fingers pointed again. “That burner there, the electric stove; you’ll have to heat up some water and sterilize the hypodermic. Jab Rocky, and then jab me.”

Devereaux stood still as he was, as if he had not heard the taxi-driver’s request. A time later, the detective spoke in shocked tones, “Penned in here, with you playing doctor with bootleg pharmaceuticals… With you shopping groceries and keeping house…”

Toller said, “Rocky wanted it like this. We both wanted it like this, mister!” The underlip was going uncontrollably again, but now there were sounds. “The only big thing he ever had was his pride. The Tiger Man, Undefeated Champion Of The World. He wanted to be remembered only like that. Undefeated, mister!”

Devereaux shook his head slowly. He had a stifled feeling, as if entrapped; the denouement found him cheerless, even regretful for it. Rocky Star on a death-bed just around the corner from Tenement 222 that had cradled Rocco Starziani. Tenement 222, where an old man fooled with matchsticks, building cathedrals, and a son fancied his own image. The old block, and the cycle completed; Rocco had come back an anonymous wraith, to die on the old block. A secret kept, almost kept, and the cost of it was murder. Now Toller spoke as if again anticipating the detective’s question. “Hobie too wanted it like Rocky and I wanted it. The Champ had gone away, and never mind where. It was nobody’s business but Rocky’s!”

A phrase repeated in Devereaux’s head. Hobie’s own phrase; obscure once, but he understood it now. “Who has stolen the statue from the public park—”

Toller continued, “Hobie was up here every chance he had, reading books to Rocky and kidding him that he was going to win this bout and get better. Kidding him that the uptown place was still set up and waiting for Rocky to come back to it. Hobie was wonderful, and the bad things I said about him weren’t true, mister. I was conning you around.”

Devereaux said incredulously, “The way you remember Hobie…the fine feeling. Yet you killed him. You were the one!”

There was no denial of it. And no yield of expression. No wincing look, or care, or remorse that Devereaux could see. Toller was a zealot, and all of him dedicated, and murder and atrocious assault were the mere signs of his dedication. Like the grocery bag standing fat with food, the morphine and the hypodermic needle, the checkerboard and the checkers. All in kind, all in proof, murder and home medicine and checkers, and no one sign or deed more exacting than another to the taxi-driver. And all of it in the name of the Cause, in homage to it. All of it in the name of Rocky Star—the sanctity of the myth of The Tiger Man.

Toller said, “Hobie was going to tell you where to go find Rocky. He put me on notice; he’d reached that answer to his situation. I went to Brooklyn to talk it over with him. Hobie let me in. Later, I let myself out. A funny thing, I think Hobie knew I was coming to kill him, but didn’t give a damn.”

Devereaux looked long and futilely at the taxi-driver. He was again vainly assessing Toller, his camera again aimed at a subject who dodged out of focus before the click. Toller, the perversity of this one man and the insanity, was too complex for Devereaux’s grasp. A casebook of psychopaths over a quarter-century of police work, provided not index, type, or prototype to Max Toller. Toller was uniquely Toller, utterly new in Devereaux’s experience. A study for clinicians, never a detective.

Devereaux heard Toller say, “Hobie was dead anyhow. The heart was out of him. Rocky was Hobie’s whole life.”

Devereaux asked, “The corpse in the marsh. Who was it, and what grave did you rob?”

“He was Mamie Regan’s late husband, Kid Coogan. He died close to the time Rocky had to drop out of sight. I was at his funeral; we laid a wreath on his grave that set Rocky back five hundred dollars.” Now there was the merest smile on Toller’s face. As if proud of his device, the genius of it. “There’s an empty coffin now where Coogan was buried. Coogan was a middleweight. His last bout with Rocky, their, measurements tallied.”

“When did you put Coogan in the marsh?”

“Months ago. About the time that columnist Carter went to bat for Nina Troy. Carter brought Rocky’s disappearance back to public attention.” Toller’s tone took on stress, as if some decent explanation was a particular need with him. “I had to stop the girl. Mind you, I knew her situation, and I was sorry for her. But if she found Rocky, then so would the world.”

He continued, “Coogan’s remains was my ace in the hole all along. The investigation got rough, I had a corpse to hand up. A corpse with Rocky’s measurements, wearing Rocky’s ring—Let the cops beat their brains over it. It was the perfect cover for Rocky. And to make it sweeter, it was the perfect frame for Marco. Marco would get what he deserved.”

A long moment later, Toller said hopelessly, “Rocky still wants it like this, mister.” He read Devereaux’s face, and then the glaring cat-yellow pupils the detective had missed seeing through the night and day came alive again. They held a flame, and now there was a grotesque set to Toller’s face.

The taxi-driver said, “You’re a cop and you’re a crumb. The Tiger Man built something with his guts, and now you’re going to tear it down. You’re going to show him up to be nothing…just some more garbage on the East Side.”

Devereaux shook his head violently. He wanted to cry out that the flesh had no consequence, and that it was the spirit only that mattered. That a game fighter could never lose face, or the love of his fellows, or high seat in the universe. That the applause of The Tiger Man would be as great as before, even greater than before. That they were wrong, these two, the fighter and his trainer; that they had the wrong value of pride, a lunatic concept of it…

But Devereaux said nothing. It was a speech he could think, but never make. Lofty words and tender words…he was awkward in it, he did it badly…

Toller said miserably, “I should have killed you that night I fired over your head. I made my mistake there, mister. I should have killed you.”

And then he said, “Go on, sweep us into the gutter, mister. We’re garbage. Swing your broom.”

Devereaux stared at the taxi-driver. The underlip was going uncontrollably in the incantation without sound. Not long after, it stopped. Toller was quiet; he had passed out.

Part 2.

She made flurried and uncoordinated movements with her clothing accessories and the sheaf of papers she carried, as if in these diversions she would perhaps find that poise she somehow had lost.

Her eyes turned away as she spoke. “You’ve done this wonderful thing…you don’t know how grateful…”

Devereaux nodded to her across a distance, and she fumbled through another bit of speech. “My marriage will be substantiated. He—Rocky—is anxious for it too.” Her eyes filled with horror. “Poor Rocky…how terrible!”

Devereaux made silent nod again, and then looked down at her hand reaching to him. “I’ve got to run,” she said somewhere deep in her throat. “I’m Laura Brooks this morning, and you know how fanatical the Director is about promptness…”

They touched fingers barely.

When she was gone, Devereaux found it hard to re-conjure her. Ghosts without flesh, they had met briefly and touched without incident or envelopment. A dalliance in the shadows, and now it was day, cold and clear. He was in his lonely corner, depressed, but oddly glad for the depression. This was his milieu, the familiar self; he was at home in loneliness.

He watched Sam Solowey emerge from the box that was the elevator, and come striding toward him. He watched Solowey, with a great wish to erase him. He was jealous of his lonely corner.