Date: 1966-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery
Description: A dead spy sucks Tim Corrigan into a deadly international conspiracy Walter Ingram has an English name, but a German accent. He passes through the lobby of his New York hotel with ramrod-straight posture, bypassing the bar and going directly to his room. There, he’s greeted with a pistol to the skull. The 1st blow dazes him; the 2nd knocks him out. As he dies, Ingram murmurs, “Nein . . . Nein.” Seconds later, a cabbie fighting his way through New York traffic hears a sickening thud as the mangled remains of Ingram’s body crash into the hood of his car. On the streets of Manhattan, it’s raining
Publisher: Open Road Media
Rights: All rights are reserved.

Who Spies, Who Kills?

Ellery Queen

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

“He that spies
is the one who kills.”

—IRISH PROVERB

1

The man who called himself Walter Ingram wriggled out of the Manhattan afternoon rush hour like a fish bucking the current.

He insinuated himself into the revolving door at the Fifty-Second Street side entrance of the Hotel Amernational with relief. In the air-conditioned sanctuary of the lobby, Ingram paused to dry his forehead and neck with a damp handkerchief.

Berliners, Londoners, Parisians: Ingram had rubbed elbows with them all. But New Yorkers held the record in his experience for sheer hurly-burly.

Ingram glanced across the Amernational’s lobby to the cocktail lounge. The thought of a frosty beer made him drool. But then he defeated temptation. There were too many people in the lounge, and more were trying to wedge their way inside. He did not like crowds.

He was a neat, average-looking man, and he went unnoticed as he carefully made his way toward the desk. He carried himself like a man who had made of walking a special sort of exercise—spine straighter than straight, chest far out, head far back, knees at the ready, toes turned in very slightly. If anyone had bothered to look at him, the observer would have said that here was a man walking on the edge of a cliff, trying to ignore it and not quite succeeding.

Ingram patiently waited his turn at the busy desk. A clerk checked in a harried-looking man who wore a 20-year company pin in his lapel. As the man walked off trailing a bellhop, Ingram slipped forward. “I am Mr. Ingram. Nineteen-nought-four. You have a communication for me?”

The desk clerk looked up and at Ingram for the first time, his trained ear catching the stilted phraseology. Ingram looked like an Englishman, one of those modest sandy chaps who usually come with a pipe, lunch on fish and chips during an occasional outing at Brighton, and risk half a quid once a year on a nag in the derby. He wore a quiet blue suit and blue necktie.

But the accent was wrong. It was guttural northwestern Europe, and it suggested two chins and the belly of a kidney-pie-and-cabbage eater.

The clerk looked in the 1904 pigeonhole. “I’m sorry, sir.”

The damp handkerchief made quick jabs at Ingram’s lean jawline. “Are you sure?”

“You can see for yourself, sir. The box is empty.”

“Perhaps a misplacement …”

The clerk looked at the people crowding behind Ingram. “Are you going to your room, sir?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll ring you immediately anything comes in.”

Ingram’s eyes seemed about to pop. Then he slipped the handkerchief into the breast pocket of his jacket. The quick gesture left a precise show of white over the pocket. His body inclined in a short, stiff bow. “Danke schön.”

He turned toward the elevators.

On the nineteenth floor he inserted a key, unlocked the door of his room, and stepped inside.

In midstep, as the door clicked shut, Ingram knew he was not alone. He had caught a rustle of movement, a breath. Someone was flattened against the wall. His flesh went icy. He felt his muscles twist and turn, and he glimpsed a face like stone, the blur of a down-coming arm, the glint of a clubbing gun.

Too late Ingram’s hands flew up as the barrel of the gun made contact and his scalp ruptured in a two-inch gash. A detonation behind his eyeballs blinded him. Blood burst from his head and spurted down the side of his face. His lungs collapsed, throwing out an animal gasp.

The blow reduced him to a mindless mass. But the will to survive was strong. Ingram did the impossible. He remained on his feet, reeling away from his attacker. Clawing at the air for support, he staggered across the room, bumping into one piece of furniture after another.

A battering ram struck him from behind and sent him crashing to the floor.

Ingram’s hands fluttered.

“Nein … Nein …”

He felt the impact of the gun barrel against his jaw. Dimly, he heard a bone break. Further shock had no time to reach him. He was enfolded in a soft blackness.

Pete Muscari spotted a break and squeezed his cab into the traffic on Fifty-Second Street. A pedestrian, racing the traffic light, sprang out of the way, and a cop screamed a warning with his whistle.

Pete meekly braked. The cop shouted, “Get that hack out of here!” Pete grinned and stepped on the gas. If he had ignored the whistle, the cop would have taken his license number and there would have been a ticket to pay, maybe a trip to traffic court.

His grin became a smile as he glanced at his rear-view mirror. He had picked up the young couple at Kennedy. A pretty blonde girl and a clean-cut young man who looked a little like Pete’s oldest boy, the one in the Navy. The girl’s corsage was wilted after the plane ride, but the shine in her eyes was still bright. They were holding hands. Pete thought of Bertrina in her kitchen and the shine in her eyes when he came home.

Just ahead loomed the green canopy with the white lettering that spelled Hotel Amernational. Pete cut toward the curb. An impulse to share in the happiness of the young honeymooners made him feel warm. I won’t take the tip, he decided.

He let the cab creep forward toward the doorman. Something struck the hood of the cab. It made a sound like no sound Pete had heard since Korea. The taxi shuddered under the impact. Glass sprayed from the windshield and some structure of flesh and bone came flying through. It showered the interior of the cab with blood and bits of tissue. Fingers dangled from the remains of a human arm, dripping onto the seat beside him.

In that fractured instant when none of it could be happening, Pete saw that there was a face also. Not a face, actually, but what had once been a face. One side had been smashed in. An eye stuck to the cobwebbed windshield.

Beyond the face was a mess of broken body. It lay in the well it had made in the hood of the cab.

Pete did not know he was out of the cab until he tripped and fell. He got to his knees, feeling the curb against his toes. Then he was knocked over by a rush of fleeing people. A woman’s heel slashed the back of his hand. He yelped in pain, scrambled to one side, banged against a standard, grabbed it, pulled himself to his feet.

He discovered that he was across the street from his taxi. People seemed to be running in all directions. There was a great deal of meaningless shouting. A woman had fainted in the middle of the street. A car had swerved, run into another, and had itself been hit in the rear. Through the chaos cut the thin cry of a siren.

Pete forced himself to look again toward his cab. He wondered if one of the screaming voices had been the young bride’s. First stop on her honeymoon, and somebody jumps out of a hotel window.

He was sick all over the sidewalk.

Inspector Macelyn, ramrod of the Main Office Squad, was having a brought-in breakfast of ham and eggs when Captain Tim Corrigan entered his office.

Macelyn was in his sixties. He looked forty-five. He always struck Corrigan as ageless.

The inspector raised his fork from the tray in a small salute.

“How are tricks, Inspector?” Corrigan said.

“As usual,” Macelyn grumbled. “Cold eggs and cold ham. About as tasty as the inside of an abandoned refrigerator. Sit down, Tim. Have some of my coffee?”

“No, thanks, Inspector. I like my coffee without wax.”

“So do I, but I never get it.”

Corrigan sat down, folding his 5-foot 10-inch frame into the heavy leather chair beside Macelyn’s desk. He was on the dapper side, Madison Avenue style, and looked more like a younger edition of the model for the Hathaway shirt ads than a member of the New York City police force. He was the only man in the department to wear an eye-patch, by special dispensation of some brass who preferred him with one eye over a great many men with the usual complement. He had lost the eye—his left—in Korea, where he had not only been in combat but served a hitch in the OSS as well. Inspector Macelyn found him invaluable for all sorts of assignments, particularly the ones that called for insight on odd cases. But Corrigan was not merely a brain. The obvious disadvantages in a police detective who had to wear a piratical patch over his eye had forced him to toughen up. Everybody knew Corrigan; and those who knew him best—in line of duty—often wound up in a hospital.

The captain had arrived at headquarters less than ten minutes before. He had not reached the Main Office Squad-room or his own dingy little office, because the desk sergeant had said, “Inspector Macelyn wants to see you right away, Captain, if you can make it.” Such messages were requests, not orders. If a man had to be ordered about, there was no place for him on the MOS.

Macelyn tossed his napkin on the tray and lit up his first cigar of the day. Over the puffs he studied Corrigan with eyes that were usually cold as an accountant’s heart. Macelyn and Tim Corrigan’s father had begun their careers pounding adjacent beats, and later they had ridden the prowl cars as partners.

“What have you got on at the moment, Tim?”

“No pressure. We put the collar on the Wilkerson brothers last night. They made the mistake of crawling out of their holes and going to a joint on Eighth Avenue where the barman knew my phone number.”

“Any trouble?”

Corrigan shrugged. “Rocky is in the hospital with a gunshot wound, not important. Raymond had breakfast in jail. After the way they raped and murdered that teenage girl, I hope he choked on it.”

Macelyn rocked forward and picked up a sheaf of paper from his desk. “See the morning report?”

“Not yet. I came directly here.”

“We’ve got a probable that I want you to look into,” the inspector said. “His name as it appeared on the hotel register was Walter Ingram. The boys in the precinct at first figured it suicide. Ingram apparently stepped out of a room on the nineteenth floor of the Amernational Hotel. He used the window instead of the door, and he forgot his parachute. He landed on the hood and windshield of a taxicab.”

Corrigan narrowed his brown eye. “Sounds messy.” It was normally an amiable eye.

The inspector grimaced. “Pair of newlyweds hired the hack at Kennedy. In the big city for a glamorous honeymoon. The girl suffered such a case of shock she wound up at Bellevue.”

“The precinct men didn’t peg Ingram a suicide without a reason,” Corrigan said. “What was it?”

“A note was found in his room. Usual stuff, good-bye-cruel-world-I-can’t-take-it-any-longer. The note was hand-printed on a piece of hotel stationery. Plenty more of the stationery on the small desk in the room.”

“Hand-printed. That sounds fishy.”

“It doesn’t mean much by itself. You know what they’ll do in their mental state when they want to kill themselves. We’ve seen plenty of it—the guy who dresses right up to his hat and then blows his brains out; the woman who gets her kids off to school on time before she swallows a bottle of sleeping pills. So maybe this Ingram was a scribbler who couldn’t decipher his own handwriting and wanted to make sure the note was legible.” But he did not sound as if he believed it.

“What else, Inspector?”

“It was written with a ball-point pen. No such pen on the body or in the room.”

Corrigan picked up a clear paperweight from Inspector Macelyn’s desk. Embedded in the paperweight was a misshapen .38 slug that Macelyn had caught in the chest a dozen years before. “The pen could have fallen out with Ingram.”

“Maybe. But a matched set, pen and pencil, was in his inside jacket pocket when he was scraped up and brought to the morgue. The lab says it was not the pen that wrote the suicide note.”

Corrigan flicked a glance at Macelyn’s face. Macelyn’s face said there was more.

“The lab and tech boys have been with it all night, and they’re still with it,” the inspector said. “They topped the suspicious suicide note with some blood—a single faint smear on the windowsill of the hotel room. It matches Ingram’s blood type.”

Corrigan sat hefting the paperweight. “Gunshot or knife wound on the body?”

“No.”

Corrigan looked at Macelyn again. Their faces reflected a common mental picture. Ingram slugged unconscious. A killer writing a note at the desk. The unknown returns to Ingram. Blood is seeping from Ingram’s wound into his hair, onto his face, but not on the carpet. The killer’s hands reach, drag the unconscious man across the room. His shoulders are hoisted to the windowsill. A few drops of blood fall from Ingram’s scalp or face onto the sill. It makes a slight smear as Ingram is shoved out. Later a tech man decides to examine the windowsill with a magnifying glass. Part of the routine.

“Who was this Ingram, Inspector?”

“Include the answer in your report. He had nothing on him for purposes of ID. No credit cards, no driver’s license, not even a social security number. He checked into the room with a single piece of luggage the day before yesterday. And his suitcase is missing.”

“Taken by the guy who used a burglar tool or skeleton key to get inside the room and lay for him.”

Macelyn nodded. “Maybe the suitcase contained whatever our man was after. In any event, we know that Ingram was in his room until four forty-five yesterday afternoon. At that time he made a phone call. He must have gone out shortly afterward. He didn’t stay gone long, though, just time enough to grab a sandwich, say. He returned at five forty and asked a desk clerk if he had a message. The clerk remembers him.”

“Why?” Corrigan sat up.

“Two reasons. One, Ingram insisted that there ought to be a ‘communication,’ as he put it, in his box. Second, the clerk says he looked British but had a thick German accent.”

“Ingram. An alias. Pretty stupid with a German accent.”

“Who says he had brains?”

Corrigan bounced the paperweight off his left palm and caught it with his right hand, lightning quick. “Whom did he call? The hotel switchboard have a record of it?”

Macelyn’s eyes glinted. Corrigan went instantly quiet, waiting for Macelyn to pull it out of his sleeve. “Hotels like the Amernational keep good records. Ingram called Loren Donahue.”

Corrigan whistled softly. “The publisher of World Events?”

“Circulation nearly sixty million monthly. In fourteen languages.”

Corrigan eased back in the chair.

“That’s right, Tim,” Macelyn said. “It’s beginning to look big enough for the Main Office Squad. That’s why I called you in. As a matter of fact …” Macelyn broke off and puffed on the cigar. It had gone dead. He took it from his mouth and frowned at the ash. “British type with a German accent … fourteen-language mag that blows the lid off international secrets every chance it gets … a nineteen-story fall with a blood smear left on a windowsill and a suicide note written with a pen that’s no longer around … You may be damned glad, Tim, you learned all those dirty tricks in the OSS before you came back to the department.”

Corrigan nodded soberly. The case had the smell of international hanky-panky. The players in that sort of game did not fool around. There were no ethics in the game, just the rule of survival, and anything went.

Macelyn struck a match and stabbed the butt with the flame. “Damn it, Tim, you keep that one eye of yours over your shoulder in this case. Just keep remembering, too, that the MOS has the authority to use the facilities of any precinct in the city. If this hunch of mine has any basis in fact, I won’t tolerate heroics. Hear?”

“I hear, Inspector.”

“You need help, you yell for it.”

Corrigan got out of the chair, grinning. He knew what was behind Inspector Macelyn’s monologue. The old man was mother hen to every man in his department, but in Corrigan’s case the feeling went a little deeper. He had often wondered how much of it stemmed from Macelyn’s old-time relationship with his father, and how much was exclusively personal. If the inspector had special insight into the matter, he never revealed it.

Corrigan took out his handkerchief, wiped the paperweight, and placed it precisely on Macelyn’s desk.

“I’ll see what I can do, Inspector.”

Macelyn chomped on his cigar. “You still here?” he growled.

2

Corrigan’s office was a cubicle off the Main Office Squad-room. There was nothing on the frosted glass door but his name and rank—certainly nothing to hint at his importance in the New York police scheme. The cubby lacked all frills. It was a dehumanized cell dedicated to tireless, cold-blooded work.

Chuck Baer was patiently absorbing the view from the window when Corrigan came in. Corrigan’s eye lit up.

“Chuck. Hi!”

“Hi yourself and see how you like it.”

They chuckled at each other.

Baer was built like a side of beef, with a smashed nose in an ugly puss and the angelic smile of a choir singer. His ugliness was accentuated by his bricktop, which looked as much in place as a Marine haircut on a Beatle. In spite of everything, the big man contrived to look like somebody’s benevolent uncle from Australia, the comfortable and comforting one. He had comforted Corrigan many times, when they had faced death side by side.

Corrigan sat down at his desk, leaned back, and clasped his hands behind his neck. “Don’t tell me the hotshot private eye is up the creek and sweated it all the way down to Centre Street to report a lost paddle.”

“Centre Street? Is that where this joint is?” Baer lit one of his eternal panatelas. “Little man, any time I need an assist from you, lint from my belly button will be selling for a hundred dollars a gram.”

“Do tell.”

“Yeah!”

“Park it, Chuck.”

“When in hell,” Baer grumbled, straddling the only other chair in the office, “are you going to requisition a chair big enough to hold a full-sized man?”

They regarded each other fondly.

They could hardly have differed more in appearance. Where Corrigan looked like a midtown executive who spent an hour or two a day at a gym, Baer—in the imperishable phrase about Heywood Broun—looked like an unmade bed. Baer’s homeliness enhanced the planes and highlights of Corrigan’s handsome face. And there was a coldness in the depths of Baer’s blue eyes, like the water in the bottom of a well, that was altogether different from the warmth in Corrigan’s remaining eye.

But for all that, each recognized, deep in the other, a part of himself, or rather, parts of themselves that were complementary. (At that, Corrigan’s brown eye could become quite as frigid as Baer’s two, given the circumstances.) They shared a viewpoint, an attitude. Only yellowbellies ducked an issue. Only scum went back on their word. Only rats failed a friend. And crime was a dirty word.

And each was the toughest man in a fight the other had ever known.

Their friendship went back a long time, to the Korean War and their service in the OSS together. They had operated as a team behind enemy lines. Each owed his life to the other many times over. After the war, Chuck Baer had opened his own detective agency in New York. Corrigan had gone back to the police department, turning down a major general’s suggestion that he make a career of military intelligence. As he had told the general, he was “a chronic cop” who could no longer change his metabolism. He did not tell the general that he had no stomach for the military life. Corrigan did not like wars, which would have surprised many characters who had felt the TNT of his fists.

“You didn’t come down here, Chuck, to complain about my chairs,” Corrigan grinned. “What’s on your so-called mind?”

“Insults I get.” Baer dumped his cigar ash in the clean glass tray on Corrigan’s desk. “Ought to have known better than to give a bunch of ungrateful lice—or is it louses?—a break on the Ingram case.”

Corrigan slowly sat forward. “Walter Ingram?”

“The guy who couldn’t wait for an elevator at the Amernational. Who else? Don’t tell me you’ve got two Ingram cases?”

“Not that I know of. What about Walter Ingram?”

“My phone rings early yesterday afternoon. Walter Ingram is on the other end of the line.”

“What was his problem, Chuck?”

“He didn’t say. He was going to say—later. Later turned out to be too late.”

“How well did you know Ingram?” Corrigan picked up a pencil.

“Didn’t know him at all,” Baer said. “Never saw him. But he’d taken the trouble to learn something about me, Tim. He said he’d made inquiries and learned that I was the only private cop in New York with an OSS background.”

Corrigan nodded. That old international feeling crept closer. It was practically nuzzling.

“But he didn’t say why he wanted such a man?”

“Nope. Except for one hint. He said he was confident I’d go for the job he had in mind, because I’d not only get a good fat fee, I’d also do a service for my country.”

“No kidding,” Corrigan murmured.

“This naturally put an ant in my pant.” Baer sounded grim. “But when I tried to milk this Ingram, he clamped down. Said he wouldn’t discuss it over the phone, but was I interested enough to meet him. Alone, away from my office. I told him I’d meet him anytime, anyplace.”

The temperature of Chuck Baer’s blue-water eyes had dropped a few degrees. Corrigan knew why. A client had been willing to trust him in what had all the earmarks of a nasty business, and the client had been killed. That Baer had reached the murderous conclusion Corrigan took for granted.

“Did Ingram name the place, Chuck?”

Baer shook his big head. “No. He said he had to contact some people in late afternoon. He asked for my apartment phone number and said he would call me in the evening. I called off a date with a 36-23-36 hunk of blonde, went home and waited. I’m still waiting.”

Baer jabbed his cigar to extinction in the ashtray. “A newscaster finally told me why my phone hadn’t rung. Ingram was a probable suicide, the brain said; a suicide note had been found in his room. But it hit me as damn funny. A man busy on something that included a private detective stops in the middle of it and steps out of a nineteenth story window? Ingram’s dive, timed as it was, looked like one hell of a coincidence to me.”

“I see your point,” Corrigan murmured.

Baer looked immovable and dangerous. “Following that line of thought led to some uncomfortable questions, Tim. Did this killer know about Ingram’s contact with me? Maybe Ingram, grabbing at any chance to stall and stay alive for another tick of the clock, warned the killer that he’d phoned me. Would the killer start wondering if Ingram had spilled the beans to me—how much he might have told?”

A rapport clicked between Corrigan and Baer. Their minds, Corrigan knew, shared the same thought: If Ingram had been involved in something worth committing murder for, a second murder would be hardly more than a slight surcharge. If Chuck Baer sat on his hands waiting to learn whether Ingram had involved him, he might find the killer breathing down his neck. The prospect did not invite hand-sitting.

“So I was up and out before the birdies left their nests this morning,” Baer growled. “Chinned with your tech boys first thing. I was hoping they’d laugh me off with a crack about advancing age and hardening of the suspicions. But they’re a bunch of hope-wreckers, that crew. That smear of Ingram’s blood on the windowsill did it, Tim. It’s got to be murder.”

“It looks that way,” Corrigan said. “It’s even possible that Ingram’s contact with you forced the killer’s hand, Chuck. Made him decide it was high time to slug Mr. Ingram and drop him out the window.”

“That’s a sweet thought, buddy,” snarled Baer. “I wasn’t feeling bad enough.”

“You know you thought of it yourself, Chuck.”

“Okay, so I thought of it! Where you going?”

Corrigan had pushed back his chair. “Want to tag along?”

“This case?”

“What else?” Corrigan said. “Maybe we can dig a lager-and-pretzel accent out of a publisher’s switchboard.”

Loren Donahue deliberately cut the hissing shower from hot to cold. The icy blast knocked the breath out of him. He began to gasp and dance up and down on the rubber mat.

His delicate hand involuntarily went to the tap that controlled the cold water. But then he jerked it back in a desperate gesture of self-denial. He forced himself to remain under the needle spray. His skin was stippled with goose bumps, his lips rimmed in blue. But he felt victorious.

Donahue’s sense of mastery over the cowardly flesh did not last long. As he stepped into the adjacent dressing room, a towel about his middle, he caught sight of himself in the full-length mirror.

“You stupid sonofabitch,” he said to his sorry reflection. “What did that little display prove?”

He knew the answer. It proved the same thing proved by the other little displays that, put together, summed up the public image of Loren Donahue. Image? he thought. Exactly, for an image is a dead thing. His whole life had been one continuous demonstration that he. was a man, not a pasteboard cutout on a marquee.

He sank onto a bench, groping for a cigarette on Carmalita’s cluttered vanity.

As his body warmed, the tired feeling crept in. He had been tired for a long, long time. Longer than he cared to recall. Forget the tiredness, he admonished himself. Stand on your two legs like the man you once thought you were. Suck in your gut and make believe the last twenty-five years never happened.

Donahue got to his feet and sucked in his gut. He forced some starch into his spine, squared his shoulders. He slapped his belly, and cringed inside. God, how he hated the flab creeping in like a tide!

I’m fifty years old, he thought. How far is sixty?

This morning he felt like flab personified. It was beginning to pad the fine, almost effeminate bones of his face. Pouches under the eyes, jowls starting, dewlaps … He suddenly remembered his grandfather’s face, as firm as granite. The old satyr had never had to prove a thing, to himself or anyone else. Not that the first Loren Donahue had ever cared about what people thought. His public image had also been the inner man. Bedding his women, killing his fifths, using the magazine he had founded to blast the crown from a king’s head—all with the automatic assumption that the planet and its billions had been put into space and time for the benefit of Loren Donahue the First.

The old man had struck the mold in which his heirs were to be cast. God damn him! This morning Loren the Third welcomed the thought that the founder had long since been reduced to worm food and polished bones.

Donahue dressed quickly. His clothing from skin out was Bond Street. He replenished his wardrobe twice a year when he took his image to the London offices of World Events.

He straightened further, pulling in his waistline with another effort. The cut of the tropical gray suit concealed the too, too solid flesh. Now he examined the finished man. Tall body, wide shoulders, long face with a high forehead, uncompromising lips, cutting gray eyes. Every inch the man of power.

He borrowed the brush from the vanity to smooth the carefully tailored hair that was graying at the temples. A shave and a facial could wait on the barber who came in each morning to Ms private office.

Donahue stepped from the dressing room, shutting the door gently. He was in a large, darkened bedroom. It faintly held her scent. The thought of last night twisted his lips as he stood there in silence. As usual, her body, her art, had excited him. But he had almost failed. Those short hours ago, when sleep had at last claimed her sweating naked body, he had lain sleepless with her long black hair on his shoulder, telling himself over and over again in a sort of horror that he was in the first stages of impotence.

It was not the first time in his life that he had experienced panic. But this panic had been different; it struck to the roots. He had had to exert all his strength to resist the impulse to creep out of her bed and steal from the apartment like a thief.

Somewhere along the line he had dropped off to sleep. And sometime in the predawn stillness he had been roused by the exploration of her hands and the little moans coming from her lips. And it had happened again, the near-miss.

Did she know? Did she realize? I covered it well, he thought. But how long can I fool her? The self-disgust he felt now came into his mouth like brash.

The lush carpet deadened his footsteps as he went to the huge circular bed, the Hollywood bed, the whore’s bed, the bed of delights. The satin headboard glimmered in the early light stealing in between the floor-to-ceiling drapes.

The satin recalled her skin, olive, with a sheen, without a blemish. He stood over her, silent. She slept like an animal, life in suspension ready to spring awake, under the silk sheet. Her lashes swept her cheeks. Her shoulders and one large, full breast were exposed. Her jet hair, long and straight, was tousled against the pillow.

Donahue felt desire stir in him, but nothing happened below his waist. He thought in despair, my God.

Then he saw that she was awake. The long thick lashes had lifted, the midnight eyes crinkled at the corners. He searched them anxiously. Did they hold reproach, contempt, amusement—pity for the trouble he had had? But he could see nothing except sleepiness and the acceptance of their intimacy.

“What time is it?” Carmalita yawned.

“Almost nine. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t, silly. I’ll fix you some breakfast.”

“No,” Donahue said. “Really, Carm. You lie there.”

“At least some coffee. You always say you like my coffee.” He loathed it. She prepared coffee Cuban style.

Carmalita sat up. The sheet fell to her waist.

Donahue felt a knife go through him. Her breasts loomed large as melons, and as firm. There were dimples in the olive of her shoulders. Her waist was incredibly tiny, swelling to magnificent hips. She had an unusual face, too irregular to be called beautiful, sultry, a unique enchantment, with a focal point of large soft lips, as richly red as her nipples were richly brown. I’m going to lose all this, Donahue thought. I’m going to lose this goddess of a female.

He reached out and rumpled her hair, smiling. “Go back to sleep. Then amuse yourself in those Fifth Avenue shops.”

“When will I see you again?”

“When I call you,” he said in the powerful baritone of his image.

“Don’t put it off too long, darling.” She yawned again, showing her splendid teeth.

“The first chance I get, believe me.”

In the hall, Donahue paused to lean against her apartment door. He felt as if he had been running. Then he hurried to the elevator.

Corrigan cooled his heels in the main waiting room of World Events, leafing through the current issue. The waiting room reminded him of a Hollywood set in the style of the early forties, out of an MGM musical. It was all angular blond wood and lemon leatherette, with full-color enlargements of various notable covers of the magazine on the walls. One solid wall was a bank of fish tanks and fronded plants, with tropical fish darting about.

The offices of World Events occupied the uppermost six floors of the Loren Donahue Building on East Forty-second Street. This was the lowest level where, for the herd, the express elevators discharged all visitors.

The receptionist’s grandiose desk would have satisfied the bureaucrats of the Kremlin. Corrigan was studying the receptionist over his magazine, wondering whether her circulatory system contained blood or machine oil. She was a high-fashion mechanism dressed to attract and chosen to repel, an android with eyes as polished as her fingernails. The way she handled visitors fascinated him. There was the automatic voice, the automatic smile, the efficient gesture, the telephone manner, and for most the smooth brush-off. It must have taken months to train her, Corrigan thought. He could only admire the result at the same time that she made his skin crawl. He wondered what she was like in bed, if she used a bed.

Perhaps one out of five callers would be directed upstairs, via the private elevators. Or Miss Robot would touch a button, and shortly some personage from Olympus would appear to chat briefly and maneuver the unfortunate toward the public elevators with an oily artfulness that inflicted no pain.

Chuck Baer was sitting beside Corrigan, examining the receptionist more candidly. She seemed to puzzle him. He nudged Corrigan and said, quite clearly, “She’s not for real,” and reached for a magazine. “The whole damn place isn’t for real. This damn rag isn’t for real.”

“It earns real money,” said Corrigan. “Watch it, Chuck. We’re on next.”

Baer muttered, “I’ll bet those boobs are full of gears,” and rose.

Corrigan got up, too, dropping the magazine on the blond-wood table. He had been scanning an exposé of certain European cartelists who, according to World Events, were fomenting an uprising in a newly hatched African republic. (How much of the yarn was true? he had asked himself. The World Events of today was slicker and glossier than its predecessors, but it seemed to lack the guts of the Donahue periodicals of the days of Loren Donahue’s father and grandfather.)

The mechanism said mechanically, with her mechanical smile, “Mr. Donahue will see you now, Captain, and you, Mr. Baer. Follow me, please.”

They followed her, watching her hips rise and fall. It was like watching a beautifully greased engine in a beautifully kept engine room.

The engine stopped. “This is Mr. Donahue’s private elevator. It will take you directly to his penthouse office.” She actually touched the elevator button for them, waited for the door to open, ushered them into the elevator, and waited for the door to close. Corrigan gathered that this was special service, from which it followed that anyone granted a visa to the boss man’s suite ranked at least one grade higher than a prince of industry. (Princes of industry avoided the offices of World Events.)

“Tim,” said Baer.

“What, Chuck?”

“Do we have to go down on one knee?”

“I think a bow will do it.”

“Well, one thing,” Baer growled. “I’m not going to go out backward.”

A short, swarthy man with a brush of gray hair and wearing a white jacket was stowing some barber’s equipment in a black case when Loren Donahue’s private secretary ushered them into the presence. The secretary, Corrigan was interested to note, showed traces of individuality. She was beautiful, and she was dressed à la mode; but she was past thirty, there was nothing mechanical about her sharp eyes, and she did not smile at all. Corrigan decided that she was a shrewd cookie, which raised Loren Donahue a notch in his estimation.

The barber actually bowed as he slipped out, shutting the ponderous brass-studded black leather door softly behind him.

Loren Donahue rose from his desk and came around to shake hands. It was an even larger desk than the receptionist’s, six floors down, but this one was of solid mahogany, and there was absolutely nothing on its vast mirrored surface except an interoffice communicator and a telephone. The office itself was overpowering. It had tall cathedral windows, severe metallic drapes to the floor, a fireplace ten feet high, immense pieces of leather-covered furniture that looked handcrafted, and a floor of black tiles in the terrazzo Veneziano style strewn with solid-color scatter rugs in offbeat shades and odd shapes.

The publisher of World Events fitted like a tenon into the mortise of his office. He was simply perfect, Corrigan thought—the distinguished man in all the accouterments, from the dully polished English-last shoes to the touches of gray at his temples and the modestly barbered look. So perfect that he must have been designed along with the room, an accumulation of details constructed to make a whole, like an architect’s drawing or a painting by an old master.

Designed.

The word kept sticking in Corrigan’s craw. The details were authentic enough—the original Picassos and Modiglianis on the walls, the depth and quality of the rugs, the oily tiles, the handwoven drapes, the handcrafted furniture, the magnificent desk—but authenticity was not the problem. At least the authenticity of the milieu. It struck Corrigan suddenly that what was wrong was the man for whom all this had been put together. The fact that he had been designed, too, was what made the whole thing synthetic. Humanity had been left out, or painted over.

Corrigan was briefly irritated by himself. So Donahue had come off a drawing board. So what? The town held hundreds like him, maybe thousands. Get to the business at hand.

As it turned out, it was not his will that prevailed. Donahue took a surprising tack.

For one thing, he was nervous. He fidgeted and tried to hide it. His manicured fingers made little drumming movements and were stopped guiltily. The pleasant smile on his face was fixed, as if he were determined not to lose it.

Why should the publisher of World Events be nervous? Corrigan honed himself to a finer edge. This promised to be more interesting than he had anticipated.

“I know you’re with the Main Office Squad, Captain Corrigan,” Donahue said, “—oh, sit down, gentlemen,” he said as he seated himself in the great leather chair behind his desk, “but I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch who you are, Mr. Baer.”

“I’m a private detective,” Baer said, and let it go at that. So Chuck’s spotted it, too, Corrigan thought.

“Mr. Baer has a professional interest in the matter that brings me here,” he said. Apparently the publisher had checked with police headquarters when the receptionist relayed the relevant information about him to his private secretary. Corrigan wondered whom Donahue had checked with. He was powerful enough to hit straight for the Commissioner. Corrigan decided to take it easy.

“I see,” said Donahue. “Or rather, I don’t see at all. It must be a serious matter to bring an officer of your rank here, Captain.”

“Yes, Mr. Donahue, I’d call it serious. I came—”

“I see.” So he doesn’t want it right away, Corrigan thought. He’s going to stall … Every one of his senses was on the alert. “It wouldn’t concern Jason or Victorina, I trust?” the publisher asked suddenly. “My children … They’re not hurt …?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s a relief.” Donahue leaned back, looking happy. “You know, gentlemen, a father these days never knows what’s coming … when some crazy kid kick backfires—breaking up a nightclub, hot-rodding it up Broadway at five in the morning …”

“Your children have nothing to do with this. Far as I know, sir.”

“Of course not.” Before Corrigan could say anything, the publisher went on indulgently: “They’re not really bad, you know. Don’t believe the gossip about them the rags print. Oh, I don’t deny they’ve got into scrapes—I suppose they’ve been spoiled—but it’s never been anything serious, and I always insist that if there are any damages involved Jason or Victorina pay for them out of their own funds. I’m very strict about that. But, hell—” he laughed “—I remember sowing a few oats myself when I was a youngster.”

So he was still stalling, trying to stave off the moment when he would learn the reason for their visit.

“Had a little black book by the time I was a frosh at Harvard,” Loren Donahue was saying comfortably. “Every number in it a call girl worth twice her price! I suppose I shouldn’t have said that, Captain. But I have the feeling you’re a man who knows how to keep a confidence. And Mr. Baer.”

“I’m the original clam,” Baer said. “You don’t have to worry about us, Mr. Donahue.” He was using his forelock-tugging technique. Chuck was hep, all right. Corrigan could have kissed him.

He sat back to wait Donahue out.

3

“I must admit, Captain,” said Loren Donahue, inserting a triple-filter cigarette into a gold cigarette holder and lighting up with the aid of a gold lighter—he had a broad smile on his face—“I must admit you gave me something of a turn. We’re all a little afraid of the police, aren’t we? Shouldn’t be that way, but there it is. And that patch doesn’t help matters any. If you don’t mind my asking …”

Corrigan didn’t mind. “I lost the eye in Korea, Mr. Donahue.”

“I’ve never seen a police officer wear anything like that. What makes me bring it up is that my first wife—Jason’s and Victorina’s mother—had to wear an eye-patch once because she actually bumped into a doorknob during a binge …” He said suddenly, “This wouldn’t have anything to do with her, would it?”

You’re an idiot, Corrigan thought. Or so badly rattled you can’t do anything but babble. “No, sir. It has nothing to do with the first Mrs. Donahue.”

“Or the second,” said Chuck Baer respectfully, “or the third.”

“Then my present wife … Of course, that’s it. Although I wouldn’t have thought that Felicia would call the police just because …” The publisher choked on the smoke. “Excuse me, gentlemen. My doctor tells me I shouldn’t smoke—”

“Because what, Mr. Donahue?” Corrigan said.

“Oh … after dinner last night I had to return to town on business. It lasted longer than I expected and I spent the night in a hotel. Should have phoned my wife, I suppose. But she ought to be used to my late hours by this time. Anyway, it shouldn’t have alarmed her. I told her I might not get home.” He began to rise, as if to say: Of course, that’s it. And I’m a busy man, gentlemen. Good morning.

Corrigan said, “If Mrs. Donahue phoned the police, I don’t know anything about it.”

The publisher sank back into his chair, staring at the policeman.

Corrigan wondered about the woman with whom Donahue had slept the night before, what sort she was. Not many women would see through the publisher’s shiny front. It had been slathered on him all his life, like layers of marshmallow. And he would be very careful not to let them scrape down to the essential man. Donahue had the world of women to choose from; he would demand variety. His string of highly publicized marriages was evidence that no one female could give Loren Donahue the assurance he needed that he was the man his grandfather had been.

“Well, I see I’ve been wasting your time, Captain,” Donahue said. “Just what does bring you here?”

So at last he had to face it. Corrigan almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

“A man named Walter Ingram, Mr. Donahue.”

He kept his eyes on the publisher’s face. Chuck Baer was watching closely, too. But Donahue had had time to prepare himself. Nothing showed. If, of course, there was anything to show. It was always possible this was a wild-goose chase.

“Walter Ingram?” The handsome head shook a negative. “I’m afraid, Captain, the name means nothing to me. Is it supposed to?”

“He placed a telephone call to this office from the Amernational Hotel yesterday afternoon.”

“A great many people call World Events,” Donahue said. “Our switchboards handle hundreds of calls daily.”

“I didn’t say he called the general offices of World Events through the main switchboard,” Corrigan said. “Inspector Macelyn, my superior, had the number checked out. Ingram spoke to someone in your upper echelon, Mr. Donahue.”

The publisher wrinkled his distinguished forehead. “Ingram …” He shook his head again. “It’s possible he may have talked to one of my editorial staff.”

“Not likely,” Corrigan said. “The call has been traced to your private line. To this office. Do your editorial people use your phone, Mr. Donahue?”

“Well, no, of course not. Ingram … If I talked to anyone of that name, Captain, I have no recollection of it. When you’re in daily contact with as many assorted people as I am …”

“Then you’re not sure you didn’t speak to a man of that name?”

Now he’s going to try to get tough, Corrigan thought. Here it comes.

“That’s an odd way to put it! Now see here, Captain, I’m not sure I like this. I’m not sure I like it at all! Just who is this Ingram? I haven’t all morning—”

“I don’t know who he is, Mr. Donahue,” Corrigan said, “but I can tell you what happened to him. Walter Ingram was murdered shortly after he phoned this office.”

Loren Donahue sat still. Only his eyelids moved; he kept blinking like a fighter dumped on the canvas by a roundhouse blow.

He knows Ingram, Corrigan decided. He knows something.

“Did you say … murdered? This man Ingram?” Now the tongue appeared to touch the firm, manly lips. It immediately took cover.

“The way we make it,” Corrigan said, “he was slugged unconscious in his hotel room, and then pushed out the window to drop nineteen floors. So you can see why we’re interested to learn more about him, Mr. Donahue. You’re absolutely positive you didn’t know Ingram?”

“In fact,” said Chuck Baer suddenly, “are you insisting on it?” Chuck had decided to cut the comedy.

Donahue’s slender hands slipped below the level of the desk top. Corrigan suspected the hands were being clenched to control their trembling. The man’s freshly shaved face needed a little help, too. It was greenish pale. And a muscle was out of whack at the corner of his mouth.

Donahue took his time. He stared carefully at Baer, then at Corrigan. He settled himself in his chair.

“Insist? That’s a strong word, Mr. Baer. You two make it sound as if I were denying something or other.”

“Are you?” Corrigan asked.

“Certainly not!” The greenish pallor had vanished, to be replaced by an angry pink. “I think I’ve been more than patient with you, Captain Corrigan. I certainly don’t intend to sit here and be insulted in my own office. If you have anything else to ask me, please do so. Otherwise this interview is over.” He made as if to rise.

Neither man moved. The publisher crouched there, suspended.

“I’m not saying it’s so in every case, Mr. Donahue,” Corrigan said pleasantly, “but it’s my experience that when a man gets mad in one of these interrogations it’s because he’s hiding something. I’m just doing my job. A man is dead, with every reason to believe it was murder one. Very shortly before he was thrown out of that window he talked by phone to someone in this office. It’s a lead we have to follow up. You see that, don’t you?”

“I suppose so,” Donahue muttered, sinking back. “If you could tell me who Ingram was … why he might have phoned …”

“It might refresh your memory?”

“It might. Or he could have been a crackpot. Like other media, we get our share of crank calls.”

Corrigan shook his head. “I don’t buy Walter Ingram as a crank, Mr. Donahue. Cranks don’t usually make that big a splash when they leave us, unless they walk out on window ledges. And Ingram was shoved.”

The publisher winced. “You paint a pretty picture. I’m sorry, Captain, I wish I could help you, but I can’t. Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“Unless he phoned yesterday after I left the office.”

“Oh? What time did you leave?”

“About half past three. I accompanied Felicia—Mrs. Donahue—to a fashion show at Sabrini’s.” He was talking smoothly now, to make up for his momentary lapse. “I’ll be happy to give you the rest of my movements, if they’re of interest. At five Mrs. Donahue and I went to a cocktail party at the Algonquin some publisher was throwing for one of his authors. We remained there until about six thirty, when Smitty—my chauffeur—drove us home to Brandywine. That’s our place on Long Island.”

Corrigan had heard of Brandywine. The mansion dated back to Donahue’s grandfather and the Guilded Age, when American millionaires bought titled husbands for their daughters, dismantled European castles, and had them shipped in crates, part by part, to the United States to be reassembled on some virgin acreage and become society showplaces. Brandywine was of sixteenth-century English vintage, he recalled.

“It was—let’s see—about nine when Smitty drove me back to town. A free-lance photographer had just got in from the Middle East with some stuff that sounded hot, and I wanted to get first crack at it for World Events—”

“I don’t think that’s smart, Mr. Donahue.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know we can check that story. Wouldn’t you like to save us the trouble?”

“I don’t understand what—”

“Who was the woman, Mr. Donahue?”

“Now see here—!”

“In confidence, of course. If Mrs. Donahue bought the photographer bit, that’s your business. We won’t tell her. But I would like to know the woman’s name.”

Donahue sprang to his feet. His cultivated voice shook with rage. “Get out of here.”

“It’s your office, sir.” Corrigan rose; Chuck Baer did not. “But you must know this can’t be the end of it. I’ll pinpoint every movement of yours in Manhattan for the past twenty-four hours. I’m going to find out why an unidentified man set up for the kill was trying to call you—or did reach you—during the last minutes of his life.” Corrigan glanced down at Baer. “Let’s go, Chuck.”

“I think,” said the private detective, “Mr. Donahue wants to talk some more.”

Corrigan turned back to the publisher. The tall man was greenish pale again.

“Sit down, Captain. Perhaps I’ve been hasty. Please try to understand my position …”

“I understand it,” Corrigan said.

“You know how these things are …”

“Try me. How are they?”

The tall man came out from behind his desk. He began to patrol the terrazzo floor, his polished heels making clickety sounds on the tiles. He kept his eyes away from the two men.

“Felicia—my wife—she mustn’t know …”

“We’ve been over that, Mr. Donahue.”

“Come on,” said Chuck Baer suddenly. “We weren’t raised in a cabbage patch, Mr. Donahue. So you’ve been sleeping with some babe. So what? Who is she?”

The publisher stopped at the fireplace and nudged one of the free-form andirons with his toe. He was half-turned away from them.

“Her name is … Sorolla. Carmalita Sorolla. She was—she’s a refugee.”

“Carmalita Sorolla,” said Corrigan. “Refugee from where, Mr. Donahue?”

“Cuba.”

“Recent?”

“A year or so ago. She managed to get in with some people who were making a run for it in a small boat. They just about made it to Key West. They were given asylum in Miami under the refugee act, Carmalita among them.”

Corrigan was a great hunch-player. In some respects he was as intuitive as a woman. Now he recognized the symptoms, a slight prickling of the scalp.

He had no idea where he was going. But he had long ago learned not to ignore that scalp warning.

He had to know more about Carmalita Sorolla. All about her.

“Sounds interesting,” he said, leaning back and crossing his legs. “How did she come to settle in New York, Mr. Donahue?”

Chuck Baer was glancing crosswise at him as if he had gone out of his mind.

“She met a publisher who was vacationing in Miami Beach. Carmalita is as fluent in English as in her native Spanish—not even an accent. The publisher was interested in some anti-Castro pieces a refugee committee were publishing in the Spanish language. Carm translated for him. She did such a good job that his recommendations launched her on a career in New York.”

“As a translator?”

Donahue nodded. “She’s highly successful at it. Moves chiefly in a world of newspaper and magazine people, and agents who represent publishers in Spanish-language countries.”

“How did you happen to meet her?”

“It was at a literary party—I’ve forgotten whose. She came up to me and introduced herself.” The publisher uttered a self-conscious little cough. “She confessed to me—on another occasion—that she had attended the party expressly to meet me.”

“So you didn’t ‘happen’ to meet her, Mr. Donahue. It was by deliberate design on Miss Sorolla’s part.”

The publisher smiled faintly. “Certainly. People of all sorts have designs on me. World Events is a powerful and influential periodical.”

“But Miss Sorolla’s designs weren’t altogether professional, if she wound up in bed with you.”

He said it deliberately, to see how far it would push Donahue. Rather to his surprise, Donahue, far from taking offense, reacted with a cocky smile. “I don’t know why you’re suddenly so interested in Carmalita’s personal life—or mine, for that matter, Captain—but at least as far as Carm is concerned, you’re way off base. She’s a quite remarkable girl. Naturally at first I was wary—a man in my position has to be. But I soon enough decided that Carmalita Sorolla was different. She wasn’t trying to get me into bed, with a photographer skulking in the closet to set me up for blackmail. She was all business—the personal interest developed naturally as an offshoot.”

“That’s the nicest way,” said Baer. “Tim—”

“Just a minute, Chuck,” said Corrigan. “So it started out all business, Mr. Donahue. What business?”

Donahue stared at him again. “You know, Captain, you utterly baffle me. What on earth difference does it make what her business was with me?—I mean, to you?” From Chuck Baer’s expression, he was silently asking the same question. “If it’s in your mind that Carmalita … no, I won’t even say it. It’s too stupid. I’ll merely tell you that she’s never mentioned anyone named Walter Ingram to me.”

“What business?” Corrigan said.

Donahue’s lips thinned. It gave him a remarkably bloodless look. “Captain, no one uses that tone to me! The project Carm had in mind can have nothing to do with whatever you’re after. It was an idea for a series of articles in World Events. She would translate Castroite propaganda, and side by side she would run a column of rebuttal comment out of her own and other refugees’ experiences with Castro’s brand of communism and its motives and excesses.”

“It sounds like a good idea. Why didn’t you go ahead with it?”

“We may yet. The hitch in my view is that the rebuttal needs a by-line recognizable by readers throughout the free world, and of course the name Carmalita Sorolla is unknown. The rebuttal needs at least the appearance of authority, or it becomes just another opinion. Also, with an unknown, there’s always the danger that the by-line may be accused of being a front for what is actually the editorial brains of World Events. That would vitiate the whole idea, in my opinion. So at the moment we’re at what you might call a Cuban standoff.” The publisher smiled again. “Anything else, Captain?”

“From that point on,” said Corrigan, “you saw Miss Sorolla frequently?”

“Well, yes. I became interested in her, and she—I might add—in me. Genuinely. Personally. Is that all?”

“That idea of hers paid off for her, didn’t it?” Chuck Baer said.

Donahue glanced at the private detective distantly. “Your friend’s mind is no prettier than his face, is it, Captain?”

“Romance is wasted on Chuck,” Corrigan said. “Just as Walter Ingram’s phone call seems to have been wasted on you.”

“For God’s sake! Are we back to that?”

“We’ve never been away from it, Mr. Donahue,” Corrigan said. “Somebody took that call. And Ingram expected, as he put it to the desk clerk, a ‘communication.’ I take that to mean an answer to something.”

The publisher looked disgusted. He said, not without humor, “I’ve got to get you out of my hair some way, Captain, or I’ll have to cross this day off as a total loss. Let’s see if we can’t get some information.” He stabbed a button on his intercom. “Miss Leroy!”

“Hi, Pops,” said a lilting voice.

“Victorina? Where’s Miss Leroy? What are you doing at her desk?”

“I gave her the day off.”

“You what?”

“I’m doing penance, Papa. For that wild weekend in Connecticut. Actually, it was as dull as douche water, but you never believe me about anything.”

“Vicky—!”

“So I’m doing Miss Leroy’s job for the rest of the day. Just to show you that your little girl has the working blood of the Donahues in her capillaries. Chest out, nose to the typewriter, whip at the ready in case the natives get restless, and nobody you don’t want to see gets past my fair body no matter what. Now will you open the doghouse door and reinstate my allowance?”

“Vicky.” Donahue was trying to control his voice; he only partially succeeded. “I’m in conference here. These gentlemen aren’t interested in either your escapades or our mutual problems. You get Miss Leroy back at her desk—”

“I can’t. She went to see the new Dickie-Liz flick. She’s mad for him. Besides, I can be as good a secretary as that frigid frost any day. Why not try me? Maybe you’ll double my allowance.”

“Victorina.” The publisher sounded desperate. “Will you be serious for a moment—?”

“I am being serious. Look, Pops, one of your flunkeys just brought up some artwork on the Bolivian tin-mining spread—”

“Never mind the Bolivian tin miners. If you’re serious about taking Miss Leroy’s place today, daughter, do something for me. Have a telephone call traced. It originated at the Amernational Hotel yesterday. It’s supposed to have come in at—” he threw a glance at Corrigan. “What time, Captain?”

“Four forty-five.”

“I heard the man,” the gay-voiced intercom said. “What’s he a captain of? Not industry, I’ll bet—he’s too nice a voice for that. I’ll get right on it.”

Loren Donahue sat back, forcing a smile.

“Do you have any children, Captain?”

“None that I know of.”

“My two are both bright, beautiful, and healthy as wild horses—and just as hard to break in. You heard my daughter just now. That was a mild sample.”

“She sounds like fun, Mr. Donahue.”

“So is an unbroken bronc, if you’re a cowboy. The trouble is, I’m no cowboy. I just don’t know how to handle her. And her brother Jason is the same kind of handful, male style.”

“From what I’ve read about your grandfather, they come by it honestly,” Corrigan smiled.

“I suppose so …” The publisher shook his head and made some familiar remarks about the younger generation, while Corrigan and Baer listened politely with their ears cocked for the intercom.

And suddenly there was the girl’s voice again.

“Yoo-hoo in there.”

“Victorina. Well?”

She sounded quite efficient. “Kermit Shulder took the call. He’s on his way up.”

“Good. Thanks, Vicky.” Donahue sat back. “The call must have been switched to Shulder’s line when I wasn’t in.”

“Shulder,” Corrigan said. “He’s one of your editors, isn’t he?”

“Yes, one of my top men. A specialist.”

“In what, Mr. Donahue?”

“Apparently you’re not a regular reader of World Events. Shulder knows everything there is to know about the Hegelian method, dialectics, Marx, Engels. He’s a wizard at analyzing Iron Curtain events in language the man on the street can understand.”

“Yeah,” Chuck Baer drawled. “That one. The guy who keeps saying in print that we ought to take the ‘long view’ of the commies, whatever that means.”

“Oh, yes, I remember now,” Corrigan said. “The man who wants us to get out of Asia and let the Asians work out their—what did he call it?—their ‘manifest destiny.’”

“In other words,” said Baer, “hand half the world over to the Chinese Reds without a squeak.”

“I don’t think you’re representing his viewpoint quite accurately, Mr. Baer,” said the publisher. “In the relatively short time Kermit Shulder has been with us, I’ve come to admire his grasp of historical trends. What he actually believes—”

Whatever it was that Donahue’s fair-haired boy actually believed they were not to learn. The door opened and a man and a young woman came in.

Corrigan had expected Kermit Shulder to turn out a bushy-haired professorial type who peered from behind thick eyeglasses and dangled a smelly Wellington from his lips.

Shulder turned out quite different He had to be in his late thirties or early forties, but time had made few marks on him. He was above Corrigan’s height, a little narrow in the shoulders, flat-bellied, quick-moving. He was correctly tailored. His thin, almost boyish face, beautiful white even teeth, and remarkable eyes aroused Corrigan’s interest as they shook hands. The eyes were like two chips of green marble fixed in his head immovably. He was as unreadable as a statue.

Loren Donahue’s daughter presented no such difficulty. Corrigan read her like a tabloid. She had a Swedish-type body that cried out for unveiling in Playboy. There were faint smudges under her blue-violet eyes, the only marks left by the life she led. The butterscotch body was topped by an angel-food-cake sort of face, childlike and a little pouty. The combination was crowned with unbelievably golden hair worn to the shoulders.

She has two problems, Corrigan decided: the bottle and the bed. And she can’t decide which has a stronger grip on her.

Vicky Donahue seemed to be measuring Corrigan’s and Baer’s capacity for pleasure and for pleasing her as she cuddled their hands and looked into their faces with her childish stare. Afterward, when she had drifted across her father’s office to perch on his desk, her enormous eyes with their tipped-up corners strayed continually to Corrigan. His eye-patch seemed to titillate her. He was very much aware of her. It would take a eunuch, he told himself, not to be. She brought out the rooster in a man.

Chuck Baer visibly preened. He could not keep his eyes off the girl. She almost deliberately ignored him. But Corrigan noticed that when she crossed her long fine legs, it was in Baer’s direction, so that he got the full benefit of the momentary exposure of her thighs.

The byplay was not lost on Kermit Shulder, Corrigan noticed. The editor seemed amused by it. It was evidently an old story to him.

Shulder said, “Vicky’s mentioned that you’re interested in a call made, by a man named Walter Ingram, Captain.”

“That’s right,” Corrigan said.

“All I can tell you is this.” Shulder’s gold cufflink glinted as he glanced at his watch. “I was the only senior editor remaining in the office at four forty-five yesterday afternoon. I took Ingram’s call.”

“Did you know the man?”

“No.”

“Had he called previously?”

“I can’t say. Certainly I had never spoken with him before.”

Corrigan caught the flash of the glance Vicky Donahue sent to her father. The glance was full of knowing mischief. Again Corrigan’s scalp prickled. Donahue knew something about Ingram, all right, and his daughter knew he knew it.

“Mr. Shulder,” Corrigan said. “Did Walter Ingram state his business?”

“No.”

“Whom did he ask for?”

“He asked for Mr. Donahue.”

“I certainly wish I’d been here,” Donahue said heartily. “This thing is beginning to arouse my curiosity.”

Vicky murmured something under her breath that sounded like “Oh, brother!”, stretched her legs out straight, and invited the male world to admire them.

Corrigan had to wrench his glance away. The girl was a disturbing influence. “Ingram simply asked for Mr. Donahue, then, Mr. Shulder.”

“That’s right, Captain. I identified myself and stated my position with the firm. I asked him if I could be of service. He said no.”

“Did he seem to be upset—nervous?”

“He talked rapidly, putting in a German word here and there. It might have been his normal way of speaking. However …” The editor paused, frowning.

“Yes?”

“My guess is he was anxious about something, now that I come to think of it. I could be wrong. He did say it was very important for him to get in touch with Mr. Donahue—no, he didn’t say ‘very important,’ he said ‘imperative’—he spoke a rather stilted English. In the light of what happened later, I assume he meant the word seriously, not as a figure of speech.”

“Did you take him seriously at the time?”

Shulder absently rubbed the back of his neck. “I rather think yes, Captain. That’s what probably decided me to give Ingram Mr. Donahue’s Brandywine phone number.”

“Oh?” Corrigan’s brown eye stabbed at the publisher. “You didn’t say anything about a call from Ingram to Brandywine, Mr. Donahue.”

“Because I know nothing about any such call,” Donahue said stiffishly. “I certainly was told of no message when I got home.”

Corrigan nodded and turned back to the editor. “Wasn’t that unusual, Mr. Shulder, giving a perfect stranger Mr. Donahue’s home phone number?”

“Not at all. Mr. Donahue will tell you himself that he takes a day-to-day working interest in the operation of the magazine. He often gets news directly from the source, bypassing the editorial department.”

“That’s correct,” the publisher said.

“Ingram was so insistent that I took a chance, rather than lose a possible lead to a story. You know, Captain, an editor,” Shulder said with a faint smile on his cold lips, “is something like a detective. Half his work is following hunches. There was something about Ingram’s voice—Teutonic—as contrasted with his Anglo-Saxon name, plus the urgent tone, that activated my news sense.” Shulder glanced again at his watch. “To sum up, Captain: I took Ingram’s call; he insisted he had to talk to Mr. Donahue without delay; I gave him the Brandywine number. That was all. Oh, yes, he did bother to thank me.”

“And so do I, Mr. Shulder.”

“If you need me further, I’m here at least ten hours each working day.” Shulder rose, nodded, and went to the heavy door. He suddenly turned back. “One favor, Captain.”

“Yes?”

“If you find out what this Ingram wanted, give me a buzz, will you? Considering Ingram’s fate, this might be a story at that.”

“If I can, Mr. Shulder.”

Shulder smiled and left.

If I were in this organization, Corrigan thought, and this guy stood on the rung below me, I’d sure as hell brace the ladder.

4

Corrigan and Baer took their leave, Victorina Donahue still swinging her legs at them. At the private elevator, just as Corrigan was raising his hand to the button, the elevator door opened.

The man in the elevator stared at Corrigan. “Tim? Tim, you sonofagun!” A grin broadened the man’s big heavy face. “And old bird-dog Chuck, no less!”

He charged out of the elevator, grabbing Corrigan’s arm with his right hand, Baer’s with his left.

“What the hell are you two doing here? Of all the guys to run into in the boss’s office!”

He was a large man, a series of chunks, with pillars for legs and arms. He wore a black serge uniform, a white shirt, black bow tie, and a chauffeur’s peaked cap. He had the face of a well-battered wrestler.

“Well, if it isn’t Reo Smith,” Corrigan said. “Donahue mentioned that he had a man working for him named Smitty. How are you, Reo?”

“Wonderful! Got me a real cushy job. Long hours, but the work is a pipe. And the cook at Brandywine feeds me filet mignon like I used to eat hamburger.”

“Old Reo himself,” Chuck Baer said, grinning. “You look great.”

“Never better.” Smith punched Baer in the gut. “You think because those hoods flattened me I was going to stay down?” He drew them to one side, chattering.

Corrigan’s mind went back to a night more than a year before. Reo Smith had been a police officer that night, walking a beat on the lower East Side. He had heard a girl’s outcry come from beyond a dark doorway, deep in the entrails of the rundown building.

The girl’s call for help had been a decoy pulled on a cop doing his job. They had been laying for Reo just inside the entrance. Who or how many of them there were, the department had never found out.

They had slugged him brutally, stripped him of his shoes and his wallet. And gun. It had never turned up.

During the brain operation, the surgeons had kept Reo Smith alive with emergency heart massage. He had died under their hands twice. But they had refused to let him go. Somehow, they had saved him. When Reo’s eyes had opened, he looked at the needles and tubes feeding him, and his first words were a request for a rare steak.

Reo lifted his cap, exposing short, wiry hair. “Even the brush grew back, only gray. Never know there’s a silver plate in there, would you, Tim?”

“You’re looking fine,” Corrigan said. “How’d you happen to hook up with Loren Donahue?”

“Hell, I was due for a break,” Smith chuckled. “When I got out of the hospital, it was lousy. Sitting on my butt eating off pension money was worse than the hospital. I spill my woes to my old precinct captain. There’s no way he can take me back with this silver-plugged hole in my head. But old Reo sticks in the captain’s mind. He talks about it to the commissioner. So happens the Commissioner belongs to the same Racquet Club as Mr. Donahue. You guessed it. Mr. Donahue needed a chauffeur, I got an interview, and he hired me. I’m kind of like his man Friday. Seems he’d tried a string of crumbs after his man got sick two-three years ago. One doped off, another tries some hanky-pank with Donahue’s daughter—I don’t broadcast this to just anybody, Tim—a louse is caught red-handed by Mr. Donahue lifting some cash lying around. What brings you here, Tim?”

“A man named Walter Ingram,” said Corrigan.

“Yeah? I heard about him on the newscasts. He’s the one did the Dutch from that nineteenth story window yesterday, ain’t he?”

“It wasn’t a Dutch, Reo.”

“No?” Smith’s eyes lost their humor. “And you’re talking to Mr. Donahue about it?” He shook his big head. “You better call IBM for some replacement parts, Tim. You’re off your rocker.”

“Ingram was trying to get in touch with Donahue just before he was heaved out that window.”

“So what? Mr. Donahue’s phone rings a hundred times a day.”

“Donahue says he was at a cocktail party when Ingram went out the window. Was he?”

“If he says so, he was there.”

“Reo—”

“Look, Tim.” Smith’s face had gone cement-hard. “I’m not a cop now. I got a bellyful—and a headful—of that. I work for Mr. Donahue. If you want the moke on him, ask him. Not me.”

“I’m asking you about you, Reo. Did you pick up Loren Donahue at six thirty last evening?”

“Sure did.”

“Where?”

“At the cocktail party, right where he told you he was. You’re cocking your leg at the wrong tree, Tim. Mr. Donahue was nowhere near the Amernational when Ingram took his flyer.”

“Would you tell me if he hadn’t been?”

Corrigan’s steady brown eye bored in on the chauffeur. Smith stared back just as steadily. “I don’t know that I would, Tim. Mr. Donahue gave me a break when the rest of the world knocked my brains in and wrote me off. Sorry. Nothing personal.”

Corrigan shrugged.

Smith snapped a light left to Corrigan’s shoulder. “See you around. Nice running into you, Chuck.”

They watched Smith move toward Loren Donahue’s private office with his stumpy, thick-legged stride. Then they stepped into the elevator.

The report was waiting when Corrigan sat down at his desk in his cubby office:

#146788-AS

Supplementary Report.

Bureau of Technical Analysis, NYPD.

To: Captain Tim Corrigan, Main Office Squad.

Subject: Walter Ingram.

Findings: This report supplements previous findings set forth in #146788-A, attached. Supplementary findings herein concern clothing worn by subject at time of death. Examination reveals that garments worn by subject were manufactured in a variety of foreign locations. Pen and pencil set removed from inner pocket of subject’s jacket was manufactured in Czechoslovakia; wrist watch was made in East Germany; subject’s underclothing, consisting of broadcloth drawers, carries the label of an English maker; shirt, suit, necktie, and socks worn by subject were all manufactured in the United States; subject’s shoes are the product of a factory in the Soviet Union, or a Soviet zone.

Varying degrees of wear and usage were ascertained in subject’s garments. Apparel purchased in United States shows minimal wear: analysis of fiber from suiting material reveals that garment had never been dry-cleaned. Condition of shoes indicates long service. Opinion: Shoes were purchased prior to garments made in England. Apparel of U.S. manufacture most recent purchases.

So Ingram was a walking international haberdashery. Corrigan wondered if the shoes were originally worn with a Russian or Czech suit.

He thumbed quickly through #146788-A. It contained little that Inspector Macelyn had not already told him.

Chuck Baer stirred. “What’s the poop, Tim? You look as if you’ve struck dirt.”

Corrigan handed him the report and picked up the phone.

“Yes, Captain?”

“Tell ID I want a set of prints, also mug shots, full face and profile, of Walter Ingram.”

“Right away.”

“Not right away. Yesterday!”

“Will do, Captain,” the man on the switchboard said hastily.

“Better yet, I’ll be there to pick them up as the pictures come off the dryer,” Corrigan snapped. He hung up and said to the private detective, “What do you think, Chuck?”

Baer said slowly, “I think you’ve stepped into something, and it smells.”

Their destination was a door which presented a blank face to an upper-level corridor in the main Manhattan post office.

The upstairs corridor was quiet after the hurly-burly in the post office; the heels of the two men bounced an echo off the tiles as they strode past offices of federal agencies, the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Entomology.

The unmarked door was near the end of the corridor. Corrigan rapped on the frosted-glass pane.

The door was unlocked by a tall thin man of indeterminate age. His high-cheekboned face, dark skin, and jet black hair suggested an American Indian somewhere in his ancestry. His necktie was pulled loose, and he was in his shirt sleeves.

At sight of Corrigan and Baer he said, “Hi,” with no surprise, and shook their hands. The three had once been fellow-members of the OSS. A lot of blood had been spilled since then. These days they moved in different orbits. A few weeks before, Corrigan had chanced upon Neil Ramey in a restaurant. Ramey was one of the small group of CIA men assigned to the Manhattan area.

“Come on in.” Ramey locked the door.

The CIA man’s lack of surprise suggested to Corrigan that Ramey had half expected him. But Neil was a hard customer to figure. Nothing fazed him; the Indian face rarely showed anything analyzable. Corrigan had seen him kill a man with a total lack of emotion in the service of his country and a half hour later sit down to a hearty meal, which he had eaten with as much enjoyment as he ever showed about anything. They had not got on at first, Corrigan remembered. Ramey was too bloodless for Corrigan’s taste, or at least so he had seemed. But that had been before the night when Corrigan saw him risk his life to fetch some water for a dying Korean girl, who was dead before the water touched her lips. They had got on after that.

“You’re putting on weight, Chuck,” Ramey said. “Squat.”

They squatted in a couple of nondescript chairs.

“It’s more than I can say for you, you damned Cherokee,” Baer said. “I’ll bet you can go for two weeks on a piece of jerky.”

The nearest thing to a smile that they had ever seen lifted the corners of Ramey’s thin, fine lips. “Why not?” he said. “Everybody eats too much. Well, Tim. I don’t flatter myself that this is a personal call. What brings you to the old home place?”

“The old home place” was an arid office furnished with three desks, half a dozen wooden chairs, and a filing cabinet. Fluorescent light spilled coldly over the desk at which Ramey had been working.

Corrigan opened the manila envelope he had brought with him from headquarters. He slid out the mug shots of Walter Ingram and laid them on the desk.

“This joker’s shoes track him all the way back to Russia, or at least some Soviet zone,” Corrigan said. “He died with the shoes on, Neil. Somebody set him up and busted him all to hell. Know him?”

Ramey looked at the pictures. “The shoes gave you a good lead. His name was Heinrich Fleischel.”

“German?”

“East German. Came originally from Griefswald.”

“Baltic Coast.”

“Check.”

“What’s in Griefswald?”

Ramey massaged the lobe of his left ear. “Houses, shops, people. Fleischel didn’t stay there long. When he first came to our attention, he was in East Berlin. A journalist, one of the crew who earn time and eating-money by rationalizing the party line for the masses. But the guy was a wrongo from the party point of view. He had a good mind and a heart. If he’d been brought up in the West, he probably would have made a topflight reporter of human-interest stories.”

“You make him sound like a secretly dissatisfied commie,” Baer said.

Ramey picked up the full-face mug shot, nodding. “We think that at first Heinrich Fleischel honestly tried to sell himself a bill of goods. He was a sensitive man faced by a fact of life. He and his people were living under communism, looking straight into the muzzle of the gun. He had to believe that things would work out.”

The CIA man let the photo fall to his desk. “After the abortive 1953 revolt in East Berlin, which the West watched without lifting its fat tail, you’ll recall, Fleischel figured the regime was in to stay. If there was to be hope, it had to come through an evolutionary process from men entrenched in the system. So he jumped into the bureaucratic dogfight. Gradually bettered his position, became a little fish in the party mainstream. It did give him access to information, though, and a freedom of movement the people without membership cards could only dream about.”

“But he eventually defected?” Corrigan nodded. “Same old story. Finally got a bellyful and ran.”

Ramey’s Indian face showed nothing. “You’re only partly right, Tim. He got a bellyful, yes. Nothing sudden or dramatic. He just became an older, wiser man. He couldn’t take the crap any more. But he didn’t come over. Not right away.”

“You put him on the payroll?” Baer said.

“We tried,” Ramey said. “We wanted him to work for us. We’ve got people who watch for the Heinrich Fleischels. We made a contact easily enough. But he wasn’t quite the man he thought he was or wanted to be, poor devil. Espionage, a double life, a bullet behind the ear if he made a mistake—the thought squeezed the stiffener out of him. He wanted out. He offered to work for us, not under cover, but from our side of the line. But he was of no use to us unless he stayed where he was. So we broke it off and closed the file on him.”

Corrigan and Baer swapped glances. Baer said, “When did you reopen it?”

“Recently. If you want the exact date—”

“I’m more interested in the how and the why right now,” Corrigan said.

“The how and why?” Ramey shrugged. “We didn’t ask him to do it, but we must have put the idea in his head. He figured there was suddenly a net under the tightrope he was walking—convinced himself we’d make a place for him west of the Rhine if he defected with proof of his sincerity.”

“He brought out something,” Corrigan exclaimed. “What was it?”

“A microfilm. He ran a hell of a risk, and it took him a long time. But he did the job. As it turned out, there was nothing in it we didn’t already have.”

Chuck Baer was leaning forward. “Come on, Neil! What was it?”

“The microfilm was a record of Russian manned space-flight failures to date. Reproductions of documents, pictures—the works.”

Corrigan was sitting on the edge of his chair.

“They’ve scored five manned failures,” Ramey said. “One, an early Soviet astronaut, is still out there, frozen solid; his retro rockets fizzled. A second was killed when his craft overshot the landing area and crashed in the Arctic. Number three’s telemetry and computer systems balked during reentry; he became the first human meteor.

“They rephased and stepped up their program. A two man team was killed—launch vehicle blew up on the pad. Very irritating. The damage to the pad knocked the new schedule back several weeks. Lastly, a man-and-woman team dived to the bottom of the Pacific after their spacecraft veered off course for some reason and failed to reach orbital velocity.”

Baer slapped his knee. “No wonder Fleischel thought he was all set!”

“And you should have seen his face when he was told that we knew all about them. The poor guy looked as if we’d kicked him in the gut.”

The CIA man glanced at the photographs of the dead defector. There was a trace of pity in his black eyes. “Fleischel was an amateur, and that’s the way he played it. The microfilm looked so hot to him that he made the mistake of assuming we’d wet our pants. You, or I, or Chuck here would have tasted the brew before we swallowed it whole. If we could lay our hands on it, we’d have wondered if the other side already had it. But Fleischel thought we’d send up fireworks when he brought it in.”

“How did he get it out, Neil?”

“He wormed his way into a cultural exchange. They expected him to come back and write reams about the misery of the American masses under the lash of Wall Street.”

Corrigan picked up the mug shots and slowly returned them to the envelope. “A man using the alias of Walter Ingram was murdered yesterday afternoon. He was Heinrich Fleischel.”

“I know,” Ramey said.

“But no microfilm. Could it have been in his suitcase—it was stolen—in the lining?”

“Could be.” Ramey rocked forward suddenly. “I know what’s on your mind, Tim. Could also be that somebody was hot on Fleischel’s heels, somebody who didn’t know we’d turned hands down on him.”

“Know of a better motive?”

“I’m not on your force, Tim. We washed Fleischel out when we put together a dossier on him and handed it to Immigration. Murder in the City of New York is your baby.”

Corrigan slammed the manila envelope on the desk. “What gives? You’re telling me—?”

“Look for another butt to kick, Tim. Officially the CIA never heard of Heinrich Fleischel. Let the Russians wonder if he got to us and how much of it was news to us. That’s the orders, Tim. They come from the top. You know damned well we’re not going to strain American-Soviet relations by making an international incident out of the death of one poor slob.”

“Sure,” Corrigan said. “I’ve been out of the OSS for so long I think like a simpleminded cop.”

Ramey said nothing. Corrigan regretted the barb in his words. He knew Ramey. Neil hated death and fear and oppression more than most men. He was devoting his life to doing something about it. A part of that devotion was the discipline to face the job cold-bloodedly.

“We want to keep a finger on this thing.” Ramey looked at Baer. “How do you figure in this, Chuck?”

“Ingram—Fleischel—phoned my office for an unspecified assignment. He said it had something to do with my country, but he wouldn’t say what. He was to contact me later. He splashed before he could.”

“You get a fee?”

“Nope.”

“You’re on one now.”

“Neil,” said Corrigan. “I don’t want to cut in on Chuck’s business, but if requested the department will feed you information—”

“A finger on it, I said, Tim. Not a finger stuck in it up to the elbow. No regulations.”

Baer looked delighted. “Speak to me, old buddy! I’m with it.”

“Strictly on your own,” Ramey said. “You get in a spot that might embarrass the United States of America, and the CIA never heard of you.”

“Who’s the CIA?” Baer said.

“I’ll make the arrangements. Your usual fee-and-expenses rate will apply.”

Baer got to his feet. “I’ll bet I just set a record of some kind. First private operative to have his country for a client.”

The three men walked to the unmarked door.

Ramey did not unlock it immediately. “What’s your takeoff, Tim?”

“A man named Kermit Shulder. Know him?”

“Shulder? Should I?”

“He’s a rising editor at World Events.”

“I make him now. Vaguely.”

“Struck me as a smart operator. He writes pieces interpreting the world scene, especially as it involves Soviet Russia and Communist China. Everything pro-U.S., of course. Not a subversive word. But the whole insidious effect of his argument is that if we can’t accommodate to communism it’s because we’re stupid or shortsighted. If you want to see it in the right light, read Kermit Shulder. That kind of approach.”

Ramey’s lips thinned further. “A lullaby singer. I’ll have to pay some attention to him.”

“I’m not accusing him of anything, Neil,” said Corrigan. “I just don’t know. Anyway, I haven’t made a study of him.”

“Lull the enemy so you can knife him,” Ramey muttered. “One of their standard tricks. I’ll catch some of this bird’s stuff.”

“Heinrich, under the Ingram alias, placed a call to World Events only about an hour before he was killed,” Corrigan said. “It was the last time Heinrich used the telephone. Shulder took the call. Goes without saying that Shulder will remain under surveillance until we get to the bottom of this thing.”

Ramey unlocked the door and stood aside.

“Thanks for everything, Neil.”

“Anytime.”

Chuck’s farewell was on a more practical note. “I’ll send you a bill, Uncle.”

5

Kermit Shulder sat in a Forty-fourth Street bar brooding over a Scotch Manhattan. The place was not as fancy as those he usually picked to indulge his carefully regulated drinking. Nor was the time of day usual (he had left his office shortly after lunch). Nor the amount of liquor. The drink before him was his third.

He was alone at a corner table, paying no attention to the noise around him. His thoughts concerned a woman named Doris Farlow.

He had met her a little more than two months before. Young Jason Donahue had brought her to an office party, a deadly affair Loren and Felicia Donahue had thrown for a dignitary from Washington.

Later, when the party broke up, a group had adjourned to a Sutton Place apartment. Shulder had surprised himself by going along. He had known the course the brawl would take—asinine talk by a crew of egomaniacs, Victorina Donahue pawing every man in the place, and Jason Donahue falling-down drunk.

The reason Shulder had trailed along was that a strange thing had happened to him at the party in the penthouse of the Donahue Building. He had found his libido rising, as if to a challenge, as he watched Doris Farlow. It had been obvious that she was feeling the same sexual reaction. Her glance had kept coming back to him, steamier each time. She had looked past young Jason when the tipsy group was deciding where to continue the party—looked directly at him in calculating invitation.

Shulder had experienced a sort of schizophrenia. It had been the weirdest thing. One part of him—the fastidious part that had plagued him all his life—had sickened at the prospect of this guttersnipe pickup; that she could be had for the taking, almost without a word spoken, he never doubted (and by any man, he told himself cynically). At the same time (and perhaps for that very reason), he wanted her—violently, bestially, in sweaty nakedness. The desire had been so sudden and profound that he had actually become dizzy. He had found himself approaching her.

“You want me, don’t you?” he had heard himself saying.

“And you want me,” Doris Farlow had smiled. (She had a trick of wetting her lips with the tiniest tip of her red tongue, the memory of which inflamed him even now.)

“Terribly,” he had said.

It had worked out. Her date, Jason Donahue, eventually passed out; a couple of his hilarious pals carried him to a bedroom and parked him on the bed with a lily in his folded hands.

Shulder had taken Doris Farlow home; he had left her apartment at four in the morning, feeling as emptied as a roach carcass eaten by its young. He remembered how he had despised himself, at the same time that he had known he would go back to her.

“Another drink, pal?”

Shulder glanced up at the waiter. His glance held distaste. It was a schlock joint. He would never come back. With his spare shoulders, lean face, and opaque green eyes he had a wolfish look.

“No, thanks.” He rose, glanced around. “Where is the phone, please?”

“Near the end of the bar.” The waiter slapped the table with a damp towel and stamped off.

In the phone booth, with a dime in his hand, Shulder hesitated. Then his lips flattened, and he jabbed the money into the slot and dialed Doris Farlow’s number.

Her phone rang half a dozen times. Shulder was on the point of returning the phone to the hook when she answered.

“Hello?”

“Doris?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?” Her voice was thick and sluggish. It always reminded him of something struggling out of a cocoon.

“Kermit,” he said. “I’m coming by.”

“Oh, you. I told you, Kerm, I’m kind of busy.”

“This won’t take long, Doris.”

“Well. Okay, I guess.”

She admitted him to her apartment with indifference, as if he were the janitor or a TV repairman. (She might be less indifferent with the repairman, he thought, especially if the man had hair on his chest.)

“Be with you in a minute.” She had just finished dressing. A few pin-curlers were still in her hair.

Shulder followed her into the bedroom. The apartment had interested him the first time he had seen it. It was like her—tousled, cloyingly warm, with lots of soft pillows around and heavy drapes of a hot red. It was her favorite color. The puff lying half off the bed was as hotly red as Satan.

The rumpled bed suggested her body—soft, moist hiding places, a scent of musk, a lying-down invitation.

Kermit Shulder watched her sit down at the dressing table, drape a towel on her shoulders, and begin to brush her hair. It was thick and shining, and it fell about her face in auburn cascades. He studied the face. He knew every inch of her body, but he had made a special study of her face, calculating like an IBM machine and prognosticating the probabilities. Now the face was sleek and round and heavy-lipped, with eyes almost Eurasian and a complexion still unspoiled by cosmetics. But he knew that before many more years passed there would be fine crinkles, enlarged pores; the dimple in her chin would be buried in fat (she ate like a swine). Nor would the corruption stop at her neckline, which already showed a suggestion of wattling. Every calorie she ingested would turn to suet, making her full breasts fuller, to the point of sagging, distorting the lines of her tapered thighs, thickening her waist, padding her flaring hips. She would become a blowsy, corseted old barfly.

But that was for the future.

Now she was of a piece with all the enchantment of sexuality … at her ripest, a rather stupid creature, without a redeeming feature except for her athletic ingenuity in bed.

But God, Shulder thought.

She admired her image in the mirror, tilting her face as she thrust the brush under her hair.

The brush paused in midstroke.

“What are you looking at me like that for?”

“I like to look at you,” Shulder said.

“Like that? You look like you got a pain or something.”

“I have a pain. You know where.”

“Oh, you.”

She smiled and continued her brushing. Her gestures were lazy; she knew her power. But there was something else. Doris Farlow could sit there all day long, brushing and brushing, without a thought in her head. She was not troubled by mentality. To her, life was fixed in time, unchangeable.

“You said you wanted to see me,” Doris said.

“I did. I do.”

“For what, Kerm?”

“I left some of my things here,” he said. She rattled him, sitting there. He felt angry. It was all he could think of. “I came to pick them up.”

“So pick them up. Who’s stopping you?” She stopped brushing and reached for a lipstick. “You know where they are.”

The pile in Shulder’s head reached critical mass. In helpless fury he heard himself explode.

“Damn you to hell.”

“Huh?” The lipstick stopped.

“Pig! Whore!”

She swiveled slowly on the bench; through her clothes he could see every curve and crease between thigh and belly. The fire in his head jumped to his groin.

“Who you calling names?”

“You! That’s what you are! That’s all you are! A cheap whore!”

Two little islands of pink appeared in her cheeks. The eyes were stupidly indignant. “I ought to know your kind. Snotty as all hell. Everybody who ain’t like you is dirt. What did I ever get out of you?”

“You got more than you’re worth!”

She looked him up and down, her eyes lingering contemptuously on his middle. “You ain’t so much, Mr. Shulder. You ain’t half the man you think you are. Are you asking for a refund? For what? You got better than you gave.”

Streaks of lightning pierced Shulder’s eyes and blinded him.

He heard her bleat.

“Now, Kerm …!”

The bleat of terror cleared his vision. Somehow he had got halfway to the bench. He saw his raised arm, the club of fist. He felt good suddenly. She was pressed hard against the dressing table, an arm thrown up to protect her face.

“Don’t you come near me!” Doris screamed.

He laughed and was upon her, grinding his fist against the exposed patch of face, muttering obscenities and grinding and grinding.

“Please, you’re hurting me! Kerm … Kerm, no!”

The terrified eyes satisfied him, and he stepped away from her. His body was singing like a blade. He felt strong, powerful, above bitterness.

She sat staring up at him, her chest rising and falling in panic. Her hand went to her cheek.

It even amused him that she was still defiant.

“Big man,” Doris snarled. “You’re happy now, ain’t you? Got what you came for! You have to make people scared of you, don’t you? You know what you are, Kerm? You’re a yellowbelly! You’re so tough when it comes to girls. I should have known the first time I let you get into bed with me. You’d like to do it like a man, but your brains get in the way!”

She went on and on, in a diarrhea of hate. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the bubbles off his lips.

“Don’t say that,” he said. “Don’t ever say that, Doris.”

“It’s the truth!” she yelled.

He said thickly, “In your brainless way you may have struck something valid. We make a good pair. A stupid pig and half a man. But the half that’s left is too good for the likes of you. You’re just a sex organ surrounded by corrupting flesh, Doris. I deserve better, fouled up as I am. Do you hear me, Doris? I deserve better!”

“All right,” she said. “You win, Kerm, if that makes you feel more like a big shot. You knew I was through with you. You knew I could spit in any direction and get better than you have to give. You couldn’t stand it. You had to turn it around. You had to make it look like you were throwing me over, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

He was silent.

“You see?” she cried in triumph. “I’m a stupid pig, and I got you pegged right down to the ground! How do you feel now, big man? Like you picked up all the marbles? Or like you just got kicked in the tail?”

It was beautiful, one part of him said, watching the mortal struggle between her fear and her malice, watching the malice gain the upper hand, even as she cowered for the blow she half expected.

The other part said, “I take it all back, Doris. I apologize for underrating you. I admit that the idea of being kicked out by the likes of you galled me. It was ridiculous and it was outrageous, and it hurts. But it’s all over. It really is. I’m purged of you.”

“Use words I can understand!”

“I don’t need you any more.”

That seemed to sting her, and he felt childishly glad. She tossed her head and looked at herself, and him, in the mirror. She even picked the lipstick up again.

“That’s what you think.”

“You think I do?”

“I know damn well you do. I know men, big man, even if I don’t know anything else.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ll want to come back.”

“We’ll see,” he spat at her. Why don’t I just walk out of here? he asked himself. Why am I standing here like a fool?

“You’ll want to come back so bad your tongue’ll be hanging out. You won’t be able to keep your mind off it. You’ll come begging to let you jump back in bed with me.” The spite in her shrill voice revolted him.

“Who is he?” Shulder heard himself say.

“What?”

“I said, who is he? The man you’ve thrown me over for?”

“It’s none of your goddam business. Anyway, you’re the one who’s giving the boot, Mr. Shulder, remember? Why should you care who the guy is?”

“You’re right,” he muttered.

“Now will you please get the hell out of here?”

“I’m going. But get one thing straight, Doris. I’m not coming back. I’d kill myself before I allow myself to become a slave to a thing like you!”

Oh, Kermit, he said to himself. You have lost your manhood and your dignity and your common sense. You have lost everything.

And then the whole thing turned around, as if the scene had never happened. It bewildered him. He had not only lost his self-mastery; even the capacity to understand the loss had deserted him. He was as much a creature of unknowable forces as she was.

The door buzzer sounded, two short buzzes, one long.

A signal.

Doris flashed to her feet. He had never seen her move so fast. He cut her off at the doorway.

“The new boyfriend?”

“I don’t know who it is. Let me go!”

“Liar.” He had hold of her arm.

She writhed out of his grip. “I’ll scream,” she hissed. “You want to hear me scream? Just you try to make trouble—”

“Answer the door,” he said. He followed her into the living room. He fumbled for a cigarette. Who was he?

Doris Farlow opened the door, and there stood young Jason Donahue.

The publisher’s son propped himself against the open door and clucked.

“Well. Old Shuldy himself. Hi.”

Shulder had no respect for any of the Donahues, least of all Vicky and Jason. But Loren Donahue was his cakes and ale. Shulder said, “Following me, Jason?”

“You followed me with Doris. Turnabout is fair play.”

Young Donahue pushed away from the door, reached backward for it with his heel, and shoved. The door banged. He had the usual insolent smile on his face.

He was still young enough not to look like what he was, a spoiled, dissipated, nonspinning end product of a thinned-out bloodline. He was tall, taller than his father, with fine bones and an aesthetic quality that was entirely illusionary. The hollows in his face gave him the hungry look of a poet, but all he hungered for was a meaning to his useless life. He could play tennis and polo, dance, sail; none well.

“I don’t think Doris plays return engagements,” Shulder said.

“That’s her business, and mine.”

“I was about to leave. Why don’t we leave together?”

Jason laughed. He had an unpleasant laugh. “Shuldy, you fracture me.”

Doris was standing in the middle of the room, looking from one man to the other. She was pale, but there was a glitter in her shallow eyes.

“Come on,” said Shulder.

“I read you like a book, Shuldy. You don’t fool me one bit. Remember, I’ve slept with her—I know what you’ve lost.”

“You’re worthless, Jason, do you know that? A boil on society’s neck.”

“Maybe. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that stupidity goes along with it.”

“I don’t believe I care to discuss myself with you.”

“What’s your hurry, Shuldy? Let’s discuss Doris.” Jason went over to her and put his hand on her buttocks. “The best lay in New York.”

“Jase,” said Doris. “Is that a way to talk?” She wiggled out of his embrace. He laughed again. She faced him squarely and approached him and put her arms about him and deliberately began to bump and grind. All the time she bumped and ground she looked over her shoulder at Kermit Shulder, smiling.

The older man closed his eyes. Then he opened them.

“All right, Jason.”

He went to the door. And Jason Donahue was before him, blocking his way.

“One side,” Shulder said.

“Not till I tell you where you stand,” said Jason Donahue. He was smiling, too.

“Get out of my way, Jason.”

“Make me,” said Jason Donahue.

Shulder saw now what he was up against. He could smell it on the younger man’s breath.

“You’d like me to do that, wouldn’t you, Jason? Loren Donahue’s son.”

“Chicken,” the son jeered. “Damn right Loren Donahue’s son. It gives me the edge, Shuldy, doesn’t it? I can make you jump through hoops. And all you can do is jump.” He shouted suddenly, “Jump!”

The lightning struck Shulder’s head again. Why was his life so full of frustration? Nothing seemed to go right. Not his work, at which he was so clever. Not his personal life, this place, this woman, this disgusting cub—not anything at all.

Most assuredly not the whelp who blocked his way and screamed his liquored arrogance into a man’s face and represented all that Kermit Shulder hated in the sorry world.

He struck out at it.

It was stupid. It was foolish.

It felt like a cold shower.

The jolt traveled all the way up to his shoulder. Dimly he heard the crack of his palm on the younger man’s cheek.

Jason stumbled back, striking the door with a thud. His face was comical with shock. It was as if he could not believe the evidence of his own nerves.

Doris cried, “Oh, my God,” ran into the bedroom, and flung the door shut.

To Shulder it was a distant event, without meaning. He was concentrating on his adversary, breathing hard. Jason’s cheek was blazing where Shulder’s palm had set fire to it. He felt elation, recklessness, but nothing showed in his expression. His eyes threw out a cold, green light.

“Aren’t you going to hit me back, Jason?”

Young Donahue stared at him. He was holding his cheek where Shulder had slapped him.

“You didn’t think I’d do it, did you?”

Donahue said nothing.

“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” said Shulder. “Do you know, can that overbred brain of yours comprehend how much I’ve wanted to? And now I’ve done it. And what are you going to do about it?”

Not altogether to his surprise Jason jumped for the glass ashtray on the cocktail table. He had half seen it coming in the reciprocal hate in the younger man’s eyes. But Shulder felt strong now, master of everything. He was on young Donahue in a bound, gripping the hand scrabbling for the ashtray, twisting the young arm, pinning it behind his back.

“You and your whore. She’s nothing. But you’re less than nothing, Jason. All your insolence and your swagger and your arrogance are empty eyeholes in a mask covering a blank face. I spit on you.”

To his surprise he found himself trembling.

“You bastard,” Jason whispered. “I’ll fix you for this. I’ll have your heart torn out by the roots. Let—go—of—me!”

Shulder stayed in close. He inched the arm higher. Jason squealed and slumped.

“Don’t … think I … won’t …”

“You won’t do anything, Jason. On top of everything else you’re a coward. You cause me one moment’s trouble … say one word to your father about me … and I’ll beat you to within an inch of your life. You hear me, you bourgeois degenerate?”

“Let go!”

Jason’s head was slued about. His eyes were glaring, his mouth was open. It was as if he could not believe what he was seeing and hearing.

“Are you going to tell your father?” Shulder pushed the arm up further. “Are you, Jason?”

Jason squealed again. Then he said very softly, “No, Kerm, no. Please let go. I won’t say anything.”

Shulder shoved. The young man reeled away. He began nursing his arm, the one Shulder had hammerlocked.

“That’s as good a way as any of leaving it,” Shulder said contemptuously. He had never in his life felt so much on top of everything. It was good after all.

And then a voice said from the doorway, “Anything wrong, Mr. Donahue?”

The editor whirled. A powerful man in a black uniform, a chauffeur’s cap in his big hand, was standing there. For a moment Shulder did not recognize him. But then he saw that it was Reo Smith, Loren Donahue’s man Friday.

“There’s nothing wrong, Smith,” Shulder said.

The chauffeur was still looking at his employer’s son. He cleared his throat. “Mr. Donahue, you know your father told you to stay away from here.”

“You’ve been following me,” Jason muttered.

“I do what your father tells me, sir.”

“I was … I was just leaving.”

“You, too, Mr. Shulder?”

“Yes,” Shulder said.

The new voice brought Doris Farlow out of the bedroom. Smith gave her a grin. “Don’t worry, Miss. They won’t wreck your place now.” The chauffeur said to Shulder and Jason Donahue, “I’ve got one of the cars downstairs. I’ll take you gentlemen wherever you want to go.”

The woman was glaring at Shulder. She said furiously to Smith, “You take Mr. Shulder to hell, that’s where. And dump him. I don’t ever want to see him again!”

“Yes, Miss,” Smith said, still smiling.

Young Donahue had reached the doorway before Shulder. Without warning he whirled and punched Shulder in the mouth.

The editor was rocked back. The next moment he was lunging at the younger man, his fist pumping toward the contorted face.

Smith was there first; Shulder’s knuckles grazed the chauffeur’s cheek. It did not even make the ex-police officer blink. His hand shot out and clamped on Shulder’s wrist with a grip that made the editor’s knees buckle.

“I wouldn’t try that, Mr. Shulder. Mr. Donahue wouldn’t like it.”

There were tears of rage in Shulder’s green eyes.

“Let go of me, you ape!”

“Not till you promise to be good.”

“He didn’t have the guts to hit me till you showed up! He knew—”

“I don’t know anything about that, Mr. Shulder.” Smith’s grip was unrelenting. “I just don’t think you ought to do it, sir. You promise, sir?”

“All right!”

Smith let go. Shulder stood there massaging his wrist. He did not look at young Donahue.

“Let’s go, gentlemen.”

He maneuvered the two antagonists from the apartment with the ease of his training. There was no shoving, just a firmly courteous pressure, inviting them to precede him. His chunky body managed to remain between them.

Doris Farlow followed the trio at a small distance. She watched them get into the elevator and the elevator door slide shut. Then she said an unladylike word.

She walked down the staircase and reached the vestibule just as the three men split up on the sidewalk. Jason Donahue jumped into his foreign sports car and raced away. The chauffeur and Kermit Shulder got into the big black Mercedes, Smith respectfully holding the door open for the editor.

When the two cars had disappeared, the Farlow woman turned from the tall windows beside the entry. As she started back across the vestibule, she glanced at her mailbox out of habit. There was something in it. Oh, rats, she thought. She took the elevator and was back in a few moments with the mailbox key. She unlocked the box and removed a folded piece of paper. It was not in an envelope.

Doris frowned as she unfolded the note. It had been hand-printed with a ball-point pen. The paper had been ripped from a small appointment pad or pocket reminder.

Her lips silently formed the words of the note:

I don’t think they’ll connect you. But you’ll feel better if you’re off the scene for a few days. Go to the Amernational and register under the name of Dolly Fowler. Don’t take a suitcase, just what you can stuff in your handbag. Make sure you’re not tailed or collared. If anything should happen, sit tight. Don’t panic. Remember, you’re safe if you clam. I’ll see you soon. Keep telling yourself this is the big one. You’ll have so many diamonds you can play jacks with them.

The note was unsigned.

Doris read the last sentence several times. It was like a pick-me-up on the morning after.

6

Detective Second Grade Meisenheimer stepped out of a doorway when Corrigan curbed Car 40, NYPD. Meisenheimer was a big man with bushy gray hair and a gray moustache. His unfailing meerschaum left a smoky trail across the sidewalk. He opened the door of the black, unmarked Ford. Its outward appearance did not betray its police-band radio or the powerful Interceptor engine.

As he plunked down in the seat, Meisenheimer nodded toward the apartment building across the street. “The woman lives on the second floor, front. Her name is Doris Farlow. After Shulder got a little oiled in that midtown bar and visited the woman’s apartment at this time of day, I thought it was worth a report. Shulder was certainly breaking his routine.”

Corrigan nodded. While the apartment building did not exactly spell mink and ermine, a great many New Yorkers would have figured it sheer luxury.

“I talked with the building super, Captain,” Meisenheimer said. “He didn’t know the man’s name, but he recognized the description and pegged Shulder as a regular caller at the Farlow woman’s apartment for the past couple of months.”

“Is Shulder still up there?”

Meisenheimer emptied his pipe out the car window. “He’s left. He wasn’t her only caller, by the way. A young shot in a foreign car parked by the no-parking sign and went into the building. A little later a big Mercedes rolled up and the driver got out. He was wearing a black chauffeur’s uniform and cap. I swear he looked like one of the boys who used to be on the force. Reo Smith.”

Corrigan nodded. “I saw Smitty earlier today. He got himself a job looking after Loren Donahue.”

Meisenheimer banged a-meaty fist into his palm. “That young jerk in the sports job—I thought he looked familiar! Jason Donahue, the publisher’s son, pride of the scandal sheets. Looks like papa had his man Friday out keeping track of junior.”

“How do you know they all went up to the same apartment?”

“Betcha.” Meisenheimer placidly refilled his pipe. “The three of ’em came out of the building together. Looked like there’d been trouble between young Donahue and Shulder. Old Reo was maneuvering between them and pointed them on their separate ways. Doing it like a good riot squad man, too.”

“We’ll continue to keep an eye on Shulder.”

“Right, Captain. I alerted Communications to put a tail on the Mercedes. Our boy is zeroed in, too. I’ll take over wherever he gets through zooming around in the dream boat.”

Both officers got out of Car 40. Corrigan crossed the street alone.

As he mounted the stone steps of the building, he saw a woman in the foyer. She was studying a note. She raised her eyes occasionally to stare into space. It was Doris Farlow. He did not know how he knew, but he knew.

Corrigan was as male as the next man, and under certain circumstances very much so. The moment he laid eyes on her he regretted that he was on duty. It was an unsummoned thought, and he immediately dismissed it. He looked her over, however, with pleasure. No skin-and-bones model, or “model,” this one. She was all curves and challenge, spilling over in every direction. Even the natural auburn hair stimulated. And that chin dimple, with the little bit of tongue darting out above it … No wonder Shulder and young Donahue had tangled over her.

He stepped quietly into the vestibule. He startled her. She snapped her head around, remembered the note in her hand, and quickly slipped it out of sight in her cleavage. Then she hurried up the stairs.

A glance at the mailboxes gave Corrigan the number of Doris Farlow’s apartment. The elevator was somewhere aloft. Instead of waiting, he chose the stairway, too.

When he reached the second floor, he saw the woman from downstairs opening a door at the end of the hall.

“Miss Farlow?”

She stiffened, threw a glance at Corrigan over her shoulder as he loomed beside her. He had been right.

“You’re Doris Farlow, aren’t you?”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

She was twenty-five, Corrigan guessed. He gave her about six more years before she went to seed.

“My name is Corrigan. I’m with the police. I’d like to talk to you, Miss Farlow.”

It scared her. He could see it in her oriental-looking eyes. “I didn’t do anything …”

“I didn’t say you did,” Corrigan smiled.

“I’m busy. I was going out—”

“I won’t take much of your time, Miss Farlow.”

The artificial lashes came down to conceal her eyes. She stood there in an oddly listening stance, as if she were trying to hear instructions someone was giving her from far away.

“How do I know you’re from the police?” She was edging into her doorway. “You might be a … mugger or something.”

“I’m sorry.” Corrigan pulled out his wallet, flipped it open to his ID. “I should have shown you this right off. You’re entirely right, Miss Farlow. A girl has to be careful these days.” He was inching into the apartment after her.

She managed a smile. “You did scare me, following me up the stairs that way.”

He smiled back.

They were inside the apartment now, and he gently closed the door.

It was a lusty place. Not so much feminine as just plain female—raw sex. It reeked of it. Corrigan wondered if she had a record. Although, at her age and with her endowments, she wouldn’t have to solicit—not for years yet. He could well imagine how men beat a path to her door. Men like Kermit Shulder and Jason Donahue. Although, come to think of it, Shulder was something of a surprise.

She was standing there awkwardly. “What do I do?” she asked with a forced laugh. “Offer you a drink, or what? I’ve never entertained a cop before.”

“You’re not entertaining this one, Miss Farlow,” Corrigan said, not without grimness, “so relax. All I want is some information.”

“If I can help you—”

“I think you can.”

“Well. Is it all right if I ask you to sit down?”

“Let’s both sit down.”

They sat down. Corrigan deliberately said nothing for a long minute. He wanted her as tense as he could get her. That was why he had told her to “relax.” It never failed in an official interrogation to have the opposite effect.

When she began to squirm, Corrigan went to work.

“Have you known Kermit Shulder long?”

“Who?” she said instantly. She had been braced for it.

“Kermit Shulder. He just left your apartment.”

“Oh,” she said. Then she said, “What did you want to know again?”

“How long you’ve known him.”

“About … oh, two months.”

“How did you meet him, Miss Farlow?” He had his notebook out now. The notebook act worked like a charm sometimes. It depended on the interviewee. Corrigan guessed that it would work with Doris Farlow.

Her eyes were on the notebook. “At a party. Jason Donahue took me.”

“He just left here, too.”

“Oh,” she said faintly. “You know … that.”

“It’s our job to know things, Miss Farlow,” Corrigan smiled at her. This one was apple pie.

She actually said, “Is Mr. Shulder in trouble?”

“You tell me.”

“But I don’t know anything about him!”

Corrigan cocked his one remaining eye at her. With the black patch over the empty socket of the other he looked like a benevolent pirate. “Now, Miss Farlow, let’s not play footsy with each other. Shulder’s been coming to this apartment on a regular basis, and I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been to discuss world events—or World Events. You must know a good deal about him.”

“I really don’t,” she cried. “You’ve got to believe me. He’s a friend, that’s all. He never mentioned business to me. Or anything about his affairs.”

Corrigan, looking at what she had to offer, was inclined to believe her. The only business a normal man would discuss with this girl was the business of getting into bed with her. And that would be a pleasure. Just the same … Corrigan decided to go all out.

“When did Kermit Shulder introduce you to Walter Ingram?”

“Huh?”

“Walter Ingram,” Corrigan said. His brown eye was watching her intently.

“I don’t know the name,” Doris Farlow said.

“Think, Miss Farlow. It might be important to us.”

But she shook her head.

“All right, let’s try this on for size. Ingram had another name. Fleischel. Heinrich Fleischel. Does that improve your memory?”

The eyelashes came down again, very quickly.

Corrigan kept watching her. It was sometimes hard to figure the vaginal types. They were usually stupid, and stupidity was one of the most effective protections against interrogation in the book.

He decided he had pulled a boner. He had put the cart before the horse. He should have hit her with the name Heinrich Fleischel off the bat.

The eyelashes came up. She looked very innocent. “I don’t recognize that name, either.”

“My information says otherwise.” He allowed a note of menace to harden his voice.

“Then your information is wrong.” She tossed her head.

“I’m afraid I have to warn you, Miss Farlow, that you’re making a bad mistake.”

“Mistake?”

“Anyone who knows the name Fleischel may be in danger. Physical danger. I’d hate to see a chassis like yours banged up.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I tell you I don’t know anybody of that name.” She jumped off the sofa. “You’ve got a nerve, barging in here and trying to scare the panties off me when I haven’t done a thing wrong!”

Corrigan lit a cigarette and leaned back.

She tossed the hair back from her face and walked over to the small bar. She poured herself a stiff shot of bourbon. Her hands were shaking.

With her back to him she gulped the whole thing down. Then she turned to him. Her shoulders were high and tense. “I’m sorry, officer. I didn’t mean …”

Corrigan put some warmth in a smile. It worked. She looked at him as if for the first time, woman to man. A measuring glance ran up and down, weighing him.

“Why don’t you tell me about Jason Donahue?” he asked. This may be a tough one to walk away from, he thought.

“What about him?” Now she was giving him the throaty business.

“You’ve known him longer than Shulder.”

She ran her fingers over the nape of her neck. It raised her full breasts. “He’s a spoiled brat. But he sure spends on a girl.”

“Then why did you switch to Shulder?”

“On account of Jason’s old man. Somebody ought to do something about a man as nasty-mean as Loren Donahue.” She poured herself another drink and took a mouthful of it.

“Oh, Jason’s father got tough?”

“Just because he’s got all the dough in the world.” Doris raised an imaginary lorgnette and broke into a falsetto British accent. “And my deah, such a veddy fine old family!” She said savagely, “They’re just a bunch of phonies.” She gulped the rest of her drink.

Corrigan grinned, falling in with her mood. She grinned back and poured herself a third drink. Glass in hand, she curtsied.

“My deah fella, you rahlly should see the skeletons in our closet.” She began to giggle.

“I gather you don’t care for the Donahues.”

“I care for their money. The hell with them. That sister of Jason’s, Victorina. Without all those charge accounts she’s nothing but a tramp you cops would have standing in the bullpen every Monday morning. And Loren’s wife, Felicia. Know her?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Who said anything about a pleasure? Unless you’re in the social register, my deah. She’s a phony bitch, that’s what she is.”

The third drink was getting to her. Corrigan kept watching her.

“Where did this Felicia come from, Doris?”

“How the hell would I know?” The girl nodded at the bottle of bourbon. “How about having one, Commissioner?”

Corrigan smiled. “On duty, Doris. Wish I weren’t.”

She studied him, head cocked. “I wish you weren’t, too. It would be easy to forget you’re a cop. You sure don’t look like one. Where’d you lose the eye? Peeking through a keyhole?”

“Something like that,” Corrigan said.

She threw her head back and drained the third one. The sudden movement threw her off balance, and she bumped into the bar. “Whooeeeeee, who’s rocking the boat?”

“We were talking about Felicia Donahue,” Corrigan said.

“I know something about her,” Doris Farlow giggled. “She was some kind of an editor—one of those career gals—over at World Events. Prob’ly came from Corn-pone, Kansas, or someplace. She didn’t want much. Jush—just everything. Wound up making a play for the big boss—that heel!—and goddam if she don’t land him.”

“I take it you got all this from Jason.”

“You take it right, m’friend. Me, I never laid eyes on the babe. Jason hates her guts. He hates her so damn much he’ll even take time out from playing with me to bitch about his stepmama.”

“That,” murmured Corrigan, “would take a lot of hate.”

“You’re damn right, friend.” Doris picked up the bottle and eyed it somberly. Then some instinct for caution made her put the bottle down. “I’m getting drunkee, you know that, Commissioner?”

“Tell me more, Doris.”

“About Felicia? Jason’s papa won’t get rid of her as easy as he did his other wives. And it’ll serve the bastard right. He’s a slave driver, Jason says. Won’t stop long enough to let his ulcers bleed. Maybe someday he’ll bleed to death. When that happens, I hope he remembers the stinkin’ threats he made to me!”

“Oh?” said Corrigan. “Tell me about it, Doris.”

“The louse said he wouldn’t bother trying to buy me off. He’d just send around a couple of muscle boys. When they got through with my face, he said, Jason wouldn’t be able to look at me without throwing up. That’s what he said!”

“You should have reported that to the police.”

“Oh, yeah?” She looked around for a cigarette, spotted the cigarette in Corrigan’s fingers, wove her way toward him, and took it from him. “Fat lot o’ good that’d done me, cop. Would you take my word against Loren Donahue’s? And even if you did, would you put men to guard-in’ me twenty-four hours a day?”

She was right about that, Corrigan thought.

Her laugh was explosive, producing bursts of cigarette smoke. She began to cough, and ground the butt out in an ashtray on the coffee table.

“So you gave Jason the gate?” Corrigan said.

“Listen, mister, I was plenty scared. Anyway, the hell with Jason. For all his dough, I was starting to get sick of his snottiness. He thinks any girl gets round heels the minute he snaps his fingers. So you know what I did? I made like it was all my idea, and I booted him out. Man, did it rupture his gallbladder!” She laughed again. “He can’t forget me. Keeps coming around. Hell, I don’t care. He’s always good for a hundred, or a nice present. What the hell happened to my cigarette?”

Corrigan gave her one and lit it for her. Her cheeks hollowed as she took a deep drag. “Okay, Mr. Cop, you’ve dry-cleaned me. Satisfied? Too bad I ain’t got no dirt for you on—what’s-’is-name?—Ingram, Fleischel, whatever the hell it is.”

“You’re sure you don’t know a man going by either of those names, Doris?”

She looked at him owlishly over the curling smoke of the cigarette in her mouth. “You asked me that before, wise guy.”

“I’m asking it again,” Corrigan smiled.

“Tell you what. If I hear either o’ those names dropped—I get around, Mr. Cop!—why don’t I give you a call?”

“Corrigan, Main Office Squad.”

“Corrigan, Main Office Squad. Police headquarters?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll remember. Girl can always use a friend among the fuzz is the way I see it.” She came very close, eyes slitted.

“You certainly can,” Corrigan said.

He got out of there fast, before his libido took over.

7

Chuck Baer entered the lobby of the Broadway building in which his office was located. The girl on duty at the newsstand was sliding afternoon editions into the racks.

“Hi, Mr. Baer. The usual?”

“A box, baby.”

The girl slid a box of Baer’s favorite panatelas from the cigar case. “You have a Wall Street widow for a client?”

“Nope,” Baer said, “just an uncle named Sam.” He traded some money for the cigars. “Some day, baby, I’m going to show you my etchings.”

“How do you know I want to see them?” She blushed.

Baer winked at her. “I’ve got inside information.” He pinched her cheek and went to the elevators. The girl wore a brace on her right leg. She was also homely. The etchings routine was a ritual.

He stepped out of the elevator with the cigar box tucked in his armpit. He swapped nods with a shirt-sleeved man who was crossing the corridor with some papers. A couple of doors away a girl was machine-gunning a typewriter.

Around the ell, the hallway was quiet. Baer shifted the box to the other arm, took out his key, and unlocked his office door.

He remained fixed in the doorway. His teeth bit through the cigar in his mouth; the burning end dropped to the floor. Automatically, he stepped on it.

His office was wrecked. Papers littered the floor from ripped-out desk drawers and the jimmied filing cabinet. Pictures had been yanked from the walls, apparently in a search for a safe. The contents of the wastebasket had been dumped out on the floor. Chairs were overturned, as if their undersides had been examined for something that might have been taped there. The wall-to-wall rug had been slashed.

Baer’s wrestler features slowly shifted to a snarl. He was a mild-natured man at most times, but this was not one of them. He tore the butt of the cigar from his mouth and hurled it to the floor.

“Sonofabitch,” he growled aloud. “If I lay my hands—”

He caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, but he was too late. A demolition ball swung against his skull, knocking him forward. He felt the edge of his desk knife into his groin. Even as he went down on his knees he managed to swing his head, a bull refusing to concede to the poleax.

Through the bloody mist he caught the wavering figure of a man. The face was a white blob, something looming out of a fog.

He saw the second blow coming and shifted just enough so that it glanced off his head and struck his shoulder. He wrenched himself about, kept conscious by an unconquerable rage.

He felt his hand touch a trouser leg. He grabbed at the material in a herculean effort to drag himself upright. Or drag the man down. It did not matter which. The important thing was to get his hands on the man’s throat.

He never made it. Pieces of the building fell on his head and shoulders. His grip broke, and his head played kick-the-can with the wastebasket, spinning it halfway across the office.

Thickly he heard the man’s feet kicking through the litter and the office door close. His attacker was gone.

For the moment Baer could not have cared less. He lay there nursing the pain, fighting his stomach, which was making craven efforts to empty itself.

That’ll teach me, he thought. That’ll teach me to look first behind the door I open. The greenest rookie would know that.

He went back to the battle with his stomach.

The air hammers in his head gradually wore down, became mere hatchets. He crawled a few inches, his belly contracting in protest. Once his head dropped against some of his papers. His fingers wadded them, as if they were the unknown throat.

The second need to regurgitate was not as strong as the first. It eased off in a few moments, and Baer pulled himself forward and touched the desk. He hauled himself up and slumped across the top, his hand groping for the phone, knocking it from the cradle.

In the midst of the unhumorous sensations he was enduring, Baer heard himself laughing.

For the life of him, he could not remember Tim Corrigan’s phone number.

A fire-engine-red Thunderbird convertible was parked before the building where Corrigan had his bachelor pad. The sinking sun made yellow fire out of the hair of the girl behind the wheel. A halo.

Corrigan thought, as he nosed Car 40 against the T-bird’s rear bumper, Victorina Donahue with a halo? Like a juvenile delinquent in the church choir.

Vicky scooted out of the bucket seat and met Corrigan on the sidewalk.

“Ahoy there.” She threw him a smile. A breeze stroked her dress against her body. The dress was of polished cotton, its modish cut suggesting its cost. “Or does one usually say, ‘And the top of the afternoon to you, Officer Corrigan’?”

“Depends on the time of day, Miss Donahue. What brings you to this part of town? It’s a long way from the penthouses and the Long Island estates.”

She pouted with wet red lips. “You’ve got me pegged as a useless playgirl.”

Corrigan’s eye roved over her. “I wouldn’t exactly call you useless.”

She linked her arm in his. “Now that’s more like it, Captain. I like flattery when it comes from the right men. Not from those vapid jerks Jason and I grew up with. Golly!” She touched his rock-hard biceps. “Nothing vapid about you. Unless it’s window dressing? Like those dud bombs who make with the bar bells?”

“It’s a temptation to challenge you to find out,” Corrigan said. “You’re a rare-looking dish.”

“Don’t you ever succumb to temptation?”

“Not,” said Corrigan, “when I’m on duty.”

“Just the same,” Vicky Donahue said, “I may try to do just that.”

“Just what?”

“Find out.”

Corrigan opened the front door of the apartment building and stood aside for her.

“Meanwhile, I suppose,” he smiled down at her, “you’re wondering what’s going on back at the ranch.”

“You have a brain, too!”

“I was born with it,” he said modestly.

They crossed the foyer and got into the balky elevator. Corrigan punched the button.

“Well,” said Vicky. “I do keep wondering what’s with my pop. I have my cerebral moments, Captain. Daddy is World Events, and vice versa. I don’t want anything to happen to either of them.”

“Naturally.”

The elevator lurched to a stop. They got out and crossed the hallway, and Corrigan keyed the door and showed her into his apartment. He had a pleasant sensation of danger.

She took in the masculine living room with a sweeping feminine glance. The furniture was uncomplicated and solid, like Corrigan himself. The rack on the wall above the fake fireplace held a gun collection, his hobby. (The “fireplace” he always regarded wistfully, wishing it were real; but the tenement building law forbade.) A portable TV, a stereo, a shortwave radio, occupied niches in one of the walls, along with a little inset bar. An obviously homemade cabinet held a collection of Korean War mementoes. One of them was the piece of shrapnel that had scooped out his eye.

“I like it,” Vicky Donahue said.

“It’s so different, eh?” Corrigan said. “I mean from the bachelor digs you’re used to. So inexpensive.”

“That wasn’t necessary,” she said. “I know you think we’re dreadful snobs. I’m not, really. I’d like a drink, please.”

“Sit down. What do you drink?”

“Anything. But if you have Scotch, I’ll take that. On the rocks.”

He went into the cubby kitchen for the ice cubes. As he dumped them from the tray he watched her through the doorway. She was at the stereo looking over his modest collection of records, which ranged from blues to Mozart.

He wondered if her professed concern for her father had much depth. She lived in a world that belonged to the Donahues. Corrigan doubted her capacity to believe that anything could really shatter it.

Corrigan suspected that the office time she put in at World Events was random, a matter of whim. She could hardly, with her background, stick to anything serious. In time the whim might stiffen into resolve—when pleasure finally bored her, or she went through mother-hood, or got religion. On that distant day she might even come to reflect the qualities of the earthshaker who had founded World Events—she did have spirit, vitality, and intelligence; But, somehow, looking at her shining head and quick, sexual figure, Corrigan doubted it.

He brought the ice bucket into the living room and made two Scotches on the rocks.

“You like Mozart,” Vicky said, almost accusingly.

“He’s one of my secret vices.”

“A Mozart-loving cop! Will wonders never cease?” She accepted the glass and raised it to eye level. “To the funniest fuzz I know.”

“Me?” said Corrigan.

“Who else?” she said.

“Funny as in funny, or funny as in kook?”

“The latter, sir.”

“Don’t tell Inspector Macelyn.”

“Who’s Inspector Macelyn?”

“My boss.”

“Bosses.” She wrinkled her little nose and drank, deeply. When the glass came down she sank onto his divan and tucked her long legs under her. She had gorgeous legs. “Have you chased down my pop’s connection with Walter Ingram yet?”

“Who’s interrogating whom?” Corrigan asked with a smile.

“You don’t actually think my father could have anything to do with a man going out a hotel window, do you?”

“Why not?”

“My father?” She threw her head back and laughed merrily. Her throat was slim and tanned and delectable. “He’s the original Walter Mitty.”

“Walter Mitty,” said Corrigan dryly, “had dreams of grandeur.”

“And that’s just what they remained—dreams.”

“Your father is tough enough to run one of the most influential magazines in the world.”

“That.” She dismissed World Events with a sweep of her glass. “It practically runs itself, like automation. Pops was squeezed into the mold from his didy days. Just as his father was before him. But if pops had his druthers, his biggest problem would be whether to use a wedge or pitch onto the green.”

“How about your brother Jason?”

“How about him?”

“He seems to have escaped the mold.”

She swirled her drink, head cocked for the music of the ice. “Maybe the mold is worn out. Or my father isn’t the man to cram Jason into it. Anyway, what does it matter? Jase and I won’t ever have to worry. World Events is a big, fat, self-sustaining giant.”

“Tempting the leeches,” Corrigan remarked.

She frowned. “Are you referring to my brother and me?”

“I’m talking of the working leeches,” Corrigan said.

“Thank you, Captain Corrigan.”

“Of course, the invasion of the working leeches doesn’t necessarily have to prove disastrous. They can always be picked off and squashed. If it’s done in time.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you?”

“You couldn’t mean Kermit Shulder, could you?”

“You’re perceptive,” Corrigan said. “What makes you think I meant Shulder?”

“We girls have our secret methods, Watson.”

But Corrigan did not smile. “Publishing magazines is out of my line, Miss Donahue. But, along with sixty million other common people, I’ve seen World Events around all my life. I’m afraid I don’t read every issue—apologies to your circulation staff—but those I do see seem to me to miss. They just don’t have the zing they used to have. It seems to me to have gone—I don’t know—soft. Mushy might be a better word. It used to have iron in it. Five, ten years from now …” He shrugged. “For your sake, I hope I’m wrong.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” the girl said. “I’m set for life. My grandfather saw to that. He used to tickle me in the tummy and say, ‘You’re my favorite girl.’”

“I’ll bet,” Corrigan said. “By the way, where did Kermit Shulder come from?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know. Some college or other. Lost his professorship. Do we have to talk about Kermit?”

“We have to,” Corrigan said. “Why did he lose his professorship?”

“I’m not sure. Some of his ideas, I guess. Maybe a personal scandal. I’ve often thought he might be a queer.”

“I doubt it.”

She shrugged. “Anyway, he wrote a couple of heavy books, got into publishing, ended up on World Events.”

“Or got started,” Corrigan said.

That got her full attention. “What’s that supposed to mean, Captain?”

“I’m not sure,” he confessed. “I’m not sure of anything yet. But Shulder may be a Red. If he is, he’s dangerous. He’s sitting in a mighty strategic editorial seat.”

“A communist? On World Events?” She laughed again. But when Corrigan did not join her, she stopped and gave him a remarkably serious look. “Whatever gave you such an idea, Tim? You don’t mind my calling you Tim, do you?”

“No.”

“And you call me Vicky.”

“All right, Vicky.”

“Now answer my question.”

He was tempted to. He was tempted to say: Walter Ingram was really a Red named Heinrich Fleischel who had turned coat on the party and didn’t make the grade. Not after Shulder took that call from the Amernational Hotel …

But Corrigan did not say it. The tongue in that lovely head might flap in the wrong places. Instead, he said, “I’ve read some of his stuff.”

“Oh, that. He’s ultraliberal, sure. Pops used to put him on the carpet about some of his articles. So what? What harm can he do? Maybe we ought to take another look at communism and ourselves. We’re not all Ivory pure, you know. Come here, Tim.”

He found himself going over to the divan and sitting down beside her, in the place she was patting.

“He can do a lot of harm, Vicky. Maybe he’s already done a lot. I’m not one of those who advocate a shooting war with communism—not with that damned H-bomb in the arsenals—but I can’t see shutting our eyes, either. The Reds have propaganda down to a science. We could be brainwashed into letting our guard down. It was a Russian who practically invented the conditioned reflex. And there’s Mao and his invention of modern guerrilla warfare, something we still haven’t learned to cope with … Mao, whom your editor Kermit Shulder seems to understand so well—”

“Tim,” Vicky Donahue murmured. Her empty glass had slid out of her hand to the floor. She reached over and took his glass and set it down on the cocktail table. Then she sank back and eeled her arm about his neck. “I didn’t come here for a political science lesson.” Her slim body wormed closer. Her fingertips brushed the hair at his temple. “Let’s make love.”

“Why?”

“I want to.”

“Why?”

“How many reasons are there?” She pulled his head down and clamped her lips on his. Immediately he felt the wriggling life of her tongue boring its way into his mouth.

Then her hands were all over him.

Corrigan was no celibate. He had had his share of women, from little, slim, expert Korean girls to their larger, more passive American sisters, and he had enjoyed every moment of it. But this girl was different. There was a rapacity about her, a hunger of starvation, that transcended the sexual and touched the psychoneurotic. She wanted all of him, and all of him was not enough. He knew that from the first moment.

It helped him. It helped him fight her off, even as his body reacted to her fierce attack. She was reaching for his eye-patch when he got hold of her hands and forced them away from him and pushed himself off the divan to stand over her. There was sweat on his face.

“You never had a man with one eye before,” Corrigan said to her.

“No … Please, Tim …”

“You had to have one.”

“Tim …”

“A new kick. Right, Vicky?”

She stared up at him.

He picked up what was left of his drink and swallowed it. “Besides, I told you I was on duty.” He went over to the bar and refilled his glass and another and brought her the other drink. “Here:”

She took the glass and sat there holding it. Her eyes never left his face. There was speculation in them now, a cooling appraisal.

“What is it with you? Don’t give me that duty dirt. You’re not a pansy, either. What is it?”

“I told you.”

She said a four-letter word.

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Corrigan said. “Drink it.”

She sipped, still looking at him. Her skirt was halfway up her thighs; she was not wearing panties. He reached over and jerked her skirt down. This amused her, and she began to laugh. She took a long swallow.

“I wouldn’t put it past you to set me up for a rape charge,” Corrigan said. “How old are you?”

“Old enough.”

“Look, Vicky.” He set his glass down and stood there before her, his brown eye impaling her from above. “I’m investigating a murder case. I don’t like murder. I was born not liking it. Walter Ingram was murdered. I’m going to get whoever shoved him out that window. For all I know right now, it could have been somebody named Donahue. Your name is Donahue. When this is over, and if no Donahue is involved, and if I’m in the mood, I’ll be glad to show you what a one-eyed man feels like in bed. In other words, I’m taking a rain check.”

“Suppose there’s no game afterward?” Vicky asked, smiling up at him.

Corrigan shrugged. “There are plenty of women.”

“You bastard!” In her anger she slopped the remains of her drink; some of it wet her dress. “You’ll never get it now!”

“The loss, it seems to me,” said Corrigan, “will be at least mutual.”

That broke her up. She began to giggle, and Corrigan laughed. She jumped off the divan and ran over to him and flung her arms about his neck and kissed him like a little girl. “Before I just wanted you,” Vicky said. “Now I like you. I don’t usually like the men I do it with. Oh, shoot.” The phone was ringing. “I suppose you have to answer it.”

“Saved by the bell,” grinned Corrigan; and he took her arms from around his neck and went into the bedroom.

He picked up the phone from the bedside table. “Corrigan.”

“Tim … Chuck.”

Corrigan almost failed to recognize Chuck Baer’s voice. “Chuck. What’s the matter?”

“I’ve been cockalized.”

“What do you mean? Where are you?”

Baer told him, through his pain. As Corrigan listened, his lips compressed. Baer’s voice trailed off.

“Chuck. Chuck! You still there?”

“Yeah,” Baer said weakly. “It went black for a second. It’s okay now.”

“Sit down, Chuck. Move as little as possible. I’ll have a doctor down there in no time. And a couple of prowl-car boys, in case that sonofabitch feels like coming back for more exercise.”

“Thanks, Tim.”

“I’m on my way.”

Corrigan broke the connection. Then he raised his finger and dialed headquarters. He tersely notified Communications Center and dropped the phone.

As he turned away from the bed he saw Vicky Donahue standing in the doorway.

“I couldn’t help overhearing, Tim. It sounded as if somebody was hurt.”

“You heard correctly. Chuck Baer.”

“The big, ugly redhead who was with you in my father’s office?”

“That’s the one. Some muscle-man worked him over in his office. Was laying for him—Chuck never had a chance. I’m sorry, Vicky, but I’ve got to get to him.”

On the sidewalk, she ignored her Thunderbird and hopped into Car 40.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Going with you.”

“This is official business, Vicky.”

“And the Donahues are in it up to their necks. You said so yourself.”

“Vicky, I haven’t time to argue—”

“Then get in and drive!”

8

The doctor had worked his way down to the abrasion on Baer’s jaw. Chuck was sitting on his office couch as the M.D. swabbed the raw spot. “With your constitution, Mr. Baer, they should have sent for a veterinarian.”

Baer accomplished a grin. “I come from a long line of mules, Doc.”

“I still think you ought to check into a hospital for a more thorough work-up.”

“And crowd some guy who’s really sick out of a bed?” Baer got to his feet, flexed his muscles. “I’m all right.”

“Suit yourself.” The doctor snapped his bag shut. “But remember, any dizziness or nausea may mean concussion.” He glanced around at the activity in the upended office. Tech men were popping flashbulbs and going over the place for fingerprints. The doctor’s eyes briefly appreciated Vicky’s contours.

“Then he’s all right, Doctor?” Corrigan asked.

“If somebody hit your friend with an ax,” the medic said, “it would dull the blade. He must have a skull like Pithecanthropus. Of course, my examination has been superficial. Somebody ought to keep an eye on him for the next twenty-four hours.”

Vicky’s eyes mocked Corrigan for a moment. Then they turned Chuck Baer’s way. “Among my various accomplishments, Mr. Baer, is a way with small children and big animals.”

“That’s me,” said Baer enthusiastically.

“So I’ll nurse you.”

“Arf-arf,” Baer said. But at the same time he glanced from the girl to Corrigan. Corrigan knew what he was thinking—that something had come up between them, and that the something had gone sour. Corrigan grinned wryly. If he knew Chuck Baer—and he knew Chuck Baer—it was a situation to be taken advantage of.

He was right. Baer groped his way toward Vicky in fake blundering helplessness and draped his big arm about her shoulders. “Let’s go take care of my aches and pains, Nursie.”

She squirmed to pat his bruised cheek. “Take it easy, Tiger,” she cooed, and wriggled out of his embrace.

“I always put my arm around my nurses,” Baer said.

“Not now, while you’re rocky. I like to get my patients well first.”

“Sit down, Chuck,” Corrigan said.

“Huh?”

“I said sit down.”

“What for? I’m all right, Tim.”

“You heard what the doctor said. If you had any sense, you’d check into a hospital for observation. As it is, you’re going to take it easy till we’re through here.”

“Better do as the mean old captain says, Tiger. We can have fun some other time.”

“Help me,” Baer said perfidiously.

Vicky Donahue helped him to the office couch. He sank onto it with a loud groan. She sat down beside him and began to stroke his brow. He closed his eyes, grinning.

Corrigan glanced at the tech men. “All right, you peeping Toms,” he said. “Haven’t you ever seen an alley cat going to work? Have you found anything, Thaxton?”

Thaxton, the fingerprint man, had just straightened up from dusting the office door. He was a gangling character with an iron-gray fringe on an otherwise bald head. “Not much, Tim.”

“The guy was a pro, I tell you,” Baer said, lifting his ugly head from Vicky’s shoulder. “The lock proves that. An amateur couldn’t have got in without busting it. Or the glass panel in the door.”

Corrigan nodded. “You’re sure, Chuck, you never saw him before?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” Baer growled. “But if you pin me down, I’d have to say I don’t think I ever have.”

“Then we can probably rule out somebody connected with one of your old cases, a grudge, anything like that.” Corrigan stared at Vicky’s arm; it was about Chuck Baer’s shoulders. She stuck her tongue out at him. “Do you think you could make an ID on him, Chuck?”

“I don’t know that, either. Possibly, but all I got was a blur after that first knock on the head.”

“Too bad.”

“He was a pro all the way. When my key went into the lock from the hall, he faded behind the door and waited for me to walk in. He knew he’d have the edge, that double take I’d have to give the office when I came in—just enough of an edge to let him step out from behind the open door and bounce one off my skull.”

Corrigan nodded again, looking about at the wreckage of the office. A stranger, not anyone from Chuck’s case-file.… That meant somebody contemporary. The contemporary sequence was: phone call from Heinrich Fleischel, alias Walter Ingram, to find out if Chuck was available for some chore; aftermath of phone call, Fleischers murder; aftermath of Fleischel’s murder, Chuck’s office ransacked. Could be.

“Your bopper was worried, Chuck,” Corrigan said. “He had to know how far Fleischel had got with you—if it had gone beyond that one call.”

“That’s the way I dope it, too.”

The doctor had left, and the tech men were leaving. Corrigan said to Vicky Donahue, “Do you think you can tear yourself away from this middle-aged Casanova?”

“I’ll try.” She put up her face and kissed the end of Baer’s mashed nose. “This IBM machine obviously wants a private session with you, Tiger. I’ll be right outside, waiting.”

“I’ll try not to keep him long,” Corrigan said.

They watched her swish out. The door closed. Baer continued to look at the door.

Corrigan snapped his fingers. “Tiger?”

Baer came back to present company. “Man, what a chick.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. She made a pass at me, too.”

“So what? I couldn’t share her with a better man.”

“You don’t mind sharing the wealth?”

“Not a bit,” said Baer cheerfully. “I know you do, Tim, but—hell, c’est la guerre. Anyway, you’ve got plenty of time to fret about little Vicky and me living it up.”

“Speaking of time, didn’t the CIA buy some of yours?”

“Neil Ramey wasn’t smart to put in a bid so fast.” Baer reached down and picked up a piece of paper from his scattered files. “The creep who did this … I don’t need CIA dough to get me hungry for his scalp.” The banter was gone from his face now, exposing the stone. “I want a starting point, Tim. And you’ve got a bee in your bonnet. I know you.”

“Maybe I have,” said Corrigan.

“Who is he?”

“Not a he. A girl named Doris Farlow.”

Chuck got off the couch to retrieve one of the panatelas strewn about. “Connected with Heinrich Fleischel?”

“I’m not sure. She’s played the bedroom game with Kermit Shulder and Jason Donahue. Jason strikes me as meaningless as the motions he makes under the excuse of living. But Shulder … Shulder is a horse from a different stable.”

“This Doris Farlow a whore?”

“She doesn’t auction it night by night. Takes one or two men on at a time. Maybe just one, with a little overlapping.”

“Jason Donahue and Kermit Shulder. She doesn’t come cheap.”

“She doesn’t have to. I gather she’s prime stuff. She’d never let herself tumble for a guy without dough. She was Jason’s girl for a while, but Papa Loren apparently scared her off with language she understood, a threat of violence. She strikes me as the scare-easy type. That kind can be dangerous if they’re cornered.”

“After Jason came Shulder?” Baer asked.

Corrigan rubbed his eye-patch. “And now I think she’s giving Shulder the heave. There was a break in his routine today. He knocked off work, braced himself at a midtown bar, and went to her place. She’d had words with him by the time I showed up. Scare was written all over her.”

Baer took the cigar out of his mouth. “Might work. No telling what Shulder might have let slip to her when they were bedding down.”

“She might even have known Fleischel. I threw the name at her, and I’m almost positive it meant something to her.”

“So now we go to work on that scariness of hers, with me playing the role of heavy?”

“Well,” Corrigan said, eying him, “you do look the part. Chances are she never tangled with a real private detective, and rates you two-time-Charlie chasers according to what she’s read in the paperbacks. So when she talks to you it won’t be like talking to a cop. With a cop she can yell police brutality and scream for a lawyer—excuse me, mouthpiece. With you she’ll expect rough stuff, and no place to run. It might work, Chuck. It’s worth a try.”

“Okay, pal, I’ll see if I can get more than her name, rank, and serial number.” Chuck Baer looked longingly at the door. “Wonder if I can talk Vicky into waiting in my pad?”

Corrigan’s working day had stretched into a moonlit evening. The darkness was spiced by a tangy Atlantic breeze from across Long Island.

He had Car 40 humming along the private road that lay like a blackened umbilical cord between the public highway and Loren Donahue’s estate, that monument to Donahue the First, which for three-quarters of a century had fought off highway commissions, shopping centers, and Levittowns.

The road to Brandywine bored a tunnel through the shadows cast by the endless ranks of old maple giants. The trees were in full leaf, and the filtering moonlight speckled the road like surf foam.

He drove out of the tunnel into open space. The road began to skirt formal lawns and gardens that would have burst the bounds of Yankee Stadium.

Prepared as he was, Corrigan marveled at the sight of the main house. There were spires, towers, ramparts, stone balconies. Moonshine silvered leaded windows and made caverns of lofty Gothic doorways. The sheer size and solidity of the mansion spurned any need for frills. I wonder, Corrigan thought, why the old boy left off the drawbridge and royal guard in armor?

As he drew Car 40 to a stop on the expanse of concrete before the entrance, Corrigan would not have been surprised if a sentry’s voice had challenged him from the battlements.

The front steps, he noted, were at least twenty yards wide—long tiered layers of stone guarded at each end by crouching stone lions.

Corrigan had phoned ahead from the midtown restaurant where he had had his dinner. Mrs. Donahue had been in. Mr. Donahue had been out, but he was expected “shortly.” So the publisher should be home.

The massive knocker boomed on the great front door, and it opened with the smoothness of a bank-safe door. Corrigan gave his name to a tall white-haired butler who said, “This way, sir. Mrs. Donahue is expecting you,” and led the way.

The interior was a fresh reminder of the whims of wealth. What the original tycoon had done was to import a medieval English castle and stuff its shell with the trappings of an Italian Renaissance villa. Corrigan’s feet whispered across an acre of entry foyer floored in rose-hued marble buffed to a high sheen. Ahead a fountain dripped jewels of water. He passed statuary so delicately executed that it was hard to remember they had been chiseled from stone. Columns of Italian marble aspired to an arched cathedral ceiling whose great expanse exhibited scenes and figures of an Italian Renaissance heaven—God with a long beard, bosomy angels, fat cherubim. Beyond the fountain a half spiral staircase floated to the upper regions.

Felicia Donahue was waiting for Corrigan in a long sitting room off the entrance foyer. The room was overpowering. He had a confused impression of a carpet as lush as a hand-tended lawn, of massive Italian furniture, brocades, man-high candelabra, draperies like sheets of beaten gold. Then he concentrated on the publisher’s wife.

She was standing near the tall window-doors that led to the gardens. The doors were open, and Corrigan caught the perfume of roses.

She was moving toward him. “Good evening, Captain Corrigan.”

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything, Mrs. Donahue.”

“Not at all.”

Corrigan remembered the description he had heard. Corrigan always questioned descriptions by untrained people. But this one was a reasonable fit. Felicia Donahue made him think of a portrait by an artist who used metallic paints. Upswept slick hair of copper. Cobalt eyes in a face of aluminum. A tall, slender figure flawless in contour, as perfectly modeled as the statuary in the entrance hall, but in Florentine silver. The cold perfection was sheathed in a blue dress that caught the light and reflected it in a shimmer.

Corrigan politely refused her offer of a drink.

She seated herself on one of the brocaded chairs with the fluid mechanics of a fashion model.

“So you want to get right down to business, Captain. That’s my way, too. What brings you here?”

“Has Mr. Donahue come home yet?”

“No. I’m not sure now just when he’ll show up. Sometimes, when he’s out this late, he spends the night in town.”

With a lusty Cuban refugee, Corrigan thought. He wondered if this woman, the latest in Loren Donahue’s string of wives, knew whose bed her husband was occupying. The cobalt eyes, the aluminum face, were expressionless. But they seemed to be reading Corrigan’s mind.

“Do you know where my husband may be spending the night, Captain?”

Corrigan rubbed his nonexistent eye. When it itched, something generally happened.

“I believe you do,” Felicia Donahue said. “And so that you won’t think I’m an utter fool, her name is Carmalita.”

“How did you know I knew, Mrs. Donahue?”

“You wouldn’t have come here about Loren if you hadn’t done some spade work on him. As for how I know … we’re not what you’d call a harmonious family, Captain. If I hadn’t found out about Carmalita Sorolla on my own, my stepchildren would have steered me in the right direction. They’re not nice young people. Although I’m sure they don’t think me a nice stepmother, either.”

The scent of the roses seemed to change. As if they had turned into flowers in a mortuary. It was remarkable how this mechanical woman turned a Renaissance room into a tomb. Or had it happened the other way around?

A male voice said, “It’s just that you’re wrong for the part, Felicia. Too young for the old man, and too old for the young one.”

Corrigan saw a tall, too-thin young man. A few ounces of flesh might have made his gaunt face handsome; as it was, it looked wasted, like his life. The quality of his thinness was such that for a moment Corrigan suspected that young Jason might be on the junk. But then he dismissed the suspicion. Marijuana, perhaps, but none of the other vital signs.

Corrigan sought Felicia Donahue’s reaction to her stepson’s remark. None was visible. It had bounced off the metal façade. Did anything matter to this woman? If it did, she kept it well-hidden.

Brandywine, he thought, must be her purpose in life. To be mistress of all this splendor, to enjoy the luxuries it afforded, were what had come to matter to her.

“Captain Corrigan,” she said, “this is Jason Donahue.” She might have been introducing a stranger.

Jason did not shake Corrigan’s hand. Corrigan caught the smell of stale whiskey halfway across the room.

“The fuzz who came poking around the office when that Ingram character fell out a hotel window,” young Donahue said. “I’ve heard of you, Captain. Found any suspects to beat up yet?”

“You’ve been watching television, Mr. Donahue,” Corrigan smiled.

“Yeah? Well, I wouldn’t expect you to admit it.”

“There’s nothing to admit.”

“You mean to stand there and tell me that if your name ends in ez or your skin is black you don’t get sapped and kneed in a station house?”

“I don’t operate out of a station house, Mr. Donahue. I’m with the Main Office Squad. Have you ever been pulled in?”

“Sure.” He said it almost boastfully.

“Were you struck or kneed?”

“I’m Loren Donahue’s son,” said Jason Donahue. “White skin, and no ez on my name. Is there anything to drink around here?” He shouted, “Clarence!”

The butler materialized.

“Double Scotch.”

“Yes, Mr. Donahue.”

“And cut out the faithful-retainer bit, Clarence. I’m tired of you trying to keep me sober by cutting my Scotch.”

“Yes, Mr. Donahue.” The butler vanished.

Jason dropped into a huge carved chair. “Go ahead, you two. Don’t let a mere Donahue interrupt the lady of the house.” He’s afraid of Felicia Donahue, Corrigan thought.

The glance she directed at her stepson held nothing translatable into emotion. Its very unreadability told its story. She looked at him as if he were of no importance whatever.

“I dislike airing the family linen in front of Captain Corrigan, Jason,” she said in her cold voice, “but I long ago learned that you’re incapable of tact or good manners. What time did you start on the bottle today?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m merely acting as your father’s wife. He’s asked me to keep tabs on your drinking. It was early, wasn’t it?”

“Around noon,” he said sullenly.

“It was earlier than that, Jason.”

“If you know, why the hell are you giving me the third degree?”

“Please don’t swear at me. I suppose you know that I couldn’t care less, but the fact is, if you keep this swilling up, you’ll either turn into a hopeless alcoholic or develop cirrhosis of the liver.”

“It’s my liver.”

“Who’ll run World Events?” There was the slightest twist to her lips. “You know how much your father’s counting on you to take over when he retires.”

“The hell with him, too!”

“Shall I tell him that, Jason?”

His eyes unlocked and sought something else. “I wouldn’t put it past you.”

For one moment more she stared at her stepson. Then she shrugged and turned to Corrigan.

“My apologies, Captain,” she said, “for subjecting you to this.”

Corrigan nodded. He said nothing.

Jason said, in a very loud voice, “Where the hell is my drink?”

9

The butler appeared with Jason’s drink on a gold tray, and departed.

The mistress of Brandywine watched Jason gulp. “By the way, Jason, did you see your father today?”

“For a couple of minutes.”

“How did you get home?”

“Smitty drove me. Good old Reo to the rescue. He …”

“Yes, Jason?” Mrs. Donahue looked interested.

“Nothing,” Jason said.

Corrigan said suddenly, “Was the rescue by Reo Smith effected in Doris Farlow’s apartment?”

Jason’s hand jerked. Liquor spilled down his chin. “What makes you think that, fuzz?”

“We’ve met, Miss Farlow and I. As a matter of fact, I was talking to her before you were clear of the neighborhood.”

Felicia turned the rock-bit hardness of her eyes on Jason. “That’s something I will tell your father! He’s warned you to stay away from that woman.”

Jason pointed a finger. He had no need to shake it; the finger was already shaking. “You keep out of this! You, with the poison you keep pouring in my father’s ears!”

“Mr. Donahue,” Corrigan said, “I’d rather you put off your fight with your stepmother until I get what I came for and leave. I’m interested in what went on in Doris Farlow’s place today. Of course, whatever you tell me is in confidence. Unless it’s self-incriminating. Is it?”

“Hell, no! I’ve got nothing to hide, except from my father, and he’ll hear about it soon enough.” He sent a baleful glance at his father’s wife. “Kermit Shulder was there when I showed up. He and Doris had had a fight.”

“About what? Do you know?”

“Shulder’s got a screw that comes loose sometimes. He goes crazy-jealous. When I barged in I could smell it. Doris was heaving Shulder out on his ear and locking the door behind him. He looked ready to explode. When he saw me it triggered the explosion, and he tried to get tough. I could have handled him. I didn’t need Smitty to do it for me.”

I’ll bet, Corrigan thought. Aloud he said, “You and Doris were picking up where you’d left off?”

“I keep trying,” Jason said defiantly. “Only it scares her when I come around. My old man put the fear of Loren Donahue in her. She usually kicks me out. It bugs me, so I make her squirm now and then. Hell, it’s just a little game I play when I get bored. Even Shulder should have known he didn’t have to be jealous of me any more.”

“You mean his jealousy should have been directed elsewhere?”

Jason pitched his empty glass to the table beside his chair. The glass shattered. “Don’t ask me, Captain—Shulder had the best chance of finding that out. It has to be some guy with money—what Doris dishes out comes high. Shulder came after me, instead of keeping his fingers closer to the facts.”

“Was one of the men in her hit parade Walter Ingram? Or a man named Heinrich Fleischel?”

Young Donahue laughed. “You’re not involving me in this Ingram mess. Didn’t know the guy—never saw him in my life. And this Heinrich what?”

“Fleischel.”

The young man pushed out of the chair. “Never heard, Captain. I need another drink. I’ll fix it myself—Clarence is too damned handy with the water.”

Felicia watched her stepson leave the room. “And there goes the scion of a great and noble family.”

“You must have started hating rich people’s guts at a very tender age, Mrs. Donahue,” Corrigan said.

“I beg your pardon!”

“How about being honest with each other? We may read it differently, but we both know the score.”

For the first time the cobalt eyes glinted with human feeling. She did not take them from Corrigan’s face as she reached to a beaten silver humidor for an ivory-tipped cigarette. Tip to lips, she silently commanded a light.

Corrigan just as silently gave her one. She leaned back, waiting. But he said nothing more. Finally she smiled.

“How many other nasty surmises have you made about me, Captain? I really don’t care what you think of me, you know.” She let a tendril of smoke trickle out of a corner of her mouth. “But merely as a matter of clinical interest, go on. Do you see any redeeming features?”

“You’ve got initiative.”

“Thank you.”

“And you stick to what you start.”

“You’re pretty good, Captain. Anything else?”

“When you make a plan, you don’t skip a detail.”

“The man is clairvoyant,” she murmured.

“I know you started as one of the bees in the World Events hive. Today you’re the queen. That’s a pretty long jump. Want me to go on?”

“By all means!”

“You’re beautiful. Like a custom-made yacht.”

“I’m not sure I like that. But tell me more.”

“On top of all that, you’re very smart.”

“And you,” she said, “are a razor. I’m not fond of razors, Captain.”

Corrigan shrugged. “You asked.”

“Are you quite finished?”

“Just starting,” Corrigan said.

“With Walter Ingram?”

“Yes.”

She mashed out her cigarette. “What makes you think I knew him?”

“I think you know as much as your husband does about what goes on at World Events. Maybe more.”

“I have an office there. I use it more or less regularly. Sorry I wasn’t in when you called.”

“And people?”

The cobalt eyes chilled him. “People?”

“A few strategically planted through the organization. Doesn’t the queen always have a spy system?”

She did not reply. Corrigan watched her get up and stroll toward the floor-length windows. She had as fine a set of buttocks and legs as he had seen in a long time.

When she turned back to him Felicia Donahue said, “What did Loren tell you about Walter Ingram?”

“Not a thing.”

“You won’t let it go at that, of course.”

“No, ma’am.”

She laughed a short and brittle laugh. “Can I buy a ringside ticket when the knockout punch swings at Loren? That I would dearly love to see.”

“You may be in the ring yourself, Mrs. Donahue, and not as the referee,” Corrigan said.

“Never, never try to threaten me, Captain.” Her voice was soft. “It gets my back up. I claw when I’m angry.”

He should have known it. Corrigan got out of his chair. She watched him uncoil.

“So my husband played ignorant about Ingram?”

“He ducked me,” Corrigan nodded. “But that was this morning. I was just starting. I’ve tightened a few screws since.”

She floated over to a long Florentine table. Her perfect hands shifted a stem here, a bud there, changing the arrangement of the centerpiece. “That’s Loren. He avoids trouble as long as he can.”

“In this kind of business that’s the surest way of compounding it,” Corrigan said. “By the way, Ingram’s real name was Heinrich Fleischel.”

“Really?” She stepped back to study the flower arrangement. “You have been active, Captain.”

“He squirmed out from behind the Iron Curtain first chance he got. Carried a peace offering. Got all the way to the fort, too.”

“Brave fellow.”

“But the C.O. already knew all about it.” He kept watching her.

“My! Bad moment for the brave fellow.”

“I’ve tried to see it through Fleischel’s eyes before they went blind,” Corrigan said. “I’m stuck, Mrs. Donahue. In strange country. That’s Fleischel thinking. I’m in danger of being sent back to the hostiles, where burning at the stake would be the easiest way out.”

“Time for you to run, Mr. Fleischel,” Felicia Donahue murmured. “I think this white carnation looks a little droopy.”

“Where do you suggest I—Fleischel—run to?”

“The Argentine. Zanzibar. New South Wales. Anywhere to get lost. The world’s full of hiding places.”

“And how do I get there? Hitchhike?”

“Maybe you could sell something, Mr. Fleischel.” Her hand lifted the faulty flower from the arrangement and crushed it.

Corrigan was playing one of his hunches. He could not have said why. That was the nice thing about hunches; they needed no rationale. “Say, a microfilm? An authentic, documented record of Soviet manned space-flight failures?”

It did not startle her. So he had been right.

“The Russians have certainly kept the lid on that kind of news, Captain. A sensational film—if there was one.”

“Sensational is hardly the word. It was the scoop of the century. And Fleischel—a newsman himself—knew what he had. The hell with the Pentagon and the CIA—he wasn’t licked yet. Convert the film to cash and run, was the ticket. While Immigration measured its red tape, run like hell.”

Felicia Donahue consigned the crushed flower to the mouth of a tall urn. “A man in his spot wouldn’t have time to take bids,” she murmured.

“You’re so right, Mrs. Donahue. Go straight to the biggest and top-paying customer. The one that grew to giant size on a diet of international dirt.”

“You’re referring to World Events, of course?”

“What else? I’m not altogether guessing, Mrs. Donahue. The phone call Fleischel made an hour before he died was to the head man’s office.”

The cobalt eyes glittered. “We don’t have the film, Captain.”

“Let’s pretend I believe you, Mrs. Donahue. If you don’t have it, who beat you to it?”

“I don’t know.”

Somewhere out in the night there was an explosion.

Corrigan launched himself at Felicia Donahue. She had time for a single self-protective gesture. Then his hard hands were dragging her away from the tall windows. She stumbled, and Corrigan’s arm flashed about her waist. He fell on her behind one of the massive chairs.

“What do you think you’re doing? Get off me!”

Corrigan disentangled himself. She half sat up, braced by her extended arm, her palm against the floor, glaring at him. He had knocked her coiffure loose. Her dress was over her knees, exposing her thighs. One of her shoes lay a few feet from the chair.

She looked down at herself, felt her hair; she actually seemed on the verge of tears. “I’ll have you broken for this!”

“Save it,” Corrigan said. He was scarcely listening. All his attention was on the darkness beyond the open windows.

Her hands clawed at the back of the chair as she tried to rise. Corrigan turned quickly back to her.

“Don’t be a fool,” he said. He took hold of her shoulders and dragged her down again. Her fingernails slashed at his face.

Corrigan sideslipped, grabbing her wrists. She pulled hard. There was nothing cold about her face now. It was as if she felt in deadly danger of losing all that was precious to her, her perfection; for that she would fight like an animal.

“Mrs. Donahue,” Corrigan said. “Mrs. Donahue, stop it! What did you think I was trying to do—attack you?”

“You fell on me,” she panted, struggling. “With your whole—hateful—body! I’ll not only have your shield, I’ll see you put away for this!”

“For what?” Corrigan said. “For saving you from stopping a bellyful of shotgun pellets?”

She stopped struggling.

“Shotgun?” she said faintly.

“Yes, shotgun. That was no sonic boom out there. Now stay down, please. Stick your head over the top of this chair and you might get it blown off.”

She sank back on her haunches, staring at him.

Corrigan went for his snub-nosed .38. He put it off safety and crouched.

“Just stay where you are, please.”

He dove from behind the chair to the protection of the Florentine table. Then to the huge bronze urn. Then to a heavy bookcase.

Beyond the tall windows the night was blank. He kept it in the sights of his revolver.

He paused just long enough to catch his breath. Then he got down on his belly and crawled to the side of one of the windows. Here he drew himself up behind the velvet drapes.

He took a moment to survey the sitting room. Felicia Donahue was out of sight behind the chair. If the butler or Jason Donahue had heard her outcry, neither had responded.

There was a big mirror in a heavily gilded and carved frame on the opposite wall. Corrigan measured the triangulation. Three straight lines. The angles were in his favor. Anyone outside, in a position to see the mirror, would not see the part of the room where he was standing.

He sucked in his breath and without hesitation darted through the window, dropping in a crouch on the terrace.

His eye took a swift panoramic survey. Stonework balustrade, the walkways, the shadows of the box hedges. The night was as peaceful as a baby’s yawn.

He launched himself over the balustrade and ran low across the side lawn. He stopped in the shadow of an oleander, alert for the least movement in the shrubbed area before him. He heard and saw nothing.

Finger snug on the trigger of the .38, Corrigan began to make his way past boxwoods, hedgerows, a rose arbor. He made no sound.

He was five hundred feet from the main house, approaching a stand of poplars, when a bark brought his short hairs up.

Corrigan spun about like a cat. It was a German shepherd. The dog was coming fast, barking its head off.

The beast looked as big as a bear in the moonlight. The eyes gleamed yellow, fangs showing. Corrigan knew he had to contend with a man-killer.

The dog growled, gathered itself, and sprang at him like a projectile. The fangs were entirely exposed.

Corrigan threw himself aside. The shoulder of the animal barely grazed him, but it staggered him. He went down on one knee. Instantly he rolled over and bounced to his feet.

The dog was in a belly-crouch. It was not growling now. The eyes were pure yellow fire. Saliva dripped from its mouth. The fangs looked a foot long.

Suddenly it began to circle him.

Corrigan kept turning with it. His hand on the gun felt sweaty.

“Back, boy,” he said in a low voice. “Easy now …” He prepared to shoot.

And just then, somewhere out in the darkness, a man’s voice, a familiar voice, called out calmly, “Lancelot Freeze.”

The dog froze.

“And you there, whoever you are. Don’t make a move. One blink and I’ll let the dog tear your throat out.”

Corrigan stood very still, his .38 trained on the shepherd’s massive chest. From the corner of his eye he made out the bulky shadow of a man, approaching at a leisurely pace. He was coming along the line of poplars. As he emerged into the moonlight Corrigan saw that he was cradling a .30-.30 in his arms.

“Reo,” said Corrigan softly.

“Who the hell is that?” The man’s pace quickened.

“It’s Tim Corrigan.”

“Tim?”

“Get this devil out of here before I put a bullet in him.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. Freeze, boy, freeze!”

The dog quivered, slavering. Its eyes had never left Corrigan’s throat.

“He wants me, the bastard,” Corrigan said. He was not looking at Reo Smith. “Will you get him away from here? Or do I have to blast him?”

“Don’t shoot, Tim,” Loren Donahue’s chauffeur said quickly. “Go back, Lancelot. Back!”

Lancelot looked disappointed. But he got up on his four legs and whined and faded into the darkness.

Corrigan let his breath out. He was drenched with sweat.

The ex-police officer looked ghastly in the moonlight. He was sweating, too. “My God, Captain. We could have killed each other.”

“If your doggie hadn’t killed me first. Who fired that shotgun?”

“You tell me.” Smith raised his arm and swabbed his face with his sleeve. “I was in my quarters over the garage, dozing off. Windows all open, breeze on my kisser, when I hear somebody prowling around outside. I got up and had me a look. Some sonofabitch was walking fast, like he was in a hurry to get away from the main house. I gave him a yell and he took off for the trees. I grabbed my pants and shoes and rifle, and lit out after him. I spotted the guy as he ducked into those trees over there.” Smith pointed. “Just beyond is the skeet range. Not used much anymore—the Donahues are scared of guns. But the shotguns—couple or three of them—are still in the traphouse.”

“Let’s take a look, Smitty.”

The two men trotted in the direction Smith had indicated.

“Bastard took a potshot at me,” the chauffeur said from between his teeth. “I was lucky—the shot bounced off some leaves to one side of me. But it kind of discouraged me, which was what the guy was figuring. I back-peddled fast and hugged me a tree. I don’t go barreling into dark doorways any more, Tim. Loren Donahue pays me a hell of a lot better than the City of New York ever did, but he don’t have the kind of money to make me pull a fool stunt like going after a guy with a shotgun in the dark.”

They came through the trees. Before Corrigan lay a vast field of roughly mown rye grass. He made out the silhouettes of the skeet range, a traphouse, the low wooden dividers that separated the shooters’ stations.

Smith shook his head disgustedly. “As quiet as a dead whore’s fanny. I thought I had him when Lancelot got into the act. We’ve lost him, Tim.”

“Afraid you’re right.” Corrigan scanned the landscape. “What’s beyond those woods?”

“The highway. About half a mile over.”

“You’d better report in to Mrs. Donahue, Smitty. I left her hiding behind a chair.”

“Aren’t you coming back with me?”

“No, I’m going back to town. I’ll stop off on the way to tell your constable about the prowler. He might turn up a set of footprints.”

“Thanks.” Smith cleared his throat. “Tim … I’m sorry as hell about the dog.”

“Forget it,” Corrigan said. “He was just doing his job.”

10

Five A.M.

Doris Farlow writhed and whimpered in her sleep as if the sheets clinging to her were made of potato sacking. She was lost in a frightening dream, in a cold strange place she could not identify. Jackbooted feet were in a precise ring around her. She could not see the men, just the boots.

They were subjecting her to an old communist torture: mounted on a low stool; ankles tied to its rungs; hands lashed behind her back. They had upended a dirty bucket and dropped it over her head. Now they were pounding on it with metal clubs, one after the other, in ceaseless rhythm. It was tearing her brain apart. She began to scream.

Doris’s eyes snapped open. She found herself bolt upright in the hotel bed, uncovered. She was gulping for breath. She had to have air; there was no air in the room. And the ringing …

The ringing began again. But she was awake!

Her hand flew to her face. Stupid! It was the phone. Just the phone. On the night table.

The phone was cool and its touch reassured her. She snatched it free, snapping the dream sounds. She licked her lips and put the receiver to her ear.

“Yes?”

“Doris?”

The familiar voice coming out of the dark filled her with relief.

“Hello! Yeah, it’s me. I got here to the hotel okay. Registered as Dolly Fowler, like you told me in the note.” Her fingers suddenly convulsed on the phone. “Why are you calling me at this hour? Are they after you? They’ll be after me!”

She scrambled off the bed, clutching the phone. Her eyes were stabbing the dark of the room as if she were caught out alone in the middle of the night in a jungle. The gauzy material of her nightgown kept trembling, as in a breeze.

“Easy, baby, take it easy,” the familiar voice was saying. “Everything’s perfect. I just wanted to let you know.”

“But this time of night,” Doris said. But the voice was having its effect; her gown had stopped trembling and the darkness did not seem so formidable.

“What’s wrong with this time of night? It’s the best time for a powwow. With the rest of the world in dreamland. Anyway, what have you got against the wee small hours? We used up a lot of them having fun, baby, didn’t we? They were real great. And there’ll be plenty more.”

She used the back of her free hand to wipe the fine moisture from her ear.

“I wanted you to know everything’s under control. All you’ve got to do is keep a hold of yourself. Anyway, I had to call while the others were sleeping.”

“Where you calling from?”

“Phone booth in an all-night drug store. Close by. Listen, I’ve got some time. I’ll come up. Would you like that, baby?” His voice had grown lascivious.

But Doris shivered. “Oh, yes! I’d like that. The room’s so damn lonely. I just had a terrible nightmare.”

“The nightmares are over, baby. I can’t stay long—I might be spotted. What’s your room number?”

“Six-eighteen. Why’d you have to pick this hotel? I had to take two pills to knock myself out … thinking about that guy on the nineteenth floor.”

“Baby, it was the only hotel to pick,” the voice chortled. “They’d never expect me to walk back into the Amernational. Look, Doris, drop the night chain and leave your door unlocked. Have a smoke, relax. Think of all the things you’re going to buy, the places we’ll be going together.”

“All right,” she said. She shivered again. “But hurry.”

“Be right up.” He broke the connection.

Doris replaced the phone slowly. Then she went to the door and removed the chain from the slot, turned the bolt to the unlocked position, turned the key in the lock. She could hardly wait for the door to open … for him to walk in.

She went back to the bed and sat down and tucked her legs under her. She reached for her pack of cigarettes and took one and lit it and sat there smoking. She really ought to turn on the lights, she thought, but she did not move. The night was no longer a jungle, just the darkness of a hotel room; knowing he was on his way up made all the difference. Anyway, she hated hotel rooms. They reminded her of things she would rather not remember.

She gave the pillows a one-handed fluffing, untucked her legs, and sank down on her back. As she puffed, the glow of the cigarette fitfully illuminated her face.

I have to hang on to this one, she thought.

An endless row of men’s faces moved across the ceiling in her mind’s eye, and she winced. It was like something out of a corny TV commercial. Dissatisfied users. Looking for a better product. What was the matter with her?

Why was it like that? All of them with their tongues hanging out at first. They could hardly wait to jump into bed with her. And she gave—oh, she gave. They all said she was wonderful. One in a million. They kept coming back, and she gave her best, and suddenly they weren’t coming back so often. And sooner or later they stopped coming altogether. What was wrong? Was she getting old?

Of late Doris had been thinking more and more of the future. It was not pleasant. Her body, that they clutched so hard, would begin to spread out. Her neck would develop sagging places; her face, fine lines and puffiness. She would grow old and ugly. Where would she get the nice apartments and the good food and the furs and jewelry that made life bearable? How would she live?

She felt suddenly like throwing up. She fought her stomach.

Relax, the way he’d said. Oh, she was glad she had him. He had enough money to last them a long, long time. They’d leave the country. Acapulco would be nice.

Yes, she would keep this one. There were bonds between them now. Something that clamped them together. He couldn’t afford to drop her even if he wanted to. She had to hold on to him.

She heard the door. The bed gave a creak as she turned over on her side and propped herself on an elbow, facing the source of the sound.

“Is it you, baby?”

“It’s me, baby.” His voice came from across the room.

Doris dropped the cigarette butt in the bedside ashtray and sat all the way up. His shadow advanced on the bed. She was so glad. The springs gave under his weight as he sat down beside her and began sliding his hands across her nightgown.

“Hey, what’s with you, baby? You’re shaking like a leaf.”

Doris clung to him. “I don’t like it here. Please. How much longer till you finish up and we go?”

“Soon, soon.” His lips nuzzled her neck. “We’ve got to get you out of here. If they got to you, you wouldn’t last five minutes. You’d be screaming it out like you had the d.t.’s. But don’t worry, baby … You won’t have to wait long …”

His lips had blazed their way from her ear across her cheek to her mouth.

Doris felt very grateful. Her lips came apart and the tip of her tongue stung his in the old practiced way, but with genuine love this time, or so it felt to her. He feels it, too, she thought, as his hands came sliding up her back and across her shoulders in a sort of convulsion.

His hands locked on her throat.

“Don’t do that,” Doris whispered. Why was he doing that? He had never done it before. Nobody had ever done it before. “I hate not to be able to breathe …”

It was not love.

Doris tried to scream. But her wind was cut off and her body was suddenly buried under the avalanche of his weight and all she could do was arch herself, writhe, try to get out from under, try to get at him, any vital part, in the fight for what she now knew was her life. Her knees tried to get in between his thighs, she was trying to claw at his wrists, get at his eyes. He protected them by sinking his face into the warmth between her breasts. And all the time his fingers sank deeper into her throat.

The flopping under him gradually subsided. At last it stopped altogether. But the man remained where he was for several minutes more, squeezing with all his strength.

Finally his hands came away and he pushed himself off her body and backed onto the floor. He stood there looking down at her. He could see vaguely in the lightening darkness of the predawn. She was tumbled there like a flung doll, with her mouth open and her tongue hanging out of a strangely dark face and her eyes wide and glaring up at him but not seeing him. He could not recognize her at all.

So it was done, what he had planned.

The man did not like it, or himself. She had been something. But she had made him prove himself; she, the coward, always scared of something. She would crumble like a cigarette ash at the first pressure. That was why she had had to die.

Almost four hours later the woman in the posh apartment several blocks uptown came awake. Carmalita Sorolla awoke with the instant awareness of a cat. She experienced no need to push back the waking process or linger in the warmth and protection of her bed.

She was on her feet, reaching for the blue satin robe that lay across her boudoir chair, when the door buzzed a second time.

Her high-arched feet located the satin slippers beside the bed as she picked up the robe.

The smothered hissing of the shower continued after the buzzer stopped. Loren Donahue was in the bathroom martyrizing himself under his morning blast of cold water. The same old ritual. Carmalita thought: he wakes groggy and tired. If he thinks no one is looking, he practically crawls out of bed. Then the shower. Followed by black coffee and amphetamine. He was not aware of doing it, but he always swallowed the pills with a desperate gulp as if he were secretly afraid that this was the morning when the pills would fail him.

She went to the door, knotting her narrow sash; then she. pushed her heavy raven’s hair away from her face with both hands. She reached the door as the buzzer started its third complaint. She unlocked the door and opened it, but left the night chain on.

It was a solid, well-tailored man outside. His face was all angles, and his one brown eye made her think of a bullfighter she had known. There was a black patch over the other eye.

“Yes?” she said in her full voice.

“Miss Carmalita Sorolla?”

“Yes? What is it?”

The man took a wallet from his pocket. He tipped it toward her and let it unfold under its own weight.

“I’m Captain Corrigan, Main Office Squad, police headquarters. May I come in?”

“Would it do me any good to be difficult about it?”

“Not very much,” Corrigan smiled. “You’d probably find yourself talking to me downtown.”

“Then be my guest, Captain.”

The visible strip of interior vanished. Corrigan heard the rattle of the night chain. The door swung wide.

Corrigan stepped into an apartment that was as expensive-looking as it was sterile. The living-room furnishings were Danish day-after-tomorrow. Abstracts, reminding him of Rorschach blots and finger-paint drawings, were mathematical on the white walls. The only sign of the world as it was appeared in the Central Park greenery visible through the windows.

Corrigan did not miss the way her midnight eyes made a quick survey of him. He had the feeling that he was being gone over by a vacuum cleaner. This was no doxy, whatever else she was. She knew all kinds of scores.

“May we talk in the kitchen, Captain? I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

Corrigan nodded. “Why not ask Mr. Donahue to join us?”

He said it deliberately, to see if it would throw her off stride. It did not. Or, if his remark had disturbed her, she had iron control. The olive face remained as smoothly reposed as a sleeping infant’s.

“Of course.”

She moved away, the robe clinging to her body. Corrigan’s eye followed her with appreciation. Well, Loren Donahue could afford the best. He thought of how he and Chuck Baer and the rest of common humanity had to do it the hard way, and mourned. There was no doubt about it, being rich and powerful was unfair to Joe Blow.

She disappeared in what he took to be the bedroom. Corrigan heard the mutter of voices. She was giving the bad news to Donahue. He grinned to himself. There were satisfactions in being a cop, he thought, at that.

When she came back—alone—there was lipstick on her mouth and the blue-black hair had been worked over by a brush. It hung, straight and shining, to below her shoulders.

“Mr. Donahue will join us in a minute, Captain.”

“That’s all right.”

“The kitchen is this way.”

“Fine.”

Corrigan followed her into the compact kitchenette. With its stainless-steel equipment and tiled walls, it reminded him of a hospital operating room.

She pressed a button to activate an electric burner, slid a cabinet panel aside, took out a glass coffee maker.

“Cuban coffee too heavy for you, Captain?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever tasted any. I’d like to try it.”

Her movements were like silk as she measured water, then finely ground coffee. Corrigan suspected that anything she did would be done like silk.

“Loren’s told me about your visit to his office. Are you making any progress with the Walter Ingram case?”

“We always make progress, even if it’s only backing out of a blind alley to start in a new direction.”

She watched the heating water. She seemed amused. “Am I a fresh direction, Captain?”

“Are you?”

“I’m no more nor less than what I appear to be. A benighted Cuban refugee who picks up a few pesos turning not particularly deathless prose from English into Spanish or the other way around.”

“I understand you got off the island when the Castro crackdown was at its worst. There must have been spies and informers everywhere.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes in one’s own family. I had no family, fortunately.”

“How many people got out with you?”

“Four. A very tall, emaciated young man named Manuel Bastione stole a boat. We had no food or water. But it was a mere ninety miles, and I can’t say it was a real hardship. Manuel knew the sea.”

“You were very lucky.”

“I hope that’s not a crime, Captain.” She joined the sections of the coffee maker. Boiling water rushed to the upper section, and she set the maker aside to watch the water tanning. “When you have nothing to lose, you don’t mind taking long chances.”

“Well!” Loren Donahue’s voice boomed from the doorway. “Up with the birdies, I see, Corrigan.”

Impeccable in an Italian sharkskin suit, the publisher strode in, hand extended, heartiness all over him. He exuded a confidence that had little more substance than the aroma of his cologne, in Corrigan’s view. The lingering coolness in Donahue’s palm was a reminder of the shower that must have frosted his marrow. But it had not flushed the gray out of his face. And there was a gauntness in his cheeks that had not been noticeable the day before.

Donahue nodded toward the elevated dining area. “I understand you’re having coffee with us, Corrigan. Shall we sit down?”

“Thank you.”

For all his affability he’s embarrassed, Corrigan thought. He damn well ought to be!… He joined the publisher at the fragile-looking pecanwood table. Silver drapes kept the morning light from flooding the floor-to-ceiling thermal panes.

“Perhaps you’d like breakfast, Captain,” Carmalita Sorolla said as she set a silver coffee service on the table. “I’m a very good cook.”

“I’m sure you are. But I’ve had my breakfast, thanks.”

“Loren?”

“Just coffee.”

“Loren—”

“No!” Donahue said it peevishly, almost sharply. So he was not as relaxed as he looked. Donahue seemed conscious of an error. He said in a milder tone, “I feel a little off my feed, Carm. Coffee is all I want. Well, Captain, what brings you here this morning?”

Corrigan watched the Sorolla woman’s quick hands as she began to serve. “How much, Mr. Donahue, did you offer Fleischel for the microfilm?”

The coffee maker poised where it was. But only for a second. Then it resumed pouring.

Donahue reacted differently. Donahue sucked in his breath, and his gray cheeks went grayer, and he pushed away from the table. He was staring at Corrigan as if Corrigan had been a doctor just over telling him that he had terminal cancer.

“So you know about that …”

“You should have told me yesterday,” Corrigan said.

“But you were asking about a man named Walter Ingram,” Donahue said quickly.

“That won’t work, Mr. Donahue. You knew perfectly well Ingram was Fleischel’s alias.”

He stared at the publisher. Donahue’s glance faltered and fumbled toward Carmalita Sorolla. But he found no help there. She was calmly pouring a third cup of coffee.

“All right,” Donahue mumbled. “Damn it all to hell, I wish I’d never heard of the man! Carmalita warned me that Fleischel was ambulatory trouble. Didn’t you, Carm?”

She said nothing. Corrigan said, “Please address yourself to me, Mr. Donahue. Did you make the deal? Have you got the film?”

“Carm …”

“I said,” said Corrigan in his quietest voice, “to me.” But suddenly he turned to the woman and said, “All right, Miss Sorolla, he seems so anxious for you to carry the ball, you take it.”

She lowered the steaming cup from her mouth. “I told you last night, Loren, you should have laid it all out to begin with. But no, you simply had to duck, didn’t you? It comes as naturally to you as breathing. You duck, and you duck, and then comes the moment when you can’t duck any longer. I’m not carrying the ball for you, darling. It’s your play.”

“I should have listened to you,” Donahue cried in a sort of anguish. “But I’m not forgetting, Carm, that you told me to play it close!”

Corrigan sat there listening.

“But not with the police, darling. Never with the police.” She went calmly back to her coffee.

“Then with whom?” Corrigan asked. “With whom are we playing this little game so close?”

“You can’t be that stupid,” Donahue muttered.

“Maybe I am, Mr. Donahue. Enlighten me.”

“With Red agents, for God’s sake! Whom else?” Donahue wadded his linen napkin and flung it on the table. “They pitched a man from a nineteenth-story window, didn’t they? What do you think they’d do to me?”

“You went into the deal willingly enough. Didn’t you?”

“So I was stupid!”

“So it got scary,” Corrigan smiled. “Maybe that’s why Fleischel was trying so hard to get in touch with you an hour before his death. You were backing off. You were ruining everything for him.”

“I never want to hear that bastard’s name again!”

“I can believe that, Mr. Donahue. But who started you backing off? Who put the fear of God in you?”

Corrigan caught the flicker of Donahue’s desperate eyes, so he glanced at Carmalita Sorolla. The silence stretched. He sat looking at the lovely olive face as if he had all day.

Finally she lowered her cup. “Of course I pointed out to Loren that the film was as lethal as a bottle of nitro. Ingram’s death seems to have proved my point.”

“Wasn’t it taking a great deal on yourself,” Corrigan said, “warning a magazine like World Events not to publish a series of articles?”

“I was warning a man, Captain, of whom I happen to be fond. Any fool should have realized that the Soviet Union wouldn’t sit back and meekly let itself be made a laughingstock, its failures held up to worldwide ridicule.” She added a touch of sugar to the thick coffee and stirred it slowly. “I might add, Captain, one fact.”

“What’s that, Miss Sorolla?”

Her hand reached to Donahue. Still looking at Corrigan, she said, “Except for people who have stopped in briefly to discuss assignments, fees, and other business matters, Loren Donahue is the only man I’ve admitted to this apartment since I came to New York. Do I make my meaning clear, Captain?”

It was certainly clear to Donahue. Lapping it up, Corrigan thought.

The old itching began in his eyesocket. It was a funny thing how every time something was going to happen or he was on the brink of some discovery or resolution the missing eye itched. It was a better barometer than a rheumatic finger.

Right now it was telling him that a woman like this could not be in love with a weakling like Loren Donahue. She couldn’t even be after marriage—she must know that an affair with Donahue was not likely to lead to an altar and the Donahue millions. The Donahues of this world did not marry the women they slept with. They married social icebergs, like Felicia Donahue, for window-dressing.

So Carmalita had a hidden purpose. The question was, what was it? Whatever it was, she was able to wear Donahue like a kid glove. He seemed completely dependent on her strength.

Corrigan decided to take another tack. “Everybody seems to have known about that microfilm but the police. Who else was in on your party line, Mr. Donahue?”

“Party line! Are you accusing me—?”

“Excuse me, a very bad figure of speech. I meant, whom else did you let in on the business of the film?”

“Nobody! I told no one but Carmalita here. It was too big a load for me to carry, I confess. Yes, I was scared, Captain. So I had to have somebody to talk it over with, share it. Somebody who understands me.” Donahue gripped the woman’s hand.

“How about you, Miss Sorolla? Women’s tongues have a habit of flapping.” Corrigan did not believe this for a moment, in her case. But he had to find some way to sting her into an indiscretion.

“Captain,” she said, looking him in the eye. “Loren told me under a promise of absolute confidence, and I’ve kept my promise. You’ll have to take my word for it.”

“And mine,” Donahue said. “Just three of us knew—I, Carmelita, Felicia—”

“A moment ago you told me you’d only told Miss Sorolla. We seem to have picked up your wife. Did you tell Mrs. Donahue, too, or didn’t you?” He knew perfectly well that Felicia Donahue had known all along, but he wanted to hear what Donahue had to say.

“Felicia knows everything that goes on at World Events, Corrigan,” the publisher said. “Anyway, neither Miss Sorolla nor I has blabbed. We’ve wanted to forget that the damn film existed.”

“Would Mrs. Donahue have told anyone?”

“Not a chance. Felicia’s closemouthed about everything, but torture wouldn’t have opened her mouth about this. She was too set on the film’s remaining a secret until we exposed it to the world.”

“I take it, then, that Mrs. Donahue isn’t afraid of this, the way you are? She’d still like to publish it?”

Donahue dabbed the dew from his brow with the napkin. “Felicia has a sharp news nose, but no finesse. She doesn’t see the nuances of our business.” And you do, Corrigan thought sourly. “When you get right down to it, what good would it do the free world to have World Events print that story? Everybody knows they’ve had failures, only they’ve covered up. It’s the weakness in their system. So it’s not as if we were to publish something sensationally new and unknown. So they’ve lost some spacemen. So what? It only proves they’re as human as we are.”

“It proves they’re not,” said Corrigan. “We haven’t lost any yet, have we? But I’m not going to argue with you about it, Mr. Donahue. Go on.”

“I have nothing more to say. I had to make a publishing decision, and I made it. In my judgment printing that story would do no good and might stir up harm. It would certainly not help our space program outdistance theirs, or put us on the moon first.” Loren Donahue was the millionaire tycoon again, confident, strong-voiced, booming down from above. “Anything else, Captain Corrigan?”

“You’ve left out something, Mr. Donahue.”

“What’s that?”

“That not publishing the story will help Soviet-American relations, or some such garbage.”

“It’s not garbage. It’s true!”

“All right, Mr. Donahue.”

Corrigan wondered how much Kermit Shulder had had to do with the decision. And/or Carmalita Sorolla.

But that was not, to him, the most frightening part of it. Loren Donahue wielded immense power in the lockedin struggle of the world’s free press against the untiring propaganda factory behind the Iron Curtain. How many Loren Donahues could the West afford? One was too many.

I’ll get nowhere on this, Corrigan thought.

“How many times did you and Fleischel meet?” he demanded.

“Twice. The last time was five nights ago at a hotel in Newark. He was staying there under the name of Walter Ingram.”

“Was the second meeting to work out the final details?”

Donahue glared at him. “Something like that. I’d questioned the genuineness of the microfilm. A normal precaution. Fleischel had worked out a plan between the first meeting and the second. He suggested bringing in a third party—a private detective—to help authenticate the film and also to handle the physical transfer. He said he would make inquiries about a detective he had heard of, a onetime member of the OSS, who was absolutely to be trusted—he didn’t give the man’s name.”

“Chuck Baer,” said Corrigan.

“Baer?” Donahue stared. “Wasn’t that the name—? The big fellow who accompanied you to my office the other day! I didn’t know Baer was the man Fleischel had in mind.”

“That last call of Fleischel’s, an hour before he was tossed out that window, may have been for just that purpose, to tell you about Baer. Keep going, Mr. Donahue, I want to hear all of this.”

Donahue’s chairman-of-the-board look was fading. He shifted in his chair. “Fleischel told me he would slip into New York and register at the Amernational under the Ingram alias. His plan was to have the private detective deliver the microfilm and pick up my certified check in payment. The private detective would hold the check. I would immediately contact the CIA. When the Intelligence people assured me of the authenticity of the microfilm, the detective would deliver the certified check to Fleischel. Fleischel would convert the check to cash, pay the man’s fee, and then disappear.”

“Neat,” Corrigan said. “Fleischel was no mean planner. How much were you going to pay him for the film?”

“A hundred thousand dollars,” the publisher said. “It looked right then like a bargain. The films had enough material for a long exposé—ten or twelve articles. We’ve paid double that price for really hot stuff.”

11

Donahue took a final swallow. His cup clattered, and he rose.

“Just a minute,” Corrigan said.

“What?”

“I don’t like gaps,” Corrigan said. “I’m still feeling around in this one. Did your wife accompany you to both meetings with Fleischel, Mr. Donahue?”

“Why not ask her?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Yes, but what difference does it make?” Donahue burst out. “I didn’t get the film. I paid out no money. I’m innocent of wrongdoing.”

“Why was Mrs. Donahue along?”

“She insisted on going. You don’t know my wife, Captain,” the publisher said, between a snarl and a whine. “It was she who thought of the precautions—telling Smitty to make sure we weren’t followed, giving false names to the desk clerk at the hotel in Newark. She’s very good at that sort of thing. She’d make a hell of a spy. Go talk to her. I’ll draw you a map to Brandywine.”

“I know the way to Brandywine,” Corrigan said.

Donahue jerked a glance at Carmalita Sorolla; she shrugged. A tic struggled at the corner of Donahue’s mouth. “You’ve … already been out there, Captain?”

“Last evening.”

“Did you tell her—?”

“I didn’t tell Mrs. Donahue anything about you and Miss Sorolla, Mr. Donahue,” Corrigan said. “I didn’t have to. She knew all about it.”

The Sorolla woman was on her feet. Something in the interchange had touched her off. Gone was the calm on her olive face, gone the control over her body. She was trembling with rage.

“You told me—you swore!—she didn’t know!” she cried to Donahue. She was actually shaking her finger across the table at him.

“I didn’t tell her, Carm—”

“You didn’t, didn’t you? Then how did she find out?”

“I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “I don’t know how Felicia finds things out.”

She drew a deep breath that brought her magnificent breasts up. Corrigan could see her make the good fight. When she spoke again, it was quietly; she had won. “I think, Loren, we ought not to see each other for a while.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what I said. I have a logical mind, Loren. It goes from A to B, and then it knows by some miraculous process that the next thing is C. If Felicia knows, I ask myself, how many others know? How many times has my name been on your lips when you were whooping it up with the boys at your club? You can’t drink worth a Cuban centavo.”

“Carm, I swear—”

“I told you at the very beginning, Loren, I’ll not have my name kicked about as if I were some cheap tart. I don’t know whether you’ve told anyone or not, Loren. But I’m going to protect myself. Please don’t call me; I’ll call you. Captain Corrigan, excuse me.”

She went out of the kitchen and a moment later Corrigan heard the bedroom door shut and click as a key was turned.

He looked at Loren Donahue.

The man was the color of death.

A polished shoe swung hard. Its toe met the leg of the dinette table and the leg broke and the table settled gracefully on the floor, like a ballet dancer on one knee.

Donahue was ludicrously dancing on one foot and glaring at Corrigan. “You and that Fleischel!” he choked.

“Temper,” said Corrigan.

The publisher hopped from the room. The outside door opened and crashed.

Corrigan shook his head. He had rather enjoyed it. It’s my sadistic streak, he thought with a grin.

After a moment he let himself quietly out.

When Corrigan reached the sidewalk, he saw Chuck Baer resting his ample fanny against the fender of NYPD Car 40.

“Hi, Tim. I see you topped Loren Donahue’s morning. He went thataway,” Chuck motioned with his head. “A one-man offensive line looking for a taxi to knock off.”

“How’d you make out with Vicky Donahue, you louse?”

“I didn’t. She diddled around with my stereo and files of Playboy while I spent most of the evening nosing after Doris Farlow.”

“Get anything out of Doris?”

“Nope.”

“What the hell. You found her, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I found her.”

Corrigan got out his car keys. “Where is she?”

“In the morgue.”

“What?”

“Get in the heap, and I’ll take it from the top.”

Corrigan went around the front of the car and got behind the wheel. Baer climbed in beside him.

“All right,” Corrigan said. “Let’s have it, Chuck.” His voice sounded forbidding.

“Now look, mon capitaine, I didn’t louse it up, even though my bones and muscles still feel like Jell-O from that beating I took in my office. I feel just as bad about Doris as you do.”

“All right, you’re bleeding,” Corrigan said. “What happened?”

“I went to her apartment last night. Nobody home. Asked around, chased my tail to several spots she favored. No Doris.

“It was getting late, and I was beat. Even if Vicky hadn’t been waiting, I’d have called it a day. But I was out pecking with the chickens early this morning.”

Corrigan was drumming on his horn without sounding it. “Where was she killed?”

“I’m getting to it. First thing this morning I go back to her apartment. She’s still not home. I tell the super a big fat lie about how I’m her brother, and my sister has this heart condition, and I’m afraid she’s sick in her apartment. So he lets me in. No Doris. I look around.

“There’s a matched set of luggage in the clothes closet,” said Baer. “I say to myself, ‘Chuck, if she’s taken a powder, it was on the fly.’ She left with no more than a change of undies, nightgown, cold cream—things she could stuff in a large handbag.”

Baer paused to light a panatela. Corrigan waited, wanting to brain him.

“The closet is neat, except for this one dress that’s been thrown across the things hanging up. I figure she’d changed dresses in a hurry, at the closet door. And I’m practically standing on something that must have fallen when she made the change.”

“A note?”

Baer looked at him. “How’d you know that?”

“First time I saw Doris Farlow she was in the vestibule of her building, cramming a note down the bosom of her dress. What was the message?”

“Read it for yourself.”

Corrigan’s hand leaped to the note. He read it twice. “Hand-printed … written in ball-point … the same as that fake suicide note in Fleischel’s room.”

“Same hotel, too.” Baer gave his cigar ash a connoisseur’s inspection. “A real smarty. Figured we’d never think he’d go back to that hotel.”

“I get the feeling,” Corrigan said bleakly, “that she followed the instructions in the note.”

“You’re feeling fine. I went to the Amernational. Yep, they had a Dolly Fowler registered. Room on the sixth floor. I got lost in the lobby crowd, then ambled up to six.

“Her door was unlocked. I sneaked a look inside. Almost wish I hadn’t.”

“How the hell did she die?” Corrigan snarled.

“On her bed. Nightgown up to her belly button. Face bloated like a blowfish. Tongue hanging. He’d strangled her. She probably never got to let out a peep. She was a whore, but that gave the sonofabitch no call to murder her.”

Corrigan spotted a break in traffic. He gave the Interceptor engine a boot in the accelerator. The car shot from the curb.

“I reported the killing,” Baer said. “Then asked for you, and Centre Street gave me the address of the field you were plowing. I charged right over. So you keep headquarters off my neck for leaving the scene, or next time I let you do it the hard way.”

Corrigan and Baer took care of lunch with inhaled sandwiches. Lab and morgue had confirmed that powerful male hands had strangled Doris Farlow about 5:00 A.M. Fingernail scrapings had yielded no crumbs of skin, so the man’s face was probably unmarked. The Fleischel-Ingram suicide note and the instructions to Doris had been penned by the same ball-point—same ink, same microscopic imperfection in the tiny ball-bearing tip.

It didn’t take Einstein to figure. Fleischel had been killed for the microfilm, and Doris, because she knew the identity of the killer.

He must have felt something through the Farlow killing, Corrigan thought as he and Baer rode a headquarters elevator up. Her absolute trust testified to that. She had obeyed her man blindly, opened the hotel-room door to him, invited him into her bed. Not knowing until the squeeze of his hands that the man in her arms, however much he valued her sexual prowess, valued his own safety more. He could not have been happy about it, though.

They got off the elevator and headed for Corrigan’s office.

If he had entered the dreary cubicle blindfolded, Corrigan would have known that Detective Second Grade Meisenheimer was there waiting for him. The meerschaum reek was a dead giveaway.

“Hi, Captain,” the bushy-haired detective said. “I was going to put it in a report, but they told me downstairs you were in the building.”

“Kermit Shulder jump a fence?”

“Of sorts,” Meisenheimer said conservatively.

Corrigan went behind his desk, but he did not sit down. There was that old “debbil” tickling behind his lost eye. The busy day was going to get busier.

“Our mark went way downtown this morning,” Meisenheimer was saying, “to the office of the Novotny Export-Import Company. Not far from Wall Street.

“Shulder stayed in there—” Meisenheimer consulted a notebook “—forty-three mintues. He came out looking like a tomcat in Fulton Fish Market. He caught a cab and took off uptown.”

“Reighard teamed with you today?”

The detective nodded. “He stuck with Shulder, I nosed around the neighborhood. The import-export outfit is owned by a bird named Gregor Novotny. He’s got a small office—no assistants, one secretary. Keeps to himself.” Meisenheimer curled a shaggy brow. “And his name is on file.”

Corrigan slapped his palm on the desktop. This time he sat down. “Tell me more, you Saint Bernard!”

“He got on the docket two years, one month, and ten days ago. The charge was assault. One of those commie-front organizations—Committee for Chinese Understanding or some such crap—was holding a convention at a midtown hotel. A hundred or so delegates had come in from various parts of the country. It was the usual—workshops, reports, planning, with the last-night banquet giving the speakers a chance to gas the joint.

“The trouble occurred during the oratory. A vet organization was also in convention, and some of the boys got boiled and decided to kibitz the commie crowd. They barged into the banquet room, somebody said something, somebody pushed somebody, and hell broke loose. The outnumbered vets got clobbered, but they put up a whale of a fight.

“Gregor Novotny was one who didn’t get away when the riot squad moved in. He’d unlaced some guy’s scalp with a champagne bottle. Found guilty as charged. Fined, suspended sentence.”

Meisenheimer put the notebook back in his pocket.

“Needless to say,” Chuck Baer said, “Gregor Novotny wasn’t one of the vets.”

“Are you kidding, Chuck?”

“Yes,” said Chuck.

Corrigan’s grin was wolfish. “Let’s go, Chuck,” he said.

Gregor Novotny’s secretary was a collection of old sticks in a carefully pressed and mended black dress.

“Mr. Novotny went out to mail a package,” she told Corrigan. “If you’d like to wait, I’m sure he’ll be right back.”

“We’d like to wait,” Corrigan said. He and Baer seated themselves on a rickety office sofa.

Corrigan’s training made him automatically study the woman. Lusterless eyes; skin like Pablum; a faint mustache over the upper lip; nails short-clipped, without polish; a shine on the cracked leather of her low-heeled shoes. Just the kind to devote a lifetime of unthanked service to two-bit employers. Another stick of office furniture. With a probable yen to talk. Who would talk to her?

“Have you been with Mr. Novotny long?”

“No, sir.” She sat eagerly at her desk. She seemed to have little to do.

“Do you know Mr. Shulder very well?”

“Shulder?”

“The man who was in here earlier today.”

“Oh. That was Mr. Vonnerman.”

“Wasn’t there a man in before Mr. Vonnerman?”

“Until you came, no one but Mr. Novotny, Mr. Vonnerman, and myself has been in or out of this office.” She seemed to perk up at the friendly voice. But there was a snap in her tone.

“My mistake,” Corrigan said. It had been Kermit Shulder’s mistake. Vonnerman. An alias. A code name.

“What does Mr. Vonnerman buy or sell?” Corrigan sounded as if he were making talk to pass the time.

“I can’t say.” She cut a prim figure, back straight, hands folded old-maidishly in her lap. “Mr. Novotny’s customers don’t discuss their business with me. Or before me. They always go into the private office. And I really shouldn’t be discussing them with you, sir.”

“Oh, I’m just making conversation,” Corrigan said. “Sorry if it’s against the office rules.”

“I didn’t mean that—”

“I don’t want to get you into trouble with your boss.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble,” she said quickly.

Corrigan nodded and smiled. He let a little time pass. Finally he crossed his legs. “Import-export. What does Mr. Novotny deal in?”

“Don’t you know, sir? I thought—”

“Oh, we’re in the market for film.”

“Film? Oh, yes,” she said brightly, “Mr. Novotny buys film, all right. His business with Mr. Vonnerman this morning was about film.”

Corrigan felt Baer stiffen beside him. Add a splash of color: she listens at doors. They had something here, all right.

“I’m rather surprised Mr. Novotny went to the post office himself,” Corrigan said. “Don’t you do things like that?” He gave her his warmest smile. “You look awfully efficient to me.”

“I usually do.” She responded like a flower to the sun. “I thought it was funny this morning, him going himself to mail a package not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes.” But then she said suddenly, “You’re pumping me. What are you, a policeman?”

“As a matter of fact,” Corrigan said, “that’s just what I am.” She was shrewder than she looked. He showed her his wallet ID. “Would you mind answering some questions?”

“Is Mr. Novotny in trouble?” she asked in a conspiratorial voice. Her tired eyes had come to life.

“Could be. Any idea where the package was going?”

“The Antron Novelty Company—something like that; I didn’t get a good look at the mailing label. Mr. Novotny made it out himself. Some post-office box, I didn’t see where.”

“Is that one of Novotny’s regular accounts?”

“No, sir, it’s not in the file.” She was beginning to act nervous. “Is he a criminal? I think I’d better leave—” She started to rise.

Corrigan shook his head and she remained in a crouch.

“I’m only employed here. I’ve got nothing to do with—”

“You may leave after Novotny comes in,” Corrigan said, “not before. I don’t want him running into you outside the office.”

Her bony buttocks settled back on the chair. “I never have luck with my jobs,” she complained. “The good jobs all go to the ones with pretty faces …”

Corrigan had no time to reflect On her lot. The office door opened, and a man stepped in. He fitted the description Meisenheimer had given during the ride from Centre Street. Short, heavy, compact, powerful. A half-Mongolian head capped with coarse black hair.

Novotny did not notice them at first But the sight of him electrified Chuck Baer. Corrigan sensed his reaction and glanced quickly at him. His huge hands were flexing, and his eyes were spitting sparks.

Novotny was frowning at his secretary. “What’s the matter with you?” He had a heavy voice, almost a basso profundo.

“I’m not in the habit of working for people in trouble with the police, Mr. Novotny—”

She ceased instantly to exist as far as Novotny was concerned. He whipped around with the agility of a dancer.

Corrigan and Baer were on their feet. Novotny’s broad face flattened with shock. His slanted eyes flashed to the door, but Baer was halfway there.

The secretary beat both of them to it. She was out like a weasel. Smart of her, Corrigan thought. Then he forgot her.

“Chuck,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“Take it easy!” Baer seemed to have grown three inches. “I’ll take it easy, Tim. I’ll also take it slow.”

He maneuvered until he was between the man and the door, moving on the balls of his feet. He never took his eyes off the Mongoloid face. The man was retreating cautiously, with little side eye-jerks, as if seeking an escape route he knew was not there.

“Chuck,” Corrigan said again. He had his ID out. “I’m a police officer. Are you Gregor Novotny?”

“Out of my way, Tim,” Chuck Baer said. “Get the hell out of my way.” He was in a crouch now.

Corrigan stood there, between them. He was very much disturbed. Only once before had he seen that expression on Baer’s face, although they had gone through many tight spots together against tough opponents and odds. Baer usually went into action with a sort of majesty, like a force of nature; there was nothing personal in his violence. But that time in the Korean hills …

They had been on an intelligence mission in the middle of one of the confusing battles Korea had been famous for, when lines were fluid and hills changed hands a dozen times a day. A tide of battle had washed them into enemy-held terrain, and they had had to hole up for a few hours. When darkness fell they tried to slip back behind their own lines.

They had come upon the scene suddenly. Behind some tall rocks, in a clearing before a cave, four Chinese soldiers were huddled round a carefully screened fire. There was a smell of roasting flesh in the air. At first they had thought the Chinese soldiers were cooking their dinner. But then one of them shifted, and Corrigan and Baer saw that what they were cooking was an American GI. They had him trussed on a spit, like a pig, and were slowly turning him. One of them, speaking a singsong English, was trying to get information out of the GI about his platoon’s strength and position. Whether the Chinese were drunk or drugged Corrigan and Baer never found out. What they did see was that the GI was beyond speech, clearly dying.

They had shot two of the Chinese in the back with their 45’s, and Corrigan had shot a third. But Baer had paid no attention to the third. He launched himself at the fourth, the one who had been turning the spit.

The man went down under Baer’s weight, making a squealing sound. Then Baer was on one knee and the Chinese was over it, face up, Baer’s left forearm across the man’s throat, his right arm pinning the man’s thighs. The big American had exerted pressure very slowly, while the Chinese gargled. Corrigan, who had run over to the GI, trampling on the fire, seeing that the boy was dead, turned to see if Chuck Baer needed help and was just in time to catch the expression on Baer’s face. It was stone cold, with no expression at all—death personified. Only when the Chinese soldier’s spine snapped with a crack like a branch breaking under a layer of snow did the expression humanize and Baer become recognizable. He had dropped the body and emptied his clip into the head, and then they had taken the boy’s dog tags and buried him under some rocks, and that had been the end of that. It had all been done in silence. They had never spoken of it afterward.

Baer had the same death look on his face now.

Corrigan stepped over to Baer and smacked him with all his strength across the cheek. The big man shook himself, and slowly straightened up.

“I’m all right, Tim,” he said. But his eyes were still on Novotny.

The man was backed against the wall. He was still not sure of Baer. He was swallowing nervously.

“What’s the beef, Chuck?” Corrigan asked, as if he did not know.

“This is the sonofabitch who broke into my office and went to work on my skull,” Baer said.

“You’re sure, Chuck?”

“I’m sure.”

“If this man thinks I did something to him, I will be glad to answer him in court,” Novotny said. He had a marked Russian accent, like Gromyko.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Corrigan said. “Reduce it all to a B and E, and let it go at that.”

“Reduce it all?” Novotny’s heavy brows raised. He still had his eyes on Baer. “What else is there? This man’s charges … what other reason would you have for coming here?”

Corrigan slid over and hauled the man from the wall and whirled him around and frisked him.

“I don’t carry weapons, if that is what you are looking for.”

“So you mailed the microfilm,” Corrigan said. Novotny blinked.

“Microfilm?” he said. “I do not know what you are talking about, Officer.”

Corrigan stood very close to him, belly to belly. “There’s nothing safer than the U.S. mails, is there, Novotny?”

“I do not know what—”

“Most private means of communication in the world. Our world, I mean, not yours.”

The man’s lips were dry. He licked them. “Advise me of the charge, if any. Then I shall seek counsel.”

“I’ll bet you will.” Corrigan did not attempt to put on an act. The man was nervous, but he felt himself in a strong position. With the microfilm in some postbox, what did he have to fear?

“Otherwise,” the importer said, “you are trespassing, Officer. Charge me, or get out of my office.”

What he had to fear was Chuck Baer. Corrigan weighed the elements. The man was keeping an eye on Chuck over Corrigan’s shoulder. Chuck just stood there quietly. Corrigan did not have to turn around to know what was going on in the private detective’s face. What was going on was worse than something—it was nothing, that deadly nothing. Corrigan made up his mind.

“Shall I get out, Mr. Novotny,” he said, “and leave you alone with Mr. Baer? Chuck,” he said over his shoulder, “how long do you think you’ll need?”

“Facing him with my eyes open?” Baer said. “About thirty seconds. But I’d like ten minutes.”

Novotny blinked again. He looked from Corrigan’s eye-patch to Baer’s dead face and back again. And again he licked his lips, but this time thoroughly. “There are laws to protect—”

“If I walk out of here,” said Corrigan, “the law walks out with me. Then I’ll walk back in and give the protection of American law to what’s left.”

“You would not!”

Corrigan turned and walked to the door. He had his hand on the knob when Novotny said quickly, “Wait.”

Corrigan turned around. “Yes?”

Novotny was looking not at him but at Baer. “You must realize my position,” he said. “There are men on my side with faces as dead as your friend’s. It is—how do you say it?—it is for me six of one and half a dozen of the other. I do not care for pain. I am a small piece of the apparatus.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Novotny?”

“It depends on how much you know. I shall make up my mind after that.”

There was a finality in his bass voice that carried conviction. All spies came to the same dilemma in the end—a choice of evils.

Corrigan deliberately laughed. “We know all of it, Novotny. Fleischel. The microfilm. The arrangements to sell the film. Kermit Shulder.”

“No one of that name ever came to this office.”

“Naturally not. No editor high on the staff of a magazine like World Events would allow himself to be caught dead in this dump. But a man named Vonnerman would.”

That got through.

Corrigan permitted Novotny to stumble to the sofa. The man’s face toppled into his palms.

Baer just stood there, waiting. Corrigan came back and stood over the man.

Novotny dropped his hands. “How much can I salvage?”

“No deals,” Corrigan said.

“Then why should I cooperate?”

Corrigan jerked his thumb in a backward gesture. “For the reason standing there.”

“He would kill me?”

“Worse. He would let you live. If you can call it living.”

The agent cracked his knuckles. “The film. Damn the film. Such a detail …”

“Two people died because of it.”

“But I did not kill anyone! My role in getting possession of the film did not involve killing—”

Corrigan looked down at him. He was inclined to believe the denial. Neither the Soviet nor the United States people in charge wanted a stink about the film. The logical move was for Novotny, the Soviet agent, to buy the film back so that it could be returned to Moscow, examined, and destroyed. The men in the Kremlin would double or triple the World Events offer without a second thought. It was not like the old days of Stalin and Beria, when killing was the first resort rather than the last.

“How much did you pay for the film?” Corrigan asked the spy.

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Whom did you pay it to?”

“I do not know,” Novotny said.

“You can do better than that. You will do better than that if I walk out of here and leave you with this man.”

Novotny’s jaws began a little dance. “What do you expect of me?” he shouted. “I cannot tell you what I do not know! I received instructions by telephone!”

“From whom?” Corrigan persisted.

“I have no names, I tell you! I tried to discover—” Novotny suddenly stopped.

“Who was keeping tabs on you?” Corrigan shrugged. “The spy watching the spy. It’s wonderful how your people trust one another.” His eye raked Novotny. “All right, you received instructions and the money, and you made delivery.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Three thirty this morning.”

“Where?”

“In Queens, on a back street. My instructions were to park. A man would get into the rear seat of my car. He would hand me the film, and I would pass the money back to him. That is exactly how it went.”

“The man who got in—whom you gave the money to, who handed you the film. Who was he?”

“I do not know.”

“What did he look like?”

“I do not know. My instructions were to keep my lights off and to park where there were no street lamps. And to keep my eyes straight ahead. He approached from the rear, and he left the same way.”

“How about his voice?”

“He did not speak.”

“You’re not arousing my sympathy, Novotny. All I get from you is a lot of ignorance.”

“How can I help it?” the spy cried. “That is what happened.”

“All right. You got the microfilm, you made it up into a small package this morning, you addressed it to the Antron Novelty Company, at a post-office box. What’s the box number, at what post office?”

The dance stopped in Novotny’s jaws. For the first time he looked directly up into Corrigan’s face. He was no longer sending side-glances-at Chuck Baer.

Something had happened. What?

“Yes, Antron,” Novotny said. “But it was not the film that I sent to Antron, officer. It was a Czech-made transistor radio, a revolutionary small design. I was going out for coffee and I dropped the package off at the post office. The film was passed along another way.”

“What other way?” Corrigan demanded.

“I think I shall not tell you any more,” Novotny said. He was now staring at the opposite wall of his office. In a singsong voice he said, “Any act of brutality will be reported to all metropolitan news media. I am a citizen of the United States. I demand immediate access to my attorney.”

“All right, Tim,” Chuck Baer said. “Give me my ten minutes.”

“You may kill me or cripple me,” Novotny said. “I shall say no more.”

“He means it, Chuck,” Corrigan said in low tones to Baer. They were on the opposite side of the office. Novotny was still sitting quietly on the sofa, but staring at the floor now.

“Tim, if you leave this guy to me—”

“No, Chuck. Something went wrong. I pulled a boner, he knows it, and the Iron Maiden couldn’t make him talk now. Now he’d rather face you than his own people, which means he thinks the film will get out after all.”

“I still owe him for my headache,” Baer said, staring across the room. “And what he did to my office.”

“And you’re temporarily CIA, Chuck. I wouldn’t have let you work him over, anyway. It was a bluff, and it’s failed.” Corrigan pulled his lower lip. “Look. You take Novotny in tow, and pick up Shulder. Turn them both over to Neil Ramey. And no rough stuff, Chuck.”

“What are you going to do, Tim?”

“I have a clue to chase down.”

He remained in the office for a few minutes after Baer left with the Red agent. What had the tip-off to Novotny been? Previous mention of the mails had not soured it—so the film had been mailed. But where? It could even have been passed to another agent for mailing in another city.

The only thing Corrigan could put his finger on was his mention of the Antron Novelty Company. Novotny’s secretary had been unsure of the name—she had qualified the Antron with “or something like that.” The instant he had said “Antron” to Novotny the man had clammed up. That was what blew it. It was not Antron.

The CIA would have to go to work on that. He reached over to the phone and called Neil Ramey.

12

“A post-office box?” Carmalita Sorolla echoed Corrigan’s question with a laugh. “Why on earth would you want to search my apartment for a key to a post-office box, Captain? And why should I let you?”

Corrigan shut her apartment door and leaned against it. “As a patriotic gesture from one liberty lover to another, Miss Sorolla.”

“Of course you can’t prowl through my apartment. I have an appointment, Captain. I was just going out.” She tried to reach around Corrigan to the door. “Please.”

He remained there.

“Captain, I know some important people—”

“The other way,” Corrigan said, “is for me to stay here watching the apartment while I have a search warrant sent over. Which will it be, Miss Sorolla?”

She tossed her blue-black mane. “Just what is it you’re after? Who do you think I am?”

“I think you’re a Red agent,” Corrigan said.

She laughed. But a certain pallor crept under her olive skin. “A spy, Captain? Bomb in hand?”

“More the Mata Hari type,” Corrigan said.

“I believe you’re serious.”

“I don’t joke about communists. Or spies.”

“I’m a refugee—”

“I know. Poor refugee gal trying to make a buck translating Spanish into English and back again. It’s as good a cover as any, I suppose. But it’s not a cover anymore.”

“I don’t have to listen to this nonsense.” She started for the bedroom. But Corrigan was before her. She gave him the freeze. “You’re either drunk or insane. Please get out of my way.”

“I’m giving you a chance to explain your mistakes.”

“Mistakes?”

“You made a lot of them, muchacha.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The boat ride from Cuba, for instance,” Corrigan said.

“I escaped just as I told you.”

“At the height of the crackdown there? I don’t buy it, Carmalita. At that time a small boat wouldn’t have got out of sight of land unless the top dogs in Havana wanted it to get out. Because it had a Red agent aboard.”

“That’s not much to build a case on, Captain,” she said contemptuously. She sat down and folded her hands.

“I’ve got plenty. This apartment comes high. Unless you brought the smesh out of Cuba. You certainly don’t make this kind of money translating. And there were no men before Loren Donahue to foot the bills.”

She said nothing. But her fingers were going to work.

“Dough like this,” Corrigan said, “starts out from Moscow or Peking. With your looks and talent, your people set you up where you’d do the most good.”

“You’re boring me, Captain.” She folded her arms; it kept her hands under control.

“As much as Loren Donahue? You didn’t cultivate the publisher of World Events for love or his money. You moved in on Donahue just in time to step on an embarrassing disclosure of Russian manned space failures.”

“Aren’t you forgetting that I knew Loren Donahue before Fleischel reached this side of the Atlantic?”

“They’d tumbled to Fleischel’s game and were hot after him on the other side of the water. In case he made it across, you were to bottle him up here. So you were planted early. Your people knew that the CIA wouldn’t take a direct hand in disclosing the space failures. Fleischel would obviously have to turn to the news media. World Events was the logical choice; they’d pay big, and Fleischel was after money. If he went somewhere else, the grapevine would pick it up and the publisher of World Events would be your listening post.”

Her long lashes came down. Corrigan reached over and tilted her face up, not gently.

“One other thing about Donahue. Weren’t you a little quick giving him the gate? That act this morning. A phony from the word go. You didn’t seem to mind my catching you here with Donahue in your bathroom. You were pretty clumsy about that, Carmalita. You had no reason to dump him so abruptly unless you’d picked his so-called brains and figured he was no more use to you on your assignment. You were looking for the first chance to slam the door in his face, and you took it.”

She reached over to the table for a cigarette. But she did not light it.

“Your biggest mistake was trying to cover all bets,” Corrigan said. “You visualized everybody else failing, but not you. You added up all the possible mistakes, and you knew that the microfilm might end up in the offices of World Events, anyway. You should have counted on Kermit Shulder as a backup man to destroy or arrange an accident for the film. But you wouldn’t risk it. Not you. You blew yourself wide open.”

Her eyes had grown sooty. “And how did I do that, pray? As long as you’re fantasizing.”

“By brainwashing that dope Donahue into ‘deciding’ against publishing the space-flight-failure story.”

She saw the cigarette in her fingers and began rolling it back and forth. It crumbled and tobacco flakes fell all over her lap.

“I don’t blame you for taking it to heart,” Corrigan said. “In this game you don’t get a second chance. You didn’t play it badly, Carmalita, you just got overanxious. Now the roof’s going to fall in on you.”

“I ran into the wrong opposition.” Her voice was tired.

“Well, gosh, thanks.” Corrigan’s eye went over her. “It’s a hell of a waste.”

He went over to the phone. He kept his eye on her as he dialed.

“You know what you’re doing to me, don’t you?” she asked in a low voice.

“I sure do, baby. Hello—Chuck? I’ve got another one for the CIA … No, I’m through cleaning up your side of the street. I’ve still got a double murder stuck in my craw, remember?”

A low sun was painting the battlements of Brandywine pink.

Ahead of Corrigan, beyond the sweep of the front lawn, a black town car had pulled to a stop in front of the castle. A man—he appeared to be Loren Donahue—had just gone inside. Reo Smith was walking back around the car. He spotted the approaching Ford and stopped to wait.

Corrigan drove up and got out. The chauffeur stolled over. “Hey, Tim. How goes it?”

“Hello, Smitty. How many of them are here?”

“The Donahues? The whole family for a change. They’re having cocktails on the back terrace.” Smith pointed. “A walkway over there takes you around, through the flower gardens.”

Corrigan looked about. “That man-killer in the neighborhood?”

Smith laughed. “I keep him tied up except when business calls. But if you’re nervous, I’ll blaze the trail for the great white hunter.”

“Go to hell,” Corrigan said pleasantly. He had dreamed about the dog the previous night.

The Donahues—the publisher, his wife, Vicky, and Jason—were sprawled about the terrace table drinking with both hands.

“Happy family,” Corrigan remarked.

Smith grinned. “They don’t make much music, that’s a fact.”

Loren Donahue rose, cautiously. Jason reached for a fresh drink. Felicia Donahue noted Corrigan’s arrival without a flicker of recognition. Only Vicky brightened. “Hi, you-all! Have a drinkee. And this time don’t palm me off on that ugly friend of yours. He stayed away most of the night.”

“Victorina!” her father blatted.

She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve got a strait-laced pappy, Corrigan. I’ll take you later to a joint where they play strip poker.”

“That’s enough, Vicky,” Mrs. Donahue said. It was hard for Corrigan to tell in which pair of clashing eyes there was more violence.

“I’m looking for a strait-laced publisher who’d like to do something for his country,” Corrigan said, “by telling the world about the other side’s space flops.”

Donahue sank back in his chair. His wife reared from hers. “You’ve located the microfilm?” she exclaimed.

“The CIA will probably locate it. The brass won’t request its use, but I know they’d like to see the exposé carried out as originally planned, with the government not involved.”

“I … don’t know,” Loren Donahue said.

But his wife said, “When they get the film, Captain, we’ll be glad to look it over at World Events.”

“Good. Meanwhile, the CIA is scraping the facts together on three people who look very Red. A man named Gregor Novotny, Kermit Shulder, and Carmalita Sorolla.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Jason. “The old man’s chick herself. There’s no sucker like an old sucker.”

Vicky was watching her father with a wicked smile.

Donahue shrank in his beautifully wrought terrace chair until he looked like a hunchback. “Shulder?”

Felicia Donahue gave her husband a look that silenced him. “Are you sure, Captain? Kermit Shulder? It will take us a while to digest this. Did any of the three kill Heinrich Fleischel?”

“No,” Corrigan said. “That’s obvious on the face of it. Killing Fleischel was a complication they would have avoided. All they wanted was the film. Once they got hold of it and sent it on its way to the Soviet Union what harm could Fleischel do? He was no threat without the film, and in time Immigration would have got around to deporting him.”

“Then you don’t know who killed Fleischel?”

“I do,” Corrigan said, “now. Doris Farlow knew, too. The killer of Fleischel shared his secret with her. But when Fleischel’s death wasn’t accepted as suicide—when it was pegged as, murder—this man knew that Doris, a weak sister, could nail him. So he strangled her.”

Corrigan had even Jason’s attention now.

“This man’s motivation was pretty simple. He wanted the microfilm. He went to the Amernational Hotel and killed Heinrich Fleischel to get it. Afterward he arranged for Doris to meet him at the same hotel. It gave him the chance to get his hands around her throat.”

Felicia Donahue’s tone was as metallic as her face. “Only Loren and I knew that Heinrich Fleischel was going to the Amernational, Captain. We saw Fleischel in Newark and made the arrangements.”

“And you discussed the entire project later?”

“Of course.”

“On the way home? In the car?”

Felicia was the first to understand. Her glance went to Reo Smith.

“That’s right,” Corrigan said. “The family chauffeur, invisible in the front seat, a piece of the machinery.”

Smith thumbed back his peaked cap. “I don’t think that’s funny, Tim.”

“Neither do I, Smitty,” Corrigan said.

The Donahue family were gaping at their chauffeur.

“I knew you’d driven them over there, Smitty. So you had to be taking in every word they said. You saw the chance of your lifetime. If the film was worth a hundred grand to World Events, it would be worth twice that to the Reds. Where would you ever put your mitts on a pile like that?”

Smith took a step backward. “This is a hell of a note, Tim. Just because I was driving—what kind of evidence is that?”

“Not much, Reo. But now that we know where to look, we’ll get the evidence. A fingerprint of yours in the hotel rooms—a few grains of Doris Farlow’s face powder on your shirt collar, or the sleeve of one of your coats …”

Smith shouted, “You got nothing—nothing!”

“More than you want to think about,” Corrigan said. “Only you and Mr. and Mrs. Donahue knew Fleischel was going to the Amernational. The Donahues don’t need money, Smitty. They don’t have to kill for two hundred thousand dollars. They’ve got millions. That leaves you.”

“Somebody else found out—maybe the one who was prowling around here and fired the shotgun at me—”

“There was no prowler. With Fleischel murdered, you had to have time to collect your two hundred grand and disappear. As an ex-cop, you knew the value of red herrings. It always takes time to check them out. Your shotgun prowler was a red herring, Smitty, for my benefit. You fired that shotgun yourself.”

“How’d you dream that up?” The chauffeur’s voice had turned into a snarl.

“Lancelot told me,” Corrigan said. “When I got out there, that watchdog raised a real ruckus. But he hadn’t let out a peep before, when you claimed a man was skulking around the grounds. That tells me no one else was out there, Smitty, just you, in charge of him.”

“Tim …” Smith’s face was slick with a greenish sweat. “I don’t like to hear you talking like this—”

“You did too much talking—on paper,” Corrigan said inexorably. “That note to Doris instructing her to duck and register at the Amernational. In it you used the words tail and collar. A few laymen might use tail, but hardly anyone except a man with police training would automatically use the word collar. So maybe we’ll even find a ballpoint pen in your pocket, Smitty, that the lab will be able to match to the writing in the notes.”

Smith became a blur.

“Hold it!” Corrigan yelled.

Smith’s legs churned across the lawn. He was headed for the trees dead ahead.

Corrigan felt his feet digging into the soft turf. He heard the scramble of the Donahues behind him fleeing into the mansion for safety.

Corrigan had his .38 out. “Smitty!” he shouted. “I won’t warn you again!”

Smith twisted his head, not breaking stride. Then Corrigan saw the gun in his hand.

The gun spat an ugly fire into the calm day just as Corrigan hit the grass and rolled. He landed on his feet. Smith was zigzagging toward the trees.

Corrigan took aim, squeezed. The gun jarred his palm.

He saw the slug buckle the fleeing man’s left leg, and Smith tumble like an insect with a limb removed. The gun dropped as he grabbed his thigh with both hands. One, two, three wobbling steps, and Smith pitched to the ground. He scrabbled for handfuls of grass, trying to haul himself toward the trees.

Corrigan stopped beside the struggling man.

“Smitty,” he said quietly. “Don’t.”

The man’s face flopped to the grass. He sucked breaths. Finally he heaved himself over on his back. He looked more than ever like an incapacitated bug.

“Tim. I had to have her, Tim.”

“Easy, Smitty.” Corrigan was down on one knee, examining the gunshot wound. It was a bad one. He stripped off his belt and made a tourniquet around the heavily bleeding thigh.

“I think I’m going to pass out … What do you know, I’m still here … I met her through Jason, Tim. That punk. Jason’s old man sent me around there to pick junior up that first time, and when I got a look at her … I’d never had a broad like that, Tim … The Reds promised me two hundred G’s for the microfilm. All that dough, and Doris Farlow, too. That’s why she went for me, Tim. I didn’t kid myself … it was the two hundred grand … So I told her I’d get it, and she said I didn’t have the guts, so I had to prove it to her … I had to kill her, Tim, afterward. I’d got in too deep. She’d have opened up at the first tickle, like an oyster …”

Corrigan wiped his hands off on the grass. It left pretty red streaks. That’s right, he thought, you had to kill her. Women did you in all along the line, Smitty. First that girl in the doorway setting you up for the muggers. Then Doris. He wondered how much the plate in Smith’s skull had to do with everything that had turned him from a good cop into a two-times killer. And where the hell were the Donahues? He hoped one of them had had the sense to get on the phone.

“Was Kermit Shulder your contact to get rid of the film?” he asked the glassy-eyed man on the grass.

“That’s right. Only Shulder didn’t know who he was dealing with. I knew the gossip around the office. I’d figured him for a commie stooge. First time I called him I asked if he knew any parties who’d be interested in the film. He played it cute, gave me a number to call back. It was chicken soup from there. They made the arrangements, delivered the dough—it’s in a package addressed to me at General Delivery, Alloway, New Jersey …”

Smith’s mouth slackened and his eyes filmed over. Corrigan said, “Reo.”

The eyes made partial focus. A hand groped up and fumbled at the spot where his skull was patched.

“Tim … Tim, a girl’s in there yelling she’s being raped … They did something to my head … Tim?”

“Right here, Smitty.”

“Rape a girl, slug a cop …”

“Relax,” Corrigan said gently. “Don’t think about it.”

The eyes rolled over. Smith passed out.

Corrigan got up on his two feet and he turned around to go to the mansion and put in the call that would wrap up the whole rotten mess.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1966 by Ellery Queen

Copyright renewed by Ellery Queen

Cover design by Kat Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1995-8

This 2015 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Table of Contents

- Cover Page
- Title Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- Copyright Page