“You mean the affair with that redhead? It started-“

  “No,” I said, “I mean this,” indicating the office with a sweep of my hand.

  “Since I couldn’t get anywhere with the detective agency,” she said. “Olaf, the janitor, is an electrician. He helped me rig things up. He got some old parts-“

  “Think you can trust him?”

  “With my life,” she said.

  I lit a cigarette and said, “How about the washroom? Is it open?”

  “I’ll have to give you my key,” she told me, opening her handbag. Then she hesitated a second and said, “I think it’s in another purse. But the lock’s mostly ornamental. Any key will work it. Or you can use the tip of a penknife.”

  I looked down into her handbag. “What’s the idea of the gun?”

  “For protection,” she said, closing the bag.

  “All right,” I told her, “pass it over. I’m your protection now. You’ll get in trouble with that gun.”

  She hesitated a moment while I held my hand out, then reluctantly took the gun from her purse and hesitated with it in her hand.

  “But suppose you’re not with me, and something should happen? Suppose he should find the wires and follow them in here and catch me?”

  “Keep with me all the time,” I told her.

  The business end of the gun waved around in a half-circle. “Want me to go with you now?” she asked.

  “Don’t be a sap,” I told her. “I’m going to the washroom. I’ll be right back.”

  “And if my husband comes in while you’re gone, I suppose I’m to tell him it’s not fair, that you’re seeing a man about a dog, and he mustn’t choke me until you get back.”

  I strode over to the door. “Keep your plaything until I come back,” I said. “When we go out, you either get rid of the gun, or get rid of me. You’re the one who’s paying the money, so you can take your choice.”

  I crossed the office to the door, opened it, and pushed the catch so I could open the door from the outside. I wondered what would happen if Harvey Pemberton should make up his mind to go to the washroom while I was in there, or should meet me in the corridor. I’d kill that chance by going to the floor below. I saw stairs to the right of the elevator, and went down.

  The men’s room was at the far end of the corridor. The first key on my ring did the trick.

  Five minutes later, when I got back to Mrs. Pemberton, I saw that she was nervous and upset.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did something happen?”

  She said in a nervous, strained voice, “I was just thinking of what would happen if my husband ran into you in the corridor.”

  I said, “Well, he didn’t.”

  “You shouldn’t take chances like that,” she told me.

  I grinned. “I didn’t. I ran down the stairs for a couple of flights and used the room on the fourth floor.”

  Her face showed relief. “All right,” I told her, “let’s go. We’ll pick up my baggage and then I’m going to take you home. Then, if you don’t mind, I’ll borrow your car. I have work to do.”

  “Have you any plan?” she asked.

  “I’m an opportunist.”

  “All right,” she said, “let’s go. We’d better run down the stairs and ring the elevator from the lower floor.”

  We started for the door. She clicked out the light.

  “Just a minute,” I told her. “You’re forgetting something.”

  “What?”

  “The gun.”

  “It’s all right. I thought it over. I decided you were right about it, so I ditched the gun.”

  “Where?”

  “In the desk drawer.”

  I switched the lights back on and went over to look.

  “The upper right-hand drawer,” she said, her voice showing amusement.

  I opened the drawer. The gun was there. I picked it up, started to put it in my pocket, then changed my mind and dropped it back in the drawer. “Come on,” I told her, closing the drawer and switching off the lights.

  We sneaked across the hall and down the flight of stairs to the lower floor. I rang for the elevator. Olaf brought the cage up and I took another look at him. He was a big raw-boned Swede with a bony nose, a drooping blond moustache, and dog eyes. His eyes never left Mrs. Pemberton all the way down to the ground floor.

  Mrs. Pemberton kept her head turned away from him, toward the side of the elevator shaft, watching the doors creep by. When we got to the ground floor, she turned and looked at him. It was some look. His eyes glowed back at her like a couple of coals. Olaf opened the door, I took Mrs. Pemberton’s arm and we crossed over to the parking station.

  “I’ll drive,” I told her. “I want to get accustomed to the car.”

  I drove down to the station, got my baggage and drove Mrs. Pemberton back out to the house. The butler carried my things up and showed me my room.

  After he left, I opened my suitcase. There were two guns in it. I selected one with a shiny leather shoulder holster. I put it on under my coat and knocked on the door of Mrs. Pemberton’s room.

  She opened the door and stood in the doorway. The light was behind her, throwing shadows of seductive curves through billowy, gossamer silk. I resolutely kept my eyes on her face. “I’m going out,” I told her. “Will you hear me when I come in?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll wait up.”

  “If I cough when I pass your door, it means I have good news for you. If I don’t cough, it means things aren’t going so well.”

  She nodded, stepped toward me so that her lithe body was very close to mine. She put her hand on my arm and said in that peculiar, throaty voice of hers, “Please be careful.”

  I nodded and turned away. My eyes hadn’t strayed once. Walking down the corridor and tiptoeing down the stairs, I reflected that I never had known a woman with that peculiar husky note in her voice who didn’t like to tease the animals.

  Forty-two fifteen Centre Street was a three-story frame apartment house, the lower floor given over to stores. A doorway from the street opened on a flight of stairs. I tried the door, and it was unlocked.

  I went back to sit in the car and think. It was queer the lawyer had never appeared in the picture except as a shadowy figure. No one knew his name. He was quoted freely, but he left it up to his client to do all the negotiating. Therefore, if the racket turned out to be successful, the client would be the one to collect the money. Then it would be up to her to pay the lawyer. That didn’t sound right to me. It was like adding two and two and getting two as the answer.

  I looked the block over. There was a little jewellery store in the first floor of the apartment house. It was closed up now, with a night light in the window, showing a few cheap wrist watches and some costume jewellery.

  I drove around the corner and parked the car. A catch-all drugstore was open. I went in, bought some adhesive tape, a small bottle of benzine, a package of cotton, a writing pad and a police whistle. “Got any cheap imitation pearls?” I asked the clerk.

  He had some strings at forty-nine cents. I took one of those. Then I went out to the car, cut the string of pearls and threw all but four of them away. I pulled a wad of cotton out of the box, put the four pearls in the cotton and stuffed the wad in my pocket. I popped the pasteboard off the back of the writing pad, cut two eyeholes in it and a place for my nose. I reinforced it with adhesive tape and left ends of adhesive tape on it so I could put it on at a moment’s notice. Then I climbed the stairs of the apartment house and located apartment 3A.

  There was a light inside the apartment. I could hear the sound of a radio, and gathered the door wasn’t very thick. I took a small multiple-tool holder from my pocket and fitted a gimlet into the handle. I put a little grease on the point of the gimlet, bent over and went to work.

  The best place to bore a hole in a panelled door is in the upper right-or left-hand corner of the lower panel. The wood is almost paper-thin there and doesn’t take much of a hole to give a complete view of a room. Detectives have used it from time immemorial, but it’s still a good trick. After the hole is bored, a little chewing gum keeps light from coming through the inside of the door and attracting the attention of a casual passer-by.

  Making certain the corridor was deserted, I dropped to one knee and peeked through the hole I’d made. The girl was redheaded, all right. She was listening to the radio and reading a newspaper.

  Watching through one hole to make certain that she didn’t move in case my gimlet made any noise, I bored two more holes. That gave me a chance to see all of the apartment there was. I put a thin coating of chewing gum over each of the holes, went downstairs and waited for a moment when the sidewalk was deserted and there were no cars in sight on the street. Then I took the police whistle from my pocket and blew three shrill blasts. By the time the windows in the apartments commenced to come up, I’d ducked into the doorway and started up the stairs.

  I held my pasteboard mask in my left hand. All I had to do was to raise it to my face, and the adhesive tape would clamp it into position. I backed up against the door of apartment 3A and knocked with my knuckles. When I heard steps coming toward the door, I slapped my left hand up to my face, putting the mask in position, and jerked the gun out of my shoulder holster. The redhead opened the door and I backed in, the gun menacing the corridor. Once inside of the door, I made a quick whirl, kicked the door shut and covered her with the gun.

  “Not a peep out of you,” I said.

  She’d put on a negligee and was holding it tightly about her throat. Her face was white.

  “All right, sister,” I told her, “get a load of this. If any copper comes wandering down the hallway, you go to the door to see what he wants. If he asks you if anyone’s in here or if you’ve seen anyone in the corridor, tell him no. The reason you’ll tell him no, is that I’m going to be standing just behind the door with this gun. They’re never going to take me alive. I’d just as soon go out fighting as to be led up thirteen steps and dropped through a hole in the floor. Get it?”

  She was white to the lips, but she nodded, her eyes large, round and dilated with fright.

  “I stuck up that jewellery store downstairs,” I told her, “and I’ve got some swag that’s worth money. Now, I want some wrapping paper and some string. I’m going to drop that swag in the first mailbox I come to and let Uncle Sam take the responsibility of the delivery. Get me?”

  She swallowed a couple of times and said, “Y-yes.”

  “And I’ll tell you something else: Don’t hold that filmy stuff so tight around you. I’m not going to bite you, but if a cop comes to the door and sees you all bundled up that way, he’ll figure out what’s happened.

  If there’s a knock, I want you to open the door a crack and have that thing pretty well open in front, when you do. Then you can pull it shut when you see there’s a man at the door and give a little squeal and say, ‘Oh, I thought it was Mamie!’ Do you get that?”

  “You’re asking a lot of me,” she said.

  I made motions with the business end of the gun. “You’ve got a nice figure,” I said. “It would be a shame to blow it in two. These are soft-nosed bullets. You’d have splinters from your spinal cord all mixed into your hip bone if I pulled this trigger. The cop in the doorway would get the next shot. Then I’d take a chance on the fire-escape.”

  She didn’t say anything and I jabbed at her with the gun. “Come on, how about the wrapping paper?”

  She opened a door into a little kitchenette, pulled out a drawer. There was brown paper and string in there. I said, “Get over there away from the window; stand over there in the corner.”

  I crossed over to the little card table. There was an ashtray there with four or five cigarette ends in it and some burnt matches. I noticed that a couple of the matches had been broken in two. I pushed the tray to one side, spread the paper out, and took the cotton from my pocket.

  When I opened the cotton, she saw the four big pearls nested in it and gave a little gasp. Standing eight or ten feet away as she was and seeing those pearls on the cotton, she felt she was looking at ready money.

  “That all you took?” she asked in a voice that had a can’t-we-be-friends note in it.

  “Is that all I took?” I asked, and laughed, a nasty, sarcastic laugh. “That jeweller,” I told her, “has been trying to get those four pearls for a client for more than two years. They’re perfectly matched pearls that came in from the South Seas, and, in case you want to know it, they didn’t pay any duty. I know what I’m after before I heist a joint.”

  I put the cotton around the pearls again, wrapped them in the paper, tied the paper with string and ostentatiously set my gun on the corner of the table while I took a fountain pen from my pocket to write an address on the package. I printed the first name which popped into my head, and a Los Angeles address. Then I reached in my pocket, took out my wallet and from it extracted a strip of postage stamps.

  “What-what are they worth?” she asked.

  “Singly,” I told her, “they aren’t worth over five thousand apiece, but the four of them taken together, with that perfect matching and lustre, are worth forty grand in any man’s dough.” I shot her a look to see if she thought there was anything phoney about my appraisal. She didn’t. Her eyes were commencing to narrow now as ideas raced through her head.

  “I suppose,” she told me, “you’ll peddle them to a fence and only get about a tenth of what they’re worth.”

  “Well, a tenth of forty grand buys a lot of hamburgers,” I told her.

  She moved over toward a small table, slid one hip up on that, and let the negligee slide carelessly open, apparently too much interested in the pearls to remember that she wasn’t clothed for the street. She had plenty to look at, that girl.

  “You make a working girl dizzy,” she said wistfully. “Think how hard I’d have to work to make four thousand dollars.”

  “Not with that shape.”

  Indignantly she pulled the robe around her. Then she leaned forward, let the silk slip from her fingers and slide right back along the smooth line of her leg.

  “I suppose it’s wicked of me,” she said, “but I can’t help thinking what an awful shame it is to sell anything as valuable as that for a fraction of what it’s worth. I should think you’d get yourself some good-looking female accomplice, someone who could really wear clothes. You could doll her up with some glad rags and show up in Santa Barbara or Hollywood, or perhaps in New Orleans. She could stay at a swell hotel, make friends, and finally confide to one of her gentlemen friends that she was temporarily embarrassed and wanted to leave some security with him and get a really good loan. Gosh, you know, there are lots of ways of playing a game like that.”

  I frowned contemplatively. “You’ve got something there, baby,” I told her. “But it would take a girl who could wear clothes; it’d take a baby who’d be able to knock ‘em dead and keep her head while she was doing it; it’d take a fast thinker, and it would take someone who’d be one hundred per cent loyal. Where are you going to find a moll like that?”

  She got up off the table, gave a little shrug with her shoulders, and the negligee slipped down to the floor. She turned slowly around as though she’d been modelling the peach-coloured underwear. “I can wear clothes,” she said.

  I let my eyes show suspicion. “Yeah,” I told her. “You sure got what it takes on that end, but how do I know you wouldn’t cross me to the bulls if anybody came along and offered a reward?”

  Her eyes were starry now. She came toward me. “I don’t double-cross people I like,” she said. “I liked you from the minute I saw you-something in your voice, something in the way you look. I don’t know what it is. When I fall, I fall fast and I fall hard. And I play the game all the way. You and I could go places together. I could put you up right here until the excitement’s over. Then we could go places and-“

  I said suspiciously, “You aren’t handing me a line?”

  “Handing you a line!” she said scornfully. “Do I look like the sort of girl who’d have to hand anyone a line? I’m not so dumb. I know I have a figure. But you don’t see me living in a swell apartment with some guy footing the bills, do you? I’m just a working girl, plugging along and trying to be on the up-and-up. I’m not saying that I like it. I’m not even saying that I’m not sick of it. But I am telling you that you and I could go places together. You could use me and I’d stick.”

  “Now, wait a minute, baby,” I temporised. “Let me get this package stamped and think this thing over a minute. You sure have got me going. Gripes! I’ve been in stir where I didn’t see a frail for months on end, and now you come along and dazzle me with a shape like that. Listen, baby, I-“

  I raised the stamps to my tongue, licked them and started to put them on the package. The wet mucilage touched my thumb and the stamps stuck. I tried to shake my thumb loose and the stamps fell to the floor, windmilling around as they dropped. I swooped after the stamps, and sensed motion over on the other side of the table.

  I straightened, to find myself staring into the business end of my gun, which she’d snatched up from the table.

  “Now then, sucker,” she said, “start reaching.”

  I stood, muscles tensed, hands slowly coming up. “Now, take it easy, baby. You wouldn’t shoot me.”

  “Don’t think I wouldn’t,” she told me. “I’d shoot you in a minute. I’d tell the cops you’d busted in here after your stick-up and I distracted your attention long enough to grab your gun; that you made a grab for me and I acted in self-defence.”

  “Now listen, baby,” I told her, keeping my hands up, “let’s be reasonable about this thing. I thought you and I were going away together. I’d show you London and Paris and-“

  She laughed scornfully and said, “What a sap I’d be to start travelling with a boob like you. A pair of pretty legs, and you forget all about your gun and leave it on the table while you chase postage stamps to the floor.”