“You going to call the cops?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Do I look dumb? I’m going to give you a chance to escape.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said, “I haven’t got the heart to see a nice-looking young man like you go to jail. I’m going to call the cops and tell them I saw you in the corridor. I’ll give you ten seconds start. That ten seconds will keep you from hanging around here, and calling the cops will put me in the clear in case anybody sees you.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said sarcastically. “You mean you’re going to grab off the gravy.”

  “Ideas don’t circulate through that dome of yours very fast, do they?” she asked.

  I made a lunge toward the paper parcel I’d wrapped up, but the gun snapped up to a level with my chest. Her eyes glittered. “Don’t crowd me, you fool!” she said. “Of all the dumbhead plays you’ve made, that’s the worst. I’ll do it, and don’t think I don’t know how to shoot a gun, because I do.”

  I backed slowly away.

  “There’s the door,” she said. “Get going.” She started toward the telephone and said, “I’m going to call the cops. You have ten seconds.”

  I spilled a lot of cuss words, to make the act look good, unlocked the door, jerked it open and jumped out into the corridor. I made pounding noises with my feet in the direction of the fire-escape and then tiptoed back. I heard a metallic click as she shot the bolt home in the door.

  After waiting a couple of minutes, I dropped to one knee and peeked through the hole in the door. She was over at the table, ripping the wrappings from the parcel. I straightened, and pounded with my knuckles on the door.

  “Police call,” I said in a deep gruff voice. “Open up.”

  Her voice sounded thick with sleep. “What is it?”

  “Police,” I said, and dropped again, to put an eye to the peer-hole in the door.

  She ran to a corner of the carpet, raised it, did something to the floor and then snatched up a kimono.

  I pounded with my knuckles again.

  “Coming,” she said drowsily.

  She twisted back the bolt, opened the door about the width of a newspaper and asked, “What do you want?”

  I stood aside so she couldn’t see me.

  “We’re looking for a man who robbed the jewellery store downstairs,” I growled in my throat. “We think he came up here.”

  “Well, he didn’t.”

  “Would you mind letting me in?”

  She hesitated a moment, then said, “Oh, very well, if you have to come in, I guess you have to. Just a minute. I’ll put something on... All right.”

  She pulled the door back. I pushed my way into the room and kicked the door shut. She looked at me with wide, terror-stricken eyes, then jumped back and said, “Listen, you can’t pull this. I’ll have the police here! I’ll-“

  I walked directly to the corner of the carpet. She flung herself at me. I pushed her off. I pulled back the corner of the carpet and saw nothing except floor. But I knew it was there and kept looking, pressing with my fingers. Suddenly I found it-a little cunningly joined section in the hardwood floor. I opened it. My package had been shoved in there, and down below it was a package of letters.

  Bending down so that my body concealed just what I was doing, I pulled out pearls and letters and stuffed them in my inside coat pocket.

  When I straightened, I found myself facing the gun.

  “I told you you couldn’t get away with this,” she warned. “I’ll claim you held up the jewellery store and then crashed the gate here. What’re you going to do about that?”

  “Nothing,” I told her, smiling. “I have everything I came for.”

  “I can kill you,” she said, “and the police would give me a vote of thanks.”

  “You could,” I told her, “but nice girls don’t go around killing men.”

  I saw her face contort in a spasm of emotion. “The hell they don’t!” she said, and pulled the trigger.

  The hammer clicked on an empty cylinder. She reinforced the index finger of her right hand with the index finger of her left. Her eyes were blazing. She clicked the empty cylinder six times and then threw the gun at me. I caught it by the barrel and side-stepped her rush. She tripped over a chair and fell on the couch.

  “Take it easy,” I told her.

  She raised her voice then and started to call me names. At the end of the first twenty seconds, I came to the conclusion I didn’t know any words she didn’t. I started for the door. She made a dash for the telephone and was yelling: “Police headquarters!” into the transmitter as I closed the door and drifted noiselessly down the corridor.

  In the hallway I pulled off the pasteboard mask, moistened a piece of cotton in the benzine and scrubbed off the bits of adhesive which had stuck to my face and forehead. I wadded the mask into a ball, walked around to my car and drove away.

  I heard the siren of a police radio car when I was three blocks away. The machine roared by me, doing a good sixty miles an hour.

  Walking down the corridor of the Pemberton home, I coughed as I passed Mrs. Pemberton’s door. I walked into my bedroom and waited. Nothing happened. I took out the letters and looked at them. They were plenty torrid. Some men like to put themselves on paper. Harvey Pemberton had indulged himself to the limit.

  I heard a scratching noise on my door, then it slowly opened. Mrs. Pemberton, walking as though she’d carefully rehearsed her entrance, came into the light of the room and pulled lacy things around her. “My husband hasn’t come in yet,” she said. “But he may come in any minute.”

  I looked her over. “Even supposing that I’m your brother,” I said, “don’t you think he’d like it a lot better if you had on something a little more tangible?”

  She said, “I wear what I want. After all, you’re my brother.”

  “Well, go put on a bathrobe over that,” I told her, “so I won’t be so apt to forget it.”

  She moved a step or two toward the door, then paused. “You don’t need to be so conventional,” she said.

  “That’s what you think.”

  “I want to know what you’ve found out.”

  “You’re out in the clear,” I told her. “All we need now is to-“ I broke off as I heard the sound of an automobile outside. There was a business-like snarl to the motor which I didn’t like, and somebody wore off a lot of rubber as the car was slammed to a stop.

  “That’s Harvey now,” she said.

  “Harvey wouldn’t park his car at the curb in front, would he?” I asked.

  “No,” she admitted.

  “Get back to your room,” I told her.

  “But I don’t see what you’re so-“

  “Get started!” I said.

  “Very well, Sir Galahad,” she told me.

  She started down the corridor toward her room. I heard the pound of feet as someone ran around the house toward the back door. Then I heard feet on the stairs, crossing the porch, and the doorbell rang four or five times, long, insistent rings.

  I slipped some shells into the empty chambers of my gun, switched off the lights, opened my door, picked up my bag and waited.

  I heard Mrs. Pemberton go to the head of the stairs, stand there, listening. After a moment I heard the rustle of her clothes as she started down. I stepped out to the hallway and stood still.

  I heard her say, “Who is it?” and a voice boom an answer through the closed door. “Police,” it said. “Open up.”

  “But I-I don’t understand.”

  “Open up!”

  She unlocked the door. I heard men coming into the corridor, then a man’s voice say, “I’m Lieutenant Sylvester. I want to talk with you. You’re Mrs. Pemberton?”

  “Yes, but I can’t understand what could bring you here at this hour. After all, Lieutenant, I’m-“

  “I’m sorry,” the lieutenant interrupted, “this is about your husband. When did you see him last?”

  “Why, just this evening.”

  “What time this evening?”

  “Why, I don’t know exactly.”

  “Where did you see him last?”

  “Will you please tell me the reason for these questions?”

  “Where,” he repeated, “did you see your husband last?”

  “Well, if you insist on knowing, he was here for dinner and then left for the office about seven-thirty.”

  “And you haven’t seen him since?”

  “No.”

  The officer said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pemberton, but your husband’s body was found on the floor of his office by the janitor about half an hour ago.”

  “My husband’s body!” she screamed.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the lieutenant said. “He’d been killed by two bullets fired from a thirty-two calibre automatic. The ejected shells were on the floor of his office. In an adjoining office, furnished with a dilapidated desk and a couple of chairs, we found a home-rigged microphone arrangement which would work as a dictograph. In the drawer of that desk we found the gun with which the murder had been committed. Now, Mrs. Pemberton, what do you know about it?”

  There was silence for a second or two, then she said in a thin, frightened voice, “Why, I don’t know anything about it.”

  “What do you know about that office next to your husband’s?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’ve never been in there?”

  This time she didn’t hesitate. “No,” she said, “never. I don’t know what makes you think I would be spying on my husband. Perhaps someone has hired detectives. I wouldn’t know.”

  I tiptoed back to my room, picked up my bag and started silently down the corridor toward the back stairs. I could hear the rumble of a man’s voice from the front room, and, at intervals, the thin, shrill sound of Mrs. Pemberton’s half-hysterical answers.

  I felt my way down the back stairs. There was a glass window in the back door - , with a shade drawn over it. I raised a corner of the shade and peered through the glass. I could see the bulky figure of a man silhouetted against the lights which filtered in from the back yard. He was holding a sawed-off police riot gun in his hands.

  I took a flash-light from my pocket and started exploring the kitchen. I found the door to the cellar, and went down. From the floor above came the scrape of chairs, then the noise of feet moving about the house.

  There was a little window in the cellar. I scraped cobwebs away and shook off a couple of spiders I could feel crawling on my hand. I worked the catch on the sash and pulled it open. It dropped down on hinges and hung down on the inside. I pushed my bag out, breathed a prayer to Lady Luck, and gave a jump. My elbows caught on the cement. I wiggled and twisted, pulling myself up, and fighting to keep the side of the window from catching on my knees and coming up with me. I scrambled out to the lawn.

  No one was watching this side of the house. I picked up my bag, tiptoed across the lawn and pushed my way through a hedge. In the next yard a dog commenced to bark. I turned back to the sidewalk and started walking fast. I looked back over my shoulder and saw lights coming on in the second story of the Pemberton house.

  I walked faster.

  From a pay station, I put in a long distance call for old E. B. Jonathan. E. B. didn’t appreciate being called out of his slumber, but I didn’t give him a chance to do any crabbing.

  “Your client down here,” I told him, “is having trouble.”

  “Well,” he said, “it can keep until morning.”

  “No,” I told him, “I don’t think it can.”

  “Why can’t it?”

  “She’s going to jail.”

  “What’s she going to jail for?”

  “Taking a couple of pot shots at her husband with a thirty-two automatic.”

  “Did she hit him?”

  “Dead centre.”

  “Where does that leave you?” Jonathan asked.

  “As a fugitive from justice, talking from a pay station,” I told him. “The janitor will testify that I was with her when she went up to the place, where the shooting occurred. The janitor is her dog. He lies down and rolls over when she snaps her fingers. She thinks it’d be nice to make me the goat.”

  “You mean by blaming the shooting on you?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “I’d trust some women a hell of a lot more than you do, and some women a hell of a lot less. This one I trust a lot less.”

  “She’s a client,” E. B. said testily. “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “I know she’s a client,” I told him. “That may put whitewash all over her as far as you’re concerned, but it doesn’t as far as I’m, concerned. I made her ditch the gun out of her handbag so she wouldn’t be tempted to use it. I got my fingerprints on the gun doing it. When the going gets rough, she’ll think of that, and the janitor in the building will swear to anything she suggests.”

  He made clucking noises with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I’ll have Boniface drive down there right away,” he said. “Where can Boniface find you?”

  “Nowhere,” I said and hung up.

  There was an all-night hamburger stand down by the depot. I ordered six hamburgers with plenty of onions and had them put in a bag to take out. I’d noticed there was a rooming-house across from the apartment where Diane Locke lived. I went there.

  The landlady grumbled about the lateness of the hour, but I paid two days’ rent in advance and she showed me a front room.

  I said to her “I work nights, and will be sleeping daytimes. Please don’t let anyone disturb me.”

  I told her I was Peter J. Gibbens from Seattle. She digested this sleepily and ambled away. I found a ‘Do not Disturb’ sign in the room which I hung on the door. I locked the door and went to bed.

  About three o’clock in the afternoon, I sneaked out in the hallway for a reconnaissance. There were newspapers on the desk. I picked up one, left a nickel, and went back to the room.

  My own picture stared at me from the front page. ‘Peter Wennick, connected with prominent law firm in the metropolis, being sought for questioning by local police in connection with Pemberton murder. ‘ This was in bold, black type. It was quite an account: Mrs. Pemberton had “told all.” She had consulted the law firm in connection with some blackmail letters. The law firm had said I was a “leg man and detective.” I had been sent down to investigate the situation and report on the evidence. She had taken me to the office, where, with a friendly janitor, she had rigged up a dictaphone. I had listened to a conversation between her husband and “the woman in the case.”

  On the pretext of leaving for the washroom, I had thrown the night latch on the door of the office so I could return at any time. She had forgotten to put the night latch back on when we left. Therefore, I had left myself an opportunity to return and gain access to the room.

  The janitor remembered when we had left. Something like an hour later, he had heard muffled sounds which could have been the two shots which were fired. He thought they had been the sounds of backfire from a truck. He’d been in the basement, reading. The sounds had apparently come from the alley, but might have been shots echoed back from the walls of an adjoining building. The medical authorities fixed the time of death as being probably half an hour to an hour and a half after we’d left the building.

  Mrs. Pemberton had insisted she’d gone home, and that I had immediately gone out. She didn’t know where. I had returned, to tell her that I had good news for her, but before I could report, police had come to the house to question her in connection with her husband’s death. I had made my escape through a cellar window while police were searching the house.

  Arthur H. Bass, Pemberton’s partner, had stated that Pemberton had been very much worried for the past few days, that he had announced it was necessary for him to raise immediate funds and had offered to sell his interest in the partnership business for much less than its value. Bass had reluctantly made a nominal offer, but had advised Pemberton not to accept it, and when Pemberton had refused to consider such a nominal amount, Bass had been jubilant because he didn’t want to lose Pemberton as a partner. He had met Pemberton at Pemberton’s request, to discuss the matter.

  The district attorney announced that he had interviewed “the woman in the case.” Inasmuch as she seemed to have been “wronged” by Pemberton, and, inasmuch as a Peeping Tom who had tried to crash the gate of her apartment had caused her to place a call for the police at approximately the time Pemberton must have been killed, the police absolved her of all responsibility.

  It seemed that this Peeping Tom, evidently trying to make a mash, had knocked at her door and advised her he had held up the jewellery store downstairs. She had promptly reported to the police, who had visited her apartment, to find her very much undressed, very much excited and shaken, and apparently sincere. Police records of the call showed that the police were actually in her apartment at the time the janitor had heard the sounds of what were undoubtedly the shots which took Pemberton’s life.

  Mrs. Pemberton, the news account went on to say, could give no evidence in support of her alibi, but police were inclined to absolve her of blame, concentrating for the moment on a search for Pete Wennick, the leg man for the law firm.

  Cedric L. Boniface, a member of the law firm, very much shocked at developments, had made a rush trip to the city and was staying at the Palace Hotel. So far, authorities had not let him talk to Mrs. Pemberton, but they would probably do so at an early hour in the afternoon. Mr. Boniface said he “hoped Mr. Wennick would be able to absolve himself.”

  That was that.

  Just for the fun of the thing, I turned to the Personals. It’s a habit with me. I always read them in any paper. Under the heading: “Too late to classify,” I came on one which interested me. It read simply: “P. W. Can I help? Call on me for anything. M. D.”