Bill said, “No, no, I am on the level with this. She—”

  Slim swung the blackjack with the deft wrist motion. The peculiar thunk sounded as though someone had slapped an open palm against a ripe watermelon. Bill turned glassy-eyed, his head dropped forward, he slumped down in the chair, and then, with fear in his eyes, he held on to a thin margin of consciousness.

  “No, no,” he screamed. “You guys aren’t going to do that to me.”

  The peculiar thunk was repeated.

  Butch didn’t even glance at Bill. He looked at Peggy and said, “So you’re from the insurance company that has the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar policy on the Garrison gems.”

  Peggy pointed toward the strip of adhesive tape on her lips.

  “You don’t need to have that off to nod,” Butch said, his eyes cold.

  She remained stiff-necked, defiant. Butch jerked his head, and Slim moved over beside her.

  “When I ask questions,” Butch said, “I want you to answer them. Slim plays rough, and he doesn’t have any more feeling about women than a snake. Now, as I get it, you work for the insurance company, and Bill was making a deal with you to turn back the gems provided you could buy him immunity and pay him maybe thirty or forty thousand bucks. Is that the case?”

  She shook her head.

  “Soften her up, Slim,” Butch said. “She’s lying.”

  Slim tapped the back of her neck with the blackjack. It was only a gentle tap, but it sent a sharp pain shooting through Peggy’s brain. She saw a succession of bright flashes in front of her eyes and felt a numbing paralysis that gradually gave place to a dull, throbbing ache.

  “I’m waiting for an answer,” Butch said.

  She took a deep breath, fought back the nauseating headache, then shook her head determinedly.

  Slim cocked his wrist and then held it at a sign from Butch, whose slightly puzzled eyes held a glint of admiration. “Dammit,” he said, “the babe’s got nerve!”

  Butch turned to regard the unconscious Bill. Then he said, “When he comes back to join us we’ll ask him some questions. I sure had a straight tip that Bill was in on a sellout, and—hell, it has to be true.”

  “Want me to take the tape off?” Slim asked.

  “Not yet,” Butch said. “We’ve got all night. We—”

  There was a peculiar sound at the door of the apartment, a rustling noise as though garments were brushing against it.

  Butch looked at Slim who moved toward the door. His right hand streaked for the left lapel of his coat, but the blackjack that was looped around his wrist impeded the motion. The door banged open explosively, hitting against the wall.

  Detective Fred Nelson, looking over the sights of a .38, sized up the situation. “Okay, you punks,” he said, “that’ll be about all.”

  He looked at Peggy, sitting there with the strip of tape across her lips. “I guess this time you were on the up-and-up,” he said. “You got sore and wouldn’t tell me where Bill Everett was living, but it happened one of the boys had done a routine check job on him because he is an ex-con.

  “Now, you guys line up against that wall, and keep your hands up. You can spend the night in a cell or on a marble slab, and it don’t make a damn bit of difference to me which it is.”

  Peggy sat in Detective Fred Nelson’s office. Police Captain Farwell, whose eyes made no attempt to conceal respectful admiration, sat at one end of the big table. Don Kimberly sat at the other end. Nelson asked the questions.

  Peggy felt like a tightrope walker, giving them step-by-step conclusions to get Kimberly off the hook of the murder charge. But she was faced with the necessity of glossing over certain clues that she and Kimberly had suppressed and of minimizing the clues Nelson had overlooked. There was no use in making Nelson look dumb before his superior.

  “A woman,” Peggy explained, “naturally notices certain things a man would never see.”

  “What things?” Nelson asked.

  “Well, for instance, a matter of housekeeping.”

  “Go ahead,” the captain said.

  “Well,” Peggy went on, choosing her words carefully, “you have to put yourself in the position of a murderer in order to understand how a murder is committed.”

  Captain Farwell glanced at Detective Nelson. “It isn’t going to hurt you to listen to this with both ears,” he said.

  Peggy said, “Let’s suppose I wanted to murder Stella Lynn by giving her a drink of poisoned whiskey. I’d have to make certain she drank the whiskey and I didn’t. So I’d poison my bottle of liquor and then go call on Stella so I could get rid of her liquor.

  “Now, Stella might be fresh out of whiskey, or she might have a bottle that was half full or she might have a full bottle. She was going out on a date. She wouldn’t want to drink too much, and, of course, I wouldn’t want to drink much because I couldn’t afford to be drunk.”

  “So what would you do?” Nelson asked, his eyes still cautious.

  “Why,” Peggy said, “I’d make it a point to smash her bottle of whiskey so I’d have a good excuse to go out and get another one to take its place. Then I’d want to be sure Stella was the only one who drank out of that new bottle.”

  “Go ahead,” the captain said.

  “Well, if you dropped the bottle on the living-room carpet, or on the kitchen floor, which had linoleum, it might not break, and then your murder plan would be out the window. There was only one place you could drop it—on the bathroom tiles.

  “A man would have a lot of trouble working out a scheme by which he could take the bottle of liquor Stella had, carry it into the bathroom, and drop it—without the whole business seeming very strange. But a woman could do it easily.

  “She’d run in while Stella was dressing. Stella would say to her, ‘I’m getting ready to go out on a date, but come in and talk to me anyway,’ and the woman would have all the chance in the world to carry the liquor to the bathroom, start to pour a drink, drop the bottle, and say, ‘Oh, dear, Stella, I’ve dropped your whiskey. You go right ahead with your dressing. I’ll run down, get another bottle, and then clean up this mess.’

  “So the woman went to get the other bottle of whiskey—the bottle that had been poisoned and then resealed. She came back with the package, handed it to Stella, and said, ‘Now, Stella, you just go right ahead with your dressing and I’ll clean up this mess in the bathroom.’

  “So she started picking up the pieces of glass, and Stella took the new bottle of whiskey. Stella being Stella, she simply had to open it, pour herself a good-sized drink, and toss it off.”

  There was silence for several seconds, then Captain Farwell nodded slowly and again glanced at Nelson.

  Nelson said almost defensively, “It’s a damned good theory, but where’s the proof?”

  “The proof,” Peggy said, her eyes wide and innocent, “why, there’s plenty of proof. I looked carefully at the bathroom floor to see if there weren’t little pieces of glass that hadn’t been cleaned up. It’s awfully hard to clean up glass slivers, you know. Sure enough, there were several little pieces.”

  Nelson took a deep breath.

  “Yes,” he said, “we saw them.”

  “And then, of course, the broken bottle that was out in the trash can in the backyard. You see, the whiskey had to be mopped up, and the murderer’s hands were sticky and they left a beautiful set of fingerprints on the broken bottle.”

  “Where’s that bottle?” Captain Farwell asked.

  Nelson’s eyes shifted.

  “Oh, Mr. Nelson has it,” Peggy said quickly. “He’s got all the evidence, and it occurred to me that if Mr. Nelson would have his men comb the neighborhood thoroughly to see if someone didn’t leave a package at a nearby drugstore or restaurant, or some place around there where she could go back and get it, and they could identify that woman— Then, of course, there are the fingerprints.”

  “Whose fingerprints are they?” Captain Farwell asked Nelson.

  Peggy answered the question. “We’ll have to let Mr. Nelson finish the detail work before we know for sure, but they have to be those of Mrs. Bushnell.

  “You see, we’ve established that Stella was killed by a woman. We know Bill Everett got Fran to try to arrange a sellout with the insurance company. His only point of contact was Frances, and her point of contact was Stella.

  “And Fran was the only one who simply wouldn’t have dared to take that butterfly. If she had, Bill would have known she was so jealous of Stella that she used the opportunity to kill Stella instead of peddling the gems to the insurance company.

  “She wrote me that anonymous letter telling me Kimberly and Stella were going to meet at the Royal Pheasant, then planted the poison in his darkroom—”

  “How did she know I’d suggest a meeting at the Royal Pheasant?” Kimberly asked.

  “She knew that was the most natural spot. Stella had told her she’d arrange a meeting, and Fran must have figured you’d say the Royal Pheasant. If you had named some other place, Fran could have tipped me off. But you didn’t.”

  Captain Farwell got to his feet. “Well,” he said, “the newspaper boys are out there yelling their heads off, wanting to get in and get some action. I don’t care what the details are, just so—” He paused and looked at Peggy, then looked at Don Kimberly. “Just so the department gets the credit for doing the damned fine job that it did.

  “And on this murder,” Captain Farwell went on, “we’re sorry, Kimberly, that we had to take you into custody.”

  “Oh, think nothing of it,” Kimberly said.

  Captain Farwell left the room.

  Peggy got to her feet. “Well,” she said, “we won’t be here when you’re talking with the newspapermen, Mr. Nelson. You can handle that. I’ll get you the broken whiskey bottle with the fingerprints on it. Of course, you understand that E. B. Halsey, president of the company, is very anxious to have a good press for the insurance company …”

  “Sure, sure, I understand,” Nelson said, “and we want to thank you folks for your cooperation.”

  “I take it I’m free to walk out?” Kimberly asked.

  Nelson nodded. “Hell, yes. Want me to pull out a red carpet?”

  Don Kimberly looked at Peggy Castle as though suddenly seeing her for the first time.

  “Come on, glamour puss,” he said. “Let’s go and let Nelson get his work done. You’re too pretty to be mixed up in a sordid crime.”

  “Oh, how nice!” Peggy exclaimed. “Just wait till I tell my uncle Benedict what you just said!”

  Something Like a Pelican

  It was approximately two-thirty in the afternoon, and Lester Leith, strolling idly along a backwash in the shopping district, was very frankly interested in a pair of straight-seamed silk stockings—not those which were in the hosiery display of the window to his right, but those which were very animatedly displayed on the legs of a short-skirted young woman some fifty feet in front of him.

  In such matters Lester Leith was a connoisseur, but because his interest verged upon the abstract, he made no effort to shorten the distance. Leith liked to stroll and watch the panorama of life streaming past. A few seconds from now his interest might be claimed by a face which showed character, or some passing pedestrian might interest him. At the moment it was a shapely pair of legs.

  Half a block away a woman’s head protruded from a fourth-floor window. Above the sounds of traffic could be heard her shrill screams.

  “Help! Police! POLICE!!”

  Almost instantly a dark furry object was thrown from the window. For a half-second it fell as a compact ball; then the resistance of the air opened it out into what seemed to be a fur cape. This cape, like the proverbial young man on the flying trapeze, sailed through the air with the greatest of ease, to come to rest finally upon a metallic crosspiece which supported a street sign four stories below.

  At his right, Lester Leith heard cynical laughter, and his eyes, seeking the source, encountered the grinning face on one of those cocksure individuals who is never at a loss to explain the significance of anything that has happened.

  “Advertising stunt,” the man said, catching Leith’s eye. “That’s a fur company up there. Just throwing fur capes away. Get it? They’ve hatched up something which will give ’em a lot of newspaper publicity.”

  Leith heard the sound of a police whistle and the pound of authoritative feet as the traffic officer from the corner came down the sidewalk.

  For reasons of his own, Leith preferred to avoid contact with police officers who were rushing to the scene of a crime. His methods were far too subtle and delicately balanced to invite risk by blundering into some police dragnet.

  “Thanks for the tip,” he said to the omniscient stranger. “I was just about to fall for it. As it is, I won’t be late for my appointment.”

  And Leith deliberately turned his back upon the scene of excited confusion.

  Lester Leith, slender and debonair in his full-dress evening clothes, stood in the lobby of the theater at the end of the first act and debated whether to wait and see the rest of the show.

  The usual opening-night audience of celebrities, sophisticates, and the social upper crust either promenaded around the lobby or formed in little clusters where they engaged in low-voiced conversations.

  Many a feminine eye, drifting in the direction of the straight-shouldered, slim-hipped young man, registered approval, but Lester Leith was, for the moment, engrossed in the problem which had been gnawing at the back of his consciousness all evening. Why should a young woman trying on a silver fox cape in a furrier’s on the fourth floor of a loft building abruptly toss the cape out of the window, nonchalantly pay the purchase price in cash, and leave the premises, apparently seeing nothing unusual in the incident?

  Melodious chimes announced that the show would resume in exactly two minutes. People began pinching out cigarettes and drifting through the curtained doorways to the rows of seats. Lester Leith still hesitated.

  The show, he was forced to admit, was better than average, but his mind simply refused to let the entertainment on the stage exclude from his consideration the mysterious young woman who had so casually tossed a valuable fur cape out of a fourth-story window.

  Lester Leith inserted his thumb and forefinger in the pocket of his waistcoat and removed the folded clipping which he had taken from the evening paper. Despite the fact that he knew it almost by heart, he read it once more.

  Pedestrians on Beacon Street were startled this afternoon by the screams of a young woman who leaned from a window of the Gilbert Furrier Company in the Cooperative Loft Building four stories above the sidewalk calling for the police. Looking up, they saw a silver fox cape come plummeting toward the sidewalk. The cape spread out, caught the breeze, and finally fell across a rod supporting the sign of the Nelson Optical Company, where it lodged just out of reach of the clutching fingers of dozens of eager feminine shoppers. The screaming woman was later identified as Miss Fanny Gillmeyer, 321 East Grove Street, an employee of the furrier company.

  Officer James C. Haggerty, on duty at the intersection, left his post to rush with drawn revolver into the loft building, commandeering an elevator which rushed him up to the fourth floor. As the officer came running down the corridor, he was greeted by F. G. Gilbert, head of the Gilbert Furrier Company, who explained that the screamed alarm had been a mistake.

  Officer Haggerty insisted upon an investigation which disclosed that a young woman customer, whose name the company refused to divulge, had been trying on silver fox capes. Abruptly, she had said, “I’ll take this one,” wadded it into a roll, and tossed it out of the window. Miss Gillmeyer, the clerk who had been making the sale, thinking that she was encountering a new form of shoplifting, promptly proceeded to shout for police.

  By the time Mr. Gilbert, the proprietor, appeared upon the scene, the customer was quite calmly counting out bills to the amount of the purchase price. She offered no explanation as to why she had thrown the cape out of the window, and quite casually left instructions covering the delivery of the cape when it was recovered. During the confusion which ensued just prior to the arrival of Officer Haggerty, the young woman, who was described as a dazzlingly beautiful blonde some twenty-five years of age, left the building.

  Officer Haggerty was inclined to believe the young woman was an actress who was intent upon getting publicity. If this was true, her desire was foiled by the refusal of the furrier company to divulge her name and address. The cape was subsequently retrieved and, after being cleaned, presumably delivered by the Gilbert Furrier Company to the eccentric purchaser.

  The dimming lights announced that the second act of the play was about to start. Lester Leith, returning the clipping to his pocket, reached a decision and turned toward the street. A waiting taxi took him to the Cooperative Loft Building on Beacon Street.

  There was nothing about the appearance of the Cooperative Loft Building which offered a clue to the strange behavior of the purchaser of the fur cape. The Gilbert Furrier Company occupied the entire fourth floor. The window from which the fur cape had been thrown was evidently the one directly over the sign of the Nelson Optical Company.

  Leith noticed, on the opposite side of the street, two men who were evidently waiting for some event which they felt would take place in the not too distant future.

  The manner in which they “loafed” on opposite sides of the entrance of the Rust Commercial Building, directly across the street from the Cooperative Loft Building—the manner in which they completely ignored each other, yet managed to turn their heads in unison whenever the sound of a clanging elevator door came from the lobby of the office building—indicated a certain common purpose. Moreover, whenever one of the belated office workers left the building, these men converged upon the doorway, only to move casually away again as soon as they got a good look.

  Leith got back in his cab and said to the driver, “We’ll wait here.”

  The cabbie smiled knowingly. “Want the radio on?” he asked.

  Leith said, “No, thanks,” and settled back to a cigarette and a period of watchful waiting which was terminated after about twenty minutes when a slim, youthful woman in a blue skirt and jacket, wearing a rakish, tight-fitting hat perched at an angle over her right ear, walked out from the elevators across the lobby to the entrance, her trim, smooth-swinging legs carrying her at a rapid pace.