The Clue in the Clay

Dolores Hitchens writing as D.B. Olsen

ONE

Swanson Street was always quietly decorous on Sunday mornings, as befitted a careful neighborhood; so that there were few, if any, people about on that day early in June to observe the remarkably odd behavior of the little man in the green overcoat.

The little man came running hatless around the corner of number one hundred twelve, from the rear. He was a childishly plump and pink little man, with a horridly adult convulsion of fear upon his features, and a gait as jerky and mechanical as a toy’s. He stopped in the front yard to clutch at the building with one hand, and to pull at his collar with the other; a shrill wheeze that may have been meant for a scream came through with the automatic promptness of a steam-whistle; he shivered once, violently; and then he collapsed into a ludicrous green heap on the lawn. Nor did he move afterwards.

Number one hundred twelve, was the smallest house in the block. It was of mellow orange brick, with a roof of shingles cunningly bedeviled into looking like thatch; and the whole place, including the tiny front yard and the flagged path, had an appearance of mild facetiousness, of smirking from under its near-thatch roof up at its three- and four-storey neighbors. On its oaken door, done in antique metal, was a name plate which read:

MABEL EDWARDS

Sculptress

The word Sculptress also seemed facetious, and somehow a bit improper, in the face of the smug ancient dwellings that surrounded the little house.

Some minutes later, a window in the most dingily correct house of all, which stood next door, came to life with a face. Bitter eyes looked past a beaked nose; saw the prone little man; widened in anger and scorn. Ten minutes after that, Officer Charles came upon the scene, having been notified through his call-box from headquarters that a drunken man was adorning and disturbing the Sunday rectitude of Swanson Street, to the anguish of its proper inhabitants.

Officer Charles investigated the fallen little man, found life in him, and got him to his feet. “Steady there! Had a little too much to drink, haven’t you?” And then marked the absence of any odor of liquor, and looked more closely at the pale, hatless, sagging figure. The little man began to come to himself, goggling frightened eyes to heaven.

Sound rumbled in the short throat; died away to whispers; renewed itself. “Miss Edwards!” it came out at last, half-recognizable. “She’s … she’s … h … h …” Dreadful silence while the little man got through swallowing. “She’s hanged herself!” the little man managed, all in one breath as though he might never draw another.

Officer Charles was slow. “Dust yourself off, now. You’re all right. And don’t be laying in the yard.” He held the green figure gently erect.

The little man was obviously glad of shelter and support. He clung to Officer Charles’ bosom, and let his breath out in a long relieved sighing. “It’s perfectly hideous. And I stumbled on her, not knowing. She’s hanged herself, Officer. Done it in the night, I guess.”

Officer Charles, having digested the thought that the man was not really intoxicated, pushed him abruptly away. “What’s that you’re telling me?”

“Miss Mabel Edwards,” the little man said very distinctly. “She has hanged herself beside the back door.”

Officer Charles obviously did not believe him. “Some woman has killed herself? You mean that?”

The half-bald little head trembled forward in a nod.

Officer Charles took hold of a green shoulder, not gently. “Look here—this is straight goods, is it?” The little man winced, and admitted that it was. “Well, snap out of it, then. Show me the body!” The shoulder faltered away; but Officer Charles kept hold of it. “Come on. Lead the way.”

The little man waddled reluctantly round, and with the woeful precision of a duck, he pursued the narrow path that led through a tangle of shrubs into the back yard. Officer Charles followed him with a look of severity in his usually mild grey eyes. In the back, they came upon an incongruous addition to the house, planted untidily against the mellow brick: a small enclosed porch of wooden boards, not well painted, and with two wash-tubs half visible through the door, which was ajar. The little man lifted an unwilling arm. “In there,” he murmured. “You’ll see that it’s just as I said it was. She’s quite … quite dead, Officer.”

Officer Charles mounted three wooden steps, pushed the door wide, and went into the porch. The little man wobbled after him for a short distance; paused to become silent and apprehensive; and at last, with a bleated apology, disappeared behind a shrub to be sick.

Officer Charles found himself in a narrow, gloomy space; but there was light enough for him to see the stark figure that hung against the wall. To his right, as he glanced about, he saw tubs and washing paraphernalia. To his left was a door through the brick wall into the house, and just beyond it, by a rope from an iron hook from which a lighting fixture had been removed, hung the body of a young woman in a peach-colored satin-and-lace nightdress. Officer Charles looked inquiringly into her face, and then wished mightily that he hadn’t. He focused his attention upon other details: the overturned stool below her bare feet; the heavy ornamental lighting fixture, made in the fashion of an ancient lantern, that had been placed in one of the wash-tubs; the little man’s fallen hat, as ridiculously green as his coat; the row of soap-boxes … the bottle of bluing … anything but the dead girl and her terrible features….

Having made a quick examination of the place, and keeping his gaze down, Officer Charles came out. The little man was still behind the shrub, unmanfully gagging. The sight of his sickness did sudden and dreadful things to Officer Charles’ stomach; so that Officer Charles might be somewhat excused for the serious blunder he proceeded to make.

“I’m going to call Headquarters,” he got out in an odd voice. And added hurriedly: “You’ll stay right here until I get back. I’ll want a statement from you….” Quiet, while Officer Charles turned his head and the little man ducked behind his shrub. “… and so will the men from Headquarters.”

The little man muffled his gagging with a handkerchief, and peeped frightened between the leaves. “It’s only suicide, isn’t it? Nothing … er … worse?”

Officer Charles managed a frown. “That’s not for us to decide.”

The little man slid meekly from behind the shrub, and looked sympathetically on while Officer Charles fought a rebellious breakfast. “May I get my hat?” he asked timidly. “I dropped it in there.” He did not look in the direction of his fallen headgear.

Officer Charles denied him. “Don’t go in there again. Everything must stay as it is. You can have your hat when…. Damn!” He started hurriedly on the path towards the front of the house. “I’ll be right back,” Officer Charles promised over his shoulder; but the little man did not pay him any heed. He was busy retrieving his hat from the wooden floor of the porch, and blowing off it such specks of dust as it had gathered.

Officer Charles was entirely out of sight. With a little quack of dismay, Green Overcoat scurried through the back gate and was gone.

Officer Charles was roundly berated and threatened with demotion for having let the little man get away. Suicides are carefully checked on, in San Francisco.

Officer Charles got very angry over the whole affair; and went home and soundly and inexcusably he kicked the cat. Whereupon his young wife took her cat and left for Mother and Oakland, after having called Officer Charles various kinds of a brute.

Officer Charles at first made light of her anger, and pretended a careless ease at meal-getting by opening a can of beans and trying to eat them for his supper. Admitting the beans flavorless, and the empty house hideously depressing, Officer Charles went out to get thoroughly drunk….

It was at Otto’s that he ran into his old crony and class-mate, Detective Lieutenant Stephen Mayhew.

The Mayhews had arrived in San Francisco that morning. Their honeymoon was but five days old; it had begun at Breakers Beach, where Lieutenant Mayhew was engaged in disrupting the schemes of malefactors; and had continued at Santa Barbara and Monterey, with interludes of Mayhew’s peculiarly frenzied style of driving.

Over their dinner in the hotel dining room, Sara Mayhew scolded her husband for being so self-conscious. “And you’re so clumsy, besides,” she said admiringly, watching him fumble a fork. “Anyone would know that we’re just newly married. Can’t you be a little more graceful? More suave, let’s say. And put an ice-pack on your ears to cool them off; they’re terribly red, darling. They’re the only part of you that seems able to blush, and they keep doing it constantly. Buck up, dear. You’re such an obvious bridegroom!” She mocked him with a pert mouth.

Lieutenant Mayhew, who is an extremely large man and as blundersome as a bear, put on a wounded expression. “Sorry, darling,” he apologized; and dropped a bite of pie into his lap. He went on in a hurry, as if to switch her attention from himself: “Look, we’ve got to do something this evening. What’ll it be?”

“What do people do in San Francisco evenings?”

“Movies …” Mayhew offered hopefully.

“No. Too ordinary. And besides, you’d take me to see some murder mystery. And I don’t like them; not even the best.” She shook a slim finger into Mayhew’s square face. “See, darling? No murders on our honeymoon. Not even celluloid ones. Understand? Forget your business, you … you bloodhound!” She tinkled a laugh at him; it took the edge from her words without removing their underlying sincerity.

“We could take in the night-spots,” Mayhew suggested. “They’d be soothing.”

She pretended anger. “Such sarcasm! But I’ll overlook it, dear. The night-spots sound inviting. Let’s go.” She stood up, erect and slender; and a glow of worshipful pride came into Mayhew’s dark eyes. She was in white chiffon, with a froth of ruffles and flowers across her breast; and her hair as smooth as a yellow ribbon around her head. Mayhew followed her from the room like a lamb.

It was at Otto’s that they ran into Mr. Franklin Charles, who was, it seemed, an old friend and college classmate of Lieutenant Mayhew. It further developed, over a round of cocktails at a corner table, that Mr. Charles was a police officer with domestic worries; that his wife was gone; that there had been some odd difficulty about a cat; that Officer Charles had allowed a little man in a green overcoat to slip through a back gate and get away; and that some foolish woman had killed herself.

“Hummmm,” Sara mourned, shaking her blonde head in sympathy. “It sounds like The House That Jack Built. You remember: “This is the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that …”

“I know: the rat comes next. But we can do without him, darling.” Mayhew was being very casual. “Some woman killed herself?”

Officer Charles bemoaned the beans. “If my wife weren’t such a damned good cook, I’d let her stay till she gets her mad out. She never stays mad longer than a week. But I hate the canned stuff; it sticks in my throat, and damned if I can swallow it.” He swallowed his cocktail as if to demonstrate; but it went down easily enough. “My wife can make biscuits and pies like nobody’s business,” Charles mourned, fingering his empty glass.

Mayhew was surveying the glittering chrome-and-crystal distances of the cocktail room. “I suppose they’re sure it’s suicide. Did you find her, Frank?”

“No, I was just telling your wife…. Oh! I didn’t find the woman first. This little guy did. That’s what the trouble was about. I shouldn’t have let him get away without getting his name and address.” Officer Charles fidgeted in memory of his humiliation. “And now my wife’s gone, too. I’m a hell of a fellow.”

“What’s your favorite kind of pie?” Sara asked brightly.

“A kind my wife calls Apple-Cheese pie. She makes it with apples and cottage cheese and a sort of a custard mixture to hold it together. It’s damned good; but you never see it in restaurants.” Officer Charles looked scorn at a waiter discreetly in the distance. “I’ll bet that guy would drop dead if you asked him for it. He’s never heard of it.”

“Let’s try him,” Sara suggested, lifting a hand to beckon the waiter.

Mayhew lit a cigarette; blew a mushroom of smoke to the ceiling. “Why do you think the little guy ran out on you like that? Anything funny about the business?”

“Huh? Oh…. No, nothing wrong, I guess. Bailey’s working on it. As far as I could figure, she was just a dame that got tired of living and took the hard way out.” Officer Charles’ face brightened with a cruel amusement as the waiter came close. “Here! We’d like three pieces of Apple-Cheese pie, please.” But the amusement died as the waiter simply bowed and withdrew in the direction of the kitchen. “Do you suppose they have it?” he asked, dumbfounded.

“Of course not!” Sara comforted him. “He’s just gone to confer with the cook. When he comes back he’ll be crestfallen.”

“Who was the woman?” Mayhew asked, very nonchalantly.

“Woman?” Officer Charles’ grey eyes grew round. “Say—I’ve been talking about my wife! Didn’t I tell you I was married?” He stared at Mayhew, half inclined to be indignant.

Mayhew let his cigarette sag into the ash-tray. “Good God, man! Your wife has hanged herself?”

“No,” Charles exploded. “Dammit—I’ve been telling you—my wife’s left me and gone home to the old lady. And I can’t cook! I’ve either got to get down on my knees and beg her to come home, or eat out in restaurants. Great guns, what a life!” The waiter had crept again to Officer Charles’ elbow. “Well, what do you want? Huh? The pie? What about it?”

The waiter admitted ashamedly that he was unable to serve the particular variety of pie requested.

“See?” moaned Officer Charles to Lieutenant Mayhew. “They haven’t any. They’ll never have it. No, I wouldn’t care for plain apple. Go away.”

“Maybe it was murder,” Mayhew said gently without any visible expression on his face, or any particular concern in his voice. “It might be, you know. Your little guy running away like that seems kind of odd. As if he might know something about it, and were afraid that you’d get it out of him. What do you think?”

“Lord, I don’t know….” Officer Charles was beginning; when Sara Mayhew awoke to the state of her husband’s mind.

She had been fussing with the ruffles on the bodice of her white evening dress, pulling them into place where they had been crushed by her wrap; but she suddenly stopped all movement and sat perfectly still. When she looked up at her husband, her eyes were accusing. “You promised!” she cried, breaking in upon Officer Charles’ preamble to reasoning. “You said that you wouldn’t!”

“Wouldn’t what?” Mayhew asked, with the aggravating innocence of a bear caught licking a honey-pot.

“Wouldn’t be a policeman. Not on our … our trip! You did promise; you know you did!” Her young face blushed a pretty pink with anger. “You promised me faithfully, that even if we should find a corpse under our bed, you wouldn’t go poking around to find who did it—who murdered it, I mean. And now you’re doing it!”

“Doing what?” Mayhew looked out from under his black brows in mild reproach. “What was I doing?”

“You were inventing a murder.” Sara turned to Officer Charles in desperate appeal. “Don’t tell him any more. He’s a murder-maniac. He collects murderers the way some people collect stamps. But I won’t have him doing it now. Stop telling …”

“The woman had clawed herself something awful,” Officer Charles remembered meditatively, staring into a new cocktail. “Great welts all over her face and neck—the Doc said she had done it trying to get the rope off, after it was too late. Hanging there by her neck against the wall, you know—no foothold in the bricks; the stool already turned over; and maybe changing her mind at the last minute. Clawed the rope. Dug into her face and neck with her nails.” He downed his drink hurriedly. “Made an ugly sight, I can tell you.”

Sara drew back as Mayhew leaned forward. “I suppose you’ve got pictures of her?” he asked.

Sara touched his sleeve. “What is it, Stephen? What’s in your mind about this thing?”

He shrugged his great shoulders, and knitted his black brows in a heavy frown. “I don’t know. Just a hunch.”

“We could drop into Headquarters. Bailey’d likely still be there. He’s got the pictures we took, and the dope on the woman. Want to do it?” Charles included Sara in the invitation by a look in her direction.

Sara gave them a bitter-sweet smile. “I wouldn’t care to go. No. But don’t let me keep you, gentlemen. Run along. I’ll be here when you come back.”

“I’m in the dog-house, as far as the Chief’s concerned. But Bailey’s always decent. He’ll talk to us.” Charles got up, half-wearily, and stretched. “Sure you wouldn’t like it, Mrs. Mayhew? It’s kind of interesting if you’ve never …”

Sara bent over her drink. “Thanks. I’ll wait here for you.” She sipped a moment in silence; then looked up at her husband, standing beside his chair. “Stephen; what is it? What on earth is there in it—to get you off poking into the thing?”

Mayhew did not meet her look. “It’s the little guy, darling. He shouldn’t have run away.”

“I would have,” she admitted honestly.

“I know—but …” Mayhew smiled, and made a deprecating motion with one hand as if to belittle his own suspicions. “It’s just that I’m-incurably blockheaded, dear. You’ve married a policeman.”

He kissed her briefly on the cheek; and he and Charles swung away and were gone. Mayhew has been heard to wonder since, just what it was that first intrigued him about the case; what flaw it was in Charles’ recital, obvious even then, that told him there had been murder done.

“What are you thinking about?” Charles wondered, after they had got into a cab.

“The bricks,” Mayhew said slowly, as though his vision of the thing were just beginning. “You said that she was hanging against a brick wall, didn’t you?”

“So what?” Charles demanded.

“Wait till we see the pictures,” Mayhew decided.

TWO

Inspector Bailey was a small man, stoop-shouldered and lean, and with the terse friendliness of a terrier. He welcomed Officer Charles and Lieutenant Mayhew into a room filled with an acrid haze of cigarette smoke.

“I’m a bachelor,” he offered as if in explanation. “I never have to go home. Mayhew? Heard of you. The Sticklemann case, wasn’t it?”

Mayhew admitted modestly to his fame.

Charles broached the subject of that morning’s suicide. “Mayhew here wants to talk to you about the Edwards woman. What about it?”

Bailey shot a quick look in Mayhew’s direction, and drew deeply on his cigarette before answering. Then he moved deliberately to the other side of his immense, untidy desk, and searched through layers of papers until a sheaf of pictures came into view. He held them out towards Mayhew. “Here are the photographs. I can’t say that I see anything out of the way. It’s suicide, as far as I’m concerned.” He watched Mayhew’s dark face as the big man took the pictures and looked at them.

There was silence in the smoke-filled room while Mayhew scrutinized the photographs of the dead woman.

“What do you know about her?” he asked at last.

Bailey looked disappointed as Mayhew handed back the pictures without commenting on them; but he searched further through his piled-up papers and found a clipped set of memo sheets, closely written upon. “This is the dope, what there is of it,” he grumbled. “We still don’t know who discovered the body. Some little geezer in a green overcoat.” His look towards Charles was reproving. Charles got red.

The three men relaxed in their chairs as Bailey began to read his notes in a monotonous voice. “The woman’s name was Mabel Edwards,” Bailey read, flipping his cigarette around between his lips with each syllable. “She wasn’t married; she was thirty-one years old; and she was a … a whad-duyoucallem …” He waved with one hand. “She made statues.”

“Sculptor,” Charles supplied.

“That’s a man,” Mayhew objected.

“She was a female sculptor, then,” Bailey went on. “And she lived all alone in this little house out on Swanson Street. It’s a funny damn little house. Quaint, I guess a woman would call it. You know, arty … kind of. The neighbors didn’t like her.”

Mayhew’s look flickered to Bailey. “Didn’t they?” he asked.

“No. All of them old fossils, old fogies. Been there since before the fire. As I see it, she built her house to suit herself; and it didn’t suit the rest of Swanson Street. Not by a jugful. What was it that old dame next door told you?” He turned to Charles.

“Let’s see.” Charles scratched his head and seemed perplexed. “It was something about farming,” he remembered.

Bailey and Mayhew smoked in silence while Charles struggled with his thought-processes. “See here; what is it a farmer does in the springtime?” Charles begged. “You know.” He held one arm in a circle; threw the other wide.

“Sows,” Mayhew offered. “Sows his grain.”

“Yeah.” Charles nodded happily. “That’s it. Now—let me think.” He fitted words together in an unrecognizable mumble. “Listen. Here it is. The old woman came out and leaned over the fence and told me the Edwards girl had sowed folly and reaped retribution. She was the same old woman—so she claimed—who had complained to the police over the telephone about the little guy in the green overcoat being drunk and lying in the yard. Only he wasn’t drunk, of course. Just sick and scared silly.”

Mayhew stared intently at the toe of his big shoe. “When this old woman came out and said what she did to you—did she already know that the Edwards girl was dead?”

For a long minute Charles appeared to think. “I can’t say for sure. But she must have. Else why would she say what she did?”

Mayhew added several strata of blue smoke to the fog in the room before he spoke again. “It’s odd, the thing she said to you. Think about it. She said that the Edwards girl had reaped retribution. You don’t reap retribution by accident, you know. Retribution is a fancy name for good old plain revenge.”

“The Edwards woman hanged herself. Her footprints were on the stool she kicked over,” Bailey said flatly. “The old woman next door is nuts. You can’t afford to pay any attention to meddlesome old hens in our business. You know that, Mayhew. See here, I’m getting hungry. Let’s go out and eat.”

“Go on with what you were telling us,” Mayhew requested. “I’d like to know what else you’ve got on the thing.”

“Well…. Death by strangulation, of course. Abrasions on face and neck made by the woman’s own fingernails. Gobs of flesh under the nails. You saw the pictures of her face.”

“How long had she been dead?” Mayhew asked absently.

“According to Doctor Matthews, and he admits there might be leeway in either direction on the clock, she had been dead about fourteen to fifteen hours. Even as short a time as twelve; because the night was cold for June.”

“And why do you mention twelve?”

“Because that’s the time we figure it must have happened. She was discovered by Charles here at just about eight o’clock this morning. Twelve hours back would have made it eight o’clock last night that she hanged herself.”

“And why do you figure she must have picked out eight o’clock to do the deed? To suit your convenience mathematically?”

Bailey began to lose his friendliness and to get mad. “See here, Mayhew. Dammit, the woman was in her nightgown. Ready to go to bed. See? Maybe already in bed, lying there and staring out into the dark. Worrying; having hysterics. You know how women are. So she gets up and goes out and hangs herself on the back porch. Like that.” He snapped his fingers sharply. “Then her troubles are over.”

“Easy, isn’t it?” Mayhew blew scornful smoke. “Did anybody happen to look into that porch during the evening?”

“You mean before eight o’clock? Lord, I don’t know. But it stands to reason she would have waited till dark. Somebody might have seen her out there in her nightdress. A woman wouldn’t like that.”

“You know a hell of a lot about women for a guy who’s not married,” Mayhew gibed. As Bailey stood up and gored an ash-tray with his cigarette, Mayhew went on in the same easy tone. “Who are her relatives? Or hasn’t she any?”

Bailey was distracted from his anger long enough to glance again at his clipped notes. “A cousin identified the body. A Mr. James Pierce, a lawyer with offices in the Strutt Building. We got his statement after he’d been to the morgue. He said he knew of no reason for his cousin to commit suicide.” Bailey slapped the notes back to the desk. “Now, dammit, you’re going to tell me what you think you see in the thing. Why isn’t it suicide?”

Mayhew was bland. “Have I said that it wasn’t?”

“No.” Bailey nibbled his lower lip in fierce irritation. “But you have some kind of an idea about the Edwards woman. Else you wouldn’t have come up here with Charles. I know damn well that coming here wasn’t his idea; he’d heard more than enough on the subject this afternoon, and was glad to get out of here when he did. It was you who wanted to come and talk to me; and you’ve got some kind of cursed idea about the affair, or you wouldn’t have come snooping.” He glared at Mayhew from under his sparse, sandy eyebrows, and jutted his nervous chin in the direction of the big man opposite him.

“Go on about the Edwards woman. Who were her other relatives?” Mayhew coaxed, taking a fresh cigarette and settling more comfortably in his chair. The chair groaned; and from somewhere within its vitals emitted a sharp popping noise. A trace of worry crossed Mayhew’s face as he glanced down at it; Mayhew was notorious in his own bailiwick for his destruction of chairs.

Surliness and anger were not natural to Bailey; and after his brief flare-up, he seemed to return to his good-temper. “You might tell me what you’re thinking,” he complained, looking again into his notes.

“I’m not sure of what I do think,” Mayhew admitted. “It’s no more than a hunch. I would like to know more about the Edwards woman, about her background and her family. It might explain a feeling I’ve got that there’s something funny about her dying like she did.”

Bailey shrugged, and began mumbling excerpts from his notes. “She was an orphan,” he read absently. And later: “Nearest relatives, two cousins. This James Pierce, the lawyer; and a Miss Muriel Maddox, who’s an actress. I understand she’s in the cast of the play they’re putting on at the old Bathhouse. It’s a revival of an old melodrama, and the audience sits at tables with beer and pretzels. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. There’s one running in Los Angeles, too.”

“I know.” Mayhew stared oddly into space.

“Most of this stuff we got from the people next door. They seemed to think that the Edwards woman was a combination of sin and poison. But nothing real in it—no facts. Just their opinion, and they were free with that.”

“The people next door—you mean the old woman who called for the police to remove the drunk?”

“No. She lives on the right side, going into the yard. These people are towards your left; their name is Smith. Old folks. Look as if they’d been pickled in vinegar; and still had a mouthful with them.” He screwed his face into a wry expression. “When the homicide squad got there …” Bailey stopped in confusion; then explained: “We weren’t taking any chances. It might have been murder.” He watched Mayhew’s thick brows go up. “As I was saying, when the homicide men got there, these old fogies swarmed out of their holes like a bunch of bees. Like they were holding a wake. Damned if I didn’t expect them to start dancin’ any minute.”

“Glad, huh?” Mayhew asked.

Charles came out of a reverie long enough to show scorn, and spat. “Dirty buzzards,” he grumbled. “Thank God I don’t live near them.”

Mayhew leaned across the desk to flip a thick finger through Bailey’s notes. “You’ve done a good job here.”

“Thanks,” Bailey said with exaggerated sarcasm.

“Were you inside the Edwards woman’s house?”

“Sure. We went through it. Just what you’d expect—a lot of clay, and a mess of half-finished junk, and tools everywhere. Nothing related to what you’re thinking.”

“Was I thinking?” Mayhew asked indifferently. “Had her bed been slept in?”

Bailey bared yellow teeth in a grin of sardonic amusement. “Plenty. If you know what I mean.” He watched Mayhew through the smoke of his cigarette. “It helped bear out that theory of mine that I told you—about the Edwards woman lying in the dark and having hysterics. That bed was just plain torn up.”

“Torn up?” Mayhew echoed interestedly. “How torn up?”

Bailey quit being amused. “Not the way you imagine. Not like she’d been strangled in it. Rumpled, I meant. Like she’d lain in bed and tossed around; cried, maybe. You know how women are.”

Mayhew let himself out frankly in a laugh. “Bailey, you’re a scream. You and your keen insight into women.” He got up out of the sagging chair, and took Bailey’s arm. “Come on and meet my wife. She’s a good specimen for you to study.”

Charles got up also, looking worried. “I’ll bet she’s mad at us. We’ve been longer than we’d thought.”

Mayhew laughed again. “Misery loves company,” he consoled Charles. “Maybe we’ve both lost our wives by now.”

Sara looked sleepy when they found her again in the corner at Otto’s; but she rallied to Bailey’s flattering regard.

“You’re a nice man on the surface,” she told him over a pink drink. “But do you go around thinking about dead people? About why, and how, and when, and wherefore they died?”

Bailey made an expression of disgust with his thin features. “Nothing so foolish,” he answered briskly. “Not with a girl like you around, Mrs. Mayhew. People could die like flies. I wouldn’t be bothered.”

“What do the taxpayers of San Francisco pay you for, Bailey?” Mayhew wondered. “A taxpayer wouldn’t want to die like a fly; and if he should happen to, I rather imagine he’d like to know that you were doing something about it, afterwards. Or aren’t you interested?”

“I’m a genius,” Bailey explained graciously. “I just look into the crimes that strike my fancy. Especially the ones that are somebody else’s business.” His glance at Mayhew was keen.

Sara applauded prettily with her slender hands. “Bravo, Mr. Bailey! I thank you from the bottom of my heart for putting my husband in his place. He’s been needing it all evening.” She took in Mayhew’s slow blush with an arch surprise. “You’re angry, darling! Aren’t you?”

“No. Just thinking.” Mayhew raised his eyes, to look into Bailey’s thin, sardonic face. On it was an expression of utter and complete disgust.

Mayhew left the cab at the entrance to the hotel garage; and dived into the bowels of the building, after asking Sara to go on to the room alone. It was after midnight; the garage attendant was drowsy, and ungrateful for Mayhew’s appearance. Mayhew located his stored car, rummaged in it, and came out with a length of stout rope.

Sara had waited for him at the elevators. When she saw what he carried, she frowned somewhat, and a stubborn look settled about her mouth; but she did not speak until they were inside their room. Then: “What are you going to do, Stephen? Why have you brought that rope to our room?”

Mayhew did not answer her directly, but sat on the edge of their bed with the rope in his hands, staring about him at the room. “It wouldn’t be the same,” he pronounced at last. “Not here. We’ll have to go out there.”

Sara found a pair of fur-trimmed slippers in her luggage and set them carefully beside the bed. “What are you talking about?” she asked very casually; and took off her shoes.

“About the woman who hanged herself,” Mayhew answered slowly. “I’ve got a hunch about the thing, and it won’t leave me alone. I’ll never be able to sleep until I’m sure.”

Sara unhooked her dress and slid out of it, and stood very young and very slim in a satin slip. “It’s not bothering me a bit,” she pointed out cruelly. “I’m as sleepy as anything. I can hardly wait to get into bed.” She yawned widely, tapping her lips with her fingers while she did so; and then she stretched.

Mayhew became very earnest. He leaned towards Sara, still holding the rope, and his eyes had narrowed and grown shining. “I’m sure of it. As sure as I am of sitting in this room with you. But I can’t be satisfied until I have proven it to my own satisfaction.”

Sara grew stock-still under the brilliance of his gaze. “Proven what?” she said out of a dry throat.

“That there’s been monkey business in the death of the Edwards woman,” Mayhew told her.

“And how do you propose to prove it?” she shot back at him.

Mayhew hesitated for a moment; looked down at the looped rope in his hands. “I’ll need your help, Sara,” he said quietly. “I can’t do anything alone.”

Without looking at Mayhew, Sara shook her head. Then she went to the dresser, let down her hair, and started to brush it. For a while there was no sound in the room save the rhythmical strokes of her brush as it swept the length of her hair. Mayhew said nothing more, nor did he move from the edge of the bed. The narrow brightness was dying from his eyes; and his shoulders sagged, ever so little.

Sara had watched him in the glass, with her own features showing pain as his relaxed in disappointment; and when she could stand it no longer, she dropped her brush and turned to face him. “What is it you want me to do, to help you?” She put her back against the dresser as if to find support for her body, and one hand crept involuntarily to her throat.

Mayhew watched the progress of that hand, and when its fingers tightened under her chin, a spasm of something like dismay crossed his square face. But he spoke to her calmly enough. “I wanted you to help me find out something about the condition of a body hung where the Edwards woman’s was.”

Sara kept very cool, though her hand stayed at her throat. “You mean that you want me to demonstrate the … the suicide for you, don’t you? You’d like me to hang myself. Isn’t that it?”

Mayhew looked down at the rope with a fixed stare; a muscle twitched, once, in his dark cheek. “That’s it, Sara,” he admitted; and then shook his head. “But you won’t do it. It’s not even fair of me to ask you to. It’s a hell of an idea, in the first place.” He got up from the bed suddenly, and flung the coil of rope the length of the room. It struck the bare floor beside the dresser; slid to the wall. And Sara bent and picked it up.

“You’ll want me to wear a night-dress under my coat, won’t you?” she said in a quietly practical voice. “Wasn’t that the way that the Edwards woman was dressed when they found her—just in a nightie? No coat—no shoes? She must have died cold.”

Mayhew watched her as she got into a wrap, and stuffed her silken blonde mop up inside a beret, and thrust her feet into shoes. Then he went to her, and took her in his arms.

“Are you afraid?” he asked abruptly.

She pushed him away, rudely and expertly. “Of course I’m afraid,” she snapped at him. “And who wouldn’t be? Going out in the middle of the night to be hanged by the neck until dead…. I hope you have sense enough to cut me down before I’m clear gone.”

He was both hurt and worried; but he tried to match her new mood of careless sarcasm. “This is what you get for marrying me,” he scolded her. “I hope you see your mistake. Why didn’t you marry a guy like Bailey? He’d never leave the delights of the boudoir to go poking off into anything like this.”

Before she switched off the lights, Sara made an incredibly ugly face at him. “Boob!” she flung out, with the air of an extremely naughty child. “As if I wanted to marry you! If we both hadn’t been dead drunk …”

They scuffled the length of the hall.

THREE

Swanson Street is even less lively in the middle of Sunday night than it is on Sunday morning; and on this particular night it had chosen to harbor the densest fog in San Francisco. The old dwellings of Swanson Street stood stark in the midst of wavering vapor, like skeletons dressed in gossamer; and the few blobs of yellow that were streetlights threw into relief the boniness of their outlines. There was no soul abroad. The proper denizens of Swanson Street were respectably sleeping.

Mayhew had not cared to take a cab on his peculiar errand. He and Sara had gone into the basement garage, routed an attendant still more drowsily indignant than before; had pried their car from where it was squeezed meticulously between other cars; and had driven to Swanson Street at a snail’s pace through the fog. Sara managed to be debonair until they braked to a stop a few doors short of number one hundred twelve. Then she started shivering.

“It’s …” she began, with her teeth chattering. Mayhew swung in his seat behind the wheel to look at her. “It’s so damned spooky,” she finished.

“Remember that you’re a lady,” Mayhew reproved her. “And ladies mustn’t swear.”

“I’ll be a dead lady very shortly, if you don’t manage this thing right.” She opened the door next the curb. “Here we go. Tomorrow I’ll start writing my book: Back to Life, or The Villain Foiled.” She gave him a serious look over her shoulder. “Or maybe I won’t be doing much of anything. Just holding a bunch of lilies….”

He caught her shoulder in a big hand. “You’re frightened, Sara. Dammit, I won’t go on.”

She squirmed away without answering him. After a moment’s indecision, Mayhew followed her. They walked in silence to the front of the little house of Mabel Edwards, shadowy figures even to each other; and Mayhew unlatched the gate. The flags of the path sounded hollow underfoot; shrubs brushed them wetly; and then they were feeling their way into the back porch of the little house. Mayhew snapped on his flashlight briefly; found the latch to the back door, and closed it behind them. They were alone in a little room of death.

Mayhew let the yellow beam of the flashlight play over the inside of the porch. They found it just as Charles had described it, in his brief account at Otto’s. The lighting fixture, dusted with fingerprint powder, and with the stub of electric cord attached, was still lying in one of the washtubs. Mayhew picked up the lantern; made out fingerprints. “Those would be the Edwards woman’s prints,” he muttered; and put it back. The washing powders, the bluing, stood in a row. In one corner, in neat array, was a shelf of gardening tools: hand-spades, nippers, weed-choppers, claw-tools. Out of order was the tool used to keep the shrubs neat: a big scissors-like affair that had been cast back carelessly upon the others. Mayhew picked this tool up. It, too, had been powdered for prints. Mayhew studied the marks upon it. They were smooth greasy smudges. “Gloves,” Mayhew said under his breath, smiling grimly.

Sara was staring at the iron hook in the wall with wide, fascinated eyes. “Now what?” she breathed at her husband.

Mayhew went poking off into shadows at the far end of the porch, under the bench that held the tubs. “There should be a stool here somewhere, unless they’ve taken it away,” he told her. He bent suddenly, to reach into darkness. “Here it is. Red leather and maple. Full of powder; and with footprints. As Bailey said.” He looked long and earnestly at the little stool. “Eighteen inches high, I’d guess. She must have stood on her toes. Eighteen inches isn’t much leeway.”

He muttered further calculations under his breath as he placed the stool for Sara to stand on.

Sara took off her coat and laid it over the edge on one of the tubs in the manner of a sleep-walker. She let one slipper drop; then the other. Her beret fell into the tub. “I’m ready,” she said in tone oddly husky, and moved towards the red-leather stool. In the flow of the flashlight, her satin gown gleamed white as a shroud, with its knot of embroidered flowers on her breast as red as blood.

She put out a foot, touched the stool with it. Mayhew saw how she trembled, how her whole body shook so that the satin rippled with its shaking; and he heard how unevenly her breath went in and out, between her teeth. “Let’s not,” he said suddenly, putting out an arm to keep her from mounting the stool.

She really frowned at him then. “All in the interest of science, my darling. For science and the taxpayers of San Francisco. Get out of my way.” She stood on the stool, looked slightly down at him. “How tall was the Edwards woman, anyway? As tall as I am?”

“About,” he said absently, still obviously undecided in his mind as to whether he should let her go on with what they had started to do. The rope swung in his fingers.

Sara twisted her slender body, so that she stared above her head at the iron hook that had held the light. “Look, Stephen; here’s an idea. If the Edwards woman had changed her mind and didn’t really want to die, as the doctor figures from those scratches she inflicted on herself, why didn’t she reach up and grab that hook and hang on and scream? She could have brought the neighbors that way. They’d have cut her down.”

Mayhew measured the space above Sara’s head with his eye. “Try it,” he suggested.

Sara reached. The tips of her fingers touched the metal, but not enough to curl over. “Couldn’t have done it,” she admitted in disappointment. “That’s out. And I thought I had something there.”

Mayhew knotted the rope; tested it by pulling on it; slipped it over Sara’s head. “You fasten it,” he told her. “I want to see how you do it.”

Sara tied granny-knots until Mayhew corrected her. “The Edwards woman had done a damn good job with her knots,” he observed. “There couldn’t have been an inch of give in them. Look. Square knots, like this.” He demonstrated, throwing a loop up over the iron spike and making knots below it.

Sara stood on tip-toe on the stool, with her shaking figure spotlighted by the flash that lay on the bench opposite. All about was a shadowy silence permeated with a strong smell of laundry soap. Sara moistened her lips; swallowed; closed her eyes tightly. “Ready?” she asked crisply.

Mayhew nodded; the next instant Sara had kicked the stool aside with one push of a bare foot, and her body had jerked the length of the rope. For a moment that seemed an eternity to Mayhew she made no move at all, beyond the fact that her eyes came slowly open to stare at him. Then her legs drew up inside the satin gown; she lashed out with them, and frenzy possessed her. Her hands struck her throat; clawed up the rope; scraped the surface of the wall behind her for a finger-hold; found none. Her mouth came open for a scream that did not materialize. Her body arched and twisted, while her heels scraped frantically, uselessly for a hold upon the bricks. The gyrations of her body tautened the rope so that it buried itself deeper and deeper into the soft flesh of her neck.

Mayhew watched her in suppressed desperation. A fine dew of sweat stood out all over his face, and he wiped it off with the flat of his hand without taking his eyes off his wife. Suddenly he sprang forward and caught her in his arms.

Sara sat on the stool until she was through gagging. Mayhew was very solicitous; he bathed her forehead with a wet handkerchief and offered her whiskey from a flask. The whiskey came up immediately.

A long while later she got up and reached for her coat. “And so to bed, darling,” she said in a very hoarse voice. “I take it you’re finished with me.” She stepped into her shoes; winced. “Damn! My heels are raw! All same hamburger. Or hadn’t you noticed?” She brushed back her yellow shining hair to look at him.

Mayhew was calmly recoiling the rope, giving the appearance of some ruthless inner curiosity satisfied. He took in Sara’s bruised and lacerated heels with a regard which betrayed neither concern nor surprise; instead, in the reflected glow from the flashlight on the bench, his mouth wore an expression of grim humor.

“You don’t care!” Sara turned accusingly from him and picked up her beret. “You’re a perfectly heartless man….” Her voice died into silence in the same instant that Mayhew snatched the flashlight and clicked it off. Somebody was coming.

Unmistakably, there had been steps upon the flagged path in the yard outside. Not especially stealthy footsteps, nor slow either. More like an ordinary walk—as if, Sara thought suddenly, the person who made them had been looking back over his shoulder and had not seen their light through the cracks of the wooden porch. Sara and Mayhew waited in silence. The steps quickly came closer.

The darkness inside the porch was complete; it had texture, and a smothering quality like down or a basket of feathers. Sara backed further from the door; felt the rope on the floor make a loop around her ankle; tried to shake it off; experienced a moment of unreasoning insane fear before she got hold of herself again. There was no slightest sign of Mayhew’s whereabouts in the dark, no indication of what he was doing. Outside, a foot touched the bottom step of the porch. The step creaked as weight was brought to bear upon it; then the next step gave forth sound, and the next…. A hand fumbled at the latch, and Sara held her breath.

The crash of Mayhew’s fist upon the door splintered the silence for Sara. The door boomed open, and she looked out into the grey fogged space of the back yard. Her husband’s figure rushed through the doorway, cutting off the dim light for an instant; there was a cry of angry fright from below him; and then fury set in.

Two figures merged into one whirling shadow, and Sara heard the thick sound of blows, and harried pantings. Mayhew cursed once, luridly, when his swinging right took, not his adversary, but the brick wall behind him. There were tearings of cloth, thumpings of bodies against wall and flagstones, and over all the rest of it a sharp chattering cry, betraying rage and fear, from the man that Mayhew sought to capture. It reminded Sara of a sound she had heard once at a zoo: the cry of a little monkey cornered by a big monkey, and wanting not to fight but to run away.

“Damn you!” Mayhew bellowed. “I only wanted to …” There was a final yelp from the other man, and in spite of Mayhew’s lunge and clawing grip, he was away and pounding up the path to the corner of the house. Mayhew, off balance, took two plunging steps and fell flat on his stomach under a shrub. By the time he had gotten disgustedly to his feet, even the sound of the other’s footsteps was gone.

Sara focused the flashlight upon the sorry picture of her husband. He looked at her with one eye puffy and closing, the other bright with wrath. “I only wanted to find out who it was,” he finished to Sara. “Damn the guy! I didn’t even get a look.”

“People seldom stand still when you leap upon them out of the dark,” Sara pointed out helpfully. “They’re funny that way. Nine times out of ten, I bet they’d run. Why didn’t you speak to the man first, if you wanted to question him?”

Mayhew shook his head. “He wouldn’t have waited. Not even if I’d sung him a love song. His business here was private, or my guesser’s out of order.”

“And that could be,” Sara said sweetly.

Mayhew bent to brush dirt and bits of stick from his trousers. Beside his foot, half buried in sod, bloomed a spot of color brighter than the rest of the lawn. Mayhew kicked it with an investigating toe, and then picked the buried object out of the dirt and shaped it with his hands.

He had discovered the only article dropped by his frightened foe. It was a man’s felt hat of an incredibly brilliant green.

Bailey was in his office early, and well started on a day’s strenuous smoking, when Mayhew called upon him. Bailey took in the bruised face and closed eye with a look of shrewd distrust; but offered Mayhew a chair willingly enough.

“You were all right when I left you last night,” Bailey commented without taking his cigarette out of his mouth. “What happened afterwards?”

Mayhew found a sturdier chair and let himself down into it easily. After he had a cigarette of his own going well, he summarized the story of last night’s adventuring with Sara. Bailey blew clouds of smoke and listened without comment.

After Mayhew’s recital was done, there were several minutes when nothing was said. Mayhew appeared to be waiting for Bailey’s opinion; and Bailey appeared to be thinking. All at once the small man swung in his chair to look at the big Lieutenant.

“What did you get out of it? I can see satisfaction sticking out all over you. You’re so damned smug…. Spill it.”

Mayhew allowed himself to smile at Bailey’s obvious jealousy. “I did prove a very interesting point about the Edwards case,” Mayhew admitted cautiously.

Bailey bit his cigarette. “There isn’t an Edwards case.” His desk resounded to poundings from his fist. “That was a suicide. Pure and simple suicide.”

“You use strange adjectives, Mr. Bailey,” Mayhew gibed bitterly.

“All right. Quit crabbing and spit it out. What is it you think you’ve found out about the thing?”

“I have found out one of two things, but I don’t know which one it is.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Maybe.”

Bailey was getting so curious he could scarcely contain his impatience to hear what Mayhew knew. “Go on. Go on,” he commanded hastily. Smoke poured from him in a grey stream.

Mayhew settled himself more comfortably. “I know now that one of two things is true. Either the Edwards woman died with her shoes on; or she died somewhere else from where Charles found her. It’s possible both of them may be true. But one of them must be.”

Bailey kept sharp watch on Mayhew’s face. “Yeah?” He crushed out one cigarette and lit another.

“If she was hanged barefooted where she was found, against the bricks of her house, and had struggled as she must have before she died….”

Bailey leaned forward tensely.

“Her heels would have been hamburger,” Mayhew concluded, using Sara’s expression. “I know this because my wife very graciously consented to perform an experiment for me. I told you that we went out to the Edwards woman’s house last night. We went for the purpose of determining this very thing.”

“Damn you! You’d use your wife like that?” Bailey cried in real anger.

Mayhew made no apology. “I did find out that if a woman had hanged herself, without shoes, in that place and position, that her heels would have been considerably bruised and torn during her death-struggles. That’s the fact. And the Edwards woman’s heels had no sign of scratches in the pictures you showed me of her body.”

Bailey laid down a smoke-screen across his desk; then spoke through it. His voice held grudging admiration. “You knew that, even before you took your wife out there; didn’t you?”

“No. I didn’t know it. I thought it. Theorized it, as the books say. Charles had told me—and I had seen in the pictures—how terribly torn the woman’s face and throat were. She had died hard. If it really was suicide, she sure as hell regretted it before the end. She clawed and fought the rope. Do you think it reasonable to suppose that she kept her feet perfectly still? I didn’t. I don’t now.”

A hand came out of a blue cloud and reached for Mayhew’s. Mayhew shook it absently. “So we’ve got a murder on our hands?” Bailey remarked in a kind of pleased excitement, as though the possibilities were beginning to appear before him.

“Not for sure,” Mayhew corrected. “It might still possibly be suicide. Suicide with trimmings. Monkey business. Why?”

Bailey got abruptly from his chair, sticking his head above the fog of cigarette smoke. “Let’s go have a looksee at the body.”

“Where is it? In an undertaking parlor?”

“No. Still in the morgue. We haven’t signed a release yet; though the Edwards woman’s cousin wants her taken away. I thought that as long as you were poking around, I might as well hold off for a couple of days. No harm in waiting to see what you’d turn up.”

“You gave me damn little encouragement,” Mayhew growled.

“Professional jealousy, old man. The complete cad. Murderer’s friend. Come on, curse you. Now I’ve got to work.”

They came out of the police morgue and stood in fog-sifted sunlight to smoke. Traffic roared through the street in front of them: the lively, honking traffic of San Francisco, where everybody hurries either in an effort to get where he’s going or because of an understandable desire to keep warm by exercising. Mayhew watched the brisk movement of cars and pedestrians with distaste. Breakers Beach, far to the south, below Los Angeles, is a drowsy little city of Spanish ancestry. It’s traffic is leisurely. Mayhew was known there as a fast driver. In San Francisco he was one of the herd.

After giving the traffic its due, Mayhew turned his thoughts again to the death of the woman whose body he had just seen; whose heels were unmarred; whose face and throat were a criss-cross of fingernail scratches. He pondered before he spoke to Bailey. Then: “I’d like to see the rope she was hanged with.”

“Sure enough.” They went back to Bailey’s office. Bailey produced the rope, and Mayhew examined it.

“Let’s have a magnifying glass on this,” Mayhew requested. Bailey brought two of them; used one himself. Minutes ticked by.

“Look.” Mayhew steadied the glass so that Bailey might look through it at the slip-knot that had choked life from Mabel Edwards.

“Cat hairs?” Bailey wondered, reaching into a drawer for a pair of tweezers.

“Fur,” Mayhew supplied briefly.

Bailey extracted four bits of black hair from the twist of the knot, and laid them on a sheet of white paper. None of them was over a half-inch long. Two were fragments. Above the knot, wound round the rope, were many reddish hairs several inches long. Mayhew gave them scant attention, beyond removing them from the rope, for he knew without doubt that they came from the head of the dead woman. But the fine bits of black he studied under a powerful glass, shielding them from his mouth and nostrils. A breath would have sent them scattering into oblivion.

Bailey got up and stalked the room in discomfort. “I’ll have to take all this to the Chief,” he said bitterly. “I don’t know what he’ll say. Having an outsider, even you, come in and …”

“Never mind that,” Mayhew cut in. “You take the credit. I don’t care.”

Bailey wrung a smile out of his mouth. “And what are you getting out of it?”

“Fun,” Mayhew answered, and went back to his study with the bits of fur, putting them on a slide and under a microscope. .

FOUR

On Monday mornings Swanson Street comes slightly alive, and bustles with a very discreet, very subdued activity. There is a general air of hush-hush; of careful tappings and more careful door-openings; of laundered clothes and groceries being delivered unbeknownst to the ancient great of Swanson Street; and a scurrying, but thorough sweeping of all vestibules, steps, and walks by severely capped maids, as dourly proper as their mistresses indoors.

The eyebrows of all broom-wielders shot upwards as an official car of the San Francisco police swung suddenly to the curb in front of number one hundred twelve and disgorged Inspector Bailey and Lieutenant Mayhew. The two men crossed the sidewalk and paused for a moment at the odd little plank gate; Bailey to light a cigarette and Mayhew to size up the place by daylight. Mayhew took in the multicolored brick, the tortured roof, the general appearance of old-world quaintness without a scrap of expression on his dark face. Then his gaze lifted suddenly to the right.

Through a window-pane so spotless as to be invisible, he met the look of a pair of black, brilliant eyes in a face with the color and surface texture of a withered crabapple. The face drew back as he watched it, frowning under the lace of its little cap, and two hands lifted knitting into view. The woman was very old, very clean, and inexpressibly ugly; and she made no pretense of hiding her indignant scorn over the arrival of the police.

“We aren’t being appreciated,” Mayhew told Bailey. Bailey followed his glance.

“Neither was the Edwards woman,” Bailey pointed out. “They’re a damned proper bunch in this neck of the woods. Old families. They resent it when a skeleton pops into view, though their closets must be chock full of them. However….”

Mayhew touched Bailey’s arm with sudden decision. “Let’s go have a word with the old lady. She can’t do any more than refuse to see us. If she is willing to talk, she ought to know something worth telling.”

Bailey shook his head. “You’re a bear for punishment. But lead the way.”

Mayhew rapped with the old-fashioned knocker, and a butler who was all of seventy and crippled with rheumatism, opened the door and asked their business. Mayhew requested a moment’s talk with the elderly lady at the upstairs window.

“You’re speaking of Miss Ophelia Tannerton, sir. I’ll see if she’s in to you, sir. Pardon me, sir.” He creaked away on his ancient spindling legs, leaving the door on the chain.

“And be damned to you, sir,” Bailey smirked, doing an imitation of the butler’s tottering walk. “It’s this way, sir. We’re aristocrats, sir. And you’re the dirty, dirty cops, sir.” He pranced until his mood collapsed into sour disgust. “Hell,” he brought out, flatly.

Mayhew’s mouth barely twitched. He had moments of worrying about Inspector Bailey, who was, to Mayhew’s notion, a little too hare-brained for a police officer.

The butler returned after a while of waiting. He opened the door warily, and with evident disapproval, and looked anxiously at the feet of the two detectives before he allowed them to step upon his immaculate carpet. Then the elderly man turned, and with a not-too-friendly gesture indicated that they might follow him upstairs. Mayhew caught the musty, still odor of the old house; thought “Dry rot” to himself, and trod the stair-case with a thoughtful expression on his features.

They came into a room that was a Victorian decorator’s dream. There were what-nots everywhere. Bailey made the mistake of sitting upon one of them, thinking it a kind of deformed stool, until Miss Tannerton asked him to move himself. “That’s a tabouret,” she informed him chillingly. “Graves has removed the art objects to dust it. Have a chair if you will, sir.”

Bailey blustered into a chair, with a sharp look of annoyance on his face. Miss Tannerton turned to Mayhew, sitting large and dignified opposite her. “And what is it you wished to speak to me about, Mr…. ?”

“Lieutenant Mayhew,” he supplied; and indicating Bailey with a glance—“this is Inspector Bailey of the San Francisco Police.”

Miss Tannerton made no mention of any pleasure she might feel at making their acquaintance. Instead, she gave Mayhew a look of blunt interrogation out of her amazingly black eyes. But it was Bailey who next spoke. He has said that it makes him mad the way people always ignore him to listen to Mayhew; and he’s sure that it’s simply because Mayhew is bigger.

Bailey leaned forward with an aggressive motion, and stuck a quarrelsome finger in the direction of Miss Tannerton. “We want to know all you’ve seen out of that window. We saw you watching. What do you know about the Edwards woman—especially what did you see that might have a bearing on her death?

Miss Tannerton clipped her lips together, and Bailey has said that he had a feeling she would have buttoned them if she could. Three stitches were knitted carefully into her work before she answered. Then: “I know nothing, gentlemen.” The word ‘gentlemen’ bore a faint, ironical accent. “Nothing at all, I can assure you.”

Bailey moved quickly, impatiently. He brought his open fist down on the arm of his chair, frowning meanwhile at the woman in front of him; then he opened his mouth as if to speak; closed it, and looked at Mayhew. When Mayhew lifted the heavy line of his brow, Bailey waved him wearily into the fray. For a little while there was tense silence, during which Miss Tannerton made atrocious mistakes in her knitting.

When Mayhew began talking, it was in a perfectly natural manner. It was as if he presumed that the spare old woman across from him were in an entirely friendly mood. “It’s this way, Miss Tannerton; though perhaps I shouldn’t be taking you so much into our confidence. We think that there may have been something peculiar about Miss Edwards’ death. I’m not saying it was murder, you understand. And I’m sure that you won’t repeat what we tell you confidentially.” The ramrod back of Miss Tannerton relaxed ever so slightly in the direction of the cushion of her chair. Mayhew went on in a tone that indicated all of San Francisco might be listening at the key-hole. “There was some very strange circumstances in Miss Edwards’ dying. We have good cause to believe….” He looked round, and it seemed to the annoyed Bailey that he caught the merest flicker of a wink. “… that there has been an effort to mislead the police in this matter. Naturally that makes the affair even more serious than we had at first supposed. A great deal more serious. And, Miss Tannerton—it is upon good, intelligent citizens of your standing that the police must depend, in cases where there has been deliberate tampering with the truth.”

It was the longest speech Bailey had heard out of Mayhew. At the same time, he could not help but notice how smooth and swift Miss Tannerton’s knitting had become. The merest shadow of pink had crept into the sallow parchment of her cheeks. Mayhew went on, more adroitly than Bailey could have believed possible. “I understand how a lady of your-breeding would hesitate to be connected with this sort of thing. But, believe me, it’s pretty important to the police to have the kind of help you can give us.” Miss Tannerton looked up to smile, just a little. Bailey almost fell out of his chair.

Mayhew made the rest of it sound actually believable. “Now, Miss Tannerton, I noticed upon getting out of the car how alert and wise you looked, up here in your pleasant window. It occurred to me that you were probably just the person we needed. Someone too shrewd to let things happen under her very nose without seeing them and weighing them in her mind. Someone who knew the neighborhood like a book; understood character, and wasn’t fooled by pretense. Seeing you, I felt that I must talk to you. Of course, we knew that it was inconsiderate of us to barge in on you….”

Miss Tannerton laid down her knitting to put out a skinny, denying hand. “Oh, no, Officer. You’re perfectly welcome. And I’m glad to help.” Her smile even included the dumfounded Bailey this time. Then she picked up a silken cord by her chair and pulled it. The butler teetered in, scorned the police, and bowed to his mistress. “You may bring us some sherry, Graves. We might as well be sociable while we’re talking about poor Miss Edwards.”

The sherry arrived on a silver tray. It was a mellow old wine, delicately flavored; and even Bailey, who prefers a drink called a Singapore Sling, was moved to admiration. The conversation went forward quite easily while the sherry was being drunk. Miss Tannerton discussed Mabel Edwards; reviewed material that Mayhew already knew; and finally got around to the discovery of the body.

“I’m afraid I was a bit upset that morning,” she admitted with a faint tone of regret. “I—I may have said something to one of your officers that you might have misunderstood.” Her bright black eyes searched Mayhew’s noncommittal face. “You see, we here in the neighborhood have had years of that young woman’s foolishness … all sorts of odd goings on. For instance, she kept an alligator in her front yard for a while. And it hasn’t been six months since we practically forced her to get rid of a totem-pole she’d set up just inside the gate. So, it might be understandable to you…. I mean, my telling the officer that the young woman had come to the end you might expect from her foolish behavior. Suicide, I meant. It seemed to fit in with the rest of her irrational acts.”

Mayhew spoke without any special display of curiosity. “Just what was it that you said to the officer on the morning the body was discovered?”

“Why … I said….” She puckered her brow as if remembering. “It seems to me now that it was just a remark about her killing herself. I don’t remember the exact words. My maid had come and told me of the body being discovered; and some odd idea came over me to go and tell the officers that we’d expected as much, here in the nighborhood. We knew how foolish the young woman was. But—No, I can’t recall my exact words.”

Mayhew did not press her to remember. “And now about the death itself. Did you notice anything from your window that might have some bearing on this—any unusual callers, for instance?”

“Do you mean early in the morning, before the discovery of the body? The only person I saw then was that odd little man in the green coat. He came very early: it must have been no later than seven. I had just sat down here to have my breakfast by the window, when I saw him knocking at Miss Edwards’ front door. Then he went around the side of the house to the rear. It wasn’t much more than a minute later till he came back. He stood at the front corner of the house, and acted queerly; then he just fell down all in a heap. I thought he was intoxicated, and I had Graves call the officers to remove him. That’s how Miss Edwards’ body came to be discovered.”

“And have you seen this man since then?”

“No. Not once.”

“Nor any other people at Miss Edwards’ house that morning?”

“None.”

“Had you ever seen this man before that morning?”

“Oh, yes. Several times, during the last few months. He usually came to Miss Edwards’ house along about six o’clock in the evening. He never stayed very long. There was something about his visits—his manner, or the quickness with which he always went away—that gave me the idea he had confidential business with Miss Edwards. But of course that’s just an impression.”

The little old lady took a sip of sherry and went on. “Though his visit the night before was the strangest of all.” She watched the look of narrow brightness come into Mayhew’s eyes; and it obviously pleased her. “It was just before dark, that I saw him go into her house. He stayed a few minutes, and then came out in a dreadful hurry. Oh, practically running! And—the oddest, most unexplainable thing was the hand!”

Bailey knew that the little old woman was teasing them along with her dramatics, and it made him angry. But Mayhew sat stolidly, listening placidly, with only that look of intense brightness in his eye to betray how eagerly he followed Miss Tannerton’s recital. Miss Tannerton sipped sherry and watched them merrily over the brim of her wine-glass. “At first, when he struggled to get away, I thought that his coat was caught somehow in the door; that the lock had fastened on it, or something. But then, when I looked closely—it was twilight, you see, and the street lights weren’t even on, and there was just a little bit of fog—but when I watched more carefully, I saw that there was a hand holding the little man’s coat. It looked like a woman’s hand. He pulled and pulled, and at last got away, and the hand went back indoors.”

“And then?”

“He just scurried up that front walk. He was out of sight in no time. You can’t imagine how quickly he traveled.”

“Oh yes, I can,” Mayhew said dreamily, remembering his adventure the night before.

“Do you want to know what I think of it?” Her black eyes shone with the desire to express her opinion. “I think that he and Miss Edwards had quarrelled, and that he got away before she had finished saying what she wanted to say. Maybe their confidential business hadn’t gone so well!”

“Perhaps not,” Mayhew agreed, his mind obviously occupied with other thoughts. After a moment he brought out a question: “Are you sure that this was Miss Edwards who had hold of his coat?”

She nodded briskly. “Of course I’m sure.”

“Why are you sure?”

“Because Miss Edwards was the only person inside the house.”

Mayhew did not quite hide his surprise at this comprehensive knowledge of the contents of the neighbor’s homes; and Miss Tannerton saw his surprise, and blushed a little. “I mean,” she explained a little uncomfortably, “that I couldn’t help noticing who entered and left Miss Edwards’ house. And I know that only Miss Edwards was inside.”

A short awkward silence fell upon the three of them then. Mayhew studied the toe of his shoe; Miss Tannerton studied the pattern of her dress; and Inspector Bailey studied his empty sherry-glass. When the silence ended, it was with another question from Mayhew. “What other regular callers had Miss Edwards?”

“No one that I knew by name,” Miss Tannerton said promptly. “There was a big woman who always wears furs; she came often, and seemed to be a very good friend of Miss Edwards’. There was a man once in a while: he’s over thirty, very pale blonde hair, and a little moustache. I believe I remember hearing Miss Edwards call him James. Then there was a blonde young woman, very childish-looking; and a girl who resembled Miss Edwards very much: red hair, and all. Must have been a relation of some sort. Then, too, there was a dark young man, quite goodlooking. He must have been Miss Edwards’ sweetheart.” She gave Mayhew a shrewd glance. “You can’t help seeing things like … like that.”

“Did any of these people call on Miss Edwards during the Saturday evening? I mean, before eight o’clock. According to the police surgeon, she must have been dead not later than eight. What callers did you notice if any, during the early evening?”

Miss Tannerton turned to look out of her window, as if to place her mind back in the evening before Mabel Edwards’ death. “I’m sure that there was no one,” she said at last, slowly. “No one came after that odd little man in the green overcoat. I remember distinctly that there were no lights on in Miss Edwards’ house that night. She must have stayed in there in the dark, until she … until whatever happened to her, happened.”

“And before this man in the green overcoat came? No one else was there?”

“Oh, yes!” Miss Tannerton lifted her gaze quickly to Mayhew’s. “Do you want to know everyone who was there?”

Mayhew was frowning with some puzzle of his own; but he answered at once. “I’d like to know. Yes.”

“There was the yard man, of course. He came Saturday afternoons about three-thirty. He takes care of most of the yards in this neighborhood. I have him here on Tuesdays. Well, I noticed him working in Miss Edwards’ yard last Saturday afternoon, as usual. He was there when she came home. I don’t think she spoke to him. She went inside right away, as if she were in a hurry.”

“And the yard man stayed outside?”

“Oh, indeed yes!” Miss Tannerton crammed into the three words her horror of yard men who would dare come indoors. “He went right on working.”

“Have you any idea of what time Miss Edwards arrived home that afternoon?”

Miss Tannerton thoughtfully refilled their sherry-glasses, before she answered. “Yes, I’m quite sure that I know. I remember that as she went inside, the postman stopped at her gate and dropped something into her letter-box there. Our postman is very regular; he goes past here at eleven o’clock every morning, and at four o’clock each afternoon. That would make it just about four that she went into her house.”

“Four o’clock,” Mayhew repeated, as though making a notation in a mental note-book.

Miss Tannerton took up her story between sips of sherry. “And it wasn’t much later that her housemaid came.” A faraway look settled in Miss Tannerton’s black eyes. “And that’s an odd thing, too; now that I recall it.”

Bailey has said that getting information out of Miss Tannerton was like picking the meat out of a nut: bit by bit, and the main requirement being patience. But Mayhew thought that Miss Tannerton did quite well by them. He leaned toward her now, and his expression indicated that he expected great things to come.

“The housemaid went inside,” Miss Tannerton continued, “at about four-thirty. I believe that’s her regular time. You see, she didn’t live in at Miss Edwards’, but came by the day; and she had Saturday mornings and all day Sunday off, according to my maid. At any rate, I always noticed her coming late Saturdays, just in time to get dinner, I think. And last Saturday, now that I remember it, was unusual because she didn’t stay. Not more than a few minutes. When she came out, she stood talking to the yard man for a little while, and then she went away.”

“And anyone else?”

“The big woman, the friend of Miss Edwards who always wore the furs; she came afterwards, but I went downstairs to dinner, and didn’t see her leave.”

“But you said that you were sure Miss Edwards was alone in the house when the man in the green coat called, later.”

“And I am sure. Graves mentioned to me at dinner, that he had seen the woman in the furs come out Miss Edwards’ front door and go round to the back and hide behind a shrub, and didn’t I think that it was odd. I told him nothing was odd at that house, but to keep an eye on the woman nevertheless. And he told me later that she had gone away through the back gate.”

Bailey could not quite repress a groan; and Mayhew reproved him with a stern look. Bailey said that Miss Tannerton deliberately kept things back, so as to surprise them with unexpected facts; but Mayhew liked the way she told her story. He thought she gave the thing punch.

FIVE

Some minutes later, having finished their sherry and congratulated Miss Ophelia Tannertori upon her sharp-wittedness, Lieutenant Mayhew and Inspector Bailey walked through the gate of one hundred twelve and tried the door of the little house.

“Our Miss Tannerton could write all the diaries in the neighborhood, I think, and never miss a trick,” Bailey was saying, when the door swung open easily under his touch. They looked into a big gloomy room, shadowy because of its drawn shades that shut out the morning sunlight. “Hello!” Bailey exclaimed. “The damned door was open! That shouldn’t have been left like that!” He stared about him in the half-light.

Mayhew was trying to make up his mind about the room. It had elements of both a luxurious living room, and a sculptor’s studio. To his left, set in the outer wall of the room, was an immense fireplace done in glistening red tile. In front of it, and facing the hearth, was a long dark-blue, richly upholstered davenport, flanked by two overstuffed chairs. The fireplace, the heavy furniture, and the little table that held a bowl of faded flowers and several ashtrays, seemed to constitute the living-room section of the place. But to his right, and to the rear of the room, were all of the paraphernalia of the artist in clay. There were shelves upon which were untidily piled tools, broken and unfinished statuary, and gobs of apparently useless dried clay. At the back of the room, where it faced upon the yard, was a large alcove finished on three sides with windows. In the center of this alcove, upon a modelling stand, stood a shapeless mass wrapped in burlap windings. It was quite evidently the last statue which Miss Edwards had worked upon; and Mayhew thought, glancing at it, that the hands which wound it in its moist wrappings had not been very far from death.

There were two doors on the wall to his right. Mayhew had moved to throw the first one open, when a sound beyond it stopped him. Bailey had been stalking towards the fire-place; he also stopped and listened. The sound came again. It was the sound of a woman’s weeping.

“Somebody’s here before us,” Bailey said in a low voice, reaching beyond Mayhew to open the door. The two men stared into a bedroom, very prettily furnished in blonde maple; and at the woman stretched upon the pink satin counterpane of the bed. The woman heard them suddenly, and scrambled to her feet. Her face was reddened and distorted from prolonged weeping. She wore a plain dress of some dark cotton material that appeared to be a uniform.

She was quite evidently angry at their intrusion; her voice was shrill. “Who’re you, and what are you doing here?” she shot at them, wiping her eyes fiercely on the back of her hands. “Haven’t you any respect for a house of death? Newspaper men, I’ll bet.”

“We are the police,” Bailey said sweetly, entering the room to stare more closely at its occupant. “And you’ll do us the favor of telling us who you are. And what you’re doing here. As you say, this is a house of death. Naughty, naughty! Mustn’t break into such places, my good woman!”

She stared at him for a moment as if she were looking at a madman; it was apparent that his nonchalance was unbelievable to her. “But … but I’m Edna McGuffin. I belong here.”

“Edna McGuffin!” Bailey twisted the unhandsome name in his mouth in such a way that it sounded ridiculous. The woman flushed, and plucked with one work-roughened hand at the neck of her dress. Bailey smirked at Mayhew. “She belongs here,” he said mockingly.

Mayhew shook his head in a way that showed he did not quite approve of Bailey’s levity at such a time; and turned his attention to the woman.

“You are Miss Edwards’ maid,” he stated, as if repeating a fact she had already told him. “Do you have a key to this house?” The woman gave him a frozen stare and a mechanical nod. “You came this morning to do the housework—didn’t you already know that Miss Edwards was dead?”

“I knew it,” she said dully. “I thought maybe there was some little thing I could do, now. Maybe pack away her things. I—I can’t believe she is dead. She was always so good to me.” Edna McGuffin turned her head suddenly to hide the convulsion of grief that shook her. “She was the only one who ever considered me in any way…. I just…. I just can’t—” The voice died in sobbings.

Bailey stared at the pale-blue ceiling. “Damn!” he whistled between his teeth. “More dramatics, huh? Devil take the women!”

Mayhew let Miss McGuffin cry in peace while he prowled the bedroom. He made detailed examinations of all articles on the dressing table, most particularly the comb. When the maid had again gotten control of herself, he came back and sat down on the edge of the bed facing her.

“I’d like you to tell me about the last time that you saw Miss Edwards,” he told her. “When it was, and all details that you can remember.”

She wrung her hands, and stared at Bailey in bitter resentment, as if fearful of his gibes. But at last she gave Mayhew the information he had asked for. “I last saw Miss Edwards in this room, sir. That was day before yesterday afternoon—Saturday, that was—when I came back after my half-day off to get dinner. She was lying in here on the bed, but not undressed; and she was crying. When I stepped inside the door, I heard her call my name, and so instead of going into the kitchen as I usually did, I stepped into this bedroom. She didn’t have much to say to me, sir; just that she wasn’t feeling right and for me to go away at once. I asked her if I mightn’t bring her a pot of tea, or get the doctor for her; but she said no. She said that she felt wretched, that things had gone terribly wrong for her—she didn’t explain that any further, sir—and said for me to go, that she didn’t want to eat. Then I thought maybe I could do just one little thing more for her, and I tried to slip off her shoes. And … and she….” Again sobbings shook the angular figure under its plain uniform, and the unbeautiful face turned from them. Edna McGuffin was forty-ish, and thin; but the ravages of grief had made her extremely ugly. “She did this, sir.” The woman turned her thin cheek, and lifted the mouse-colored hair from across her ear. A half-healed scar showed in the flesh near her jaw-line. “She kicked me. And it was so unlike her, sir. I knew then that something really was terribly wrong, and that I’d best go. So I begged her pardon, and went out. I hadn’t even got my coat off, nor my hat. I went right away through the front door.”

Something moved in Mayhew’s face, that turned its usually dour uncommunicativeness into open pity. He swung about to look at Bailey, but if he had expected the woman’s humble story to move that sprightly officer to deeper emotions, he was disappointed. Bailey was smirking, and triumph glittered in his eye.

“Haven’t I told you something of my theory of this thing?” he jeered. “Wasn’t it I who suggested that the Edwards woman was in here flopping around in bed, crying and having hysterics; and finally getting up and going out to hang herself? Wasn’t that my story? Well, you damned fool, here’s corroboration for it. It proves my idea was right in the first place. The Edwards dame was a screw-ball from the word go. And by—”

Miss McGuffin cut off his words by leaping at him like a wild thing, with fingers curved into claws, and a raking nail on the end of each finger. There were no gentle instincts of merely slapping or hair-pulling in Miss McGuffin; she went after Inspector Bailey in the manner of a Bengal tiger, and after three seconds in her clutches Bailey showed marks of the fray. “You shan’t talk about her like that … you—you beast! I’ll stop you! I’ll….” But Mayhew had her about the waist; and when Mayhew pulls, things let go. Between the two of them, they got Miss McGuffin safely into the closet, and the door fastened.

Bailey fell over upon the bed with his eyes closed. “Why, oh God, are women?” he moaned. His words were punctuated by screams and kickings from the closet.

“Yes. Why are they? And, since you know so much about them, why do you insist on rubbing every damned one of them the wrong way? Bailey, you’ve got the damnedest knack for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, of any man I ever knew. We’ve still got to question the McGuffin woman. That means we’ll lose time, till she cools off.” Mayhew lit a cigarette and smoked furiously, and stared in resentment at the sprawled figure on the bed.

Bailey staggered wearily to his feet. “I’ve got to mop up. That damned wildcat has dug me up like a potato-patch,” he said, disregarding any mixture of metaphors. “Here. This is the bath.” He opened the other door, besides the closet door, which opened from the inner rear wall of the bedroom. A bath in white-and-blue tile was revealed. Bailey went into it.

While he splashed at the wash-basin, Mayhew decided to look through the remainder of the house. It was a truly little house—having just the floor space of a good sized apartment—and a short walk took him back through the living room, and through another door into the kitchen. It was an extremely neat, cream-colored kitchen, and showed a different kind of care than that which the studio section of the living-room had received. There were rows of pots, dishes in mathematical rows upon the cupboard shelves, and a little stove, and an immaculate sink. Mayhew glanced over the room carefully, and then tried the back door. It was locked with a nightlatch; Mayhew opened it and looked out into the space of the wooden wash-room where Mabel Edwards’ body had been found.

He was absently studying the mechanical performance of the lock on the back door, when the merest scratch of sound reached him from the front room. Mayhew is an extremely big man, but he can move with almost incredible swiftness. He was into the front room, and had made a flying tackle upon the fleeing figure of Miss McGuffin before more than five seconds could have passed. Miss McGuffin tried to wield upon Mayhew the nails she had used on Inspector Bailey, but she was hampered by an armful of clothing, dark and heavy material, that impeded her movements. She and Mayhew sprawled to the floor in a heap, and over her struggling figure, Mayhew caught sight of Bailey running from the bath-room with his face dripping and his eyes round with surprise.

“Hell and damnation!” Bailey swore, rushing to aid his fellow officer. “Now how did she get out of the closet?”

Miss McGuffin landed a neat punch with her heel into Inspector Bailey’s solar plexus. Bailey sat down with a look of incredulity spreading across his face. For once he seemed unable to speak.

Mayhew is peculiar in one respect; he feels no reluctance about hitting a woman in a fight. Miss McGuffin dug a heel into his groin, and worked away for dear life; but instead of admitting himself beaten and retiring gracefully as possible, Mayhew maneuvered Miss McGuffin into the correct position and let fly a hay-maker to her chin. Miss McGuffin, for a split second, wore the same incredulous look as Bailey. Then her eyes glazed and she fell back into the bundle of clothing she had been carrying. Mayhew got up, dusted himself, and found a fresh cigarette in his pocket.

“What are you staring at? Can’t you believe that swat you gave her really knocked her out?” Bailey grumbled, also getting to his feet.

“I’m looking at that bunch of clothes she’s carrying,” Mayhew said calmly. “What do you make of them?” He blew a great gust of smoke at the ceiling; and then went to the front window and raised the blind, so that the room was garishly bright in the sunshine.

Bailey looked indifferently at the garments Miss McGuffin lay among. “Some of the Edwards’ woman’s clothes, I’ll betcha,” he pronounced. “Looks like a classy outfit. Not quite in our little pal Edna’s line.”

Mayhew bent and lifted a short black coat with an immense standing collar of black fox fur. “Doesn’t this remind you of something?” he asked Bailey casually.

Bailey smirked. “Dear old Sherlock,” he gibed. “If he hasn’t found the evidence, I’ll eat it.” His tone turned gruff. “What do you take me for, Mayhew? An idiot? Of course I see the black fur on the thing; and our little friend here trying to sneak it out doesn’t look so hot, either, does it?” He stared morosely at the limp scrawniness of Miss McGuffin. “Let’s take her down to headquarters and put her through it. She’ll talk, I think.” He kicked the other garments about, to make out what they were. There was a skirt to match the black jacket, and a pale pink blouse, and a little hat with a green feather stuck into its crown.

Mayhew found a chair and let himself gently down into it. “Wait till she comes out of it, and hear what she has to say. She might have reasons, you know.” Bailey made a scornful noise in his throat as a reply, but suffered himself to wait. After a while, Miss McGuffin sat up shakily and felt of her chin.

“You’re no gentleman,” she accused, staring at Mayhew where he sat placidly with the black jacket across his knees. “And this suit is mine, in case you think you can take it away from me. Miss Edwards gave it to me, over a week ago.”

“She wore it last Saturday, didn’t she? Wasn’t she dressed in this suit when you saw her lying here on the bed?” Mayhew inched forward, his eyes suddenly piercing and narrow.

“Yes. She wore it last Saturday. But she had offered it to me last week, and I just hadn’t taken it away. I … I want it now. It’s something to remember her by. You can’t imagine how much I cared for Miss Edwards. You’ve never worked for the women I worked for, before I came here…. I was a slave, I tell you. But she was kind to me. Now I want her suit. I’ll never wear it; I’ll just keep it safe—”

“I’ll tell the world you’ll never wear it,” Bailey growled, prowling the space before the fire-place in anger. “You’ll never even get out of here with it. Now, come on, woman. Tell us your real reason for trying to steal this particular suit.”

Miss McGuffin sank into sulky silence; not looking at Mayhew or Bailey, but picking a mended place in the skirt of her uniform. “Damn you!” Bailey cried, coming and standing in front of her. “Do you want me to take you to headquarters and turn you over to those dicks down there? You’ll talk then, dammit, or they’ll tear you to pieces.”

Immediate and intense fright sprang into the eyes of the housemaid. She cringed away from Bailey; her throat worked in spasmodic swallowings; and her hands, plucking at the neck of her dress, trembled. “It’s the truth, what I told you,” she got out, hoarsely. “Honest, it is.”

Bailey snorted in contempt; but Mayhew was leaning back in his chair, blowing leisurely smokerings at the ceiling. “You could help us quite a bit, you know, if you were willing,” he said, as quietly as though the other two were not frantic with fear and stirred with anger. “For instance, you could give us some confidential information about your mistress. What kind of woman she was; what her financial position seemed to be; and who were her closest friends and relatives.”

Bailey gave him a glance that implied that he was out of his head; and the woman crouched on the floor seemed not to hear.

“Who is the little man in the green overcoat?” Mayhew asked in a very calm voice.

Edna McGuffin shook her head. “I never knew,” she answered dully. “Miss Edwards never let me stay in the house while he was here. She made me go and sit in the back porch, and close the door to the kitchen. They had some kind of a secret together; but I never knew what it was. And I wouldn’t risk my job by prying into it.”

“Had your mistress many friends?”

Again the mechanical head-shaking. “Not many. Mrs. Sewell and Miss Campbell were the only ones who came to see her regularly.”

“She had a sweetheart?”

A brisk nod this time. “Mr. Philip Hellman. They were engaged.”

“And relatives?”

“Just her two cousins. Mr. Pierce and Miss Maddox. And none of them seemed to be good friends, even if they were related.”

“What did you think of Miss Edwards’ money affairs. Did she seem to have plenty?”

“Always plenty. And she was so generous with everybody. So good all the time, and never turned anybody down. I just can’t believe that such a good person is dead—has killed herself! It … It’s not—” Miss McGuffin started her monotonous sobbing again. Bailey went and stood by the window, cursing. Mayhew smoked on in silence.

Miss McGuffin looked up suddenly through her tears. “You’ll make fun because I say this—but the Druid did it. When she started it, I told her it was an evil thing…. It wasn’t the kind of statue she usually made. And I told her it was bad luck to model a thing like that. It was like bringing old horrible things to life … that Druid!”

Bailey turned on her in exasperation. “And what the Hell is a Druid?” he demanded angrily.

“The Druids were ancient inhabitants of Britain,” Miss McGuffin mumbled, as if repeating verbatim an explanation she had heard from someone else: Miss Edwards, Mayhew thought. “They were tree-worshippers, and made human sacrifices to their tree-gods. They … they could cut out a person’s heart without killing him right away; and hold the heart up for a sacrifice while the … while the person looked at it.” She shivered suddenly, with her face gone ghastly. “I can’t explain how awful it seemed, having her work on a thing like that. Even the sketches were terrible.”

Bailey swallowed; even he looked sober at the explanation made by the housemaid. Mayhew got out of his chair and strolled towards the alcove at the rear of the room; and raised the blinds there to throw light on the swaddled figure upon the modelling stand.

“This is the Druid?” he asked Miss McGuffin.

She made a frightened pushing motion with her two hands. “Don’t unwrap it, sir. It’s an evil, evil thing. Like a mummy it is, now. Wrapped up and harmless. But you shouldn’t….”

Slowly, round and round, Mayhew was taking the burlap windings from the thing.

SIX

“He’s a hell of a looking fellow,” Bailey whistled, staring at the figure in clay that Mayhew had unwrapped. “Look at those eyes. Leap out at you, somehow, don’t they? Ugly devil…. Now why in hell would a woman want to work on a thing like that?”

“God knows,” Mayhew said fervently, and also staring.

“Looks like moss hanging over his ears here. What’s this in his hair? A crown of twigs? Humph…. Look. What’s this he’s holding in his hands?”

Edna McGuffin had crept close, as if fascinated by the horror of the statue she hated; and now her voice rose on a quavering note. “It’s a human heart he’s got. Miss Edwards explained to me about it. He’s just made a sacrifice, and he’s supposed to be holding the heart and staring off into the first light of dawn. He’s the priest of the Druids; and he’s got a kind of ec … ecstasy, Miss Edwards said. I can’t endure to look at the evil thing. He … he kind of comes alive if you look at him long enough….” Her eyes dropped away from the clay figure, and she shivered.

Mayhew nodded. “Yes; he’d come alive all right. She’s put a kind of….” Mayhew stopped to grope for words. “… a kind of living wickedness into the thing….”

The figure of the Druid was somewhat less than life size, and showed the body of a man from the waist up. The body was arched slightly forward in an attitude of fanatical eagerness; the face was set in an expression of unutterable joy; and the fingers that clutched the dripping heart were talons. It fascinated by repulsion. Mayhew tore his gaze away.

“It’s that damned lower lip that gets you,” Bailey said musingly, and still staring. “Look at the way it’s drawn down from his teeth…. Like he’s almost ready to take a bite out of the….”

Miss McGuffin burst out with a horrified cry; and Bailey did not finish his sentence. Mayhew picked up the burlap wrappings to re-cover the statue.

“The wrappings should be damp,” Edna McGuffin offered. “You see, the clay must be kept wet so that it won’t harden before the statue is finished.”

Mayhew made a wry face. “Who’s to finish the thing?” he asked bluntly.

The woman stopped and stood silent for a moment. Then: “I’d forgotten. I can’t seem to remember about Miss Edwards. It seems as if she’s coming home any minute….” The housemaid walked disconsolately towards the front of the room. “You’d best cover the thing,” she said back over her shoulder.

Mayhew and Sara were having a late lunch in the hotel restaurant when Bailey again appeared. He slid into a seat beside Sara, grinned, and picked up a menu.

“I don’t like you,” Sara said pointedly.

Bailey appeared scandalized. “Why, Mrs. Mayhew! Whatever makes you so unkind today? Wasn’t it only last night I was your fair-haired child?”

“So you were,” she said, bitter-sweet. “But today I hear you’ve been aiding and abetting my husband in his murder-madness. You’re no friend of mine now.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Bailey clucked. “Mrs. Mayhew, on my word of honor, I was led. Yes, practically carried into this investigation. It was no concern of mine whether Miss Edwards had met a fair death or foul, but up pops this husband of yours and forces me to use my intellect. Upon using it, I am further forced to conclude that there are strong indications of monkey business, right on the surface where I should have seen them all the time. So what? So I’m working.”

“I’m not forgiving you,” Sara replied severely.

Mayhew looked up from his pie. “What about the fur on the jacket?”

“The same. I took the jacket down to the lab, and Untermyer made God knows how many tests, and decides that the scraps we got out of the rope and the fur on the jacket are from one and the same animal.”

“From Miss Edwards!” Sara cried, forgetting to be angry.

“No indeed,” Bailey reproved her. “Miss Edwards—nor any other woman for that matter—ever grew her own fur. Though the Lord knows it would be cheaper…. However. This fur was grown by a member of the genus foxus. Fox, to you. Black fox.”

“So the Edwards woman was hanged while she was still wearing her clothing. And shoes can be presumed,” Mayhew rumbled through a bite of meringue.

“Sure. Only none of her shoes showed any marks from kicking a brick wall. After you’d rushed off to keep this luncheon date with your wife, I got our McGuffin into the closet to see if a pair of the Edwards woman’s shoes could be missing. She said that none of them were; and she showed me the pair that went with the black suit and all…. I’m open to suggestion. What do you make of the damned thing?”

“Murder,” Mayhew said pleasantly, taking a last bite of crust. “A good murder; neat; looked a whole lot like suicide. Except for one thing that made it not quite good enough.”

“What’s that?” Bailey asked.

“Hanging her against the brick wall barefooted. It shows lack of imagination. And—there’s another thing—the little guy in the green overcoat shouldn’t have run away.”

“Oh, him….” Bailey made a large airy gesture, and then struck a match to his cigarette. “He was just scared silly. Charles said he was puking all over—”

Sara laid down her fork. “Pul-ease, Mr. Bailey!”

Bailey had the grace to blush. “Excuse me, Mrs. Mayhew. I’m forgetting you’re a lady. But look, Mayhew: lots of people duck out when they find a dead body suddenly. It bowls them over. All they want to do is to get off somewhere and get over their fright. Running away doesn’t mean anything—”

“All right. But why should he come back in the middle of the night, last night when Sara and I were out there?”

Bailey took refuge by summoning a waiter and ordering lunch. Then he smoked for several moments in silence.

“You should smoke less and eat more,” Sara pointed out helpfully; but Bailey seemed not to hear her.

“You’ve got something there,” he said at last, slowly. “Look, this little guy seems to have been the last person to call at her house Saturday night. Maybe he killed her.”

“You’re forgetting what Miss Tannerton saw. Remember? The hand that caught his overcoat and tried to pull him back indoors? That proves that the Edwards woman was alive, and indoors, when he went away.”

“He could have come back,” Bailey said blithely. “Come back, crawled in at the rear somewhere, and murdered her.”

“How?”

“Throttling her. Throwing a loop over her head and choking the life out of her.”

Mayhew looked thoughtfully across the table. “There’s something not quite right about that idea,” he said finally.

Bailey waited in impatience for him to go on.

“It’s this. The Edwards woman had fought the rope like mad. As if it were the only thing that were killing her…. Look—she didn’t have a hell of a lot of time before she died; and she must have spent all of it trying to dig the rope out of her throat. Now, if you’ve got somebody down and you’re strangling him….”

“I’m not going to be the dummy again,” Sara put in bitterly.

“No, dear. Now, if you’re strangling a person, he’s going to fight you.” He looked hopefully from one to the other of his hostile audience. “Can’t you see it?” he begged.

“I don’t want to see it,” Sara pointed out with gentle sarcasm. “I’ve had enough of murder in my day.” It was true; before their marriage, Mayhew had snatched his bride from the clutches of a homicidal maniac.

“Draw us a picture,” Bailey gibed, handing Mayhew a menu; but Mayhew took him seriously.

“All right. Here it is as I see it. The Edwards woman was hanged; hanged with her clothes on, and somewhere inside her house out of the public view. Such business isn’t one you carry out on a rickety back porch. Then she was stripped of her clothes, a nightgown put on her, and her body moved to the place where Charles found it.”

“O. K. Granted a motive that we haven’t found yet; and granting it’s murder. Still—why move the body to the back porch? Why not leave it hanging indoors, if that’s where she died?”

“I’ve thought of that. And the only logical idea that has occurred to me is that the murderer might have wanted the body to be discovered on Sunday morning. The difference between hanging the woman up indoors and hanging her outdoors is mainly this: if she were indoors she wouldn’t have been found until Monday, when the maid came to begin another week’s work. As it was, she was discovered early Sunday. Of course, this is just theory. But it appeals to me as having sense in it somewhere. What the advantage was in having her found so soon after death I don’t know; but I’ve a hunch it meant a very real benefit to the person who killed her.”

“Words, words, words,” jeered Bailey nervously. “See here, Mayhew old pal; you’re leaping at things like a locoed horse. Now I’ll admit there are some funny points about the Edwards woman’s death. But I still say there’s no evidence that it wasn’t suicide. Suicide and a lot of bamboozling around afterwards, for God knows what weird reasons; but murder—not certainly.” He breathed cigarette smoke into the dewy freshness of his salad. “You’ve got murder on the brain, Mayhew. Do you look under the bed nights?”

Mayhew ignored the gibe. “Do you mean you’re going to drop the investigation, and let it go as suicide?”

“Oh, no. No indeed. Monkey business and taxpayers mustn’t mix; as you said. Not good for the taxpayers. We’ll carry on. But we’re not leaping anywhere, or at anything. The woman’s dead; we’re admitting that.” Mayhew gave a scornful snort. “She’s dead, and there was considerable shuffling around of things after she’d died. But was she murdered? Who can say?”

“I suppose you’re waiting for the murderer to come out and say, ‘Here I am, teacher,’ or some such nonsense. I thought I had you convinced. Why the sudden return to normalcy?”

“Just my cool brain taking charge. By the way; the inquest’s this afternoon. Like to come lookee?”

Mayhew’s expression indicated an unholy joy. “And what are you going to say at the inquest?”

“Not what you’d like me to say,” chortled Bailey. “But I’m going to listen with all my might.”

The Coroner was a pompous little man with a red face and white, cottony hair, and a habit of staring at the ceiling while he asked questions of his witnesses. The jury was middle-aged, middleclass, and uncomfortably self-conscious about its duty; and to a man it seemed to resent the fact that Officer Charles had let the prize witness get away. Officer Charles was the second witness; he had been preceded by the doctor who had made the post-mortem on the body, and who had given as his opinion that the deceased had died of suffocation induced by strangling. Officer Charles told his story morosely, with a wary eye on the jury. The jury answered him with looks of disapproval.

“He needs to tell them about the cat, and his wife leaving him,” Sara whispered in Mayhew’s ear. “That’s why he’s so sad. Couldn’t they take a minute and listen?”

But Mayhew whispered back, that Bailey had heard that Mrs. Charles had relented and come home. The Coroner quit staring at the ceiling long enough to find them with his eye and frown.

“Mr. James Pierce,” boomed the Bailiff.

Mr. James Pierce seemed to be with his wife; at least, he was sitting next a lady who was like him in sleekness and sophisticated elegance. They were in front of the Mayhews by one row of chairs; and when Mr. Pierce arose, and laid his natty overcoat across the back of his seat, he looked absently behind him at the big dour man and the slender blonde Sara; without, however, appearing to see them. Then he gave his perfectly tailored suit several jerks and pats, bowed to his wife as if in apology for disturbing her, and crawled across her satin knees to the aisle. Taking his seat beside the coroner’s table, he was seen to be a man of average height, rather slender, with a pale face and nervous grey eyes. His hair, and the tiny moustache which adorned his lip, were blonde almost to the point of whiteness. Mr. Pierce folded his hands rather tightly into his lap, and in reply to the Coroner’s first question, gave his name, occupation, and the fact that he was a cousin of the, deceased.

“I last saw my cousin on the afternoon preceding her death,” he continued in a voice as neatly precise as his necktie. “She called at my office in the Strutt Building, on a matter concerning her will. After she had left the instructions she wished carried out, she went immediately away. We did not talk of any personal matters.”

“What seemed to be Miss Edwards’ mental condition? Would you say that she seemed upset?”

“A little. She was angry at someone we both knew.”

The Coroner let this go by as being of no consequence; though it seemed to Mayhew that Pierce had dragged the point in by the hair of its head and was waiting to elaborate.

The Coroner asked about Miss Edwards’ financial affairs. Mr. Pierce, looking a little crestfallen, said that her financial condition was something about which no one but Miss Edwards had known anything.

“But her will? She disposed of property in that instrument, did she not?” asked the Coroner briskly.

“Mining properties in Placer County,” Mr. Pierce rejoined indifferently. “Their value is very much open to question.”

After a few more queries which brought only nondescript replies, Mr. Pierce was relieved; and Miss Muriel Maddox was called.

Miss Maddox had hair of rich red; and Mayhew was reminded of the few strands that he had picked from the rope. In more than her hair did she resemble her dead cousin; there was even a faint tracery of likeness between her well-modeled features and the distorted and ravaged face that Mayhew had seen in the police photographs of the suicide. Miss Maddox appeared to be in her late twenties; she was slender and yet pleasantly rounded; and her clothing showed conservative good taste.

The testimony which she gave was brief, and from Mayhew’s point of view, useless. She had been so busy with her duties at the theatre that she had not seen her cousin for a period of several months preceding Miss Edwards’ death. Of her cousin’s financial or other possible worries she knew nothing. She could imagine no reason for her cousin’s taking her own life. Miss Maddox was dismissed.

The housemaid, Edna McGuffin, was the next called. She repeated for the Coroner’s benefit her story of finding Miss Edwards despondent and half-hysterical, lying on her own bed, the afternoon preceding her death. Mayhew knew the weight that such testimony must carry for the jury. He fidgeted in his chair, and frowned at Miss McGuffin.

The Bailiff next called, “Mr. Philip Hellman,” in a voice out of all proportion to the size of the room. A man was heard to get up in the rear of the room; and came forward.

Mr. Hellman, in his middle thirties, was goodlooking in a dark, well-shaven manner. His expression was decently sober; but Mayhew distrusted men who use even a trace of brilliantine. Mr. Hellman gave his occupation as broker. His relation to the deceased had been that of her fiance. He had not seen her on the day of her death; but on the day preceding—Friday—he and she had had luncheon together at a fashionable rendezvous. She had been nervous and distracted, and unlike her usual self. She had not spoken of any definite problem; but he had sensed that something was positively wrong. No; there had most certainly been no quarrel between them. Mr. Hellman’s brown eyes were properly bereaved; his manner held dignity and grief. He gave the appearance of manfully and quietly bearing his sorrow, and Mayhew felt how the sympathy of his listeners went out to him.

Miss Susan Campbell was the next to give testimony. She had seen her friend, Miss Edwards, on the afternoon of that dreadful Saturday. Had Miss Edwards hinted of the tragedy to come? Oh, dear, no! Had Miss Edwards seemed emotionally upset? Well…. Miss Susan Campbell was tiny and blonde, small-boned as a child, and with a face as prettily expressionless as a doll’s; and she wore a hat that appeared to be a lacquered strawberry-basket topped by a ribbon, a cluster of feathers, and a rose.

“I asked her to please stay for dinner,” explained Miss Campbell in a light voice. “But she would rush off. Poor Mabel…. But no; she didn’t once even hint at anything dreadful.” She gave the cottony-haired Coroner a sad little smile. “She left my house sometime about three-thirty. I never saw her again.”

Mayhew stirred in his chair, and muttered under his breath.

“Sssh!” Sara warned him.

Miss Campbell was gently got rid of. Mrs. Anita Sewell was called. A large woman wearing a long scarf of fox-furs stood up and made majestic progress toward the front of the room.

“Enter the Amazon,” Sara murmured.

Mrs. Sewell sat in the chair provided for her. A calm, handsome face, rather big of jaw, looked out between the ruddy foxes and the narrow brim of her hat. Mrs. Sewell passed time by removing her gloves; the Coroner scribbled. Then, getting down to business, he began his questioning of her. She gave her occupation as librarian. She was, she said, a widow of ten years. The Coroner asked if she had seen Miss Edwards immediately before her death? Mrs. Sewell had.

“Would you describe Miss Edwards’ behavior as in any way peculiar?” asked the Coroner, watching the antics of a fly above him.

“Most decidedly,” replied Mrs. Sewell briefly.

“Will you relate the circumstances of your meeting?”

“I will.” Mrs. Sewell’s voice was as pleasantly controlled as her face. In low, even tones she told her story.

Mayhew has moments of wanting to kick himself for not realizing the significance of that story when he first heard it. He thinks now that if he had concentrated his attention upon the words of that dignified lady, the murder of Mabel Edwards would have been solved almost at once; another life would not have been laid upon the altar of the Druid; and that evil statue would have been carted off immediately to the police station.

SEVEN

“On last Saturday afternoon, I left my home at about quarter past five,” said Mrs. Sewell. “I walked the distance between my home and Miss Edwards’. It is about a ten-minute walk, and I think that it was a few minutes before five-thirty when I knocked at her door. She made no answer whatever the first time that I knocked; and thinking that she might be in the kitchen, I knocked louder the next time. Then she answered me. Her voice seemed to come out of the bedroom window to my right; and somehow, from just hearing her speak a few words: ‘Who’s there?’ or something like that, I sensed immediately that something was wrong. I can’t explain the feeling. It came over me suddenly. I asked her at once, while I was still on the steps, if everything was all right. She said, ‘Of course,’ and then asked me to wait a moment. It was several minutes before I heard anything more from inside the house. Then she called, ‘Come in.’ I opened the front door and walked into the living room. Miss Edwards was across the room from me; and she was working at her statue.”

“Was there anything unusual about that?” asked the Coroner. .

“Not at all. She was liable to be at work at any time during the day. But there were two unusual things about my visit that evening. The first I noticed at once. The maid was missing, and there seemed to be no preparations being made for dinner. Miss Edwards always ate at six o’clock, and on Saturday evening she and I had intended having dinner at her house and going downtown to a show afterwards. Naturally I was surprised to see no signs of a dinner being cooked. When I asked Miss Edwards about it, the second unusual thing came to my attention. It was something that continued during the entire time of my visit that evening.”

“And what was that?” The Coroner was worried about his fly; it had left the ceiling and was going to alight upon Miss Susan Campbell’s strawberrybasket hat. At the same time, he was mildly interested in Mrs. Sewell’s recital.

“During the entire time that I was in Miss Edwards’ house, she neither spoke to me nor looked directly at me. We had had a small disagreement during the first part of the week; but I considered the matter of little consequence, and presumed that she did, also. However, because of her determined silence and avoidance of me, I was forced to conclude that she was extremely angry, and I very shortly left. I suppose that in all, I was there about fifteen minutes. To me, the behavior of one who had always been my closest friend was simply amazing. I was hurt and disappointed; but when I read of her death Sunday, I ascribed her strange behavior to the same motive which had caused her to take her life.”.

“Very neat,” Mayhew complimented her under his breath. “You’re all finishing it off nice. Suicide, or I’m a billy-goat.”

“And that was the last that you saw of the deceased?” asked the Coroner mildly.

“The last,” Mrs. Sewell replied.

“She’s forgetting the part about hiding in the back yard,” Mayhew hissed in Sara’s ear.

“Maybe it didn’t count,” Sara breathed in reply, taking her husband’s large brown fist to hold comfortingly within her slim palms. While they watched, the Coroner shuffled his papers together, getting ready to sum the thing up, get a quick verdict, and go home to dinner. The room was growing shadowy, as beyond the hills of San Francisco the sun was dying in the sea. A kind of hush came over the room. Flies danced in the last bars of sunlight.

It was then, in that moment of peace, and like an actor who has forgotten his cue and come upon the stage a little late and hurriedly, that Inspector Bailey got out of his chair at the back of the room, where he had been sitting with Charles, and marched on the Coroner’s table. His whisperings in the Coroner’s ear were hoarse and tantalizing, for words could be made out, but not enough to make sense. The Coroner drew away from Bailey, stared amazedly around as if trying to find his fly, and then told the jury that, because of police inquiries now going forward and not complete, the inquest into the death of Mabel Edwards was adjourned for a week.

Mayhew was immensely surprised; but not too surprised to notice the reactions of the other players in his little drama. Mr. Pierce and his sleek wife, directly ahead, jerked about in unison to stare at each other. Miss Susan Campbell, seen from the tail of his eye, sat abruptly straight, and then sank slowly back into her previous relaxed posture. Mayhew swung his head, and looked straight at Philip Hellman. Mr. Hellman was turning his hat in his hands, and seemed interested solely in the gyrations of his head-gear. Then Mayhew glanced at Mrs. Sewell; and there he got a surprise. For Mrs. Sewell was staring at Muriel Maddox; and Muriel was as intensely staring back; and in their look there was naked, blazing hatred as bald as words.

Sara and Stephen Mayhew came out of the stuffy little hall, and stood on the sidewalk to decide upon a place to dine. It was after Bailey had joined them, and they had decided to try French food for a change, that Mayhew caught sight of the scurrying figure that crossed the street. It was a small, dumpy man, with nothing noticeable about him but the hideous shade of his overcoat.

Charles was coming out of the door of the Coroner’s hall; and Mayhew swung, caught his arm, and pointed without speaking towards the man in the green overcoat, who had by now reached the comparative safety of the opposite sidewalk. At the same moment that Mayhew raised his hand to point, the little man across the street looked at them. Fat though he was, he seemed to shrink in upon himself; a rabbity quivering shook his chin; and then he flung about, and for a little man he ran extremely fast. Mayhew and Charles plunged after him; but by the second alley he was gone. Puffing, shamefaced, they came back to Sara and Bailey.

Bailey was smoking again, letting out long peaceful puffs into the cool evening air. “Got away again, didn’t he?” he remarked to the crestfallen ones. “Only, you know, you needn’t have chased him.”

They looked up in sullen surprise.

“I know the guy,” Bailey said happily. “We’ll get him in.”

Mayhew looked thoughtfully at his friend. “A private dick?” he asked gently.

Bailey frowned. “Damn you. You always crab my lines. Now you’ve spoiled my little surprise. How did you know?”

Mayhew shrugged. “It was pretty obvious, when you thought about it. He had confidential dealings with our Miss Edwards. He wasn’t a friend; yet he had regular calling hours. He always came at about dark, and didn’t stay long. McGuffin had to go out on the porch while he talked to the Edwards woman. If that doesn’t stack up to something awfully like a private investigator bringing home the dirt, I’d like to know what it does look like.”

“Since you’re so smart: what in hell was he doing there the morning she was found dead? It wasn’t his regular time to call, according to our Miss Tannerton.”

Mayhew admitted not being a clairvoyant. They continued their quarrel through dinner, with Sara a discouraged listener.

At the end of the meal, the men decided to go out to Mabel Edwards’ home again, to try to find the place inside the house where the woman could have been killed in the manner that Mayhew maintained she had been, and which Bailey said was impossible. But Sara had had enough of their mutually vituperative company. She went off to the movies.

Mabel Edwards’ house was cold, and already smelled faintly stuffy and airless, as unoccupied houses do. Bailey drew down the blinds they had raised that morning, and switched on the lights. He and Mayhew were in the bedroom, arguing the point of whether Mabel Edwards could have been hanged by putting a rope across the top of a door; when the lights flickered once, and then went out. In the darkness, Mayhew heard Bailey begin cursing; and then there was another sound.

There was a brief, dull thud, followed at once by the bright clatter of falling glass. The sound was so clear and so unexpected that it took Mayhew a moment to locate its source; and then he knew that it had come from the living room. He and Bailey rushed for the door to the other room; collided with a corner of the bed; sprawled; kicked each other in a frenzy of trying to get up; and finally made the living room to find it as dark as the bedroom had been, and entirely deserted. They stood still, listening; but there was no further sound in the unrelieved blackness.

It was Mayhew who first felt the strange coolness on his face. He asked Bailey about it; and Bailey felt it, too. There was movement and freshness in the air: an odor of outdoors. And then, softly, they heard the tapping of a curtain against the frame of an open window.

Mayhew felt his way through the dark to the rear of the room, and into the alcove there. His exploring hands found the flapping shade, gingerly fingered the shattered remnants of the pane behind it, while his big shoes crunched on bits of glass. Then he swung without stepping away, and put out his arms towards the stand of the Druid.

A wooden surface, crumbly with clay-dust, flat and absolutely empty, was all that met his touch.

Bailey had stumbled cursing through the dark house to the back porch, and was lighting matches and peering into the meter-box when Mayhew found him. The main switch had been thrown; Bailey pushed it back into place, and lights sprang on inside the house. They went back indoors; but when Bailey, at the door from the kitchen, caught sight of the bare stand where the Druid had been, he started cursing again, not in anger but in amazement.

“Now what the devil has happened?” he mourned.

“Somebody’s taken our playmate,” Mayhew said bitterly. “Our little Druid, that Miss Edwards worked on just a short while before she died.”

“What are you getting at, Mayhew?” Bailey growled, peering out into the night through the empty frame of the open window. “What do you mean by: ‘worked on a short while before she died?’ What’s the connection?”

“Don’t ask me,” Mayhew shot back, irritably. “There is one. There must be. Else why this last bit of fun? But I don’t know it. I’m like the cow’s tail: always behind. I begin to expect things after they’ve happened.”

“Yeah. We’re bright. More like the goofy bird, who flies backwards because he doesn’t care where he’s going but wants to know where he’s been. Now our Druid’s gone. Why? We can’t imagine. We only know the damned thing’s been jerked from under our noses.”

Mayhew studied the empty stand; then spoke over his shoulder to Bailey. “Let’s go have a look at the dirt under the window. There ought to be something there, unless the Druid got out under his own power. Which isn’t likely.” He led the way through the back porch, down the steps into the shadowy yard, and to the left to a point under the broken window, which was the one nearest the porch.

Distinct even in the flickering light of their matches, in the soft loam were four or five imprints of a woman’s shoes.

Bailey stood up with a weary expression settling into the thin lines of his mouth. “More work,” he moaned; and used his match to start a cigarette. “As I said before: Why are women? Why were creatures of their ilk ever invented? Reasonable man wonders.”

Mayhew stretched his hand, to judge the length of the embedded prints; but Bailey reached down and stopped him. “Don’t touch them. I’ll go and call Alderson to come over. He’s the best moulage man I’ve ever known. He’ll get those prints for us to the last pore in the leather. And God help the female who owns them, if I catch her.” Bailey flung ash savagely at a shrub. “Meanwhile, if you would, you might be finding some boards. We’ll have to nail this window up for the night. Don’t monkey with the stand inside. I’ll have Alderson bring along a fingerprint outfit, and see what’s on it, if anything.” In the deflected light that seeped round the window shades from inside the house, his eyes were bitter.

Mayhew sat back upon his heels. “I thought you were a woman expert?” he complained. “Don’t say that you’re at a loss to explain the behavior of our little friend!”

Bailey’s voice went sour. “What little friend?”

“The little friend who made these footprints. Come on man! Where’s your feminine insight?”

Bailey aimed a kick at Mayhew; Mayhew tried to get out of its way. His hands crushed three of the footprints into oblivion. With meticulous care, Bailey helped him to his feet.

“Look,” Bailey said, tiredly. “Go home, won’t you?”

Sara got out of the theatre at a little after nine. She had a malted milk, bought a magazine that seemed to contain plenty of recipes, and went back to the hotel. The fifth floor corridor was deserted, and very quiet. Sara fitted her key into the lock, tried to turn it; and realized that the door had not been fastened. It was during that first moment of surprise that she looked up and saw the light shining across her transom.

For a little while she did nothing at all except to wrinkle her brows and try to remember whether she had turned off the lights before leaving; and then she remembered that she had left the room to go to lunch with Stephen, and that not by any chance would she have had the lights on at one o’clock in the afternoon. Slowly she slid the key out of the lock and backed away from the door, and as she did so, a hoarse voice spoke to her from inside the room.

“Come in,” it said.

Sara stood still in the hallway and looked in either direction, and wondered what she should do. There was a little while that she wanted most to scream, and then run. But at last she summoned her nerve, laid a hand on the knob, and opened the door.

An unlovely face and two glaring eyes stared at her from a chair across by the windows. Sara closed the door behind her.

“What do you want?” she said.

After long labors inside and out of the little house of Mabel Edwards, Mayhew and Bailey went into an all-night drugstore and Mayhew bought himself a new pencil and a little black leather-covered notebook. “So it’s come to this,” Bailey jeered, following him to a booth at the rear of the store. “Just like in the movies. Our hero’s taking notes.” But over their sandwiches and coffee, he helped Mayhew fill in some of its pages.

“We’ve got to get the time element straight,” Mayhew said, and chewed a row of teeth-marks into the pencil. “Let’s start with the Edwards woman getting home. That was just about four o’clock in the afternoon.” He made a careful entry at the top of the second page of his book. “Then the housemaid, Edna McGuffin, came at about four-thirty to start dinner. Let’s give her ten minutes indoors. That should have been about right; so she left at four-forty.” Another careful entry went down on the page. “The next person to come to the place was the Sewell woman. She got there, according to her story, at just a little before five-thirty; and she claims to have been inside about fifteen minutes. Say five-forty-five.” He stopped writing to stare thoughtfully into Bailey’s thin, ironic face. “She spent a while out in back in the shrubs. We’ll have to know about that.”

“Hell,” Bailey complained. “Who’s running this damned show, anyhow? You or me?”

“You,” Mayhew said placidly. “Then this little guy—what’s his name?—the private dick. He always got there about six o’clock, according to Miss Tannerton.”

“His name’s Hunrath,” Bailey supplied. “He’s a good little guy if you get to know him. I’d never dreamed, though…. Say, there’s one thing about him.”

Mayhew raised his black brows in query.

Bailey was smoking and staring through blue drift in meditation. “I’ve never known him to touch anything that had any risk in it. He’s a glorified errand boy; but he won’t watch or peep on anybody that’s apt to get ugly. I know that Macklin down in San Juan tried to swear him in at the time of the lynchings down there. No go. He wouldn’t play. And he’s never carried a gun.”

Mayhew digested this information along with a bite of hamburger. “Huh,” he commented briefly when Bailey had done. “Well, as I was saying, he got there at six. Old Miss Tannerton said that he stayed ‘a few minutes.’ That might mean anything. She did say that it was darker when he came out. Let’s give him fifteen minutes. That brings us to six-fifteen.”

“An hour and forty-five minutes to die in,” Bailey said calmly.

Mayhew sat quite still and began to frown.

Bailey watched him, eating an olive and spitting out its pit. “All right. What’s on your mind now?” he demanded. “You look like a brain-wave struck you.”

“I was thinking,” Mayhew said carefully, “that according to the medical testimony, the Edwards woman might have died at any time from four till eight. Eight was the latest. What’s the matter with five, or six, or seven?”

“But, see here. She might have been seen out on that porch…”

Mayhew gave him a scornful stare from under his black brows. “You know as well as I do that she didn’t die on that hook she was tied to.”

Bailey fell back. “Oh.” He seemed baffled for a moment; then: “But, look—you’re forgetting! Didn’t old lady Tannerton see the Edwards woman holding Hunrath’s coat, trying to get him to come back inside when he wanted to leave? You can’t….”

Mayhew interrupted by leaning forward and shaking a large forefinger in Bailey’s resentful face. “Think, man,” he commanded. His gaze held Bailey’s with a kind of mild ferocity; and his dark face was flushed. “There was no one—no person at all—who ever saw Mabel Edwards from outside her house, once she went into it last Saturday.”

Bailey shook his head, blowing smoke across his coffee. “So what? She was seen inside the place, wasn’t she? Didn’t McGuffin, and the Sewell woman, and Hunrath all see her?”

Mayhew shrugged his immense shoulders. “So they say. But who’s going to deny that one of them could have killed her?”

EIGHT

Bailey shook ash into the remains of his coffee, and stretched his legs under the table. “O.K., Sherlock. You’re doing fine. McGuffin murdered her; Mrs. Sewell dressed her in her nightie; and when Hunrath came along, he obliged by hanging her out on the back porch. Community crime. I’m still listening. Who came tonight and stole the Druid, and why?”

“I haven’t any idea who,” Mayhew admitted bluntly. “But I’ll hazard a guess as to why. Think back over what Mrs. Sewell said at the inquest this afternoon.”

“About the Edwards woman working on the statue when she was there?”

“Yes. And about how the Edwards woman acted. Mrs. Sewell said that Mabel Edwards wouldn’t look at her, or speak to her; and that she thought the woman was angry. Well, supposing for my theory that Sewell is telling the truth. Say she’s in there; the Edwards woman is monkeying at the statue across the room, and not looking at her. All right. The Edwards woman was looking somewhere, wasn’t she? Suppose she was looking through the open door of the kitchen at the business end of a gun? What do you think she’d be doing on the clay surface of the Druid?”

Bailey spoke patiently, even kindly. “You’ve been reading too many detective stories; or somebody dropped you on your head when you were a baby. Now you’ve got the Edwards dame scribbling her murderer’s name on her statue.”

“Make up your own yarns, then,” Mayhew grumbled. “The damned Druid was stolen, wasn’t it? I don’t think it was got for a paperweight.”

Bailey ruffled his sandy hair with nervous fingers; crushed out his cigarette in his plate; and reached for his hat on the hook over the table. “Don’t get sore. Only I didn’t see any handwriting on our playmate. Maybe they think he saw something…. Remember how the McGuffin woman thought he was practically alive; I think—Say!” He stopped, half-standing, at the edge of the table; and brought his fist down sharply.

Mayhew, absently studying their check, looked up in surprise.

Bailey was grinning. “Little McGuffin’s the first on my list for tomorrow morning. If a pair of her shoes don’t match the moulage molds we got from under that busted window, I’ll eat ’em.”

“She didn’t like the Druid,” Mayhew pointed out.

“Sure she didn’t. She hated him. He was the buggerman in her life. I didn’t say she took him home to sleep with; but I’ve got a damned good hunch he’ll be popped off one of the bay bridges if we don’t catch her first.” He fished for a new cigarette; poked it between his lips; and started breathing out great excited gusts of smoke. “Like to come lookee? Be at my office at eight.”

Mayhew found Sara up and waiting for him. She laid down her magazine and got out of her chair when he came into the room. “There was someone here to see you,” she said quickly.

The statement surprised him a little. “Who?”

“One of the women who testified at the inquest. That Miss McGuffin, who was Mabel Edwards’ maid. She had walked right into the room, and was sitting here when I got back from the show. She said she had been too frightened to stay out in the hall. She looked it, too.”

“What did she want?”

“You. I wasn’t any good to her, she said. She’s been gone about a half-hour.”

Mayhew shrugged; and began taking off his coat. “No note?”

“Wouldn’t leave a word. Said things were bad enough as they were. Say, you’re a fine bridegroom! Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

Mayhew obliged with fervor, so that Sara giggled and tried to get away again; and he caught her by the glittering skein of her fallen hair.

“Of course,” she mocked him, “I know that I’m not as interesting as a corpse.”

A smile tugged at the corners of Mayhew’s sober mouth. “You’ll do,” he told her.

Bailey was very spruce. He had on a yellow overcoat, and new pigskin gloves; and he stared in distaste at the scabby paint on Miss McGuffin’s door before he knocked.

His rappings sounded hollowly up and down the narrow hall. Bailey knocked again, and louder; but there was no answer from inside. “She’s gone already,” he complained to Mayhew, whose bulk cut off most of the light from the front door. “The landlady must have missed seeing her go out; or else there’s a way out the back. Damn the luck!” He dropped his gloved hand to the knob, and turned it; but the door was locked.

It was not more than a few minutes after eight. The air in the hallway still bore the chill of night. Bailey made an impatient movement with his shoulders, and raised his fist to knock again. But instead of pounding the door, he turned his arm inside the sleeve, and opened the palm of his glove.

His tone was both mournful and angry. “Now that’s a hell of a note.” He gestured with the hand to Mayhew.

“Now what?” Mayhew wondered.

“My glove. The damned things are new, too. Look at it—all gooped up with some kind of stuff—Say, that mess came off the doorknob.” He bent to stare. “You know what it is?”

“No.”

“Blood. Good old gooey gore. A whole swab of it here on the knob.” He stood up; and in the half-light, Mayhew saw how his pale eyes glittered. “Three guesses what we’ll find on the other side.” He thrust his thumb in the direction of the shabby, peeling door.

No flicker of expression crossed the brown square of Mayhew’s face; but he moved closer and gestured Bailey out of the way. “The landlady has no extra key?” he asked, with his bulk poised on one foot.

Bailey shook his head. “Come on. Smash it. And don’t flop on whatever’s inside, or my guess is you’ll need to go to the cleaners.”

Mayhew’s big shoulders bunched under his coat; he took a short, quick step; and the door splintered inwards with the sound of tearing wood. Bailey felt for the light switch; clicked it on; for the shades were drawn and the room was in darkness.

It was obvious at first glance that there was no need whatever to call a doctor.

Bailey whistled shrilly and almost soundlessly between his teeth. “Great jumping, leaping—” His words died into an inadequate mumbling. For a while there was silence in the small cold room; while Bailey and Mayhew stared with practiced eyes, first at the corpse of Edna McGuffin and then about at the surroundings. Bailey slipped off his soiled glove to touch the tortured face. “She’s still warm, he said softly. “Not more than a couple of hours, I think. Gagged. Looks like a couple of socks in her mouth; and this is a leather belt—a woman’s—between her teeth to hold them in. Her arms are under her. My guess is they’re tied, too. Tied behind her, while this….” His face set suddenly into an expression of fury, as he stared at the body of the dead woman. “They’ll be dissecting them for us, next thing. What did they want—the whole insides out of her?”

Mayhew looked soberly at the nude, unlovely form. “You’re forgetting something. The Druid business. Cutting out the heart. I only hope they didn’t follow all the rules.”

“They’ve laid her open, and that’s no lie,” Bailey commented grimly; and then thought of the meaning of Mayhew’s words; and looked quickly at the other man. “You mean—alive?”

Mayhew was studying the buffeted, old fashioned furniture that filled the dreary room. There was a bed, rumpled as though someone had just risen from it; a dresser with uncertain paint and a splotched mirror; two chairs; and a wash-stand with basin and bowl. Beside the bed, and in front of the door, was the cleared space in which lay the body of Edna McGuffin, surrounded by a great pool of blood. Mayhew appeared not to hear Bailey’s question. He swung for the door. “I’ll call headquarters for you,” he offered. “Homicide? Or aren’t you sure?”

“Shut up and get going,” Bailey snapped; and took his handkerchief and opened the drawers of the dresser without handling them. He rummaged through a tossed pile of underthings, dingy-white and well-mended. “Nobody’s fooling now,” he muttered. “This guy’s getting down to brass tacks.”

When Mayhew came back from using the telephone in the landlady’s apartment, he found Bailey standing at the foot of the big iron bedstead, and staring at a point on the metal foot-piece at about the level of his eyes. When he heard Mayhew come in, he swung to look at him.

“Tell the landlady?” he jerked out.

“Yes. I told her. She’s coming down here as soon as she gets her clothes on. She’s mad.”

“We aren’t exactly happy about it. Come here. Look at this rough place along the top of the foot-piece. See anything?”

Mayhew moved closer, staring; and then reached out a finger and gently touched the part of the bed that Bailey had indicated. A tuft of wool sprang back into place after his finger had passed over it; a brilliantly green tuft, caught by the rough surface of the metal. “It’s green,” Mayhew said placidly; and then gave it still a more thoughtful stare than ever.

“Sure it’s green,” Bailey smirked. “Green like Hunrath’s overcoat. Three guesses as to what he’s doing with his overcoat now. If he isn’t poking it into a furnace somewhere, he’s crazy.”

Mayhew began frowning a little. “How’d he catch himself there?” He moved so that his chin came directly above the tuft of woolen stuff. “This is the highest point on the foot-piece. Don’t tell me he flew over.”

Bailey started to speak; stopped; and then made an exasperated gesture with his cigarette. “No. He didn’t have wings. Maybe it came off his collar someway…. See?” He backed against the bedstead, looking over his shoulder, trying to maneuver his collar against the top bar.

“You’re sure trying hard,” Mayhew said grimly. “Hunrath must have had a hell of a time.”

Bailey got quickly away from the bed. “It’s there, isn’t it?” he grumbled.

“Listen. No bird-brain planned this business. We know that from the way the Mabel Edwards affair came off. He’s shrewd, and he’s good. If he had snagged his coat as much as he must have to have left a piece that size, I think he would have noticed it. And there’s another point about that chunk of wool.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s almost exactly at eye-level. Like the pictures they hang in museums. Exhibit A—right out where you can’t miss seeing it. What I’m interested in is what might have been left on the floor.”

Bailey slowly grew red. “Are you trying to teach me how to be a detective?” He inched forward like a bantam cock, his body tense. “Because if you are, you can sure as hell get out of here and leave me alone.”

Mayhew stared stolidly into the brilliant eyes; and reached out to grab a chunk of Bailey’s overcoat. “Look, moth-mind. When you want me to get out, I’ll get. But damned if I can teach you anything. If there’s been a conviction for murder in San Francisco in the last ten years, it’s because you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“You think you’re so damned hot,” Bailey jeered, “because that piddling mess you handled down south brought you a little publicity. Teach me? Bah!”

Mayhew tightened his grip upon the overcoat and brought Bailey up so that they stood nose to nose. They were thus, rigid with fury and ready to fight, when the broken door was pushed open and a red-haired man looked in upon them.

“Hold it boys,” the red-haired man said pleasantly, coming into the room. “I’ll be referee. Geminy! Who’s the dame?”

Bailey shook himself free; and Mayhew put his hands into his coat pockets. Bailey mumbled an introduction. The red-haired man stuck out his hand. A second man, sleepy-looking and unshaven, came into the room lugging a camera.

“Where’s Doc?” Bailey asked the red-haired man, at the same moment that a brisk fat little medico came through the door. Doctor Samuels nodded to them all; opened his bag; and knelt beside the dead woman. He examined the mutilated body at some length, and then looked wonderingly about at the great pool of blood. When he stood up, his plump sober face was no longer pink.

The red-haired man leaned forward and stared at the Doctor. “Huh?”

Doctor Samuels shook his head. “Bled to death,” he said simply. “She was apparently still alive when this….” He moved one hand in a circle that took in the eviscerated corpse and its scarlet frame. “She’s been dead a little over two hours.” He looked at his watch. “Say six-thirty.”

The photographer began to set up his camera. Mayhew drew away, and prowled the far corners of the room.

On a chair that stood next the door he noticed a comb lying, almost at the edge; and under the chair he saw a torn fragment of yellow paper. Upon one end of the big, old fashioned dresser was a space from which toilet articles had been cleared. Mayhew leaned close, and studied the surface of the wood. Once he took a hand from his pocket, and delicately picked up some bit of stuff and rubbed it between his fingers.

The body was turned over now, and its bound hands examined. From between the fingers of the right hand, Bailey bent and pulled forth the stub of a pencil. He was holding it up and staring at it when Mayhew walked over.

“Give me time. Don’t rush me. Remember I’ve only got a five-watt brain,” Bailey snarled; and Mayhew laughed.

“Bring your five watter to bear on that comb lying on the chair by the door, and the scrap of paper under the chair. Even a one-watt can figure that out.”

Bailey looked shrewdly at the comb; and then at Mayhew. “Already up and combing her hair?” His eyes went to the pencil. “Where does this come in?”

“She laid the comb down, after she’d answered the door. That’s why the comb is on the chair; because that’s the easiest place to put it. She laid it down because she had something to do; something that required the use of her hands.”

Bailey’s glance went again to the scrap of yellow paper. “Telegram? That would do it, wouldn’t it? I suppose you’ve known this for simply hours?”

Mayhew did not smile.

“The super-intelligence works pretty fast, doesn’t it?” Bailey went on, without apparently seeing Mayhew’s darkening frown. “Do you do it consciously or unconsciously? Or go into a trance?” He fished out two envelopes from his pocket; and put the pencil into one and the scrap of paper into the other. “Try the comb first,” he called to the red-haired man, who was dusting for fingerprints.

“Now you’re sore,” Bailey went on; and looking at Mayhew again. “You’re sore as hell because you can’t take a little gaff. Look at me. I go on and on. Nothing ever daunts me. The taxpayer’s delight.” He watched Mayhew as the big man went to the door and opened it. “Now where are you going?”

“Home,” Mayhew said. There was no sign of anger in his deep voice. Bailey watched him step into the hall.

“Why don’t you bring your wife down and have lunch?” Bailey spoke hurriedly to Mayhew’s broad back. Mayhew looked briefly over his shoulder.

“Thanks,” he said. “We’ll let you know.”

“I know a darned good Italian joint down on Columbus Avenue. Ravioli like manna from Heaven. How’s about it?”

“I think she’s got something planned. If she hasn’t I’ll call you.”

Bailey looked thoughtfully into the empty hall.

NINE

Mayhew and sara had lunch at a cafeteria on Market Street. Mayhew ate carefully, and seemed thoughtful. Beyond the fact of the discovery of Edna McGuffin’s body, he appeared unwilling to divulge any further information about the case. Sara was puzzled. She sensed that something had gone wrong; she knew her husband’s manner was not right; but she couldn’t get anything out of him to substantiate her suspicions. On the way back to the hotel she bought an early edition of an evening paper.

When they reached their room, Mayhew flung himself on the bed and closed his eyes. “I’m going to have a nap. Wake me up in about an hour, and we’ll go out to see things. There ought to be something else in this town besides murders.” He stretched himself, and burrowed into a pillow.

Sara laid down the paper on a table beside her chair. “What’s happened between you and Bailey?” she asked sharply. “Aren’t you going to see him this afternoon?”

“Why should I?” he grumbled into the pillow. “Let him paddle his own canoe. He can’t stand coaching.”

Sara nibbled her crimson lower lip, frowning a little; but she did not push the matter further. After several minutes of silence, she picked up the paper again. “There’s a lot in here about the McGuffin woman.” Her voice was quite casual. “Would you like me to read it to you?”

“If you want,” Mayhew answered, still muffled by the pillow; but his voice did not sound sleepy.

“Here’s a picture of her,” Sara said, rattling the paper as she spread it out. “It’s an old picture. She looks young in it.” Mayhew made no reply. Sara was afraid that he might be getting drowsy after all. “This is the landlady’s story,” she went on quickly. “The woman—her name’s Mrs. Jenkins—says that Miss McGuffin came in last night at about eight-fifteen or eight-thirty, and that someone was with her. The landlady says that she peeped out into the hall, and that Miss McGuffin was closing the front door, and talking over her shoulder to whoever had come in with her. This other person was out of sight, further along. The landlady says she didn’t see them, and couldn’t make anything of their voices, either. Well…. Oh, yes. Here she says that Miss McGuffin was carrying an enormous big package of some kind. It was something wrapped up in burlap.”

Mayhew uncovered one eye; but Sara appeared not to see it. She frowned at the close type of the newspaper. “Bailey was right, then,” Mayhew said in a subdued tone. “The McGuffin woman did steal the Druid. He thought that she had.”

“Bailey’s all right,” Sara said indifferently. “I like him. He’s got a sense of humor.”

Mayhew made some scornful noise deep in his big throat and covered his head with the pillow again. Sara went on with her reading as though nothing had happened. “The landlady says that she heard Miss McGuffin and this other person go up the hall to Miss McGuffin’s door. There they stood and talked for a minute. She didn’t get what the stranger said. But she claims that Miss McGuffin said, ‘No, I’m going to do it alone. And now you get out of here.’ The other person mumbled something. And Miss McGuffin again said to get out of the place. Then she heard Miss McGuffin go into her room, and the other person coming back down the hall. The landlady closed her door in such a hurry, that she didn’t even leave a crack to peep through. She didn’t get to see Miss McGuffin’s companion, but she says that the stranger walked like a big woman or a man.” Sara laid down the paper, looking dreamy. “When I’m old, I’m going to be a landlady,” she told her husband. “Think what fun it must be, keeping track of all your lodgers.”

A dead silence answered her from the bed. Sara stole a glance at the buried figure of her spouse. “Did you know that the McGuffin woman had had the Druid in her place?”

Again the eye came into view from under the pillow. “Of course. She had set it on end of the dresser. There were bits of clay there, that had fallen from it.”

“Did you show them to Bailey?”

The eye closed, and disappeared. “I’m sleepy,” Mayhew complained.

“You’re young,” Sara scolded. “You’re about five years old, and so is Bailey. Like two kids fighting over a bag of marbles.”

“Get on with the landlady,” Mayhew said crossly.

Sara went back to the paper, and found her place. “Well…. Here the landlady goes on to say that after about ten or fifteen minutes—just around nine o’clock, that would be—Miss McGuffin came out of her room again and stopped at her door on the way out, and said that she’d like the landlady to keep an eye on her place while she was gone. The landlady promised to look out for it, and asked Miss McGuffin if anything was wrong. Miss McGuffin said that she was very worried about something. The landlady quotes her as saying: ‘I’ve done something awful foolish.’” Sara pursed her lips in pretty annoyance. “It seems as if you shouldn’t put incorrect grammar into the mouths of dead people,” she complained.

“That’s probably just what McGuffin did say,” Mayhew told her. “Or more like: ‘I done somethin’ awful foolish.’ She wasn’t exactly a college woman, you know.”

“Just the same; it isn’t right. However, the landlady says that Miss McGuffin then told her where she was going. She says….” Sara’s voice stopped suddenly; her lips dropped apart and then spread in a smile; and she began laughing.

Mayhew uncovered both eyes. “What’s funny?”

“I know I shouldn’t laugh over anything so terrible. But, really, dear! It says that Miss McGuffin was going out to call on a man named Mayhew; and that the police are now looking for this Mayhew person. They want to question him.”

“Bailey knows that the McGuffin woman was here trying to see me last night. I told him the first thing this morning. This, I suppose, is his idea of a joke.”

“It’s not a bad joke,” Sara defended. “What are you going to tell the police when they come?”

“You guess,” Mayhew growled, crawling back into his pillow.

“Well, I’m going on reading, even if you are like a bear with a sore paw. The landlady, this Mrs. Jenkins, says that she doesn’t know when Miss McGuffin came home the next time. She says that another lodger, going to work early, met a telegraph messenger in the hallway. The messenger was dressed pretty much as usual, I guess, except for one thing. All the other lodger noticed was that the messenger had on a yellow oilskin raincoat over his uniform.” Sara read in silence for a minute. “And here it says that a man next door saw somebody come out of the rear of Mrs. Jenkins house, carrying a yellow bundle. That was about quarter of seven. The neighbor doesn’t remember what the person with the bundle looked like, beyond the fact that he wore men’s clothing.”

“The McGuffin woman died at about six-thirty. It all fits. Somebody else wanted the Druid. And they were mad as hell at the McGuffin woman for having it in her possession. If you could have seen her body….” Mayhew put the pillow aside, to lie on his back with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

Sara lay the paper aside with a sober expression on her delicately colored face. “The thing that’s really terrible about it, dear, is that you missed Edna McGuffin by so narrow a margin. Think what it might have meant if you could have seen her here last night and talked to her. Isn’t it likely that she wouldn’t have died at all? That she might have admitted having the Druid, and that you could have gone with her and got it, and perhaps seen what there was about it that made it so valuable to this other person?”

“Perhaps.”

“What could it have been dear? I mean, didn’t you have any suspicions about the thing? Any ideas of how it might tie in with the murder of the other woman?”

“There’s only one thing.” Mayhew spoke slowly, as if he were thinking aloud. “And that was the fact that Mabel Edwards, for some reason that nobody can know, got out of the bed where she had been lying when Edna McGuffin saw her, and went and worked on the Druid while the Sewell woman was there. That’s the thing that sticks me. I don’t see reason or rhyme in it; and the longer I think about it, the more inconsistent it seems. There’s something strange about that part of that last afternoon before she died. The Druid was in it somewhere. But what the connection was…. I can’t even guess.”

Mayhew’s coat was hanging across the back of a chair. Sara reached into its breast pocket, and took out a small black leather-covered notebook. “You started this. Why not bring it up to date?” she asked.

A flash of annoyance crossed Mayhew’s dark eyes; then he turned on his side and reached for the notebook and pencil that Sara held out to him. Briefly he outlined and timed the murder of Edna McGuffin. Then he handed it back to his wife.

“I suppose the paper has dragged in some mention of the Edwards woman?” he asked without any particular show of interest. Sara regarded him with careful attention.

“Do you want to hear it?” she asked innocently.

Under the heavy line of his brows, Mayhew opened placid brown eyes. “You might as well read it. It passes time, and I’ll go to sleep if you read long enough.”

Sara smirked into the newspaper. “Well. Here is where it mentions something about Mabel Edwards. Let’s see…. It says that the McGuffin woman worked for Miss Edwards, for four years; and it tells about the Edwards woman dying, and the inquest being adjourned. It doesn’t seem to hint at any possible connection.”

“That’s Bailey playing his fine hand. It must be. He couldn’t be as stupid as he seems.”

“Now, dear. Here’s a picture of Miss Edwards; also one of Mr. Hellman. Isn’t he good-looking? He’s got the nicest hair.”

“Brilliantine,” Mayhew said with scornful sharpness.

“Here’s some stuff about the police. They’re checking all possible sources where the murderer might have gotten the messenger’s uniform or the raincoat. Also, they’re checking the contents of Miss McGuffin’s big bundle. It seems to be missing.”

Mayhew laughed, a short ironical chuckle, and punched the pillow to make it fit his head. “How careful they are,” he mocked.

“Maybe they have to be, dear. Now tell me what you think of it. Was the person who came home in the evening with Miss McGuffin the same one who came back in the early morning to kill her?”

Mayhew closed his eyes. “Who knows?”

“But you must have some kind of an idea, darling. Come on, now.”

Mayhew rolled on his side, so that he could look at the delightful vision that Sara made in the midst of yellow afternoon sunlight. He appeared dourly thoughtful. “It seems reasonable to think that they might have been the same person. Whoever came in the evening must have known that she had the Druid. So did the person who killed her, if we take it for granted that the theft of the Druid was the point of the crime. Both people were apparently men.”

“Then you think that they were the same person?”

“I don’t know. Nobody could, yet. By the way, what does it say about the police reports on fingerprints, manner of the crime, and so forth?”

Sara ran a slim finger down inky columns of print. “Here it is. It says that there were a few glove prints in the room. They think these were made by the murderer. There were no fingerprints beyond those of the dead woman herself. Also, it states that the crime must have been committed by someone with a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy. It gives the cause of death as shock and hemorrhage.” She read silently for a while, skipping rapidly over the page. “Here’s something I missed,” she said suddenly, putting her finger under a name. “They’re holding somebody as a material witness. He’s named Salvatore Tonelli. What’s a material witness, dear?”

“Somebody who ought to know something, and usually doesn’t,” Mayhew grumbled. “Who is this Tonelli?”

“According to the paper, he was the part-time caretaker for Mabel Edwards’ place.” She looked up, to meet Mayhew’s sober gaze. “Was he at the inquest? I don’t remember him.”

A flash of narrowing brightness crossed Mayhew’s eyes. “Nobody has remembered him,” he told her, “until now.”

Salvatore Tonelli was a little man, swarthy and thin, with a prominent Adam’s apple and eyes as yellow-green as a goat’s. His clothing was noticeably faded and worn, and his square, broken-nailed hands gave evidences of his toil. He had a nervous habit of running his fingers through the hair on the left side of his head. Under the beguiling looks of Inspector Bailey, he seemed the embodiment of unease; and Bailey let him sit for at least five minutes, watching him through the smoke of his cigarette, before he relieved the nervous tension somewhat by asking his first question.

“Why did you come to the McGuffin woman’s apartment this morning?” Bailey said briskly, without preamble.

Tonelli jumped a little at the sudden sound of Bailey’s voice. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed and his eyes seemed to get bigger. “I tol’ you that,” he answered, with a soft trace of accent in his words. “It’s like I say. I want the book.”

Bailey drew hard on his cigarette, so that it almost flamed; and then shot smoke out in a long stream. “Don’t give me that,” he said curtly, after a minute of silence. “I know you’re lying. There wasn’t any book in Miss McGuffin’s room. It’s a bum stall, anyhow. What would you be doing with a book?”

Salvatore looked down at his entwined hands, and clenched them more tightly together. “My little Maria—she’s sick. It for her, I want the book.”

“This is police headquarters, you know,” Bailey reminded him gently. “You won’t get out of here without telling the truth.”

“Maria’s sick,” Tonelli repeated. “I ought to get home, now.”

Bailey laughed a little. “Home is where you hang your hat. You’re home now, if you only knew it. Look. Do you really want to get back to your sick kid, or don’t you?”

Tonelli lifted his yellow eyes. “I got to get home, Mister. Maria, she ain’t got nobody but me.”

“All right. You can go right home—” He watched the quick readying tension of Tonelli’s body. “—as soon as you tell me why you came slithering up the hall to the door, and then tried to scram as soon as you saw the room was full of cops. Huh? Come on now. Be nice!”

Tonelli relaxed in his chair; and anger stirred in the yellow depths of his gaze. “I already tol’ you. I want the book.”

“Why did you try to get away?”

“I know something was not right. I got to work. I got to take care of my Maria. Cops, they spoil things like that. All I wanted was the book.”

“What book?”

“The book Miss McGuffin let me have, before. It was a big book full of pictures of the insides of people. And some places it told how to make people well when they got sick. My Maria, she’s sick. If I can see the book, maybe I can make her get well again.”

Bailey crushed his cigarette savagely into the ash-tray. “Listen, you lunk-head. There wasn’t any book in the McGuffin woman’s room. No book of any kind. And no medical books, least of all.”

Tonelli shrank sullenly into himself, and cast down his yellow eyes. “It wasn’t her book. She got it for me once, when Maria was sick before. It came out of Miss Edwards’ house, but Miss McGuffin, she was good and she got it for me.”

Bailey stopped mutilating the cigarette-butt and stared intently at the shabby man across the desk. “Now I’m beginning to see things as they are,” he said irritably. “Somebody needs a squint at a medical book. Maybe they think they didn’t cut the McGuffin woman up according to the rules. Come on—who sent you to get the book from McGuffin’s room?”

Tonelli began biting his lips. “My Maria, she’s sick. I got to get home.” Bailey made no further talk; Tonelli ran his fingers through his hair several times, and hunched uneasily forwards. “Mister, I tol’ you what’s true. I want the book. I know the Edwards woman, she’s dead. But I think maybe Miss McGuffin has a key. Maybe she would get me the book again. It’s a good book—tells what to do if you get sick. I can’t buy no book. Me and Maria, we’re poor.”

“I know I’m a fool,” Bailey growled. “But I’ll go have a look for the damned book. Now you tell me what it’s like.” He lit a fresh cigarette, and fixed Tonelli with a frowning stare. “I still think you’re lying. That damned book had better be there.”

“It was an old book. It had a blue cover that was torn on the back. It was all about the insides of people.”

“What was the name of it?”

Tonelli looked bewildered. “I can’t think of no name. Just a book.”

“How long since you had it before?”

“Two months, maybe.”

“Did the Edwards woman know you had it?”

Tonelli’s yellow eyes grew troubled. “I think maybe she didn’t. I don’t know, sure.”

Bailey motioned for the officer that stood beside the door to the hall. “Take him away and lock him up.” As the shuffling, protesting figure of the caretaker vanished into the hall, Bailey made a face of disgust. Then he took his overcoat off its hanger, put on his hat, and left headquarters by a side door. On the sidewalk, he ran into Inspector Dugan, who had been assigned to check on all costume and uniform rental establishments. Dugan was excited.

“I’ve found the place where he got the messenger’s outfit,” he told Bailey. “It’s a little joint down on South Street. They lost an outfit like that yesterday. Somebody called up and asked them to deliver a messenger’s uniform to an address out near the beach. They sent a kid out in a car with the suit. Somebody met him at the door—he says he didn’t get a good look at them—and handed him a ten-dollar bill. The deposit and rental only came to six. The kid went off to get change. When he came back, the place was deserted; and a rent-sign that hadn’t been there before was back in the window.

“Fine,” Bailey said; and went off with Dugan and spent two exasperating hours trying to get the delivery boy to remember something—anything—about the person who had taken the messenger’s uniform through a crack in the door.

It was after dinner, and long after dark, that he turned in at the gate of the little house of Mabel Edwards. Up in the yellow square of her lighted window, he saw Miss Tannerton knitting, her thin ugly face distinct in the mellow glow of her lamp. Bailey had the key which he had taken from Edna McGuffin; he unlocked the door of the little house, and stepped inside. The musty odor inside was worse; it smelled strongly of unventilated dampness; and there was a new element in it: the faint, flat smell given off by drying clay.

Bailey felt for the light switch, and clicked it on. The oddly hybrid room sprang into brilliant relief. The fireplace tiles glistened redly; the overstuffed furniture showed a film of grey dust; and the flowers, still in their bowl on the low table in front of the dead fire, were no more than withered, spidery stalks. A drift of cobweb hung from the mantel. Bailey walked to the fireplace, to shake ash from his cigarette. As he turned again toward the room, he made an odd gesture with one hand: a gesture half amazement and half angry disbelief. On its stand in the alcove at the rear of the room, as securely as if it had never been gone, reposed the burlap-wrapped figure of the Druid.

TEN

With two hours to kill before dinner, Sara decided to visit the Art Museum. Mayhew seemed not to care where he went. He maneuvered their car from the depths of the hotel garage; whirled up breath-taking hills; and frightened Sara by parking in an absent-minded manner on the edge of a precipice. But he went obediently, even interestedly, into the vast white marble palace that houses the best of San Francisco’s art. Through a pillared terrace, past a pebbled courtyard with a tinkling fountain, they came into the inner sanctuary.

Here there was reverent hush.

What few people stood or walked about in the great rooms, did so in the elaborately noiseless way that people reserve for museums. There were occasionally guides to be seen, tall spare men of no particular age, who seemed gravely eager to be of service. After fifteen minutes of aimless wandering through a confusion of modern oil paintings, Sara approached a guide and asked him where the exhibit of the San Francisco art association could be found. He directed her with quiet courtesy; and still unaware, Mayhew followed her neat blue figure through numberless rooms.

They came into an end room, whose windows let in the flame-glow of the sunset. Around the wall were paintings. Statuary stood in groups about the room. Humming a little song, Sara went casually about, reading titles at the bases of statues.

She stopped at last before a piece in bronze; and Mayhew looked over her shoulder to see the head of a laughing woman. It was a good piece; it had dignity and charm; and joy without abandon. There were hints of maturity in the line of the chin, and the eyes were sober, though the rest of the face laughed.

“It’s nice, somehow. Isn’t it?” Sara said without looking at her husband.

“Not bad,” Mayhew answered indifferently; and then grew taut with sudden attention, and moved closer to the bronze head. He studied the lifted coppery features; stepped back to read the little tag below. His glance at Sara was stern. “You knew this would be here?” It was more accusation than question.

Sara failed to look ashamed. “I read something about it in the paper. It was just a notice about the local art association having an exhibit out here. I thought that perhaps Mabel Edwards had belonged. Do you suppose that they don’t know she is dead?”

Mayhew shrugged his big shoulders. “They may not. Perhaps it wouldn’t make any difference. Wouldn’t you say that this is Mrs. Sewell?”

Sara gave the statue a thoughtful regard. “Yes—and no. It’s a lot like her; but it’s better than she is, somehow. It … It’s like she could be if she wanted; if she were willing to let go some of her dignity. Of course, I only saw her at the inquest. Maybe she isn’t always so reserved. But still—I can’t quite picture her like this.”

“But the features are hers.”

“Yes; they’re hers. It’s the pose and the expression that are different.”

They were absorbed in their study of Mabel Edwards’ work, when a little man in a dark coat and striped trousers came into the room. He had some sort of memorandum in his hand; and after he had glanced at it for the second time, he came to where Sara and Mayhew stood, and begged their pardon for disturbing them.

“This piece has just been purchased,” he explained apologetically. “I’m sorry to take it away while you’re looking at it; but the purchaser is in a hurry. Pardon me, please.”

Sara’s smile has detained busier men than the assistant director of the Museum. “We are interested in this piece because of the artist who made it,” she told the stout little man, who by now had his hands firmly about the base of the bronze head. “We knew Miss Edwards, and admired her work.” Mayhew looked for at least the trace of a blush at this brazen lie; but there was none. “Were you personally acquainted with Miss Edwards?”

The little man kept his hands on the head, but he looked round at Sara; met the full glory of her smile; and responded readily. “I have met Miss Edwards in a professional way,” he answered. “She often exhibited statuary here.”

“It was so unfortunate about her death.”

“Most certainly it was. She had the promise of a great career before her. This head, now. We’ve had several queries about it today. And now it’s already sold, though its first day on exhibition is not yet over.”

“Miss Edwards was working on something quite new for her, at the time of her death. I believe it was a figure of some mythical being—some Druid—if I remember rightly. Did you know anything of that?”

The little man looked blank. “No. I knew nothing of Miss Edwards’ work, any of it, until it came here. Miss Edwards always did such cheerful things. I believe that’s why they sold well. Some critics—” He motioned with his hand as if to brush the critics into the ash-heap. “Some critics said that her work was commonplace. That upset Miss Edwards; but it needn’t have. Her work was simple, but it was good. It sold well.”

Sara slid over into dangerous territory; and she fixed the little man with a smile dazzling enough to hypnotize him. “We’ve often wondered about Miss Edwards’ success as far as money was concerned. She didn’t talk much about that part of it. I guess no real artist does. The artistic temperament disdains money. But—would you consider that she had a good income from her work as a sculptress?”

Incredulously—for she had been determinedly casual in her manner of speakihg—Sara saw the frozen surprise that fixed the little man where he stood. His eyes jerked up to meet her gaze, and she shrank from the intensity of amazement that she saw there. The little man moisened his lips; and the beginnings of annoyance showed in his expression. “That’s very odd,” he said at length. “It’s most decidedly … odd.”

Sara took the smallest possible step backwards, away from him. “Why, what’s odd?” She knew, despairing, that her voice betrayed her. It was not at all casual now. To her, it sounded hoarse with guilt.

The little man fixed his lips in a firm line, and studied Sara with disapproval. “I’d like to know,” he told her, sternly, “just why there is this sudden interest in Miss Edwards’ income. You are the fourth today—the fourth!” he insisted, “—to ask me, in one manner or another, just what Miss Edwards got out of her statuary.”

With that, he picked up the bronze head of Mrs. Sewell. At the door, he turned back to look at them again. “I don’t know anything of Miss Edwards’ financial returns. Perhaps it’s rude to say this—but I have a suspicion that it’s none of your business, either.” With the ruffled air of a miniature turkey-cock, he strode away and left them.

Sara moaned. “I’m crushed. Simply crushed. Did you see that last look he gave me?”

“Serves you right,” Mayhew replied, snatching her hand. “Let’s go risk getting crushed some more. We might find out who’s buying Mrs. Sewell.” They followed the assistant director to his office; and stood innocently studying a picture of what seemed to be an egg with two pennies, an eye, and a flock of pink hands doing the rhumba.

After a ten-minute wait, the door of the assistant director’s office opened and a slender, well-dressed figure stepped out into the corridor. She closed the door behind her; looked quickly from one side to the other; and then came down the hall towards Mayhew and Sara. Sara concentrated upon the pink hands, discovering that some of them had no thumbs; but from under his hatbrim, Mayhew took a long look at the woman who passed them with a package—an obviously heavy package—under her arm.

“Who was it?” Sara breathed. “Anyone we know?”

“The bereaved cousin,” Mayhew whispered back. “Muriel Maddox, the darling of the stage.”

Bailey discarded his cigarette regretfully, took off his overcoat, and approached the stand where the Druid stood. He looked about carefully for fingerprints; and studied the windows. One pane had not been locked, and raised easily when he touched it. He went outside as he and Mayhew had done before, but in the soft dirt was no sign of footprints. “Smart fellow,” Bailey muttered under his breath. On the outside of the sill, fine and sharp under the touch of his fingers, he felt several crumbs of dried clay. “You came in this way,” Bailey complained. “Why’d you have to go and get so damned clever?”

Back inside the house, he returned to studying the Druid. Gingerly, one by one, he removed the layers of burlap wrappings, now long dried, that covered the statue. The clay of the figure revealed a surface full of hair-like fissures, and these Bailey studied with displeasure. “You’re cracking up, old man. Guess you weren’t dried right. How’s for telling me who brought you back here? And why?” He leaned sidewise, to stare into the malevolent, twisted face of the ugly figure. Above the cavernous mouth, the ridged nose, stared out the fierce, implacable eyes. “Ugh!” Bailey grunted.

He went and sat for a while on the long davenport in front of the fireplace, staring into the dead ashes, smoking and thinking. Once he got up to rove the length of the room, and to stand and look absently over the clutter of half-finished stuff that lined the shelves at the back. He picked up one figure. It was a body without head or arms. Bailey turned it in his hand, eyeing its outlines; and then sat it carefully back among the rest. Most of Mabel Edwards’ work was small stuff: figurines, heads, little busts. The Druid was the largest—and by far the most lifelike—of anything else in the studio. Still absently, Bailey went back to the fireplace and sat down.

The silence of the room was of the dead sort that is encountered in caves, deep in the earth; it had a resounding hollowness that beat on the ears more insistently than noise. The stillness of the place made Bailey uncomfortable; every once in a while he looked over his shoulder as if expecting someone else to be there. At last, apparently making up his mind to something, he left the house; but not for long. In a little less than fifteen minutes he returned.

From his overcoat pocket, he took out a large magnifying glass; and went across to the figure of the Druid and began to study it closely through the lense.

Immensely large under the glass, the fine fissures in the clay showed up like broken earth after a landslide. Here and there, across the clay and divided by the cracks, appeared depressions made by the fingers of the creator. Bailey moved the glass from side to side, and up and down; and got so intent upon what he saw, that he failed to hear the slight noise behind him—if noise there was.

But Bailey is old in police work; and he says now that he felt the downward rush of that murderous arm before it was half begun; at any rate, he ducked and fell sidewise, so that he took the blow of the pistol-butt on his shoulder. He would have turned then, to see the face of his attacker, and know once and for all who was the killer that stalked the little house of Mabel Edwards. But the pistol was raised again; it was flipped end over end by an agile wrist, so that a forefinger found the trigger; all this in the space of a second—and the bullet was fired. The bullet entered Bailey’s head at a peculiar place, because he was in the act of turning: it caught him under the jaw; tore slivers from his jaw-bone, and shattered two teeth on its way out. There was an immediate gush of blood. Bailey fell forward on his face, and a puddle widened unevenly from under him.

“There’s this about it,” Mayhew told Sara, while they watched a floor show across a couple of cocktails. “The McGuffin woman must have told somebody that she intended to get the Druid and destroy it. She told them early enough, so that they had time to make two separate plans.”

“Go on, darling. Tell me all about it. I’ll do anything but demonstrate.”

“Their first plan was weak; but if it had worked, it would have done well enough. It was, I think, simply to talk the McGuffin woman into letting them have the Druid. The plan was tried, immediately after she got the thing in her possession; but it didn’t work. The landlady heard McGuffin ordering whoever it was to leave, so we may presume that, as the first plan had failed, the second, and much better one, was ready to be put into operation.”

“Fascinating,” Sara murmured.

“We know that it was ready; because the messenger’s uniform was stolen that afternoon, before Edna McGuffin had gotten the statue. That uniform was the essence of the second plan—it was a disguise which would enable the murderer to get at the McGuffin woman without any trouble or suspicion. The murderer wore an oilskin coat over the uniform, and for two reasons: it protected his clothing from the blood of his victim, and it gave him something to wrap the Druid in, when he took it away. As I see it, the McGuffin woman was up and combing her hair, even at that early hour; probably because she needed work, and wanted to start early to look for it. The messenger brings a telegram to her door. She lays down her comb, takes his pencil to sign for the telegram, and through some accident or artifice, fails to keep her eyes on the messenger for the moment. The moment is all that he needs. He catches the McGuffin woman, muffling her mouth with his gloved hand, and carries her quickly inside her room. There he binds and gags her, and because she must not be allowed to repeat any act so foolish as coming to me for advice—which he probably knew about—she is killed.”

“Stabbed?” Sara asked with a show of interest. “Butchered,” Mayhew replied bluntly.

Sara raised a pair of widening blue eyes. “You’re fooling,” she said thickly; and pushed away her cocktail.

Mayhew did not answer her. His brown face was taut, thinned by some inner emotion that gripped him. After a while he took up his drink and finished it at a gulp.

At midnight the streets were roused by the cry of newsboys hawking an extra. At the door of the hotel, being importuned by a loud-mouthed urchin, Mayhew bought a paper. But he was tired; he did not open it, but tucked it under his arm. In the room, he flung it at a chair.

“What are you going to do tomorrow? See Bailey?” Sara asked him.

Mayhew kicked his shoes under the bed. “No. I’m through with the thing. In spite of your little excursion to the art gallery.”

“But you’re still interested in it. Be honest. Aren’t you?”

“No. It’s a senseless business. Personally, I’m beginning to think it’s an idiot on a rampage.”

Sara began brushing her hair. “Now you’re lying. Whoever it is—he’s as cool as cool. And you know it.”

“Damn,” Mayhew said softly. “Shut up, won’t you?”

“No. I won’t shut up. I’m going to tell you a thing or two. When we came here to San Francisco, was it my idea to rush off into a murder? It was not. I begged you not to be a detective on our honeymoon; I even made you promise not to go ferreting out murderers no matter what. Did you keep that promise? Indeed, you didn’t!” Sara’s blue eyes, from under the fluffy mass of her hair, were sternly accusing. “You promptly found somebody who had apparently hanged herself, and worked at it until you found murder in it. Then you rushed around with Bailey, the two of you fighting like a couple of pups with one dog-biscuit, until you’d got the affair well under way. Until everybody wanted to see the end of it. And then what? Then you suddenly retire to your tent, like Achilles or whoever it was, and sulk and won’t come out.”

Mayhew bit off his words spitefully. “Bailey’s doing O. K.”

A fine blush came over Sara’s face; she was angry, but words suddenly failed her. “I think you’re …” she began; and then flung around to face the mirror. “Oh, what’s the use? Let’s not fight.”

Mayhew watched her; watched the sullen strokes of the brush; but when Sara inched herself higher and twisted her head, staring into the glass but not at herself, he grew puzzled.

“What are you looking at?” he grumbled.

Still she looked into the glass; but now she had grown quiet, and her face was quite serious. Her attitude was such an odd mixture of shock and amazement, and her steady gaze into the mirror was so unusual, that Mayhew began to be worried. He moved a little in his chair; Sara held up a hand, quickly.

“Behind you,” she said in a dry voice. Mayhew whirled round; but the room was empty. He frowned his displeasure at the fright she had given him.

“On the floor. The paper. It’s—” She turned, slowly, with the brush held awkwardly, meaninglessly in her left hand. But Mayhew was not looking at her; he was reading the incredible headlines on the paper which had fallen to the floor at his feet.

POLICE OFFICER SHOT IN MYSTERY HOUSE, ran the top banner; and below: Inspector Bailey Given Slight Chance to Live.

One jewel-like, brilliant tear slipped down Sara’s cheek. “He was a nice little man,” she said softly; and began crying in earnest, huddled on the bed like a child.

Mayhew kissed her on the back of the neck, under the froth of yellow curls that nestled there. “I’ll be back, darling. Keep the door locked. And don’t let anybody in. Hear?”

He felt in the corner of his suitcase for his automatic; took it out; looked in the chamber to make sure that it was loaded. Presently the door clicked shut behind him. Wearily, still crying, Sara got up and went to lock it.

ELEVEN

Bailey talked badly because of his broken teeth, and because his swollen, bandaged jaw hurt so infernally when he moved it; but from the depths of his hospital pillow, he managed to get over to the Chief of Detectives, McClennan, the fact that he had no idea who had shot him. McClennan was disappointed, and showed it. He was a thin man, long-headed, with stone blue eyes and a great shock of mouse-brown hair; and when he was displeased, his face reddened, and his lips went hard. He had been with Bailey since ten o’clock the night before.

Miss Tannerton’s butler had phoned in to Headquarters to complain about a pistol shot in the house next door. He implied that a pistol shot was a personal affront to the dwellers on Swanson Street; and that something ought to be done. What was done, as a matter of routine investigation, discovered Bailey bleeding on the floor, and brought McClennan from home in a hurry.

Now, after eight o’clock in the morning, Bailey was telling him that he didn’t even get a glance at his assailant.

Dugan, large and blonde, wandered in from the corridor. He held a bouquet of lilies across his paunch; and offered them soberly to Bailey. Bailey tried to make a face, and ended up cursing from the hurt of his efforts. “I might die yet,” he muttered, his eyes angry. But Dugan shook his head.

“The Doc says you’re going to be O. K.” Dugan found a vase for the lilies. “This is just to let you know what you missed. We’d have all gone to the funeral. Honest.”

A nurse stuck her white-capped head around the door. “There’s a Lieutenant Mayhew in the waiting room. He’s been here since about midnight. Shall I send him away; or do you want to see him?”

McClennan made a brief gesture of dismissal with one hand, and the nurse was withdrawing, when Bailey rose up to speak. “Bring him in,” he managed to get out, before she was gone.

She frowned professionally at him. “You’re not to talk, Mr. Bailey. That’s Doctor’s orders. Remember now!” The frown disappeared into a smile as impersonal, as detached from feeling, as the frown had been; and she withdrew.

“Hell,” Bailey said, through his bandages.

The smallness of the hospital room made Mayhew’s figure seem even bigger than it was. His face showed evidences of his sleepless night, and under the heavy line of brow, his eyes were bloodshot. He pushed open the swinging door with a big shoulder, and took in Dugan, the lilies, McClennan’s angry mouth, and Bailey with the lower part of his face all gauze, with one quick glance.

Bailey flopped a hand towards McClennan. “Chief of Detectives. Boss. McClennan.” He flopped the other towards the blonde bulk of Inspector Dugan. “Dugan. Same as me.” Above his eyes, a fine dew of perspiration gathered. “Say howdy, boys. I can’t do all the talking.” Dugan gave Mayhew an uncertain look. “Meet Lieutenant Mayhew. Famous bloke from down south. Don’t you read?”

Dugan brightened visibly, and stuck out his hand. “Oh, sure. I remember. Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant.”

McClennan swung in his chair, and gave Mayhew a long look from his stone-blue eyes. “How do you do?” His voice was not overly friendly.

Bailey waved to a chair. “I’m going to live, even if I do feel like the devil. Have a seat. My jaw’s got an anvil in it somewhere. Meanwhile, there are advantages. I’m learning to talk without moving my mouth. When I get out of here, I’m going to be a ventriloquist.”

“Who did it?” Mayhew said abruptly.

“He doesn’t know.” It was McClennan who had spoken, in a tone as cold as his eyes, and so quickly that he covered up whatever Bailey had meant to say. “He didn’t see them,” McClennan added, a little more graciously.

Bailey fixed Mayhew with a meaningful stare. “The damned Druid’s back inside the house. Like it had never been gone.” Again the dew showed across his forehead. “I was looking it over, when somebody came up behind me.”

McClennan was frowning now. “You’re not supposed to be talking, Bailey. And besides, the case isn’t finished—yet.”

“Good God, will somebody give me a cigarette? Yeah, I know I’m supposed to stay still—all same mummy. And the case is as wide open as an old maid’s heart.” He poked the cigarette that Dugan handed him between the bandages and into his mouth. “The Saints preserve me if I catch this mask afire. So—as I said about the case, it’s open But it wouldn’t have been, without Mayhew butting into it.” He flicked a glance at McClennan, and saw that he had caught the Chief’s attention. “It was Mayhew who told me about the bricks, and he found the fur inside the knot that had hanged the Edwards woman.”

McClennan’s stone-blue gaze grew frosty. “What are you being paid for, Bailey?”

“To see things after somebody else finds them for me.” Smoke trailed upwards from his white-swathed face. “I know—but I’m not always so punk. Give Mayhew some credit. He’s a good guy—if you can stand his damned sour disposition.”

There ensued a period of silence. McClennan appeared to be making up his mind about something. Mayhew and Dugan lit cigarettes of their own, and added to the smoke in the room.

Bailey spoke again, in a voice obviously tiring. “Since you’re such a hell of a smart fellow—ain’t I even admitting it?—why was the Druid put back where it belonged?”

Mayhew did not answer at once, but puffed quietly on his cigarette. McClennan looked up at him, his stare gone frostier than ever. “We aren’t asking for any outside help,” he said meaningfully.

“What do you think. Huh?” Bailey persisted, in a voice like a saw.

“There was a point that puzzled me before. I think that this clears it up.” Mayhew was placid, unruffled. “The thing was this. Somebody obviously did not want Edna McGuffin to have the Druid. They killed her to get possession of it, after she had stolen it; and that killing involved careful and shrewd planning beforehand. The point that puzzled me was that, since they wanted the thing themselves, they did not go ahead and steal it before she did. It seemed inconsistent, to let her steal the Druid and then commit such a cold-blooded crime to get it away from her; when stealing the Druid from the Edwards woman’s house would have been so much simpler. Now that the Druid has been returned, the thing is clearer.”

“Yeah. Same like mud.” Bailey’s eyes grinned, though his mouth could not.

“It makes it obvious, that the murderer does not want the Druid moved from the Edwards woman’s house. He knew, somehow, of the McGuffin woman’s intention to get it, and to possibly destroy it—though we must only guess at her motive in the theft. He made his plans to thwart her. When she showed resistance, he killed her; and then he returned the statue to the place where he wants it.”

“Why?” McClennan shot at him, scornfully.

“Why did he want it to remain in the Edwards house? How should I know? I’m not the murderer.”

“Only the accomplice,” Bailey gibed, with weak humor.

McClennan arranged his hard lips in a smile that failed to get up to his eyes. “Who is the murderer?” he asked, gently.

Mayhew’s dark gaze was mildly reproachful; he watched McClennan’s false smile until it faded. “Somebody with motive. And opportunity.”

“That’s copy-book stuff,” McClennan retorted, sneering.

“So it is. But it’s generally true, except in cases where there’s homicidal insanity. Nobody gets himself within smelling distance of California’s new gas chamber without a pretty good reason.”

“Like what?”

“Like money, or jealousy, or revenge. The Edwards woman seems to have had plenty of money. Where did it come from? Did the sale of her statuary keep up her house, pay her expenses, hire the servant? Or did she have some other source of income? You might try finding out.”

McClennan sat perfectly still, with his face gradually going redded and redder. “We aren’t asking you for advice. We’ll get along.”

“That’s what I say,” Bailey croaked, from the bed. “I hate a damned meddler.” McClennan shifted his long head, to give Bailey a queer look from his light-blue eyes. “I wished you’d stayed out of it from the beginning. We’d still be calling the Edwards woman a suicide. God knows what we’d have called McGuffin. Accident, maybe. She could have fallen against the bed-post and punctured herself.” Bailey blew smoke from between his white-gauze lips. “Life was fun, till you came along. Get out, can’t you?”

The anger died out of McClennan’s face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound the way it did.” He got up, found his hat on the dresser; and stopped just inside the door. “I’ll be running along. Dugan, you’re on this thing now. Get all you can from Bailey.” His look flickered to Mayhew’s square brown face. “As long as you’re in San Francisco, we’d be glad of your help.” The door swung shut behind him.

“I’d never expected that,” Bailey rasped out. “Not even on Christmas morning. Maybe he’s getting human at this late date.”

Dugan took the chair that McClennan had vacated, and put his feet upon the edge of Bailey’s bed. “Now you’ve got to tell me anything I don’t know. I want to get to work.”

“All zeal, aren’t you?” Bailey jeered. “Well, I’m tired as hell; and my throat’s afire to boot. Ask Mayhew. I’m going to quit talking.” He slapped Dugan’s ankles smartly. “Mustn’t. I’ve got to stay pretty for the nurse.”

Dugan removed his feet from the counterpane. “What do you think about Hunrath?” he asked Mayhew. “The guy’s disappeared from all places where he’s known. Run away. And there was that green wool on the bedstead in Edna McGuffin’s room.”

“There’s no doubt that he either knows something or is actually guilty. Until we know what business he had with the Edwards woman, we can’t even guess at a motive. The green wool looked phony to me; but that’s only an opinion. Have you sent for him?”

“Plenty. But he’s gone slick as a whistle.”

Mayhew turned to Bailey. “What about the moulage mold made the night the Druid was stolen? Did it match the McGuffin woman’s shoes?” Bailey jerked his head in a nod, without opening his eyes. He was propped up, and looked asleep.

“How did you happen to go back there last night looking for the Druid?”

Bailey wagged a weary hand, limp at the wrist. “There’s a guy down in the jail named Tonelli. Ask him about the book.”

Mayhew and Dugan took Tonelli with them, when they went back to Mabel Edwards’ little house. Under the high sunlight of noon, the place looked extraordinarily innocent. Once indoors, Mayhew raised the front and rear window-shades, so that yellow light flooded the dusty room. At one side of the fireplace stood a narrow, glassed-in cabinet full of books. Mayhew threw open the doors and invited Tonelli to have a look. Tonelli squatted, fumbled several volumes, took two out to have a better view of them; but when he had examined them all, he glanced up at Mayhew. There was fear and anxiety in his face, and under the coarse blue of his shirt, his Adam’s apple quivered.

“It’s not here,” he said nervously.

Mayhew swung away from him, and prowled through the rest of the house. He found the back door swinging on its hinges, half-open; and went out into the porch. Beside one of the tubs, upon the red-leather surface of the foot-stool which had never been moved, lay a book with a dull-blue cover, much worn and ragged. Mayhew picked it up with his handkerchief over his fingers, and took it indoors. He showed it to Tonelli. The man’s yellow-green eyes widened in surprise.

“That’s it!” he cried, and made as if to take it. Mayhew jerked his hand back.

“Not so quick. We’ll want to look it over for finger-prints—if any. Meanwhile, I lay it up here.” He put the book on top of the glassed-in cabinet. “Keep your hands off it. I’m going to have a look at the Druid.”

He and Dugan studied the statue respectfully; Dugan stared at its face, at its cruel mouth and ironic eyes; but Mayhew looked at the body of the thing, at the knotted and sinewy back and arms, and the hands like talons of a bird of prey.

With gentle hands, Mayhew tilted the statue and looked at its under side. The rounded clay of the waistline encompassed a square block of wood, which, when tapped, gave off a solid sound. “How do they make these things, anyhow?” Dugan wondered, bending his head down.

“My wife knows a little about it. I think she said that she studied it in High School. Anyway, she tells me that they take a block of wood for the base, and build up a wire framework to fit the head—they call it an armature. After the armature is fixed, and gives a rough idea of what they’re working towards, they cover it with the clay, filling out details to suit.”

“But this doesn’t look right. The stuff you see in the art galleries is marble—pretty white stuff. Or metal. How do they get it finished that way?”

Mayhew went on tapping and frowning, talking over his shoulder. “There are different ways of having them finished. Most amateurs or beginners have their work molded by men who are experienced in the work; cast in stone or metal—bronze, for instance. Yesterday, I happened to see one of the Edwards woman’s statues in bronze. It looked good. Then, some professionals work from their own models—mostly in marble. I’d like to know which method the Edwards woman used. Whether she did her own reproductions or not. I’d guess not, offhand, because of the difficulty in casting with metals.”

“What’s the point in knowing it?”

Mayhew set the Druid level, and shrugged. “It might give us an idea of how much work she was turning out.” He swung around, to stare at the array of unfinished stuff upon the shelves. “I’d like to know how much her stuff brought her. She must have had a fair-sized income. If it didn’t come from her statuary, it came from something else … something about which her relatives and friends, at the inquest, seemed to have no knowledge whatever.”

“You spoke to McClennan about motive—are you thinking that money might be the motive for the murder?”

Mayhew stared directly into Dugan’s inquiring blue eyes. “You’ve had experience. You know that there are people who’d literally kill you for fifty cents. A fortune would tempt any number of people.”

“Yeah.” Dugan appeared placidly to think. “Who’d know about the Edwards woman’s financial doings? Her lawyer?”

“He should—but he happens to be her cousin, and at the inquest he stated quite plainly that he knew nothing about her money matters.”

Dugan looked sly. “Maybe he could be helped to remember.”

“There’s something else I’d like to ask him—something he brought up at the inquest. He told the Coroner that Mabel Edwards called at his office, and changed the provisions of her will, because she was angry at someone. The point wasn’t gone into, though Pierce seemed rather anxious to talk about it.”

“We’ll get it out of him,” Dugan was happily confident. He went to the book-case, and took Mabel Edwards’ “Family Medical Friend” from it, and flipped through the pages. “Suppose we take this along, after we have it looked over for prints. Maybe he’ll recognize it.”

The book fell open at a place where the binding was looser than elsewhere; it displayed an anatomical chart, such as were the custom in the old-fashioned doctor-books, with the organs arranged in neat layers inside a paper man. Mayhew reached out a thumb nail, and lifted the paper man open. “This has been well studied. And to a purpose,” he said grimly. Inside, the paper man was really dog-eared.

“Somebody learned anatomy from him,” Dugan commented. “There ought to be prints here, if they’re anywhere. Come on, Tonelli, we’re running along.” He swung his stout figure towards the door. “Well, Mayhew, what have we got? The Druid looked O. K. I can’t see why Bailey should be shot for looking at it.”

“Neither do I,” Mayhew complained in reply; and says now that he ought to be kicked for not seeing what was staring him in the face. “As for what we’ve got—” They were outside the door, with the sun warm on them, and Dugan was turning to lock the door. The Family Medical Friend was under his arm.

Tonelli hesitated on the edge of the lowest step, with his dark narrow face staring back at them. Neither Mayhew nor Dugan were looking directly at him. Dugan chose a key, and tried it in the door.

Tonelli began to talk in a rapid, nervous voice. “Miss Edwards—she did that, on that last day. I saw how she was. Her hands shook.”

Dugan turned round in slow surprise. “What’s that you’re saying about Miss Edwards?”

Tonelli edged a step nearer; his yellow eyes glowed, widening. He fastened his gaze on Mayhew’s inscrutable brown face. “She felt bad. I know. Her hands—they shake so. She try the key, like you; but it don’t fit. I think maybe she’s afraid. Maybe she’s cry … but something not right. Then, after Miss McGuffin come out so soon, and talk, I know she’s in trouble. Miss McGuffin, she say Miss Edwards is sick, inside the house.”

Dugan frowned in Mayhew’s direction. “What the devil’s he talking about?”

“He was working in the yard, when the Edwards woman came home, the afternoon she died. The old lady next door—Miss Tannerton—told us that he was here at the time. He’s telling you that the Edwards woman seemed nervous and upset.”

“Hmmmm.” Dugan stroked his chin with a thoughtful finger. “It fits in. But it’s nothing new.” He finished locking the door, and started down the steps. Tonelli came closer still.

“I … I want—” His voice was hoarse with some urgent need; its tone caught Mayhew’s attention. Mayhew stopped on the top step, looking down. “I want the book!” Tonelli cried, suddenly loud, suddenly bold; and with one lunge he had snatched it from under Dugan’s arm.

He was a frail and awkward man; and Mayhew is an ace shot.

Dugan had stumbled and fallen; he cried out to Mayhew to get out his gun if he had one; and at the same time warned Tonelli not to run away. Tonelli fled towards the gate with all the speed that his thin legs could muster.

Mayhew was in an excellent position to fire.

At the gate, Tonelli fumbled with the latch for a moment that must have been eternity to him. Under his breath, he sobbed; cursing the fumbling of his fingers, and the delay. For an instant his terrible yellow eyes looked back, as if to see Mayhew’s gun upon him.

Mayhew’s hands never moved.

“Hell and damnation!” Dugan raged, getting up after Tonelli was out of sight. “And why didn’t you wing him?”

Mayhew came slowly down into the yard. “Let him go home and see his Maria. We’ll get him again when we want him.”

“But—damn it!—the book! He’s got it!”

“So he has,” Mayhew said wearily. “And if the murderer left a print in the thing—I’ll eat it. Let it go.”

TWELVE

Dugan and mayhew reorganized their plans of battle over a couple of whiskey sours at a bar. Dugan had sent in a call to headquarters to have Tonelli picked up; he still bewailed the loss of the book. But Mayhew’s mind appeared to be on other things.

On inquiry by telephone, it was discovered that whatever Mr. Pierce’s business hours were, they were certainly leisurely. By the time that Dugan decided to see him that afternoon, and called his office, he had already gone home. The secretary wanted Dugan’s name, but he refused it.

“It’s probably just as well,” Mayhew meditated, assimilating this information. “Let’s go see him at his home. He ought to know the provisions of his cousin’s will, wherever he is. And we’ll get to see Mrs. Pierce, too.”

The Pierces were with three other people—two women and a man—in their chrome-and-blue-velvet living room; and Mr. Pierce’s mood was a little flat from having too much to drink; but he sent his wife and guests off willingly enough to the kitchen to mix more cocktails, and gave his attention to the two detectives. The women and the other man trailed from the room laughing. Dugan settled his portly bulk into a severely modernistic chair. Mayhew chose a corner of the davenport.

“Always glad to be of service to the police, gentlemen; though I must admit this call is unexpected. What can I do for you?” He looked round suddenly, to see the butler still discreetly within hearing distance. “That will be all, Davis.” Frowning, he turned back to look into Dugan’s stout placid face. “Now, gentlemen. What is it?”

Mayhew was struck again by the man’s faultless, even stylish, way of dressing: though it is a word he dislikes to use for a man. Mr. Pierce was got up in band-box fashion; and his meticulous neatness extended also to his white-blonde hair, which was parted correctly to the last hair, and to his light moustache, which looked as if it had been cut by a ruler. He was a pale man; and his pallor was of the sort that is not due entirely to lack of sunlight, but is richly compounded of gin, late hours, teasing foods, and due appreciation of lovely women.

Dugan stirred slightly, as if to settle himself more comfortably in the chrome chair, and came without preamble to the heart of the matter. “We’re investigating the death of two women, Mr. Pierce. One of them was your cousin, Mabel Edwards; the other was her housemaid. Both of them are dead—and both, we have good reason to believe, were murdered—”

At the sound of the last word, Mr. Pierce’s eyes leapt slightly. He interrupted at once. “But I understood that my cousin’s death was a matter of suicide. I was most certainly given that impression at the time of her death; and there was nothing at the inquest to disprove it. Are you in possession of some new evidence concerning her death?”

Dugan nodded calmly. “Not only have we uncovered new evidence in regard to Miss Edwards’ death—there is the matter of the McGuffin woman. She was killed in such a way that there can be no doubt whatever but that she was murdered; and her murder is directly related in several ways to the death of your cousin. Even if we had no evidence that Miss Edwards was murdered, the killing of her housemaid under the present circumstances would make us mighty suspicious. But, as it is, both cases are now definitely catalogued as murder. And we’d like some information from you concerning them.”

Mr. Pierce raised his carefully manicured hands in a gesture of helpless willingness. “Of course, I’d be glad to help. But I know nothing whatever about the McGuffin woman, beyond the fact that she was my cousin’s housemaid, and what I read of her death in the papers. And about my cousin—”

Dugan nodded approval, as if Mr. Pierce had nicely brought up just the subject he wanted. “About your cousin. Let’s talk about the will she left. I understand you were her lawyer. I’d like to know what was in the will.”

Mr. Pierce hedged a little; his grey eyes gone uncertain. “Its provisions—that’s what you mean?”

“Obviously.” Mayhew’s tone was dry, but not sarcastic. Mr. Pierce shot him a questioning glance; but Mayhew’s brown face was as uncommunicative as usual.

Mr. Pierce appeared to collect his thoughts slowly. “Well … let me see.” He tapped a shining nail on the arm of his chair. “There was the mine, of course.” His look swung from Dugan to Mayhew. “Do you know about that?”

Dugan shook his head without speaking.

“My cousin inherited a mine from an uncle of hers—her father’s brother, I believe. It’s located in Placer County—up in the mountains somewhere. I think the thing is abandoned. At any rate, it’s in the will. And then, there’s her house, of course.”

Mayhew broke in upon Mr. Pierce’s recital. “Who got this mine, in case she died?”

There was a heavy minute during which Mr. Pierce said nothing at all. He was plainly struck by some new thought of gigantic import. Twice he moistened his lips; and his grey eyes stared through Dugan’s solid figure as if he were not there.

Mr. Pierce came out of silence as if he were waking from a dream. “Uh … well…. Where was I?” His sick grey eyes found Mayhew’s stern face.

“Who gets the mine your cousin owned?” Mayhew asked again.

Mr. Pierce sat up, to waver in his chair, to feel for his moustache with a gleaming finger; and to fall back suddenly, with a look of defeat on his face. “I do,” he said at last, in a voice that betrayed no feeling whatever. “I do,” he said again, as though they might not have heard.

Dugan plodded on. “And the house? Who gets it?”

Mr. Pierce shook his head as if to rid it of cobwebs. “Ah—Mrs. Sew—No. I mean, Miss Maddox does. Miss Maddox.”

Mayhew stepped in suavely. “At the inquest, you said that your cousin had made a change in her will just before her death. Did the change concern her house?”

“It did,” Mr. Pierce brightened. “You know, that change seemed to me to point definitely to motives for suicide. Though, if you say—”

Dugan frowned. “It wasn’t.”

“Ah—Well, as I was going to say. Mabel came in on Saturday. I just happened to be in a little later than usual, and saw her. She was very angry at Mrs. Sewell; and she wanted to add a codicil to her will, changing the part about the house. I made the change for her, and she signed it.”

Mayhew spoke calmly. “You consider that a quarrel with Mrs. Sewell would have been sufficient cause for suicide?”

“Uh? Well, in Mabel’s case, it might. You didn’t know Mabel. She was an intense kind of person—vital, I guess you’d call it. And stubborn as the devil when she wanted her own way. Mrs. Sewell and she had had a scrap about a statue that Mabel had made; Mrs. Sewell had been the model, I believe. Anyway, there was some fuss about putting it on exhibit. And it ended up in an awful row. Mabel came up in a perfect stew, and said that she never wanted to see the Sewell woman again, and that she didn’t intend to leave her the house, either. When Mabel quarreled with people, she really quarreled. Like her neighbors out there on Swanson Street, for instance—”

“It wasn’t suicide,” Dugan reminded him determinedly. “Now, you’ve mentioned the mine and the house. Did Miss Edwards leave anybody else anything?”

Again Mr. Pierce seemed to fall into reverie. “Just personal things. A ring, I think, to the McGuffin woman; though I hardly know what we’ll do about it now. And her statuary. Her fiance, Mr. Hellman, gets all of that. Poor fellow—small comfort a bunch of cold clay can be, when you’ve lost the woman you love. That’s about all, I think.” His harried eyes looked into Mayhew’s again. “You think that inheritance might be at the bottom of the crime?”

Mayhew’s dark stare was benign. “It might be. We can’t know, until we know what’s to be inherited. Now, there’s another point that attracted my interest, and that’s the matter of Miss Edwards’ income. She must have been getting a fair amount of money right along, to keep her house, and a maid, and the kind of clothes she wore. Where did she get her income?”

Mr. Pierce looked honestly bewildered. “Nobody really knew. Her friends and relatives weren’t in on the secret, if there was one. Some of us thought—” He checked himself, and did not go on with the statement. “She kept that part of her business pretty much to herself,” he finished, lamely.

“What about bank accounts?”

“She didn’t have any,” Mr. Pierce said firmly. “That was one of her peculiarities—to hate banks the way she did. Her father lost a fortune in a bank failure, years ago when she was small. I remember my people talking about it. Mabel never put a penny into a bank, since that day.”

“Stocks or bonds?”

Mr. Pierce admired a shining fingernail. “None of those. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what to make of it. I’m the executor of the estate, of course; and beyond about fifty dollars of loose currency that was found in her dresser by the police, I know of no money in her possession. It’s—it’s rather puzzling, when you think of it. Unless her work brought her more money than any of us guessed, she must have had some other income. But what it was—I can’t even imagine.”

Mayhew moved a big foot, and studied the toe of his shoe. “The mine, now. What kind of a mine is it?”

The tip of Mr. Pierce’s tongue came out to moisten his lips; and a little of the frozen look crept back into his face. “Gold … it’s a gold mine,” he said finally.

“Isn’t it possible that this mine gave her an income?”

Mr. Pierce so far forgot himself and his appearance as to nibble the point from one perfect nail with his teeth. “No. That’s not at all probable. I can be pretty sure about that. You see, Mabel hasn’t been near it for years. When she first inherited it, on her uncle’s death about five years ago, she went up there; and for a while she seemed to have great hopes for it. But the thing petered out. I hadn’t heard her mention it for years.”

“In your opinion then, the mine is absolutely valueless?” Mayhew impaled Mr. Pierce on his gaze, like a suffering moth on a pin.

Mr. Pierce started his nervous drumming again, on the arm of his chair. “Oh—I couldn’t say that. I … ah … I really don’t know. I don’t know at all.” He shook his head vigorously, and he looked anywhere but at Mayhew’s dour face.

Laughter drifted into the living room from the rear of the house; and it was followed by a faint tinkle of ice against glass. Mr. Pierce looked hopefully at Dugan—“Couldn’t I offer you gentlemen a cocktail? Anything you say—”

Dugan exuded propriety. “I’m on duty now, Mr. Pierce. It would be against regulations.”

Mr. Pierce subsided into disappointment.

Mayhew started talking again; and Pierce openly flinched. “Your cousin had some dealings with a private detective—a Mr. Hunrath. He was the man who first discovered her dead, the next morning; and he is also known to have called at her house the night before, at an hour which could not have been long before she died. Do you know anything about her relations with this Hunrath?”

Mr. Pierce swallowed. “Relations?”

“Business relations,” Dugan said reprovingly.

“Oh.” Mr. Pierce took more time for thought. “Is he a little man; stout; and goes about in a bright green overcoat?”

“That’s him,” Dugan agreed. “You know him?”

Mr. Pierce was careful. “I’ve seen him, I think. Once, several months ago, when I stopped in at Mabel’s place on some errand or other. He was leaving. I asked her who he was—just idle curiosity—and she didn’t seem to want to tell me. Made some excuse or other. The memory of it stuck, somehow; though if she hadn’t acted like she did, I’d probably have forgotten it long ago.” He let a minute go by in watchful silence; then: “Just what kind of business did she have with this fellow?”

“Don’t you know?” Dugan growled.

Mr. Pierce drew back into his chair. “Why, no—I—What makes you think I might?”

“We don’t know, either,” Mayhew said flatly. “Hunrath’s disappeared; we’ve never been able to get our hands on him since the morning he found Miss Edwards dead. Naturally, we’re anxious to find someone who knows what his dealings with Miss Edwards were.”

Mr. Pierce revived. “I’ve no idea whatever.”

Again laughter swept down the hall and into the room where the three men sat. It was slightly louder now; the tinkle of ice was much more distinct; and then footsteps sounded, coming closer. Mrs. Pierce thrust a sleek dark head round the corner of the door; her fine greenish eyes pretended fright.

“Have the policemen taken you away, Jimmie? No? May we come in—we’ve brought you a drink!” She laughed then: a slow throaty chuckle; and came into the room trailed by her guests. They were sophisticated people; the women wore velvet and furs, and strange high little hats; their nails glittered; all of them were smoking. The other man was a small indefinite person, as pale as Mr. Pierce; but not so nervous. Mrs. Pierce seated herself on the arm of her husband’s chair; gave Dugan one brief brutal look; and turned her attention to Mayhew.

Mayhew had met women like Mrs. Pierce before: women with surface polish and tigerish innards; women who make a careful show of breast and leg without seeming to; women who are at once respectable and wanton; the kind of women he most decidedly does not like. But Mayhew is big, and there is a ruthless calm about him that has infinite attraction for women like Mrs. Pierce.

Pierce made hazy introductions; his guests murmured polite monosyllables; and Mrs. Pierce grew arch. “What has Jimmie been doing, Lieutenant? Shooting marbles for keeps?”

Careful laughter greeted this remark. Mayhew stared at her from under his heavy brows; his eyes are peculiarly dark, and now they were almost angry. “We are inquiring into the death of your husband’s cousin, Miss Edwards,” he told her.

“So?” She raised a beautifully cared-for hand to pat her shining hair. “Poor Mabel. But she killed herself.” Her green glance kept on Mayhew’s face. “Didn’t she?”

Mr. Pierce stared into the depths of the cocktail he had been brought. He breathed deeply twice, and then bit his lip.

“Miss Edwards was murdered.” Dugan said it smugly and simply.

“Oh.” She turned a little, so that light from a far window crept down the deep V-neck of her velvet hostess frock, and touched the faint arch of her breasts with pink. “I thought it was all settled—about it being a suicide, I mean. Didn’t she hang herself?”

“She was hanged,” Dugan corrected, eyeing her dress.

“Terrible. Eh, what?” said the other man, twiddling his thumbs. The two women guests nodded indifferently. An air of constraint had come into the room. One of the other women was watching Mrs. Pierce slyly from the corner of an eye. Mr. Pierce turned his drink slowly, holding it against the light and looking carefully into it.

“When did you last see Miss Edwards, Mrs. Pierce?” Mayhew asked suddenly; he seemed not to notice that Mrs. Pierce had a body.

Mrs. Pierce reached for a cigarette on a near-by table, and in so doing allowed a silken leg to show through a slit in her gown. When she came erect again, still swinging the leg, her green eyes glowed through the smoke of her cigarette. “Really … I don’t even remember. It’s been so long. Won’t you gentlemen have a drink?”

“Thanks, no,” Mayhew answered for them both. “I think we’d better be going. I suppose you know of no motive—no quarrel or anything—that would bear on this case?”

Her little waist straightened inside the velvet gown, and she made a pretty gesture of surprise with one hand. “No. I wouldn’t have believed—This is a regular murder mystery, isn’t it? I hadn’t thought of it that way, before. Let’s see.” She smoked with studied gracefulness; her body at once relaxed and yet poised; her skin like cream—and a lot of it showing. “A motive…. Goodness, I’ve read dozens of mystery stories. What makes a good motive, darlings?” She glanced about her little audience. The other women smirked.

“A long-lost lover,” the pale little man suggested.

Mrs. Pierce made a scornful, throaty noise. “Not good enough. It’d have to be a fortune. That’s better. Only poor Mabel didn’t have a fortune, that anybody knew of. Of course—” She grew thoughtful, and a little melancholy. “There’s the mine,” she said at last, not smiling.

Mr. Pierce looked at his drink as if it were poison.

Mrs. Pierce glanced up at Mayhew and obviously found him good. She smiled again, teasingly. “That makes it simple for you, Lieutenant. Make the mine your motive. Somebody wants the mine.”

Mr. Pierce’s fingers had tightened so around his glass that the knuckles, and the veins on them, were like knots.

Mrs. Pierce laughed her deep laugh again. “The mine; and Muriel Maddox. Miss Maddox is our cousin—” She shot a side-glance at her husband that Mayhew was not to understand until later. “And Miss Maddox inherits the mine, because poor old Mabel’s dead.”

Mr. Pierce did not raise his eyes to those of Dugan and Mayhew. With infinite care, he stood up and put his drink down on a table. “Excuse me, gentlemen. If you want me again—I’ll be at my office tomorrow. Goodbye.” He bowed, rather stiffly, and with mechanical promptness turned round and walked from the room.

Mrs. Pierce watched him go. “I say—he looks sick!” exclaimed one of the women.

Mr. Pierce had seemed sick: sick with a ghastly and wretched illness that had come on him in a moment.

Mrs. Pierce laughed, a little uncertainly. “Did I say something?” she wondered, turning to Mayhew.

Outside, Dugan stopped for a minute on the sidewalk to stare back at the house. He grinned maliciously. “That Mrs. Pierce—” He made a wet clucking sound out of the side of his mouth.

“To hell with her,” Mayhew growled, plunging straight ahead.

THIRTEEN

That evening mayhew took sara with him to see Bailey at the hospital. Sara insisted on getting yellow roses; and though Mayhew considered them unnecessary, he was surprised to see how Bailey brightened at the sight of them. Bailey made unrecognizable noises through his mask; the nurse had added a layer of adhesive tape to the section about his mouth, to keep him from talking. Sara smiled.

“Don’t try to talk. I know you like them,” she said happily. “You’ve an appreciative soul. Now be good and be still.”

“You’re just going to listen,” Mayhew growled at him. “For once, thank God, I’ve got you where I want you; and I don’t have to listen to your gabbing. I want to tell you about the Pierce outfit.”

Bailey made frantic wagglings with his hands.

“Oh, I know Dugan’s been here, already; but who is Dugan? I want to give you my impressions of the thing.”

“Dugan’s a nice man,” Sara said severely. “He brought you home at a decent hour. That’s more than I can say for Mr. Bailey.”

Mayhew shot her an affectionate glance from his dark eyes. “Shut up,” he told her. “Now I’m talking. Get this Bailey: Dugan used his eyes too much up there at the Pierce place. I don’t think he had much time to listen.”

Bailey emitted a scornful grunt.

“Mrs. Pierce had on a long dress that was pretty scant in the right places. Her …” His glance strayed to Sara. “Let it go. Anyhow: did Bailey tell you that Pierce lied to us about who’s to inherit the mine that the Edwards woman owned?”

“Nuumph,” said Bailey, his eye livening.

“I thought that he’d missed it. He was trying to get a squint at Mrs. Pierce’s—”

“Stephen!” cried Sara, horrified.

Mayhew looked up mildly. “—at Mrs. Pierce’s leg. Just leg, Sara. However—as I was mentioning: Pierce told us during the time we were alone with him that he was to inherit the mine. Just before he said it, he had a spell of looking like he’d seen a ghost; and seeming to think like the devil for a minute. He’s got something on his mind. Then Mrs. Pierce and her friends came in to see us, and she spilled it. The Maddox girl’s going to get the Placer county property.

“My offhand guess is, he’s trying to cover the Maddox girl. They’re cousins; might be some family affection behind it. Anyhow, if I were you I’d ask Dugan to go early to see Mr. Pierce, and ask him for the will that the Edwards woman signed. And make Mr. Pierce tell him why he lied about it.”

“Grrrrph,” said Bailey, reaching for a pad of paper and a pencil on the bedside stand. He scribbled noisily for a moment.

“Pierce told us that the Maddox girl was to inherit the house. That’s an odd thing, when you consider it. He lied about her getting the mine, but he willingly admitted that she’s to inherit the house. It looks as if he thinks the mine might be at the bottom of it.”

Bailey made scornful gruntings into his bandages.

“You’re thinking he wouldn’t throw suspicion upon himself?”

Bailey nodded vigorously.

“Well … I don’t know. We ought to find out how he stands with Muriel Maddox. Maybe they’re bosom pals from childhood, or something.”

Sara chuckled. “I wouldn’t classify Miss Maddox as the ‘pal’ kind,” she told Mayhew. “She’s too feminine for that. Maybe Mr. Pierce feels like a big brother towards her.”

Bailey stared at them with resentful eyes. It was plain that he was bursting with speech. After a minute, he tore off a sheet of paper from the pad, and wrote “Quarrel with Mrs. Sewell?” on it and passed it to Mayhew.

“Mrs. Sewell?” Mayhew read, absently. “We can’t know about her, yet. If you’ll let me, I’ll go see her early tomorrow, while Dugan’s out badgering Mr. Pierce. How about it?” Bailey nodded grudgingly. “Don’t you wish you could be up and around?” Mayhew went on, beginning to jeer. “Just think now—I might get more famous than ever on this case … and wouldn’t that gripe you? Oh, to be up and hogging the spotlight again. Eh, Watson?”

Bailey tried to sit up; his eyes were furious, and a series of muffled curses came out of his gauze mask. Then he fell back, and again grabbed his paper and pencil.

“To hell with you,” he wrote viciously. “Wait till I get this junk off my face. I’ll tell you a few things to make your hair curl.”

Mayhew laughed heartily. “You’ll forget it before you get up.” He reached for his hat. “Try thinking a little. Not too hard.”

Sara came close, and laid a cool slim hand on Bailey’s brow. “I like you,” she comforted him. “Tell you what—when this Mrs. Pierce has vamped my husband away, you and I’ll get married.”

Mayhew gave Sara a look of astonishment.

“Didn’t you think I knew?” she said, a little spitefully. “Then you are stupid. There’s not a good-looking woman alive who’d waste time on Dugan.”

Bailey started to laugh. A nurse came and drove Sara and Mayhew out of the room. “He’s not to laugh,” she scolded, frowning.

“Hell,” Bailey said, distinct in spite of the bandages.

A telephone call to the Public Library got Mayhew the information that Mrs. Sewell was not at work on Thursdays. Thursday was her day off. At nine-thirty he rang the bell to her door. She occupied the third in a row of identically ugly houses; houses which looked worn and dusty in the morning sunshine.

She came to the door in a housedress; looked rather puzzled while he introduced himself; and a little hesitantly, invited him inside. “I’m housecleaning. Excuse the room,” she apologized, moving a stack of books from a chair so that he could sit down. “Now you were saying that it’s about Miss Edwards? What is it you’d like to know?”

“Several things,” Mayhew said easily, and obviously not in a hurry. He looked Mrs. Sewell over carefully; remarked again the quiet, matured dignity of her face, the erectness of her bearing, the strength and purpose of her poise. “Miss Edwards was murdered. You knew that?”

She remained perfectly composed. “If you say she was, I suppose it’s true. Though I can’t see how—”

“She was hanged; and conditions arranged to simulate suicide. It didn’t quite work. Now we’re inquiring into several things that have come up in connection with her death. One of them is her will.”

Upon her broad, big-jawed face there was no flicker of emotion. “Her will?” she repeated, pleasantly.

“Were you acquainted with any of the provisions of Miss Edwards’ will? Did you, for instance, know whether you figured in it?”

She shook her head, that was beginning to turn grey. “No, I know nothing of Miss Edwards’ will. If its contents concerned me in any way, I have not learned of it.”

“You were in it, all right,” Mayhew assured her, with a touch of brutality in his manner. “You were in it until the day she died. That Saturday, she removed your name. You were to have inherited her house. She left it instead to her cousin, Miss Maddox.”

The cool eyes remained steadily on his. “It was her privilege to leave it to whom she chose. Miss Edwards was my friend. I always respected her wishes.”

He tried a pot-shot in the dark. “Do you know who was to inherit the mining property Miss Edwards owned?”

“I have no idea whatever.”

Mayhew swung round mentally to try another tack. “What sort of income did Miss Edwards have?”

She raised her brows a little, at that. “What sort? Do you mean how much?”

“How much; and from what sources,” Mayhew requested.

“She had enough,” Mrs. Sewell answered. A shade of distraction came into her manner. “I sometimes wondered if her statuary sales paid all of her bills. She seemed well supplied with money. Once or twice, I suppose, it occurred to me that what she spent seemed a little more than what she made. I—Well, it really wasn’t any of my business. And she resented prying.”

“I see. She never mentioned any other source of income?”

“Never.”

Mayhew leaned forward to look more closely at the large, placid face across the room. “It’s known that Miss Edwards had some sort of dealings with a private detective named Hunrath. He called at regular intervals at her home; and the maid, Edna McGuffin, was not allowed to remain indoors, or listen to their interviews. Do you know anything about this man Hunrath, or his relations with Miss Edwards?”

The square mouth trembled slightly, under his stare. “I couldn’t really….” Mrs. Sewell got hold of herself again; was calm, serene, though with an obvious effort. “I knew she had dealings with some such person. I didn’t know his name. Several times I met him, coming or going from Miss Edwards’ house. She never told me anything of his visits, or why he came there.”

“You know some of the ordinary uses of private detectives. One of the most common is to keep watch on someone who is suspected of being untrustworthy. Can you think of anyone whom Miss Edwards distrusted?”

“No one.”

“What about her fiancé, Mr. Hellman?”

Something stirred behind the smooth mask of her face; but was quelled instantly. She took a moment for thought. “She was devoted to him. And she trusted him absolutely.”

“I see.” If he was disappointed, Mayhew gave no sign. He was as much a master of expressionless facial technique as was Mrs. Sewell; and into the brown rectangle of his face, no perturbation intruded. When he spoke again, it was upon another line of inquiry altogether. “Mrs. Sewell, I’d like to review with you, your testimony at the inquest. To my mind, you made some remarkable statements. Please repeat briefly what you said then.” She smoothed her cotton skirt with a slow hand. “Well … wait until I think for a moment. It was about the last visit I paid Miss Edwards, wasn’t it?” There was silence in the disordered room. Then: “I must have arrived at her house about five-thirty. I’m pretty sure of the time. We had an agreement to go to the theatre that evening. We were going to eat at her house, first. I got there at the time she had specified.” Mayhew frowned, following the meanderings of her reason. “Miss Edwards didn’t come to the door. She just called to me to come in.”

“Wait.” Mayhew held up a hand suddenly. “There was another point in there, that you mentioned at the inquest. You said that the first time Miss Edwards spoke to you, she seemed to be in the bedroom. Isn’t that right?”

She gave him a look of surprise. “Yes—now that you remind me; I do remember that. Did I say it, at the inquest?” Mayhew nodded. “But I might have been mistaken,” she hurried on. “For when I went in, she was wearing her smock, and working at the statue of the Druid. I realize now, that she must have been simply furious with me. She wouldn’t speak, nor give me a direct look.”

“Now—about that, Mrs. Sewell. Where did she look?”

Mrs. Sewell was exasperatingly vague here. “Oh—everywhere. Into the kitchen—the door was open—and out of the window on the other side of the statue. She kept busy at her work all of the time; and looked mostly, of course, at the statue.”

“Did she act frightened in any way? Did you notice her hands trembling, for instance?”

“No, I didn’t—” Mrs. Sewell began her answer placidly; broke it in the middle; looked first astonished and then fearful. She glanced quickly at Mayhew to see if he were watching; met the gimlet of his gaze; and dropped her eyes.

“Go on,” Mayhew told her gruffly. “You’ve remembered something, haven’t you?”

She plucked at her dress, and did not look up.

“What is it?” Mayhew demanded; his voice gone hard.

Her next words surprised him. “Was Saturday a windy day?”

He made an abrupt gesture of displeasure. “I don’t know. Why?”

“If it was,” she went on, slowly, “this might mean nothing at all. But when you spoke of her hands trembling, I remembered, all at once, a thing that I had forgotten. It’s like a picture, when you suddenly see it again after a long while. All in a moment, I saw—it’s hard to explain—but it’s ever so clear; I remembered that a branch of the shrubbery outside the window shook violently. And how Mabel raised up on tiptoe to look across the Druid at it.” She gave him a look both meek and hopeful. “Would that be important?”

Mayhew stared at her without saying anything.

“There could have been somebody outside the window. Maybe they were watching and waiting to … to murder Mabel.”

“It’s odd you didn’t think of this before,” Mayhew told her and brought quick blood into her face.

“It’s true,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry not to have thought of it at the inquest.” Her eyes looked down again. “Now you won’t believe it.”

“I want to believe it,” Mayhew said frankly. “You see, it bears out a theory that floats through my head every time I think of your testimony at the inquest. This theory is, that while you were there, the murderer might have already been in the house, or at least in a position where he could keep watch upon Miss Edwards. Such a fact would account, even more than her anger, for her acting the way that she did while you were there.”

After a while she nodded. “It would, wouldn’t it?” And absently went on: “But there was no one in the back yard, when I—” She bit off her words in a hurry.

“When you were hiding in the shrubs there?” Mayhew finished for her. “I’d like to know about that part of it. Why, and how long.”

Her fine head sank a little lower; something glittered under the fringe of her lashes; and she clenched her hands painfully, in her lap. “It was a foolish thing to do; but I was worried about Mabel’s behavior. I thought perhaps I’d see, if I waited, if everything were all right. But when I saw the butler from the house next door looking out at me, I left. It—it was an absurd way to act. I’ve no doubt the neighbors thought I was crazy.”

Mayhew is uncomfortable in the presence of female emotion. He quickly got off the subject of Mrs. Sewell hiding in the bushes; and was master enough of human nature to bring up something that might rouse a different set of feelings. “You had a fight with the Edwards woman,” he blurted out, ignoring two tears that stood perilously close to dropping from under Mrs. Sewell’s eyelids. “Tell me what it was about.”

“It wasn’t a fight.” Mrs. Sewell kept her head down, but her pose began to suggest embarrassment instead of grief. “It was just a—a disagreement between us.”

Mayhew began to breathe more easily. “What about?”

“About a head she had modeled of me. She wanted it to go on exhibition; but I didn’t. I didn’t think it was quite like me.” A moment of silence intervened while Mrs. Sewell chose her words. “It was rather funny—if you knew me,” she finished helplessly.

“Hmmmm.” Mayhew sounded impressed.

“I begged her not to put it on exhibition; but Mabel could be awfully stubborn when she wanted to be. She was simply determined to send the bronze head off to the museum. I quit begging and got angry. So did she. We had a bad quarrel.” Mrs. Sewell raised her eyes at last. They were altogether free of tears. “Is there anything else?”

“Just one. What do you know about a book that Miss Edwards owned, called the Family Medical Friend?”

She looked full at him then, and plainly with surprise. “That old book? Why—all I know is that she had it. It had belonged to her father. It was one of the kind they used to call ‘Doctor Books.’ It had everything in it from lessons on anatomy to cures for the mumps. It wasn’t authoritative, in the modern sense, at all.” She studied his brown face. “Is it—does it figure in this, too?”

“Quite neatly,” Mayhew said bitterly. “It made a good textbook for murder.”

Mrs. Sewell appeared puzzled; but Mayhew did not go on to enlighten her. He took his hat from a stack of books beside him, and rose to go.

There was a jingle at the door-bell. “Excuse me,” Mrs. Sewel said hurriedly. “There’s the postman. I’ll go see what he has.”

Mayhew stepped into the hall after her. The postman was grumbling about the weight of the package. Mrs. Sewell took it; turned back to pass Mayhew. “It is awfully heavy,” she said in a quiet voice. “Oh—are you going now?”

Mayhew flung his hat on a chair. “I’d better take that; hadn’t I, Mrs. Sewell?”

She drew away from him. “Must you?” she asked; but held the heavy package towards him.

He put it on the hall table, and bending, listened. Then, gingerly, and without allowing the lid to come up, he untied the cords that bound the stout little wooden case. With a cautious finger, he explored its insides.

Mayhew lifted the cover quite suddenly, and looked at what was inside; but his bulk barred the view of Mrs. Sewell. Resting on coarse excelsior packing was the bronze head from the museum.

It had been added to, with paint and other materials. The neck was drawn grotesquely with wrinkles; the eyebrows frowned; the mouth widened into a grimace; the cheeks were rouged like a clown’s. But—most hideous of all—between the lips had been inserted a slab of red tongue that stuck out as if the thing were gagging.

Mayhew touched the tongue, and decided that it was Plaster of Paris, painted red. Then he put the lid quickly back on the thing, and tied up the box.

Mrs. Sewell looked at him as if she were afraid.

“I need this,” Mayhew told her. “It’s your bronze head. You knew that, didn’t you?” She nodded, her eyes wide. “I’ll return it as soon as I look it over for fingerprints. Is that all right?”

She nodded again, as mechanically as before.

Mayhew went out and left her standing there, her big face sad, her arms hanging at her sides.

FOURTEEN

Mayhew had lied to mrs. sewell. He made no attempt to search for fingerprints on the bronze head; for he had a very decided notion that there weren’t any. He simply tucked the wooden case under his arm and walked away; and when he came to the first drug store, he turned into it and used the telephone book to look up Muriel Maddox’s address. A taxi deposited him in front of an awninged entrance about fifteen minutes later. He rang Miss Maddox’s bell.

Miss Maddox sported no maid. She admitted him herself; listened with abstract, impersonal politeness to his self-introductory speech; and allowed him to have a chair. It was a good room in which he found himself—a cream-and-cocoa room with pale walls, warm striped overstuffed furniture, and a deep brown rug with a glistening nap. Beyond the wide windows to the north, a faint ruffle of water showed, and a smudge that was the other side of the bay. Because Miss Maddox lived on a hill, the view was excellent.

Mayhew slid the wooden case from under his arm, and let Miss Maddox see it. Her abstraction vanished in a moment, to be replaced by a cool steady wariness; Mayhew felt the quick change in her, as an explorer in the tropics would feel the sudden impact of an Arctic wind. He said nothing, holding the case toward her.

“I—What is it?” she stammered; and he saw how she hated her own uncertainty. “It’s not mine,” she finished, regaining poise.

“No. The bronze head isn’t. The decorations are.” He went on giving it to her; and at last she reached and took it.

Her fingers fumbled with the strings that bound the lid; she broke a nail getting them undone; and made a soft, impatient exclamation. When she lifted the lid at last, she gave an appearance of shocked displeasure. “This is hideous. Really horrible.” She looked up to sneer. “What makes you think I did it?”

“Your fingerprints were on it,” Mayhew lied glibly.

Her face, that was too smooth for age and yet too hard for youth, turned pink. “Now I know you’re lying,” she burst out “My fingerprints simply could not have been on this thing.”

“No?” said Mayhew mildly. “And why not?”

“Because—” She caught herself up short; her eyes narrowed with anger. “You’re trying to trap me! But you’ll not!”

“I have trapped you. Already,” Mayhew continued, still peaceably. “You’re too dogmatic in your statements. An innocent person would have said that he didn’t quite see how his prints had got there. You knew absolutely that they weren’t. Why? Because you most likely never touched the thing without wearing gloves, since you brought it home from the museum.”

“You—knew!” she breathed; and let the bronze head and its case slide from her knees to the thick rug at her feet.

“You should have carried it off as a joke. I wouldn’t have believed you, but it might have been a little less embarrassing for both of us. As it is—I still have to ask you why you did this to Mrs. Sewell.”

“I am not compelled to answer you.”

“That’s true; you aren’t. It just might be better in the end, if you did.”

“End?—what end?”

“The end that awaits your cousin’s murderer. I hope this thing doesn’t go on forever.”

“What I have done has nothing whatever to do with my cousin’s death. I know of the ridiculous theory the police have, that Mabel was murdered—”

Mayhew’s eyes grew bright; narrowed; and his square mouth almost smiled. “Who told you that the police think Miss Edwards was murdered?”

“Why—ah—” She caught at a straw. “I read about it in the papers.”

“Indeed you haven’t” Mayhew assured her. “There isn’t a paper in San Francisco that has printed it. They’re in an uproar over the killing of Edna McGuffin; but they’ve practically forgotten the connection between the two cases—and they never did label the first one murder.”

“But they all hinted…. I mean, they dragged out pictures of Mabel, and even of Philip, when the McGuffin woman was killed. I must have thought—”

Mayhew broke in upon her. “Didn’t Mr. Pierce call you and tell you?”

“Oh, he wouldn’t have done a thing like that.”

“Wouldn’t he? He was perfectly free to do so, if he wanted to, you know.”

Her look changed to uncertainty. “Could he?”

“Let’s say that he did. And now let’s get on: why do you dislike Mrs. Sewell?”

Again her manner froze. “I can’t discuss that with you. It’s a personal matter.”

“Would you mind cleaning up that piece of bronze, or shall I?”

“I will.” She got brisky out of her chair, picked up the fallen case; and crossed the room to a door behind Mayhew. He heard her pause there, and without seeing her, he knew what a look of intense hatred she was giving him. Then she opened and closed the door; and in another room he heard water running.

He stood up and gave the room a leisurely survey. On a far wall he found a framed picture of a family group; evidently during or after a party, for everyone was in costume. In the center row of faces were those of two young girls, startlingly alike; both haughty and stubborn, both round-chinned and long-haired. One of them was Muriel Maddox, and one was Mabel Edwards, who was dead.

Mayhew looked at the picture for a long while, whistling an absent tune through his teeth. But when Miss Maddox brought back the bronze head, gleaming in its box, he was seated again where she had left him.

“Here it is,” she said, giving him the open case with its contents showing. She did not sit down. It was an open invitation to leave.

Mayhew can be incredibly thick-headed when he wants to. He did not seem to notice Miss Maddox’s impatience. “I’d like to talk to you about your cousin,” he told her. “I’d like to hear what you know about her income. How much it was, and where she got it.”

Miss Maddox shook her red head. “I don’t know anything about Mabel’s financial affairs.”

“Then why did you ask the Assistant Director at the museum, how much she had been getting out of her statuary?”

A furious light crept into Muriel Maddox’s eyes. “You know everything, don’t you?” She found the edge of a chair, and sat on it, still with that expression of ferocity on her face. “Well—I had a right to ask. She was my cousin.”

“And you were her customer,” Mayhew said, apparently without sarcasm. “Although a post-mortem one. Do you always ask the grocer how well he’s doing?”

She made no answer to this; but sat rigid with anger, and with a fine moisture stealing across her upper lip.

“Weren’t you just a little curious to know whether she might not have been getting some money from her mine?—from the mine that you’re to inherit, now that she’s dead?” Half-grinning, Mayhew stuck out the brown square of his face; and Muriel Maddox, with a little cry of rage, lashed at him.

“You beast!” Her voice was weak, suffocated; and she struck him three times in rapid succession with a sound like the crack of a whip. Then she moved her feet, blindly, and started to stand; she was trembling, and breathed with her mouth open.

Mayhew drew back with his face turning red where she had slapped it. Muriel Maddox took two steps, melted at the knees and onto Mayhew’s lap; and started to weep.

Mayhew was conscious of warmth and perfume and the yielding pressure of Miss Maddox’s body; but he found her another chair. For a while he did nothing save sit and listen to her sobs; and look absently about him at the room, and through the windows at the bay. There was in the lines of his big body a suggestion of weariness. A clock ticked somewhere, hollowly, and once a white cat came from under a chair to look at Mayhew.

When Muriel Maddox spoke again, it was in a hushed, hoarse tone that had no weakening in it. “You police are all alike. Prowling and poking about. Raking up scandal for the newspapers.” She sniffed indignantly, without raising her head. “You’re only interested in coarse brutal stuff. You won’t believe that Mabel might have killed herself, because that isn’t sensational enough. You want her hanged. Well, she wasn’t. I know she wasn’t. My cousin was exactly the kind of person who would go out on a pitch-dark porch and hang herself if she felt like it. She would. She had iron in her. Her body was obedient to her will. She could fast. She could force herself to work for long hours without food or sleep. You didn’t know her as I did. She tock pleasure in forcing her will upon people—upon herself, as well as others. Look at the way she defied that neighborhood she got into! She kept the bunch out on Swanson Street hopping mad all the time—simply because she did as she pleased, without consulting them.” Miss Maddox stared at the view of the bay with her eyes narrowed, red, angry. The wrinkled knob of her handkerchief she pressed to one temple, as if to soothe her brow. “Though … I guess some of them still remember that it was her father’s bank they lost their money in.”

“Miss Tannerton?” Mayhew suggested coolly.

Miss Maddox jerked her head in a nod. “Miss Tannerton. And the old folks on the other side of her, too; the old couple. Smith, I think their name is.” A little of the furious tension went out of Miss Maddox’s pose; Mayhew saw an ankle relax suddenly, and a foot drop sidewise. “That was a long time ago. It shouldn’t make any difference now. And Mabel wasn’t to blame for the bank’s failure. She was only a child then.” A moment went by on the hollow ticking of the clock. “Though I warned her—James and I both warned her, when she moved there. The lot was a part of her father’s estate, what little he had after the bank closed; and the people on either side of it had been heavy losers in the bankruptcy. She shouldn’t have built her house—not that kind of a house, at any rate, where she did. But you couldn’t argue with Mabel. You couldn’t sway her; not in the least.” Miss Maddox touched the tip of her pretty nose with the handkerchief; and shot a brief look at Mayhew. “And now she’s dead.”

“Murdered,” Mayhew put in.

“Who’d murder my cousin?” Muriel Maddox demanded in a tone that stopped neatly short of being insulting.

Mayhew shrugged. “Speaking of motives: there are plenty who might have wanted to. Mrs. Sewell for example; Mrs. Sewell because she had been cut out of your cousin’s will, and no longer would receive anything.” Mayhew kept narrow watch on Miss Maddox while he said this.

She swung and looked at him without warning, so that she caught the expression on his face. She laughed, then. “You’re reasoning it wrong end to. Mrs. Sewell wouldn’t have killed my cousin, if that’s what you want me to say. She would have either done it before Mabel changed her will, or after she’d made up and got her to change it back again.” From under henna-colored lashes, Muriel Maddox mocked him with her eyes. She said slowly: “You should study acting, Lieutenant Mayhew.”

Mayhew took her gibe seriously, his brown face placid. “So I should. Though I think I haven’t your natural talent, Miss Maddox.”

She studied him; a flicker of interest gathering as she raked his square masculine face; his big figure; his long untapered hands. Miss Maddox began to smile.

Sara says now that she wishes she could have been there; that she would most certainly have put Miss Maddox in her place; that she would have tacked a Taken sign upon her husband; that she might even have slapped Muriel Maddox. Certainly, she thinks, there was no excuse whatever for Miss Maddox trying to kiss Lieutenant Mayhew.

Mayhew came out of it second best. He wore a decoration of lipstick, which he smeared with his handkerchief in an effort to wipe it off. Standing, he was too tall for any further efforts on Miss Maddox’s part. His dark eyes were frankly angry.

She stood quiet, away from him; not bending as she had when she had given that light, provocative caress; but erect, straight, a little triumphant and scornful.

“Do you do this to all of your callers?” Mayhew grumbled, still rubbing his mouth.

There was nothing repentant in her voice or manner. “Not all. Only the ones who interest me.” Mayhew did not ask the obvious question, but she answered it. “Yes. You interest me. You’re inhumanly full of business. You’re like a big dog who ought to be chasing his tail or lying in the sun—except that somebody’s got him out on a leash, using him for a bloodhound. You have possibilities.” She eyed his well-set shoulders, his big arms. “Definitely.”

“Miss Maddox,” Mayhew asked soberly, “did you murder your cousin, Mabel Edwards?”

Miss Maddox giggled. “I didn’t kiss her to death, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“She wasn’t exactly kissed to death.”

A shadow drifted into Miss Maddox’s arch gaiety. “No. She wasn’t, was she? Who do you think might have done it?”

“You. From the way you have dragged redherrings of lap-sitting and kissing across the trail, whenever my questions were getting where you didn’t want them to get.” Miss Maddox was decent enough to blush a little at this. “Why did your cousin, Mr. Pierce, lie to us about who was to get the mine Miss Edwards owned?”

She made innocent eyes at him. “Silly old James. Did he? I’m to get it of course. Though I don’t know what for. It’s useless.”

“Is it?” Mayhew asked; and fitted his hat on his head.

“Are you going so soon?” There was a trace of real disappointment in Miss Maddox’s manner. “If you are, hadn’t I better get that lipstick off your mouth?”

Mayhew looked at her in patience. “If you will.”

She went into the other room; there was the sound of more water running; and she came back with a little soapy cloth wound round one finger. “Bend down,” she commanded. There was a wise veil across her eyes.

But at her first movement; at the first delicate lift of her bright mouth; at the first droop of henna lashes; Mayhew sprang back. “No more, please.” He held out a hand. “I’d like the cloth.”

She flung it at him, and threw herself into a chair. “I hate you. You’re unbearable.” She watched him with her jaw gone hard, her eyes wide and glittering. “I hate you. Do you hear me?”

Mayhew stuck his face close to a mirror and scrubbed it vigorously with the little cloth. “I hear you. Stay that way. I’m married.” He regarded his chin, screwing his mouth this way and that to discover any lurking trace of lip-rouge. “Do you know, Miss Maddox, I’m the wrong man for this kind of work. There’s a—” He found a concealed spot, rubbed it hard. “—an Inspector Bailey who’d eat this up. Even Dugan would do better than I do.”

Miss Maddox pouted in her chair, and seemed not to hear.

He looked at her reflection in the glass. “You’re a very clever young woman. I suppose you know it. Look at the gamut of emotions you’ve run this morning: tears, indignant respectability, love….”

“Love!” She spat the word at him.

“Hatred. You hate Mrs. Sewell’s guts. Mystery. You won’t tell me why you hate ’em.” His ironic smile was hidden by the wash-cloth.

Miss Maddox straightened, and put on the manner of a coy child. “You’d be more interested in me if you guessed what all I know.”

“I’ve no doubt of it,” Mayhew muttered at the mirror.

“There’s a lot you can’t even dream of. Such as James and I being married when we were just kids. Our parents annulled it right away, of course. We were head over heels…. Wouldn’t you like to hear more?”

Mayhew’s dark gaze grew wary; but he said nothing. He went on scrubbing his face aimlessly; and put lipstick back upon it in his carelessness. The little clock became audible again, its hollow ticking loud in the silence. The cat stirred, to let forth a soft mewing cry.

“I’m late for rehearsal,” Miss Maddox said; and leaned back laxly into her chair.

Mayhew seemed to come out of his thoughtful abstraction; he put purpose into his rubbing; finished his face; straightened his hat; and gave Miss Maddox a look that brought quick angry blood to the smooth cheeks below the henna lashes. “I’m going, Miss Maddox. I’ll return the bronze head to Mrs. Sewell.” His disapproving glance strayed down Miss Maddox’s long legs; she drew them hastily towards her. “Are you any relation of Mrs. Pierce’s?” he wondered.

“Certainly not!” she cried.

“Only a thought….” He went briskly to the door, and on his way picked up the wooden case that held Mrs. Sewell’s head. “I know what’s wrong with you, Miss Maddox.” She glanced up at him, startled. “It’s a matter of deduction—as Sherlock Holmes liked to put it. You were in love with your cousin, and while you were still very young, you and he eloped and were married. The family broke it up. Wasn’t there a tearful parting?” Miss Maddox flinched, and tried to speak. “Then came years of separation—and Mr. Pierce broke your heart by forgetting you and marrying another woman. So what? So now Mr. Pierce is unhappy, and tries to drown his sorrow in drink because he got the wrong woman, after all. And so you try to make every presentable man you meet make love to you, to bolster up your self-respect, which Mr. Pierce pretty well kicked around. And so Mrs. Pierce, who knows damned well that she isn’t her husband’s only darling, also flirts. She also has her self-respect, you see. No woman wants to think she’s totally undesirable. However—of the two Jezebels that Mr. Pierce in his wisdom has made, I think Mrs. Pierce is a little the more alluring….”

Muriel Maddox got up out of her chair and went to Mayhew and hit him squarely in the mouth with her clenched fist. Then she kicked him, once; and went back to sit down. She made no sound of weeping, but something shook her from within, and her face was white.

“Why do you hate Mrs. Sewell?” Mayhew persisted, at the door.

She looked at Mayhew as if he were a piece of furniture. “She told me … what you’ve just said. Once when we were all together … at Mabel’s.” Her hands caught each other in her lap. “I always meant to get back at her. Tell me: did she see the mess I made of that head of her?”

Mayhew opened the door. “I didn’t let her look at it.”

“You spoiled it. I hate you,” Miss Maddox said with expression.

“You’re late for rehearsal,” Mayhew reminded, and stepped out into the hall. Miss Maddox watched him go without saying another word.

FIFTEEN

Mayhew thinks that actresses are the worst possible subjects for questioning; and he blames Miss Maddox’s evasions, excursions, and emotional deviations upon the manner of her calling. But Bailey has put it much more simply: he says that all of the women in the case were crazy.

Mayhew went to see him, after a snatched lunch with Sara, who was sullen because of his neglect; and found Bailey propped up, bright of eye, and with so many more layers of gauze and adhesive-tape across his face that he gave the appearance of wearing a turban on his chin. Not even a mumble could come through the mask. His accustomed and comfortable profanity was not to be thought of.

Mayhew gave him a digest of his morning’s work. The actions of Miss Maddox he edited without being exactly untruthful. Bailey seemed impressed; and wrote Mayhew a note on his pad of paper.

“Pierce was drunk,” he told Mayhew, by way of scribblings. “He broke down to Dugan—told his life’s history—loves the Maddox girl. But even Dugan can see he’s made up his mind that Maddox killed the Edwards woman … and thinks he can protect her by covering up any motive.”

“Why does he think Muriel Maddox killed their cousin?” Mayhew demanded.

Bailey shrugged against his pillow. “He wasn’t drunk enough to spill that,” he wrote, and showed it to Mayhew.

There was further conversation between them, now on one subject and then on another; conversation which circled the crime, nipped it with theory, but elicited no signs of solving the thing.

Mayhew at last brought up a point from his interview with Mrs. Sewell: her mention of the violent shaking of a shrub outside the window at which Mabel Edwards was working upon the statue of the Druid the afternoon of her death. “Now, we have talked to Miss Tannerton. We know what went on at the front of the house; who went in, who came out, and the approximate times of each entrance and exit. But we have contacted no one who could have seen the back of the premises, with the exception of Miss Tannerton’s butler, who took time out to watch Mrs. Sewell hiding in the shrubs because his mistress had told him to. We don’t know, as yet, and because we haven’t tried to find one, any person who might have been looking into the back yard while Miss Tannerton watched the front. I’ve an idea, however.”

Bailey breathed hard to indicate impatience.

“The old people on the other side of Mabel Edwards’ house haven’t been talked to since the morning when she was found dead—when everybody had decided that it was a case of suicide. They had the same sort of interest in the dead woman that Miss Tannerton had: she was the daughter of a man who, whatever his motives, caused them to lose a lot of money; and she was the woman who had built a ridiculous little house in the midst of their old neighborhood. Maybe they watched her with the same spiteful interest that Miss Tannerton did. Maybe they happened to see whoever it was in the back yard that afternoon. Remember—nobody has told them that such incident might have a significance. Nobody has prodded their memories for them.” Mayhew leaned towards Bailey with an expression of happy anticipation on his face. “How about letting me run out there and talk to them?”

“Nothing doing,” Bailey scribbled promptly. “Dugan will handle it. Thanks for the tip. Go on home and make your wife happy.”

Mayhew straightened; his chin gone hard. “Any other suggestions needed? Or are you really going to do your own work for a change?”

Bailey’s eyes screwed up with silent laughter. “I’m still Boss,” he wrote with a light hand. “Beat it. You’ve got a fine way with the women. I’ll let you know when we’ve got another female to interview.”

Mayhew felt entirely justified in immediately going to see the Smiths.

He found them at home. They were a very old couple; both white-haired, wheezy, and full of cunning humor; and Mr. Smith was red-cheeked and plump, and Mrs. Smith was thin and sallow. She wore her mouth in a prissy expression.

Their parlor had not the over-occupied look that Miss Tannerton’s had. There were spaces where furniture seemed to be absent; and Mayhew had the feeling that the hand of the auctioneer had reached more than once toward some cherished antique. From under the snowy fluff of her pompadour, Mrs. Smith watched the straying of Mayhew’s eyes about the room, and her mouth tightened with displeasure.

“We’d like for you to come right to the point, if you don’t mind,” she said. Her voice was as thin as her body, with reedy, asthmatic overtones. “You mentioned to the maid that it was something about Miss Edwards’ death. What about it?”

He obliged by being direct, as she had requested. “The police want to know if either you or your servants noticed anyone concealed in Miss Edwards’ back yard, on the afternoon before her death.”

Mr. and Mrs. Smith looked quickly at each other; and the look was full of sly conjecture. Mrs. Smith answered him almost at once: “We know nothing about what went on at that house. We were, of course, sorry—” Here a pause, while they looked again at each other; looked with reptilian brightness and fixity; and showed no sorrow whatever. “We were sorry,” she repeated, “to hear of our neighbor’s death. It was a shock to all of us.”

Mayhew was not surprised to see that, in spite of sorrow and shock, she was smiling secretly. And that Mr. Smith was hard put to hide his delight at her little joke.

“You were fond of Miss Edwards?” Mayhew asked her.

Again the look: veiled but rejoicing. “Very fond,” Mrs. Smith assured him.

“I can understand that,” Mayhew said lamely, without being able to understand such cold-blooded pleasure in the least. “Of course you wouldn’t notice everything that went on at your friend’s house. But you might have happened to glance out during that Saturday afternoon, and seen the person we think was hiding there.”

Mrs. Smith let her lashless eye-lids drop. “We didn’t see anything,” she said. “It’s terribly sad that Miss Edwards hanged herself. We felt so sorry.” Here Mr. Smith seemed to shake in a kind of silent convulsion, with his hand across his mouth; but Mayhew refrained from looking at him. “She was so happy in her dear little home—so happy and contented. And then to die. Awful—wasn’t it?”

“Was it?” Mayhew burst out, his voice angry. “Or wasn’t it really exactly what she deserved? Hadn’t her father ruined numberless people in his bank failure? Hadn’t he somehow kept the plot of land next door to you, in spite of the demands of depositors? Hadn’t his daughter built a foolish house, the shame of the neighborhood? Hadn’t she kept an alligator—set up a totem pole in the yard—done all sorts of things to torment you? Hadn’t she done all of this?” The skin around Mayhew’s eyes puckered in an expression of furious scorn. “And didn’t you hate her for it—hate and despise and loathe her?” He fell back in his chair with a grunt of disgust. “You didn’t try to hide your feelings on the morning she was found dead.”

The Smiths looked at Mayhew in ghastly stupe-faction.

“You … You’re not—” Mrs. Smith stammered, getting half out of her chair.

Whatever she had meant to say, Mayhew finished it for her in his own way. “No. I’m not nice. I say things you’d rather not hear. Having your little fun, aren’t you? Sniggering behind your hand—” Mr. Smith jumped nervously at this. Mayhew waited then, and let the silence gather until his next statement assumed the force of a hammerblow. “Why did you kill Miss Edwards? Simply because you didn’t like her?”

Mrs. Smith squealed in a high, tinny note; and Mr. Smith, gone suddenly white, slumped in his chair.

Mayhew lighted a cigarette, plumed its tip with smoke, and regarded the Smiths with cold amusement. “I saw from the yard next door that you have a big window at the rear of the house. There was a woman there, doing something with her hands and looking out. I think the window must be over your sink. I want to talk to the woman.”

Mayhew’s quick change of demeanor pained and amazed them still further. Mrs. Smith started to speak; changed her mind; and finally left the room in the direction of the kitchen.

She came back immediately, followed by a big flat-footed Swede woman.

Mayhew brushed aside any introduction that Mrs. Smith would have made. “What’s your name?” he shot at the Swede. She answered that it was Hilda Johnson, and that she hadn’t done anything.

“I’m not saying that you’ve done anything,” Mayhew growled. “I just want you to cast your mind back to last Saturday afternoon, and try to think what went on in the yard next door.”

“I remember noddings,” Hilda informed him.

“Who was hiding in the bushes behind Miss Edwards’ house?”

“Oh—him?” Hilda seemed surprised that the man should be important. “Dot man? He yust creeping in de booshes.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“No gun. Yust a thing like dey carry paper mit.”

Mayhew looked into Mrs. Smith’s sour, reproachful face. “What’s she talking about?” he demanded.

But Mrs. Smith, gathering courage, had her own bone to pick. “What did you mean by accusing us of murdering Miss Edwards?”

“I had to break up the little game you and your husband were playing. It was fun, I know, but it wasn’t getting us anywhere. Now tell me what your Swedish nightingale’s chirping about.”

Mrs. Smith gave Mayhew a stare of open hatred; and then turned, and digging in the drawers of a big secretary, produced a flat briefcase. She held it towards the vacant-faced Hilda. “Is this what you’re talking about, Hilda? Is this what the man carried?”

“Yust the same. Like dat.”

“Now I want you to think hard.” Mayhew’s eyes bored the wide blue ones that held no expression whatever. “Did that man go into Miss Edwards’ house?”

“Not into house. Yust creeped in de booshes. Go avay den.”

Mayhew frowned a little. “You’re sure?”

“Sure. He got avay before de odder one comes.”

Mayhew pounced on her. “What other one?”

“De big voman mit furs. She came after. She sit in de booshes.” A smile came to life in the corners of Hilda’s childish mouth. “Dey vere all in de booshes dat day—like mit birds, dey vere.”

Mayhew tried another line. “Who was this man who hid in the back yard?”

Hilda shrugged. “Yust man. I don’t know him.”

“Had you seen him before?” Hilda shook her head. “Would you know him if you saw him again?” Hilda thought that she would. Mayhew swung off then into another series of questions, trying to discover if Hilda had by any chance been in the kitchen on the night that the Druid had been stolen, or the night that Bailey had been shot. Hilda told him that she went to bed early; that she was never in the kitchen after seven o’clock at night. Mayhew, on a last try, asked her to describe the man in the back yard. But in Hilda’s mind, it seemed, he was “yust man.”

Mrs. Smith ushered Mayhew to the door.

“I didn’t kill her,” she snapped at his broad back as he went out onto the step.

“So say we all,” Mayhew muttered, putting on his hat.

Mr. Philip Hellman seemed disinclined to accept Mayhew’s statements about himself. “You’re from Police Headquarters?” he repeated coldly, sinking into the depths of a worn red-leather chair from which Mayhew must have roused him; and held out his hand. “May I see your credentials?”

Mayhew’s face tightened. “You’d better call Inspector Bailey on the telephone. He’s at St. Margaret’s Hospital. He can’t talk—perhaps you read in the papers of how he was shot in Miss Edwards’ house—but he can let you know through the nurse who I am.”

Mr. Hellman sat perfectly still for a moment, looking up at Mayhew with an expression of frowning irritation upon his dark, well-shaven face; and then reached for the telephone on the table at his side.

Bending his shining head, he spoke briefly into the receiver. Mayhew held his breath, thinking God knows what Bailey might be telling the nurse, by way of lightning-like scribblings; Bailey might be getting mad again if he kept meddling in the thing. Bailey might be writing that he’d never heard of a Lieutenant Mayhew. But Bailey didn’t. Mr. Hellman put the phone back upon its cradle, and without any shading of his annoyance, put himself at Mayhew’s disposal.

They were in the living room of Mr. Hellman’s second-storey flat: a living room furnished with odds and ends of things, none of them matching, but which nevertheless gave an impression of shabby comfort. Whatever income Mr. Hellman’s brokerage business brought him did not, certainly, go into house-furnishings; but some of it without doubt had gone into the elaborately-stocked liquor cabinet at the back of the room.

Mr. Hellman listened. He was polite without being in the least cordial; and he gave Mayhew’s summary of the case a close, if patronizing attention.

“So you see,” Mayhew ended, “That we’re anxious to locate this man—the one who was hidden under the window at which Miss Edwards worked. We have a witness who would be able to identify him.” He looked shrewdly into Mr. Hellman’s deep eyes. “Would you have any objection to confronting this witness?”

Mr. Hellman’s good eyebrows inched toward his shining crown. “None whatever. Why should I?”

This was being too brief for Mayhew; he likes for people to talk and keep on talking. “What’s your idea of the affair?” he asked suddenly. “Have you any theories you’d want to advance?” It is Mayhew’s belief that all of us are vain about our powers of deduction.

Something shifted in Mr. Hellman’s attitude; Mayhew felt the antagonism go out of him, as though he had been pleased by the invitation to express his opinions; and Hellman’s eyes were almost friendly. “Of course my opinions don’t amount to anything,” Mr. Hellman began, speaking slowly. “I haven’t the scientific or psychological background of a police detective. My theories are pure guess-work.”

Mayhew kept on watching him. “You have the most valuable point of view of any of us,” he told Hellman, “for you were intimately acquainted with the victim. No police officer could match that. No prying, no questioning, could put him where you are—on the inside, Mr. Hellman.”

“On the inside … hmmmm,” Mr. Hellman murmured; and seemed to study the grain of the leather upon the arm of his chair. “It may be true—what I have to say may be important after all. Of course, I might as well tell you to start with, that the idea of suicide seemed pretty thin to me, even at the beginning. As you say, I knew Mabel very well. She and I were engaged to be married. We had mutual hopes and plans for the future.” Into his good-looking face came the pinch of painful remembrance. “All gone now….” he said quickly, and made a gesture of dismissal. “But—as I was saying; I never leaned much toward the idea of suicide. I didn’t speak to the police for the simple reason that I believed they would probably eventually discover the truth—and then, I could have been mistaken. I had nothing to go on beyond the character of my sweetheart as I knew it. And character can change, I suppose. It never seemed reasonable to me, to think of Mabel going at night out upon that rickety porch, clipping that electric wire, and hanging herself from the lantern-hook.” Again the pinch of pain; and then a widening of his deep-set eyes as some new idea dawned upon him. “Unless—it was the Druid.”

“The Druid?” Mayhew echoed, not too brightly.

A surge of red mounted Mr. Hellman’s dark cheeks; and he gripped the leather chair-arms with whitening fingers. “You’ll say that it’s a foolish idea,” he said rapidly; and bored Mayhew’s face for any trace of scorn. “There’s something evil about that statue. The … the odor of it pervades that house. I can’t express it any better. All of us—all who knew my sweetheart, felt the same about it. We begged her more than once to destroy it. Mrs. Sewell hated it. The maid dreaded and feared it. When I take possession of my fiance’s statuary, I shall destroy it.”

“The Druid has power. As a statue, it’s pretty good,” Mayhew said.

“It’s nearly human. And it’s the only thing I could ever think of that could change Mabel, as she must have been changed to go and hang herself. Lieutenant Mayhew: maybe this is a mad think to say—but I have felt that statue look at me. It’s … it’s….”

“I know,” Mayhew broke in. “But, you see, Miss Edwards didn’t hang herself. She was murdered.”

Mr. Hellman gave Mayhew a long, surmising stare. “Who gets the mine now?” he asked quietly.

SIXTEEN

Mayhew lit a cigarette; and under cover of smoke took a moment to think. “Mr. Pierce has Miss Edwards’ will. He tells us that he is to inherit the mining property,” he said slowly; and watched Mr. Hellman.

Mr. Hellman sneered. “That’s absurd—unless Mabel wrote a new will at the end. All of us knew that she had left the mine to Muriel. Not that Mabel ever gave any thought to death; don’t get that idea. She simply meant to be prepared.” He ran a quick hand across the gleaming darkness of his hair; and remembered to sneer again. “Pierce is lying,” he said flatly. “You could get the truth out of him if you wanted to.”

“We’ll try that suggestion.” Mayhew seemed mildly impressed. “What do you think of the value of the property?”

“The mine? Oh, I couldn’t say definitely. It’s in the middle of the early gold fields of California. Might be something in it.”

“Do you think that Miss Edwards had been getting money from it?”

“No—I really don’t. Whatever the possibilities of the mine might be…. She hadn’t been near the place for years; hadn’t had any dealings about it. People used to come around once in a while offering to buy it or work it on shares—old prospectors and such, looking for a strike. But the vein’s lost. She never did anything with it.”

Without any preamble, Mayhew struck off in a totally new direction. “Mr. Hellman—did you ever find yourself being followed and spied upon by a little man in a green overcoat?”

Mr. Hellman showed the proper surprise at the unexpected question. “Why … no. No, I didn’t. Was there such a person following me?”

“There may have been. He was a private detective employed for some unknown purpose by your fiancée. We’d like to know why she hired him.”

“Really—” Mr. Hellman began to give evidences of shock. “I’d never imagined … we practically never quarrelled. You’re sure about this man?”

“Positive. We know that he had private dealings with Miss Edwards. He has been identified without question as a man named Hunrath, a private investigator.”

Mr. Hellman collapsed with grief, and held his face in his hands during a long minute of silence. He gave so impressive a picture of distress, that Mayhew asked further questions. “Mr. Hellman—if this man should have followed you…. ? Would he have seen anything—I mean, had you been….”

Mr. Hellman lifted a grief-lined countenance. “Nothing like that, Lieutenant. I loved Mabel; she had no cause to suspect me as she must have done.” He rumpled his perfect hair. “Her mind must have been slipping. To have dreamed—even dreamed!—that I would be unfaithful. It’s a ghastly thing. Ghastly.”

“Her murder was certainly ghastly,” Mayhew said with practical solidity. “Now—”

But the door-bell rang then. It was a loud ring, and it roused Mr. Hellman from his misery. “Excuse me,” he muttered to Mayhew, and went to the hall that opened to the stairs. A woman’s voice, very sweet and light, drifted in to Mayhew, and he turned to watch the door.

A pretty and slender young woman walked into the room. She had a complexion of the color and texture of rose-leaves; her blonde hair cupped her cheeks in a series of little curls; and her eyes were wide and darkly blue. She gave Mayhew a smile full of even perfect little teeth. But it was her hat which instantly struck a responsive chord in Mayhew’s memory—a hat like a lacquered strawberry-basket, adorned with a ribbon, a cluster of feathers, and a rose. It was a terribly fashionable little hat; and terribly hideous.

“Miss Susan Campbell,” Mayhew said, getting to his feet.

Miss Campbell stopped just inside the door. “Do we know each other?” she asked in artless bewilderment; and took in Mayhew’s big form, his square inscrutable face, his brown eyes.

“We’ve not been introduced,” Mayhew told her; and Mr. Hellman hastened to do honors.

“He’s here about Mabel’s death,” Mr. Hellman told her gently, after the introductions had been made “The police think that it’s murder.”

“Just like the poor maid!” Susan breathed, and clutched her patent-leather purse closer to her bosom.

“Just so,” Mayhew assured her; and got promptly to business again. “I’m glad you’ve come here, Miss Campbell. You see, you’re the last person to see Miss Edwards before she returned home—to her death. I’d like to review what you said at the inquest.”

Miss Campbell sank into a chair, and raised wondering eyes to Mr. Hellman. “But I told everything—and it’s so dreadfully little. Mabel dropped in for a short time. She left about four o’clock. She wouldn’t stay for dinner, though I asked her to.”

“Did she say why she couldn’t stay?”

“Something about a dinner engagement with Mrs. Sewell. Wasn’t it a dinner engagement?” Again the appealing, childlike confidence extended to Mr. Hellman.

Mr. Hellman patted her hand. “I didn’t know all of Mabel’s plan for that week, Susan. I had lunch with her on Friday. I wasn’t to see her until Monday evening. And by Monday—” He looked away from the other two who watched him. “—by Monday she was gone.”

Miss Campbell lowered her dark blue eyes. “Poor Mabel,” she whispered.

Mayhew was ready with more questions; but again the door-bell rang. Mr. Hellman and Miss Campbell looked at each other in surprise; Mayhew watched the door. Before Mr. Hellman could admit him, Dugan strode into the room.

He gave Mayhew a belligerent eye. “Here already? Pretty cute, aren’t you. Excuse me for barging in—” He swung towards Hellman. “Nobody seemed to answer, so I just walked in. You never know when you’re going to find another murder, you know. You might have been laying here just like that McGuffin girl—all cut open—” He leered in Miss Campbell’s direction.

Miss Campbell whimpered in shrill soprano.

“Thank you for your consideration,” Mr. Hellman said, in obvious fury at his bluntness to Miss Campbell. “Would you care to explain who you are and why you are here?” .

Dugan flipped open his coat and showed his badge. “Detective Division. Inspector Dugan. I’m here about the murder of the Edwards woman.”

Mr. Hellman made a frigid gesture in the direction of Mayhew. “So is he. We’ve already told him everything.”

Miss Campbell began to sob on long quivering notes that went up and up the scale. “Why, ma’am,” Dugan told her, as if to comfort, “they cut that poor McGuffin dame open while she was still alive. Regular Chinee torture business, that’s what it was. Now don’t you want to help us catch ’em?”

Miss Campbell got up out of her chair; took too little doll-like steps; and fainted dead away.

Mr. Hellman had his arms raised in a horrified motion; Dugan is unbelievably slow; and so it was up to Mayhew to catch her, which he did. He propped her back into her chair, went to the liquor cabinet, and under the stupefied eyes of Dugan and Mr. Hellman he poured Miss Campbell’s pretty throat full of rye whiskey.

She came out of the faint with a pint inside her.

“Philip Hellman!” she screamed. “You’ve let him—!”

Then the door-bell rang again. The four of them paused to stand stock-still as figures in a tableaux; and Miss Campbell even forgot to close her mouth. There was utter silence for the space of ten seconds; and then Mr. Hellman came out of his trance. “I’d better go answer it,” he said confusedly. “Hadn’t I?”

But Mayhew, still holding what was left of the whiskey, was before him, stepping across the hall and jerking upon the door to the stairway. With the light from the door below behind them, so that their faces were in half-shadow, stood Mr. James Pierce and Miss Muriel Maddox. “May we come in?” Miss Maddox said, and put a firm hand on Mayhew’s chest to push him aside. “You here?” Pierce said, and gave him a black look. Mayhew let them pass, and closed the door after him when he followed them into the living-room.

Muriel Maddox looked briefly at Miss Campbell. “Hello, darling,” she said briskly. “Do you know you’ve spilled your drink? It’s all over you. Whiskey, from the smell of it.” She glanced back at the bottle in Mayhew’s hands. “What kind of a party are we interrupting, anyhow?”

“God!” Pierce said under his breath; and went directly to the liquor cabinet. “Give me gin. Where is it, Philip?”

“Bottom shelf,” Philip answered, growing sulky and morose.

“That beast poured a bottle of whiskey all over me,” Miss Campbell told Muriel Maddox, pointing to Mayhew. “He held me down, held me in his big brutal arms, and forced me to swallow the stuff.”

“Great Caesar’s Ghost,” murmured Miss Maddox. “How some fools have all the luck.”

Miss Campbell looked as if she could not trust her own ears. “Why, Muriel—such things you say!” She ruffled the curls under the strawberrybasket hat in a prettily distracted manner. “You … you couldn’t mean….”

“Yes. I do mean. I could do with a little manly brutality. Just so long as it was manly.” Lighting a cigarette which she fished from her purse, Miss Maddox sent a sultry, resentful stare towards Mr. Pierce. Mr. Pierce was taking a spot of gin straight, his pale head hung backwards, his light-grey eyes glassy and forlorn. “Look at that specimen I’ve spent my youth on. This morning, he tells me, he spilled the whole mess to the fat one, there.” She jerked a thumb at Dugan.

“Shall I speak now?” Mayhew interrupted gently.

“Keep your trap shut,” Miss Maddox told him. “What I told you this morning was just for you.”

“But you’re maligning Mr. Pierce,” Mayhew reminded.

“He deserves it. Besides—when a woman spills over about her love-life, it’s excusable; but when a man does it, it’s … it’s ridiculous.” She swung, to fix her eyes on Philip Hellman. “What’s been going on here?”

Philip nodded towards Mayhew and Dugan. “These two are detectives. They’re investigating Mabel’s death. I guess you’ve met the big one; haven’t you?”

“Yes. I’ve met him.” Under the henna-colored lashes, her eyes looked out upon Mayhew’s brown, square face. “He’s a beast. A perfect beast.”

“Isn’t he?” echoed Miss Campbell, sitting straighter; and Mr. Pierce came back from the liquor cabinet, not too swiftly or directly, and stood staring at Mayhew.

“What’s that you’re saying, Muriel?” he demanded; and hiccupped. “Who’s treated you beastly?”

“He did.” Miss Maddox stuck a scarlet finger-tip towards Mayhew. “He came to my apartment this morning and practically….” She looked down into Miss Campbell’s uplifted, innocent face; and made a hateful little mouth. “Well—he practically did. The beast!”

There was a moment as horrifically silent as if all of them were turned into stone; and then Miss Campbell whimpered, and Mr. Pierce drew in a long breath, and said “Damn.” But Mayhew looked at Miss Maddox in puzzlement. “You’ve just said that you liked ’em brutal!” A long step brought him close to her. “Didn’t you say that?”

A malicious gleam from under the henna lashes; and Miss Maddox allowed her breast to rise and fall in the best dramatic tradition. “I was trying to pass off a very embarrassing situation—trying to make a joke of what was very nearly a … a tragedy. For me.” She made a pitiful motion towards the bigness of Mayhew’s chest. “What was it for you—fun?” she cried.

Mr. Pierce wabbled in his tracks and went quite white. “Good God. Good God.” He said it over and over, mechanically as a phonograph. Miss Campbell was drawn far back into her chair, and clutched a hand that Philip Hellman had extended towards her; and Philip himself was rigid with anger.

Dugan had taken in all of the byplay without quite understanding what it was about; but now he looked at Mayhew in sober reproof. “See here. I hope you haven’t gone and disgraced the department. After all, you know, you’re only in it because—”

But Mayhew brushed him aside. He put a hand on Miss Maddox’s tailored arm, and spoke sternly. “You’re lying. You know that you’re lying. That scene this morning wasn’t quite as you’ve made these people believe. Now tell them the truth.”

Miss Maddox allowed the arm to drop at Mayhew’s touch; and swayed just a little, with her face turned upwards and her eyes closed. The henna lashes made a pretty shadow on her cheeks. “Don’t touch me … again,” she whispered.

The dramatic pause—the last significant word—set Mr. Pierce off like a toy boxer that has been wound up. He came at Mayhew with arms flailing blindly, with his chin and his glassy eyes leading the way; stumbling and cursing. But he came. He got at Mayhew with one clean punch, and cut his mouth against his teeth. Then, in a series of futile blows that had no power in them, he smeared the blood from Mayhew’s lip all over both of them.

Mayhew took it patiently as long as was possible; and then backed away; said “Sorry!” in an impersonal way, not sarcastically; measured the distance with his eye; and let fly a cracking right uppercut that lifted Pierce right off the floor.

There was no more out of Mr. Pierce. Mayhew caught him before he quite landed, and laid him down upon the rug in the middle of the room. There he slept with his eyes half-open, his mouth ajar as if in surprise.

Muriel Maddox gave one ear-hammering scream; and came at Mayhew as furiously as had Mr. Pierce. But Mayhew wasted no rights or lefts on her; he caught her neatly round the waist, sat down, laid her across his knees, and proceeded to chastise Miss Maddox in the best schoolroom manner.

He had his hand lifted for what must have been about the fifteenth smack when the door opened, and Sara walked in.

She took all of it in: Mr. Pierce stretched out, Miss Campbell cowering in her chair with her eyes covered; Mr. Hellman struggling to get away from Dugan; Dugan holding Mr. Hellman but feasting upon Miss Maddox’s punishment with his eyes; and her husband spanking a woman.

Mayhew stood up, seeing Sara; which deposited Miss Maddox in a heap upon the floor.

“I thought you must be busy,” Sara told Mayhew. “Don’t you know it’s getting dinner-time? Look out the window. The sun’s already set. Let’s have lights.” She reached out a hand, clicked on the electric chandelier. The room, that had become touched ever so slightly with the shadows of twilight, sprang into jarring brightness.

Mayhew blinked at her. “How did you get here?”

“Just kept going around. Nobody else was home.” She watched Miss Maddox as the girl crawled away from Mayhew. “Why don’t you help your little friend get up?”

Mayhew reached, got Miss Maddox by an arm, and hauled her erect. Miss “Maddox slapped him, tried to claw his eyes. And then stood still to glare at Sara. “Now who are you?” she hissed.

“I’m his wife,” Sara told her modestly. “I keep him chained when we’re alone together.”

Muriel Maddox gave a short, choked cry; and imitated Miss Campbell’s earlier performance: she fainted. She fainted upon Mayhew’s bosom, and he put his arms around her, looking down into the white, relaxed features, the henna-shadowed eyes. Sara frowned.

“Put her down.” Sara pointed to a leather couch in a corner. “I’ll bring her round. Better than you could.” Mayhew carried Miss Maddox to the couch and laid her on it. He turned just in time to meet the rushing charge of Philip Hellman, who had gotten away from Dugan at last, and who knew boxing much better than had poor Mr. Pierce.

There ensued a furious ten minutes in Philip Hellman’s living room. Mr. Hellman had been trained to fight; he was cagey, quick, and vicious; and his left hook was a thing to be marveled at: marveled at and avoided at all costs. He sent Mayhew spinning with it twice. But Mayhew can spin away, wreck furniture, and pick himself up to come back for more; and he came back.

Once when he had Mr. Hellman against a wall, punching him, Sara poked Dugan in the side. Dugan was watching the two, making the motions of battle without the danger. “I’m so worried,” Sara confided to Dugan. “You see, if he kills off all the suspects in this case, how’s he ever going to get to the bottom of it?”

And later, she screamed to Mayhew where he was lying against a table, having his face battered. “Stephen! What’s this stuff? It’s named….” She read the printing on the bottle. “Listen. Listen! T-e-q-u-i-l-a. Is it all right to give to Whozis?” She motioned towards the unconscious Miss Maddox on her couch.

“Maybe I’d better call the riot squad?” Dugan muttered, coming over to where Sara was pouring tequila down Miss Maddox.

“Oh, I wouldn’t. Stephen’ll be all right. He’s been in fights before.” Sara listened to the gurgling noises made by Miss Maddox. “I never can remember whether people can drink when they’re really unconscious. I guess they must be able to—she’s doing it.” The gurgling continued. Sara looked up; found Miss Campbell with her eyes. Miss Campbell was trying to squeeze behind the book-case; her dark blue gaze fixed upon Mayhew and Hellman in an expression of frenzied terror. Her little hands clawed at the heavy piece of furniture, moving it from the wall; her rosebud mouth was opened, and would have screamed if Miss Campbell could have remembered to set it screaming.

“Poor kid. Isn’t she innocent?” Sara murmured. “Now she ought to know enough not to get behind that thing. If one of the men bang up against it, they’ll mash her. Go bring her over here, Mr. Dugan.”

Mayhew and Hellman were on the floor by this time, locked in a furious, taut embrace; and often they battled across the top of Mr. Pierce without seeming to see him; and more than once Mr. Pierce took upon his unconscious face blows intended for someone else. Dugan skirted their area of operations carefully. He reached a tentative hand towards a foot of Mr. Hellman’s, but was almost kicked and went on to get Miss Campbell from behind the bookcase.

As if half-senseless with fright—as if desiring to have something solid to cling to, no matter what—Miss Campbell took a small bronze statuette off the top of the bookcase before she came away. At the side of the rolling, thrashing blur that was Mayhew and Hellman, she bent and struck Mr. Hellman neatly at the base of the skull with the heavy figurine; and Mr. Hellman expired with a sound like the air being let out of a tire.

Mayhew staggered to his feet and made motions of dusting himself; and then bent and looked carefully at Mr. Hellman.

“Is he … is he dead?” Miss Campbell quavered, shrinking close to Sara.

“No. He’s not dead. He’s not even badly hurt, though he is knocked out,” Mayhew told her; and quit exploring Mr. Hellman’s head.

“Oh! I’m so glad. I must have gone crazy for a minute.” Miss Campbell looked at Mayhew with her blue eyes glazed. “You see—I really meant to hit … you. Not Philip.”

Mayhew sat back upon his heels and studied the wreck of his clothing. “What about it?” he asked his wife. “Can this thing ever be patched up: this suit, I mean?”

“No,” Sara said definitely. “And that, my pet, was your wedding suit!”

SEVENTEEN

Mr. pierce revived and was sick in the bathroom; but Mr. Hellman remained obstinately unconscious. At seven o’clock Dugan phoned for a doctor, and one came. He was a small lean wolfish man with a fixed smile and too many teeth; named Doctor Turnbull; and he put Mr. Hellman to bed and gave Mayhew a lesson in concussions.

“May not be anything. But we’d better have him a nurse, and if he’s not any better in the morning we’ll try an X-ray. Keep the room dark till the nurse gets here. Which one of these women is his wife?” Dr. Turnbull glanced at Miss Campbell who was crouched in a chair weeping, and at Muriel Maddox who lay face downwards on the couch.

“Neither,” Mayhew told him. Sara came into the room from the kitchen, bearing a cold wet towel in her hands.

“Her?” the little doctor wondered.

“She’s mine,” Mayhew said abstractedly; and wondered why the doctor’s eyebrows shot upwards.

“I’ll call a nurse,” the doctor said after a moment, going to the telephone. Mayhew went to help Sara.

They turned Miss Maddox over; turned her red face to the light; and Mayhew saw the foolish grin that shaped the scarlet lips. Her breath rose like incense to his nostrils. “She’s drunk!” he exclaimed incredulously to Sara. “She’s dead drunk!” And bent to sniff in amazement close to Miss Maddox’s face.

“Is she?” Sara said uncertainly. “Do you suppose it could have been this stuff?” She picked up the empty tequila bottle from the floor beside the couch. “I was giving her this—all the while you and Mr. Hellman were having your spot. It smells strong; but she kept drinking it.”

Mayhew groaned; and began taking off Miss Maddox’s shoes and stockings. “Now what?” Sara demanded.

“Go and tell Pierce to get out of the bathroom and vomit in the kitchen sink if he still has to. There’s a shower in the bath. We’ve got to get this dame under it, and plenty cold. Run along to the kitchen and make some coffee. Make it strong.”

“The coffee’s your job. Get Dugan to help you,” Sara said severely. “Miss Campbell and I will tend to Miss Maddox. Doctor will you supervise?” She put firm hands under Miss Maddox’s sagging shoulders, and heaved. Miss Maddox fell off the couch.

At eight-forty Mayhew and Sara took Muriel Maddox away from Philip Hellman’s apartment, and walked her up and down Market Street. She was half-drowned and half-frozen from the effects of repeated showers; and kept belching because she’d drunk too much coffee.

Mr. Pierce had gone home in a taxi. Miss Campbell had driven away in her own rust-colored roadster. And Mr. Hellman, wrapped in peace, lay in his bedroom with a nurse to watch him through the night.

Muriel Maddox kept telling Mayhew in a deep, hoarse voice about the sundry shabby tricks that Life had played on her; but it was Sara who offered comfort. Keeping step with Miss Maddox’s long lovely legs, she said: “It’s rotten, isn’t it? Do you still love Mr. Pierce so terribly?”

“I … I thought so. Until today.” She did not look at Mayhew, but rushed on in the tragic tone she was affecting. “That’s the trouble with human beings: their affections torture them … torture them horribly. They think they’re in love with someone….”

“And aren’t they?” Sara sounded worried.

“No. They’re in love with a reflected image.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand. Is Mr. Pierce a reflected image?”

Miss Maddox made her voice very quiet. “You don’t understand because you haven’t had the experience. You haven’t believed yourself in love with someone, only to realize that you only loved in them the qualities that reminded you of somebody else. But … I’m messing it by trying to express it. You can’t be reminded of someone you’ve never met, can you?”

“No … o.” Sara studied Miss Maddox’s beautiful profile; and let her eyes slip beyond it to the sturdy line of Mayhew’s nose and chin. The snapbrim of his hat cut off her view of his eyes; and Sara looked a little disappointed. “I suppose you’re happy now. I mean finding the one you really want?”

Miss Maddox laughed softly and bitterly. “I’m as happy as I ever shall be.”

“What about Mr. Pierce? Does he know?”

“Not yet. I’m not even sure I’ll tell him. We might find some sort of happiness together.”

Sara raised her nice eyebrows. “Together?”

Miss Maddox gave her a brief, condescending glance. “Mrs. Pierce has agreed to step out of our way. James told me this afternoon. He wants us to get married again—right away. It’s decent of her; I know that. But it’s no use pretending that she’s made any attempt to be a good wife. She’s treated him wretchedly. She’s flirted outrageously with every man they know.”

“But you’re in love with somebody else. How do you know that you’ll do any better?” Sara asked hurriedly.

Miss Maddox fetched a sigh from the depths of her satin bosom. Under the neat tweed of her tailored jacket, her shoulders drooped. “The man I love doesn’t even know I exist.”

“Doesn’t he?” Sara said stupidly; and with her heart gone heavy tried to see again into her husband’s eyes. “Hasn’t he made love to you at all?” she asked in a very little voice.

“Would you call one brutal kiss making love?” Miss Maddox replied; and shivered with something like ecstasy.

Mayhew came suddenly to life when they passed a hamburger stand, brilliant with lights and sweet with the odors of meat and toasted buns. “Well, Miss Maddox, I believe you’re feeling better,” he observed, and turned towards the two women. His deep brown eyes were inscrutable, but serene. “Suppose we put you into a taxi?”

Miss Maddox was got into a cab.

Over their third pair of hamburgers, Sara asked her husband: “What were you thinking about while we were walking? You were awfully silent, you know.”

“I know.” Mayhew studied the interior of his sandwich, oozing mustard and relish. “I was thinking about something the Sewell woman said this morning. And something Hellman said this afternoon. The two don’t quite hitch.”

“You were thinking that all the while?”

“Practically all. Why? What was I supposed to be thinking?”

“Nothing.” Sara took a big bite and chewed it with gusto. “Nothing, dear. Sometimes I’m very glad you’re so preoccupied with murder.”

Bailey had a much smaller bandage across and under his chin; and he could talk, though he had to do it without moving his jaw. Mayhew went in to see him about nine o’clock the next morning and told him what had happened the day before. Bailey made impatient hissing noises through his teeth; and told Mayhew that Dugan had been there before him.

“I’m going to have to take you off the damned case. Dugan says you’ve been insulting the women—rough stuff when you’re alone with ’em … even spanked one yesterday. What the hell got into you?”

Mayhew told his side of the story.

“Razzle-dazzle tactics, eh? What’s she trying to do—make you forget you’re married?”

“She’s just an actress,” Mayhew said mildly, as though that would explain everything.

“Actress. Hell. They’re all actresses, when it comes to that. What’s your wife say?”

“She’s not taking it very well,” Mayhew said thoughtfully. “She’s getting sort of funny ideas.”

Bailey laughed. “I’ve got to get out of here. I’m missing too much. And damned if I couldn’t tame that Maddox woman. I wish she’d make a pass at me.”

Mayhew looked at Bailey with doubt plain in his eyes. “She might,” he said slowly, at last.

“But you think not?” Bailey snarled back at him. “What’s the matter with me?” He jerked straighter against the pillows. “I’m as good a man as you are any day. And don’t forget it.”

“You don’t know women,” Mayhew said briefly; and grinned to see rage creep into Bailey’s eyes.

“Dammit.” Bailey yelled, and pounded the bedclothes. “If there’s one thing I do know—”

Dugan pushed open the door and waddled into the room. “Hold it, Bailey. I’ve got some news, and it’s plenty bad.” His round face was wet with perspiration; his blue eyes bulged. He took a moment to push back his hat and swab his brow with a handkerchief.

“Spill it,” Bailey told him.

“That Mrs. Pierce. You know—” He looked over at Mayhew. “The one with the legs. Well, this morning we had two telephone calls about ten minutes apart. One was from James Pierce, her husband, telling us his wife hadn’t been home all night, and that he was beginning to get worried about her, and what could we do without letting the newspapers onto it. And the next one, in just a little while, was from some family living in a shack near his end of the Carquinez bridge. The guy had walked to a service-station to tell us there was a car run off the side of the road near his place, and that the car was empty but the inside of it was all over blood. I asked him why he’d called the San Francisco police, and he said the car was registered to a San Francisco party—a James Pierce on Pacific Avenue.” Dugan wiped more sweat, and took a deep breath. “I took a run down there. It’s like he says. I’m going back now with a print outfit, the Doc, and a couple of hounds. See what the dogs can get us.”

Mayhew stood up and put on his hat. “So long,” he said to Bailey.

Bailey jumped. “Hold it. That’s either a job for the county Sheriff’s office or the state police. We’re out of our territory.”

“I’ve explained to the Sheriff’s office. We’ll have to work with them; but they know we’ve worked on the San Francisco part of it, and are willing to cooperate.” His look swung to Mayhew. “You coming?”

They left the room with the sound of Bailey’s curses at their backs. Bailey was mad because he had to stay in bed.

It was a good day to be outdoors. The sky was clear and sunny, with a fringe of little cottony clouds low on the horizon; the bay, shallow near the end of the bridge, reflected a paler blue than the sky; and there was a crisp wind coming off the water. Mayhew and Dugan got out of the headquarters car and strode through sand and weeds to a long black sedan parked out in the brush. A group of Sheriff’s men stood beside the door to the front seat, which was swung open to reveal the interior of the car.

Dugan made introductions; and there was desultory talk. The car was gone over for prints, and these were photographed, and the camera stowed back into the headquarters car. Doctor Samuels crawled over the upholstery. “This is blood, all right,” he told the others. He washed some of the stain off into a vial of distilled water. “We’ll see if it’s human when we get back to town.”

Mayhew studied the confused pattern of footprints in the sand. Out of the mess that surrounded the car, a clear track led away towards the edge of the water. It was a single line of footprints, made by a man’s shoes. “Who made these?” Mayhew asked Dugan. “Did you ask the man who telephoned if he made them?”

“Yep. And he swore he didn’t. So it was some other guy.” Dugan’s face brightened with thought. “Here’s my theory. Somebody brought Mrs. Pierce out here in her car—got her to drive them, probably—and then beat her to death with something or other, and carried her and the weapon down to the water and pitched ’em in.”

“And then went—where?”

Dugan looked wise. “That’s why I brought the hounds. He must have walked a ways in the water, and come out of it down the line. Trying to throw us off with a trick. We’ll get him. Go bring the dogs.” Mayhew went to the car and untied two hounds from the robe-rail in the back seat. Eager, sniffing and whining, they led the way to the car and the other men. Dugan showed them the trail and they muzzled it, scattering sand with their whiffings, and then followed the footprints to the water and stood dejected. “They’ve got the smell now,” Dugan told Mayhew. “I’m going to take them down the beach and see if they pick it up. It’s damned certain the guy didn’t swim across.”

He went off with the hounds tagging him on their leashes; and the Sheriff’s men strolled in the opposite direction. Mayhew sat on the running board, and to the accompaniment of the Doctor’s clatter as he stowed things in his bag, tried to think.

After a while he stood, and walked carefully in a circle through the brush. Almost back at his starting point, he bent suddenly, and studied a mark in the sand. It was a perfectly straight line, small and indistinct, about five inches in length. And then, raising his eyes, Mayhew made out a line of them leading off through the weeds. He followed the dim trail, taking care not to mar any of the tiny lines with his own footprints; and after a while he came out upon the road. Here the trail vanished upon the hard macadam.

From under a scrubby bush a few feet further, Mayhew picked up a scrap of paper and studied it. It was a clean scrap, but torn, and though he searched for a long time, he could not find the rest of it. It was half of a match-folder, and had printing upon it:

ACM

TRA

BUR

All of the matches had been used out of it. Mayhew found an envelope in his pocket, and stuffed the torn match-folder into it.

A little further along the road, lying at the edge of the pavement, Mayhew found a board. It was a board approximately twelve by five inches, and an inch thick, and it was new. On one surface of it, Mayhew found four small, deep holes; and cast into the brush, he came across a length of small rope, much knotted; and tied into one of the knots was a little nail which exactly fitted the holes in the board. Mayhew seemed unsatisfied with these articles; and searched a long while for more. But his search was fruitless. He went back at last to the headquarters car and waited in it for Dugan. The hours of the morning whiled away. Dr. Samuels strolled on the beach. Mayhew appeared to think.

When Dugan came back, he was winded and irritable. The Sheriff’s men had long since gone, leaving word with Mayhew for Dugan to report to them what he found. Dugan hadn’t found anything.

Back in town, Mayhew stopped at a drug-store to look something up in a phone book; and then went back to Bailey’s room at the hospital. “This may not be evidence,” he said quietly, and laid out the articles he had stuffed into his pockets. Bailey watched him.

Mayhew took the new board and the bit of knotted rope with the nail in it, and with three pins borrowed from a nurse, he constructed a rude sort of sandal, and held it out towards Bailey.

“So what?” Bailey snapped at him.

“It would do. It wouldn’t leave footprints where you didn’t want them. It would, however, leave a small mark where the toe of your foot pushed it into the sand, each step you took.”

“Go on. I suppose you saw some such marks out there.”

“They were there all right. They must have begun near the car, but people had trampled them out. I picked up a row of them going through the brush out to the highway. And this.” He laid down the torn bit of match-folder.

“I don’t follow. Who did all of these things; and why? Who’s killed Mrs. Pierce?”

“I don’t believe anyone’s killed her.” Mayhew tapped the crude sandal with a thoughtful forefinger. “This is what I think must have happened. Mrs. Pierce took her car down to the bay, to a place where she wasn’t likely to be watched. She smeared her car inside with blood. I don’t think it will be found to be human blood. It’s much more likely to have come from a slaughter-house or butcher’s shop.”

“Hell, man,” Bailey interrupted, “that doesn’t make sense.”

“You just don’t understand women,” Mayhew said seriously, and rushed on before Bailey could get started. “After she’d messed the car, she took a pair of men’s shoes and went down to the water’s edge with them. I think she probably dropped something there—a bloody handkerchief, or a hat—but she forgot the tide. Then she walked back to the car, wearing the pair of men’s shoes backwards. And taking care to step in the tracks she’d already made, going down to the water. Back at the car, she put on her board-sandals, and headed for the highway.”

“That’s the damnedest….” Bailey beat the bedclothes. “… the utterest nonsense I’ve ever hoped to hear. Man alive—who do you think will believe that cock-and-bull story?”

“Nobody,” Mayhew said mildly. “At least, not until Mr. Pierce has had the wits scared out of him by the police. Ten to one his prints are the only ones in the car, outside of Mrs. Pierce’s. And the shoes that made tracks in the sand—they’re almost sure to be his. Yes—I’d say that Mr. Pierce will have a time of it explaining things.”

Bailey got quieter at once. “You think that’s why she did it—to give him a scare?”

“A scare, certainly. And if she’s ignorant about scientific things, she might hope to have him executed. On cow’s blood.” Mayhew grinned suddenly, showing his white teeth against the brown of his face. “Call up the Acme Travel Bureau. They gave Mrs. Pierce a match-folder when she went there to inquire about out-of-the-way resorts. She might have told them where she’s going.”

EIGHTEEN

The next morning Sara woke to find her husband’s pillow vacant, and a note pinned to it. The note said: “Don’t worry. I’ll be back sometime late tonight.” Mayhew’s initials were scratched in at the bottom.

Sara got out of bed, dressed, and without waiting for breakfast went to the hospital to see Bailey. Neither was Bailey in bed. He was up, shaved, and dressed in street clothes; and was standing by the window stuffing miscellaneous belongings into a bag. Before she spoke to him, Sara noticed how his hands shook at the work; and when he turned and looked at her, his eyes were tired.

“You really shouldn’t be up!” she cried impulsively. “You don’t look well enough, Mr. Bailey!”

“I’m all right,” he answered gruffly. His chin and jaw were still bandaged, and the bandage caused his speech to be slurred. “Nice of you to take an interest. Where’s your husband?”

She wrinkled her wide brow in a frown. “That’s just what I was going to ask you. You’ve sent him out on something, haven’t you?”

“No. I haven’t seen him since yesterday. Did he tell you about the bit of work down at the beach?”

“About Mrs. Pierce’s car? Yes, he mentioned it. But now this morning he’s gone; and only this note to me—and the note doesn’t tell anything.” Sara showed him the bit of paper with Mayhew’s brief message on it.

Bailey took the note in his shaking hands, and read and re-read it. “It doesn’t say much, does it? Are you sure he didn’t mention something about where he was going?”

“I know he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t say much of anything all of yesterday afternoon. We went to a matinee; and when we came out I noticed how silent he seemed. Sort of thoughtful. He stayed that way all the rest of the evening.”

Bailey looked keenly into Sara’s face. If he saw the trembling of her lower lip, he seemed not to notice. He read the note again. “I think Mayhew’s able to take care of himself. I wouldn’t worry too much, if I were you.”

“I’m not actually worried. But I wish he’d told me where…. You’re sure that you have no idea where he is?”

Bailey shook his head. “None whatever.”

“Is it something about the Edwards case?”

“I couldn’t tell you that either.” Bailey stepped to the head of his bed, and touched the call-button there. “Look, Mrs. Mayhew, I’m getting out of here. I’ll have this bag sent out to my flat and you and I can go have breakfast together. What about it?”

“Oh. Haven’t you had breakfast?”

“Not yet. And—pardon—I’m sick as hell of the damned invalid’s diet that doctor’s had me on. I like steaks, sausage, and waffles for breakfast.

Sara looked at him curiously. “Not … not all together?”

“All together. First steak and potatoes. Then sausage with maybe an egg. Then waffles—dessert. That’s breakfast.” He dug for a cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and lit a match with nervous fingers. “Let’s go. Shall we?”

They went; and had breakfast as Bailey wanted it. But neither of them was able to think of a possible destination for Mayhew.

Mayhew had driven out of the hotel garage at six-thirty that morning; and by eight-thirty he had put Sacramento behind him. At ten o’clock he was in the branch of the California Bureau of Mines in Placerville, getting information. At quarter of eleven he turned off the main highway from Placerville to Lake Tahoe, and drove the car at slow speed down a narrow, high-banked, flood-marked road. About him, outside the car, stretched a whispering, sunny wilderness that held nothing but trees and hillside and sky. There were intermittent breezes. They set the leaves rustling all along the road.

The road grew steep; topped a small divide; and descended into a little valley. Here the trees were taller, the shadows deeper, and the silence more pronounced. Mayhew braked to a stop, and climbed from the car to examine a fallen roadsign. The rotted wood fell apart in his fingers; and he stood straight to look puzzledly at the two forks of the narrow road. One led off through an open meadow where the sun turned the grass-heads to gold. The other disappeared into cavernous shadow under the fir-trees.

The silence—the kind of silence that prevails in lonely countrysides—hummed in Mayhew’s ears as he stood still to think. At last he took from a pocket a small sketch, and turned it this way and that, trying to fit it geographically into the present surroundings. Giving that up, he strode down the road that went to the meadow.

He followed it through the waving grasses, that all but covered the old marks made by wheels, and up to a little clearing where a burned scar marred the earth. It was a rectangular scar; it had been a house. Mayhew walked round it, and studied it.

On the north side of the burned area stood a young sapling. The sapling had suffered much from the fire where the house had been; but now it was putting forth new, growth, silvery green stuff that trembled on the wind.

Having done with the burned place, Mayhew took the road again. The road dipped through a boulder-strewn sandy wash, and ended on the edge of a stagnant pool. Mayhew went back to the fork where the road branched. He took a flashlight from the car.

The second road started to ascend almost at once, climbing as it wound among the fir-trees. Mayhew picked his way carefully, and stopped more than once to examine marks made in the surface of the road. There was much shadow here, and little sun; and the silence of the place was oddly deepened by the lack of light. Mayhew’s steps on the earth had an unusual snapping loudness to them; and when he stopped walking, the silence drew together again like a curtain.

The road ended abruptly on the hillside.

Here there was a wide apron of piled red dirt, and above that a tunnel going into the hill. Mayhew tried his flash. The small globe came alive with a feeble yellow light. Mayhew shone it into the mine. At the entrance was a timbering of logs, with brush and branches above to hold out the dirt. The soil was bright red. From out of the mine came the faint, flat odor of under-earth diggings; and it reminded Mayhew of another smell—the smell of the Druid, drying.

He went inside, not without a last look at the sunny hill and the trees, and shone the torch on the ancient timbering.

If there had been silence outside, here there was deathly stillness.

Not twenty feet from the entrance to the tunnel, Mayhew came across the first of the ‘drifts,’ or minor branching tunnels of a mine. This new passage was much smaller than the main part of the mine; its ceiling was low, and its sides cramped Mayhew’s shoulders. In all, it was not more than six or seven feet in depth. Whatever had led the miners into this byway was gone. Mayhew backed out.

He went on into the increasing darkness with his flashlight leading the way like an inquisitive yellow finger.

The second drift was a much longer, much more important affair. It left the main tunnel at an angle of approximately forty-five degrees, and continued almost straight for many yards. It was untimbered here. The walls were of practically solid rock. Near the end, a second tunnel branched; but ended abruptly on a wall of stone.

Mayhew went back to the big tunnel. To his right, looking the size of a dollar, showed the mine entrance. Mayhew turned his back on it, and plunged on.

There was yet another drift; a big one with a curvature in it, that led off to the right. Mayhew explored it, examined its walls, picked off bits of dirt and stone and put them into his pockets; but came back yet again to the big tunnel itself.

He went on into the blackness of the tunnel; and was surprised and unaccountably disappionted to find it ending not much farther. The beam of his flash picked out the flat red earth of its far wall. Mayhew stumbled onwards; and almost lost himself.

He had failed to see the black lip of the shaft that was sunk into the floor of the mine; or the windlass that spanned it. But it was the windlass that saved him. He caught it, and it kept him from falling into the measureless darkness below. Mayhew crawled and dug his way to safety on the other side of the shaft; and found that somehow, even in that moment of unthinking horror, he had retained his grip on the flash-light. He used the light now to see what it was that had almost claimed him.

It was circular pit, from five to six feet across, with a windlass and a swung rope going down into it; and on its other side, the projecting rungs of the top of a ladder showing just above the edge. Mayhew skirted the lip of the hole, and went and examined the ladder.

What came next, Bailey claims as an illustration of what a perfect fool would do; but Mayhew thinks each part of the thing had its proper place; and that if he hadn’t gone down the shaft, the murderer of Mabel Edwards might never have been discovered—although he knew then all that he was ever to know about it.

Mayhew climbed down the ladder. It was a light thing, not too closely made, but it took him to the bottom of the shaft. Once down, he made a guess at the depth he had come—and put it at between fifteen and twenty feet from the floor of the tunnel above. He turned the flash on the walls of the pit. And found the last drift.

Bailey also went driving that morning. He first saw Sara to the door of a hat-store, where she proposed to spend some time in buying new headgear. Then he got into his car; drove to the Acme Travel Bureau; browbeat an innocent clerk; and then picked his way through traffic to the Skyline boulevard. The Skyline boulevard took him south.

At a straggled and unpainted auto-court, he asked information.

“She’s in number six,” the proprietor told him, and spat tobacco juice within a half-inch of Bailey’s immaculate shoe. “Come in late last night. Got out of a truck in front. My wife saw her. You her husband?”

“I am not,” Bailey said decisively; he likes to think that he looks like a bachelor. Then he went and beat on the door of number six. Number six did not answer; and when Bailey flung open its door, it showed empty.

The proprietor was an old man with a seamed face, and hair the texture and color of the stuff that women sweep out from under beds. “It’s all right if she’s gone,” he meditated into Bailey’s ear. “We made her pay in advance. We always do when they’re carryin’ nothin’ but a handbag.”

“What name did she use?” Bailey asked.

“Morrison. That your name?”

“No. I told you that I’m not her husband.”

“That’s what you said.” The old man gave Bailey a wink. “She looked like she might have a temper—black hair and them green eyes. She give you a swat on the chin there?” He pointed with a grimy finger.

Bailey shuddered. “Look. I don’t think this could possibly be the right place. Are you people really registered with the Acme Travel Bureau in San Francisco?”

“Sure. We been registered with them a long time. This place used to be real pretty. Flowers all out there in front. My wife’s been sick these last few years. We built all these little cottages—built ’em nice, too.” He watched Bailey’s disapproval grow. “All it needs is a little paint. I’ll get round to it some day.” .

“I’m sure you will.” Bailey strode to the end of the long line of shabby cabins, the old man shuffling after. They came to the edge of a swale, where a stream had hollowed a little valley and where trees grew thick. “What’s down there?” Bailey asked, pointing.

“Just a kind of thicket. I go huntin’ in there some. Lots of quail. In season, of course.” Again the slow, ridiculous wink. “Think your lady might have gone off for a walk?”

“She may have.” Bailey gave the old man a sharp look. “You stay here. I’m going down there.” He picked a careful way down into the brushy gulch.

The old man scratched his head, watching Bailey’s progress. “He’s sure free with his orders. I got work to do.” He found a soft spot on some grass. “I might as well stay,” he muttered half-aloud. “Might be something doing with them two.”

Bailey found Mrs. Pierce lying on her back under a tree, staring up through branches at the sky. When he came and stood by her, she gave him a brief, surprised glance; and then looked off again.

“You’re Mrs. James Pierce,” Bailey flung at her.

“So?” She made no sudden move at his words. Her body, clothed now in a dark-green suit with a white scarf at her throat, lay relaxed, almost indifferent. Upon her folded hands, her black head shone serene. “What do you want with me?”

“Explanations.”

His brevity seemed to amuse her; she looked at him again with her long eyes. “Go on,” she told him.

“We found your car. It had animal blood smeared in it. We’d like to know—why?”

“To amuse myself … perhaps. To frighten my husband a little. To get away for a while. Won’t those reasons do?”

“You’d better get up and come with me,” Bailey told her solemnly.

She let her green gaze dwell on him without stirring. “I’ve seen you before. At the inquest about Mabel’s death. What was it you whispered to the Coroner?”

Bailey shrugged the question away. “We’d better get going.”

“Had we?” A smile curved the perfect scarlet bow of her lips.

“Yes. Come on, now.” He fell into the coaxing tones of an anxious mother.

“No. Please let’s talk a while.” She glanced towards her silken legs, crossed them at the ankles, maneuvered the green skirt to show a knee. “I’m dying to talk to an intelligent person. Did you see the old man who keeps the auto court? I talked to him last night. Even he is better than James. James is a perfect rotter.”

Bailey reached down, and would have got Mrs. Pierce by an arm; but her green eyes warned him.

“I’ll come. I can see you’re a hateful man.” She got to her feet and brushed off bits of leaves and twigs that clung to the green suit. Then she tagged Bailey back to where the landlord sat waiting for them. There Mrs. Pierce began unaccountably to hang back.

Bailey turned round, and took her gently by an elbow. Mrs. Pierce began promptly to scream. “He’s a gangster—a kidnapper! He’ll murder me!” She let the words rise in a hysterical falsetto. The old landlord looked from one to the other.

“Help! Save me!” She dropped to the ground.

The landlord plucked Bailey’s sleeve. “None of that, now. You let the lady be.”

Bailey hung over Mrs. Pierce and tried to get her up. In a clumsy effort to lift her, he twisted her arm. Mrs. Pierce let out an anguished shrilling; caught the old man’s trouser leg. “Let be! Let be!” the old man warned.

Another roomer at the court—a big frowsy man still half-asleep—came out of his cabin and proceeded to knock the stuffing out of Bailey.

Sara had a lonesome lunch. Afterwards, she read for a while in the Public Library; and leaving there, with no thought in her mind beyond the half-formed one that the woman might know where Mayhew could have gone, she asked at the desk for Mrs. Sewell.

The girl at the desk consulted an older woman in a whisper; and then told Sara what she knew. “Mrs. Sewell isn’t at work today.”

“Would she be at home?” Sara wondered.

The older woman came into the conversation on a note of authority. “I don’t think she could be. Not unless her telephone’s out of order. She should have been at work today. We’ve tried to call her, but she doesn’t answer.”

The reply aroused Sara’s curiosity; and with nothing better to do, she decided to go round to see Mrs. Sewell at home.

She found the old house, set in its row of identically ugly other old houses; and rang the bell. Somewhere within a hollow tinkle sounded. But no footsteps approached the door. Sara was turning away, when obliquely, from the corner of her vision, she saw the curtain of the near window move—move inwards, remain caught for a second by the white tip of a nail, and then drop back into place.

Sara stood perfectly still on the worn steps of Mrs. Sewell’s house; and was more puzzled than angry. She considered what could be the matter with the woman, to remain indoors, hidden and peep out at her callers.

With determination, she used the bell again. The tinkle turned to janglings—to riotous clamourings.

A deep voice spoke inside; spoke quietly, as though the mouth were pressed close to the crack of the door. “Wait just a minute,” the voice said.

The minute passed. “Come in.” The words were farther away now; more indistinct. Sara put her hand on the knob. It flashed through her mind that this delay—this business of “Wait a minute,” and “Come in,” was somehow quite familiar. Familiar and yet odd. Odd with a prickling cold oddness that she disliked.

Sara was inside the door when she remembered.

On the afternoon of Mabel Edwards’ dying, Mabel had told Mrs. Sewell to wait a minute—and then come in. And this was Mrs. Sewell’s house….

NINETEEN

Mayhew knew that the flash-light was playing him false. He knew it by the time he reached the bottom of the shaft. The yellow beam was fading ever so gradually, turning lemon-colored and dim; but Mayhew saw only the one narrow passage leading from the bottom of the pit; and plunged into it to see what might be seen before the light should glimmer out.

The passage ran perfectly straight for from thirty to forty feet; and then ended as all the other passages had, on a blank wall of earth. This earth, however, was not red. It was grey dull rotted granite. On the floor of the passage, at its end, Mayhew found a pick. He bent and focussed the flash-light on it, and examined its rusted length.

He was conscious, without knowing it, that the air was close and cold, and full of damp odors; but he is certain now in his mind, as he was then, that no sound reached his ears.

The light went out quite suddenly. Darkness closed down like a lid. Mayhew thrust the useless flash back into his pocket.

He got up from his kneeling position, and with a hand on the wall of the tunnel, went back to the floor of the sunk shaft. Here, with his hand on the earth still to guide him, he went round the circular wall twice before he realized that the ladder was gone.

Incredulous, he went round again. And then struck out across center with his arms outstretched. The swung rope brushed his face.

Mayhew took a box of matches from his pocket and lit one. The brief light showed him the red walls of the pit and the rope swinging in the center; but there was no sign of a ladder. Mayhew gazed up, trying to make out how the rope was arranged at the top, at the windlass. He took hold of it and pulled gently, to see if it were fastened. It held against his pulling. It was fastened at the windlass.

Mayhew threw down the dying match, and in the darkness again took hold of the rope. Gripping it with hands and knees, he put his weight upon it. He had made two inching advances when the rope broke with a dry tearing sound, and dropped him to the floor of the pit.

Mayhew got to his feet and stood quite still and listened. There was no sound all the length of the mine. He lit another match; and again looked up. A tag-end of shredded rope hung from the windlass. The rest lay on the floor at his feet, and he saw how molded with age and damp it was. It had been stout stuff once.

Mayhew went back the length of the branching tunnel, and brought out the rusted pick. He worked the iron head off the wooden handle, and tied the end of the torn rope to the middle of the handle; and flung the handle into the air. He worked without direction, for the blackness was like velvet on his eyes. In this pit, the light might never have been.

The pick-handle struck the windlass on its under side, and fell back upon Mayhew’s shoulder. He flung it up again. This time it went over the windlass, taking the rope with it. Mayhew had held the other end of the rope, a wilted damp thing in his hands.

He now had a double rope going over the windlass. He tied the ends together and made a loop.

He shed coat and shoes; caught the tied rope; and swung his body upwards in the dark. He was almost up to the windlass when the world went out from under him. The rope had parted where it spanned the windlass-beam.

Mayhew had a very bad fall. He writhed on the earth in a spasm of breathlessness: his lungs collapsed from the fall. When he had got wind into him again, he crawled to one side of the pit and lay quiet, breathing the earth but not seeing it.

Something hot stayed in his side. With every breath, pain gushed from the place, to flood him with misery. Mayhew began to sweat.

He knew without doubt that he was to be left in this place to die. He contemplated the kind of death that faced him: death without water; black-tongued, raving, mad-dog death. He prayed silently in his heart that Sara might never see him after; and thought of other things.

Someone must have followed him here. But no. He was too good a man and too long in the wary work of a police detective, not to have noticed if he had been trailed. Someone had been here before him. Someone must have expected him to come. But who? To whom had he dropped the slightest hint that he meant to come to Mabel Edwards’ mine? The answer was, to no one….

To whom had Edna McGuffin spoken of her mad plan to get the Druid and destroy it? To the same person, certainly…. Mayhew began to think of the murderer; of the kind of person he—or she!—must be.

Merciless … and coldly sane.

Like a series of lantern slides across the dark, the portraits of the people in the case drifted before him. Slowly. Ironically.

Mr. Pierce, pale and frightened: “When Mabel quarreled with people, she really quarreled.” An intermission then—perfectly black.

Tonelli: “I saw how she was. Her hands shook.” More black.

Mrs. Pierce, turning so that pink light crept down between her breasts; Mrs. Pierce, grinning: “Poor Mabel didn’t have a fortune, that anybody knew of.” Mrs. Pierce, fading to darkness.

Miss Tannerton, like a sparrow that has learned to knit: “And the oddest—the most unexplainable thing—was the hand!”

Hilda: “Dey vere all in de booshes dat day.” Mrs. Smith: “We were, of course, sorry—”

Edna McGuffin: “She kicked me. And it was so unlike her, sir.”

Miss Susan Campbell, nodding under her strawberry-basket hat, with her curls in a ruffled yellow bob. “But I told everything. And it’s so dreadfully little.”

Miss Muriel Maddox, whose lashes made henna shadows on her cheeks: “My cousin was exactly the kind of person who would go out on a pitch-dark porch and hang herself if she felt like it.”

Miss Tannerton again, with her black eyes shrewd: “Because Miss Edwards was the only person inside the house.”

Mrs. Sewell, as calm as a stone: “Did I say it, at the inquest? … But I might have been mistaken…. For when I went in, she was wearing her smock, and working at the statue of the Druid.”

Edna McGuffin, ravaged with tears: “I told her it was bad luck to model a thing like that.”

Mr. Hellman, gripping the arms of his chair: “There’s something evil about that statue. The … the odor of it pervades that house.”

Inspector Bailey in a wreath of smoke: “So what? She was seen inside the place, wasn’t she? Didn’t McGuffin, and the Sewell woman, and Hunrath all see her?”

Mayhew himself: “So they say….”

In the dark, at the bottom of the pit, Mayhew stirred to groan. Blind! … how blind he’d been! The earth warmed under his gaspings as he breathed out disgust…. But he knew a part of it, now.

The flickerings of his memory: the pictures of people in the dark, went on…. Reason and pain worked a cold magic in his mind.

Miss Tannerton, across her knitting: “She must have stayed in there … until whatever happened to her, happened.”

Tonneli, staring with his terrible yellow eyes: “I can’t buy no book. Me and Maria, we’re poor.”

Hilda: “No gun. Yust a thing like dey carry paper mit.”

Mr. Hellman: “It never seemed reasonable to me….”

Muriel Maddox: “There’s a lot you can’t even dream of. Such as James and I being married….”

Mayhew brushed a heavy hand across his eyes as if to sweep away the visions that drifted through his wandering mind; and then tried to sit up on the floor of the pit. Though pain stabbed him, he managed. The dark lay on him like cloth.

But he had seen the truth at last. He had felt through the visible chaos to the … he found a word … to the bones of the thing.

The fancy came to him that a crime has bones: that a murder has bones as sturdy and long-lasting and uncorruptible as its victim’s. And just as Mabel Edwards’ bones would someday lie alone, clean and white in the earth—just as Edna McGuffin’s would lie, showing no sign of her body’s red torture—so the bones of the crime had been … straight and unadorned and simple, when you found them.

Mayhew stared upwards, into darkness that had no ending.

The thought came into his head that he, too, had bones….

Mrs. Pierce did not quite get away, in spite of the good offices of the old landlord and the frowsy man who beat Bailey.

Bailey got away from the frowsy man, though much the worse for wear, and found a telephone and called local police. The frowsy man went to jail. The landlord had a lesson in the wiles of women. And Mrs. Pierce, very sulky and retiring, went to San Francisco with Bailey and occupied a cell in Women’s Jail, until she might feel willing to talk.

Bailey was at a loss to know what could have happened to Mayhew. At last, not liking to do it, he went to Mrs. Pierce, furious in her imprisonment, and asked her if she knew. Mrs. Pierce took hold of the iron-grate door and spat words at him. Not nice words.

“You mean you don’t know?” Bailey queried, blowing smoke at her.

Mrs. Pierce drew back from the door. After a while she said, very grudgingly, that she’d like a cigarette.

Bailey handed her one with a match. “Now think hard. Where’s Mayhew?”

“I wouldn’t know that,” she said coolly, and blew smoke back at him.

“Where’s your husband?”

“Isn’t he at home?”

“No. Where is he?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Mrs. Pierce went entirely away from the door and sat on the prison cot that was her bed. There she smoked, not looking at Bailey. A slow red crept into Bailey’s face.

“You remember Mayhew, don’t you?”

She swung her green gaze half towards him. “I remember him very well. He is a big man, somewhere over thirty, with a brown face like a mask on him.”

“That’s him.” Bailey paused uncertainly. “No idea where he might have gone?”

Mrs. Pierce’s green eyes widened a little, as if a new thought had come to dwell under her glossy hair. Bailey watched her; watched the beginnings of a slow, mocking grin on her scarlet mouth.

“Well?” he burst out.

“Nothing,” she told him, but still grinning.

“You’ve thought of something,” Bailey said irritably.

“Have I?” She fixed him with her cool green stare. “You’re a fool, you know, not to have thought of it too.”

Bailey got mad. “Now see here, Mrs. Pierce. You’ve got to let me know what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t have to let you know anything. By the way, where’s that lawyer I asked for? Hasn’t he come yet?”

“Why didn’t you ask for your husband?” Bailey snarled.

“He’s as much of a fool as you are. Now get out and leave me alone. You can’t keep me here without charging me, and you haven’t any evidence to charge me on.”

Bailey withdrew, muttering.

Within the hour, Mrs. Pierce was free.

In the shadowy expanse of Mrs. Sewell’s parlor, Sara stared at the person she had found there.

He was a little man: a childishly plump and pink little man with wide pale eyes and a sparse fringe of hair about the outskirts of his scalp. He asked Sara to sit down; and Sara did, still staring. She took in every detail of the little man’s squat figure, and of his clothing, and of the incredible green overcoat that he wore over his suit.

“You … you’re—” Sara began, out of a dry throat; and the little man held up his hand.

“I’m Mr. Hunrath. Yes. And I’m well aware that the police are looking for me.” He said it modestly and simply, as an athlete mentions his medals.

“But you should have come forward days ago! The whole case hinges on you—you must have known that!”

“I’m afraid you’re putting it a little mildly…. I’m quite acquainted with the fact that the police wish me on a charge of murder. And I’ll not be roped in on such a business. I know the methods of the police in such matters. Under the prod of the daily press they become … shall we say expeditious? … speedy, in the vernacular. They don’t care much whom they get, as long as it’s human. And I’ve a feeling that I’d be hanging by the neck until dead before very long.” He again held up a plump hand, to correct himself. “I’d forgotten. It’s the gas chamber now, of course. As soon as they get through testing it with those unfortunate pigs.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong. The police wanted you for questioning,” Sara cried at him.

Mr. Hunrath looked indulgently at Sara’s young face, at the smooth blonde hair that wrapped her head bentath her tall little hat. “You’re a trifle inexperienced in the ways of the police, I think. Although your husband is Lieutenant Mayhew, and a famous detective…. Men don’t tell everything to their wives, my dear.”

“They certainly don’t!” Sara exclaimed, thinking of Mayhew’s cryptic note of that morning; and then remembered why she had come here, and looked round the room. “Where’s Mrs. Sewell? There’s something I wanted to ask her!”

A frown ruffled the little man’s pink forehead. “It’s unfortunate that the lady seems not to be at home.”

“But you … you’re inside!” Sara said, bewildered.

“I admitted myself. Unlawfully. Please don’t be shocked. When Mrs. Sewell failed to answer the bell, I took the liberty of unlocking her door and coming inside. I’ve searched the premises. The article which Mrs. Sewell possesses, and which I should like to examine, she has taken with her.”

“What article?” Sara asked, very quick.

Mr. Hunrath smiled. “I can’t tell you, of course. You’d put your husband on it.”

Sara leaned forward. “Of course I would. And it would be the right thing to do. He wants to get at the bottom of this business.”

“And so do I. I want to get there first. When I can produce the murderer and the evidence to convict him, I can quit dodging down alleys and living in waterfront rooming-houses.”

“It’s too bad you didn’t come to see Stephen long ago. You see, he’s got part of it, and you’ve got part. Between the two of you, the thing would be finished in no time.”

“There’s Inspector Bailey. He’d want the credit.”

“You could have Stephen’s share of the glory—if that’s what’s keeping you. Stephen doesn’t care. He has a good job in Breakers Beach. We’re just in San Francisco on a … a trip.”

“A honeymoon,” corrected Mr. Hunrath, smiling. “I know a great deal about you and your husband—and about everyone else in this case. I’ve been—to put it crudely—snooping.”

“Then perhaps,” Sara said plaintively, “you can tell me where my husband’s been gone all this long day.”

“Gone?” Mr. Hunrath stared in surprise with his pale eyes.

“Completely gone. And didn’t tell me where he was going. I’m worried—just a little.”

“When did he leave?”

“Early this morning, before I was awake. He left a note that he’d be back late tonight.”

“Then he’ll be back,” Mr. Hunrath said comfortingly. “He’s a good man. He can take care of himself.”

“And when he does come back….” Sara pleaded with her lovely eyes. “Please come see him, Mr. Hunrath.”

Mr. Hunrath looked very thoughtful. “He may not need me—when he comes back. He should know most of it, by then.”

“You know where he’s going?”

“A possible destination has occurred to me. A likely destination. Yes … that’s it, I’m sure.” He stroked his second chin with a slow thumb. “It would account for the length of time.”

“You’ve been there yourself?” Sara cried.

“Many times.”

“But where?” Sara begged.

“Your husband didn’t wish you to know. I believe I know why he didn’t tell you; and so I cannot tell you, either.”

“It’s … it’s a dangerous place… ?”

“Now. It would be, I think. But he ought to realize the danger.”

“Maybe he didn’t!” It was a wail, high-pitched and fearful.

Mr. Hunrath touched Sara’s hand gently with a plump forefinger. “Listen, Mrs. Mayhew. If your husband doesn’t come back by tomorrow noon, will you call me?”

“Y … yes.” Sara dabbed her eyes. “Where can I reach you?”

Mr. Hunrath took out a card, and scribbled upon it; and gave it to Sara. “This a telephone number. Ask for Charlie.”

Night came: a warm night, full of summer. Sara did not sleep. Night departed on the banners of dawn; and she was still awake, still fearful. At noon she called the telephone number; and asked for Charlie.

“Charlie who?” a rough voice asked her.

“Ju … just Charlie,” Sara quavered.

“Ain’t no Charlie here!” the voice snapped at her through the earpiece; and a click sent the telephone dead.

Sara telephoned Inspector Bailey, then. Inspector Bailey was out. When would he be in again? God knows—and who was this calling? Mrs. Mayhew? Would she call again? She would.

She would, and she did.

She telephoned the number that Hunrath had given until the man at the other end refused to answer. She called police headquarters until the desk sergeant knew her voice; and cut in on her requests to speak to Bailey before she could complete them.

At twilight, with the room grown dim, she lay on the bed and wept her heart out. And because nerves and mind had had all they could bear, she presently fell asleep.

A touch on her shoulder waked her. She said “Stephen!” sleepily, and turned over to look up through the gloom. Surprise shot through her. She opened her mouth to scream.

Hunrath put his hand across her face. “I couldn’t come any sooner. I couldn’t answer when you telephoned. The police were right at my heels all day.”

TWENTY

Sara sat up on the bed, feeling with some surprise how her body trembled as if it were cold. Through the shadowy darkness, with fitful light reflected from the street below, she made out the figure of Mr. Hunrath: squat and round, with his overcoat showing green in spite of the waning day. Mr. Hunrath looked keenly into Sara’s lifted face.

“My dear!” he said softly, and patted her hand in quite a fatherly fashion.

“He’s been gone two days,” Sara told him, in a voice like a child’s. “Isn’t he ever coming back … now?”

“We’ll see. We’ll find him.” Mr. Hunrath tried valiantly to be comforting and assuring; but Mr. Hunrath was obviously tired. Sara had a flash-picture of Mr. Hunrath waddling down alleys and byways with Inspector Bailey in hot pursuit; and of Mr. Hunrath crouched, perhaps, behind a barrel full of sweepings while Inspector Bailey swept by like an angry terrier; of Inspector Bailey’s lean fingers clutching the overcoat, while Mr. Hunrath gave forth his shrill chattering cry and tried to wriggle away. This last thought brought a memory to her mind.

She looked very earnestly a Mr. Hunrath. “You aren’t angry at Stephen because of that night he jumped out upon you, from inside the porch?”

“I was very angry for a while,” he admitted without rancor, “but I presently got over it. You see, we detectives have to resort to strange practices and expedients in order to get at the truth. I excused your husband upon those grounds.”

Sara kept looking at Mr. Hunrath. “You are a very good person,” she said softly.

“Nonsense!” But her words plainly delighted him.

Sara’s thoughts turned back to their one channel. “We’re going to find Stephen? When?”

“Right away. Now. Get into your wraps; and take a robe or a blanket of some sort. It’s cold in the mountains—even in June.”

And Sara found it so.

Most of the journey she slept, bouncing from side to side in the front seat of Mr. Hunrath’s little sedan; and opening drowsy eyes to look upon dim countryside. She had started from San Francisco eager, tense; but the hours wore away, and her frantic nervousness departed. Wrapped in the blanket she had brought, she slumbered; and Mr. Hunrath drove.

It was chill midnight, with a late moon like a yellow scimitar in the sky, when Sara and Mr. Hunrath came to the fork in the road. Sara wakened when Mr. Hunrath opened the car door to get out; and peered out over her blanket at the lonely valley. To her right, one road led away across a meadow whose wet grasses were dimly silver under the moon. The other road, the one to the left, marched into a grove of trees and was swallowed up in darkness. Sara watched Mr. Hunrath walk forward to where the road branched. A flash-light made an ochre pool in front of his advancing feet; his breath trailed him like a plume. It was very cold.

Mr. Hunrath stopped, and bent close to the earth; and then swung the light in a slow semicircle about him. After many minutes of this, he came back to where Sara waited.

“I’m going to lock you into the car. Now listen, Mrs. Mayhew: and you must do as I say. Crouch down low in the seat, so that you’ll be out of sight. Don’t raise up until I come and give three light taps on the door. And if anyone comes, and tries to get into the car without tapping, reach up and press the horn. And keep pressing it until I can get back to you.”

Sara shivered inside her blanket. “Who’d be here besides us?” she asked him.

“I don’t know. I wish I did. There may be no one.”

“But … but Stephen! I want to go with you to find him!”

“And you cannot. For reasons which you’d best not think of. Just wait like a good girl.” Mr. Hunrath’s pink face pleaded with her; and then withdrew. The door was locked. Sara slid low in the seat, and wept.

Mr. Hunrath’s yellow beam crept through the black tunnel of the mine. It explored each branching drift as it came to them; and at last it stopped on the edge of the sunk shaft. Mr. Hunrath kneeled here, and shone his light cautiously down the side of the deep, dark pit.

“Are you there?” he said; and the echoes that danced back from below made hollow mockery of his words.

“Are you down inside there? Mayhew!” Dead silence answered, when the echoes had done. Mr. Hunrath, casting about with his light, discovered the ladder, drawn out of the shaft and lying along the side of the tunnel. “This shouldn’t be here!” he muttered vexedly; and with much straining of his stout little arms, he got it back into the pit again. And then climbed down it—which even Bailey, who still loves not Mr. Hunrath—admits is something.

He found Mayhew at once, bunched at the foot of the ladder, and apparently sleeping.

“Dear! Dear!” cried Mr. Hunrath, shining his light upon Mayhew’s battered face. Mayhew moved, and groaned. Mr. Hunrath plucked at his shirt sleeve. “Wake up, man. Your wife’s here.”

It is Mr. Hunrath’s belief that the mention of a man’s wife will bring him out of almost any state of unconsciousness, short of death. In some men it is love of the wife; and in others, fear. The belief has, in his experience, been quite well substantiated. At any rate, Mayhew now opened his eyes.

Mayhew groaned again; stirred his big body; and wabbled erect. There was dried blood on him. Mr. Hunrath did ineffectual work with a handkerchief. Mayhew flinched, cursing; and staggered to get hold of the ladder.

“Careful, now!” warned Mr. Hunrath. Mayhew swayed, fell off the ladder; and took a heavy fall on the earth. New red blood trickled down his temple.

“Now! Now!” clucked Mr. Hunrath. He tried lifting Mayhew; but he might as well have tried lifting the floor of the shaft. Mayhew got to his feet again; and tried to get hold of Mr. Hunrath. But Mr. Hunrath danced nimbly beyond his reach.

“I’m not keeping you down here, you know. Get into your proper senses, man. Your wife’s waiting up above, outside the mine.” He watched Mayhew with comical earnestness. Mayhew subsided into moanings, and tried to sit down again. “No you don’t!” Mr. Hunrath squeaked. He again enraged Mayhew with the handkerchief, so that the big man staggered erect.

Mr. Hunrath led Mayhew up the ladder as a matador leads a befuddled bull in the bull-ring: by offering his portly self as a bait to unreasoning rage. Mayhew followed the length of the mine after him—and then sprawled where the piled dirt made loose footing at the entrance. Mr. Hunrath went after Sara. The two of them got Mayhew into the back seat of the car.

At ten o’clock the next morning, which was Monday, Mayhew walked into Bailey’s office with Hunrath tagging his heels. Bailey looked up—Bailey was himself well-battered from his encounter with the frowsy man of the auto-court; and his two missing teeth caused him to leer—and let out a yelp of surprise. “Damnation! What’s come over you?” His eyes searched Mayhew’s face, which was spider-webbed with sticking plaster, and strayed lower to Mayhew’s waist, which was newly thin. “You’ve got on a corset!” he accused with scorn.

“Broken ribs. The doctor taped them,” Mayhew said briefly; and went on. “I’d like you to get all of the people in the Edwards case together at one place. Here’s a list of those we’ll need. I know who murdered Mabel Edwards: and how.”

“You do, do you?” Bailey mocked. He let his eyes dwell on shrinking Mr. Hunrath. “I see you’ve located our little friend for us. How’s tricks, Mr. Hunrath? Why’d you murder the woman who had employed you? Was she too strict a boss?”

Mayhew made a gesture of impatience. “Let him be. I didn’t locate him. He located me. In the bottom of a shaft in the Edwards woman’s mine.”

“So that’s where you went day before yesterday?” Bailey cried; and then paused to think. “You weren’t … you haven’t been down in a shaft all of this time?”

“Most of it.”

Bailey got very sober. “Monkey business again?”

“That’s right.”

“Were you in the dark?”

“Quite. As dark as the inside of a cat. Are you going to get those people for us?” Mayhew laid a big finger on the list of names he had put on Bailey’s desk.

“Mayhew, this is the police department. We can’t have private dicks running our business for us.” Bailey’s unloving look went to Mr. Hunrath’s green figure. “You say you’ve got an idea who killed the Edwards woman. Tell it to me. I’ll listen. Then I’ll handle things my own way.” He set his bandaged jaw stubbornly; and watched Mayhew.

Mayhew picked up his list of names off Bailey’s desk. With Hunrath still following, he made for the door.

“Who did it?” Bailey cried in a hurry.

Mayhew shrugged, not turning round, and put his hand on the doorknob. “Wait,” Bailey said, getting out from behind his desk. Mayhew and Hunrath stopped and waited. “You want to run things right to the end,” Bailey accused. “Don’t you?”

“It’s the only way that it can be managed. I said that I knew who killed the Edwards woman; and I do. But without a confession we’ll never get anywhere. What I know isn’t evidence.”

“You can’t convict them of murder?”

“Not quite.”

Bailey marched back to his desk. “I’ll have to talk to McClennan. And I know what he’ll say. What am I being paid for; that kind of stuff. And he’ll probably kick me right out of the department.”

“Bring McClennan along. It’s going to be a good show,” Mayhew said casually. “And tell him to bring his gun. You bring your own.”

“My, my! Fireworks?”

“I can’t guarantee it. They say a woman fights more desperately than a man. Maybe they do. We’ll see.”

“Good God! A woman?”

Mayhew thrust the paper back at Bailey. “Get them all together. I want them in the front room of Mabel Edwards’ house.”

Bailey groaned on a high, sarcastic note. “Oh, Lord. Now he’s getting all the suspects back at the scene of the crime. Mayhew—you’re not going to pull that old dodge?”

“It’s a good old dodge,” Mayhew replied placidly.

“You … you’re not going to re-enact the crime?” Bailey shrieked.

“A part of it. All that we know.”

Bailey danced. “Holy Harry! Wait till McClennan sees that! He’ll tear Mabel Edwards’ house down brick by brick with his bare hands. If there’s one thing that McClennan hates with his whole insides, it’s that fiction kind of detective work. He reads murder mysteries just to tear ’em limb-from-bush at the end! Oh, man! This is something for the books.”

But it was a sober enough company that met, shortly after one o’clock, in the long front room of Mabel Edwards’ little house.

Hilda had been the first to be shepherded into the room by a policeman. She came in hesitant, smiling with her wide Swede’s mouth, walking flat-footed. She found a chair in a corner. Tonelli came next. Bailey had found him again that morning, hidden in a closet of his wretched home. Tonelli shuffled in; met Hilda’s reassuring smile; and managed a feeble smile of his own.

“For vhy you don’t trim de booshes no more?” Hilda wondered. Tonelli told her he had been sick. They both looked up as Miss Tannerton swept in, crisp in grey taffeta, her black eyes sharp under the lace of her little cap. Miss Tannerton nodded to each of them; found a chair with a straight back; and seemed to forget her surroundings. She had brought her knitting.

Hunrath wandered in through the kitchen. He had been talking with Mayhew in the back porch. Miss Tannerton did not look up.

Mr. and Mrs. Pierce arrived together, with an officer to usher them. Mr. Pierce took off a new grey felt to show a glistening brow. His pale eyes looked fear at everybody. Mrs. Pierce seemed more composed: she was in black velvet, with a big worked-silver clasp under her throat, and a tall black hat with a silver feather on its crown. Her green gaze held disdain.

Mr. Hellman followed in a moment. Mr. Hellman, hollow-cheeked, showed results of Miss Campbell’s faulty marksmanship. He found a chair, mumbled hellos; and stayed silent for the rest of the time.

Miss Maddox and Miss Campbell came in together: Miss Maddox very dramatic in blue and orange—her orange hat not a good choice to sit upon her henna-colored hair—and her face frozen; Miss Campbell quite young in pink. If she had other hats than the lacquered strawberry-basket, she never wore them. Miss Campbell chattered; Miss Campbell gazed sorrow at Mr. Hellman; but Miss Maddox exuded tragedy, and did not speak.

Officer Charles walked in. Mr. Hunrath looked the other way, trying not to meet Officer Charles’ reproving eyes.

Mrs. Sewell came the last of all. Big, wide-shouldered, wrapped well in a long scarf of foxes, she walked in with a slow look for everyone. She took a corner of the davenport, which had been turned with its back to the fireplace so that it faced the room; and sat majestic and serene as though the overstuffed were a throne.

Mayhew and Bailey herded McClennan in by way of the kitchen. They put McClennan on the davenport by Mrs. Sewell. McClennan’s face was hard with anger; his stone-blue eyes looked rage. But he was prevailed upon to sit.

Mayhew stood by the kitchen door, and regarded each person in turn. “Now!” he said calmly, as if they were all just as he wanted them. Bailey smirked beside him. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Bailey sneered, “We are here gathered together in the sight of this Druid—” He made a little bow towards the fierce ugliness of the statue. “We are gathered together to re-enact a crime.”

McClennan looked as if he might burst. Officer Charles raised mildly inquiring eyes to Mr. Hunrath who wiggled.

“We needed an audience; and we hope that you will bear with us if the performance seems a little ghastly.” Bailey paused to grin; he was obviously highly pleased with his oratory. “The stage will now be set. We’ll want a good view for the beginning.” He stepped to the front of the room and raised the curtains high, so that the front yard was immediately visible. “And we will, of course, need an actress for the main part.”

“The … main part… ?” cried Miss Campbell; and Bailey grinned down at her.

“Miss Edwards’ part. She, unfortunately, cannot be with us today.” A horrified gasp rewarded him for this. “Now you, Tonelli—you go out into the front yard and get busy on the bushes. Miss Edwards will presently be coming through the gate.”

Tonelli shook a weary head, plainly not understanding any of it. When Bailey made further explanations, he got up and went towards the rear of the house. He was stopped. He explained that he went to the back porch for tools. Yes—he had always used Miss Edwards’ tools in her yard. They were better than his own. He was allowed to proceed. In a few minutes he was seen through the windows, nipping shrubbery with the giant shears.

Mayhew spoke, now. “Miss Maddox—would you be willing to act out the part of your cousin?”

Miss Maddox sat very still for a moment, and looked at Mayhew with unfathomable eyes. Then: “Yes. If you wish me to.”

Mayhew made a brief gesture towards the bedroom door, which was closed. “In the bedroom you will find the clothing that Miss Edwards wore on that last day. The suit and blouse, and the hat and shoes. If you’ll put them on….”

Miss Maddox started to get up; and then sat down again. “I … must I wear her clothing?”

“We’d like you to.”

Miss Maddox got to her feet and started to the bedroom. She put a slow hand to the knob; and looked back at Mayhew. “You know that I look a great deal like Mabel.” Her glance flickered to the others: to the Pierces, to Hellman, to Miss Campbell, and to Mrs. Sewell. “Don’t be … don’t be alarmed, when I come out.” The door closed behind her.

In a very few minutes she reappeared, standing in the doorway in Mabel Edwards’ black woolen suit with the black fox collar right up to her ears, and the hat low on her face, its veil lower than her nose. There must have been some remarkable resemblance to Mabel Edwards; for Mr. Pierce said “My God!” in a low, stunned voice; and Mrs. Sewell rose out of her chair with a cry.

TWENTY-ONE

Muriel maddox advanced into the room; her eyes fixed on Mayhew’s. “Now what shall I do?” she asked him.

“Go out to the sidewalk and come back through the yard to the front door. Do not look at Tonelli. Stop at the door.”

Miss Maddox did exactly as Mayhew instructed her. At the open door she halted. Behind the veil her face was taut, strained; and wore the look of not wanting to know what came next.

Mayhew summoned Tonelli from the yard. “Now I want you to show Miss Maddox exactly what to do. Here is a bunch of keys.”

Tonelli took the keys, apologized for his dirty hands, and proceeded to stab an imaginary lock with first one key and then another. “That will do,” Mayhew told him; and looked at Miss Maddox. “You needn’t do it. We all understand what he means. Come inside.”

Miss Maddox followed him in; and stood by the door as Mayhew talked. “The next part is difficult; because the person who acted it in real life is also dead. I do not think we need anyone to play Edna McGuffin. I will explain what happened next, as she told it to me. Miss Maddox, will you go into the bedroom, remove your hat, and lie down fully clothed, on your face, on the bed?” Miss Maddox, obviously hating it, did as Mayhew asked. Through the open door of the bedroom, which was darkened because the blinds were down, her figure could be seen, stretched upon the bed.

“Edna McGuffin came into the house and started towards the kitchen. At that moment, on that Saturday afternoon, she heard her mistress weeping. Weep, Miss Maddox.

A muffled sob, dry with realism, sounded from the bedroom.

“Edna McGuffin went immediately into that bedroom. She spoke with her mistress. Her mistress told her to go away at once. Edna McGuffin, desiring to please a mistress she loved, knelt beside the bed and tried to remove Miss Edwards’ shoes. But Miss Edwards kicked her in the face.”

Mrs. Sewell rose again, and cried: “Oh, no! That wasn’t like Mabel!”

“So Edna McGuffin told me,” Mayhew said soberly. “But to get on: Mrs. Sewell, this is where you come in. We’ll presume that Edna McGuffin has gone; and that you have arrived. Tonelli, I think you should be working at the side of the house by now. Mrs. Sewell: please go out and approach the house just as Miss Maddox did.”

McClennan’s voice rose in wordless complaint. The rest of the people in the room were watching Mayhew as if he had hypnotized them.

Mrs. Sewell went out, and returned to stand upon the front steps. Her big figure filled the door.

Mayhew spoke towards the bedroom. “When Mrs. Sewell knocks, you must raise up and ask: ‘Who’s there?’ When she asks you if everything is all right, say: ‘Of course!’ Then ask her to wait a minute; and get up and take off your jacket and put on a smock, and come in and act as if you were modeling the Druid. Do not look at Mrs. Sewell.”

Mrs. Sewell knocked. Muriel Maddox raised herself on the bed; but here her voice failed her. It was a while before she said, “Who’s there?”

“It’s I. Anita Sewell,” Mrs. Sewell said promptly; waited a second, and then went on. “Is everything all right?”

“Of course!” Miss Maddox said.

Mrs. Sewell looked in at Mayhew with terrified eyes. “It’s dreadfully like….” she whispered. “Dreadfully….”

“I know,” Mayhew said calmly. “Go on, Miss Maddox.”

“Wait a minute!” Miss Maddox said, very faintly; and got up to fumble with the buttons of the black woollen jacket. In another moment she stepped back into the living room, wearing a smock from Mabel Edwards’ closet. Her face was like paper.

“She’s nearing the breaking-point,” Bailey said soundlessly into Mayhew’s ear. But Mayhew merely nodded; and seemed satisfied.

Muriel Maddox put trembling hands upon the Druid. “Come in,” she said over her shoulder; and then looked terror at Mayhew. “That was right—wasn’t it?”

“It was. Mrs. Sewell, come into the room. We won’t try to re-create your fifteen minutes indoors that day … only a part of it. Bailey, give me the brief case.” Bailey reached into a shelf, produced a flat leather case, and handed it to Mayhew. Mayhew offered it to Mr. Pierce.

Mr. Pierce immediately went to pieces in his chair. Under the scornful green eyes of his wife, he cowered whimpering, and tore his white-blonde hair almost out of his scalp. “No! I won’t do it!” he got out at last. “I won’t. You can’t be sure it was I.”

Mayhew looked round at Hilda, and raised his black brows at her. Hilda smiled beautifully. “Dot’s de man. Yust like,” she told them. “He vas hiding in de booshes under de vindow.” She pointed at the brief case. “He got thing like dey carry paper mit.”

“Come on, man,” Mayhew said sternly. Mr. Pierce quivered, managed to struggle up out of his chair. “You brought the will for your cousin to sign. She hadn’t signed it at your office because it wasn’t completed. Now go outside with this briefcase and get into the bushes, just as you did that Saturday.”

Mr. Pierce learned to walk. At last he got out of the room. The bushes moved against the pane beyond the Druid. Mr. Pierce’s fearful face looked in.

“Good,” Mayhew said promptly, as if he were directing Mr. Pierce in a play. He beckoned Mr. Pierce to come in again. Mr. Pierce came, and stood dumb before him. “What did you see that day, Mr. Pierce?”

Mr. Pierce made many swallowings. “… working at the Druid,” he ended with mouthings.

“Who?” cried Mayhew, in a voice like doom.

“M … M … Mabel!” got out Mr. Pierce

“Not Mabel,” Mayhew coaxed. “You didn’t see Mabel. Whom did you see?”

“M … Mrs. Sewell,” gasped Mr. Pierce.

“I know. Mrs. Sewell was in here, so you didn’t come in. It didn’t seem like a good idea to bring in the will in front of her, because the will definitely cut her out of Mabel’s estate. You thought they might be making things up. So you waited. But who was working at the Druid?”

Mr. Pierce’s hands fluttered at his tie. His eyes were going glazed. “I couldn’t be sure who it was. I only saw the eyes. The … the person raised up on tiptoe to look out at me. I … saw the … the eyes.”

“And they weren’t Mabel’s eyes.”

“N … no.”

Mayhew pinned Mr. Pierce’s heaving breast with a heavy finger. “I know exactly when you realized that fact, Mr. Pierce. It had puzzled you. You had gone away bewildered from the window. But when Dugan and I asked you who inherited the mine, you at once saw a motive for the murder, and realized that the person who looked at you over the head of the Druid had seemed strange because that person was not Mabel Edwards.”

Mr. Pierce gave one plaintive glance towards Miss Maddox, still beside the Druid in her smock, and fainted dead away in his tracks.

Mr. Pierce was carried into the bedroom, and given whiskey. But Mr. Pierce preferred to sleep.

Mrs. Sewell protested her convictions. “But it was Mabel. It was. I was here with her, and I know.”

Mayhew gave her his dark glance. “What makes you so sure, Mrs. Sewell? Did you see Mabel Edwards’ face?”

“No.” She backed a little from his steady regard. “But her hair. I wouldn’t have been mistaken in that. Her hair was….” Mrs. Sewell’s eyes went unwillingly to Muriel Maddox’s henna head; and her voice died.

“Yes. Her hair and Miss Maddox’s hair were the same. Gives you an idea, doesn’t it?” Mrs. Sewell fell back, clutching her foxes, her face gone grey.

Her voice was grey, too. “But … but why?”

Mayhew kept his eyes on her. “There are two questions that I should have asked you long ago, Mrs. Sewell. I’m going to ask them now. But before I do, may I point out the known facts that bear out my theory?” His gaze swept them all. Only McClennan looked angry. The rest seemed under a sorcerer’s spell.

“To begin with: what Tonelli saw. He thought he saw Mabel Edwards, distracted with grief, her eyes blinded by tears, trying to get her door open. He thought this because Edna McGuffin told him of her experience indoors; and he connected her recital with what he had seen happen before. What he really saw was an impostor who did not know one key from another.” Tonelli had come to stand in the doorway; he nodded slowly at Mayhew’s words.

“It could be,” he whispered; and crossed himself.

“Then consider what happened to the McGuffin woman. She was summoned to a dark bedroom; and in a voice almost unrecognizable because of seeming grief, her mistress told her to go.”

Again Mrs. Sewell’s agonized cry: “But why?”

“To build up towards the suicide idea,” Mayhew said promptly. “To give an impression of overwhelming grief and worry, so that the idea of Mabel Edwards killing herself would be logical and easy to believe.”

“But she didn’t show any grief to me!” Mrs. Sewell hurried to say.

“So she did not. And let’s consider why not. Mrs. Sewell: if you had come to this house and found Mabel Edwards lying in bed almost sick with anguish and sorrow—what would you have done? Think carefully, please.”

Mrs. Sewell considered for many minutes. Then she said: “I think that I would have called a doctor.”

Mayhew smiled, briefly and grimly. “That answer is so like you, Mrs. Sewell, that it was a foregone conclusion before you said it. And calling a doctor would have spoiled things for this impostor, wouldn’t it? A doctor; a lot of light?” He watched Mrs. Sewell sink back into her chair. “That was my first question, Mrs. Sewell. You have answered it as I thought you would. You know—all of us know—that the person who posed as Mabel Edwards that afternoon had to get up and seem quite different towards you. You wouldn’t have gone away, as Edna McGuffin had. My next question is this: where did this person put her hands upon the Druid, that day while you were here?”

“Why….” Mrs. Sewell hesitated, looking about. “It seems to me—on the heart, mostly.”

Mayhew took a magnifying glass from a pocket, and went to the Druid and bent close to it. A delicate pattern of finger-prints, dried into the clay, fixed themselves under the glass. “Here we see, then, the fingerprints of this woman. It’s only a matter of time, now…. But I think there’s something more here.” He tapped the clay lump in the fingers of the Druid, and got a ripe, thick sound. Mayhew put Miss Maddox to one side; picked up a mallet and a little chisel off a shelf, and went to work. The heart presently fell away from the rest of the Druid. As it fell, a fat roll of something green toppled out of it, and came to rest at Mayhew’s feet.

Mayhew picked up the green, string-bound roll; held it towards the others. “Miss Edwards’ bank account,” he said soberly. “She never had another.” He ruffled the bills, and handed them to Bailey. “There’s something like twenty-thousand dollars in that roll, if my guess is right. Don’t pretend to lose it.”

Bailey whistled a long, dry note. “Now I know why the damned thing was returned here after the McGuffin woman stole it,” he said to Mayhew.

“That’s one reason. I think there’s another, also.” He set the broken heart carefully back into place. “And now we’ll hear you, Mr. Hunrath. First, tell us your business with Miss Edwards.”

“I was her confidential agent in the mine-business, Lieutenant. For several years—ever since the old prospector McDonnell took the mine to work it on shares—I conducted her affairs for her. It was my job to go to the mine each month, get the gold from McDonnell, sell it, and bring the money here to her in bills of large denomination. She told me that she was anxious that no one should know of it. I don’t think that it was a matter of being afraid; I think that she liked to puzzle people—she impressed me as being that kind of woman.”

“And on that Saturday evening?” Mayhew asked him.

Mr. Hunrath’s pink face grew troubled. “I came as usual, just about dark. The place was unlighted. Miss Ed … I mean, whoever it was … said that a fuse had blown, and did I mind sitting in the dark? I talked for a little while. Miss Edwards—I thought it was she—seemed anxious to know just how much I had already brought her. It seemed to me that she should have known that better than I, and I told her so. But … but presently I began to understand that the person I was speaking with wasn’t Miss Edwards at all. The voice was wrong. So I got away. She caught my coat-tail at the door. That gave me a fright.” He looked apologetically at the others; and Miss Tannerton’s lips twitched in a grim little smile. “It was an eerie experience. Awful. I got away. Then when I came back in the morning, to try to see the real Miss Edwards—and found her hanging dead out on the porch, I was so startled, I … I just….”

“You ran away,” Mayhew finished for him. “Now, tell us, Mr. Hunrath. Who was in here pretending to be Miss Edwards?”

Mr. Hunrath reproached Lieutenant Mayhew with a wide gaze. “But Lieutenant—you already know who it was!”

McClennan came out of his trance with a roar. “You already know!” he bellowed. “You’ve known all the time? Then, for the love of God, why this tomfoolery?” With much angry motion, McClennan got off the davenport. “Who is it?”

“You want to know, don’t you?” Mayhew was almost insulting. “Then go back and sit down.”

But McClennan kept on roaring. “How long have you known?”

“The murderer betrayed himself to me, days ago,” Mayhew said calmly. “It took a little thought to realize it. I had some time to think, this last Saturday and Sunday.”

McClennan remained standing; but subsided to growls. “What do you mean—betrayed himself? How’d he do it?”

“He mentioned a fact that only the murderer could have known.”

Mayhew’s calm aggravated McClennan’s anger. “Go on, go on. What fact?”

Mayhew looked at Mr. Philip Hellman; looked into Mr. Hellman’s furious black gaze; and did not smile. “Mr. Hellman said that it did not seem reasonable to him to think of Mabel Edwards going out onto a dark porch, and clipping the electric wire….”

Mr. Hellman started to rise out of his chair, his head high and tense like a snake’s that is annoyed; but McClennan is slow. Scratching his hair, he grumbled, “Well?”

Mayhew did not look away from Mr. Hellman. “Look at the thing that Tonelli has in his hands,” he said to McClennan. “That’s what the wire was cut with—hedge-clippers….”

Mr. Hellman was half-standing now, his face under his black brilliant hair like a mask that has been torn. His mouth was a gash that showed his white, gritted teeth. “What’s one word?” he demanded, and then: “Oh!”

Someone had coughed…. A small red hole appeared in the front of Mr. Hellman’s shirt. Mr. Hellman sat down again and relaxed sidewise. Mr. Hellman was dead.

Mayhew looked at Susan Campbell. Her childish blue eyes met his, though in her hand was the little automatic from her purse, with its silencer on the muzzle, that had coughed a bullet into Mr. Hellman. “I promised Philip I’d do that, when the time came. I think the time had come. And now I’m going to kill you, too.” The point of the gun crept round in a lazy arc.

“Tell us … first,” Mayhew said pleasantly.

Susan nibbled a lip; but she went on talking after a moment. “We had told Mabel that we were in love. Mabel wouldn’t listen. She said that it was an infatuation, and that Philip belonged to her.” A sigh escaped Miss Campbell’s pretty mouth. “Then Philip got angry, and said that there was no other way but to kill her. We’d get the money, too, that way. Philip was to get her statuary work if she died; and he knew, somehow, that she meant to get all of her cash together and put it into the Druid to keep it safe.”

Miss Campbell’s pretty face, under the strawberry-basket hat, looked innocently upon them all. “We killed her Saturday, just before four o’clock. I put on her clothes. You, of course, know about the hair, don’t you?”

Mayhew nodded. “I had guessed it. I saw a picture on Miss Maddox’s wall. Miss Edwards had worn her hair long until she was nearly grown, at least. In the picture, she had long hair; but at her death, it was cut. I thought that she might have saved the cut-off part for sentimental reasons—girls sometimes do, I’m told—and that the hair could have been stolen without much trouble, and made into a wig.”

“That’s it,” Miss Campbell said in her light treble. “You see, Philip had thought for a long time about the money. He knew the mine was being worked, and that it paid well. Then he heard that the vein was lost; that they had sunk a shaft to find it, but that it was really gone—played out, he said. Mabel had the old miner sent away, and had the house there burned; and Philip said the mine really wasn’t any good any more. That was when he decided to kill her. He said that it was the time.” Her wide look went to McClennan’s inching hand. “I’ll kill you, Mr. McClennan, if you try to draw your gun.” McClennan straightened his arm with a mumble.

“You’ll want to know how we did it, won’t you? Philip thought it all out. She came to Philip’s house, not mine, on Saturday; and Philip caught and held her while I put the noose around her neck. He hanged her from the electric chandelier. That way, she really was hanged, you see, just as she was found, later. Philip said the doctors would know the difference if we choked her; but that the time, if she were found on Sunday morning, couldn’t be told close enough to matter. He never could understand how you knew that it was murder.” Her tone was sad. “It worried him so much.”

“And getting the Druid back here, after the McGuffin woman took it to destroy it?” Mayhew prompted, with the gun-muzzle still pointed to his heart.

“I didn’t like that part of it,” Miss Campbell said to the stricken company, as a child might say that it didn’t like peanuts. “But Philip got terribly angry at Edna McGuffin, when she took the Druid in spite of his telling her not to. It wasn’t just the money. Philip was afraid that I might back out on him. He said the Druid would keep me in line, because my fingerprints were on it from the afternoon when Mrs. Sewell was here….” She raised big, sober eyes to Mayhew. “You knew that too, didn’t you?”

“Only since Sunday,” Mayhew answered. “I should have guessed it when Bailey was shot for looking at the thing through a magnifying glass.”

“Philip didn’t like that.” She glanced briefly to Bailey, at his bandaged chin. “He was always sorry that he didn’t kill you.”

For once Bailey had nothing to say.

“When did you put Mabel Edwards’ body on the porch?”

“Late that night. Philip drove his car up the alley. The body was still in its underwear. Together we put it into a nightdress, and Philip cut the electric wire with the clippers, and we got her into place. She looked dreadful. She had scratched herself while she was hanging from the chandelier, you see, and it made terrible….”

Mrs. Sewell had started screaming.

The long, shuddersome sound distracted Miss Campbell; and it annoyed her. She raised the gun a little; and Mayhew saw the flash of purpose in her eyes. He tried to step aside, but the gun’s black muzzle followed. Miss Campbell was going to kill him.

Her slim finger tightened on the trigger. The little gun spoke.

There was a mass of henna-colored stuff in front of Mayhew’s eyes at that instant. Unreasoning rage stirred in him. And all at once he knew that Muriel Maddox had stepped between him and Susan’s gun.

The little gun spoke again in a moment. It was put against Susan’s forehead, a little below the edge of the strawberry-basket hat; and made a round smoke-colored hole in the white skin.

Mayhew caught Miss Maddox’s limp body in his arms. A whispered message drifted up to him. “I can’t live for you … but I can die for you,” Miss Maddox said, and let her henna lashes droop upon her cheeks. Mr. Pierce, out of the bedroom by now, ran forward, but a weak hand pushed him back.

Miss Maddox had a bullet in her. But to Mayhew’s relief—and perhaps even to Miss Maddox’s—the bullet proved to be in her shoulder, not her heart.

Sara looked up from the pages of a magazine which had plenty of recipes. With scissors poised, she watched her husband’s big figure come into the room. “If you’ve finished your love-affair with the Maddox woman,” she said severely, “we might be able to go on with our trip. We’ve still got to see Seattle, you know.”

Mayhew told her of what had happened that afternoon in Mabel Edwards’ little house. Sara listened soberly, her blonde head on one side like a canary’s. “We’ll send Miss Maddox some red roses. I’m sorry I was hateful about her.” She leaned towards Mayhew for a kiss.

There was a tap on their door. Mr. Hunrath slipped inside, when Sara called, “Come in.”

Greetings were exchanged. Mr. Hunrath told Lieutenant Mayhew that the Mayhew car had been found in San Francisco. People in the neighborhood where it was located, said that it had been towed there by another car. “That would be Mr. Hellman’s work, wouldn’t it?” the little man concluded.

“It would,” Mayhew agreed.

“What about Mrs. Sewell? Where was she, the day we called on her?” Sara asked Mr. Hunrath.

Mr. Hunrath hastened to answer. “That’s a point I wanted to ask you about, Mrs. Mayhew. Mrs. Sewell’s explanation this afternoon confused me. Is it a reasonable thing for a woman, if she is worried and upset, to take a day off from work, and go out looking for a new hat?”

Sara giggled. “Hats are a feminine remedy for all troubles, Mr. Hunrath. Give a woman a hat store, and she can forget her woes.” Mr. Hunrath looked relieved, subsiding into a ball inside his green overcoat. “Now tell me, Mr. Hunrath, what you wanted to see, that you said Mrs. Sewell had.”

“I would have liked to have seen the note she was supposed to have received from Miss Edwards, inviting her to dinner that evening. If the note was really from Miss Edwards—and I would have known her handwriting—it made the behavior of the murdered woman that afternoon, very strange. It would have corroborated, in a way, my belief that there had been an impostor there. You see, I listened in on the inquest, through a crack in the door. I heard what Mrs. Sewell said.”

“About the car,” Mayhew broke in. “I suppose he brought it back here, so that it wouldn’t draw any attention to the mine, or to me in the mine, by being found up there.”

Mr. Hunrath nodded, looking thoughtful.

Sara gave the little man an affectionate look. “This was really your case from the beginning,” she told him. “You knew all along it had been a murder. You didn’t have to go testing things by hanging other people.”

Mr. Hunrath appeared confused at this. “I thought it must be murder. Yes.” He raised his round face towards Mayhew’s. “But you—what put you on it so quick?”

Mayhew showed his teeth in a smile. “It was the little man in a green overcoat,” he said. “You see—he shouldn’t have run away.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dolores Hitchens (1907–1973) was a highly prolific mystery author who wrote under multiple pseudonyms and in a range of styles. A large number of her books were published under the moniker D. B. Olsen, and a few under the pseudonyms Noel Burke and Dolan Birkley, but she is perhaps best remembered today for her later novel, Fool’s Gold, published under her own name, which was adapted into the film Bande á part directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

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 © 1938 Dolores Hitchens

Cover design by ian Koviak

ISBN: 978-1-5040-8464-2

This edition published in 2023 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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DOLORES HITCHENS

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