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Dime Detective Magazine, May 1947, with "Grim Reaper's Model"
Not every milkman has the most beautiful girl in the country rush into his arms—especially a frightened Miss America who's just posed for Death....
Headpiece from Dime Detective Magazine.
JO-ANN MARLIN was tired and cold and—yes, a little frightened. She was tired because she'd just finished the midnight show and who wouldn't be tired at past one in the morning after doing three shows? She was cold because all she had on, in this draughty, dim corridor down which she ran, was a white nylon bathing suit that just barely covered what the law says must be covered. Of course, she also wore on her lovely pale red hair a gold—well, gilded—tiara glittering with real-looking jewels, and slanting across luscious curves the wide blue ribbon whose red letters proved those curves were the most beautiful in the country. But tonight the crown was just something heavy on her head, and the Miss America on the ribbon didn't make her any warmer.
Jo-Ann was beginning to be scared because it was so dark in this hall, with only one grimy light, way behind, throwing her shadow ahead of her as she ran past shadowy doors. Dark and dusty and awful empty.
It was Fred Avery's fault she was here. He'd gotten her awful sore at him this morning. Through the thin door of her room in their hotel suite she'd heard him tell the fellow who'd come all the way from Gale County to take her picture that if the Weekly Gazette wanted one they could buy it from Atlas Fotopix. Before she could make herself decent and get out there, the fellow was gone. Well, she certainly had given Fred what-for. Just because he was her manager, that didn't mean he owned her. Suppose he had signed a contract giving Atlas the exclusive of her pictures? He'd signed a lot of contracts, but she hadn't had a letter from Dad or anyone else at home since she'd won the statecontest and they'd left for Atlantic City. The least Fred could do when someone from home showed up was to let her talk with him. He hadn't even found out the fellow's name. Why, he could be one of the boys who graduated with her from high school last year.
"That's what I was afraid of," Fred had grinned. "You're through with those local yokels, my pet. I've got big things in mind for you—and me—and they don't include going back to the farm after you've seen Paree."
Gee, it sure was scary in here. This was the old part of the Thalia Theatre. The part, Mr. Grimsby said, they used only to store things in since they built the new dressing rooms on the Rand Avenue side twenty years ago. New! That was before Jo-Ann was born. How old was this part then? How long had these lonely shadows whispered to one another in their voices of dust?
Jo-Ann stopped short, hand at her pulsing throat. How could anyone from far-off Gale County know about this forgotten corridor?
She hadn't thought of that when he'd told her to meet him here. When Fred and Mom—not Jo-Ann's real mother, who was dead, but Mary Taylor, whom Fred hired to make believe she was her mother and travel round with them so people wouldn't get wrong ideas—when Fred and Mom had gone downstairs for lunch, Jo-Ann had still been too sore at Fred to go along. Then the 'phone had rung and it was the man from Gale County. Jo-Ann had been too excited to think of anything except that this was a voice from home.
She'd wanted to ask him if Dad was doing any better with the farm now she'd sent him the money to pay off the mortgage, and if Prue Hobson's baby had turned out to be a boy or girl and—oh, lots of things. But he'd cut her short.
"We've got to talk fast before your manager comes back. You're not going to let him get away with chasing me off without a special picture of you for the home folks, are you, Jo-Ann?"
"I should say not," she'd said, getting sore all over again.
"All right, then. Listen—" He'd told her what to do and hung up, and only then did Jo-Ann remember he hadn't told her who he was.
That had made her all the more anxious to meet him. So when the curtain towered on the finale of the midnight show, she'd danced off-stage through the left wing instead of by the right where Mom was waiting with her warm robe. Before anyone could notice, she'd run up the rusty iron steps the reporter had told her about and into this musty passage with its rows of closed doors in shadow-filled niches.
One of those doors, there just ahead of Jo-Ann, was opening inward. It was where he'd said he'd be. Jo-Ann could make out the faded star on it and under the star a faded name—Edwin Wills Rooth. The door opened slowly and soundlessly, although the hinges were rusted. Yellow light showed between its edge and the scabby jamb, and a voice inside said, "Come in, Jo-Ann."
It was silly to be afraid of someone from home. Jo-Ann stepped into the dusty-smelling room, noticing that the light came from an unshaded bulb screwed into the top of the frame of a specked mirror on the right-hand wall. It was a queer-shaped bulb with a glass point on top, and not frosted, so she could see the dull-glowing curlicue inside it. "Stand before the mirror," the voice ordered, "turn around and face me."
Jo-Ann had got so used to obeying cameramen without thinking that she stepped in front of the mirror before she turned to look at the man from the Gale County Weekly Gazette.
Across the room, he bent over his camera. The flash reflector stuck up over the camera, gleaming with the light from behind her, but all Jo-Ann could see of the man was the top of his wide-brimmed slouch hat and the dark topcoat that hung from his hunched shoulders.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Later." It was the voice on the phone. "We'll get the picture first. Don't look at me," he ordered. "Look at the flash reflector."
Jo-Ann knew what that was, the round thing like a big cup silvered inside that stuck up from the side of the camera. It cupped the light of the bulb behind her, but shone much brighter than the bulb itself.
"That's right," the cameraman murmured. "Look at it. Lo-o-ok at it," he kept saying, very softly. "Keep looking, Jo-Ann." The brightness hurt her eyes but she couldn't pull them away from it. "I know you've very tired, very sleepy," the voice murmured, soft and slow. "You're sleepy, so-o-o very sleepy." She was. The sleepiness was welling up inside her, a gray mist inside her head. "No-o-ow," the voice droned. "No-o-ow, Jo-Ann, no-o-ow look at me. Look," it dropped to a husky whisper, "at Death!"
Jo-Ann looked—and screamed. White light exploded, searing her terrified eyes, her horror-stricken brain. She whirled down into the white and devastating light. His chuckle followed her down, down into nothingness....
AT six in the morning Rand Avenue was as unglamorous as a
champagne hangover. The night's flaming neons were mere twisted
glass tubes, their carnival glow replaced by a hard, bright light
that made cruelly vivid every crack in the deserted pavement,
every asphalted patch in the desolate gutter. Garbage cans were
stacked under the limp canopies of the Gray Cat, the Club
Mañana, Dolan's Tavern. The Thalia Theatre's marble lobby
yawned cavernously behind its grating of diamond-meshed iron
slats.
The only living being in all this stale vacuity was the young man in a crisp white suit who peered through the Thalia's grating at a color-washed photo cut-out, enlarged to life size, that was propped just within.
Tom Grant's freckled left hand rumpled his thatch of black hair. His right clutched the handle of a wire basket heavy with a dozen bottles of milk. Behind him, at the curb, a hundred more bottles flattened the over-sized under-inflated tires of the electric truck in which their boxes were piled. He ought by now to be around the far corner on Sixth Street, delivering to the boarding houses there, but he couldn't tear himself away from the picture, not just yet.
Standing here, Tom could imagine the girl in the bathing suit was real. That she was smiling for him alone and not for the guys who could afford to buy orchestra seats from the speculators. He could, if he dared, reach in and touch her shining golden-red hair. He could talk to her.
He said her name. "Jo-Ann. Jo-Ann Marlin." It was a pretty name, almost as pretty as she was, with her green eyes and wide red mouth, a dimple denting one corner of it. "Jo-Ann Grant." He liked that better. "Mrs. Tom Grant...."
Hell, what was the use of mooning over her? She was for some guy with money and brains, not for a dud only smart enough to cart milk around and collect for it. Who was Tom Grant to dare dream he might ever so much as get near to the real Jo-Ann?
Thin sound twisted him around to the Seventh Street corner. He heard it again—the ghost of a scream, prickling his spine. A cat, he told himself. An alley cat—Something flashed around the corner, red, white and blue, and ran toward Tom.
The wire basket dropped. Its contents smashed, and—so fast that the explosion of glass and milk missed him—Tom leaped to meet her. Her! It was Jo-Ann Marlin who flew toward Tom as if all the devils of hell were after her. Her white bathing suit was dirt-smeared, her ashen face black-smudged, the crown askew on her streaming hair. A soundless scream hovered on her pretty mouth and her green eyes stared ahead sightlessly.
She didn't see Tom, would have plunged on past him if he hadn't caught and held her. Her breath rasped in her throat and her small fists flailed at him.
"Hold it," he gasped. "Hold everything, Jo-Ann! I'm not going to hurt you. Look. I'm just a milkman."
The homely, familiar word did the trick. Her hands dropped. Her eyes cleared, saw Tom's white coat, his freckled, broadly moulded face. "Milkman?" her quivering lips repeated.
"Only a milkman," he smiled, his voice low, soothing. "I'm Tom Grant, Jo-Ann."
"Tom? Tom Grant. I don't—You know me?"
"Sure I know you. I was just looking at your picture—"
"Picture!" The terror flared again into her face. Her body stiffened in his arms—Jo-Ann's gorgeous body in Tom Grant's arms!—and she twisted to stare back over her shoulder. Then she turned to Tom. Her lips trembled violently as she whispered: "He—he took my picture!"
"Who?"
"Death!"
Her eyes were midnight pools holding remembered horror. "I saw him. I saw his fingers with the camera in them. Just bone. Skeleton fingers." Her voice was a toneless scream again, a scream Tom hardly could hear. "His face!" Her own face was a twisting mask of terror. "Bone and black boles and grinning teeth without lips. His face—a skull grinning at me. And then the light, the white Death-light...."
"Easy, Jo-Ann." Poor kid. Poor scared kid. "Take it easy." She was very young, Tom saw now, and the fuss, the late hours since she was named Miss America must have driven her nuts. "You just imagine you saw Death."
"I did, Tom. I did see him!" Her hands snatched at his white coat, clung frantically. "And he's after me. He's back there around the corner, waiting to take my picture again!"
"No one's going to take your picture, Jo-Ann. No one's after you."
"Yes he is, Tom. Death's after me. He's around the corner, watching, waiting for a chance to get at me again!"
"Okay." Humor her, that was the thing to do. "If he is around the corner, I'll go chase him away." Play along with her. Calm her down and then get her to a hospital. "I'll tell you what." He gently urged her toward his truck. "You sit down in here and rest, and I'll go chase Death away." She went docilely, sank into the padded-leather driver's seat. "And then I'll take you home."
"Home." Her pupils widened again. "He didn't come from home, Tom. He lied."
"Yeah. Sure he lied. Now you just sit here and I'll go chase him away." Maybe her babbling had something real behind it. He'd better take a bottle along for a club, just in case. He pulled one out of a box, gripped it by the neck. "Be a good girl, Jo-Ann, and I'll come right back."
"Be careful, Tom. Please be careful."
He was, Tom Grant had to admit, maybe a little nervous as he went past the Second Balcony entrance, past a cigar store window with whitewash letters sprawled across the glass: Miss America—Choice Seats—All Performances; past the shuttered Orange Drink stand on the corner.
He stopped there, looked down Seventh Street, along the Thalia's red brick wall up which iron fire escape stairs crawled, to the Stage Door and beyond it, where the wall became the almost-black, stone facade of the old part of the theatre.
Nobody, nothing, moved on the empty pavement. The gutter was empty and so was the sidewalk across. A flicker of movement at the corner of Tom's eye jerked his head back to this side. The iron stairs? They were as empty as before, but he saw now what he'd missed, that the Stage Door jutted out a little, open.
Or had it opened in the instant he'd looked away? Was whoever, whatever had so scared Jo-Ann crouched behind it, peering out at him, watching for him to turn his back?
TOM was really frightened now. Then, remembering how the girl
had looked running toward him, he was suddenly blind-mad. He ran
toward the door, swinging the milk bottle like a club. He pulled
the door wider with his free hand, plunged in—and stopped
short, windpipe locked on breath.
The bottle slipped from his numbed hand, smashed on concrete. Milk washed over Tom's shoes, washed against the body that lay face down along the foot of the drab wall. Milk whitened gray trousers and a tattered gray sweater clasping an emaciated torso, did not quite reach the sweatered arms flung out as if still trying to reach the shelf on which stood the phone from which old Grimsby might have called for help.
Tom stood frozen, staring down at the grisly dent that misshaped the gray-haired back of the old man's skull. Of old Grimby's skull, the Thalia's stage-door guardian and night watchman, to whom only yesterday Tom Grant had delivered his every-other-day quart of milk.
He'd always thought Grimsby was kidding when, rheumy eyes glittering, he'd husk a yarn of some eerie midnight visitor he'd met in the dusty corridor where the old dressing rooms rotted. "I'd be scared hairless to be in here alone all night with those spooks," Tom would kid back. Grimsby'd show his gums in a toothless grin. "Why should I be frightened of Edwin Rooth, to whose Hamlet I played Horatio before your father was born? It is the coryphées should fear him, who flaunt their naked limbs on the very boards he strode as the greatest interpreter of the immortal Bard the world has known."
Their naked limbs. Jo-Ann had shown from that stage her wonderful arms, her gorgeous legs. An icy chill crawling his skin, Tom stared into the dark depths beyond the armchair Grimsby had salvaged from some long-forgotten set. Did he make out, back there, a crouching shadow blacker than the black shadows? Was the—? Bony fingers clamped his shoulder from behind.
A soundless scream rasped Tom's throat. The grisly hand twisted him around and he gaped into a broad, red face topped by a dark blue uniform cap, saw over the cop's shoulder another pounding across the sidewalk toward them, and behind that one the green top of a police prowl car. He went limp with relief.
The second cop reached them, grunted, "Whach yuh got, Hen? A sneak thief?"
"Sneak thief, rats! Killer's more like it. He's sloughed in the watchman's skull—"
"With that milk bottle, huh?" A beef-like hand jabbed down at the smashed glass beside the corpse. "Good thing we noticed the door wuz open—"
"No!" Tom squealed, suddenly aware of what they were saying. "I didn't. I didn't kill Grimsby. I just found him like that."
"Yeah." Hen grinned humorlessly. "He didn't do it, Bill. He just come along innocent-like an' found him like that. An' he smashed the bottle just on account he likes to see nice wet milk splashin' over stiffs."
"Look." Tom pawed blue cloth. "You're wasting time. The murderer may still be in the theater somewhere. I was around the corner almost right after Jo-Ann ran up to me screaming he was after me, and—"
"Hold it," Hen broke in. "Who's this Jo-Ann an' where is she?"
"Jo-Ann Marlin. Miss America. She'll tell you. She's in my truck around there in front of the Thalia lobby."
"Uh-huh." The cop's fingers tightened on Tom's shoulder, digging in. "So Miss America's in your truck around on Rand Avenue, is she."
"That's right. I know it sounds funny but she is. You can go look."
"No, mister. We don't have to go an' look. On account of we just come through Rand Avenue, past the Thalia lobby, an' we looked for a milk truck partickler on account we saw milk an' glass all over the sidewalk in front of the Thalia. But we didn't see no truck, an' we didn't see no Miss America neither."
He turned to his partner. "Okay, Bill, call Homicide. You better tell 'em to bring along the wagon from the nut house."
WHAT happened after that was never very clear to Tom Grant. He
had a confused recollection of wailing sirens, of bright lights
and rock-jawed men in uniform and in cits hammering him with
questions whose answers they refused to believe. Of sunlight
slanting in through an open door and the mutter of a crowd
gathering outside it and, towards the end, of a tall, gray-eyed
man in a black felt hat and a black topcoat saying to him, "Look
here, Grant. We've finally found out Miss Marlin is registered at
the Grand Union Hotel and I've just talked to her mother on the
'phone. The three of them, Miss Marlin, her mother and her
manager, returned there right after the show last night. The girl
has been in her own room ever since, sound asleep."
"No," Tom croaked, his hands flat against the wall behind him. "She couldn't be."
"Something more, Grant. We've found your truck. It's around on Sixth Street, at the other end of the alley that runs behind the theatre through to Seventh Street here."
The man's face was grim but his low voice was almost friendly. "So you see, Son, if there ever were a chance of your wild story being believed it's gone now. You're tied tighter to this murder than a Siamese twin to his brother. Why did you kill the old man?"
"I didn't. I tell you I didn't. Edwin Rooth did."
"Good boy. Now you're beginning to show some sense. So you had an accomplice. Where do we pick up this Rooth?"
"I—I don't know. I don't know where he's buried."
"Buried! So now you're bringing in a ghost." The friendliness went out of the man's voice, his eyes. "Okay, Grant." Both were chilled steel. "If you're playing for an insanity plea, you'll find out you can't get away with it." His tight look moved to the cop holding on to Tom's arm. "All right, Sergeant. We've got enough to hang him without a confession. Take him in."
"Yes, Sir. Come along, you." The sergeant dragged at Tom's arm, but another man, short, with a pointed little chin-beard and gold-rimmed specs, got in the way. He plucked at the gray-eyed man's sleeve. "Captain Storm."
The other made an irritated sound in his throat. "Well, Doc. What have you got on your chest?"
"Some information that should be of interest to you. Your bright young men haven't yet learned to recognize the difference between a cadaver which rigor mortis is just beginning to stiffen and one from which it has almost passed away again."
"What the devil are you driving at?"
"Oh, just a trifle, Captain Storm." The medical examiner smiled tauntingly. "Just that the corpse in which we are at the moment interested has been a corpse for approximately five hours. It is a little after eight now, so the murder occurred at about three this morning."
The sound in Captain Storm's throat was not irritation this time.
"You see," the physician went on didactically. "It was very cold last night so that rigor set in quickly, but towards morning the automatic heating system—"
"Okay." Storm swung back to Tom.
"Where were you at three a.m., Grant?"
"At the plant, waiting to load up. I—"
The captain swung to another detective. "Get on the 'phone, Parks, and check that."
"Yes, Sir." The detective hurried away and Captain Storm was lost in the shifting knots of men. After awhile Parks was back, a smile on his square-jawed face. "Okay, Grant. You've got an alibi." He put a hand on Tom's shoulder. "You shouldn't have got rattled and told us all those ghost stories."
"But they weren't—"
"Yeah, I know. Go on. Get out of here before the skipper decides to hold you for interfering with the police in the performance of their duty."
Tom Grant stumbled out through the door into sunlight. A man with a press-card stuck in his hatband asked him something but Tom pushed past him. Another one pushed a camera at him and snapped it. A camera! Jo-Ann had said something about a camera—No, a cameraman. A skeleton cameraman. It had happened. No matter what the cops said, she'd come running toward him, so scared she couldn't even scream. Something must have scared her. Tom had put Jo-Ann in his truck, and then the truck and Jo-Ann both had disappeared.
Her mother had told the police Jo-Ann was in bed all the time. Jo-Ann's mother wouldn't lie, but maybe she only thought Jo-Ann was in her bed. Or maybe somebody had made Jo-Ann's mother lie, maybe holding a gun on her while she talked on the phone.
Then—the thought stopped Tom stock-still on the Rand Avenue corner—then Jo-Ann might still be in danger. Was still in danger. He started to go back to tell the cops, then stopped. They wouldn't believe him. It was up to Tom Grant.
THE Grand Union Hotel. It was the ritziest place in town, and
he was in his milkman's white suit, with milk splashed all over
his shoes. Well, he could do something about that. He pulled out
a handkerchief, stepped over to the man who was opening up the
Orange Drink stand and asked him to wet it. The fellow looked at
him kind of funny but did. Tom washed off his shoes, threw the
handkerchief away and went across the sidewalk toward a taxi that
stood at the curb while its driver gawked at the crowd. "The
Grand Union," Tom yelled, snatching the door open and climbing
in.
The hackie turned to look in at him, flat nose screwing up like he smelled something bad. "Ain't yeh fergot yer luggage, me lud? Or are yeh travellin' incog—incognitoo?"
"I got the fare." Tom dug a bill out of his pocket. "See." And then he got mad. "Get going before I ram your teeth down your gullet."
"You an' who else, bud?" But the cab started off, so fast it knocked Tom back into the seat.
He decided to have the cabbie let him off around in back, where the delivery entrance was. And he got a break. Some porters in white suits like his own were unloading baggage from a truck. He walked up to it and hoisted a trunk to his shoulder like they were doing and went on in after them, into a big, stone-floored room with brick walls painted gray-blue.
He was inside. But he still didn't know how to get to Jo-Ann's room, not even where it was. He saw one of the porters go up to a sort of desk on high legs, look at a tag hanging from the trunk on his shoulder and say to the man standing behind the desk, "Jenkins."
The man didn't look up. He just thumbed some cards in a box on the desk, pulled one out a little and said, "Fourteen-oh-two." Tom Grant stepped up to the desk and said, "Marlin," muffling his voice.
"Six-twenty-three," the man read from a card. Tom went around the same corner into a narrower blue-walled space where some trunks were piled along the wall. The porter was just going into a big elevator, ahead, and alongside the elevator was a door through which Tom saw stone steps going up. He put his own trunk down on top of the others. As soon as he saw him do that, the elevator man rattled the cage-door closed, which made it simple for Tom to dive to the opening beside it and start running, two steps at a time, up the walled-in stairs.
He met no one on the stairs, but when he shoved out through the sixth-floor fire-door, a woman wrapped in a white Mother Hubbard apron looked at him sort of funny over the pile of folded sheets she was carrying. He swallowed, but walked right past her as if he knew where he was going.
A right-angle turn took him out of her sight before the numbers on the doors lining the red-carpeted hall got to 623.
Some of the doors along here were open, the bedrooms inside all messed, the mattresses stripped. Counting ahead on his left, where the odd numbers were, Tom saw that the door of what must be Room 623 was closed, as were the ones either side of it. A queer, babbling noise came from behind the door of 621 as Tom passed it. He reached 623 and turned its knob.
It was locked. He had to knock. A murmur of voices inside cut off, but nothing else happened. Tom knocked again.
THE knob turned and the door was pulled half-open by a stocky
man, about thirty, with slicked-down black hair and a roundish,
pleasant-looking face.
"Good morning," he said, looking mildly surprised. He had on a maroon silk robe, and his white shirt was tie-less and open at the neck. Otherwise he was fully dressed. "You must have the wrong room. I didn't call for a porter."
"I'm not a porter." Tom shouldered the door aside and pushed in through it before the man could shut it again. "I'm a milkman." He looked for Jo-Ann but this wasn't a bedroom. It was a swell parlor with a sofa upholstered in pale green silk, a radio between two wide, drape-swathed windows, a desk littered with papers in the far corner and two or three deep, comfortable-looking chairs out of one of which a very thin man in a navy blue suit pushed up, eyes widening.
The other one closed the door and said quietly: "So you're a milkman, are you? The milkman, I suppose, we've been hearing about on the radio. The one who sees ghosts."
Tom turned around to him. "Where's Jo-Ann?"
The fellow's smile deepened and he put his hands in the pockets of his robe before answering. "Jo-Ann is in the room she shares with her mother." He pointed with his chin at a closed door in the wall to Tom's right. "Asleep, as the police were informed when they phoned."
Tom swallowed, asked: "Who're you?"
"Fred Avery. Miss Marlin's manager. And legal guardian." The other man made a peculiar, choking noise and Avery said, not taking his eyes from Tom's, "You'd better go out through my room, Roberts, I'll contact you later."
Roberts went, without a word, to another door in the wall to Tom's left, opened it, went through and pulled it shut behind him. When Tom looked back to Avery, his eyes were waiting. "Now, Mr. Milkman," he murmured. "Would you mind telling me why you're here? What are you after?"
Those eyes were pale, queer-looking. They made Tom uncomfortable. To get away from them, his own dropped to the floor, stared at Avery's shoes as he answered, "I wanted to make sure Jo-Ann—Miss Marlin is all right."
"What makes you think she might not be all right?"
"Her being so scared of someone who was after her, and then—" Tom gulped and all of a sudden was shaking inside of him. "And then her disappearing after I put her in my truck in front of the Thalia."
The freshly polished shoes at which he stared shifted a little on the green carpet. "So you really believe that story, milkman. Well, you'd better forget it because she wasn't anywhere near the Thalia at six this morning. She left there with her mother and me immediately after the last show. She came right back here with us and has been here ever since."
Tom's hands fisted at his sides and his head came up. "You lie," he said hoarsely. "You lie in your teeth. She was there at six and so were you. You were the one who drove her 'round the corner in my truck. Now I know you're lying about her being in there!" He whirled away, plunged toward the door on the right—stopped short at Avery's snapped command. "Freeze, milkman. Freeze right there if you don't want lead in your guts."
Tom twisted back, gaped at the flat blue automatic that had come out of the robe's pocket and snouted at him from Avery's fist. Just then the door toward which he'd been plunging rattled open. The babbling he'd heard in the hall was suddenly behind him and a woman's voice, saying: "She's coming to, Fred. Should I—" She broke off with gasping breath. "Oh, oh. More trouble."
"No, Mary," Avery smiled past Tom. "The end of our troubles. I was worried about this milkman and his story, afraid someone might believe him, but he was good enough to come to me with it."
Tom stole a glance over his shoulder at the brunette in the doorway behind him, mouth a thin red slit in her overly rouged face, eyes drowned in blue shadow, hand clutching a feather-edged pink dressing gown about her.
"The story will be," Avery's soft voice continued, "that he forced himself in here, stark, raving mad. He tried to get to Jo-Ann and I had to shoot him down. But first you'd better put my dear ward back to sleep. I'm afraid we're going to have to wait a while before letting the world know Miss America's gone insane. Understand?"
"Yes, but I don't like it. One killing was one too many."
"My dear, there are people who'd murder a half-dozen for a lot less than the quarter-million or so we're in for if we don't lose our nerve. And there are others who'd sing to the police to keep their own necks out of the noose. Our friend Roberts, for instance. I'm afraid it's too late to get squeamish, my pet."
"I guess it is," the brunette sighed. The door thudded shut.
"Okay, milkman," Fred Avery murmured, "we'll even skip your prayers." The automatic lifted a little. Staring at the tiny black hole in its tip, Tom Grant knew he looked at death. "We'll give my wife thirty seconds to shoot Jo-Ann another dose of morphine, and then—"
"Right now, Avery," a new voice said from the door behind him, "you'll drop that gun or get it shot out of your hand!" Detective Parks came stiff-legged into the room, fisting a Police Positive.
Tom didn't wait to ask how he'd got here but whirled, slashed open the door behind him and flung himself through. He shot past an open bathroom door, into a bedroom where the malignant Mary bent over one twin bed. He swiftly grabbed her wrist Then he slapped at a hypo that glinted metallically in her fingers. The hypo syringe flew across the room and the brunette screamed. Tom swept her aside with an impatient arm and bent over shining red-gold curls spread on a pillow no whiter than the face that stared sightlessly up at him.
"Jo-Ann," he groaned. "It's all right, Jo-Ann. I've fixed everything and there's nothing to be afraid of no more. Not no more."
Long lashes quivered. Sight came into green eyes, and recognition. "Tom," he heard. "You saved me, Tom! I knew you would." Jo-Ann smiled up at him, tremulously, and her wonderful arms lifted to him.
"WHEN I discovered Parks had let you go," Captain Storm
explained, later, "I hit the ceiling. I knew you'd really
believed the mad story you'd told us. He might have let a
dangerous lunatic loose on the town. I ordered him to get after
you, fast.
"You were gone by the time he'd pushed through the crowd to the corner but the Orange Drink man had seen you take a cab and heard you give your destination. Parks grabbed another, caught your hackie just as he was driving away from the Grand Union. What he said he'd seen you do sent my man up to the Marlin suite on the double, to grab you before you did any damage.
"Just as he turned the corridor corner on the sixth floor, this Roberts popped out of 625 and Parks recognized him as someone we've been looking for a long time, for manslaughter."
"Manslaughter!" Tom exclaimed.
"That's right. He used to have a hypnosis act till one night, there at the Thalia, he killed one of his stooges by jumping on him when he was stretched stiff between two chairs. Roberts ducked and we had nothing on his manager, so we had to let Avery go. Yes," The Homicide Squad captain smiled grimly, "the same Fred Avery who was now Miss America's manager."
"Parks knew all this. He grabbed Roberts, and was a smart enough detective to figure there was something wrong if that crook were around, so he listened at the door of 623 before barging in. Parks heard you charge Avery with having kidnapped Jo-Ann on Rand Avenue, and then he heard Avery threaten to shoot you. The house-dick, who'd come up by then, let him into 625 and—Well, you know the rest."
"No, I don't," Tom objected. "What about the skeleton cameraman, for instance?"
"That was Roberts—or rather what he successfully made Jo-Ann see him like."
"Made her see him?"
"He was a hypnotist, remember. One of the established ways of mesmerising is to focus the subject's attention on a bright light."
"The reflector!" That was Jo-Ann, seated very close to Tom on the sofa in Room 623. "He told me to keep looking at it."
"Precisely. He could make you see him as a skeleton death, and remember it after you reawakened, but since you'd never been hypnotised before he couldn't keep you under long enough to suit their purpose.
"Roberts," the captain went on, "knew the Thalia inside out. And Avery knew you, Jo-Ann, well enough to get you to that abandoned dressing room without seeming to have any part in it. The plan was for Roberts to give you a shot of morphine after he'd put you under and then sneak you out a window and through the alley where he had a car waiting. The hotel people are so used to drunks being lugged in all hours of the night that it would have been easy to get you up to your suite and to bed, where you'd wake up in the morning with a wild story that would convince even yourself you'd gone insane.
"Where their plan went wrong was that Grimsby, who'd taken a liking to Jo-Ann, noticed she didn't leave with the others. When everyone else was gone and she still hadn't appeared, he went looking for her and spied Roberts lugging her down that disused corridor. Not realizing he'd been seen, the old man stole back to phone for help, but Roberts dropped the girl, followed him and just as he was reaching for the instrument, let him have it with the flat of his camera. Then Roberts got panicky, ran out into the street and through the alley to his car.
"It took him about three hours of aimless driving to get up courage enough to go to the hotel and tell Avery what had happened. The latter had more guts, enough to return to the Thalia, park his car on Sixth Street and scout around. He spied Jo-Ann in your truck, Tom, and drove off with her, back to the Grand Union hotel. That clear now?"
"Yeah. I guess it is. But why, Captain? Why'd they want to make out Jo-Ann was mad? What's he mean about a quarter-million dollars?"
"That, more or less, is what her home farm is worth. You see, it has just been learned that the soil of the territory just around there is, of all places in the country, best adapted to produce an especially fine yield of guayule, the plant from which a fine natural rubber is extracted. Two big syndicates are fighting to get hold of all that land, bidding its price up to way above its real value, and Avery wanted to line his own pockets with the money.
"Quite by accident, or rather because he was a far-seeing crook, he was in a position to do so. You see, when he took over the management of Jo-Ann's career as a beauty contestant, he'd had himself appointed her legal guardian, which was easy enough because the local judge knew her father's reputation for shiftlessness. The court order specified that the appointment was to be effective 'as long as the said Jo-Ann Marlin shall be a minor or otherwise incompetent.' If she were adjudged insane, it would remain in effect indefinitely, and Avery could do as he pleased with the money for the farm."
"But it's my father's," Jo-Ann protested. "Not mine."
The captain turned to her. "No, my dear. When you insisted on Avery's paying off the mortgage, he had your father make over the deed to you. He wasn't missing any chance of making a profit out of you, even a small one. Your father didn't object. You were his only child and knowing his own failings, it seemed to make sense. And now, young fellow." He swung back to Tom. "Suppose you tell me something. How did you know, when Avery said he'd brought Jo-Ann home right after the midnight show at the Thalia, that he waslying?"
"Shucks," Tom Grant shrugged. "That wasn't anything. Looking down at his shoes, I wondered why they were shined so early in the morning. And then I saw there was some milk in the crease between the sole and the upper, just like there was on my shoes in spite of the fact I'd tried to clean 'em up. That told me he must have walked through the milk puddle in front of the Thalia where I'd smashed those bottles at six a.m. when Jo-Ann came running toward me."
"Oh, Tom," Jo-Ann Marlin exclaimed. "You're wonderful! Now I know you're going to take care of me and my money just divinely."
"Hey! Hey, wait up, Jo-Ann. I ain't going to be your guardian."
"Who said anything about your being my guardian?" she came back, and then covered with both hands the blush that reddened her cheeks.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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