1I climbed down into darkness and groped through darkness to a door and opened it and listened. Filtered moonlight coming through north windows showed a bedroom with twin beds, made up and empty. Not wall beds. This was a larger apartment. I moved past the beds to another door and into a living room. Both rooms were closed up and smelled musty. I felt my way to a lamp and switched it on. I ran a finger along the wood of a table edge. There was a light film of dust, such as accumulates in the cleanest room when it is left shut up.

2The room contained a library dining table, an armchair radio, a book rack built like a hod, a big bookcase full of novels with their jackets still on them, a dark wood highboy with a siphon and a cut glass bottle of liquor and four striped glasses upside down on an Indian brass tray. Besides this paired photographs in a double silver frame, a youngish middle-aged man and woman, with round healthy faces and cheerful eyes. They looked out at me as if they didn't mind my being there at all.

3I sniffed the liquor, which was Scotch, and used some of it. It made my head feel worse but it made the rest of me feel better. I put light on the bedroom and poked into closets. One of them had a man's clothes, tailor-made, plenty of them. The tailor's label inside a coat pocket declared the owner's name to be H. G. Talbot. I went to the bureau and poked around and found a soft blue shirt that looked a little small for me. I carried it into the bathroom and stripped mine off and washed my face and chest and wiped my hair off with a wet towel and put the blue shirt on. I used plenty of Mr. Talbot's rather insistent hair tonic on my hair and used his brush and comb to tidy it up. By that time I smelled of gin only remotely, if at all.

4The top button of the shirt wouldn't meet its buttonhole so I poked into the bureau again and found a dark blue crepe tie and strung it around my neck. I got my coat back on and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked slightly too neat for that hour of the night, even for as careful a man as Mr. Talbot's clothes indicated him to be. Too neat and too sober.

5I rumpled my hair a little and pulled the tie close, and went back to the whisky decanter and did what I could about being too sober. I lit one of Mr. Talbot's cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them.

6I went to the living room door, the one giving on the hallway, and opened it and leaned in the opening smoking. I didn't think it was going to work. But I didn't think waiting there for them to follow my trail through the window was going to work any better.

7A man coughed a little way down the hall and I poked my head out farther and he was looking at me. He came towards me briskly, a small sharp man in a neatly pressed police uniform. He had reddish hair and red-gold eyes.

8I yawned and said languidly: "What goes on, officer?"

9He stared at me thoughtfully. "Little trouble next door to you. Hear anything?"

10"I thought I heard knocking. I just got home a little while ago."

11"Little late," he said.

12"That's a matter of opinion," I said. "Trouble next door, eh?"

13"A dame," he said. "Know her?"

14"I think I've seen her."

15"Yeah," he said. "You ought to see her now..." He put his hands to his throat and bulged his eyes out and gurgled unpleasantly. "Like that," he said. "You didn't hear nothing, huh?"

16"Nothing I noticed—except the knocking."

17"Yeah. What was the name?"

18"Talbot."

19"Just a minute, Mr. Talbot. Wait there just a minute."

20He went along the hallway and leaned into an open doorway through which light streamed out. "Oh, lieutenant," he said. "The man next door is on deck."

21A tall man came out of the doorway and stood looking along the hall straight at me. A tall man with rusty hair and very blue, blue eyes. Degarmo. That made it perfect.

22"Here's the guy lives next door," the small neat cop said helpfully "His name's Talbot."

23Degarmo looked straight at me, but nothing in his acid blue eyes showed that he had ever seen me before. He came quietly along the hall and put a hard hand against my chest and pushed me back into the room. When he had me half a dozen feet from the door he said over his shoulder:

24"Come in here and shut the door, Shorty."

25The small cop came in and shut the door.

26"Quite a gag," Degarmo said lazily. "Put a gun on him, Shorty."

27Shorty flicked his black belt holster open and had his .38 in his hand like a flash. He licked his lips.

28"Oh boy," he said softly, whistling a little. "Oh boy. How'd you know, lieutenant?"

29"Know what?" Degarmo asked, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. "What were you thinking of doing, pal—going down to get a paper—to find out if she was dead?"

30"Oh boy," Shorty said. "A sex-killer. He pulled the girl's clothes off and choked her with his hands, lieutenant. How'd you know?"

31Degarmo didn't answer him. He just stood there, rocking a little on his heels, his face empty and granite-hard.

32"Yah, he's the killer, sure," Shorty said suddenly. "Sniff the air in here, lieutenant. The place ain't been aired out for days. And look at the dust on those bookshelves. And the clock on the mantel's stopped, lieutenant. He come in through the—lemme look a minute, can I, lieutenant?"

33He ran out of the room into the bedroom. I heard him fumbling around. Degarmo stood woodenly.

34Shorty came back. "Come in at the bathroom window. There's broken glass in the tub. And something stinks of gin in there something awful. You remember how that apartment smelled of gin when we went in? Here's a shirt, lieutenant. Smells like it was washed in gin."

35He held the shirt up. It perfumed the air rapidly. Degarmo looked at it vaguely and then stepped forward and yanked my coat open and looked at the shirt I was wearing.

36"I know what he done," Shorty said. "He stole one of the guy's shirts that lives here. You see what he done, lieutenant?"

37"Yeah." Degarmo held his hand against my chest and let it fall slowly. They were talking about me as if I was a piece of wood.

38"Frisk him, Shorty."

39Shorty ran around me feeling here and there for a gun. "Nothing on him," he said.

40"Let's get him out the back way," Degarmo said. "It's our pinch, if we make it before Webber gets here. That lug Reed couldn't find a moth in a shoe box."

41"You ain't even detailed on the case," Shorty said doubtfully. "Didn't I hear you was suspended or something?"

42"What can I lose?" Degarmo asked, "if I'm suspended?"

43"I can lose this here uniform," Shorty said.

44Degarmo looked at him wearily. The small cop blushed and his bright red-gold eyes were anxious.

45"Okay, Shorty. Go and tell Reed."

46The small cop licked his lip. "You say the word, lieutenant, and I'm with you. I don't have to know you got suspended."

47"We'll take him down ourselves, just the two of us," Degarmo said.

48"Yeah, sure."

49Degarmo put his finger against my chin. "A sex-killer," he said quietly. "Well, I'll be damned." He smiled at me thinly, moving only the extreme corners of his wide brutal mouth.