Chapter V

Lieutenant of Detectives Joseph Fenton of Homicide West was remembering some of the others. The tragic and unusual cases, the sensational ones, the kind that stayed in the headlines for weeks and months and increased the circulation of newspapers from coast to coast by hundreds of millions of copies.

He sat staring down at his best lead so far, the only lead he could really sink his teeth into, wishing to hell he didn't have to remember. He drummed with his fingers on the desktop and hunched his shoulders a little. He was making a big mistake and he knew it. It was always a mistake to think back across the years when he had a job to do that called for a maximum of effort and concentration. It made him feel guilty and took the edge off his keenness. It was the worst kind of mistake but he kept on making it, because murder was always a shock to him.

Every time he saw a beautiful white body stretched out cold on a mortuary slab he remembered how he'd fainted at the sight of the first one, twenty-five years in the past when he'd been a young rookie. Just fallen to the floor and passed out, the way medical students sometimes do when they first have to dissect a cadaver--the organs are put in separate trays, each neatly labeled--and even experienced, case-hardened surgeons when an operation is especially sanguinary ... like on the human eye, for instance. He'd read that somewhere, and he didn't doubt it, not for a moment.

Well ... there was no danger of that happening to him now. He'd seen too many of the really gruesome ones, and the badly marked up ones, and the "floaters" with no fingerprints left to identify them by, every vestige of flesh dissolved away by weeks in the water, and ... the beautiful unmarked ones who were in some respects the most tragic of all.

He had watched many of them carried away in baskets, feeling angry and resentful but forcing himself to remain calm, refusing to let the photographers and print men suspect that he was dying himself a little inwardly, and had kept right on dying, inch by slow inch, across the years. His hair was white now and his face a little more heavily lined than it should have been, but otherwise it didn't show on the surface.

In some of them he had sensed a strange kind of peace--like a hand reaching out to touch him from beyond the grave; cool, steady, no longer feverish. But over most of them there still seemed to hover a penumbra of violence, a crying out for vengeance and retribution, a protest that even death could not wholly silence.

There was no need for him to remind himself that the Lathrup case was one of the explosively violent ones, with that strange residual violence remaining, making itself felt, every time his thoughts returned to it. Not only in the magazine office itself, with her loveliness only slightly marred by the small, dark hole in her temple--the wound had bled profusely, but the blood had not spread over her features--but later, when the body had been lifted into a sheet, and removed from the office, and the last flash-bulb had gone off and he'd been left alone with the medical examiner. He had been just the same as being completely alone, because Hunter had completed his preliminary examination, and his thoughts were back in a smoke-filled room where a poker game was in progress. To Hunter it had been no more than a routine interruption, breaking in on a winning hand and making him so morose and ill-tempered that Fenton, who had always found him a hard man to deal with, had shut up after asking him only two questions.

The residual violence was there, all right, a something in the room that seemed to point an accusing finger, to demand that justice be not too long delayed, to threaten reprisals if the vanished killer were not relentlessly tracked down and made to answer for his crime. It was a feeling Fenton had--nothing more. The threat of reprisal was not directed at him, but at the nebulous entity known as society. But it was always there, always present, a demand for retribution from beyond the grave, a screaming and a pleading, an insistence that justice be done or all hell would yawn for someone.

All right, it was only something he imagined, peculiar to him alone. But he knew from experience that it was unwise to take even imagined horrors lightly. They were part of a man's thinking, his inner life, his individuality. It was a mistake to take them _too_ seriously, but just as bad to brush them aside as of no importance.

All right, the violence had been there, but in another way the office had seemed the opposite of crepe-somber. It had seemed still filled with her living presence, as if she were still striding back and forth from her desk to the window, or sitting at her desk impatiently talking into the intercom.

That she had been a strong-willed, very determined woman despite her aspect of pulse-stirring femininity he'd strongly suspected the instant he'd entered the office with its costly but severely functional furnishings. The choice of furnishings had quite obviously not been influenced in any way by feminine whims and extravagances. No woman, surely, would have really liked such severity in the décor surrounding her. But a woman determined to keep her professional and private lives in separate compartments might well have made such a choice deliberately and taken pride in her ability to impose a severe discipline upon herself.

The conclusion he'd drawn, the kind of woman he'd pictured her as being, hadn't been based on anything very solid. It had been a mere hunch at first, a gathering together of intangibles. But the few questions he'd had an opportunity to ask the editorial staff immediately on his arrival had completely confirmed it. She'd been a considerable woman, and had ruffled a great deal of fur the wrong way, apparently, and there had probably been some baring of claws.

Well ... all right. The Lathrup slaying was one of the sensational ones. It would arouse widespread indignation if it were not solved quickly and even more indignation if it remained unsolved for the next fifty years, as well it might. If the murderer was caught and stood trial--the newspapers would have no reason to complain and it would enrich a great many other people in a dozen or more ways, perhaps even the murderer himself if he wrote the story of his life for a major news syndicate the week before he went to the chair.

He couldn't take it with him--but what the hell. There'd be the thrill of making all that money overnight. Or was the stipulation that a murderer couldn't profit from his crime a bugaboo in that department too? Thirty years on the Force, and he still didn't know for sure.

Well ... there was nothing to be gained by shaking his head and dwelling with anger and pity on the tragic circumstances of a crime he could have done nothing to prevent. Her beauty, so cruelly hidden now from all but the eyes of a mortician--there would be a brief moment when it would be again on view--every aspect of her personal life; the way she'd walked and talked and held herself, her wardrobe, her personal likes and dislikes, the friends she'd made, the enemies who did not think too highly of her, her jewels, her rumored affairs, her choice of restaurants, had all become the emotional property of the public.

Not too short a life perhaps. But to die at thirty-six always meant ... many of the great moments, the moments of complete fulfillment and happiness, however brief, which every human being born into the world had a right to look forward to, would never be experienced at all. A cruel and tragic outrage had been perpetrated upon her, cutting off her life in mid-stream.

That the outrage could be attributed to the inscrutable workings of Fate or Destiny or whatever you cared to call the big, continuously revolving wheel ... that it struck down thousands of women just as beautiful every day all over the world ... that illness and accidents took a far more grievous toll ... did not diminish by one whit the tragedy of it. And when it was brought about by a deliberate act of willful criminal violence it had a special quality which made it seem a hundred times more cruel and unjust.

Fenton looked down at the three letters, spread fanwise on the desk before him. Each was neatly typewritten, neatly creased and just as neatly signed in a firm, precise hand. _Michael Willard._

An article writer, and a good one, if the staff at Eaton-Lathrup were right about him and there was no reason to doubt their competence. A free-lance article writer who had quarreled violently with Helen Lathrup three weeks before her death. Fenton had found the letters in the slain woman's desk.

Each was a hot-tempered letter and one was extremely violent, not quite threatening Lathrup with bodily harm but strongly hinting that such harm might be visited upon her if she did not correct what the writer claimed was a _very serious_ mistake.

It seemed incredible to Fenton that anyone, no matter how enraged, would send a prominent editor such threats and sign the letters with his own name.

The man had practically started himself on a walk to the chair. And that particularly irritated Fenton, because Willard would have to be captured before he could complete the walk, and a three-state alert had proved as ineffective in locating him as a fast-moving city dragnet and three Westchester roadblocks in the vicinity of his suburban home....

Fenton was still frowning down at the letters, the only strong lead he had, when someone said from the doorway: "He's given himself up."

Fenton looked up quickly, annoyed, the statement not registering immediately, as First Grade Detective John Gallison had apparently assumed it would.

Gallison was a big man, almost as big as Fenton, and he had much the same look about him--the look of a man aged in some ways beyond his years, but with a curiously unlined face, and the almost boyish aspect that seems to hover until late in life about big, ruggedly built men with beat-up features who never take the trouble to comb their hair.

"What is it, Gallison?" Fenton asked, and then the words themselves penetrated, and he rose from his desk, a look of stunned disbelief in his eyes.

"Is it Willard you're talking about?"

"Who else?" Gallison said, coming into the office and sitting down opposite Fenton in a chair that was two sizes too small for him.

"He came in and gave himself up. He said he knew we'd found the letters, and it would only be prolonging the agony for him to hide out in a furnished room somewhere and live in fear until we closed in on him. He thought of heading north into Canada, or south into Mexico, and even of hopping a freighter to South America. That's what he said, believe it or not. I'm practically quoting his exact words."

"Well, what made him change his mind? We've had such a tough job tracing him he could have gotten all the way to Brazil by this time. If you're going to tell me he was afraid the Brazilian non-extradition policy doesn't cover murder ... skip it. I'm not in a very humorous mood right now."

Gallison smiled slightly. "He said he just wasn't capable of it. Too sensitive, too imaginative, too afraid of life in the buff to take it by the horns that way. I'm still quoting him. He said he was never cut out to be a fugitive. Anything connected with the police terrifies him. If a Government agent should call on him about some trivial, completely innocent matter he'd have a heart attack. He just can't take that sort of thing. He has made a full confession. He says he killed her because she pulled an outrageous gyp on him."

"Yes, I know," Fenton said. "It's what he claims in these letters. He claims he wrote a series of articles for her about juvenile delinquency, and I guess you saw the major, six-million-dollar movie that was based on his material. The Clark Gable-Monroe sort of thing. And now it's on TV, a two-year contract for a weekly series and I think the sponsor is General Motors, but I'm not sure. In case you don't know, all of that is about as big-time as you can get. It would make practically any writer feel entitled to walk down Fifth Avenue shoulder to shoulder with the biggest names in TV and stop for a moment to shake the paw of the MGM lion. The lions in front of the library would look that way to him."

"He says he didn't get a cent out of it," Gallison said. "Not one single penny."

"That's hard to believe," Fenton said. "It seems he sold the Eaton-Lathrup Publications all rights to the material. I haven't looked too deeply into the technicalities involved in such transactions but I'm pretty sure that 'all rights' means exactly what it says. If a magazine buys material on that basis it is entitled to all of the profits accruing from subsequent re-sales, to TV, the movies or whatever."

"Willard practically admits that," Gallison said. "In fact--"

"Wait a minute," Fenton said, a little impatiently. "Let me finish. It's my understanding that not many of the really big magazine groups buy all rights. There's usually a contract involved, with a stipulation in it concerning the rights. And even when they do buy all rights they're seldom one hundred percent legalistic about it. They'll often lean backwards to see that the author gets a break, gets at least a slice of the pie if the work passes into the so-called big-time. I don't know how Lathrup felt about that or just what her policy was, of course. But if he claims he's been gyped out of money he's entitled to in a strictly _legal_ sense, I don't believe he has a legal leg to stand on. Not if he sold the group all rights, with no reservations whatever."

"That's just it," Gallison said. "That's where he claims she took advantage of him. He says that, like plenty of other writers, he's no businessman. You'd laugh to hear the way he's been going on about that, if he wasn't a self-confessed murderer. Nothing a murderer says or does is ever funny. But the way he put it would have gone over big on a TV comic program. He claims he has no more business sense than a two-year-old; would sign any contract that was pushed under his nose without looking at even the large print, let alone the fine. He claims he's--well, the term he used was 'a commercial imbecile.' He takes a sort of pride in it. And he thought she understood that some writers were like that--some of the biggest names, in fact, in the writing business.

"They can't even bring themselves to glance twice at a contract. It's not important to them, they're way off in the clouds somewhere, figuring what their characters are going to say and do in the next chapter."

"He could be right about that," Fenton said, sighing. "Up to a point anyway. I've known two or three big-name mystery writers in my time, and my wife sort of--well, collects them. Writers in general, I mean, along with painters and musicians. It's an odd hobby for the wife of an old police warhorse, but show me just one thing I can really understand about women and I'll get you a lieutenancy tomorrow, if I have to go down to Center Street myself and beg for it. You'd be the biggest asset the Homicide Squad could possibly have."

It was Gallison's turn to sigh. "I guess I'm the way Willard is about contracts when it comes to understanding women," he said. "You seem to forget I've been married myself for fifteen years. Every day my wife is a different kind of woman. But the big difference came between the day before and the day after I married her."

"It's usually that way," Fenton said. "You wake up and discover your wife is a human being."

His expression sobered abruptly. "Where is Willard now? In a cell or still under the lights. If you've got a signed confession--"

"We've got it, all right--signed, sealed and delivered."

"So you just went ahead without even consulting me, is that it? What am I supposed to be around here--a rookie fresh from the asphalt?"

"It couldn't be helped, Lieutenant.... It all happened so fast."

"John! You're asking for trouble, boy!"

"All right then, Joe. I swear it really couldn't be helped. It all just poured out of him, so fast we had trouble in taking it down and had to ask him to read it over three times. We wouldn't have laid a finger on him, anyway. You know that as well as I do."

"Sometimes I wonder. A cop can get terribly angry at times and once, about four years ago, I saw something I deliberately shut my eyes to, and I've never regretted it. They had this ... human animal ... stripped to the waist in the tank room and were ... well, never mind. He committed a brutal sex crime and when they were through with him ... they had a full confession. I just turned on my heels and walked out."

"We still wouldn't have laid a finger on Willard."

"I know, I know. I guess I'd better have a talk with him."

* * * * *

Willard was sitting alone in a cell that dwarfed him a little, despite its narrowness, because he was both a very small and a very frail-looking man. Fenton put his age at about forty-five, although he could have been four of five years older.

He didn't look very much like a writer, but Fenton knew that few writers conformed to the picture people had of them. In general, they looked remarkably like everybody else.

Willard was about five-feet-two in his socks, and he was in them now because both his belt and his shoes had been taken away from him. He had thoughtful gray eyes, and rather handsome features and there was nothing in the least aggressive-looking about him. He was hard to picture with a gun in his hand, taking deliberate aim and shooting a defenseless woman through the head. It was difficult even, to think of him as a man with a violent temper who could write threatening letters or resort to any kind of extreme physical violence, even under the goadings of rage.

He looked up quickly when Fenton and Gallison entered the cell and then got slowly to his feet.

Fenton frowned a little and gestured toward the cot upon which he had been sitting.

"Sit down, please," he said. "No sense in standing. We're just going to have a brief talk and then you can see your lawyer, if you wish. You don't have to say a word, if you prefer to wait until he gets here. It's my duty to tell you that, even though you've signed a confession. Anything you may decide to tell us can be used as evidence in court, in addition to the information in the statement you've just signed. Is that clear to you?"

Willard nodded and sat down again on the edge of the cot. "What does all that matter now?" he said. "I'm going to plead guilty anyway. I killed her because--well, you don't know what kind of woman she was, so you probably won't be able to understand how a man can be driven to desperation--"

"I've just read the statement you made," Fenton said. "It doesn't tell me what kind of woman she was, but it tells me a great deal about you. I've read the letters you wrote to her as well. You seem to feel that you've been very shabbily treated. I would like to know a little more about that."

"What more can I say? What more can I possibly say? When a writer who has lived most of his life on a very modest income loses at least a hundred thousand dollars--"

"You mean ... your rightful share in what your series of articles has brought the Eaton-Lathrup publications in cash so far? Or will bring them within the next few months? Or merely what you _believe_ should be your rightful share, putting aside for the moment all legal considerations. You signed a contract giving the concern all rights, didn't you?"

"Yes, but she gave me to believe--"

"Just what did she give you to believe?"

"That she was prepared to be very generous about the entire matter if the articles should make a great deal of money for the magazines. She wouldn't hold me to the strict letter of the contract. She'd waive the 'all rights' clause. A great many magazines do that. It's taken for granted--"

"I see. But are you sure about that? Don't you think you should have made sure before signing the contract, if you had any doubts at all? There's nothing in the least unethical about a magazine group buying all rights, you know. It's their privilege under the law."

"But she knew how impractical most writers are! She knew how--well, yes, even infantile they can be about such things. And she made me feel that she was my friend, that she'd never dream of taking advantage of me in any way."

"But she didn't, if you signed a contract giving the concern all rights, unqualifiedly, with no strings attached."

"And I still say she did! She led me on, deceived me. She--"

He was on his feet again now and some of the mildness, the constrained look, the look that _didn't_ make him look like a man who might be capable of resorting to violence under stress, was gone from his eyes.

"She led me on, I tell you. There was something about her, something I mistook for great generosity and warmth--"

Fenton looked at him steadily for a moment, carefully weighing what he was about to say. He asked the question in a quiet tone, but he knew that it was emotionally charged, and strategically just the right question to put to the man at that particular moment.

"Were you her lover, Willard?"

Willard flushed scarlet and lowered his eyes.

"Were you?"

Willard compressed his lips and said nothing, but a look of torment had come into his eyes.

"You slept with her, didn't you, Willard?"

"Yes, damn you!" There was a look of naked agony in the frail man's eyes now, and the words came out choked with rage.

Then, quite suddenly, he was trembling violently, clenching his fists like a man deranged.

"Why don't you ask me if she was good in bed? Or if I was? Haven't you a spark of decency in you? I've heard of the third degree but a question like that is worse. Oh, damn you to hell!"

"Why, Willard? I mean--why do you feel it's such an indecent question, a question I've no right to ask? You've confessed to a very serious crime. You've confessed to--I'm going to use another police term I hope won't shock your sensitive spirit too much--you've confessed to what we call the Big One. You can't stand on the niceties when you've taken a human life--or question the right of a policeman, sworn to uphold the law, to ask what, under ordinary circumstances, you might consider a damned impertinent question, an invasion of privacy. Sensitive women, wives and mothers, have been asked far franker questions on the witness stand. There are times when every question must be asked and answered, no matter how much it may anger you or make you writhe."

Perhaps, deep in Willard's nature, there was a submerged substratum of logic ... a willingness to give ground before an incontestable fact or an argument he could not hope to win. Fenton knew that to be true of the more volatile types ... on some occasions, at any rate.

Most of the anger went out of Willard's eyes and he sat down again on the edge of the cot, and cradled his head in his arms.

Fenton took a different tack. "The statement you signed wasn't too clear in a few respects," he said, casting a glance at Gallison that was generously forgiving, but still a little on the withering side. "I'd like to go over a few of the details with you. Just what happened when you entered the office and Miss Lathrup looked up and saw you standing there with a gun in your hand? Just what did you say to her before you shot her--and what did she say to you? Was she genuinely frightened from the start? It would be strange if she wasn't, but I'd like to have you tell me more about it in your own words. There are a few other questions I'd like to have answered. Take your time, try to think clearly. I'm not pressuring you. It's just that we've got to be convinced that every statement in your confession is true."

Willard looked up quickly, some of the anger sweeping back into his eyes. "Why should you need to be convinced? Don't you sometimes slap around poor devils who are completely innocent just to get _any_ kind of a confession out of them?"

"You've been reading too many paperback novels," Fenton said.

"I'm not a fiction writer," Willard said. "I haven't read a paperback novel in five years."

"You should," Fenton said, wryly. "Some of the strongest, most realistic writing in America today is being done in that field. But cops get slandered in them a helluva lot. Not always, but sometimes. Some of the writers don't seem to like cops too well. They are often very sensitive, imaginative guys themselves and they don't like what cops sometimes do, even when they try to be very hard-boiled and call a spade a spade. And I won't deny that cops sometimes do step a little over the line. But it isn't as bad as you might think. Not nearly as bad."

"I've only your word for that."

"You may take my word for it. I've been on the force for thirty years. You get sadists in any department of life--I'll challenge anyone to deny that. And if an innocent man happens to get a bad break--comes up against the wrong kind of cop--it can be very bad. You could justify a certain degree of cop hatred in almost anyone on other grounds. The world we live in isn't for children. If cops were mild-mannered intellectuals, or held completely modern, psychiatric views about crime--and the causes of crime--society in general might be in for trouble on a day-to-day realistic basis."

"It might not do any harm at all if we gave it a try," Willard said.

"On a theoretical level there are times when I'm inclined to agree with you," Fenton said. "But there's another part of my nature that says there has to be a kind of binding cement to hold society together meanwhile--I mean, until Utopia's here. Cops have to be picked for toughness--to a certain extent. But that doesn't mean they can't be completely fair. A lot of them lean backwards to be fair, will be a big brother to young hoodlums if they think there's an ounce of decency left in them and all they need is a little of that 'not being completely rejected' feeling to give them a different slant on things. You know what I mean. But some cops can be sadistic, mean, even downright vicious. I would be the last to deny it."

Fenton smiled, trying his best to bring a little warmth into his words, to get the man on the cot to trust him. "There are times when I don't like cops myself, any better than you do. It's a very human feeling. Could I go any further than that, considering that I'm supposed to be just about as tough as they come in some respects, being a Lieutenant of Detectives on the Homicide Squad?"

"What do you want to know?" Willard asked. "What do you want me to tell you? I walked into her office and shot her dead. Isn't that all down on the record now? Haven't I confessed to it?"

"It still needs a little filling out," Fenton said. "Suppose we start at the beginning and just go over it all again, step by step."

A half hour later Fenton sat again at his desk, drumming with his fingers on the big double-file spread out before him.

Gallison hadn't seated himself this time. He stood awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot, and casting an occasional glance toward the window and at the large framed photograph of an Inspector in uniform on the opposite wall--Inspector Henry Millard, who had been dead for twenty years. He did not seem to want continuously to meet and hold Fenton's level, almost accusing gaze.

"He didn't do it," Fenton said. "I knew that the instant I started questioning him, but I had to make sure, beyond the faintest possibility of a doubt. All of the things he told me--and at least one-third of the details in his signed confession--are completely wide of the mark. He wasn't there, didn't shoot her, couldn't even tell me how she'd looked in falling fifteen seconds after the shot was fired. How she must have looked, I mean, for her head and shoulders to strike the desk the way they did, upsetting an ashtray, and to be consistent with the position she was in when Miss Prentiss found her. And the body wasn't moved--not a half-inch--until we arrived.

"Other things--a dozen, at least. I had the impression he wasn't even sure just where the bullet had entered her head. Oh, a murderer can be mistaken about many things, way off in some respects. But not quite that far off. Not nearly that far off, in fact, when he's studied everything published in the papers about the case, and has been in that office many times. There were details we didn't tell the reporters, details he couldn't possibly have known and he was completely wrong about all of them, with one or two exceptions. And that only strengthens the case against him--the very damaging evidence which proves that he wasn't the killer and couldn't possibly have been."

Fenton nodded, his fingers still tapping on the file. "You'd naturally expect him to be right about one or two things, even if they didn't appear in the papers. He's no dumb-bell. He couldn't have written those juvenile delinquency articles and foster-fathered a major movie if he was. He'd naturally be pretty good at guessing games. It's always the exceptions which strengthen, lend real weight, to that kind of rule."

Fenton cleared his throat. "It's like in medicine. You take a very rare, unusual kind of disease. Say there are twenty symptoms which are very diagnostic of that particular disease. But one of them only occurs in one case of the disease out of a hundred. And the patient has that one symptom, along with the others. Now ... let's say that in the whole United States, in the course of the year, only about two hundred people die of that rare disease.

"Don't you see what I'm driving at Gallison--or do you? It would have to mean that only about two people die from that disease with that particular symptom attached to it every year out of a nation of a hundred and seventy-five million people. According to the law of averages, how likely would the patient be to have the disease? The very symptom which does sometimes occur in connection with the disease--but rarely--which you might think would strengthen the diagnosis, actually helps to weaken it, to make it so unlikely as to practically eliminate the possibility that the patient could have it."

"So it's medicine he's talking about now," Gallison said, unable to keep a slight trace of acidity out of his voice, but wishing, almost instantly, that he hadn't spoken at all.

"I only used that as an example," Fenton said, his voice sharpening slightly. "But it spells the difference between a crack medical diagnostician and a bad one. It's always those little, subtle intangibles you have to take into consideration. And that's really just another way of saying you have to have imagination to be either a good cop or a good doctor."

A slightly wistful look came into Fenton's eyes. "I sometimes wish I'd taken up medicine. Healing people is much better than wallowing in the kind of ugly--Oh, well, skip it."

"But you can't clear a self-confessed murderer completely on that basis alone," Gallison protested. "His confession could be off in a hundred ways, and he could still be guilty. At least ... it would remain a possibility. You practically just admitted that yourself. If we had other evidence ... and we do have a little additional evidence ... we could still take it before a jury."

"You mean the DA could," Fenton said, his voice becoming tinged with the kind of impatience a grammar-school teacher might have displayed toward a pupil who had just pulled a boner in geography. "What are you trying to do--add to our burdens? The DA could take it before a jury, all right. But he'd get his ears pinned so far back that the next time he ran for election it would be as a dog-catcher. Did you ever hear of an alibi, Gallison? Or is that too involved a point of law for you?"

Lieutenant Fenton sighed heavily and his voice softened a little. "Sorry, Gallison. That was a lousy thing for me to say. But at least you know that I wasn't pulling rank on you. It's something I've never done or never will do--unless you come in here and toss your badge on the desk and I have to hand it back to you and tell you to go through channels."

"Okay, Joe. I understand. Don't let it worry you."

"A policeman shouldn't have nerves, I guess. But things have been moving a little too fast for me in this case."

"Just how good is his alibi?" Gallison asked.

"Iron-plated," Fenton said. "And of course it isn't _his_ alibi in a strict sense, because he didn't even present it to us. It's an alibi we'll have to force him to accept as absolute proof that he couldn't have done it, because we want him to walk out of here without hallucinating when we release him. Otherwise someone might get the idea that this is a side wing of Bellevue. We've done our best so far to create that impression anyway."

"You mean--you think he may be ... a psycho?"

"Yes--and no," Fenton said.

"That's sure enlightening. Gets right back to what you just said about medical diagnosis. Maybe you should have been a psychiatrist, Joe."

"Maybe I'd better explain. He's not only a very brilliant writer of true-fact crime articles for the better magazines, with the stress placed on juvenile delinquency--he happens to be pretty much of a confirmed alcoholic. The wild binge kind--once in every three or four weeks he loses a week-end. Completely, goes absolutely blotto."

"Like in that Jackson novel that made such a big splash about twelve or fifteen years ago, you mean? I remember the movie even better than I do the book, but I read the book--"

"We seem to be very literary today," Fenton said. "Everywhere we turn in this case we come up against famous novels, or big-name writers or major movies or guys with a grievance against female editors. I suppose that's only to be expected--considering what kind of murder it was and where it took place. But it's hard to understand why so much of it has to drift our way in a single day. To answer your question--yes, he's the _Lost Week-End_ kind of heavy drinker."

"Then why did you say 'yes--and no,' when I asked you if he was a psycho?"

"Because it's not a term you can use loosely when you're talking about alcoholics. What I guess I should say is--it's not a term you should use _un_ambiguously. It had to be 'Yes--and no,' with a lot of half-way stages in between. There is such a thing as alcoholic insanity, you know--a clear-cut psychosis with very definite symptoms. You can get alcoholic softening of the brain, which is something else again, because it's physical as well as mental and it's usually fatal. You can be just a periodic drinker--not a hopeless alcoholic at all, although you'll be headed that way--and have the D.T.'s occasionally. Or you can be a very heavy, constant drinker and never have the D.T.'s.

"It all depends on how alcohol affects you. Just a little alcohol, for instance, could give Edgar Allan Poe the D.T.'s. And when a man has the D.T.'s, he's a psychotic, if only temporarily. Or behaves like one in all respects. And just constant, heavy drinking can make a man behave so erratically at times you could practically call him a psycho. And when a man is dead drunk, under any circumstances, would you say his behavior was merely neurotic?

"The thing you've got to remember about heavy drinking--periodic or otherwise--is that one of the things it most often does is bring about memory lapses. Very serious memory lapses--prolonged blackout periods. And that especially applies to the _Lost Week-End_ kind of drinker."

"So Willard had a memory lapse and couldn't remember whether he shot her or not. Is that what you're trying to say?"

Fenton shook his head. "Nothing of the sort. You're forgetting about the alibi, apparently."

"Sorry I interrupted."

"Think nothing of it. But I'd be very grateful if you'd listen carefully. I'm just giving you a few simple facts about alcoholism."

"Not as a warning, I hope. I hardly ever touch the stuff."

"I'll just bet. I might have gone for that idea--that he couldn't remember if he'd shot or not, if we hadn't got all this new information about him just in the last hour. He's had memory lapses going back ten or twelve years. He's been in the Bellevue alcoholic ward seven times. And he just happened to be there on the morning of the murder. He was picked up the night before in a bar on West Eighth Street, after a brawl that was a little on the special side. He was roaring drunk and he blackened the eye of one of his drinking companions and knocked the other down, almost giving him a concussion.

"They were good friends of his, so they covered up for him. No police charge was lodged against him. But he was carted off to Bellevue and he remained there for two days. I don't believe in murder by thought control, do you?"

"But why did he confess? It makes no sense at all to me."

"Doesn't it? It makes plenty of sense to me and I'm sure it will to you if you'll give it a little thought. You know what guilt feelings can do to an alcoholic, don't you? You must have arrested at least a dozen drunks in the last ten years who were burning up with impatience to confess. To homicides they didn't and couldn't have committed."

"Yeah, that's true enough," Gallison said.

"You saw what she meant to him, how he felt about her. When I just asked him if he'd slept with her it set off a trigger-mechanism in his brain. It was like a delayed time bomb. He was dead sober when he turned himself in and confessed, but alcoholics can be dead sober and still have a kind of emotional hangover--sometimes lasting for days after a real wild binge on a lost week-end. He was--still is--in a very abnormal state."

"But why should he feel so guilty about his relations with her?" Gallison asked. "Why the threatening letters. You mean that he didn't actually feel she gyped him on that article sale to the movies and TV? If he didn't, he sure is a great little actor. He should have played a leading role in the movie himself."

"Oh, he felt she gyped him, all right. And that increased his load of guilt. He couldn't remember just when he'd last spent two days in Bellevue--not the exact date. He thought he'd gone to the Eaton-Lathrup publications on the morning of the murder, had a showdown with her and shot her dead. He might not have been completely sure about it, but he couldn't forget his earlier memory lapses. Some alcoholics feel guilty on just that basis alone. They know they're subject to memory lapses and they're always wondering what terrible crime they just might conceivably have committed during the blotto stage.

"And every aspect of his relations with her was steeped in guilt, apparently. Just being her lover made him feel guilty, apparently. You saw how he flared up when I questioned him about it. It sounds crazy, but there are a few men like that left in this day and age. A Puritanic hangover that alcoholism makes a real fighting issue, if it's ever openly discussed.

"Don't you see? She probably threw him over, rejected him, told him he wasn't her idea of a lover boy just about the time that big movie sale went through. So he had a double reason for hating her--a triple reason, in fact, since he felt guilty about just having an affair with her--and it all came out in the wash when he walked in here and confessed to a crime he didn't commit."

"But how about that movie and TV angle."

Fenton frowned, staring down at the double-file on his desk. "That's the screwiest part of it, the part that really ought to be used in a book sometime, by one of those mystery writers I told you about--two writers I know very well and would probably give me a percentage for bringing it to their attention, if I wasn't more or less incorruptible regarding Homicide Squad files. Fact is ... she leaned backwards to be fair, to see that he made a fairly large sum out of the movie sale ... even though he wasn't legally entitled to anything at all. He did get pretty close to his hundred thousand dollars."

Gallison whistled softly. "Brother, that's hard to believe. What happened to the dough? He's still living in fairly modest circumstances. He has a small house just north of White Plains, as you know, but he bought it several years ago and it's mortgaged right up to the hilt."

"You've hung around bars quite a bit, haven't you?" Fenton said, smiling a little. "I mean, just in line of duty, of course. Haven't you heard guys say: 'I made three hundred dollars last week, but it was burning a hole in my pocket. I blew it all in one night.'"

"Sure, sure," Gallison admitted. "I've heard guys talking that way often enough. But a hundred thousand dollars--"

"Not quite, probably. Seventy thousand would be closer, I should imagine. And income tax would take a big slice. Half of the rest could go as a feedback."

"What do you mean ... a feedback?"

"Money squandered on her while he was still in her good graces, as her number one lover boy. That would also give him an additional reason to hate her, when he thought about it afterwards. Know what it costs to take a woman with her expensive tastes out five nights a week, for perhaps three months?"

Gallison shrugged. "How should I know? I get upset sometimes when my wife orders three cocktails before dinner at a midtown bar."

"He's probably been living very high for the past three or four months, ever since the picture was sold and she gave him a slice of what it brought in cold cash. Just why she did it I can't imagine. Maybe there actually was a generous streak in her, and she really thought the concern owed him something, despite the contract. She could even have been a little in love with him at one time. He's not a bad looking guy, remember. And she probably knew she'd get quite a bit of it back in jewelry, furs and expensive entertainment."

Gallison whistled again. "I'm beginning to get the picture," he said. "If the dough actually was burning a hole in his pocket and there are plenty of guys like that. And if he had blotto periods--"

"Well, that winds it up," Fenton said. "We'll have to release him, of course. No reason to hold him now. The poor little guy. In a way, I feel sorry for him. It's no joke to be an alcoholic and feel _that_ guilty about getting himself a piece of very high-class tail."

"You're not fooling me, Joe. I bet you have a Puritan streak yourself. The only woman you've been interested in for the past fifteen years is the glamor doll you married."

"It could be," Fenton conceded. "My father was a farmer in Iowa and he went to church every Sunday, rain or shine. It's something you never entirely outgrow. But if I ever hear you shooting your mouth off about it--"

It was Gallison's turn to smile. "Don't worry, Joe. The secret's safe with me. I'm just glad I'm not that way."

"I see. You step out now and then--just tell your wife it's a double-duty assignment that will keep you up until dawn."

"I didn't say that. Hell, there's a difference between loyalty and the kind of act our little friend put on. He actually blushed, or didn't you notice, when you threw it up to him."

"Some day you'll become tolerant of every kind of human behavior," Fenton said. "We all have a chink in our armor somewhere."

"I suppose, I suppose."

"You don't have to suppose. It's goddam true. A guy can be a prig in one respect and a liberal-minded, very intelligent kind of human being in another. We're all jackasses one third of the time, at least."

"It's funny," Gallison said. "One of the Eaton-Lathrup editors is an alcoholic too. That Ellers guy. Do you suppose he has blackouts now and then?"

"With nothing more than that to go on," Fenton said, "we'd have no justification for suspecting him. Something may turn up, of course. We'll see. We've got a lot of digging to do, and our best lead so far has gone out the window. I didn't say that all confirmed alcoholics worry or feel guilty about what they may have done during a lost week-end. Only a few of them do, the ones who have criminal impulses or a strong reason for hating someone even when they're sober. We'll see, we'll see. Right now--"

The phone at Fenton's elbow started ringing.

He picked up the receiver, listened for a moment and re-cradled it, a very odd look coming into his eyes.

"Now nothing can surprise me," he said. "A first-class lead goes out the window and one just as promising comes flying in, like one of those goddam pigeons that are always messing up the sill."

"What is it?" Gallison asked. "Or would you rather make a production out of keeping me guessing?"

"Well ... there's a young writer whose work Helen Lathrup took very seriously at first and then tore into, ripping his self-esteem to shreds. I got that from the editor you just mentioned, Ellers. They were also sort of close and cozy for a time and then she refused to even see him when he phoned. She slammed his book manuscript back with a hell of a harsh criticism--Ellers read what she wrote. He also saw the manuscript and thought it was pretty good."

"Sounds sort of familiar," Gallison said. "Like the same record almost, but with a different groove maybe in it somewhere. I mean, she sure was an expert in the tease line. Give them every encouragement, the better to watch them writhe."

Fenton nodded. "Yeah ... in general I'd say yes. We've run into it twice before and in questioning the office staff I got the impression I'd just scratched the surface. She covered a lot of territory with her teasing. Except that most women who fall into that category either won't let a man touch them or won't go beyond a kiss. She was very generous with her encouragement, apparently."

"You mean she was willing to start off as if she was playing for keeps."

"If you want to put it that way. What puzzles me a little is that she didn't have to. Just one long, lingering look and most men would have been hooked, right through the gullet like a frog when you use it for bait. Ever fish for bass with frogs, Gallison? Sometimes they climb out of the water on a nearby bank and stare back, looking forlorn and pathetic as hell--pathetic enough to tear your heart out. But they're still hooked."

"So is the fisherman--if he doesn't catch any bass. Fisherwoman in this case, of course. What did she hope to gain by it?"

Fenton shrugged. "Who can say, exactly? Probably the same kind of cruel pleasure most women who fall into that category get from keeping a man dangling. Only, as I say, she seems to have been exceptionally generous-minded about it, at least at first. Women like that really fall into three categories. The first is scared stiff when a man so much as touches them, but they enjoy leading men on. The second had some kind of trauma in childhood which prevents them from warming up to men, but they'd genuinely like to be generous and don't intend to be deliberately cruel. The third kind is like Lathrup. What they are, basically, is men-destroying women. They can be both generous and cruel, and aren't actually repelled by men physically. They'll go all the way, but the hooked frog had better watch out."

"You know what, Joe? You really should have been a psychiatrist."

"Suppose we drop all that for the moment. You asked me what I'd found out. You want to hear it, or don't you?"

"Why not? We're supposed to be working together on a homicide case."

"All right, here it is. I put a trailer on the young writer. Not a shadow, no Squad close-check. Just did a little more digging, keeping him in view. He was just one of twenty suspects. Thought nothing important would turn up. His name's Ralph Gilmore, by the way. I gave you a brief run-down on him. Have you forgotten?"

"Naturally not," Gallison said. "But when you just called him a young writer--"

"All right, you remember. Good. I won't ask you how much you remember, because I went into most of this before and you failed to remember straight off. But anyhow, the digging paid off. All Gilmore did, about ten days ago, was go into a pawnshop on Park Row and buy himself a gun. The kind of under-the-counter deal that infuriates me, and this is one pawnbroker who'll wish he'd thought twice--or three times. He'll have the book thrown at him."

Gallison narrowed his eyes. "What kind of gun was it, Joe."

"What kind do you suppose? It couldn't have been any other kind, could it? She was shot with a forty-five, and if he'd bought a pearl-handled woman's gun did you think for a moment I'd have looked as stunned as I did just now?"

"You might have. It would have shown he had murder on his mind. At the last moment, he might have decided that a big automatic was what he really needed."

"Yeah, I can well imagine."

"I'm serious in one way," Gallison said. "You can fit silencers on smaller guns. An amateur doesn't usually commit murder with a forty-five--a big Luger cannon or anything like that--unless he just happens to have such a weapon lying around ... a war souvenir, say."

"You can't argue with a fact. Gilmore bought a big, long-barreled gun. Maybe the pawnbroker had only one gun to sell and that was it. Try buying a gun from a pawnbroker sometime. Gilmore was one of the lucky ones."

"And now you think his luck is running out?"

A weary, slightly embittered look came into Fenton's eyes. "How should I know, at this stage? If I was in his shoes I'd be plenty worried. But our job is simply to do what we can and take nothing for granted ... until we've checked and double-checked."

"Then we'd better get right after it."

"I think so," Fenton said.