He leaned on the release button, then went to his door and listened.

Light quick steps ran up. Anne's steps. Rather the police than Anne! He turned completely around, stupidly drew his shade. He thrust his hair back with both hands and felt the knot on his head.

"Me," Anne whispered as she slipped in. "I walked over from Helen's. It's a wonderful morning!" She saw his bandage, and the elation left her face. "What happened to your hand?"

He stepped back in the shadow near his bureau. "I got into a fight."

"When? Last night? And your face, Guy!"

"Yes." He had to have her, had to keep her with him, he thought. He would perish without her. He started to put his arms around her, but she pushed him back, peering at him in the half light.

"Where, Guy? Who was it?"

"A man I don't even know," he said tonelessly, hardly realizing even that he lied, because it was so desperately necessary that he keep her with him. "In a bar. Don't turn on the light," he said quickly. "Please, Anne."

"In a bar?"

"I don't know how it happened. Suddenly."

"Someone you'd never seen before?"

"Yes.", "I don't believe you."

She spoke slowly, and Guy was all at once terrified, realizing she was a separate person from himself, a person with a different mind, different reactions.

"How can I?" she went on. "And why should I believe you about the letter, about not knowing who sent it?"

"Because it's true."

"Or the man you fought with on the lawn. Was it the same one?"

"You're keeping something from me, Guy.*Then she softened, but each simple word seemed to attack him: "What is it, darling? You know I want to help you. But you've got to tell me."

"I've told you," he said, and set his teeth. Behind him, the light was changing already. If he could keep Anne now, he thought, he could survive every dawn. He looked at the straight, pale curtain of her hair, and put out his hand to touch it, but she drew back.

"I don't see how we can go on like this, Guy. We can't."

"It won't go on. It's over. I swear to you, Anne. Please believe me." The moment seemed a test, as if it were now or never again. He should take her in his arms, he thought, hold her fiercely until she stopped struggling against him. But he could not make himself move.

"How do you know?"

He hesitated. "Because it was a state of mind."

"That letter was a state of mind?"

"The letter contributed to it. I felt tied in a knot. It was my work, Anne!" He bowed his head. Nailing his sins to his work!

"You once said I made you happy," she said slowly, "or that I could in spite of anything. I don't see it anymore."

Certainly he did not make her happy, she meant to say. But if she could still love him now, how he would try to make her happy! How he would worship and serve her! "You do, Anne. I have nothing else." He bent lower with sudden sobs, shameless, -wracking sobs that did not cease the long moment before Anne touched his shoulder. And though he was grateful, he felt like twisting away from the touch, too, because he felt it was only pity, only humanity that made her touch him at all.

"Shall I fix you some breakfast?"

Even in the note of exasperated patience he heard in her voice, there was a hint of forgiveness that meant total forgiveness, he knew. For fighting in a bar. Never, he thought, would she penetrate to Friday night, because it was already buried too deep for her or for any other person to go.

Twentyfive "I don't give a damn what you think!" Bruno said, his foot planted in his chair. His thin blond eyebrows almost met with his frown, and rose up at the ends like the whiskers of a cat. He looked at Gerard like a golden, thinhaired tiger driven to madness.

"Didn't say I thought anything," Gerard replied with a shrug of hunched shoulders, "did I?"

"You implied."

"I did not imply." The round shoulders shook twice with his laugh. "You mistake me, Charles. I didn't mean you told anyone on purpose you were leaving. You let it drop by accident."

Bruno stared at him. Gerard had just implied that if it was an inside job, Bruno and his mother must have had something to do with it, and it certainly was an inside job. Gerard knew that he and his mother had decided only Thursday afternoon to leave Friday. The idea of getting him all the way down here in Wall Street to tell him that! Gerard didn't have anything, and he couldn't fool him by pretending that he had. It was another perfect murder.

"Mind if I shove off?" Bruno asked. Gerard was fooling around with papers on his desk as if he had something else to keep him here for.

"In a minute. Have a drink." Gerard nodded toward the bottle of bourbon on the shelf across the office.

"No, thanks." Bruno was dying for a drink, but not from Gerard.

"How's your mother?"

"You asked me that." His mother wasn't well, wasn't sleeping, and that was the main reason he wanted to get home. A hot resentment came over him again at Gerard's friend-of-the-family attitude. A friend of his father's maybe! "By the way, we're not hiring you for this, you know."

Gerard looked up with a smile on his round, faintly pink-and-purple mottled face. "I'd work on this case for nothing, Charles. That's how interesting I think it is." He lighted another of the cigars that were shaped something like his fat fingers, and Bruno noticed once more, with disgust, the gravy stains on the lapels of his fuzzy, light-brown suit and the ghastly marble-patterned tie. Every single thing about Gerard annoyed Bruno. His slow speech annoyed him. Memories of the only other times he had seen Gerard, with his father, annoyed him. Arthur Gerard didn't even look like the kind of a detective who was not supposed to look like a detective. In spite of his record, Bruno found it impossible to believe that Gerard was a top-notch detective. "Your father was a very fine man, Charles. A pity you didn't know him better."

"I knew him well," said Bruno.

Gerard's small, speckled tan eyes looked at him gravely. "I think he knew you better than you knew him. He left me several letters concerning you, your character, what he hoped to make of you."

"He didn't know me at all." Bruno reached for a cigarette. "I don't know why we're talking about this. It's beside the point and it's morbid." He sat down coolly.

"You hated your father, didn't you?"

"He hated me."

"But he didn't. That's where you didn't know him."

Bruno pushed his hand off the chair arm and it squeaked with sweat. "Are we getting anywhere or what're you keeping me here for? My mother's not feeling well and I want to get home."

"I hope she'll be feeling better soon, because I want to ask her some questions. Maybe tomorrow."

Heat rose up the sides of Bruno's neck. The next few weeks would be terrible on his mother, and Gerard would make it worse because he was an enemy of both of them. Bruno stood up and tossed his raincoat over one arm.

"Now I want you to try to think once more," Gerard wagged a finger at him as casually as if he still sat in the chair, "just where you went and whom you saw Thursday night. You left your mother and Mr.Templeton and Mr. Russo in front of the Blue Angel at 2:45 that morning. Where did you go?"

"Hamburger Hearth," Bruno sighed.

"Didn't see anyone you knew there?"

"Who should I know there, the cat?"

"Then where'd you go?" Gerard checked on his notes.

"Clarke's on Third Avenue."

"See anyone there?"

"Sure, the bartender."

"The bartender said he didn't see you," Gerard smiled.

Bruno frowned. Gerard hadn't said that a half an hour ago. "So what? The place was crowded. Maybe I didn't see the bartender either."

"All the barmen know you in there. They said you weren't in Thursday night. Furthermore, the place wasn't crowded. Thursday night? Three or 3:30?a"I'm just trying to help you remember, Charles."

Bruno compressed his lips in exasperation. "Maybe I wasn't in Clarke's. I usually go over for a nightcap, but maybe I didn't.

Maybe I went straight home, I don't know. What about all the people my mother and I talked to Friday morning? We called up a lot of people to say good-by."

"Oh, we're covering those. But seriously, Charlesa"" Gerard leaned back, crossed a stubby leg, and concentrated on puffing his cigar to lifea""you wouldn't leave your mother and her friends just to get a hamburger and go straight home by yourself, would you?"

"Maybe. Maybe it sobered me up."

"Why're you so vague?" Gerard's Iowan accent made his "r" a snarl.

"So what if I'm vague? I've got a right to be vague if I was tight!"

"The point isa"and of course it doesn't matter whether you were at Clarke's or some other placea"who you ran into and told you were leaving for Maine the next day. You must think yourself it's funny your father was killed the night of the same day you left."

"I didn't see anyone. I invite you to check up on everyone I know and ask them."

"You just wandered around by yourself until after 5 in the morning."

"Who said I got home after 5?"

"Herbert. Herbert said so yesterday."

Bruno sighed. "Why didn't he remember all that Saturday?"

"Well, as I say, that's how the memory works. Gonea"and then it comes. Yours'll come, too. Meanwhile, I'll be around. Yes, you can go now, Charles." Gerard made a careless gesture.

Bruno lingered a moment, trying to think of something to say, and not being able to, went out and tried to slam the door but the air pressure retarded it. He walked back through the shabby, depressing corridor of the Confidential Detective Bureau, where the typewriter that had been pecking thoughtfully throughout the interview came loudera""We," Gerard was always saying, and here they all were, grubbing away back of the doorsa"nodded good-by to Miss Graham, the receptionist-secretary who had expressed her sympathies to him an hour ago when he had come in. How gaily he had come in an hour ago, determined not to let Gerard rile him, and nowa"He could never control his temper when Gerard made cracks about him and his mother, and he might as well admit it. So what? So what did they have on him? So what clues did they have on the murderer? Wrong ones.

Guy! Bruno smiled going down in the elevator. Not once had Guy crossed his mind in Gerard's office! Not one flicker even when Gerard had hammered at him about where he went Thursday night! Guy! Guy and himself! Who else was like them? Who else was their equal? He longed for Guy to be with him now. He would clasp Guy's hand, and to hell with the rest of the world! Their feats were unparalleled! Like a sweep across the sky! Like two streaks of red fire that came and disappeared so fast, everybody stood wondering if they really had seen them. He remembered a poem he had read once that said something of what he meant. He thought he still had it in a pocket of his address case. He hurried into a bar off Wall Street, ordered a drink, and pulled the tiny paper out of the address-book pocket. It was torn out of a poetry book he had had in college.

THE LEADEN-EYED by Vachel Lindsay Let not young souls be smothered out before They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.

It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull, Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly, Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap, Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve, Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

He and Guy were not leaden-eyed. He and Guy would not die like sheep now. He and Guy would reap. He would give Guy money, too, if he would take it.

Twenty-six.

At about the same time the next day, Bruno was sitting in a beach chair on the terrace of his house in Great Neck, in a mood of complaisance and halcyon content quite new and pleasant to him. Gerard had been prowling around that morning, but Bruno had been very calm and courteous, had seen that he and his little stooge got some lunch, and now Gerard was gone and he felt very proud of his behavior. He must never let Gerard get him down again like yesterday, because that was the way to get rattled and make mistakes. Gerard, of course, was the dumb one. If he'd just been nicer yesterday, he might have cooperated. Cooperated? Bruno laughed out loud. What did he mean cooperated? What was he doing, kidding himself?

Overhead a bird kept singing, "Tweedledee?" and answering itself, "Tweedledum!" Bruno cocked his head. His mother would know what kind of a bird it was. He gazed off at the russet-tinged lawn, the white plaster wall, the dogwoods that were beginning to bud. This afternoon, he found himself quite interested in nature. This afternoon, a check had arrived for twenty thousand for his mother. There would be a lot more when the insurance people stopped yapping and the lawyers got all the red tape cut. At lunch, he and his mother had talked about going to Capri, talked sketchily, but he knew they would go. And tonight, they were going out to dinner for the first time, at a little intime place that was their favorite restaurant, off the highway not far from Great Neck. No wonder he hadn't liked nature before. Now that he owned the grass and the trees, it meant something.

Casually, he turned the pages of the address book in his lap. He had found it this morning, couldn't remember if he had had it with him in Santa Fe or not, and wanted to make sure there wasn't anything about Guy in it before Gerard found it. There certainly were a lot of people he wanted to look up again, now that he had the wherewithal. An idea came to him, and he took a pencil from his pocket. Under the P's he wrote: Tommy Pandini 232 W. 76 Street and under the S's: "Slitch"

Life Guard Station Hell Gate Bridge Give Gerard a few mysterious people to look up.

Dan 8:15 Hotel Astor, he found in the memos at the back of the book. He didn't even remember Dan. Get $ from Capt. by June 1. The next page sent a little chill down him: Item for Guy $25. He tore the perforated page out. That Santa Fe belt for Guy. Why had he even put it down? In some dull momenta"Gerard's big black car purred into the driveway.

Bruno forced himself to sit there and finish checking the memos. Then he slipped the address book in his pocket, and poked the torn-out page into his mouth.

Gerard strolled onto the flagstones with a cigar in his mouth and his arms hanging.

"Anything new?" Bruno asked.

"Few things." Gerard let his eyes sweep from the corner of the house diagonally across the lawn to the plaster wall, as though he reappraised the distance the murderer had run.

Bruno's jaw moved casually on the little wad of paper, as if he chewed gum. "Such as what?" he asked. Past Gerard's shoulder, he saw his little stooge sitting in the driver's seat of the car, staring at them fixedly from under a gray hatbrim. Of all the sinister-looking guys, Bruno thought.

"Such as the fact the murderer didn't cut back to town. He kept going in this general direction." Gerard gestured like a country-store proprietor pointing out a road, bringing his whole arm down. "Cut through those woods over there and must have had a pretty rough time. We found these."

Bruno got up and looked at a piece of the purple gloves and a shred of dark blue material, like Guy's overcoat. "Gosh. You sure they're off the murderer?"

"Reasonably sure. One's off an overcoat. The othera"probably a glove."

"Or a muffler."

"No, there's a little seam." Gerard poked it with a fat freckled forefinger.

"Pretty fancy gloves."

"Ladies' gloves." Gerard looked up with a twinkle.

Bruno gave an amused smirk, and stopped contritely.