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gently.
    Copernik kept on smiling. A big whitish tongue came out and massaged his thick lower lip. “How’d I do it?” he whispered.
    “Get the slugs out of Waldo?”
    “Sure. Long twenty-twos. One smashed on a rib, one good.”
    “You’re a careful guy. You don’t miss any angles. You know anything about me. You dropped in on me to see what guns I had.”
    Copernik got up and went down on one knee again beside the killer. “Can you hear me, guy?” he asked with his face close to the face of the man on the floor.
    The man made some vague sound. Copernik stood up and yawned. “Who the hell cares what he says? Go on, pal.”
    “You wouldn’t expect to find I had anything, but you wanted to look around my place. And while you were mousing around in there”—I pointed to the dressing-room—“and me not saying anything, being a little sore, maybe, a knock came on the door. So he came in. So after a while you sneaked out and took him.”
    “Ah.” Copernik grinned widely, with as many teeth as a horse. “You’re on, pal. I socked him and I kneed him and I took him. You didn’t have no gun and the guy swiveled on me pretty sharp and I left-hooked him down the backstairs. O.K.?”
    “O.K.,” I said.
    “You’ll tell it like that downtown?”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “I’ll protect you, pal. Treat me right and I’ll always play ball. Forget about that kid. Let me know if he needs a break.”
    He came over and held out his hand. I shook it. It was as clammy as a dead fish. Clammy hands and the people who own them make me sick.
    “There’s just one thing,” I said. “This partner of yours—Ybarra. Won’t he be a bit sore you didn’t bring him along on this?”
    Copernik tousled his hair and wiped his hatband with a large yellowish silk handkerchief.
    “That guinea?” he sneered. “To hell with him!” He came close to me and breathed in my face. “No mistakes, pal—about that story of ours.”
    His breath was bad. It would be.

IV
     
    THERE were just five of us in the chief-of-detective’s office when Copernik laid it before them. A stenographer, the chief, Copernik, myself, Ybarra. Ybarra sat on a chair tilted against the side wall. His hat was down over his eyes but their softness loomed underneath, and the small still smile hung at the corners of the cleancut Latin lips. He didn’t look directly at Copernik. Copernik didn’t look at him at all.
    Outside in the corridor there had been photos of Copernik shaking hands with me, Copernik with his hat on straight and his gun in his hand and a stern, purposeful look on his face.
    They said they knew who Waldo was, but they wouldn’t tell me. I didn’t believe they knew, because the chief-of-detectives had a morgue photo of Waldo on his desk. A beautiful job, his hair combed, his tie straight, the light hitting his eyes just right to make them glisten. Nobody would have known it was a photo of a dead man with two bullet holes in his heart. He looked like a dance-hall sheik making up his mind whether to take the blonde or the redhead.
    It was about midnight when I got home. The apartment-door was locked and while I was fumbling for my keys a low voice spoke to me out of the darkness.
    All it said was: “Please!” but I knew it. I turned and looked at a dark Cadillac coupé parked just off the loading zone. It had no lights. Light from the street touched the brightness of a woman’s eyes.
    I went over there. “You’re a darn fool,” I said.
    She said: “Get in.”
    I climbed in and she started the car and drove it a block and a half along Franklin and turned down Kingsley Drive. The hot wind still burned and blustered. A radio lilted from an open, sheltered, side window of an apartment house. There were a lot of parked cars but she found a vacant space behind a small brand-new Packard cabriolet that had the dealer’s sticker on the windshield glass. After she’d jockeyed us up to the curb she leaned back in the corner with her gloved hands on