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Fox Red: The Adventures of Grace Culver, Private Investigator
by Jean Francis Webb
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Copyright (c)2004 by Renaissance E Books


Fictionwise
www.Fictionwise.com

Mystery/Crime


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         *FOX RED*
         The Adventures of Grace Culver, Private Investigator
         ROSWELL BROWN
         *(Jean Francis Webb)*
         A Renaissance E Books publication
         ISBN 1-58873-313-0
         All rights reserved
         Copyright (C) 2004 by Renaissance E Books
         This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.
         For information contact:
         publisher@renebooks.com
         *PageTurner Editions/A Deerstalker Classic*
         Selected and Introduced by D. E. Cunningham
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         *CONTENTS*
         Introduction
         Double Chocolate
         Red is For Fox
         Kitchen Trap
         Bombproof Baby
         Hit the Baby!
         Phantom Pirate
         A Grace Culver Chronology
         *INTRODUCTION*
       My son and I have a great fondness for strong female lead characters, such as David Weber's Honor Harrington, Elizabeth Moon's Paksenarrion, Karen Kijewski's Cat Colorado, and Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum. But these gals all have one thing in common-they are contemporary. A generation or two ago, strong female leads in the pulps were few and far between.
       Grace Culver of the Noonan Detective Agency is one of those characters.
       Roswell Brown's Grace Culver was the star of nineteen stories that appeared in THE SHADOW MAGAZINE between 1934 and 1937, and this red-headed spitfire was (literarily) ahead of her time.
       She didn't cower in the corner, waiting for some he-man type to rescue her ... although she was rescued from time to time by her colleagues-and always _after_ she solved the case!
       No, Grace Culver was an active participant in her adventures. Smart, cute, and full of fire. In this, she broke ground
       In addition, the stories were written _very_ competently-they hold up today with no problem whatsoever!
       Roswell Brown was a pseudonym of Jean Francis Webb (1910-1991). Under her own name, she wrote such mysteries, romances, gothics, and non-fictions as Is This Coffin Taken?, Somewhere Within This House, Carnavaron's Castle, The Craigshaw Curse, The Empty Attic, Roses from a Haunted Garden, and No Match for Murder, and the Dell mapback movie novelizations of Anna Lucasta, King Solomon's Mines and Little Women. She also wrote numerous novels under the names Roberta Morrison, Ethel Hamill, and her most popular pseudonym, Lee Davis Willoughby.
       The six stories in this collection are among the best of the Grace Culver titles, but the others are almost as good ... and there are those who will say that the best is yet to come.
       So relax, kick your shoes off, and be prepared to be totally entertained! Grace Culver awaits!
       D. E. Cunningham
       January 10, 2004
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         *DOUBLE CHOCOLATE*
       "And the double chocolate soda goes where?" the blonde waitress demanded, shifting her weight from one foot to the other with a swinging movement of the hips. She balanced a tray full of soda and shortcake expertly, her china blue eyes staring off into the distance.
       Grace Culver had been making a snake out of the paper wrapper from her soda straw. She looked up quickly, with a gleam in her eyes as they fixed on the double chocolate. But she answered the question another way.
       "Mrs. Moody wanted the shortcake, Stella."
       "Oh, yeah-I remember now." Dishes clanked on the glass top of Ye Blue Bird Tea Shoppe's front table.
       The swinging hips undulated indifferently in the direction of the kitchen once more. Maggie Moody regarded her shortcake with a two hundred pound sigh of satisfaction.
       "Sure, it's a good thing not to be so weighty you got to be worrying over what you put in your stomach all the time," she observed. "When Terrance Moody was alive-three hundred and four," they buried him at, and a better man never breathed -- "
       Grace, plunging her straws into the creamy liquid before her, listened vaguely. Her sherry-colored eyes were fixed on the tall, cool glass with a gaze of real affection. Double chocolate! It was the high spot of her birthday spree.
       Slowly, luxuriously, she began to sip. It was nice to have the day off from her job at Tim Noonan's detective agency. It was nice to be repaying her landlady's many motherly kindnesses with a holiday treat of lunch and a movie matinee. But best of all-the flavor of chocolate slipped down her throat, cool, rich, savory.
       " -- no patience with these skinny women," the ample widow of Terrance Moody was continuing. "You, now -- you're different. You're the kind that's born slim, and you eat your head off and still you stay that way. But when vain birds that won't so much as look sideways at a piece of candy for fear that -- "
       The rich Irish voice broke off suddenly. Maggie Moody had an idea.
       "Say, dearie, speakin' of candy? Why don't I buy us some at the counter there, for eatin' in the movie? After all, it's your birthday and I've given you not so much as -- "
       "And after all, this is my party, too," Grace objected. "I'd already planned to get us a -- "
       But her guest was paying no attention. A box of chocolates-blue, with a silver ribbon-had caught her determined eye from the display case along-side the door. She was making for it like a homing pigeon-more accurately, like a homing hippopotamus.
       Grace watched her with a little shake of her red curls and then turned back to her soda glass. Once Maggie Moody took hold of a notion! Oh, well -- 
       The "tea shoppe" was pleasantly restful at two o'clock of a mid-week afternoon. The girl from Noonan's liked it. Too bad birthdays didn't come oftener. But, if they did, she probably wouldn't think to take advantage of them.
       This holiday had been Big Tim's idea. She had forgotten what the day was when she reported at the office in the morning.
       But not Tim. He had been her dead father's friend-had all but brought her up, in the other man's place, after a gang war bullet had rubbed out Sergeant Culver.
       So, this morning, it had been Tim who had remembered the birthday; Tim who had pressed a crisp ten-dollar bill into her hand and shoved her toward the door; Tim who had bellowed to puzzled Jerry Riker, at a desk in the corner, that they'd have no doddering old ladies about the place this day.
       Swell, salt-of-the-earth Tim! Even if detective work weren't the grandest business on earth-even if it weren't in the Culver blood-the fact that Tim was her boss would have made the job.
       Jerry, second in command at the agency, felt that way about the grizzled ex-inspector, too. A guy like Tim -- "Counterfeit!"
       The ugly word cut into Grace's aimless thoughts like a steel knife. Her red head snapped up. The tableau at the candy counter burst upon her with all the unreality of a group in a waxworks museum.
       Maggie Moody's fleshy face was purple. The clerk behind the counter was frigid. Between them, on the glass slab, lay a blue-and-silver box-and a five-dollar bill.
       "What do you mean, counterfeit?" the big woman gasped. "What do -- "
       "I mean counterfeit. The bill's a phony. It's faked. It's no good!"
       "But I got it not an hour back from me best boarder!" Maggie snorted. "I'm tellin' you that Mr, Figgen wouldn't never -- "
       Grace rose hastily from their table and, abandoning the soda in its early stages, hurried to her guest's embattled side.
       "What seems to be the trouble, Mother Moody?"

       The older woman turned, bristling.
       "Tryin' to tell me that Mr. Figgen would pay his board in no-good money, that's what he is! When I go to pay the young man for his candy, them's the very words he ups and sasses me with! You can see -- "
       Grace picked up the disputed bill and held it to the light. She crinkled it deftly. Her eyes were unsmiling as she turned back again.
       "He's right, Mother Moody."
       Maggie's face went blank. A gray tinge stole over it. She ran the tip of her tongue along an underlip suddenly gone flaccid.
       "You mean -- But -- but Mr. Figgen-twenty years he's been -- "
       "Have you any more of the board money he paid, in your purse?"
       Figgen's landlady nodded vigorously.
       "Every cent for the month of November! And Mrs. Reilly's, and both the Hoffstadters', and old Mrs. Gilliman's. I was plannin' on (takin' them into the bank as we passed by."
       "May I see?"
       There was a fat wad of small bills in the plump hand which snapped shut the Moody purse. Maggie held them out on an open palm-perhaps a hundred and fifty dollars' worth.
       Grace bent above them for a minute, her eyes sharp, her fingers busy. Then she straightened slowly.
       "They're almost all fake, darling." Not only Mr. Figgens' money, but other money that Mother Moody had.
       The head cashier of the Importer's Trust downtown branch bank ruffled the bills through his fingers carefully.
       "Counterfeit." he said. But the word was matter-of-fact, not indignant in the manner of the Blue Bird cashier.
       "All but these few are counterfeit, Mrs. Moody."
       Maggie faced him across the mahogany desk, her eyes stunned. Grace, sitting beside her and holding one of her hands consolingly, could feel a shudder passing through the heavy body.
       "But -- I'm sure I don't understand it, at all, at all. If it was only the money from one boarder, sure;: although even then I'd be doubtin' me senses, them folks is that close to me. But here's Mrs. Reilly payin' me the first of the week, and Mrs. Gilliman only yesterday, and -- "
       "Very odd," Mr. Albertson commented. "Very odd, indeed. They couldn't all be in on the counterfeit ring, very well. And there's a new ring in operation, ladies. A big one. The same plates that struck off these have been working overtime here lately. Yours is our-let me remember-our twenty-third complaint since last month."
       It was his first remark which had struck a spark in Maggie Moody. She eyed the cashier angrily.
       "Don't you be hintin' me boarders is a crime ring, Mister-Mister What's-it! There's guests have been with me since seven years before Terrance Moody died, and -- "
       Grace laid a quieting hand on her landlady's arm.
       "There, there, darling, nobody's accusing your pets of having long jail sentences behind them. Mr. Albertson, I just was wondering-that's all new money, isn't it?"
       The cashier nodded.
       "Fresh from the plates. Cleverest engraving I've ever run across, too. As I say, we've been fooled before by this same brand. There's a lot of it around the town right now."
       "But not," said Grace, "enough to explain why every one at Mrs. Moody's should pay her with nothing but phony bills of small denominations." She turned toward Maggie. "Try to remember-was all the money they gave you new?"
       The Moody head shook instantly.
       "It was not, that! I remember thinkin' Mrs. Gilliman must of saved hers in her coal hod since the Armistice, it was that dirty. And there was a grease spot on-" Her heavy jaws dropped suddenly. "Say! None of that's my money! None of that's what me boarders paid me!"
       The redhead caught her up with shallowly concealed eagerness, her nose lifting like a pointing dog's.
       "I knew it! And the first time those bills were all together was when you put them in your purse to bank them to-day! So-where did you stop on your way from home before you met me at the Blue Bird?"
       A frown, puzzled and uncertain, pulled Maggie's honest eyebrows out of line.
       "I-I don't just recall. There was Louie's-the butcher on the corner. No place else, and I've known Louie since he was -- Wait now! There was the curiosity store!"
       The sherry-brown eyes watching her face seemed to contract.
       "The-what?"
       "That new curiosity store. You know-that place the Armenian or whatever he is opened up on the block behind us. That Ivan-you know -- "
       Grace nodded. In her mind she could see the new sign, carefully lettered, swaying above a cluttered doorway. IVAN JORGEN: Rugs, Vases, Curios.
       "I know. Whatever made you stop there?"
       "I was fixin' to buy you a birthday present. He had some strings of blue and yellow beads in the window-kind of foreign appearin' and queer-so I sort of went in and tried a couple on. But then I renumbered how you never wear beads -- "
       "Did you put down your purse while you were trying on? Even for a minute?"
       "Well -- well, yes, now that I think of it, but -- "
       Grace, small nose quivering excitedly, swung back to the cashier across the desk.
       "Mr. Albertson, have you one or two of those fake bills that have been used -- the dirtier the better? And a fine-point pen? And a bottle of green ink?" "Certainly. But I'm not sure-" Grace dipped her hand into a pocket of her jacket. An official card slipped between her fingers. She held it out toward Albertson.
       "It's quite all right. I'm Culver, from Tim Noonan's agency."
       Grace paused beneath the sign, IVAN JORGEN: Rugs, Vases, Curios, glancing into a show window filled with a hodge-podge of stuff which was, indeed, "foreign appearin' and queer." Mr. Jorgen seemed to have a little of everything in his shop.
       A thick, stale smell issued from the darkness beyond the open doorway. In the shadowy interior of the store, a lone dim figure was moving forward.
       Under ordinary circumstances, the girl from Noonan's would have hurried past the place after one glance at the cheap atrocities displayed there. But now she stood her ground, admiring a particularly ugly vase in the background. A conspicuous red leather purse-very new and shiny-dangled loosely from her fingers.
       When the heavy-set dark man had stepped suggestively to the door, she was noticeably eager. Her gaze, as she turned toward him, took in his matted eyebrows, his strong but sensitive hands, and the brutish jut of the jaw above his soiled collar.
       "I wonder-could you tell me, please, how much that is? That vase in the corner?"
       The man bowed, rubbing his hands together across his stomach. Three gold teeth glittered in his oily smile.
       "But yes, Madame. Ver' cheap. Ver' good work. You maybe step inside, like to see?"
       Grace stepped inside. It was very much the sort of junk shop she had been expecting. There was some article in that conglomerate mess in the window to attract almost any eye-to lure the passer-by inside for further examination.
       But there couldn't be many sales made. A thin film of dust was spread over the roll of wrapping paper beside the counter. Mr. Jorgen obviously wasn't making much out of his business.
       "It was that vase at the very back of the window," Her voice sounded feminine and helpless to a degree. She put down the bright red pocketbook on the edge of a chair behind her while she pointed.
       Jorgen stepped around her, lifted the bit of pottery over the back of the showcase, and put it in her hands. She glimpsed a Made in Brooklyn stamp on its bottom before his persuasive voice poured over her.
       "Imported, Madame. Ver' fine. Comes from Latvia. A very special low price -- "
       The back of the redhead's neck tingled. She yearned to spin about and face him suddenly. But instead, still keeping him out of her line of vision, she moved forward a little and held the vase up to the light-studying it intently.
       "No," she said at last, her voice regretful. "No, it isn't the right color after all. I wanted it for a special place, you see. I'm sorry."
       Now she did turn toward him. He was standing a good two feet from the chair where she had left her pocketbook. His hands were extended to take back the vase. He was smiling unhappily.
       "I, too, am sorry. Perhaps-something else?"
       "I haven't time to look, this afternoon. But I'll certainly be back! Thank you so much."
       She caught up the red pocketbook and tucked it neatly under her arm. As she marched out of the store, she was conscious of Ivan Jorgen moving along at her back and purring something about, "ver' fine turquoise bracelets, if Madame -- "
       At the end of the block, the black-and-silver facade of a beauty shop boasting the name of Maison de Chic glittered impressively. In its windows, an ornately-lettered card announced: "Paris Manicure Our Specialty."
       Grace ducked quickly into the lobby. Screened from the street, her fingers fumbled with the clasp of the bright bag crooked in her arm.
       A roll of small bills-ones, fives, tens -- fanned open in her free hand. Her sherry eyes narrowed in triumph as she held them to the light.
       On each of the noses of her own Lincolns, Washingtons and Hamiltons she had made three inconspicuous dots with the excellent green ink of the Importer's Trust.
       But the noses of all the faces before her now were innocent of any blemish! The bills had been switched while she was alone with the proprietor of the "curiosity store."
       It was Jorgen, then!
       "And will he be sore when he finds out he's taken in some of his own phonies in trade! Just proves they're good, if they fool the man who made 'em!"
       A black-gowned Frenchwoman, weighted down with artificial pearls, approached her brightly.
       "Bon soir", Mademoiselle. A manicure?"
       Grace shook her head.
       "No, thanks. I stepped into the wrong shop by mistake."
       "But perhaps, now you are here, Mademoiselle? Our Paris system, it makes the hands so chic, so alluring to the gentlemen!"
       "I've just left a gentleman," Grace chuckled softly. "And I think my hand was quite up to the situation."
       Six o'clock-closing time.
       From the shadows of the cellarway across the street, the girl from Noonan's could see the new sign swaying on its iron hooks. IVAN JORGEN: Rugs, Vases, Curios. She smiled dryly as a random thought occurred to her. What curios!
       Her eyes narrowed suddenly. The dim lights in the store across the street had snapped out. The bulky figure of the proprietor, appearing at the narrow doorway in hat and ulster, was locking up.
       Grace watched, flattening back against the rough cement wall behind her. A keen-edged wind was whipping down the street, scurrying old papers and some bits of packing excelsior before it. But it was for another reason that the girl's trim figure trembled vibrantly.
       Jorgen pocketed his key and swung out of the inky entrance. His shaggy head was bowed against the wind as he plowed off up the dark street. His massive shoulders were hunched.
       A hundred yards behind, and on the opposite side of the sparsely populated thoroughfare, the redhead followed. She had changed her clothes since the afternoon's shopping tour. Her black beret and matching wool coat were inconspicuous, The red pocketbook had disappeared.
       Down one block to the even numbered intersection, and then across town toward the west, Jorgen moved. At Seventh Avenue he boarded a downtown surface car.
       Grace was already in a cab by the time the light had changed to permit the trolley to proceed. "Follow that green one and keep behind it!" was her order to the driver.
       In the electric-spattered city darkness, the swaying yellow windows of the clumsy vehicle ahead were an easy focus for the girl's eyes.
       The taxi was equipped with a radio, over which an adenoidal tenor was beating something about "a room with a view." Grace did not hear him. The only view that interested her was the back of Jorgen's hat, outlined against the bright, steamed glass almost alongside.
       At Sheridan Square he left the car, heading west once more on foot. The girl in the taxi clipped a quick command to the man at the wheel. A moment later, she, too, was facing toward the North River, fighting the raw, chill wind..
       Up ahead, the figure of the man she was following plodded forward with long, swinging strides. His muffled silhouette, as it was repeatedly outlined against temporary light from shop windows or street lamps, was peculiarly menacing. Like a scarecrow at midnight.
       On and on. Two blocks. Around a corner.. Three. Four.
       They were almost to the river, when Jorgen's figure swerved suddenly to the left-and vanished!
       Heart pounding, Grace kept on. Had they reached the end of the trail? Or was it possible that he had learned he was being followed and was waiting for her, ambushed in some dark hole in the wall?
       Whatever it was, she had to keep going now. Breathing deeply, she swung ahead-her red curls, free of the beret, streaking in the increased blow, At the point where Jorgen had disappeared, she looked up quickly-and once again her heart skipped a beat. There he was!
       A narrow, sinister cul-de-sac opened off the pavement at right angles; a roughly paved, dead-end alley, on both sides of which grim rows of squalid buildings opened. The dirty walls were a literal honeycomb of doors and windows. There was no light except that thrown in from the street where she stood.
       At one of the doors-a battered looking cellar hatch-Jorgen's hunched figure was pausing. Metal gleamed between his fingers-a key. The door swung inward. He plunged through it into darkness, and the panel closed.
       Grace did not stop, or turn into the cul-de-sac. If there were a gang-as Albertson at the Importer's Trust had stated-others of them might easily be about the place and watching her.
       Head down, hands plunged deep in her pockets, the redhead scurried onward, turning south at the next intersection as though a muffled man in a dead-end alley were no concern of hers whatever.
       But there was a drug store on the corner, its grimy windows alight behind cigar boxes, magazines and soft drink ads. And less than a minute later, Grace was in a booth in its stuffy interior, listening to the ring of a nickel in the telephone.
       It was a long time before her party answered. But before she had resigned herself to failure, the receiver at the far end lifted.
       "Noonan's agency."
       The redhead recognized that voice.
       "Jerry Riker? It's Grace, Jerry. I -- "
       He interrupted her with a whoop. "Hi, Carrots! Say, listen-I didn't know it was your birthday until Tim spilled it this morning. How about a date to-night?"
       "That's why I called you up," she answered.
       "Swell! How about that new show at the -- "
       "This is business, Jerry! I've got a show of my own-gang of counterfeiters that are flooding the city. Stumbled on 'em by luck. Now listen! Get Tim. Both of you shag down here as fast as you can make it. I'm on Wickenden Street, a block from the river."
       "But-but what's the set-up?"
       "Odds unknown. All I can tell you is, the hang-out's in a blank alley about half a block east of the drug store where I'm phoning. You'll known it by the picture of Jean Harlow over the cash register. I've got to get back now. I'm watching 'em."
       She heard the receiver click.
       Jorgen might have gone out again already, Grace realized, as she moved back in the direction from which she had come with as much speed as she dared.
       But that had been a necessary risk. She had been in a tight spot alone, and Tim and Jerry would be on their way to help her now. She needed them.
       The cul-de-sac was empty when she reached it. Blank windows-some of them boarded up-stared down on the sinister alley like watching eyes. Behind a few of the cracked panes, stories above the street, lights shone faintly.
       But it had been a cellar entrance Jorgen had taken. There was a row of them, all alike, yawning from the shadows on the side where he had stood. She hadn't had time, before, to notice which one was his.
       Knowing only that it was the east side of the alley she must watch, Grace hugged the dingy bricks of the opposite wall and stepped forward into darkness.
       At a point some twenty feet in from the street, a rain barrel had been set against the west side of the cul-de-sac. Its lee formed a shallow black pocket, shadowed thickly. Here the girl from Noonan's stopped, flattening back out of sight with a quick, deft movement. Her thin shoulders pressed tight against the hoops of the rotting barrel.
       She waited.
       The minutes dragged past with leaden slowness, one like another, the next .like the one before. It was cold in the narrow place, but at least the wind was cut off.
       From the eaves above, water was dripping into the barrel with maddening steadiness, like a drum pounding. Drip -- drip-drip-drip -- 
       Suppose Jorgen had already gone, while she was telephoning? Or suppose he had no intention of leaving the hang-out until morning? Or suppose there were another exit, on some other street?
       It was a fool's business, waiting like a cat at an unknown mousehole while the -- 
       A latch clicked suddenly somewhere in the darkness.
       The tiny, metallic sound sent an echoing tremor through the redhead's crouching body. She tensed against the barrel until its nailheads bit into the soft flesh of her shoulder. Slowly-breathlessly-she worked herself erect, her back scraping the damp old wall.
       It was Jorgen! His rangy figure was turning away from the fourth door in the row. And he had not locked it behind him!
       Grace flattened back between the rotting staves and the cold bricks, like the middle layer of a sandwich. So close that she could have touched him, the proprietor of the curio shop swung down the alley to the intersecting street. His jaw made an ugly line against the lamplight beyond as he turned the corner and disappeared.
       She watched the entrance to the alley for a full two minutes-waiting. At the end of that time, a grocery truck bumped past the opening and a fat woman waddled along in its wake. No Jorgen. She could breathe again.
       The fourth door in the row. The girl's trim figure flashed across the space between shadows and shadows so quickly that even a watching eye might easily have missed the movement.
       But there seemed to be no watching eye. The cellar ahead of her, in which only a dim light flickered, looked empty. And Jorgen had not shown any indication of a belief that he was spied upon.
       Now-if she could get into his quarters while he was away-if she could unearth some incriminating evidence, to justify an arrest by Tim when Jerry brought him -- Now, while the place was empty!
       The door slid away from her with a rusty groan, at the pressure of her hand. Hugging the wall to keep from falling in the darkness, Grace felt her way forward into a black pit.
       Three steps down. Then level flooring was beneath her feet again. In the half-light, as her eyes became used to it, she had little difficulty in seeing what came next.
       Solid mortar walls slanted away from her, flanking a narrow hallway. There was no opening in either-no doors, no windows. But between them, a hundred yards farther on, a closed wooden panel showed, dimly. And beneath it a line of white light glittered.
       Her fingertips following the wall for guidance, the redhead moved quickly along the passageway. Her steps were unconsciously stealthy, like a stalking panther's. Her body was tense.
       At the door she stopped, holding her head flat against the unpainted wood while she listened for the slightest sound from the room beyond. But none came. It had the eerie stillness of an abandoned place.
       Slowly, her careful fingers touched the latch beneath them. She could feel it lift. The door gave, easily, silently. She stepped across the threshold-into Ivan Jorgen's hideaway.
       The cellar room was lighted solely by a dingy bulb set into the middle of the ceiling. Its walls were only the whitewashed foundations of the rickety building above. There were a few chairs about the place. In one corner stood an iron bed, its covers disordered; in another, beneath a powerful arc light which was not turned on, the wall was flanked by a table covered with a mass of sticks and wires.
       Grace, a soft sound of triumph in her throat, started forward, Etcher's tools, on that table! Knives -- bottles of acid-scalpels-copper plates. The counterfeiter's workbench!
       The door creaked on its hinges in closing, and a menacing shadow wavered suddenly over the dim white wall before her.
       Gasping, the girl from Noonan's whirled.
       The man who stood there was little better than a Thing. He had long, hairy arms, a huge chest, powerful shoulders. His head, atop them, seemed unnaturally small.
       Much of the flesh of his face had been eaten and scarred beyond recognition, in some long-ago mishap with chemicals. He was horrible to look at; and he was grinning at her with the cunning of a murderous animal.
       Swinging inward as she had entered, the door had screened him from sight. But now it had closed again. She was alone with him-trapped in the strange cellar room.
       With a low cry of instinctive terror, Grace leaped for the first weapon her eyes lit upon-an ink bottle on the stand beside the iron bed.
       But as she moved, the deformed guardian of the doorway hurled himself upon her.
       Arms like huge iron bands clamped about her with rib-crushing violence. A force as irresistible as gravity jerked her up into the air.
       With savage fury she clawed at the giant who held her imprisoned in his pitiless grasp. Her fingernails dug into the soft mass scar tissue that was his jaw. Her fists, driving furiously, thumped his chest.
       But she might have been belaboring the whitewashed stone wall, for all the good her resistance did her. The iron arms tightened. Hot breath fanned her cheek as her captor lifted her higher from the floor. The cellar rumbled with his brutish laughter.
       "Let-me-down!"
       Her face kicked wildly, but the man held her off as easily, as though she were a rag doll. His whole great body pivoted slowly, like a barber's pole, dragging her with him.
       "So-you try put one over on Rocco, eh? You try take away tools from Boss?"
       Chuckling ghoulishly, he set her on barren corner of the big room, now. He had selected a position from which he could cut off her approach to the work table, the door, or the bedside stand.
       For a silent moment they eyed each other, the disfigured monster shifting his weight easily from one foot to the other. Grace's breath was uneven. The unexpectedness and violence of the attack had shaken her badly.
       Mockery glittered in his little eyes. Mockery and hatred and something more vicious, something lethal.
       Springing forward quickly, she tried to leap around him to the door. Every nerve in her body strained forward, toward escape. But his huge hand flashed up.
       Its open palm caught her alongside the head with a slap which echoed wickedly through the low-ceilinged room. Zigzags of orange light skyrocketed through the air, and suddenly the place began to whirl about her.
       Back against the wall she crashed, the force of the impact sending a sickening shudder through her body. She felt herself falling-falling-falling -- 
       She mustn't faint! She must get back on her feet somehow! She must get through that door, before Jorgen returned-while there was only one of them to hold her!
       Slowly the room settled. She was on the floor, her knees buckled under her, her head still ringing. Above her, legs spread, Jorgen's henchman stood ready.
       With a sick quiver, Grace lifted one hand to her face. It was wet when she moved. Wet and red. A little trickle of blood was cutting down her chin, from one corner of her torn mouth.
       "You best not move," Rocco rumbled warningly. "You stay there, safer for Boss."
       She knew it was hopeless. His massive frame loomed like a wall between her and the door, or any possible weapon.
       Minutes throbbed past, desperate, useless. There wasn't anything to do. No chance of escape.
       Suddenly her heart leaped-only to fall again.
       There were footsteps stamping in the hall outside. The chance of a rescue by Tim and Jerry had flashed through her mind. But-they wouldn't be approaching an unknown hideout with so little caution. This wouldn't be help coming.
       In that moment of realization, a new and heartbreaking truth occurred to her. Tim and Jerry couldn't come! They wouldn't know where she was. The outside of the building, even if they stumbled upon the cul-de-sac, was as hopelessly pocked with entrances as a rabbit warren. They couldn't find her, even if -- 
       The door slammed open.
       "What the -- "
       Rocco, turning, stood aside. In the doorway, Ivan Jorgen paused staring at her. And, behind him in the passageway, two other figures crowded.
       Four of them! Four against her, and no chance of help from the outside!
       Grace's heart sank heavily as Jorgen stalked toward her across the wide room, a sardonic smile flicking the ends of his thin mouth, his eyes gleaming rock hard beneath their matted black brows.
       "So-it is Madame with the fondness for vases, is it not?"
       His voice was as cold as a knife blade. At his shoulder, the two others moved into the room. One of them was prematurely gray-haired, and scowling. The other's bald skull looked like the narrow end of an egg.
       The egg-head closed the door behind him.
       "And Madame has also a liking for copper plates, perhaps?" Jorgen chuckled nastily. "And the time to look around, no?"
       He was like a. cat, playing with her. Grace felt weak with dread at the menace lying behind his onyx-black eyes. Slowly, shivering despite herself, she struggled upward to her feet.
       "What goes on?"
       It was the gray-haired newcomer speaking. His brick-red face was peering over Jorgen's shoulder. It was expressionless.
       "Ah, Pete! A lady honors us who was a. customer at my store. Perhaps also you see her at your delicatessen? Or you, Mal, at your dry goods store?"
       The egg-head growled: "Nope" and the one called Pete made a similar sound of denial. But it seemed to Grace that the eyes of both had hardened.
       Other outlets for Jorgen's counterfeit money. It was easy to tie up Pete and Mal with the business at hand. Running fronts like Ivan's own curio shop, they could pull the same game on others like the ring Boss had played to-day on Maggie Moody and her own red pocketbook.
       Mal, his naked skull gleaming, walked forward slowly.
       "We oughta do something, Jork. We ougtha fix her, huh?"
       Their cold eyes bored into her-four pairs of killer eyes, all determined that she should never leave this cellar room alive. A semicircle of death, closing in on her, glittering, wicked.
       Suddenly something snapped in Grace's taut brain. Hopeless as it seemed to break through, she hurled herself forward at Jorgen with all the force left in her.
       A snarl of rage replaced the mockery on his lips. Thick brows contracting, jaw shut, he lunged for her,
       Quick as an arrow, she was past him. His extended fingers, clawing, scraped down the side of her arm as she hurtled across the room. Pete blocked the door. But there were weapons on the work bench-something-there must be something -- 
       Her right hand caught up the first thing it touched-a long, thin scraping knife like a thick knitting needle. She whirled to face the room. Not an instant too soon.
       Mal, the egg-head, was upon her. His lips were drawn back from yellow in a grimace of hatred. His paws were up, and in one of them a blunt-tipped blackjack wavered.
       Driving hard, in a frenzy of fighting fury, Grace let him have the knife.
       It was the force of his own descending blow that saved him. The thin blade ripped him from shoulder to elbow.
       Blood spurted through the long gash in his coat sleeve. Screaming, he tottered back.
       Before the girl could recover, Rocco was upon her. Those pitiless iron arms clamped around her again, crushing. Her own arms, pinned to her sides, were powerless.
       "Bloody devil!" Mal was shrieking. Rocco growled menacingly.
       "Maybe you like I slap her around some more, eh. Boss?"
       Jorgen strode across the room until he was standing directly in front of her, his face a mask of hatred as he thrust it close to hers.
       "No slapping, Rocco! This lady who know so much, too much-she need more than a slapping, no?"
       Grace faced him with the blood gone from her cheeks. Her eyes were wide.
       "You're-what are you going to do to me?"
       The counterfeiter shrugged his wide shoulders expressively,
       "When some one is executed-they grant one last wish, no? You have such wish? This is the time, Madame."
       Execution!
       Grace always had known that Death played tag with her profession. Her own father had gone out that way, fighting, with his boots on. She might have been content to follow him.
       But cold-blooded execution, without a chance -- 
       Something flickered in Jorgen's hard eyes. Ugly amusement.
       "Maybe you like a nice vase, eh?"
       He really meant it, then-that "last wish"! His twisted sense of humor relished the situation. If only she could think of something difficult-something that would give her a little time -- 
       "A vase, Madame?"
       She eyed him as calmly as she could, and forced her voice to steadiness.
       "No, thanks. I'd-I'd like a double chocolate soda, please."
       It was the shortest ten minutes Grace Culver ever had spent. It seemed to her that Jorgen, laughing disagreeably, had no more than sent Rocco out to the drug store on the corner than the disfigured giant was back again.
       The prisoner was sitting on the edge of the iron cot when the counterfeiter's henchman came into the room, with the long paper carton gripped in one hand.
       Across the small stand, the iron-haired crook called Pete stood watching her. The ink bottle had been moved. There was nothing between them but the gray automatic resting under Pete's fingers on his side of the table-mute warning that there would be no second chance to reach the work bench.
       Rocco set down his purchase on the table with a grunt. There it was. Double chocolate soda. Straws. Everything. Her last wish!
       The four men stood silent, staring at her. Grace could feel .their eyes again boring, cold, pitiless. When she had finished that soda-what?
       "Drink, Madame!"
       Her fingers moved stiffly in response to Jorgen's gutteral command.
       She ripped, the wrapper from about the straws and wadded it into a hard little ball under her thumb. She thrust the straws into the creamy liquid.
       She began to drink.
       Pete's fingers, across the level table top, were spread loose on the automatic. He was only a guard. But Jorgen -- there was a gun in his hand, too, now.
       A tense hand. And the muzzle was lifting.
       Up through the straws slid .the sweet brown drink which was to be her last. It choked in her throat, but somehow she swallowed it. Nothing to do! There wasn't any way out!
       A moment, and the double chocolate would be gone. A hot roar, grim and final, would fill the room. And then the -- 
       A hideous din filled her ears, sudden, unexpected. It wasn't the gun. It -- 
       Some one was hammering on the panel which Mal had locked behind Rocco. Some one was shouting.
       "Culver! Red!"
       It couldn't be Tim's voice, of course. She must be mad. Those staring eyes had driven her mad. It couldn't be Tim.
       "Tim! Tim!"
       As Grace screamed the word, she saw Jorgen whirl-Mal leap away from the door-Rocco tense for a spring-and Pete -- 
       Whipping into action as sudden as the stupor which had frozen her, the redhead caught up the carton in which half the soda still remained.
       Into Pete's granite face she hurled the container with all her strength. The liquid, bursting from the open end of the tube, struck him with an audible slap. He fell backward, sputtering, digging raw knuckles into his eyes.
       She was around the stand in no time. Out of his still clawing fingers she wrenched the snub-nosed automatic. His fist closed-too late-over air.
       Crash!
       The shot had not been fired inside the cellar, but it was so close at hand that the walls echoed with it. The door shivered.
       Crash!
       Into the quivering instant which followed the second explosion, the small sound of metal striking stone intruded. Tim had blasted the lock loose from its moorings. The door slammed in.
       Jorgen was waiting for it. His gun was trained on the opening. His finger was tensing with deadly precision.
       "Look out, Tim!"
       And as she screamed the warning, Grace's own arm snapped up. Pete's automatic, steady in her hand, belched a thin line of hot fire. Ivan Jorgen, screaming while he caught at his gun arm, budded and fell to his knees.
       Tim Noonan was over the threshold now-familiar face set in a grim mask, gun barking from his fist as he came.
       Rocco, to Grace's left, had caught up a light chair and swung it high above his head. Through the air the bulky thing hurtled viciously. Tim ducked.
       As wood splintered against stone, the veteran detective's gun snapped up once more. Its ugly snarl spat out on a tongue of flame. Rocco cried out once -- in infantile terror.
       The slug had ripped between his pig-like little eyes. Blood poured in a fountain down his shapeless face. His throat contracted. Onto the stone floor he crashed, his huge body sprawling.
       Mal was leaping on Tim from the rear, now-screaming with rage. He held a wicked knife in his raised hand.
       But before he could reach the seasoned ex-inspector, interference from a new source intervened. A lithe young body hurtled from the dark passageway and caught him with such force that both figures tottered. The knife dropped.
       "Good work, Jerry!"
       The cry of triumph was still on Grace's lips when she saw Jorgen whipping up his gun once more-in his left hand, this time. She swung to stop him, automatic ready. But Tim was ahead of her.
       "Drop that gun, louse!"
       There were two muzzles fixed on him. The game was up, and Jorgen knew it.
       His gun clattered to the floor. His arms lifted slowly. There was a sullen light of surrender in the eyes beneath those matted brows.
       "All right, Culver-line 'em up. No funny business, crooks. We've got some boys in a car outside that are gonna take you to an art school you never been in before. Free scholarships for all of you!"
       Grace watched the patrol wagon starting up the street, with Noonan's powerful bulk in the rear end of it. He was one who believed in personally finishing a job to the last detail, was Timothy Noonan.
       "There goes the toughest spot I ever was in," she observed, in an almost matter-of-fact voice, to "Jerry Riker, who stood beside her. "Never believe 'em, my lad, when they tell you that the condemned man ate a hearty meal!"
       Riker was a good hand at action. But he was afraid of the redhead. His face colored now, just because he was alone with her outside office.
       "Gee, I was scared we weren't gonna get to you in time, Redsie!"
       The sherry-colored eyes sparkled suddenly.
       "Say! That reminds me! How did you happen to stumble into that particular cellarway out of the lot-like a movie hero in the seventh reel?"
       "The double chocolate soda," he said instantly.
       "What?"
       "The soda. Tim and I knew something was sour when we couldn't find you. So we split to search the neighborhood. I'm in that corner drug store -- I knew you'd been there when you called-and this mug walks in. When he orders a double chocolate to take out, and you're in the neighborhood, well, even a dumb dick would of followed him!"
       Grace tucked her arm comfortably through the crook of Jerry's, oblivious to his instantly reddening ears.
       "And you and Noonan are pretty smart, if your old Aunt Grace does say! A double chocolate soda! Mm-m -- how I love 'em! You could buy me one for my birthday right now, mister, if you felt inclined."
--------
         *RED IS FOR FOX*
       The girl with red hair sucked up the last of a double chocolate soda through soggy straws, and grunted regretfully at the hollow sound of air replacing creamy liquid at the bottom openings of the two stems.
       Above the drug store counter, an electric clock pointed to twenty-seven minutes after twelve. Her sherry-colored eyes watching the thin, crimson second-indicator slide quickly around the numbered circle. Miss Culver of the Noonan Detective Agency wondered what to do with the last half of her lunch hour,
       The only trouble with meals at counters, where foaming double chocolates were mixed before your eyes, was speed. Too much time left over at the end. If you didn't happen to be in a neighborhood that lent itself to window-shopping -- 
       Grace Culver grinned quickly and snapped her fingers in triumph. Of course! The Banner offices were only four blocks further downtown.
       In the old days, when she had worked on the paper as a "sob sister," she often had grabbed food from this very counter between a murder scoop and a Famous -- Actress-To-Divorce-Fifth-Husband interview. And she hadn't seen the old gang in weeks-Burton and Clancy and the rest. Time for a check-up.
       The familiar store-fronts that lined the way to the newspaper's block-square building whipped past with remarkable speed as the girl's trim figure swung forward through the sidewalk crowd.
       Her pointed little chin was lifted eagerly and her nostrils were quivering already in anticipation of the smell of the city desk. Printers' ink! She loved it.
       The only thing in the world that could have made her toss up her reporter's job was the one to which she had gone with "Big Tim" Noonan's outfit. Her father had died in action on the city force, and it had taken five bullets to drop him. The tracking of malefactors, the swift action of cornering them and the thrill of bringing them in for justice, were as much in her blood as is speed in that of a finely-bred race horse.
       Burton, the Banner's city editor, had liked her father. Partly because Sergeant Culver's official activities were pretty sure to be headline copy; partly because he was amused by the endless gadgets the police officer's mechanical brain was forever devising in his spare moments.
       Trick keyrings, a knife with six blades, a combination bottle-opener-and -- ice-pick. Burton had plenty of souvenirs of his friendship with the father of his former star reporter, and -- A sign loomed up in front of Grace:
       DAILY BANNER
       She swung out of the sidewalk traffic, stepped under the arch where the two words were cut deep in an oblong granite block, and plunged into the building's cool interior,
       Burton was at his desk, sleeves rolled up, forehead furrowed. Galleys of type proof and cuts-a three-column layout -- were spread before him on the cluttered working surface.
       Across the story, as Grace approached, he was scrawling "Kill" with a stubby blue pencil.
       "Hi, Mongoose!"
       Burton's sad eyes lighted suddenly, in recognition.
       "Culver! How be you? Haven't seen you in a month of -- "
       "I've been busy Sundays. Working."
       As the city editor tossed down the galleys and swung his chair toward the corner of the desk on which his visitor had perched from long-standing habit, the blue word lay revealed in almost dramatic clarity.
       "So they keep the lady bloodhound with her nose to the ground even on the Sabbath, eh?"
       "Nope. This business was personal,"
       Burton chuckled instantly.
       "Now, if your old man were sitting there and telling me that, I'd know what he meant. Gimcracks."
       Grace opened her purse with a deliberate snap and drew out a lipstick. She turned it deftly between her fingers, studying its polished surface. There was a queer look on her face.
       "Gimcracks?" she repeated, innocently. But Burton took no notice of the interruption.
       "What I wish is, you were back here working. Honest, Red, this business is getting me. Nothing breaks until after we're on the street, any more. And when I do get a story-phooey-it's a phony!"
       He tapped the blue-penciled galleys with a discouraged forefinger, and Grace let her eyes follow the gesture. "-sensational arrest in his stateroom on the Sylvania," stared up at her. Then the blue word-"Kill."
       "Go oil," Burton groaned. "Go on and read it. The scoop of the month. Then I'll tell you."
       The redhead's practiced glance darted down the long, smudged columns, gleaning the highlights of the story and instinctively skipping the frills:
       "Hon. John Ribden ... known to have Tamarov rubies in his possession on leaving Plymouth ... failed to declare ... customs officials made two-hour search ... the jewels were discovered hidden in the false top to a cane packed in one of the ... sensational arrest..."
       "It looks good," she said, at last.
       "The "Hon. John' gives it class, and I see you've landed some big-time art for it. What's wrong?"
       "Only one little thing," Burton growled bitterly. "When they dragged this Ribden number into court, what should the jewels in the cane top turn out to be but a half-dozen red glass beads! Nothing to declare there. They had to let him go, of course."
       "So?"
       "So instead of 'International Crook Caught In Daring Smuggle Arrest,' for page one, column one-we've got maybe six inches of humorous human-interest stuff for the second section, on 'Were The Customs Officers' Faces Red?' You know. And no build-up for the art, so that's out too."
       Grace leered at him wickedly.
       "Now had the Hon. John only known, he'd doubtless have been a smuggler just to accommodate -- "
       "Be funny!" Burton was bitter. "And the pay-off is, he really got those stones into the country somehow! Scotland Yard cabled he had then -- definite -- when he left England. And why should he toss 'em overboard when the Sylvania was three days out to sea?"
       The redhead, absent-mindedly lifting the lipstick toward her mouth as she listened, jerked it down abruptly with a soft grunt. She put it away in her purse; then pulled out another and went to work with it.
       "You mean-headquarters thinks the cane was only a plant? Ribden left it where they'd find it, guessing that England had sent over a tip-off and he'd be searched?"
       "You're going great."
       "And then, when the stuff proved valueless and they couldn't hold him, he walked out scot-free with the real stones somewhere else in his luggage?"
       "That," Burton conceded, "is the general idea. But where in blazes did he have 'em? The men detailed to the job tore his trunks wide open. Harry covered for us, and he said they left Ribden's stateroom looking like the end of a six-day 'Cruise to Nowhere.'"
       Grace spoke softly.
       "I'll bet you'd like to know where. I'll bet I would, too."
       "What a story!" For an instant, rapture glowed in the city editor's ugly face. Then it faded.
       "Nuts! You'll find that 'Red Faces In Court' drool on page seventeen tonight. And a squib in the society chatter about, 'The Hon. John Ribden, who arrived today, on the Sylvania, left town immediately for the Tallyho Inn near Lakeview, Conn. He comes from London for the Lakeview Hunt next Saturday.' Guess we'll have to run a hooch ad for the lead."
       Grace stood up slowly, slipping the second lipstick back into her purse unobtrusively.
       "Something may come up one of these mornings that'll surprise you, Mongoose. Keep the home fires burning."
       "Meaning?"
       "Meaning-nothing in particular." Burton's lips twisted into a dry smile. "Still figure on pulling rabbits out of any old hat, eh, Culver? I got to admit you always used to be able to."
       Her parting shot was: "Why not? Given a hat with rabbits in it as a starter, of course."
       Grace walked into the Noonan offices at exactly one minute past one, and a sepulchral voice boomed at her instantly:
       "Late again, Miss Culver! I'm afraid you're fired!"
       Grace grinned engagingly at the handsome face of Jerry Riker, Big Tim's other assistant, and thumbed her nose.
       "That from our office boy! All right, But one more slight out of you, Jerry Riker, and I won't let you go fox hunting with Tim and me next Saturday."
       "Tallyho!" Jerry roared instantly.
       "That's right. The Tallyho Inn. At Lakeview, Connecticut. Getting to be quite a detective for a little feller, aren't you?"
       Slowly, Jerry's broad smile faded. He studied the girl for a moment, as she took off her hat and fluffed out the waves of her bright hair before the office mirror.
       "Say, Redsie-what's on your mind?" Without turning, she spoke into the glass.
       "If six colored beads retailed for much more than three cents in the open market, there'd be a swell story in tonight's Banner. There's still a big-time crook at large, as it is. The smoothest smuggler of the season. Or Burton and headquarters and Scotland Yard are all fish. And me."
       Quickly, concisely, she gave him the details of the Ribden incident. Jerry listened, grunting now and then as a salient feature of the story struck home. When she was finished, he grunted again.
       "So what?"
       "Don't you know?" Grace demanded.
       "They pull a pinch on a guy who hasn't got any rubies. They find that out and let him go. Nothing to get all steamed up about in -- "
       There was acid in the redhead's voice as she answered.
       "Why would a known crook hide six red beads in a detectably hollow cane, and leave 'em where the cops would be sure to find out?"
       "Practical joker, maybe?"
       "Some joke! Especially when Scotland Yard knew he took the rubies out of England. But if he once were arrested, and the charge had to be dismissed -- Then, if he had the real stones on him somewhere else -- "
       "A pipe dream, Redsie!" Jerry scoffed.
       Unruffled, Grace sat down at the desk marked "Miss Culver, secretary," and ran her fingers along the keyboard of her uncovered typewriter.
       "So you say. But I'm going to dream it in Lakeview this week-end, big shot,"
       "Quit kidding. Why, there's no case there!"
       "No? If you were a woman, Riker, you'd wonder. Leaving aside the cane act, why should Ribden come all the way across the Atlantic for a second-rate fox hunt when there's plenty better in England?"
       Jerry shrugged.
       "Does sound useless, But maybe Ribden -- "
       "Maybe he knows that a lot of new-rich nitwits who want to crash the society rotogravures are always hanging around those affairs, over here. Dummies who'd fall like a thousand of brick for the Tamarov stuff, if he put on a smooth, silk-hat sales act. Easy-money boobs."
       There was a moment's silence in the office.
       "Supposing he has got the stones, Red? If Uncle Sam's pet ferrets couldn't unearth 'em, what chance have you? Anyhow, it's out of our territory. Tim will put his foot down flat."
       "Tim," said Tim's secretary, "will love it! It's front-page publicity for the agency if we make a ten-strike, isn't it? Anyhow, I've got a hunch."
       Jerry grinned.
       "All right, pal. A-hunting we will go. But when the Honorable John turns out to be nothing but a guy who likes to chase foxes, are you going to blush?"
       Grace was paying little attention to him. Her fingers were tapping out aimless words on the typewriter keys, while her eyes were fixed dreamily on the blank wall ahead of her:
       RIBDEN-RENEGADE-RASCAL. RENOWNED REVENUE RENEGER RECEIVES RAP. RETRIBUTION REACHES RUBY RUNNER RIBDEN.
       What a head for the Banner! And what a case for the agency. If -- 
       The fashionably dressed young lady stopped at the desk in the spacious lobby, listening to the switchboard operator intone a monotonously cheerful, "Tallyho Inn, Good afternoon."
       "Yes, miss?"
       She smiled at the clerk who was bowing her toward the register.
       "The rooms for Miss Rossiter and her uncle, please. We wired from New York."
       "Yes, miss." He turned the book to the "R" sheet, holding out a pen. "If you'll sign here. For your uncle, too?"
       "Miss Rossiter, Mr. George Rossiter and companion, New York City." As she wrote the words, the girl's sherry-colored eyes were busy with the name above her own. She found the one she was looking for only three up the column. HM. John Ribden, valet, chauffeur, groom-London, England.
       "Ha! Honorable John and Company, eh?"
       "Beg pardon, Miss?"
       "Nothing, thanks. It was just my false teeth clacking, I guess."
       Smiling brightly, she turned from the desk. The clerk, bewildered, stared after her.
       Not a bad-looking dish, what with that red hair and all, he decided. New money, to judge by the number of shining bracelets and the too-fancy clothes. Like a lot of the dames that tried to kick society for a goal at the Lakeview Hunts.
       Miss Rossiter crossed the lobby slowly, looking over the crowd. In one corner, a tall, dark man In riding clothes was leaning against the wall doing nothing Her eyes narrowed at sight of him, but she kept on toward the elevators.
       "Pardon me, miss, but I think this is yours?"
       The girl turned quickly, her heavy, darkened lashes fluttering helplessly she looked up at the man in riding clothes.
       "My handkerchief! And I never even noticed dropping it. Uncle George would be that put out. He had it monogrammed in Paris, and only six cost him a fortune."
       "Did they really?" The dark man's eyes were busy with the bracelets at her wrist. "Strange thing our initials should be the same. My name's John Ribden Miss -- "
       "Rossiter. Mabel Rossiter, from Tulsa. New York, just lately. Maybe you've heard of my Uncle George? He's the oil millionaire Rossiter. Owns half of Oklahoma. But I-I guess I shouldn't be talking to a perfect stranger like this."
       "Why not?" Ribden smiled at her smoothly. "I think it was a lucky accident. Fate, perhaps. I was lonely, Miss Rossiter. Just over from England. Don't know a soul. Or may I say didn't know a soul?"
       Miss Rossiter giggled, twisted her handkerchief, and whispered coyly, "Oh, Mr. Ribden!"
       "That's fine! Won't you join me for a cocktail before dinner? That is, if your uncle -- "
       "Oh, Uncle George won't mind. He can't refuse me anything. Spends money on me like water. All these bracelets and things, I have dozens more upstairs. It's just outlandish how he throws good money around."
       "The cocktail, then? A toast to Uncle George-and us?"
       She nodded, giggled again, and stepped into the waiting elevator. The grille closed on Ribden's satisfied smile. The cage shot upward.
       Three minutes later Miss Rossiter burst into Room 711, surprising two men in shirtsleeves midway of a game of double Canfield. The older one looked up at her under heavy eyebrows.
       "Find anything?" The girl grinned.
       "Found Ribden. Very drawing-roomish, he says to me, he says, 'A cocktail. A toast to us.' I'm fatal, I am."
       "Or maybe it was that wristful of ice," Jerry Riker observed sourly. "How'd you work it?"
       "The handkerchief gag. Old friends are the best, I always say. I recognized him right off, from Burton's art."
       Tim Noonan snorted, shifting the weight of his powerful frame in the Inn's spindle-legged chair.
       "Anything else, Redsie?"
       "Plenty else. He isn't working alone. He's got at least three more, signed up as servants. Even a groom. But he didn't mention a horse."
       "I'll still bet you even dough he's on the level," Jerry offered, flipping down a card. "Him and his whole troupe of trapeze artists."
       Grace Culver began to strip off her bracelets, one by one.
       "That's money you lose, or the salesman gleam in one dark stranger's eyes was a liar. Well-tonight tells the story, anyhow."
       The long, black limousine shot like a metal arrow down a white ribbon of concrete. In the mirror above the chauffeur's seat, Grace could watch the eyes of the uniformed man at the wheel.
       Like glittering buttons, they were-hard, soulless. Ribden's "Henry" looked more like an ape than like a gentleman's servant.
       "It was a wonderful party, Mr. Ribden," she breathed, fluttering her lashes, "You certainly have been mighty nice to me, my first evening in Lakeview."
       "Pleasure's been mine," Ribden answered suavely. She had dragged a lipstick out of her evening bag and he was watching the glitter of jewels at her wrist as she fingered it. His smile was set.
       "Do-do all American girls carry those paint things around with them? Let me see it."
       She handed over the tiny metal tube, and Ribden turned it between his fingers amusedly. Her eyes, fixed on his face as he played with the toy, were expressionless.
       "Red," he purred. "The color of roses. Here you are. Miss Mabel. Look out! The catch on that bracelet of yours is loose."
       The girl clutched at her wrist with a little cry of dismay.
       "Oh, thank you! Uncle George paid four thousand dollars for that. I-I always seem to be losing his presents, don't I?"
       "And I always have the luck to save them for you. It's a magnificent bracelet."
       She nodded.
       "Uncle George is nuts about-I mean, very fond of jewels. He buys anything like that if it happens to strike his fancy, no matter what the price is."
       There! That was all the opening he needed! If he really was a smuggler -- really had the stones -- 
       Ribden leaned toward her a little.
       "I wonder-but no, I guess not"
       "What, Mr. Ribden? Please tell me."
       "Well-like most Englishmen, Miss Rossiter, I'm not as well off as I once was. Taxes and all that, you know. Matter of fact, one of my minor reasons for coming over this trip was to see if I might find some chap who'd be interested in rubies. Some beauties. From the Ribden necklace-very famous-belonged to my grandmother-" Clapping her hands eagerly, the redhead seemed delighted.
       "What a break, us meeting like this! If Uncle George took a shine to the -- the Ribden rubies, he'd buy 'em in a minute! If only I could see them, so as to-you know, get up a sales talk."
       Laughing softly, Ribden slipped a silver cigarette case from his vest pocket. He held it close to his side, so that his sleeve veiled it, and a quick, metallic click reached the ear of the girl beside him
       "Here they are, Miss Mabel."
       Lying against the smooth lining of the case's open lid as if it were a jeweler's tray, six blood-red stones glittered enticingly. Seemingly, they had been right in with the cigarettes. But that click had told its story. False compartment.
       "So that's how -- "
       "What, Miss Mabel?"
       "I was going to say-so that's how really fine rubies look. They're beautiful! But-how did you happen to have -- "
       "One doesn't dare leave them at the Inn. They're safer with me, in the case. It has-special adaptabilities."
       Special adaptabilities! Something clicked suddenly in the redhead's incisive brain. The case had a familiar look as it lay in Ribden's outstretched fingers.
       Her father had made a gadget like that once. She could remember sitting on the floor in their living room back home, while he did magic tricks with disappearing cigarettes on a rainy afternoon.
       "Where-where did you buy it? The case, I mean? It's so unusual -- "
       He laughed sharply, at a joke too good to keep.
       "It was made just after the war by a New York bobbie-cop, you'd call him, eh? I-managed to acquire it. A sort of souvenir." Grace looked down at the floor, screening her eyes. A red haze had risen before them suddenly. Her father's case! She recognized it now. The dirty -- 
       Without turning, the girl said, "Could I bring Uncle George to your rooms to look at the rubies? That is, if he's still up when we get back to the Inn?"
       "Certainly," Ribden said again.
       "Uncle George" was still up. There was a tense, almost grim look to his rugged features when Grace walked into Room 711, twenty minutes later.
       "You've been gone a long time, Redsie. I was beginning to -- "
       Deathly pale, she faced him.
       "He's got the Tamarov stuff all right, Tim. It's on him now, in his cigarette case. And we're going to make the pinch right off!"
       "Steady, Redsie. No rush. If you're sure there's evidence -- "
       "The dirty rat! Do you know how he smuggled those stones into the country? In the secret compartment of a gadget my own police-sergeant father put together, years ago!"
       The door marked 323 swung inward, revealing a man in valet's uniform. Above a stiff collar, his long, pointed face stretched like a weasel's. Crafty. Cruel.
       "Yes, sir?"
       "The Honorable John Ribden," the elder of the two men in the outside hall requested distinctly. "Name's Rossiter. My niece, here -- "
       From the room beyond the panel, suave and smooth, Ribden's voice reached them.
       "I'm expecting Miss Rossiter and her uncle, Muggs."
       The door opened wider, and Muggs stood aside. Tim stepped across the threshold, with Grace and Jerry at his heels. The door closed softly. "Good evening again. Miss Mabel." A queer smile flicking his lips, the tall, dark man in evening clothes stepped toward them, Grace, cold as death inside, smiled back at him.
       "This is my Uncle George, Mr. Ribden. And this other gentleman" -- pointing to Jerry-"is my cousin. Uncle George just simply had to see the rubies right off. I told you how he was about jewels -- "
       "Yes." Something cold stirred in Ribden's eyes. "May I offer you a cigarette, Mr. Rossiter, while you examine the stones? I think you'll find them-very interesting."
       His long, muscular hand moved slowly to the vest pocket where he carried his case.
       A sudden grunt of surprise burst from Tim's lips, and the big detective lunged forward.
       "Too late-Mr. Noonan!"
       A sinister little revolver, miniature but somehow the more grim for its very size, was leveled at Tim's chest in the steady fingers of the man before him.
       The grizzled agency chief checked his forward motion so abruptly that his big frame seemed to rock with the instant tension of its trained muscles.
       Into his side pocket, his right hand flashed with the same uncanny speed. And in the identical split-second, Ribden yelled: "Henry! Puss!"
       From the curtained windows opposite the door, a thin dart of orange flame ripped at the shadows. There was no sound except a soft, ugly ping! But Tim spun, his left shoulder jerking backward.
       "Duck, Redsie!"
       The shout was Jerry's. As if a spring had been released beneath his feet, he vaulted the low table between himself and the window alcove. Like a human bullet he hurtled toward the curtained recess.
       As he came, the heavy hangings whipped aside. Henry stood there, smoking, silenced gat clutched ready in his paw, his brute face working.
       "Jerry! He's -- "
       But before the startled cry could leave Grace's lips, the gun in Henry's hand had spat its yellow fire again. Straight at the oncoming detective it lined.
       Jerry stiffened, gasped, plunged forward again.
       Before Henry's finger could tense for a third time on its trigger, Tim's helper was upon him. The thug's gun arm jerked upward, Jerry Riker's fingers clamped desperately about its hairy wrist. Jerry's left, a knotted fist, pounded the other man's chest.
       From behind her, Grace heard the rush of running feet. She spun, ducking sidewise. The lanky body of Muggs, the supposed valet, hurtled past her, clawing,
       On the desk beside her lay the usual equipment of an hotel writing table. An inkstand. A paperweight. A letter opener. Various pens.
       Her clutching fingers closed on the fancy handle of the paperweight-a carved brass monkey rearing on its hind legs above a square metal block. Her arm jerked back.
       Fingers of steel gripped about it instantly, twisting her around with such violence that her knees buckled beneath her and she all but stumbled to the floor.
       Her own fingers fanned, twisting open with a sickening wrench. The paperweight, forcibly-freed, crashed to the floor with a heavy thud and slithered away from her, scarring the high polish of the bare wood with one sharp corner.
       "You damned little hellcat!"
       The man who panted the vicious words, the man who held her, was a stranger. The one Ribden had called "Puss." Bigger than Henry. Bigger, even, than Tim. The "groom" of the Tallyho Inn register, probably.
       Gasping, Grace struck at his sinister face with her free hand. Its pointed red nails ripped at the flesh of her captor's cheek leaving a trail of long, angry marks.
       Swearing with pain, the big man jerked her arm again. This time the force of it threw her to the floor, twisting her body forward.
       Tim had his own gun out now, and his practiced hand had lifted. But Ribden was there ahead of him. His pint-sized weapon, deadly accurate, belched a thin, silent fan of fire.
       The older detective groaned. His lifted gun arm flapped like a broken wing and fell harmless at his side.
       His heavy frame swayed as if he were beginning to dance-went limp-crashed floorward, its plunge broken momentarily by the arm of a wing chair along-side.
       At the window, Henry's free fist had swung up in a wide, swift arc to contact Jerry's defenseless jaw. Grace saw him totter backward, the force of the blow breaking his wound-weakened grip on the thug's gun arm.
       Ribden laughed savagely.
       Puss suddenly flung her from him, down to the floor. Stunned, breathless, she lunged frantically after the lost paperweight.
       The hoodlum's stub-toed boot, viciously swung, crashed violently into her face. Searing, ghastly pain tightened her muscles. Blood spurted from her mouth.
       Ribden, his voice a coarse roar stripped completely of its fake English accent, was sneering above her.
       "Try to put the finger on me, will you? Miss Rossiter! I knew you the minute you recognized your old man's cigarette case in the car. I'd heard his kid had turned dick with Noonan's outfit, and there was no mistaking the way you took what I said about"
       Puss swung his foot again. Its heel, descending with terrific force, plowed into Grace's stomach. The breath seemed to explode from her lungs with the roar of a collapsing thirty-story building.
       The room blacked out like the end of a sketch in vaudeville,
       Grace was sitting in a chair, her head lolling weakly against its high back, when the lights came up again. Her whole body ached, and her jaw and the pit of her stomach were centers of fiery agony.
       Moaning softly, she opened her eyes. Puss was standing over her, his undershot jaw set, the silenced automatic with which Henry had downed Jerry Riker held warily in his competent hand.
       Henry and Muggs and Ribden had vanished. At first, she thought herself alone with the gorilla who was guarding her. Then, with a sick little gasp, she saw Tim.
       He lay on the floor, clotted blood darkening a bullet gash just above one temple. He was alive and conscious, his gray eyes open and snapping with helpless rage. but it would have been impossible for him to have moved a muscle.
       Tape held his mouth firmly shut. His arms and legs were bound so tightly that little bulges of cloth stood up on either side of the ropes that held them.
       "Tim!"
       She knew that he heard her impulsive cry, for the corners of his eyes tightened instantly. But as she started forward, the butt of her guard's automatic prodded with brutal warning into her throbbing stomach.
       "Take it easy. sister."
       Quivering, she relaxed against the tall back of her chair. Her eyes lifted, meeting the cold grin that bared the gunman's discolored teeth.
       "No use trying to bolt, redhead. Nor yell neither. I got my orders, and if you want to be tough-well -- "
       He didn't need to finish the sentence. His glittering eyes spoke, for him. He would think nothing more of killing a woman than of blowing his nose.
       The girl from Noonan's watched him warily.
       "Where-what did they do with Jerry?"
       Puss leered.
       "You'll find out. But it ain't nothing to worry you. He won't be coming back again."
       Footsteps sounded suddenly in the hall outside, careful, quick. More than one person's. They stopped at the door. Puss was tense.
       "Who is it?"
       "O. K."
       Metal clicked in the lock as the guard relaxed. The panel swung inward. Ribden strode across the threshold, followed by his two henchmen. He wore a coat over his immaculate full dress. But there was nothing else left of the polished London gentleman.
       Muggs closed the door behind him.
       "All set to take the other one, boys. As soon as the hall's clear."
       He swung toward Puss.
       "Everything under control, eh? We ran into a couple of night owls downstairs in the side hall, taking the young guy out. Looked like he was only another drunk, though, with Muggs and Henry holding him up. He's safe enough in the car."
       Grace leaned forward quickly, stopping only when her chest contacted the evil weapon in her guard's motionless hand.
       "Where is he?"
       Ribden laughed nastily,
       "So the little frill from Tulsa's come to, has she? Almost had me fooled with that sucker act of yours, sweetheart. Almost."
       "Where's Jerry?"
       The jewel smuggler leaned against his writing table, staring down at her with mocking eyes as cold as the steel of his underling's steady gat, as hard as the rubies in his vest pocket.
       "Where your other cop pal's going to join him, Miss-Culver. Downstairs. In my car." He grinned slowly. "Know why they call this place Lakeview, don't you? And the lake's one of the deepest in Connecticut. Lots of strangers upset canoes out there and-sometimes they don't even find 'em afterward."
       Despite herself, Grace shuddered. Death by lead poisoning was bad enough. But this way -- sunk without a trace -- bound helplessly -- without a chance -- 
       "You-you dirty -- "
       "Save it, sister!" Suddenly Ribden went into action. "All right, you guys! The side hall ought to be clear by now. Sling your coat around him, Muggs, and cover up the ropes. Let's go!"
       Bearing Tim between them, his taped mouth screened by the seemingly accidental disarrangement of a silk muffler, Muggs and Henry vanished into the hall. Ribden paused for an instant.
       "Watch her careful, Puss. We'll be back for her when the other two are -- settled. Such an unfortunate canoe ride!"
       The door closed behind him with a sharp, final slam.
       Panting, with her hands gripping the arms of the chair until their knuckles went white, the girl from Noonan's stared at the blank panel.
       "Good-by, dicks," Puss laughed softly.
       Good-by, dicks! Tim and Jerry-her two best friends in the world-finished off in cold blood. And it was her fault. All her fault.
       She had been the one to start after Ribden. No client had hired them to bring him in.
       Nothing but her own driving desire to outsmart a clever crook-and then her fatal anger at him, for having, come by one of her own father's trick inventions to use in his criminal schemes, had betrayed them. And now in a crowded, fashionable Hotel, death had trapped them. People were everywhere around, sleeping peacefully. But no help. And if she screamed, she would be dead before they got to her.
       Tim and Jerry-finished off because of her.
       The thought kept pounding through her head, in time with the hammering beat of her pulse. The ache of her beaten body was forgotten. Sheer horror had crowded it out.
       Tim and Jerry. It mustn't happen! Only a minute -- two minutes -- three -- and Ribden's car would be on its way to the lake. It mustn't happen!
       Her sherry-colored eyes, fringed with the exotic mascara of the silly Miss Rossiter of Tulsa, lifted appealingly to Puss's pock-marked face. She smiled tremulously.
       "Mister-Mister Puss -- "
       The big gunman swung the automatic easily between the knobby fingers of his huge paw, leering brutally.
       "What's biting you, sister?"
       "I-do I look pretty bad where you kicked me in the face? Is my mouth -- you know -- messed up?"
       Puss collapsed against the table, bellowing with harsh mirth. His eyes became little, pig-like slits, glittering derisively.
       "Dames! That's typical, huh? The guys they're supposed to be taggin' with get taken for the well-known breeze around, and what's the first thing they think about? Is my mouth messed up!"
       Grace pouted pitifully.
       "You don't have to laugh, do you? I'm scared. Maybe Ribden won't be so tough on me if-if I look all right." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Some fellows are like that. They aren't all hard to get, like you."
       Still snorting, Puss scraped up something from the table with his free hand and flung it into her lap. It was her own evening bag, dropped on the floor when he had felled her.
       "Pretty up if you want to, baby! But you'll have to be good. The boss is kind of particular."
       Out of the bag, Grace drew a small beveled hand mirror and her lipstick. The same lipstick she had fingered in Editor Burton's office-was it a thousand years ago?
       There was a long welt alongside her jaw and a trickle of half-dried blood across her chin. She needed fixing up, all right. But instead, she watched Puss in the round glass.
       "Gee! You sure did do things to my map, for fair!"
       "That's what pretty often happens when gals get doing tricks with paperweights," he chuckled.
       The redhead's big eyes lifted again.
       "And I'll bet you'd kill me in a minute if I moved out of this chair. Where would you aim for, Mr. Puss? I mean -- a real killing expert like you?"
       Puss raised the automatic illustratively.
       "Right between them pretty eyes," he announced.
       The pretty eyes widened.
       "Like-like this?" She lifted her lipstick as though it were a gun, and pointed it between his thick brows. Her arm was extended. Puss bellowed jovially as he leaned toward it.
       "That's the ticket, gorgeous! Ready -- aim -- "
       Grace's thumb stiffened quickly. Puss caught the blinding stream of acid in his eyes before the smile could leave his lips.
       Even as his hands flew upward, the girl's tense body hurtled from the chair. With unerring direction, she dove for the gun in his momentarily relaxed fingers.
       Before he could check her, she had jerked his right arm back. The automatic catapulted from his hand. And Grace was after it.
       "You-you scrimy little -- "
       A soft ping cut across his words, silencing them abruptly.
       He staggered backward, sobbing, and crumpled into the wing chair. A door slammed. Feet in high-heeled slippers pounded the passageway outside.
       The side hall. Ribden had said something about it. That must mean the car was waiting in the darkness of the porte-cochere on the Lakeview side of the Tallyho. The least conspicuous place Henry could have parked it.
       Downward stairs slanted away from her into lower darkness. No time to waste in rousing the elevator at this hour of the morning. Down through the gloom she plunged, the wounded thug's automatic clutched to her breast, her flying heels beating a desperate tattoo on the hardwood treads.
       With Tim's, heavy bulk to delay him, Ribden's progress must have been slower. There was a chance that the limousine hadn't gotten under way yet, on its grim errand.
       A slim chance. It had taken so many precious minutes to keep Puss from getting suspicious.
       She was in the first floor hall now, swinging left toward the small green door at its far end. Her breath was jerking with the effort of her precipitous descent. They must still be there -- must -- 
       The sudden, explosive roar of a warming motor reached her ears as the door slammed open. Across the shadowed side porch she hurtled. A glittering black metal shape was sliding away from her, past the low railing.
       With a soft sob of eagerness, she flung her hard young body across the low barrier-forward and down.
       The big car swerved between the stone gateposts marking the Tallyho driveway and swung eastward on the high road. It picked up speed as it whipped along the downgrade into the sleeping village. The white road shimmered beneath it.
       Crouching on the trunk rack, her left arm caught through one of the straps and the toes of her pointed slippers wedged between the cross-pieces of the precarious platform, Grace felt a chill wind lifting the loose hair from her forehead.
       For the first few minutes she could do nothing but cling dizzily to her unsteady position, listening to the hum of tires beneath her and breathing heavily.
       Gradually, while the pounding in her temples lessened, she was able to swing her weight forward to gain a securer balance.
       Then, transferring the automatic momentarily to her clamped teeth and working upward little by little, she pulled herself erect with her right arm, gripping the metal trunk with rigid fingers.
       Slowly, her eyes came into line with the small window at the back of the car's shining body.
       Against the reflection of the headlights, she could make out the figures inside with comparative clarity.
       Ribden was at the wheel, with Muggs crouching alongside. In the back seat, Henry sat erect-supervising the two helplessly trussed shapes that had been dumped in beside him.
       No sooner had her face appeared at the window than the smuggler spotted it in the mirror ahead of him.
       His startled gasp called Muggs's attention to the extra passenger. Grace saw the man beside the driver begin to turn, sensed rather than saw the weapon rising in his hand as he moved.
       It was the long chance now.
       She released her right-hand grip on the trunk and snatched the automatic from between her teeth. It was her left arm, wound through the strap, and her firm toehold on the rack beneath her, that must keep her with the hurtling death car.
       Aiming point-blank through the window, she pulled the trigger.
       Glass, shattering, sounded louder than the muffled explosion. Muggs froze suddenly. A loud, gurgling sigh broke between his lips.
       He pitched forward to the floor of the car, hampering Ribden's movements at the wheel. Instantly, the machine swerved.
       The girl on the rack, taken by surprise, felt herself going.
       A startled scream tore from her throat. Her left arm tightened on the strap and held, while the hand which still managed to clutch the revolver clawed for a new grip on the slippery trunk.
       In that one dizzy, sickening instant before she was safe again, she saw the lights of Lakeview's main street glowing beneath them-not more than a quarter of a mile down the hill. And, beyond, the black flatness of the lake.
       The scream had given Ribden, kicking Muggs's limp body free of the gear shift, his cue.
       From side to side of the road the big car swerved, increasing its speed to one which only a madman would risk on the hill's steep curves.
       Grace saw the world spinning about her, streaking past, lifting, lowering-a dizzy nightmare of trees and sky and rocks whirled together. He was doing his grim best to lose her.
       She closed her eyes, clinging desperately.
       Back and forth across the highway they zigzagged, every swerve of the speeding car tearing her tense body away from its crouching hold against the trunk's smooth back.
       The redhead was sobbing with the strain of it now, and her left arm-her one anchor to life-was numbing rapidly.
       Forward-forward -- 
       Suddenly, light burst above her. Dimly, she realized that they were tearing down the deserted main thoroughfare of the village. And just beyond lay the lake.
       It was now-or never.
       Gripping the automatic close against her and pointing straight down, she pulled the trigger.
       There was a ghastly roar as the bullet plowed home through the tread of the humming tire. For the space of a breath, nothing happened. Then everything happened at once. The limousine cut sickeningly, completely out of control. One back door flew open, and out of it a screaming figure sprang-or was flung.
       Rocketing sidewise, the front end of the car brought up against the brick wall of a corner store. Plate glass shattered. Steel ripped. Some one shrieked hideously.
       Grace clung madly to the strap-still her one hope. With the impact, she felt herself lifting, torn ruthlessly from her foothold. Then she was slammed earthward again. The taut strap, breaking her fall, snapped with a vicious twang!
       She sprawled across the pavement, on her hands and knees. Blood spurted from an open gash across one palm. Her skirt ripped noisily from waist to ankle.
       But she was alive.
       The automatic had landed near her on the sidewalk, glittering in the light of an overhead lamp.
       Dazed, moving more from instinct than from reason, she scooped it up. Staggering blindly, she circled the wrecked car.
       Ribden, his face cut and bloody, was struggling to free himself of the hampering wheel. Behind him, in the unmangled rear of the machine, two trussed figures on the floor were squirming healthily.
       "Don't move, East Side Englishman!" the girl from Noonan's panted.
       Ribden snarled, ceasing his struggles at sight of the automatic. Strange voices shouted him down, coming from everywhere. Strange footsteps were running. Help.
       "That one that jumped is dead, looks like. Broken back. Gee, constable, what a -- "
       Grace slumped quietly to the pavement.
       Burton, city editor of the Banner, stopped in at Grace's New York boarding house on Sunday afternoon, to thank her for the special telegram.
       "Scooped the town! Oh, boy, what a layout! You sure pulled a juicy rabbit while you were at it, Culver."
       The redhead was balancing a lipstick in one hand and an empty cigarette case in the other. She had been working on a gadget when her caller had walked in. A seemingly harmless compact that could do everything but talk.
       "Glad to help," she said dreamily. "You know, Mongoose-breaks are funny. That crook had my lipstick in his hand once, and he never guessed. All he said was: 'Red. The color of roses.'"
       Burton grinned down at her flaming hair, remembering the things her old man had done until five bullets stopped him.
       "The color of foxes, you mean. You're a smart one, all right, kid. Culver to the last hair of you."
       Grace grinned back.
       "Foxes. That reminds me-we never did get to the Lakeview Hunt. I wonder could there have been a story in it? Or maybe a case?"
--------
         *KITCHEN TRAP*
       Something was wrong. Very wrong! It was written all over "Big Tim" Noonan's rugged face, as he walked slowly into the office of his own detective agency and closed the door behind him. His gray eyes were bleak. The lines slanting down from the corners of his mouth had deepened to two gashes in his leathery skin.
       At her desk in the corner, his red-headed secretary glanced up quickly. At another desk, nearer the window, his young assistant pushed back a mess of fingerprint data with a low whistle.
       Both of them shot the same question, in almost the same breath, at the tall man in the doorway. "Tim-what -- "
       "Say, where's the funeral?"
       Without answering, Noonan jerked the battered fedora from his gray head, jammed it on its customary hook, hung up his overcoat beside it. His movements were stiff, mechanical. He swung across the office slowly, his big frame moving more heavily than was its habit. He sank into the swivel chair at his own desk with a soft grunt. Staring at the stack of mail on his blotter, he replied to their questions.
       His voice was gruffly monotonous.
       "The funeral," he said, "will be from headquarters, I guess. Pete Brophy. They fished him out of the East River this morning. Lead poisoning!"
       Red-haired Grace Culver gasped audibly as her chief spoke the name. A quick hiss of breath in sharp contrast to Noonan's dull rumble.
       Brophy! She could remember the times the veteran Federal dick had come to town on official business, back in her own childhood.
       Her police sergeant father had been alive, then. He and Big Tim, his inseparable pal, had welcomed Pete's visits. Pete was a swell guy. Pete was the real goods. Pete Brophy was dead. Easy to understand the look on Tim's face-the dull eyes and the deepened lines. It was the end of a twenty-year friendship. Tim Noonan was the kind who valued his friends.
       "Who-do they know -- "
       Tim's grizzled head shook slowly.
       "No clues. Nothing. Harbor patrol boat found him early this morning. Six slugs in his back. Been dead since midnight or a little after."
       Grace watched her fingers tense slowly on the keyboard of her typewriter. Her eyes were misted. Pete Brophy!
       "Tim-there must be something!"
       Tim grunted again.
       "Sure! Suspicions! He was working on a political-extortion assignment. Big ring here in town, shaking down men in public life all over the East. Clever and tough, and they left no traces. It was a job for an old hawk like Brophy."
       "There's the motive, then," Grace interjected. "Pete knew too much. When headquarters puts the bee on whoever was tied up with the racket -- "
       Tim's mirthless chuckle interrupted her.
       "That's just the catch, Redsie. Whoever! There's no lead at all-nothing to give the boys to work on. If Brophy knew who he was after, the tip died with him."
       Jerry Riker, leaning across his stack of finger prints, cut in quickly.
       "How about papers? Wallet?"
       "There was nothing on the body. And somebody had lifted his key to frisk his hotel room before the cops hit it. Place was in a mess. Looked like what the whirlwind left. And-no papers that mattered."
       Grace said, "I can't believe it. I can't believe they rubbed out a smart dick like Pete without-without -- "
       Bitterly, Big Tim faced her.
       "The answer's full of bullets down at the morgue, Redsie. Flannigan ate dinner with him at some joint on Eighth Street, called Andre's. Favorite hangout of Pete's. That was seven-thirty or thereabouts. Flannigan finished ahead of Pete and came on uptown to his night desk. Nobody's located a trace of Brophy after that, until-until the patrol boat -- "
       His hard voice cracked and Big Tim's teeth clicked together. It wasn't often that his emotions got him. That made the moment worse.
       "Andre's," said Grace.
       Jerry Riker shot a quick look in her direction. Nothing unusual about Brophy's meal with Flannigan that he could see. But sometimes the Culver got hunches that were -- 
       "Spill it."
       The girl's sherry-colored eyes had narrowed.
       "Just thinking. I know that joint. It's new-and terrible! Food's all right. But it's all over cheap modern art, and the waitresses wear pink-and-orange uniforms. Once is enough."
       Riker was disappointed. This wasn't one of the redhead's times.
       "Maybe you frills notice things like that. If the food's decent, a man's not going to bother about whether there's a picture on the wall or -- "
       "Pete Brophy would. Not one picture, maybe. But the whole inside of the place is painted up like lightning striking a junk heap. That sort of stuff made him nervous. He wouldn't pick it for a hangout, with a dozen places in the neighborhood serving food just as good. Not unless -- "
       Tim's big body, leaning forward, creaked his chair.
       "Redsie, you may be -- It's just possible -- "
       "I don't see what Andre's could have to do with a big-league extortion gang," Jerry objected. "It's a long way from being the sort of dive a big shot would eat at. They couldn't pick up anything worthwhile on anybody there, if that's what -- "
       "I'm going to find out why Pete went there so much," Grace said suddenly.
       "It probably doesn't matter," Tim muttered gloomily.
       "At least-at least it's doing something."
       Jerry eyed her derisively.
       "Some day you're gonna do one thing too many, Redsie. Always sticking your pug nose into trouble."
       "And getting it out again!" she answered tartly.
       "Luck like that don't hold forever. There's going to come a time you'll wish you never saw a gun! You'll wish you was where women belong, in some good guy's kitchen. A guy like me, for instance -- "
       "Nuts!" Grace said rudely. "Any day I'm not better with a gun than with a frying pan, I'll want to hear about it. And I'm not so bad with a frying pan, either."
       But her heart wasn't in the typical exchange of sarcasms with her good-looking young office mate. She was thinking about Pete Brophy. Tim's friend. Her dead father's friend.
       Andre's was the only hint. It was true that a place like that didn't seem the right setting for important extortion. But neither was it right for Pete's hangout. He wouldn't have liked its tawdry noisiness. Home atmosphere was what the homeless Federal agent had coveted.
       So-there must have been some reason for his hanging around the restaurant. And it might not be so much of an accident that the last time he had been seen alive he had been nodding farewell to Officer Flannigan from a table in the same place. "I'm going to find out why," she said again.
       And that was the reason a taxi drew up to an Eighth Street intersection at the hour when the neighborhood restaurants were swinging into their best dinner business.
       A girl stepped out of the cab.
       Her curly red hair was almost covered by a hat unmistakably "Bargain Basement." She was overpainted, but not eye-striking. Overgarnished with cheap jewelry, but not too conspicuous.
       The big pearl swinging on a chain around her neck, and the glittering barpin on her breast were too obviously false to merit a second glance. The slightly bulky black coat was so nondescript that it might have been on any of the women in the hurrying sidewalk crowd.
       She paid off her driver in small silver, thrusting the money at him in a hand covered by a cheap, darned glove. There was nothing about her that the man at the wheel could have remembered five minutes after his cab had left the curb. She was a copy of two dozen girls who had passed him before he had cruised a block.
       But there was one small difference: The eyes of the girl he had just deposited. They were like sparkling sherry, behind the protection of their cheaply obvious make-up. Keen, bright, eager.
       They scanned the long, irregularly lighted block quickly, searching for something. Then a smile twitched the corners of the painted mouth, The thumb and third finger of one gloved hand snapped together in triumph as she plunged into the stream of passers-by.
       Ahead, midway of the block, a neon sign was blinking on and off. "Andre's," it spelled. Then darkness. Then, "Andre's" again.
       The place was crowded, garishly-lighted, noisy with the clatter of plates and the chatter of voices. Apparently unaware of the hideous color clash of sea-green tile and what the management seemed to consider modern murals, the patrons were attacking their passably good food with gusto.
       At a corner table, the redhead was busy with a bowl of clam chowder. Her spoon stirring aimlessly through a floating island of cracker crumbs, she presented a vacant, slightly stupid stare to the crowded restaurant.
       A usual-looking, nondescript mob was passing through the revolving glass door that bisected the big room's front wall.
       Clerks, stenographers, girls from the burlesque house around the corner, swung under the sign which read "Andre's-6 a. m. to Midnight." Taxi drivers, nursemaids, neighborhood residents eating out. Nothing very tough. Nothing very fancy.
       It wasn't the sort of place for big-timers. But even the sixty-cent dinner, cheapest set-up on the menu, would keep out the other extreme. Middle flight, and for the most part colorless, were Andre's customers.
       Waitresses, in the hideous pink-and-orange outfits the girl had remembered from a previous visit to the eating place, were passing up and down the narrow aisles between the tables. Dozens of them. It was a big layout.
       But-why had Pete Brophy picked it to eat in, night after night? What was there here to particularly attract a middle-aged Irishman of simple tastes and -- 
       The girl at the corner table stiffened suddenly.
       A man had come up to the blonde in the cashier's cage and was saying something-something casual, at which the girl grinned and disclosed a gold tooth. The man, from his dress, was an upper employee of Andre's. The headwaiter, possibly.
       His long face was pock-marked, giving it almost the effect of a dappled horse. His big, yellow teeth helped to accentuate the impression. It was a face ugly enough to linger in the memory. And the redhead remembered it. Front and side views, in the Noonan Agency files. Number something-or-other in the pretty grifter section. Name was-Grogan. "Sniffle" Grogan. Two years for attempted holdup. Quashed indictment for perjury in the "Angelface" Maganelli murder trial. And Grogan was working at Andre's! Not impossible, of course, for a crook to mend his ways and look for honest employment. But-old Pete Brophy wouldn't have concerned himself with honest employment.
       Still stirring the crackers into her chowder, the girl at the corner table watched Sniffle leave the cashier's cage and roll toward the swinging doors through which waitresses were passing to and from the kitchens beyond.
       A bus-boy who looked like an ex-pug met the headwaiter's glance as the two met near the redhead's table. Sniffle's head jerked quickly. "Twenty-five, Rocky."
       The bus-boy's gimlet eyes sparkled blackly in his punch-flattened face as he nodded. Andre's two employees separated, Grogan heading for the kitchens and the younger man busying himself with a tray of dirty dishes.
       Again-nothing damning. The encounter, seemingly casual, might have been explained as having to do with any one of a dozen restaurant duties. But Pete Brophy hadn't been investigating the restaurant business, either! And that look that had passed between the two -- 
       A pink-and-orange waitress, the color scheme of her uniform carried unintentionally to her lips and the blobs of color on her cheeks, stopped beside the chromium-and-tile table.
       "Anything else you wish, miss?"
       "That'll be all," the redhead answered, pushing back her chair and dropping a dime on the glassy surface beside her empty bowl. "Except-could you tell me where I'll find the ladies' lounge?"
       "Back of the restaurant, first door to the right."
       The mechanical answer did not interfere with the waitress's quick gesture toward the coin. Nodding her thanks, Andre's customer moved toward the rear of the garish room.
       A new man was stopping beside the cashier's cage now-a heavy-set, swarthy face above a too-fancy cutaway, black hair and a blue, thick chin.
       "Evening, Mr. Andre," the blonde in the cage said meekly.
       He nodded at her, but did not speak. His restless gaze roamed the restaurant.
       The redhead, passing quickly, had seemed not to notice. But as she kept on toward the ladies' lounge, her sherry-colored eyes were speculatively narrowed.
       So that was Andre!
       In keeping with the front of the place, the lounge room was cheaply pretentious. Gilt mirrors adorned the little cubbyholes of dressing rooms which lined one wall. Gaudy paintings hung everywhere. Red plush and wrought iron were featured in the furniture.
       Beneath a hideous reproduction of Venus Rising From The Waves, a telephone was fastened to a jointed wall bracket. At the moment, the main room and the four small dressing rooms were empty.
       The instrument's dial whirred beneath a gloved finger. In the silence, a far-away buzzing filled the girl's cars. Then a clock.
       "Hello."
       "Listen, Tim," she spoke softly, her lips close against the mouthpiece-"It's Grace. Can you hear me?"
       "Shoot!" the terse voice at the other end commanded.
       "I'm in Andre's. I think I have something. It isn't definite, but-you. know-the hunch is going strong."
       Tim said, "Want us?"
       Not yet. Better off alone. But if I'm not back at the office by eleven-thirty, you and Jerry -- "
       The door behind her opened quickly and a puffing little woman in rusty black scuttled through it. She paused before one mirror, adjusting her unfashionable hat. Her beady eyes regarded the girl at the telephone curiously.
       Grace Culver laughed boisterously, as if she were delivering the catch line of a joke to a friend at the other end of the line.
       "So I says to him, eat your mashed potatoes good and hot! I says, make it good and emphatic! Order 'em as hot as they do 'em in Kokomo!"
       Tim's puzzled grunt reached her
       "Say-what's the -- "
       "As hot as they do 'em in Kokomo," she repeated firmly. Then, laughing again as the curious little woman turned to stare at her, she hung up.
       It took the dumpy, deliberate creature before the glass an agonizing time to set her hat on her limp gray hair at an angle that suited her fancy.
       Grace pretended to be busy at the washbowl, washing her hands, drying them, washing again.
       At last, with a satisfied snort, her companion passed through the swinging doors once more. And they scarcely had closed behind her when the girl from Noonan's was in one of the cramped little cubicles that passed for dressing rooms.
       The black coat jerked quickly from her wiry shoulders, and with one movement of her deft hands she had pulled the lining out of it. It came easily, without a rip, that lining-because the side of it which had been flat against the coat was a pink-and-orange uniform.
       Three minutes later a perfectly turned-out waitress, complete to frizzes of red hair beneath her neat cap and badly applied dots of rouge, was standing in the cubicle.
       She bore little resemblance to the girl in black who had crumpled crackers into a bowl of Andre's chowder. Only the red hair, the false pearl pendant and the bar-pin of cheap brilliants were the same.
       The swinging doors opened again, creaked, closed. The ladies' room was empty. One more waitress, banging an empty tray against her knee as she walked, was headed for the kitchens.
       A broad pantry lay just beyond the doors which opened from the public dining room. To one side, a counter for trays of dirty china and silverware was topped with a window-like opening manned by the dishwasher's assistant. To the other, a small door stood ajar; and behind it, murky in contrast to the lighted pantry, a dim, narrow hallway stretched away into shadows.
       Directly ahead, and running the full width of the big pantry, stood the service counter. On the pantry side, waitresses yelled their orders and grabbed at plates of food as they were dished up.
       Behind, in the main kitchen, white-capped chefs were frantically busy at the grids of the five big stoves. Beyond them, forming the back wall of the kitchen, a row of storage closets extended between the side partitions. It was the small door that interested the girl from Noonan's most. The dirt that Pete Brophy had been bent on uncovering was nothing dishwater could remove; and people as hectically occupied as the chefs and waitresses at rush hour would be unlikely to have time for criminal action.
       If, indeed, there really was anything wrong about the place. The fact that Sniffle Grogan worked here, that one of the bus-boys had the eyes of a killer, and that Grace instinctively had mistrusted Mr. Andre himself on sight-might mean nothing. Nothing at all. Still, Pete had been after something. And that something seemed most apt to lie in the unexplored regions back of the pantry-the regions reached by the strangely sinister hallway. The secret of Brophy's murder! If that strong hunch was right -- 
       "Look out where you're going, can't you?"
       Grace faced an angry little girl, in a uniform identical with her own. Soup had slopped from a bowl on her tray, at the impact of their arms.
       Resisting the impulse to apologize, the redhead snarled a typical, "Yeah? You ain't blind yourself, are you?" The girl passed on. The act had been perfect.
       Beside Grace was the entrance to the hallway. In a flash, her tray had slid onto a table flanking the opening. Hinges, surprisingly well oiled for a back-stairs door of this sort, made no noise as the dark opening increased.
       The lights and clamor of the pantry were behind her, suddenly; and the closing panel cut them off. Ahead, lighted only by one bulb in an old-fashioned bracket near the ceiling, lay the hall down which-she felt coldly, groundlessly certain-Pete Brophy had moved this same time last night, to his death.
       Grayness seemed to haunt the dismal passage like a physical presence. Grace Culver felt it pressing about her, closing in as she stole forward slowly.
       The uniform had gotten her past the only barrier she had been able to anticipate in advance-that of attracting the attention of Andre's employees before she could investigate the sections of his plant which lay beyond the reach of the public. What lay ahead was unpredictable.
       But it was dangerous. Sinister shadows, seeming to flicker in the corners, warned her. The ghostly gray light seeping down from the cracked bowl overhead, brooding, dismal, warned her. Tim Noonan's words-"No clues." Six slugs in his back warned her.
       Under her careful foot, a board groaned. The redhead's startled breath sucked in sharply. A cold shudder twitched her spine.
       The walls, so close that her shoulders almost touched them on either side, were papered in a splotched design long since faded into a monotonous invisibility. Dust lay on them, and there was a moldy smell to the worn carpet under her feet.
       Ahead, leading sharply upward into blacker darkness, a flight of bare, uncarpeted stairs loomed like the bones of a wrecked accordion. At their foot, the redhead hesitated only for an instant. Then, breath quickening, she started up.
       The stairs-evidently a little-used back flight ended abruptly at an unpainted door. Grace leaned against it, her ear to the dull wood, listening. No sound came from whatever lay beyond. Nothing.
       Slowly the iron latch lifted under the increasing pressure of her thumb. Sliding away from her with a soft sigh, the door opened. ;
       It formed, she discovered, one end of a fairly long corridor. At the far end, an uncurtained window let in a faint glow from the street. Doors lined both of the sidewalls. All of them were closed.
       From somewhere, so indistinct that at first she thought it must be coming from the floor above, a hum of voices reached her unexpectedly. Low, like the buzzing of bees.
       Slowly, hugging the scant shadow, she eased her body into the empty passageway. At the first door on her right she paused, listening. It took only a minute to convince her that the room beyond it was deserted.
       But the closed panel seemed none the less sinister for that. Its brass numbers winked at her, dull and evil.
       Was it in one of these chambers that Brophy -- 
       Twenty-one!
       A picture from twenty minutes before flashed instantly back to her brain. Sniffle and the man with the killer's eyes, passing in the crowded restaurant. 'Twenty-five, Rocky." And "Rocky" nodding, a queer grin of understanding flicking his thin mouth.
       Heart pounding, feet careful on the muffling strip of turkey-red carpeting, Grace moved forward. Past the door marked 23. The voices were louder, now.
       Grace stopped again at the panel on which the brass number designated Room 25.
       Despite their carefully lowered tones, she could make out the difference between the two voices which were arguing as she leaned lightly against the closed door. Deep voices. One of them, she felt sure, belonged to Sniffle Grogan.
       "So Whitey says, according to his dope from inside, the cops don't even have no good guess who done it. They know Brophy was settin' to break some blackmail mob. They figger that mob's got anyway a swell reason. But who? Where? They ain't got a notion!"
       "How sure is Whitey?"
       "He ain't never been wrong for us yet, has he?"
       Grace was shivering as she crouched beside the closed panel. Brophy! That hunch had been straight! It had been here-here, in this dimly lighted maze of halls above the crowded restaurant, that -- 
       "You guys and your rods!"
       The new voice was a woman's. Shrewish and unpleasant, it whined through the thin wooden barrier. The girl from Noonan's felt her breath catch in astonishment.
       "There was other ways of fixing him. Why the river? Why New York? Somebody's going to be just smart enough to trace it back this way. You'll see. I told you -- "
       Three men spoke at once-seemingly the only other occupants of the room. Grogan's voice and that other. And one more.
       "Aw, dry up!"
       "Cut the calamity, Rosie!"
       "Listen, Rosie, no lop-eared flattie's gonna figure us!"
       Grace's eyes were level with the keyhole as her body crouched. But the narrow slit of lighted room beyond told her nothing. Not one of the quartet inside was in her line of vision. And from the sound of them they were seated at a table, not moving around.
       "We got the papers on that Washington love-nest to-day. Three pash notes from the Congressman. If his wife got wise -- "
       Grace had to see them, mark them for future identification. Was one of them Rocky? Who, aside from Sniffle Grogan, was in that conclave? Whoever they were, they had killed Pete Brophy.
       The chance was desperate, but she had to take it. Mentally, she gauged the distance back to the door at the head of the stairs. She would have a lead of perhaps thirty seconds. In that time, with luck -- 
       "Wife!" the woman snarled. "It's the cops that'll catch wise, after Brophy!"
       "Aw, Rosie, no dumb cops -- "
       Grace's hand lifted until its cold fingers wrapped about the tarnished brass doorknob. Slowly, carefully, they tightened. The knob turned. There was a tiny metallic click, which sounded like thunder in her ears.
       But the people inside-Pete's murderers-had not noticed.
       "Dumb cops, eh? Remember that time in Chicago, when you was putting on the senator? Was they dumb then?"
       "I tell you, Rosie, it was safe enough," the heavy, authoritative voice declared. "This plant is so good a front that -- "
       The door was opening as the arm of the crouching girl in the hall stiffened painstakingly. A strip of yellow light glittered before her, widened. Still they had not noticed. Panting, she began to rise.
       Another minute now, and -- 
       The shadow on the door loomed so quickly that she was unable to turn. Above and behind her, she caught a glimpse of a white, evil face in the darkness. Rocky's face.
       Then, over her head, a soft blackness fell with devastating suddenness. Dimly, she realized that it was a coat or a blanket. She couldn't breathe.
       Her hands beat upward, clawing at him frantically. But she was off balance, and his strong arms were forcing her down-down-down -- 
       She was gasping. Her brain seemed about to burst.
       "What the-" some one roared, a long way off.
       The blows of her fists against her attacker's unyielding body had become no more than a weak fluttering. The roar inside her skull was unbearable. Her throat was a tight, hot agony. Her chest -- 
       "Spy!" Rocky screamed vindictively. Beneath his powerful fingers, Grace Culver fell away into a wave of blackness.
       The darkness was warm and close when Grace opened her eyes. The air that gasped into her stinging lungs smelled of cooked foods-a stale, mongrel odor.
       Staring at the impenetrable, murky shadows, she lay still and waited for the pounding in her brain to lessen. She was on a floor-cold and damp. Through a chink in the wall above her, a narrow slit of yellow light seeped from whatever room lay beyond. The blackness of her windowless prison made it impossible to guess at time-how long it had been since Andre's bus-boy had come upon her in the hall. Half an hour? Two hours?
       Grace moved stiffly, attempting to lift her arms and stretch them. It was then that she discovered they were tied-bound neatly in strips of cloth, which did not cut into her flesh or numb her as ropes would have, so that she had not been aware of them.
       Bound and helpless in the dark. Perhaps in the very room where Pete Brophy had stopped the six slugs, last night. Perhaps -- 
       If only she knew where she was; who Grogan's companions behind that closed door had been; how long she had lain unconscious; what lay behind that chink in the wall above her!
       As if in answer to her last question, a series of sounds reached her ears. The rattle of dishes in a pan. A rough cough. The opening of a swinging door that creaked on its hinges and closed again.
       "One ham on rye? One sunnyside up, with bacon!" a man's voice sing-songed.
       Grace's heart leaped. She knew where she was, now. In one of those closets back of the main kitchen of Andre's restaurant!
       They had carried her downstairs, then, and in through some back way -- unless the whole kitchen staff was in on Sniffle Grogan's scheme. That seemed unlikely.
       Inching forward, she felt her shoulders contact the clammy wall. Jerkily, painfully, she edged upward, using the wall as a support. It seemed a century before she was standing on her feet in the cramped space which confined her. As she stretched, the blood began to run through her cramped limbs once more. Slowly, her body relaxed. Then, abruptly, it stiffened again.
       A woman's voice had spoken from the opposite side of the thin wall. And the redhead knew that voice! Upstairs, it had been saying, "There was other ways of fixing him!"
       "Here's the ham on," the voice whined. "Watch that pan, Rocky, it's spittin'. Watch out for your eye."
       Rocky!
       The man's voice said, "Set 'em on the tray, Rosie. The gang out front's thinned fast. Only five or six still in."
       Rosie chuckled.
       "It won't be so long now till Andy and Grogan and you can take the wren over. She sure came in fast on the heels of that flattie you rubbed last night. Something'll just as like spike that Washington jog yet. I was warnin' Andy -- "
       "Load on the potatoes," Rocky interrupted impatiently.
       The girl from Noonan's, slipping quietly along the wall, had come to the crack of glittering light. It was wider than she had dared hope. When her eye was held close against it, she commanded a view of Andre's kitchen. It was different now, not crowded with a rush of chefs and waitresses. The place was almost empty, and some of the lights had been turned out. Rocky, dressed now in a waiter's jacket, leaned against the service counter. A woman-big and broad, with greasy black hair-stood at one of the stoves.
       There was no one else in sight.
       Something above the doors to the dining room suddenly caught the redhead's notice. Eyes tightening, she gasped. The hands of the clock pointed to six minutes before midnight!
       No wonder the large staff employed to take care of the dinner crowd had vanished. No wonder the place was deserted, save for Rocky and the woman at the stove. Only six minutes to closing time. And then -- As Rocky disappeared through the swinging doors, bearing his loaded tray the girl detective tugged at the bandages that trussed her wrists. Her heart was pounding.
       Six minutes to get away! Six minutes before the guns that had snarled death at Pete Brophy came back for her!
       The bandages were tight, skillfully tied. But they had been made of what seemed to be strips of an old dish towel-obviously to prevent the appearance of marks on her wrists when the police found her body in the river. Sometimes old cloth wasn't strong -- 
       Five minutes, now. The black hand of the clock above the door seemed to be racing like a demon. The bandages still held.
       Grace's arms ached from the effort of trying to part them. The chords of her throat stood out hard and straight under her skin.
       Hinges creaked abruptly. Rocky was back.
       "There's two more guys out front wants mashed potatoes," he chuckled. "Hayseed all over 'em. They want you should heat the spuds as hot as they get 'em back home. That's just the way the old geezer puts it. 'Like we get 'em in Kokomo,' he says!"
       Grace sobbed with the effort of her aching muscles. Kokomo! The signal! Tim and Jerry were out front. And she was helpless!
       "Kokomo!" Rosie scoffed. "Where's Kokomo?"
       The bandages-old, rotten linen-began to give.
       There were three minutes left, according to the clock. Grace felt her wrists pulling away from each other as the worn cloth which held them separated. Thread by thread, the rip in the white bandage widened before her eyes. Outside in the kitchen, the swinging doors beneath the clock creaked as Rocky passed through them on his way back into the restaurant. A pan rattled. The woman at the stove muttered something, savagely, beneath her breath. The girl from Noonan's gasped as the bonds which had held her parted with a final swift, ripping sound. Her arms jerked apart, free. The bandage dropped away from her, lay like a twisted white snake on the floor at her feet.
       Moving quickly, but without noise, the redhead slid along the smooth plank wall which separated her from the room where Rosie was at work. Her fingers were flat against the partition, searching wildly for a break in the even surface.
       As the pan on the stove rattled again, she found it. The slight aperture which meant a door! Her hand shook as it slid down and closed over metal.
       She pulled the knob toward her, cautiously. Nothing happened. She pushed against it. The panel would not move.
       The door to her prison was, as she had more than half suspected, locked. And if the key was in the lock on the other side -- 
       Quickly crouching in the darkness, Grace leaned forward until her forehead was pressing against the cold knob. A pin point of light from the kitchen was even with her eye, now.
       She sobbed in gratitude. The key had been moved! Whoever had locked her here, earlier in the evening, had been taking no chances on her accidental discovery.
       Clawing in their eagerness, her fingers snatched at the cheap bar-pin on her breast. She felt it part and slip away from the starched material which had held it.
       Her fingertips slid along the tiny, almost invisible corrugations of the clever skeleton key which former the trinket's crossbar. How many minutes had passed now? How much time had she left?
       The lock, as with most cheaply constructed kitchen closets, was not a difficult one. Almost at once, she felt it turn beneath the probing tip of the gadget in her hand. As it gave, she pressed silently forward.
       The panel slid away from her, swinging out into the lighted kitchen. And in the sudden glare, just turning from her stove, the black-haired woman was twisting toward her.
       Grace sprang.
       A startled snarl, born on the other woman's lips, was choked abruptly as she dived toward a glittering butcher's knife which, lay on the work table opposite her stove.
       Rosie and the girl from Noonan's reached the table in the same split-second. The cook's muscular fingers, groping wildly, clamped onto the handle of the murderous knife. Grace, swinging around the end of the table, had caught up a flour-dusted rolling pin.
       The knife, sweeping upward, glittered savagely in the naked light. Down it started. Down-as the rolling pin, backed by all the muscle of a wiry young arm, crashed ruthlessly across Rosie's livid face.
       Blood spurted in a horrible stream from the woman's mangled mouth. Screaming, she flung herself forward. The knife twisted from her hand as Grace struck again.
       The second blow, catching its victim square alongside the skull, thudded heavily. The cook's big body tottered, lurched backward toward the stove, collapsed.
       As it struck the floor, Grace was upon it. Panting, she caught the limp arms in her hands and began to pull. Rosie was no lightweight. But the nerveless poundage of her inert carcass slid gradually over the shining linoleum.
       Inch by inch, foot by foot, the redhead dragged her. Around the corner of the work table and back to the open door of the closet. Into the closet.
       She stepped out again quickly, slamming the door behind her. In the pot on the stove, cold potatoes were being reheated. Mashed potatoes for "the two guys with hayseed all over 'em," were doubtless heated even more than suited the local taste in Kokomo. If they ate mashed potatoes in Kokomo.
       The girl from Noonan's yanked down a ladle from the open utensil rack above the stove, and went to work. Out of the pot she fished the double order, and into waiting saucers. Steam still rose from the smooth potatoes.
       Hurriedly, she unclasped the bar-pin from her breast and inserted it in a mound of mashed potatoes. But Grace's heart was tingling with triumph.
       A step sounded suddenly on the far side of the doors beneath the clock.
       Catching up the saucers the girl detective swung around the corner of the work table. In three swift steps she reached the service counter which separated the kitchen from the pantry beyond.
       Quickly setting down the saucers, she shoved them away from her across the counter. The doors opened. Grace ducked.
       Her crouched body trembling as it pressed against the counter and beneath the protecting overlap of the service shelf, she listened to Rocky's steps come toward her across the pantry.
       "Hey, Rosie, them hicks said to be sure -- "
       The voice broke abruptly on a startled grunt. Then Rocky stuttered out, "I'll be -- "
       The doors to the dining room creaked again.
       Slowly, when the receding footsteps had faded, Grace swung erect. As she rose from behind the counter, her eyes were on the clock. Its hands stood at one minute after twelve. A minute longer than she had been entitled to expect, remembering the restaurant's closing time! Evidently the blackmailers were waiting until their last customers, the gentlemen from Kokomo, had left.
       Back across the kitchen Grace hurried. At the closed door of the closet, she paused, only long enough to glance across her shoulder. Then she reached for the knob.
       Still unconscious and breathing heavily, Rosie's crumpled body sprawled on the floor inside. Hastily, expertly, the girl detective frisked her. But, as she had feared, there was no gun on the woman.
       There was a sudden soft sound in the kitchen outside. Tim and Jerry, so soon? Grace whirled to the closet door. A low cry burst from her lips.
       In the pantry, and therefore visible only from the waist up, two figures stood. But they were not the two she had hoped for. Sniffle Grogan, like a giant gorilla, was peering at her in stupid astonishment. And behind him, his brute face working in rage, loomed the figure of Andre himself.
       In the split-second while their eyes met, the girl realized that the small door from the back hallway stood open-that Tim, out front, could not have seen them enter the kitchen. And both of them were drawing guns!
       Her muscles moving instinctively like well-oiled springs, she leaped forward.
       The soft snarl of a silenced automatic sang at her across the service counter as she moved, and the sharp sound of splintering wood in the closet wall behind her followed almost instantly. Flat on the floor, weaponless, cornered, the girl from Noonan's waited. "Get her, Sniff! She's that cursed spy from -- "
       Andre's voice, she realized, was the deepest of those from the room upstairs. Proof of his guilt!
       Thoughts blurred. She seemed to be swinging upward through a haze of lights, moved by some force greater than her own will. Her fingers had closed over something-the handle of Rosie's fallen knife-as she sprang.
       The haze lifted sharply. Grogan, automatic clutched in one big paw, was straightening from his leap across the counter. Andre, face working, was taking the longer way-ground.
       Sniffle's gun lifted, as steel flashed through the air. The knife's blade, murderously bright, glittered toward him like the wings of a humming bird.
       Gore spouted from his hand, the knife slicing through matted hair and flesh. The gorilla's crooked fingers fanned. The gat hurtled floorward, its clatter lost in his hideous shriek of pain.
       Straight for the dropped gun, the girl from Noonan's dived. Dimly, as she sprang, she was aware that the doors beneath, the clock had crashed open.
       Grogan lurched above her. Her fingers clawed for the automatic. Andre, almost beside her, had spun toward the counter.
       Grogan lunged.
       A deafening roar filled the kitchen! Grace, staggering upward with the automatic in her wet fist, saw Sniffle stiffen, relax, plunge forward on his face.
       His paws, groping, had scraped her arm in a spasmodic effort to check his fall. Now they clutched and relaxed, spreading on the new linoleum like a five-branched crack in breaking ice.
       Tim's voice said, "Up with 'em, Andre!"
       In answer, Andrews own lifted gun snarled gently. The glass in the little round window above Tim's head shattered. The automatic spat again at the pair in the pantry.
       Jerry Riker, at his chief's side, gasped and staggered forward. The gun in his right hand had sprung from his fingers like a thing alive. His shoulder sagged ominously.
       Tim fired, his bullet ripping a long scar into the smooth wood of the counter as Andre ducked behind it to safety. Grace, whirling after the blackmailer, checked suddenly.
       The doors had slammed open again. Rocky, dashing in from the empty restaurant, was leaping at the veteran detective from behind. A thin dagger, whipped from beneath his waiter's coat, glittered in his lifted hand.
       "Tim! Look out!"
       The sharp whine of the gun in the girl's fingers crossed the counter. The man who had smothered her upstairs, and who now was attacking her chief, screamed something shrill and terrified.
       His body seemed to slam backward against the doors, as if a magnet had jerked it away from Noonan's shoulder. He screamed again. Then he buckled and vanished from her view.
       Grace swung swiftly toward Andre -- but not in time.
       The blackmailer, lunging upward with dazzling speed, caught her around the waist with one iron arm. Her slim form, jerked off balance, slammed against him. Holding her as a shield between himself and Tim's threatening gun, he began to back away from the counter.
       "Stand off, Noonan! Stand off, or the girl gets it'"
       Tim, powerless, stood rooted to the spot where Rocky had attacked him.
       Grace, despite her useless struggles, felt Andre dragging her backward step by step across the slick linoleum.
       Fighting fiercely but helplessly in his grip, she felt her side slam into the stove as they reached it. Her gun was useless. And as Andre jerked her suddenly to avoid the stove, it wrenched completely free of her twisted hand.
       Another minute, and he would win to the back door-and freedom. Pete Brophy's killer! The leader of the ring Pete had been set to crack!
       The girl's desperate eyes fell on the stove past which he was dragging her. Her left arm flung out, its hand snatching wildly at the nearest thing. Her fingers clamped on the handle of the grease-filled frying pan.
       Up and backward, over her shoulder, she jerked it. Hissing fat from the skillet's bottom flew square into the face of the man who held her.
       For a split-second, the iron grip about her waist relaxed. Grace spun. Her arm still lifting, she faced Andre's tortured oath. The hot grease had blinded him.
       Down the pan hurtled in a vicious arc. Its blow as it contacted the blackmailer's skull made a sickening crunch. Andre, groaning only once, fell backward.
       They rode uptown in the back of the patrol wagon. Inside, under guard, Andre and his helpers were on their way to answer for Brophy's murder.
       The blackmailer and Rosie had recovered from their blows. Rocky was still unconscious. Grogan, who was probably beyond help, had been rushed off in an ambulance.
       Big Tim, looking into the sherry-colored eyes of his young secretary, smiled grimly.
       "Kokomo mashed potatoes! I like to fell under the table when I forked 'em and found that bar-pin inside!"
       "It was a pretty good trick," the redhead answered softly. "Pete would have liked it, I think -- "
       Tim said, "How come?"
       "I figured I'd probably need to get word to you from back there-or, at least, without speaking to you if I waited on you in the restaurant. That's why I wanted to definite signal in the potatoes which were for you."
       There was a moment's silence, broken only by the shrill siren of their swaying car. Then Tim chuckled.
       "Mashed potatoes!"
       "They like 'em hot in Kokomo," Grace said.
       Across from her, Jerry Riker moved his bandaged shoulder and grinned.
       "That's right. And gee, were you a honey with that frying pan! Didn't I tell you that a woman ought to stick to her stove instead of her guns? Any time you'd like to get smart and move into my kitchen -- "
       The siren screamed again. Andre, between two plain-clothes men, was swearing volubly. Rosie was nursing her swollen jaw.
       "A kitchen's got a lot to recommend it," Grace conceded, giving her fellow worker at least one point. "Frying pans and rolling-pins. An awful lot!"
--------
         *BOMBPROOF BABY*
       "It's summer fever," the redhead yawned, stretching like a cat and knocking a file of finger-print cards off one corner of her desk with the sweeping gesture.
       "Huh?" Jerry Riker muttered.
       He had been looking at the backs of her bright curls for a long time and thinking thoughts of his own. When she came suddenly to life, it startled him. But "Redsie" Culver was always startling him.
       "Summer fever," Grace repeated distinctly."Spring fever grown up. I'm sleepy. I'm bored. Nothing happens. Life is too smooth."
       Jerry looked hopeful.
       "How about a movie to-night?"
       "A movie? You would!" Disconsolately, "Big Tim" Noonan's secretary and right hand began to gather up her scattered cards. "A movie I'd even rather sit here like I am, till I'm old and gray, trying to prove that the mug that broke into Mrs. Rabinovitz's store and tuck the till for eight bucks fifty hasn't got a double-whorled thumb like Rocco C. Bragatelli's. And that says little."
       It was a perfect afternoon outside the windows of Tim Noonan's detective agency offices. Blue sky. Bright sun The wrong time entirely to deal with Rocco C. Bragatelli and his problematic connection with minor monies once in the possession of Mrs. Ashelom Rabinovitz.
       "I wish Tim would get back she announced. "I could tell him about that laundry lad that's telephoned three times since he left for lunch. It would take up a couple of minutes, anyhow."
       Jerry grunted.
       "What the guy want?'
       "I wouldn't know. And if I did, as the perfect confidential secretary to a man of affairs, I wouldn't tell."
       It was ten minutes and an additional laundry call later that Big Tim lumbered into the office and tossed his battered panama in the direction of the hatrack with nonchalant precision. Grace whooped at the sight of him.
       "Your Sunday shirt's been shredded, Noonan! Or else they broke off all your buttons. They're hot to apologize."
       "Who?"
       "Horner's Laundry. Mr. Horner himself, in fact-whoever he is. I've taken four calls and a call-back number. They must have messed up your scanties good and proper."
       The gray-haired giant creaked into his desk chair.
       "I trade with a one-eyed Chinese man on Madison Avenue. Where's that number? Oh, yeah. I'd better see. They maybe have run the Rabinovitz woman through a wringer by mistake. In which case, no call for apologies."
       He spun the dial.
       Exactly six minutes later, he was on the street hailing a cruising taxi to the curb. His red-headed secretary, slightly breathless, was beside him.
       "I still don't see -- "
       "Get in. The meter's running," Big Tim suggested.
       Grace got in. The laundry was a Brooklyn address. The cab started downtown, in the direction of the bridge.
       "So what goes on in Brooklyn?"
       "A war," Noonan rumbled.
       "A-huh?"
       "A war. Laundries for trenches. There's a protection racket gang starting its stuff, from what this Mr. Horner tells me. The old Chicago game. He don't want to play."
       "So-enter Noonan?"
       Big Tim stared out the window beside him.
       "I wouldn't know. That takes more confab with Horner. So far, there ain't any case. Only crank notes. We're going over to have us a look."
       The redhead sighed dismally.
       "I ask for excitement, and what do I get? A peek at a set of Brooklyn valentines!"
       That finished the Horner case-for fifteen minutes. And then the lid blew off. Literally blew off.
       The cab had no better than turned the corner at the end of the block occupied by Horner's Home-Way Laundry when the explosive roar fanged into the silence, vicious, deafening.
       "Holy-cat!"
       A delivery truck had just nosed into the street from the doors of the Horner garage.
       One second, it was edging cautiously forward. The next, it seemed to lift into the air. Its sides buckled out. Its roof tore open like the top of a burst balloon, and shredded.
       Along the opposite curb, a curtained black sedan had been cruising slowly as the track appeared. Now, springing into sudden swift motion, it hurtled forward, headed toward the far intersection.
       Tim was onto his driver's neck like a striking rattlesnake.
       "After 'em!"
       The cab shot ahead. But the quick movement seemed almost simultaneous with the shrill, tortured scream of jammed brakes. Swerving, they brought up abruptly at the curb.
       Into their path. swinging crazily to block off the entire street, the shattered truck had careened like a spinning top. There, miraculously on all four wheels, it jerked to a standstill.
       Around the distant corner, the escaping sedan whipped out of sight into the maze of city-bound traffic. Swearing softly, Tim leaped the taxi's running board.
       From the laundry, shouting employees were racing for the bombed truck as Grace sprang after him.
       The private office of Nicholas Horner overlooked the street in which the sudden attack of a quarter hour previous had taken place. As he finished his statement, the haggard laundry magnate stared down at the wreck of his truck, sombre-eyed.
       "So there it is, Mr. Noonan. The whole industry has received notes like those. Some of my rivals have seen fit to pay the 'dues' and 'assessments' this Mr. Almond demands. I did not. You saw what happened."
       Big Tim flicked the little stack of notes through his fingers. All of them typed. All signed with one name, in a round uniformed hand: "Mr. Almond."
       And all pompously decorated with blobs of red sealing wax in which the letter "A" had been stamped with the sort of stock signet available at the jewelry counter of any cheap department store!
       "Look like kid stuff, don't they?"
       Horner smiled wryly.
       "That truck down there doesn't look much like a child's game, Mr. Noonan. At least, my three at home don't play that rough."
       Tim's eyes, following the smaller man's, inspected the wreck of the blasted vehicle below. Shreds of charred cloth-all that was left of the two o'clock delivery-were swirling in the eddies of wind that fanned the neighboring gutters.
       "How about the police?"
       Horner frowned.
       "No. We haven't gone to them. Police mean publicity Publicity means ruin. No sane housewife would send out a wash she knew was going to be blown to atoms before it was returned to her."
       Noonan fanned the letters in his big hand.
       "The Laundrymen's Protective Combine, eh? Who is this Almond guy? What's he look like? Could you identify him?"
       Horner couldn't.
       "Nor can any other laundryman in Brooklyn. His letters are all we have on him. Except his bombs."
       Tim tossed the collection of papers into his secretary's lap. She scooped them up eagerly. There had been too much time wasted already, she felt.
       "What you make of them, Redsie?"
       She grinned.
       "There is no Mr. Almond."
       Horner lurched forward. His eyes were wide. He was quivering with emotion.
       "No Almond? Young lady, if you think that truck is a mere hallucination or -- "
       Grace interrupted. "It's real enough. And whoever wrote those letters means business. But his name isn't Almond. See how slowly be has formed each letter? That's not the way you'd dash off your own familiar signature."
       "Who-who is he, then?"
       "I don't know-yet His right name doesn't begin with A, because the signet is evidently brand-new. He's illiterate, of course. And he isn't a business man or used to seeing letters, or the 'Mr.' would have been a first name or initials. Aside from that -- "
       A door at the opposite end of the office opened. Horner's secretary, a drab female in tweeds, shuffled in.
       "They've finished the emergency treatment on Wally, Mr. Horner. The ambulance is on its way."
       "Wally?" Tim rumbled.
       "Wally Mapes, the driver. Badly messed up, he was."
       Tim's big frame swung toward the exit at the secretary's back.
       "Better talk to him before the hospital people come. No chance he saw anything out there. The attack was too quick. But it won't hurt to ask. Coming, Redsie?"
       Wally Mapes was fully conscious, stretched out on a mattress on the floor of the laundry garage. The doctor who had been rushed to the scene had given him emergency treatment on the spot before sending for an ambulance.
       Peering down at the bandaged figure, Grace contacted the man's tortured eyes almost at once. Her scrutiny seemed to arrest his attention. They stared at each other for a full minute without speaking.
       "Tough luck, Wally."
       Hopes made no answer. His lint-swathed jaw might have explained this. So, she thought suddenly, might some other things.
       It was the driver's eyes that had burned the corners of the redhead's intuition. Strange eyes. There was a dark glint in them. Something like-like blood hate.
       What could that mean?
       "Can he talk, doctor?" Tim rumbled.
       The physician shrugged.
       "A little. But not too much, man. He's lost some blood. Shock, too; you know."
       There was no shock in Mapes's eyes, the girl -- from the agency mused. And no noticeable weakness, either. Some terrible inner struggle seemed to be burning him, lending him extra strength.
       But the man's Home-Way uniform was blood-spattered, and the thin mist of sweat on his forehead showed he was suffering.
       Tim bent above him.
       "Who got you, old-timer?"
       Mapes might have been bomb-deaf. His eyes, meeting the detective's, sparkled dangerously. Then they closed. He made no other movement.
       Tim turned away, shrugging. But those eyes of the injured man's still bothered Grace Culver. Just a hunch. But she bent above him quickly.
       "You could hear him, Wally. And you know something. Come on and give! We'll find out other ways, any how."
       Wally's lips panted slowly. But when she bent to catch the slow words gritting through his teeth, they weren't the tip she bad been half-expecting.
       "The-devil with-you-baby." And that was all he had to say.
       The ambulance arrived, clanging like mad up the narrow street. Orderlies loaded the mangled Horner driver aboard. Grace, following them to the curb, stared after the departing vehicle with a puzzled little frown.
       Seeing the street reminded her of that moment the bomb had landed. The slowly cruising car, abreast of the laundry door at just the right minute. The neat get-away All too perfect for a hit-or-miss hoodlum job.
       Mapes couldn't have seen his attackers. And yet he knew who did the job! The hate in his eyes could mean nothing else but that Mapes knew.
       Heart tingling Grace went back to Horner's office. Tim was just turning from the telephone.
       "Calling Jerry,"' he explained. "Not much chance tracing those letters. Only may to get action from this Almond is to bait a trap. One truck is only a starter. He'll crack down on others, And -- "
       "And there we'll be!"
       Tim's eyebrows lowered.
       "There Jerry and me may be. Not you. Pineapples are no toys for girls. This case is all male stuff, from now on."
       "Tim Noonan, if -- "
       "No sale." Tim said.
       She knew he meant it. The Irish in her flared up, then died. No sense getting him riled until-"When do you big men try it?"
       "To-night. Near midnight, maybe. But as far as you're concerned, young lady -- "
       "All right, all right!"
       She left the office hurriedly. Her eyes were bright, angry. She found it hard work to smile when she stopped at Horner's secretary's desk in the outer waiting room.
       "Er-could you -- "
       "Yes, Miss?"
       "I need some information. Do your delivery trucks go out on a definite schedule? I mean, that one this afternoon? Is two the regular hour?"
       The secretary's pale lips twitched.
       "No, Miss. The regular schedule has been suspended for a week. Since the Combine letters have seemed dangerous, each driver has been told when to report the next day. Never two days the same."
       "So only the driver and Mr. Horner would know?"
       "Yes, Miss."
       Grace nodded thoughtfully.
       "I see. And one more thing. I wonder if you have this particular driver's home address on file? Wally Mapes, I mean."
       "We have, Miss."
       Slowly, the smile in Grace Culver's sherry-colored eyes was becoming more genuine.
       Number 11 Barnstable Street, might have been the building from which the dreary little crosstown alley had derived its name.
       Standing on the broken flagstones that passed for a sidewalk, Grace stared up at the bleak expanse of peeling paint and gray, weathered timber. Narrow windows, like unblinking dead eyes, stared back at her.
       Mr. Wally Mapes, she decided, was in a brighter spot even in the bare, anti-septic-scrubbed aridity of the District Hospital's emergency ward.
       Climbing the rickety wooden steps from the street, she jabbed a rusty bell with one cautious finger tip. It had seemed more than likely that the ark of a building would collapse under the pressure.
       Somewhere inside, a metallic jangle began and continued until she removed the finger. She waited. The finger that had pressed the buzzer button traced the outline of a long pearl barpin, obviously cheap and flashy, that she wore at the throat of her blouse. The pin had not been part of her costume when she had left Horner's laundry, half an hour earlier.
       Heavy footsteps, moving slowly, thudded along the hall on the other side of the drab panel. The door, opening a narrow slit, creaked dismally on its hinges.
       The girl from Noonan's looked into the red-rimmed eyes of the sloppy female who peered out at her. Frowzy hair and rolls of fat vanishing into the ample filth of an unwashed Mother Hubbard, was her chief impression.
       "Mrs. Mapes?"
       The woman's voice, answering, was an ill-tempered rasp. But Grace kept on smiling.
       "Naw. Miz Mapes lives upstairs. I'm Miz Clancey. What you want? You another of them charity bureau people?"
       "No. I'm a staff aide. From the hospital. It's about Mr. Mapes. Is his wife -- "
       "She's still up to the hospital, lookin' after Wally." Grudgingly, the door opened wider, "You can set on the stairs and wait if you're a mind to, I guess."
       Grace sat on the stairs and waited. "Miz" Clancey lumbered off into the shadows at the rear of the reeking hallway, leaving her to her own devices.
       Her own devices consisted largely of trying not to breathe any oftener than she had to and of piecing and re-piecing what few tidbits on Mapes and Horner affairs had come her way during the early afternoon.
       That "Combine" of the mysterious Mr. Almond. Childish, or no, there was a big-shot gun who had a pretty sizable industry by its coat-tails. His little daubs of sealing wax meant something in the laundry world. Something noticeably grim.
       Did Mapes know who "Mr. Almond" was?
       Grace doubted it. But he knew something. That curious glint in his eyes had been more than the bad nerves that might very easily follow such an experience as he had just been through.
       Ten to one, the redhead figured, Wally at least knew who had tossed that pineapple at him. And if he wouldn't tell, there must be some darn good reason. Yet he couldn't have identified his attacker in that curtained sedan. Couple that with the secret delivery hour, and you got -- 
       Heels beat a swift tattoo on the flimsy steps outside, and the door at the front of the hall was flung open suddenly. Before Grace could scramble to her feet, it had shut again.
       The little woman who began to climb the stairs was wiry and bright-eyed. Wisps of fading hair escaped from beneath her outmoded hat. Her face was colorless, set in lines of strain, its lips grim, its cheeks hollow.
       "Mrs. Mapes?"
       The woman gasped.
       "My lands! I didn't see -- "
       "Sorry if I startled you. I'm from the hospital, Miss Redmond."
       Mrs. Mapes kept on climbing. "Hospital? But-I've just been there, and Wally was doing pretty good. It-he isn't -- "
       "No." Grace swung into step beside her, going up. "No bad news at all. Only some questions. Routine stuff. If you'll just give me five minutes or so.
       Mrs. Mapes was fumbling with her latchkey.
       "Sure. That's all right, Miss Redmond. Come in, if you like."
       The Mapes flat was just what might have been expected from a look at the outside of the building. Small. Dark. Clean enough, but tainted with the fetid smell of decay that hung over everything in the place.
       Mrs. Mapes, indicating a wicker rocking chair to her caller, flopped wearily onto the broken-down couch herself.
       "All set, Miss Redmond."
       The girl from Noonan's pawed in her bag for a notebook and the stub of a pencil. She flipped the former open on her knee with a professional snap that she hoped would impress her hostess.
       "Now then! Mr. Mapes's age?"
       "Forty-three."
       "Born in New York?"
       "Englewood, New Jersey, ma'am."
       Stock questions, all meaningless, dropped from the girl's lips as quickly as the driver's wife could answer them. In the notebook she was making shorthand notes of quite another character. Such as: "Beer steins on shelf; Mapes and two others must drink here. Poker chips under table-they play here-Poker-face Mapes."
       At last, having lulled the woman's suspicions, Grace started to put out her feelers.
       "Has Mr. Mapes any close friends?"
       "Friends? Sure. He ain't a clubby man, but he gets on all right."
       "I mean, special friends. People we ought to let know about hospital visiting hours?"
       "Well-there's Peewee Belk and Otto. Especially Peewee. Them three play a bit of cards together. And Wally and Peewee been meeting noontimes at the Imperial Lunch near by Horner's, ever since Peewee was fired from there."
       "Check ex-employee Belk," went into the notebook.
       "I'm liable to find him at the Imperial, then, Mrs. Mapes-to inform him?"
       Wally's wife nodded.
       "It's right good of you folks to do all this for a poor man, Miss Redmond. I sure didn't realize -- "
       "Part of our regular hospital routine, Mrs. Mapes. Now if you could give me a description of Mr. Belk, so I can -- "
       The woman jumped to her feet and began to fish for something in one drawer of a battered chest in the window corner of the room. After a moment, she dragged out a sleazy snapshot album and bore it in triumph across to the rocker.
       "Better than that! Here's the photo the boys had took at the laundry convention picnic last year. Peewee was still workin' for the laundry, then. There's Wally, and then Slugger Nixon-him and Wally ain't good friends any more-and then Peewee next."
       It was too dark in the cubbyhole of a flat to make sure of faces. But Grace studied the convention picture as best she could, cursing the shadows.
       Nixon, with whom Mapes had fallen out somehow. "Peewee" Belk, fired from Horner's, the wounded driver's crony. The fact that they were side by side at the picnic might have been an accident. On the other hand -- 
       Grace Culver's whole life had been a series of hunches, striking like lightning. One of her better ones struck now! She swallowed hard.
       "Thanks, Mrs. Mapes. That about finishes us, I think. I'll be getting on now. Oh-one more thing. I hate to bother you, but could I have a glass of water? I'm dry right down to my toes."
       "Why sure. Why sure you can."
       Mrs. Mapes's willing back had scarcely disappeared into the kitchen when the redhead went into action.
       The tawdry pearl barpin at her throat jerked open in quick, strong fingers. The disguised skeleton key that formed one end of it had gotten the girl from Noonan's out of many a tight jam before. But it was another part of the gadget that she was using to-day.
       One side of the cross-piece was filed and whetted to the sharp edge of a razor blade. This, she slipped deftly beneath a loose corner of the convention picture. The white paper lifted easily from its mounting, curling forward like a wave ahead of the sliding knife.
       When Mrs. Mapes came back with the water, her husband's album was lying neatly closed on the edge of the couch. Miss Redmond was waiting at the door.
       "Thanks, Mrs. Mapes. My, that tastes good. I'm sure Mr. Mapes is going to be all right. Goodby."
       The five o'clock whistle was due to sound at almost any minute when the red-headed doll strolled into the Imperial Lunch Wagon and cocked a bold eye at the clock on the wall above the griddle.
       "You got a telephone in here, handsome?"
       Mrs. Mapes herself would have had a hard time identifying the hospital's efficient Miss Redmond. This girl might have been off any street corner in the city. Her face was made up as heavily as a circus clown's. Her eyes were stupid, her lips a flaming invitation.
       The attendant, who was fixing up a pair of "Westerns" for the two steady customers at the end of the counter, gave her an appraising look.
       "Sure, sweetheart! In that wall niche behind you. But it ain't closed in, so be careful you don't say nothin' us fellows is too young to hear."
       A certain Miss Redmond had gotten coffee at the Imperial, hours earlier. She knew about the wall instrument. All about it.
       "Thanks, wise guy."
       Swinging her hips, the doll moved up to the open booth. Blinders, fashioned after those used on a horse, screened the telephone itself. From the waist up, the girl was masked from the counter.
       The redhead opened a large flat compact and began to fish for a nickel, muttering audibly. Those mutters covered an action her audience might have found it hard to explain.
       From somewhere beneath the compact's mirror, released by the deft pressure of a spring, another mirror dropped into her hand. This was of metal, long, folded into sections like a steamer ticket and hinged four times.
       The two-inch sections of highly polished steel, capable of being set up in a variety of position combinations, could pick up a room from all its angles and mirror it entire in the final reflector.
       While the coin dropped jangling into the box, and while the doll's finger twirled the dial with gusto, her free hand was busy. By the time she had finished one operation, she had finished both. The attendant and the pair at the counter beyond were clearly visible to her, leers and all.
       The picture of Mr. Mapes's convention picnic had come in for some serious study under good lights, since it had left its moorings in the cheap album on Barnstable Street. She knew the ugly faces of "Slugger" Nixon and Peewee Belk by heart, And she was looking at them now!
       She couldn't say much for Wally Mapes's choice of friends, if Belk was one of them. But Nixon looked as if he might make a pretty good enemy. Hard-eyed, pock-marked and huge, he crouched above his food like a malformed anthropoid.
       "Noonan's Agency," a voice in her ear said abruptly. She recognized Jerry Riker's voice. Her own, lowered with seeming care, still managed to carry the length of the lunch wagon as she answered.
       "Jack? ... Listen, it's Daisy, honey."
       Jerry got it. The instrument's earpiece squeaked magnificently.
       "Well, Daisy! Hiya, baby?"
       "You hear me 0. K., Jack? There ain't no one around?"
       "Not even the little bird," Jerry told her.
       "Then listen. I just got wise Horner talked you into taking a wagon out to-night. In place of that mug they got to this p.m. You ain't gonna do it. Jack! You ain't, you hear me?"
       There was a split second's silence. then: "Never say 'ain't' to a college boy," Jerry offered weakly.
       "I won't let you, honey! They'll get you, just like him! For my sake, Jack! Midnight ain't no safer than noon. This ain't easy money. Jack-please -- "
       Things were happening in the multiple-mirror. The counter attendant didn't seem to pick up much, one way or the other. But his customers were registering interest by the bucketful.
       Belk, the nearer figure, had swung on his stool and was staring at her out of cat eyes that were nothing better than slits in his vicious little face. A fine pal to confide in! And Wally Mapes was probably thinking that same thing, along about now, in the emergency ward.
       Slugger Nixon, the crouching ape, had stopped pouring salt on his sandwich with the shaker in mid-air. The fingers of his big, hairy paw were clenched over it tight. Reflected on one of them was a tiny point of light-the kind of flashy ring, no doubt, that many bruisers of his type affected.
       "Not even midnight!" the doll sobbed into the mouthpiece. "I don't care if they got cops ambushed all around the darn laundry. That don't mean you're safe after you turn in at Hirtzell Street, where it's lonesome and dark! Jack -- listen to me -- don't hang up on me -- Jack -- "
       Taking his cue, Jerry slammed the receiver. Its click must have been audible all down the counter. Instantly. the picture in the mirrors changed again.
       When the doll turned to face them, dabbing at tear-filled eyes, the two customers had their backs toward her. They were hunched above the counter. They were eating busily.
       "There's other guys in the world, baby," the attendant suggested.
       She faced him fiercely.
       "Keyhole stuff, huh? Listenin', huh?"
       "Aw, why get tough, Daisy? Strike out this Jack. Say, I get off here at ten and know a hot joint where -- "
       "The joints I'd like to get hot." the doll announced flatly from the door, "is your flappy ears, from wrappin' that greased griddle around 'em. Can't a lady even talk private to a gentleman on the telephone, without you snoopin' in? You make me feel like I need a liver pill!"
       A clock struck, somewhere across the darkened city. Twelve times. The eerie notes trembled mournfully down the deserted block that bordered Horner's Home-Way Laundry.
       The doors between the laundry garage and the street were shut. Thin beams of light from inside sliced under their partly lowered blinds, throwing narrow slivers of illumination across the curb.
       The girl from Noonan's had parked her small, topless roadster around the corner of an intersecting avenue in the opposite direction from Hirtzell Street. She walked up the block, eyes knifing the gloom as she came. There was no sign of a Combine car anywhere in the neighborhood.
       So the little scene at the Imperial was working out! Belk and Nixon, taking to heart that tip that police would be ambushed around the laundry, had planned their own little party for somewhere along the route.
       Reaching the splinters of light on the sidewalk, the redhead turned in. Her knuckles beat a sharp summons on the fastened panel. She waited.
       Inside, Jerry Rikers voice said, "Leave me go, Tim. It may be some funny business from this Almond palooka, and -- "
       Noonan's heavy steps on the concrete door interrupted him.
       The door opened an inch, and Grace was staring into the muzzle of an automatic and one sharp gray eye. Then Big Tim grunted. The opening widened quickly.
       She stepped inside. The door thudded shut on her heels. Before she could blink her eyes into focus in the sudden light, the grizzled agency chief's sharp tongue was lashing her.
       "So what's the big notion? Didn't I tell you to stay home to-night? Didn't I say this was men's work? Many's the time I've tipped you up over my knee since them mobsmen mowed down your father, rest the soul of him! And by the -- "
       She smiled at him blandly.
       "Who's asking to ride in that truck with you? If you and his nibs want to get blown into little pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, it's your privilege. I wouldn't set foot in the truck!"
       Tim blustered.
       "Then why -- "
       "I just came to say good luck to you. And find out how everything was going. There was no order against that, Timothy Noonan."
       The laundry owner and Tim's other assistant were crouching on the lowered tailboard of a Hornet delivery truck, stacking up a wall of paper cartons and bundles at the rear of the van.
       Inside, behind the deceptive barricade, a finger of light struck cold fire from the nose of a wicked-looking "typewriter." It was set up for instant use, and ready to sweep the street behind the truck.
       "Some wash!"
       Jerry Riker chuckled.
       "And there's another one trained frontwards, over the driver's shoulder, to snipe 'em off from that end. And some fireworks of our own stacked up in the front seat."
       "Surprise, surprise! for Mr. Almond, huh?"
       "That's right. When that little black buggy with the curtains hauls in sight -- Oh, boy! Oh, boy!"
       Grace let it go at that. Her sherry-brown eyes inspected the camouflaged arsenal for a full five minutes before she spoke again.
       "Very nice. Only thing I can't figure is, how come midnight? You can't deliver wash then. I mentioned your own time at the Imperial. But won't these babies figure out there's something phony about the hour?"
       Horner explained.
       "Westchester delivery. Leaving early to be out to the suburbs to-morrow morning. We spread that tip all through the plant this afternoon. There's sure to be a leak to Almond somewhere."
       "And the streets are empty at night," Jerry finished. "Easier to spot the sedan. Less danger of nicking some innocent bystander when the shooting starts. They all seemed so sure that trapping "Mr. Almond"-or his hired rods-was merely a matter of beating the enemy to the draw, shooting first, and bringing in what was left for questioning.
       But something-her "hunch machine" at work again, maybe-seemed to warn the redhead that the business at hand was a whole lot tougher than they thought.
       Slugger Nixon's face had been a study in low animal craft, at the counter of. the Imperial. Its reflection in her series of little metal mirrors had sent a chill up her spine. Things wouldn't be so simple, with a man like that holding any kind of a hand at all.
       And, except for the arsenal, all the cards in the deck seemed to be Slugger's!
       "Ready!" Jerry barked from the tailboard.
       Big Tim, nodding curtly, climbed into the cab and eased his big frame under the driver's wheel. He had his automatic ready on the seat beside him.
       Horner jumped for the garage floor, and helped Jerry lift the tailboard on its chains. When it was in the van, with Jerry half screened by the low wall of boxes, Tim turned the engine over.
       As the motor's low drone became regular in the big room, Horner threw the bolt on the street doors. Slowly, moving before his weight in their oiled grooves, they swung open.
       The white truck, rolling like a big cloud in the darkness, dipped across the curb and swung north in the direction of Hirtzell and the other river streets.
       Horner and the redhead watched the blinking tail-light grow smaller as it drew away down the block. The laundryman grunted uncertainly.
       "Well -- "
       "That's that," Grace said.
       "If you'll tell me where I can find your car, Miss Culver, I'd be glad -- "
       "I'll get it while you're locking up. It's just around the corner."
       Homer switched off the inside lights, pulled the big doors shut from the street side, and was fumbling in his pocket for a key when the roar of a motor echoed in the shadows behind him.
       It showed no signs of slowing. The engine howled a challenge. Gasping sharply, the laundry owner ducked for cover as he spun.
       But it was the girl from Noonan's, after all.
       Her open roadster was picking up speed as it whipped past Horner's Home-Way Laundry. She was bent above the wheel like a young devil. She was grinning.
       "Hey!" Horner shouted. "Miss Culver! Hey!"
       She paid no attention. She was giving the small machine its head. And its nose was hot on the trail of the white truck's tail-light, still visible as a tiny spot of red far up the street.
       At the curb where she had parked the roadster, the redhead had stopped long enough for one simple operation. From behind the mirror of her compact, she had produced once again the small hinged steel reflectors that she had used at the Imperial.
       Above the driver's mirror, in brackets especially placed for the purpose, she had adjusted the line of plates with quick, sure movements. Then she climbed under the wheel and shoved down her toes.
       Past the laundry she shot like a bullet out of one of the truck's concealed machine guns. In the driver's glass, she was able to watch Horner waving his arms and running.
       In the little polished surfaces above, she could see the tops of trees she was passing. Nothing in the neighborhood, before or behind, escaped the surface of at least one of the reflectors ahead of her.
       The wind whistled past her with a vicious swish as she urged the little car forward at a speed that rocked the light body and made the engine roar. Up the street, the truck's swaying tail-light grew bigger. Then she could make out the bulky outline of the vehicle itself.
       Abruptly, she slowed the roadster to a pace similar to that of the machine she was following. It would be a mistake to get close enough to be recognized. And a worse mistake to trail them within gun range, if she were not recognized.
       The truck kept on, heading north and toward the river in the direction of the Williamsburg Bridge. The streets were empty as it rolled along. Occasional pedestrians or a chance taxi appeared at intersections and were gone again.
       That hunch inside the redhead grew unaccountably stronger, however, despite the silence through which she was following the bigger machine's rumbling wheels.
       The lull before the storm. She wondered what lay ahead-along or near Hirtzell Street, where she figured that, after her deliberate tip, the Combine men must be waiting.
       The truck swerved to the left, into a westbound cross street. She jerked her own wheel, keeping on its tail.
       A little later, swinging north again, the van passed under a lone overhead light. The redhead was close enough to the intersection to glimpse the mound of boxes and parcels heaped behind the tailboard. There was no sign of Jerry's lurking presence behind them.
       Down the new street, the white truck rolled like a moving tomb. It was narrow and dark ahead, the girl from Noonan's noticed. Then, as she twisted her wheel to follow, the overhead light flung its oblique rays athwart the identifying sign at the corner. Hirtzell Street. Her heart began a dull, fast pounding as the shadows of the cramped thoroughfare closed over her. Danger ahead! Danger ahead!
       The place was little wider than an alley, flanked on both sides by window-pocked factory walls. Two vehicles the width of the Hornet truck could scarcely have passed in the confined area without scraping fenders. If that elusive black sedan -- Something was wrong ahead!
       The forward movement of the disguised arsenal was slowing perceptibly. Grace, letting the roadster's pace slacken to suit, was afraid for one instant that they had spotted her pursuit and mistaken her headlights for the Combine gang.
       Then the roadster's swerving lamps picked out the real cause of the difficulty.
       Parked at the left-hand curb, all its lights off stood a car. An inconspicuous sedan, with a hood that showed black in the darkness. A familiar sedan, with all its windows screened by drawn curtains!
       Grace felt her heart do a double flip up into the region of her throat. She let the roadster coast as easily as it would toward the tailboard of the slowing truck. And she reached with her left hand for the pocket of the door beside her, lifting her head a little as she did so.
       Then, suddenly, her brain seemed to freeze.
       Her eyes had swept the mirrors arranged to reflect the areas above her to right and left. And what she saw mirrored there was-death.
       The sinister sedan ahead was obviously drawing all Tim's and Jerry's attention. The jockeying of the truck made this easily apparent. And-that was just what "Mr. Almond" and his agents had intended it should do!
       In the redhead's bright metal reflectors, their ruse was revealed. They had baited a trap as good as Tim Noonan's. A little better, in fact.
       Along the roof line of the three-story building directly above the point where the truck was slowing, three figures had appeared. Their black, hunched shapes loomed up like globs of tar against the pale sky. Rat-tat-a-tat-tat!
       The sudden staccato bark shattered the silence of the deserted street with guttural precision. Jerry's machine gun, aimed at the empty sedan!
       A distant tinkle of shattering glass came to the redhead's ears as her left hand whipped out of the roadster's side pocket and transferred its bit of cold metal to her rigid right.
       Her eyes were fixed, not on the scene ahead. but upon the mirrors directly above her. She saw one of the three globs at the roof's edge straighten and become a man. She saw his arm swing back, like a baseball pitcher's. Cra-ack!
       It was her own automatic, jerking up in a hand that reacted with the movement of a perfect bit of machinery. She saw flame fan the darkness ahead of her in a thin red banner. Her trigger finger twitched again. Crack! Cra-ack!
       The man at the roof's edge stiffened abruptly. His body had made a good target outlined against the sky. Now it lurched crazily.
       The ball in his lifted arm spun backward into space. A thin, tortured shriek ripped down from above. Then two things happened at once.
       Over the edge of the sharp drop, the swaying body pitched like a sack of meal tossed from the squatty chimneys.
       It hurtled, terrifying in its speed and silence, toward the pavement just ahead of the redhead's fenders. It struck stone with a gruesome sound that made her retch despite herself.
       Behind the dark factory, suddenly, hell broke loose. A roar like the end of time ripped at the night with shattering violence. Flame, styled after the blaze of a lightning bolt, leaped up behind the blank windows and vanished. The ominous rumble of falling stone and caving mortar followed, a dull, increasing sound. Part of the factory, on the back side, had been blasted by the charge intended for Tim and Jerry in the truck.
       At the roof's edge, the two remaining crouchers had sprung from their unexpected revealed position and were wavering uncertainly in their scramble for cover in the shadow of the overhanging chimneys. Grace's gun snapped up again.
       But Jerry, in the truck ahead, had rallied with the trained speed of a cop to the truth of the trap Nixon and his men had set for them.
       Before she could take aim on another of the men above, the masked typewriter at the back of the van sprang into action. Rat-tat-a-tat-a-tat-tat!
       One of the looming shapes above flung up his arms and reeled toward the chimneys, falling out of sight on the roof. Dead or wounded, it was impossible to tell.
       His companion, however, wheeling in a frenzy of terror, sprang straight for the drop. His arm was lifted. He had scooped up, from somewhere, a twin to the bomb that had missed fire. He was shrieking insanely as he came.
       The unrelenting snarl of the machine gun in the truck began again. The red fire of it flickered in a thin, wicked line against the blackness. Its target took the lead in his belly. Clawing, he plunged.
       The missile, rolling out of his stiff fanned fingers, took the drop ahead of him. Grace saw it coming and screamed. Jerry saw it, too and dove back into the black recesses of the van
       Deafening, blinding, the explosion filled the narrow street. Its roar shattered windows in the confining walls to either side. The paving between truck and roadster lifted like a black wave.
       The redhead ducked.
       Orange flame filled the night, and into it hurtled the dead weight of the luckless gunman. Then, thudding like hail on the hood of the roadster, bits of debris began to descend in a swift shower.
       Grace heard the glass of her windshield smash. She felt little jagged bits of the pulverized cement flaying her body. Arms shielding her head, she lay cramped in the bottom of her car.
       Amid the growling echoes of the terrific explosion, the tinkle and crash of falling fragments kept on.
       Then silence.
       The jackknifed girl straightened slowly, lifting her bruised body back into the seat.
       Ahead, the truck stood undamaged. Behind it, under cover and with his machine gun arm-cradled, Jerry was advancing cautiously on the factory side.
       Too late, he spotted the movement a corner of the van had screened from him.
       Grace lurched for her ignition. The engine coughed. But she, too, had not acted in time.
       The street door of the dingy brick building had whipped open. Toward her, at a dead run, three figures spurted. She glimpsed Slugger's evil face -- a sallow stranger, grinning-Peewee Belk's killer eyes -- 
       Springing like cats, they were upon the roadster as it began to move. Jerry shouted. His weapon was up. But he dared not use it.
       "Redsie, for the -- "
       "Keep your cover, Riker!"
       She screamed the warning as the car, careening madly to avoid the hole in the road before it, whipped forward. The third man, gun in hand, had swung on the running board to finish Jerry.
       Z-zing!
       The one instant in which the mobster had gotten out of line with Grace had been enough for Tim Noonan. His automatic barked from inside the van, and Big Tim never missed.
       "Sallow Face" screamed once before he buckled away from the speeding car. Grace had a flash of him spinning forward into the yawning pit. Only a flash. The roadster was in its stride by now.
       The wheel jerked twice in her hands. Once to the left, avoiding the truck. Once to the right, avoiding the parked sedan. Then it straightened.
       The narrow blackness of Hirtzell Street lay ahead.
       Far away, the wailing of police sirens split the night. Help! But she couldn't stop for it. Two killers were hanging onto her car, one on either running board. Both of them with rods in their hands.
       Her only hope lay in keeping the roadster moving at top speed, so that they dared not finish her. Eyes grim, teeth set, she jammed down on the gas.
       Ahead of her, a little needle wavered and began to climb.
       Fifty-five -- sixty -- sixty-five -- They whipped past an intersection, and she heard a scream from far away.
       "You-little-punk-" That roar was Peewee Belk. He was on the farther running board, hanging on like grim death and howling at her. Her gaze was steady on the lane ahead. But one corner of an eye took in the rim of the door beside her. A paw gripped it, wet with strain, white at the knuckles. Five brute fingers. A signet ring. Nixon was "Mr. Almond," then! Crouching so close that his hot breath fanned her, he was growling his lethal command in her ear. It was an order that meant business. "Slow her down, sister! Slow her down, or -- "
       Sixty-five -- sixty-eight -- Her foot was jamming the floorboard now. The needle shivered at seventy when she took the corner, swerving west toward the river. Tires screamed, skiddering over the bad pavement. She could feel the wheels on Peewee's side lift into the air. He howled a frenzied oath before they slammed earthward again.
       "Stop this dame, Slugger! Stop her quick -- "
       The new street plunged down a short hill to the water front.
       Too late, sickness gripping her heart, she realized the truth. A dead end!
       Far off, the sirens were wailing. They seemed no nearer. Wind whipped back her hair, lashing in through the shattered glass.
       "You grab the wheel, Slugger! I'll pump her!"
       Ahead, a closed gate of thin iron rods shut off the empty coaling pier in which the little side street ended. Bars, and the pier, and then a blackness that must be the river.
       No way out! And death if she stopped!
       Belk's voice was a sudden frantic shriek.
       "She ain't stopping! She's crazy! She -- "
       The redhead laughed between her teeth.
       "Summer fever, Peewee!"
       They hit the gate head on.
       A splintering crash that meant the end of the roadster filled all the world, as the rusty old bars caved before the terrific impact.
       In a flash of blinding clarity, Grace saw Peewee's finish. One of the broken spikes had caught him. Clean through the little rat, it had ripped.
       He was swept from his running board and hung there, in the air, helplessly impaled. Except for his ghastly face, there was little to prove those dripping scarlet shreds had ever been human.
       Down the pier the car lashed, rocketing, utterly beyond control. The wheel had snapped in its driver's hands. She was helpless.
       Then-only blackness ahead.
       She felt the tires leaving ground. Blindly, in the direction where Nixon should be, she struck out. Her arms contacted flesh. As the water closed over them, she clung.
       Tim explained most of it, afterward.
       They were flung free of the car. When the patrol reached the pier, she was holding Slugger's head under water like grim death. They had a hard time breaking her grip so they could fish him in.
       Grace was wrapped in a blanket, in the back seat of a borrowed car, when the haze cleared. Jerry sat on one side of her. Tim on the other.
       "It's too bad," were the first words she said.
       "Huh?"
       "It's too bad I finished Peewee before Mapes could get at him. Mapes had him marked. His pal, the only one he'd told when his truck would start! Mapes knew! He had a better right to -- to -- "
       Big Tim grunted.
       "Truck drivin'? It's not the soft racket I'd figured it. To-night, if you hadn't been fool enough to trail us on a man's job and spot that -- "
       Grace grinned at him. "A woman's job!"
       "How come?"
       "Well-that part of it was all done with mirrors, wasn't it?"
--------
         *HIT THE BABY*
       "Blue Monday?" The redhead yawned, stretched, looked up from her desk in the quiet office of the Noonan Detective Agency. "Who started that whoop-de-doo about Mondays being blue? You got a whole new week's work ahead of you on a Monday morning. Saturdays, it's all over. Nothing but a picnic in the country or washing out your stockings to look forward to."
       Young, good-looking Jerry Riker straightened from the filing cabinet where he was culling routine entries. He grinned at the girl who sat scowling on the other side of the desk sign reading: "Miss Culver, secretary." "Bored, huh?"
       "Alongside of me," said Grace Culver, drearily, "a guy in the last stages of sleeping sickness feels as spry as a kangaroo. Saturdays! Whoever invented 'em?"
       Jerry saw an opening and dove into it. They came few and far between with a fast-action girl like "Big Tim" Noonan's red-headed aider-and-abetter. But from long habit, young Riker kept on trying. "Saturday nights are Heaven's gift to the movie business, Redsie. Every right-minded citizen goes to a show then with her Big Moment." He reached a morning newspaper from his own desk, flicking it open to the amusement page as he laid it down before her. "There's the ads. Take your pick. And a free feed with Jerome A. Riker goes with it."
       "Why bother with a show, then? Watching you eat spaghetti is funnier than any comedy."
       Grace glanced down at the printed spread propped against her typewriter. Gossipy columns of news from Moviedom separated other columns of advertising on "epic features" and "colossal super-spectacles."
       "How's about it, lady?"
       The redhead smiled at him absentmindedly. "I see Moe Eisman opened up his Long Island studio again. Shooting a picture with Lulu Dore," she said, dreamily.
       "Very interesting. But what about my date for -- "
       "Listen to this," Grace commanded. "The headline reads, 'Eisman Defies Witch Jinx To Film Dore Extravaganza.' Then it goes this way."
       She continued to read aloud, oblivious to the dark looks she was getting from Jerry's corner. The article stated:
       Suddenly opening the Eastern studio of Dictator Pictures Corp. for the first time in seven years, Moe Eisman yesterday began surprise production on "Love Locked Out" at his Maysville lot. The elaborate screen spectacle features Lulu Dore, famous French song star now appearing personally on Broadway in "Errors of 1936."
       Interesting to the show world in this connection is the producer's disregard of the jinx popularly attributed to Dictator's Long Island plant at the time of its closing in 1929. Folks who are afraid of black cats are asking if Ik-la-Duk still haunts the Maysville stages.
       It will be remembered that salary difficulties with the Haitian witch doctor imported to lend authentic zombie atmosphere to "The Voodoo Vow," the company's last Eastern production -- resulted in a complete break between executives and magician. A series of strange and tragic mishaps following the rumpus gave rise to a then-popular superstition that Ik-la-Duk's demons were holding his curse over the studio.
       "The Voodoo Vow" was Dictator's most expensive and drastic box office failure.
       "So what?" Jerry Riker demanded, as the redhead stopped reading. Zombies and voodoo were so much banana grease to Jerry. But Grace Culver was the kind of girl any young man likes to have hanging on his arm of a Saturday night. "How about our stepping out?"
       Big Tim's secretary folded the newspaper slowly.
       "Well, it won't be as much fun as tracking down a witch doctor. But it's better than catching up on my back mending. Suppose we -- "
       What she had been going to say then, was something Jerry Riker never knew. The shrill whine of the telephone on her desk sliced imperiously across the redhead's idle banter. She uncradled the little black instrument and clipped into its mouthpiece the traditional, "Good afternoon. The Noonan Agency."
       The voice at the other end was shrill and excited, making the earpiece click so fast that Jerry could catch nothing of what was being said. But he could see Grace's keen sherry-brown eyes going wider and wider.
       It was three full minutes before the voice stopped, waiting for an answer Then all Grace said was, "Right away Mr, Eisman"-and she hung up.
       "Eisman?" Jerry blurted. "That couldn't be -- "
       "The great Moe Eisman of Dictator. In person. And a pretty excited person, too!"
       "What -- "
       "Tim's visiting at his sister's over the weekend. He said not to bother him unless something hot came up. What's her number?"
       Jerry tossed her the Brooklyn telephone directory. "What's Eisman want? Another of his hot-shot movie stars being blackmailed?"
       The redhead was spinning her dial with fingers that trembled visibly.
       "Blackmail could wait. Murder can't!"
       Jerry's jaw dropped.
       "Mur -- Say, somebody hasn't gone and gotten bumped off over at that jinxed studio?"
       "Somebody's gone and done just that!" She jerked her bright head back to the telephone. "Hello? Tim? ... Listen, it's Grace. There's a voodoo curse running wild out at Moe Eisman's studio. A guy named Dinty Boyd was killed this morning. Shall we stop by for you?"
       There was significant rust on the open gates of the old Dictator lot. Seven years is a long time in the movie game, but according to the papers those grilles had been shut since the last "take" on Eisman's ill-fated production of "The Voodoo Vow."
       Just outside them, a little caretaker's bungalow looked newer than the rest of the plant. Grace had only a glimpse of its white clapboards and green shutters, as the agency's black sedan roared past it.
       At the gates, a uniformed attendant was waiting with hand lifted to stop them. The sedan slowed as Jerry pressured the brakes. Big Tim, on the other side of the redhead, glared like an outraged lion full into the scarred face of the watchman.
       "We're expected," he growled.
       "Orders not to let anybody in but police and the company," the studio employee answered firmly. "There's been trouble here."
       "Yeah. Trouble about a stiff named Boyd." Tim flashed the identification badge cupped in the palm of his hand. "Eisman sent for me."
       Instantly the man's manner changed. He stood aside.
       "Beg pardon, Mr. Noonan. I took you for reporters. Only expected one of you." His voice was deep and resonant, like a radio announcer's.
       The disapproving word "reporters" rang out good and clear. Jerry nudged the redhead in high glee. Time was when the Evening Banner had known no better "sob sister" than Grace Culver.
       "Mr. Eisman's in his office, Mr. Noonan," the guard informed. "First bungalow on your left inside the lot, He's waiting for you."
       Big Tim signaled and his young assistant drove on. When the brakes squealed again, it was before the painted front of the building the guard had indicated. A placard above the entrance further identified it with the name:
       M E. EISMAN.
       The agency trio tramped up the steps, with the grizzled chief a step in the lead. He jabbed a rusty button. Inside, a bell warned metallically. The door opened. A thin, horse-faced young man with the look of a secretary stood inside, nervously inquiring.
       "Timothy Noonan to see Mr. Eisman!" The giant ex-police inspector's boom seemed to blast the little fellow back into the bungalow's cool interior. Moe Eisman's callers followed.
       At a desk between the two windows of the office's far wall, the producer himself was turning toward them. Bald, flabby, the Hollywood tycoon lumbered forward eagerly. His florid face was marked by worry. Purple patches rimmed his glazed eyes.
       "Thank heavens you have come, yet! For eight hours already, the village police tear up my studio! They find nothing. Now I send for you. My company gets maybe in such a panic I should have a walk-out, unless your agency finds me who killed poor Boyd."
       Big Tim took the floor.
       "This Dinty Boyd-who was he? Work here?"
       Eisman nodded. "Sure, sure! Nobody, only they got business in 'Love Locked Out,' has set a foot on the lot. Dinty was my gaffer. He -- "
       "Gaffer?"
       "Our chief electrician, Mr. Eisman means," interpreted the secretary's timid voice, somewhere in the background. "It's studio slang, sir."
       "I get it. Go on. What happened to him?"
       "Must be it early this morning. Six o'clock, maybe. Dinty was alone on the sound stage, working on wires. We got people called for to-morrow, Sunday work on account of Dore is in this Broadway show and only got mornings and Sundays to give me. It must've shot from behind of him, up on the grid where we got overhead lights banked."
       Noonan jerked forward.
       "Boyd was shot, then?"
       Eisman nodded until his fat jowls shook. Then the movement checked. He had thought of something else.
       "But not by a bullet, no! It was a blow-gun arrow, poisoned like-like sometimes they use in voodoo tribes! Mr. Noonan, I ain't a superstitious man-but -- "
       "Never mind the zombie stuff. Miss Culver here told me that witch-curse yarn the papers dug up. Blow-guns take a pair of real lungs, like an automatic takes a real trigger finger. Let's see the sound stage."
       Eisman led the way out of the bungalow. But as his squatty bulk plodded forward, miserable words piped over a thickset shoulder to his followers' ears.
       "Only that Dore wouldn't budge a step from Broadway, never had I come back to this place! A square mile of safe million-dollar stages in Hollywood, and why should I? But no! I had to have Lulu Dore in my picture! I had to mess into them same jinx breaks like seven years ago! Ten times the salary I was paying that black devil, and it would have been cheap!"
       Stage 5, the faded paint above its dingy entrance indicated. But it was the only one in the long row that had even been unpadlocked. It was Stage 1, as far as the "Love Locked Out" company was concerned.
       The atmosphere of desertion hung heavily over Dictator's Maysville lot. Overgrown weeds had replaced its one-time grass. Windows of locked buildings were screened with dusty cobwebs. Late afternoon sunlight and the little knot of shirt-sleeved workers and uniformed police guards on Stage 5 did little to liven up the barn-like enclosure.
       "Where'd you find Boyd?" Big Tim queried.
       Eisman led him around a section of erected canvas scenery that seemed to represent one end of a banquet hall. Dead ahead, the blank brick wall of the enclosed stage was pocked with doors that stood like a row of shadows on guard.
       "Right-here!"
       The movie mogul stopped on a spot not a dozen feet from one closed door. Instinctively, the trio from the agency glanced down. There was a blue chalk mark on the hard, bare floor to show where the murdered "gaffer" had fallen. Big Tim turned. Behind the painted canvas set, and a good two yards nearer the rafters, a skeleton iron runway like a fire escape flanked the heavy pipes from which large, unlighted multiple-arc lamps, of the type known as "ash cans" were swung.
       "That's where the blow-gun artist stood? Up there on the catwalk?"
       "Must have, the angle the arrow hit," Eisman nodded, his froggy eyes blinking.
       "Tim."
       The interruption came from the redhead at the grizzled agency chief's elbow.
       "Tim, Boyd was shot in the back, according to Mr. Eisman. Doesn't that add up?"
       Noonan frowned.
       "Huh? Sure it adds. The guy on the catwalk was no spook and couldn't risk being seen. So he waited till Boyd was headed away from him before -- Hey! Now I get you!"
       He lunged forward eagerly, gray eyes ablaze. Four scant yards lay between that blue-chalked X and a door in the thick brick wall. And on the steel panel, in painted letters that had been white six years ago, were the words: ELECTRICAL SUPPLIES-SUPPLEMENTARY STOREROOM.
       "He was heading for that door!" the big detective bellowed. "You're right, Redsie! Whoever dropped him-didn't want him to get there. It's locked. Where're your keys, Eisman?"
       Panting after him, the flabby mogul looked blank.
       "Boyd-he had the caretaker's set. They-they wasn't found on him this morning, though."
       "No duplicates?"
       Eisman's head shook.
       "Too long it's been locked up. By to-morrow, maybe, I could get -- "
       "To-morrow's too late. If those keys were worth lifting, I want to see what's inside that store room, right now!"
       From a shoulder holster, the brawny ex-inspector drew a revolver that seemed dwarfed in his big hand.
       Tim stood back a pace from the storeroom door, leveled the gun and pressed the trigger.
       An explosion, just loud enough to attract every worker on. the big stage, shivered the metal panel.
       Noonan snatched for the doorknob, twisted it. As the door jerked forward, halves of its shattered lock clattered to the cement floor.
       "Now we'll get at whatever your zombie didn't want Boyd to find!"
       They went over the threshold, Grace and Jerry at Big Tim's heels, with the studio employees and their stuttering boss crowding behind. The redhead and her seasoned chief caught at the same eloquent detail with the same soft breath.
       "Footprints!"
       The supply room was a windowless brick cell, illuminated from a glass skylight and the open door. Rolls of insulated wire were stacked along its walls, covered with the grime of long disuse. Nothing else, except two empty crates for plugs, was visible. The dust lay thick over everything, including the floor-and it was there that the footprints showed.
       Two sets of recent male tracks, an average size shoe, were easily traceable. One trail led from the door to an open, empty crate in the far right corner. The other led back again to the door.
       Jerry Riker grunted in disgust.
       "Shucks! Boyd was in here once, after all. Took away some plugs. There goes your theory, Redsie. It was cute while it lasted."
       The redhead smiled thinly.
       "It's still cute."
       "But -- "
       "Mr. Eisman, it's true, isn't it, that every technician who works on a sound set in movie-making wears rubber soles to kill any noise the sound tracks aren't supposed to record?"
       Moe Eisman blinked.
       "Sure! You bet! Nothing but rubber."
       Grace met Jerry's puzzled glance. "Leather soles with hard heels made those marks, Bright Eyes. Which means that it wasn't Boyd but our murdering voodoo zombie pal who used those missing keys to get in here, and then -- "
       Faint but sharp, a distant sound cut across her excited explanation. There was a quality of stark horror in it that jerked every one of the scant dozen in the group erect.
       The cry trembled from outside, in through the foul air of the supply room like a scream from hell.
       "Help!"
       Big Tim's feet were pounding the hard floor of the sound stage before his red-headed assistant shook off the freezing terror of that shout enough to dive into action.
       Hard on her chief's heels, she raced across the big barn in the direction where daylight showed beyond the huge sliding doors. She was abreast of him when they reached the relative brilliance of the open lot.
       That eerie yell had come from somewhere near Stage 1, at the end of the row. Noonan and Grace plowed toward it, trained instinct guiding them through the weedy lawn that once had been a carefully kept-up picture plant.
       The late light slanted from behind the last stage, throwing a blotchy purple shadow toward the oncoming detectives. And huddled at the rim of the unobstructed radiance lay what they were racing toward.
       A crumpled shape-a man scarcely more than a boy-sprawled limply among the weeds. His face, turned skyward, was distorted with terror, jaw rigid, eyes bulging. Like a giant grinning mouth, a gash clear across his throat was spewing blood in a terrible, swift tide. From the brutal wound, where it had been sunk almost to its hilt, a queer, primitive dagger protruded.
       As Grace went down on her knees at the boy's side, she could hear their racing followers thrash to a horror-choked standstill in the undergrowth at her back. Moe Eisman's breathless whimper panted words of recognition.
       "Oh! Bill Daley, it is! Is-is it that he -- "
       "Dead," the girl from Noonan's pronounced quietly. She had seen death strike often enough before in her private detective career. But there was something so wantonly savage in the attack on this good-looking kid, that it left her silent.
       "Daley? Who's Daley?" Tim rapped. "My camera punk. Assistant camera man, that means," one of the shirt-sleeved workers spoke up. "I'm Ziegler, the camera chief. I sent Bill over here to look over the stock, maybe half an hour ago."
       "Stock?" Tim cut in. "What stock?" "All the photographic stuff Dictator didn't ship west when they shut down here is stored on Stage 1. Maybe some things we could fix up, instead of buying new. Bill is-was-good at that kind of tinkering."
       Looking up from the dead boy's side, Grace saw her employer's grizzled brows draw together. He queried:
       "The kid was alone?"
       "Sure. We got only a small crew. All the rest were on Stage 5, working with me, when you blew that supply room door."
       Tim bent slowly, squinting down at the knife plunged into its ghastly crimson sheath. He had made no move to enter Stage 1; seemingly because the two local police in the crowd had jurisdiction and had gotten on the Job already.
       But Grace realized, from intimate knowledge of the older man's methods, that he had taken in the whole layout and figured search to be a waste of time.
       "Funny kind of a knife. Looks like one of those native machetes from-from some place like Haiti."
       He straightened decisively.
       "There's a print of that voodoo movie you made somewheres around the studio, Eisman?"
       The paste-colored face of the terrified executive twitched in stuttering acknowledgment.
       "Like all white elephants-sure!"
       "And a projection room, of course?"
       Again Eisman nodded.
       "I want you to have it run through for my two assistants. Right away." He turned to Grace. "There is a tie-up some place, I don't know what you'd best look for. But give that Ik-la-Whoosit a good once-over, anyways."
       He strode off purposefully, on some errand of his own. Neither of his helpers followed. They had their orders.
       The redhead met Jerry Riker's eyes unsmilingly.
       "Well-here's your chance to take me to a Saturday movie," she said.
--------
       *THE VOODOO VOW*
       The darkness of the tiny, unadorned cubbyhole flickered as that out-dated picture's title flashed on the screen. Tinny and hard, the voices of the early "talkie" rasped from the screen as the opening sequence slid on.
       A native dive in Ornoa. Villainous-looking extra people crowded the bar, lounged at tables, chanted with the weird native orchestra. The scene narrowed down to one table.
       Two white men, in spotless linen, were talking. An elderly English character actor and a young, almost too handsome chap Grace remembered vaguely as Barit Tyson. He had been a promising second lead, once. Since the coming of talkies, she couldn't remember having seen him.
       The Englishman, sardonically amused, said, "So you don't believe in our voodoo magic, eh? Well, Bob, if you'd been here long enough to see the things I have -- "
       Tyson, interrupting, said, "Magic? Mumbo Jumbo, you mean."
       Just four words. But Grace straightened quickly in her hard chair. Ugly voice? It was deep and appealing, even in those first crude days of recording. Barit Tyson had been a talkie natural!
       The Englishman's line, emphasized by a curt nod of the head, was, "Yes? Glance over there, then, my friend. See that man near the door?"
       The camera trucked across the noisy, vicious crowd, once more to show the dive's battered entrance. A black man, tall but emaciated, crouched there.
       He looked like a black skeleton draped in tattered rags. Sunk deep in their sockets, burning eyes stared out from the screen with a fanatic madness that was no act. Ik-la-Duk, the antagonized witch doctor!
       "Golly!" Grace breathed in Jerry Riker's ear. "If that face was haunting me with any curse, I'd give up quick! Eisman picked the wrong baby to fight with about salary."
       "The first big mistake was ever letting him get out of Haiti."
       Reel by reel, "The Voodoo Vow" went on with its story of love under the dark menace of zombies and demon visitations. Tyson, as the unbeliever, was tortured and driven mad himself amid the tropical jungles that once had bloomed artificially in the Maysville studio.
       Jerry grunted suddenly.
       "That knife there! See it in the zombie's hand? It's a dead ringer for the one the throat-ripper used on that poor Daley kid!"
       Grace nodded grimly, Fifty minutes of sitting in the dark and watching this witch stuff, and you began to wonder.
       Could some dark spirit actually be hovering malignantly over this long-closed movie lot? Could that legendary curse of Ik-la-Duk be anything more than tommy-rot to fill the gossip columns?
       The terrified producer, she knew, really believed in it. Two men had already been butchered, in the same day and for no sane reason, as soon as the "haunted" lot was reopened. Both weapons used were native devices. And why would any human murderer have picked them; and how come into possession of them?
       "I wonder," she muttered in the darkness, under cover of the wailing voodoo death chant that emanated from the screen, "whatever became of Barit Tyson?"
       Moe Eisman was getting ready to leave his office for the day when the little redhead from Noonan's agency appeared on the office bungalow's doorstep. The mogul's car was waiting, and in his eyes lurked something that said he didn't at all like to be in this particular spot after dark.
       But the girl detained him with a grin.
       "Well, Miss-Miss Culver?"
       "I won't keep you a minute, Mr. Eisman. But 'The Voodoo Vow' got me to remembering Barit Tyson. I thought maybe you'd know why he dropped out of pictures? Where he is now?"
       The seemingly unimportant question had hounded her, for some reason, to the extent of bringing her here. Yet, despite its insistence, she was unprepared for the way Eisman took it, for the popping of his frightened eyes and the visible chill that racked him.
       "Oh! You should ask me now about poor Tyson! It was that no-good of a monkey devil that did it! Just like now he kills off good workers like Boyd and Daky and -- "
       "Did what?" Grace gasped. "Did Barit Tyson die here, before you closed the lot seven years ago?"
       "Better he should've! Such a box office! Such a draw with the women! Only two days and we'd have finished shooting the picture. And it had to happen to Tyson!"
       The redhead's brown eyes glinted.
       "But what happened, Mr. Eisman?"
       "A charge of powder is supposed to blow up the witch doctor's hut, for the fadeout."
       "Yes?"
       "Gives it a defective fuse, gives it voodoo monkeyshines, I don't know. She goes up two minutes too soon. Like a beefsteak, Tyson's face turned out. Scars! Burns!"
       "So that's why he had to leave the screen?" Grace exclaimed softly. "Poor devil. Where is he now?"
       Eisman shrugged.
       "To fire him is a crime. He's no more good in pictures. So I give a job as watchman here. I build him a nice bungalow. Still he stays on. It was Tyson let you onto the lot, this afternoon."
       Barit Tyson, the scarred gateman? But it was true. That deep voice of his was what she had been remembering all through the voodoo picture. Grace's heart began to pound.
       Eisman, turning away, was scurrying into his limousine. She caught at his elbow.
       "Mr. Eisman, shooting on 'Love Locked Out' begins in the morning, doesn't it?"
       "Heaven help me-yes!-if we have no troubles."
       Grace smiled.
       "Fine. I'll be on deck. I'm working for you, Mr. Eisman. I'm an actress."
       The producer's face registered despair.
       "Listen. Actresses I've got. Sure, you're pretty! Sure, you got personality But now you're in steady work. The movies is no place for a nice sweet -- "
       "I'm an actress-for one day only." Grace's voice was firm, "My name's Olga-Olga Egloff. What clothes do I wear? Oh, and you don't know me. Catch wise?"
       Mr. Eisman blinked down at her stupidly. Then, slowly, he caught wise.
       The Sunday morning sun was cut off from Stage 5 when the heavy doors rolled shut against it. But the big barn was bathed in a dozen-fold better job of lighting than nature had provided the previous afternoon. Arc lights and "ash cans" glared whitely overhead. Small spots-"pickles"-played from the sides.
       The "herder," one of a mess of assistant directors, was collecting his costumed extra people on the set. Ziegler, head cameraman, standing on a box, was training the camera on the pretty blonde who was "standing in" for Lulu Dore.
       "Hit the baby!" somebody shouted.
       A little Russian actress, with coal-black hair twisted in a heavy braid around her head, turned curious sherry-colored eyes on a girl who had shared her make-up mirror an hour before.
       "What do they mean, 'Hit the baby'?"
       The girl laughed.
       "It's studio for 'Turn on the spotlight'. They're ready for Dore now."
       Before Grace could make further conversation, the costumed mob fringing the lighted set fell back. It was Dore, the French prima donna, sweeping in with a blaze of emeralds.
       At her heels trotted a stunted man-almost a dwarf, but with bull-like shoulders. He carried a littered tray.
       "That's Waxy Lubin with her," the girl at Grade's side confided. "Greatest make-up man in the show business! But he'd never leave New York. He retired when Dictator's Eastern studio was closed, until now Eisman hires him back.
       "They call him 'Waxy'-because he can wax in wrinkles and lines till the oldest living citizen looks like an infant! Why, one time Waxy -- "
       But Gracie's new-found friend was talking to thin air-for the redhead had disappeared into the crowd.
       Grace waited, crouching low in the tall weeds, until the doors to Stage 5 had rolled shut for the last time. They were ready for the first "take" now. The whole studio would be busy inside.
       Slowly she approached the open gate, where a thinning line of hopefuls still wheedled Barit Tyson for admission. Her costume and grease paint made her conspicuous in the bright sunlight. Her knees were unsteady. She'd never tried to fool an actor before.
       "Hey! What are you doing off the set?"
       A step inside the gates, she gave Tyson's scar-ugly face the full voltage of her big eyes. She was no scared greenhorn now. She was Egloff, the great Russian dancer; and regal enough to make Lulu Dore look humble.
       "I am Egloff. I do not dance until ze dinnair scene ees fini."
       Tyson stared down at her. His brooding eyes seemed to spark to life, cruel and still handsome in their ruined frame. She flicked an addressed, stamped envelope between careless fingers.
       "I take ze walk to ze vil-lage and post my lettaire. You let me in again, yes, no? Bien!"
       She swept past him, conscious of the boring of bright orbs into her retreating back. Heart pounding, she passed the caretaker's white cottage and rounded a bend in the road that led down a short hill and so into rural Maysville.
       Then, leaping like a cat, she was across a shallow ditch and screened by roadside underbrush.
       Slowly, moving with infinite care, she wormed back undercover toward the rear corner of that unimpressive bungalow in the shadow of the studio fence. Its windows, dead ahead of her, looked blank. But if her hunch wasn't a million miles off, that dwelling wasn't empty.
       Voodoo? Curse-devils, killing for a witch-doctor's vengeance? Not by a long shot! Not after what Dixie had spilled about Waxy Lubin!
       So a one-time star had been content for six years with a gatekeeper's job, had he?-and no suits for damages against Dictator, either. And at the same time, the East's ace make-up man had retired, refusing to go to Hollywood?
       Hadn't the "voodoo devils" left the Dictator lot unhaunted, as long as nobody tried to make a picture there? And hadn't Barit Tyson been in possession of the only set of keys to the buildings inside, until by Eisman's order they were turned over to unlucky Dinty Boyd?
       Grace flashed across the narrow strip of lawn that separated the rear of Tyson's bungalow from the tangled thicket overgrowing the slope below. Flat against the white wall, she edged toward the screen door that marked the kitchen entrance.
       Inside, as the knob of the wire panel materialized under her groping fingers, she heard the guttural mutter of voices. Two men were talking.
       They hunched over the kitchen table, like ghouls dabbling in gore as they ran their fingers through the little pile that glittered between them atop a square black box. Face pressed to the wire, the girl from Noonan's waited.
       Both of the thugs were gang-stamped. One, she recognized as a gun named "Butch" Pember, with his face on file at police headquarters. The other was a stranger, with the shrewd look of a fence about him.
       That pile on the box-which, Grace saw now, was a collapsed camera-sparkled like a haul from a jeweler's vault. Stolen jewels! So that was what Tyson had been hiding away, unmolested, in various safe places around the old studio!
       This looked like the end of a good many trails of unsolved Manhattan gem thefts.
       "Gee, but that young punk came near to settin' us in the hog-pen yesterday!" Butch confided. "Seems he got sent down to Stage 1 to rubber over the old equipment. First thing his eye lands on is this old color camera Tyson had the Chinese stones put away in,"
       "Yeah? That's maybe why I got the hurry-up call to come out here and move the stuff?"
       "Sure! Tyson just spotted this Daley goin' into the stage, Jake. Time he got there with a knife from the prop room, the kid was streakin' back to Ziegler with his find as happy as a pup with a bone. Boy, oh, boy, if they'd ever got that box opened up they'd 'a' seen plenty of color, all right!"
       Grimly, the girl from Noonan's remembered young Bill Daley's dead eyes staring with horror. And the native knife. She should have had that figured long ago,
       Tyson was the only studio employee with a key to the building where props used in "The Voodoo Vow" had been stacked away. Nobody else could have gotten at the bizarre weapons the killer had used-the machete and the blowgun.
       Inside, the men were beginning to shovel the stones back into their square black nest. Grace groped in the deep pocket of her Russian smock, fingers closing over the steely coldness of the midget automatic she carried there. "That's two narrow squeaks since this cursed picture crowd showed." Butch growled. "First was Boyd, all but walkin' in on the gold plate Ty had stacked in a crate of plugs. And him with Tyson's only keys, too!"
       Jake, the fence, kept on pushing away the "hot ice."
       "Seven years of breaks, you can't expect everything. With Tyson actin' any part from a pushcart guy to a visiting duke, and Waxy fixin' up his pan according, things ain't been too tough."
       Butch started a reply, then his voice broke into a startled grunt. Grace, automatic leveled to cover them, had eased the screen door open and started forward with stern purpose in her eyes.
       But that wasn't what warned Butch Pember. Behind the girl from Noonan's, a voice yelled sharply.
       "The dame! Watch her, boys!"
       Arms flung about the agency detective's slim shoulders, knocking down her gun hand with brute force. The automatic, springing from stunned fingers, leaped away like a jackrabbit. Before she could twist to meet the unexpected rear attack, she was pinioned helplessly in a grip of terrific power.
       Waxy Lubin's distorted face leered over her shoulder as she tried to turn.
       Panting, fighting like a hellcat, using sharp heels and writhing body, Grace battled to break that grip.
       But the malformed make-up man only croaked with malignant laughter. His long, apelike arms imprisoned her as relentlessly as steel bands.
       His subnormal height was the only weapon nature had handed her for a fight that left every other trick in the monster's stack. They stood eye to eye. Eeling in that wicked grip, Grace had twisted to partly face him. His hot breath blasted in her face.
       Her head thrust forward suddenly, like that of a striking snake. Small, strong teeth pinioned Lubin's bulbous nose between white rows-and clamped. They clamped hard.
       With a shriek of anguished astonishment, the ape-man let his powerful hands fly from their old grip to a belated defense. Grace whirled away from him.
       Like a catapulted bullet, she dove across the room toward the little automatic that glittered where it had fallen almost at Butch Pember's feet.
       A huge paw smacked flat across her chin with the power of a driven pistol. Butch had awakened from his amazement at Grace's attack.
       Off balance, Grace struggled to ward off a second descending clout from Pember's rock-ribbed fist. It landed just where he'd planned it to. Her jaw snapped back inches. Then she crumpled against him.
       Vaguely, she knew that she was being carried across the room. Sudden darkness enveloped her, and she heard a latch click. She was held erect by a strength not in her battered body-by the narrow walls of the closet, so close together that she couldn't fall.
       Far away, Lubin's voice said: "She can't get out of that, I'll get Tyson, see what he wants us to do."
       Five minutes must have passed, but Grace's jaw hadn't stopped throbbing any. Propping her pounding forehead against the wooden panel in front of her, she listened to the heavy thud of feet tramping into the kitchen outside. Tyson had arrived with Waxy.
       "Waxy says you caught a dame snooping." The deep, actorish voice paused significantly. "A dame with a rod."
       "Dame, hell! Didn't you pipe Waxy's schnozzle? That's a wild panther, that frill is!"
       Tyson chuckled, a sound as cold as the click of ice cubes.
       "Well, she's caged now. What she look like?"
       Butch Pember growled, "Russian, kind of. Black hair done up in a braid. It felt like a wig, though, maybe."
       "Wig?" There was a murderous new throb to the scarred actor's exclamation. "Say! She passed me. Dancer, she said. But I got her figured now! That's the dame from the Noonan Agency, the bonfire skirt."
       Grace, upright in her narrow prison, heard him pace up to the door, wheel and stride away again. There was scarcely space to shudder in the broom closet. She'd seen coffins that were roomier.
       "The studio's getting too hot. Too many cops, along with the dicks." Tyson paused only an instant. "The zombie's going to pull his last curse-right now!"
       "Huh?"
       "The poor, faithful watchman is going to lose his bungalow, By fire! Too bad that pretty little cutie has to burn. But that's how it is with a voodoo hex."
       He went on swiftly, his cold, deliberate voice outlining the steps of his hellish plan to cover all tracks.
       "Jake, you'll stay here. Stack rags, papers, wood from around the place against the broom closet. Douse 'em with gasoline and start a good blaze. Then grab the ice and the camera and scram. Later, when the crowd collects, you're a news photographer here after pictures. Hitch back to Maysville with the fire company or the cops, camera in the open. You won't be tracked that way."
       "O. K., chief." Jake sounded pleased.
       "You, Butch-you and Waxy and I are leaving, too. But not without that Dore's emeralds. On Stage 5, in about three minutes; the hex is going to show up plenty! Good luck, Jake."
       The heavy footfalls receded-three pairs of them. Then the screen door slammed. In the kitchen, Jake began to whistle softly.
       The noise of a table being dragged toward the broom closet door scraped menacingly across the scrubbed planks.
       Three minutes!
       Twisting frantically in the narrow space, the girl from Noonan's worked her arms aloft. When they were level with the heavy Russian braid atop her head, supple fingers went to work.
       They found what they were seeking quickly, settled down to the swift business of unplaiting the false black hair.
       "Here's where that Culver gal's last chance to stay uncooked takes the spotlight for fair!" she whispered grimly.
       In her eager fingers now was a little green pellet. It was one of Gracie's many crime-solving gadgets. A single wisp of string, protruding from it, unwound slowly out of the loosened braid. Gracie pressed the green "pill" into the keyhole of the closet door. A match, from a pocket of her smock, was lighted and the flame applied to the dangling string.
       "Well, redhead: Hit the baby!"
       The muffled boom, like a single drum beat, jerked Jake from the pile of rags he was gathering from a far corner of the kitchen.
       Spinning, he was in time to see the narrow door of the broom closet splinter open as if a mule had kicked it from inside. And right behind the door came a small, leaping figure made up of shredded clothing and a powder-blackened face.
       Jake let out one yell. Then he dove. And the dive was in the direction of a corner cabinet, where two guns-a businesslike army pistol and a midget automatic-lay cuddled together like sleeping lovers.
       That instinctive move was just what the girl from Noonan's was figuring on; just what her keen, brown eyes had been watching for. It located the weapons for her.
       Swerving, she bore down on the cabinet.
       Still dazed, Jake swung to attack her, He balanced hastily; and, as she flung herself abreast, leaped with a sprawling forward lunge. His fists flayed murderously.
       Spinning like a leaf on a whirlpool, Grace slid past the driving knuckles so close that they contacted her swaying braid. Back slammed to the corner cabinet, she thrust a lightning-swift arm behind her.
       Twisting, Jake lunged again. His eyes glittered wickedly. He left his feet in a direct dive, thrusting forward with all his weight and with telling speed. The space between him and the cornered girl closed like -- 
       Cra-ack!
       Scant inches from his prey, Jake jerked back as if a rope had caught him. A tiny black hole appeared between his eyes. Surprise, then terror, flickered over his pasty face.
       Sobbing softly, he buckled to his knees and slumped against an old black camera lying unheeded on the floor.
       Palmed gun still smoking, the girl from Noonan's leaped across him and sprinted for the kitchen screen.
       Stage 5 loomed ahead of her in the glaring noon light as she sped across the empty lot. The open gate had been unguarded. Barit Tyson was through playing watchman.
       The heavy roller doors were shut and locked for the "take" supposedly going on inside. But what must really be happening on that set was something Big Tim's helper flinched to think about.
       Panting, she drew up before the big barn. Directly in front of her, set into the huge roller door, was the regulation small-hinged one for the necessary passage of technicians during a "take." Had they thought to lock that on the inside? But she was praying Tyson had left it ready for a quick get-away.
       Automatic steady despite her jerky breathing, she thrust out for the latch left-handed. It moved under her clammy fingers! Sobbing with relief, Grace flung her whole weight against it. The panel gave. She hurtled forward-into inky darkness.
       The blaze of lights she had left on the busy Stage 5 had been blotted out. Blackness blanked the walls, the cameras, the catwalk and light grid.
       Dead ahead of her, one white spot gleamed from above like a devil's eye. Undiffused, it hit the gay canvas of the backdrop. And against the canvas, arms above heads, the "Love Locked Out" company huddled like sheep.
       The direct glare from above, pointed full into their eyes, blinded them. Staring into it, with various expressions of fear or baffled rage, Grace could, glimpse Ziegler, Lulu Dore, Big Tim, Jerry, Eisman. And it was hands up high for every one. Tyson's masterly surprise, depending only on blanked lights and fiendish speed, had caught them all!
       From the utter darkness behind the light, a deep, cold voice-the scarred killer's voice-was speaking:
       "All right, Miss Dore. Off with the emeralds. All of 'em! Hold them in front of you at arm's length. Now walk forward, toward my voice. You can't see me. I won't shoot unless -- "
       Grace ducked. An inch or so to her left, where the brief flash of light had shown as she whipped through the door, something whizzed past with the silken sigh a hurled knife makes, Butch Pember's shout followed it.
       "Boss! Somebody just came through the door -- "
       Up snapped the automatic in Grace's cold fingers. The trigger kicked daintily at her expert touch, and a little orange eye of flame winked once. It didn't wink in Pember's direction, though.
       There was a tinkle of shattering glass. The girl from Noonan's whirled back against the roller door and dropped to her knees, as the bullet-riddled spotlight sputtered out.
       Instant lead, pumped from two angles at once, snarled in the place where she had stood a split-second before.
       Somebody shouted: "Cops!"
       Feet thudded across the stage, running frantically. Women screamed. Tim's warning yell split the tumult: "It might be Redsie, Jerry! Don't shoot unless-" The hammer of racing feet drew nearer, nearer, nearer -- 
       Still crouching, Grace swung to face the spot where the small hinged door would offer the crooks their only out. Nothing to do but wait. Her jaw was set.
       Suddenly, light appeared. A square of garish high noon showed, against which three backs in seething, crowded motion were outlined sharply. They had closed in on the exit together. Now Tyson was shoving back Butch Pember. Waxy Lubin was crowding into Tyson.
       "Stop! Right there!"
       They didn't stop. Butch bellowed frantically. Waxy went down on one knee, flung backward by Tyson's shoulder. Grace clipped a single shot above their heads.
       "You get the next ones! I mean that!"
       She did, and they knew she did. The fact that she was there at their backs, instead of locked in a burning closet, argued coldly for her feeling about them. Up crept their arms. Rage, impotent hatred, showed in the set of their backs; but not one of them tried out that move they had been warned against.
       Grace lifted her voice.
       "Lights, please! There are your zombies, Mr. Eisman; and you'll find the real curse in a camera over at the watchman's bungalow. Let's have a look at 'em. There's plenty of arcs and what-not for somebody to turn on around the place, even if one of my slugs did have to-er-hit the baby!"
--------
         *PHANTOM PIRATE*
       The redhead peered across the rail into a night fog like gray velvet, and listened to the muffled slap of waves far below her.
       "Many brave souls lie asleep in the deeep," Jerry Riker mourned noisily. "So be-ware, bee-ee-ware!"
       The girl grunted.
       "Always the tactful little flatfoot! Davy Jones's locker is just the thought to leave with the last of the merry-makers, as they pull for the shore. The Riker touch!"
       On the tossing black water directly underneath, the last ship-to-shore launch for the evening had nosed alongside the looming hulk of Willy Tizner's anchored Golden Galleon. The big gambling boat-a reclaimed ocean liner-lowered over the smaller craft like a duck on a frog pond, rising and falling with the swell.
       Overside, the last of Tizner's departing patrons began climbing down the stairs to meet their power motor ferry for the choppy miles in to shore. Tipsy shouts echoed back up the metal wall.
       "There goes Wanda Sylvester," red-headed Grace Culver indicated absently. "She's with that phony Count de Villo again to-night."
       "Yeah. Couldn't see either of 'em for the dame's heirloom emeralds, though. She's going to get badly bruised if that six-foot-something husband of hers ever catches wise to them. He ain't the kind that fools."
       "Gentle like a bull, you hear."
       The motor launch, loaded with its final batch of gamblers and dancers, was nosing away from the Galleon's side as she spoke. Its prow knifed the drifting fog and vanished, pulling the crowded cabin after it into oblivion.
       Grace yawned.
       "Let's go inside and see if Tom's finished telling Tizner that the Noonan Detective Agency wants none of his ill-gotten gold."
       The Galleon's ornate saloon seemed strangely deserted as they tramped back into it. Half an hour before, it had been filled with a chattering, well-dressed, hilarious mob.
       But since she had come aboard an hour ago, the redhead had been too busy wondering what Tizner would offer "Big Tim" to more than notice any of them. In the early hours of the afternoon, lean, dapper Wally had sauntered into the Agency's office-and had gotten as far as saying he had a job for them that meant money. Real money. Then Tim Noonan's gruff rumble had interrupted.
       "I don't mix in on but one side of the law, Wally."
       "My Galleon's a hundred per cent legal, that far off shore."
       "Sure. But it's probably still no go."
       "Listen, Tim, have I ever been caught pulling a raw one? You'd snap up a case like this, if it was ashore. A little salt water doesn't make it crooked."
       In the end, they had compromised.
       The Agency trio was to come out that night as guests of the management. They were to look the gambling ship over while it was running full tilt. Then Wally would make his proposition. If Tim still thought the deal shady, it was off and no hard feelings.
       "Wonder what Tizner wants us to do for him?" mused Grace. "Do you suppose Tim's changed his mind?"
       "I should play guessing games!" Jerry scoffed.
       There were only three figures left near the long bar that extended across one entire end of the big room-two at the rail and one behind the counter wiping glasses. The girl's sherry-brown eyes took in the full expanse of carved mahogany.
       "It's a fair night's take," the gambling ship's owner was admitting.
       "Thirty thousand, up or down. Hey, there, Miss Culver-Riker! Tell Sandy what you're drinking. Tim likes my Scotch."
       "Make it two."
       "Make it three."
       They stood in line. Wally shoved a fat canvas bag across the slab to his bar-keep. "Sandy," also the trusted after closing cashier, opened a wall safe midway of the bottle-covered shelves behind him-a safe masked by a good racing print framed in narrow red.
       "Lousy spot for a till, Wally," Big Tim observed, between sips. The man in the apron slid the print in place again.
       "Right public."
       "Sure. That's my notion. Not so easy to try a holdup during business hours, with two hundred witnesses in the room."
       "How about after closing?"
       "When I leave at night, the bag goes ashore with me. Sandy guards it, like now, while I go over the books."
       Tim stared into his glass.
       "Just where would this fancy watchman's job for us fit in?"
       "Mostly for this slack hour after closing every night. I'm absolutely legal, Tim. But I get darn little, protection, this far out-in case anything happens."
       "Anything likely to?"
       "I-well, I've had some ugly threat notes this past week. I can't take chances. One haul, like to-night, might ruin me."
       Big Tim grinned, tipped back his lion-sized head to swallow.
       "You couldn't take thirty G's on the chin and live? With a plant like this floating palace?"
       "Thirty G's, sure!" Wally Tizner's eyes met the veteran detective's. "But not a quarter million more than that."
       "A quarter of -- Hey!"
       "I know what I told you, Tim. The thirty are my own cut. But often times I have to accept customers' stuff as security. It's not mine. If a crook lifted something big, I could be sued for my shirt."
       It was Grace who asked the next question.
       "Like to-night, you said?"
       Tizner picked up the dog-eared ledgers Sandy had dragged from under the bar.
       "Like to-night. Ever hear of the Sylvester emeralds? Sure you have! One of the best necklaces in New York. It's in that bag!"
       "Whew!" Jerry whistled.
       "Exactly. Whew! Security for a gambling loss not a tenth of its value. To-morrow, I'll receive the cash from Mrs. Sylvester and turn back the jewels. But figure my spot if anything happened to 'em."
       He smiled tightly, turned from the bar with his heavy books.
       "Well, let me know what you three decide. I'll be in my cabin with the ledgers. Sandy'll see to your drinks."
       The saloon's swinging doors closed behind him. Grace looked at Tim. Tim looked at Jerry. Sandy moved discreetly away down the bar, leaving them clear for their powwow.
       "How about it, Tim?" Jerry asked.
       "Wally acts like he's scared, all right. A gambler doesn't scare easy. But -- I think he's worried."
       Across Tim's thoughtful words, the muffled putt-putt of an auxiliary motor drifted in from the foggy night. It was time for the launch to be getting back from shore for them.
       "I'd be plenty scared myself," said Jerry slowly, "with that much green lightning in my till."
       "Those threat notes," Grace mused. "Read any of 'em, Tim?"
       The grizzled head shook slowly.
       "Not yet. Time for that if we -- "
       "Reach for the rafters, you!"
       The cold voice whispered its command, low and harsh, from somewhere behind. It wasn't the kind of voice you played games with. It was a sound with sudden death behind it.
       Wheeling, the Agency trio lifted their arms up straight. Grace caught a sidelong glimpse of Sandy as she turned. The freckled barkeep was already facing the swinging doors -- and his eyes were bulging like golf balls. Sandy was scared at what he saw. Plenty scared.
       And with good reason. The man at the door was -- five men! And they were men without faces! As they lurked in the shadows -- four spread in a line at the doors and the leader braced against the boat's roll a few steps ahead -- there seemed to be blank spaces between their upturned collars and their pulled-down caps.
       The realest thing about them was the five stubby guns that covered the big room. Those guns "meant business". The weapon in the leader's hand held on his victims without a quiver.
       "Line up, you!" The hoarse, deadly whisper that served him for a voice only added grimly to the fantastic effect of the man from the fog. "That's the way! Flat against the bar! I'm not fooling!"
       Nor was he. The three trained detectives could tell killers from bluffers like a layman could tell red from green. And that voice belonged in the killer class. His speed attack had caught them where he wanted them. A reach for a gun would be a reach for a coffin.
       The trio lined up.
       "That's it!" The "Whisperer" chuckled his satisfaction. "Now! Two of you boys behind me scram out to the rail where we came over. Take care of any of this tub's deck crew that show from below. Two of you stay as is. You dicks keep hanging onto the sky. And you -- you behind the bar -- get busy on the safe!"
       At her shoulder, Grace could hear the breath sob along Sandy's fear-tightened throat. But the little fellow was game. He kept his head, fighting for his chief's property.
       "Safe's outside in the office, fella. If -- if you j-just let me go in there -- "
       The cold chuckle sighed through the tense stillness again. There was no humor in it. The man took a step forward, and the redhead saw suddenly what had happened to his, to all of their faces.
       She whistled softly. They wore black silk stockings pulled over their heads -- masks so sheer they could see out easily, yet without the slightest chance of detection!
       "Quit stalling, mug! The safe's right there behind you -- back of that picture of the horse race. I've been coming here night after night for more than my health. Come on! Let's see you move!"
       The creak of floorboards back of the bar spelled Sandy's movement. It was slow and grudging -- but it was toward the safe.
       The Whisperer advanced slowly. His gun covered the line-up, and against the wall behind him the two remaining guards made it three grim muzzles with the same purpose.
       "Snap it up, there! I want that sack Tizner stows his jack in. And I want it fast!"
       The combination clinked under Sandy's Fingers. Grace could hear the little grunt of satisfaction from the masked pirate ahead of her, as the steel panel swung open.
       Then came the thud of the small canvas bag striking on polished mahogany, and the forward slice of the Whisperer's arm as he readied. And then -- 
       From somewhere back of the bar, Sandy must have scooped up a secreted revolver -- with more desperate courage than good common sense.
       A yell of warning bellowed from the thugs near the door, and they charged. As the girl from Noonan's ducked, a roar like the end of Time blasted the tense silence of the Galleon's gaudy gaming room.
       The floor was the place to be when the line of fire was almost directly through you and when there was a service automatic to be fished out of a closed evening purse, in split-seconds.
       The semi-protection of a chair loomed in front of her as the redhead's fingers ripped at the catch of her bag. Feet thudded the floor. She saw Tim leap back. Jerry grab toward his shoulder holster. Somebody screamed.
       Across the table that belonged to her chair, one of the thugs dove in a foot-first plunge that landed him on his heels at Jerry's side a fractional instant before the dick could get his gun free. The masked tough didn't hesitate.
       As "Big Tim's" assistant ducked -- too late -- a clubbed gat took him alongside the ear with all the force of the man's deadly plunge. Jerry's gray eyes blanked.
       He slumped toward the masked man. His assailant sidestepped, and the young detective crashed into the table, overturning it. He limped, slumped to the floor, fingers still clawing. Grace couldn't see what was happening to Tim himself. The fancy clasp on her bag, a Christmas gift with the habits of most of them, had picked the wrong time to jam. Dynamite wouldn't blast it.
       She dropped the purse suddenly, and flung her trim, hard body in a low dive for the legs of the lead pirate. They were spread wide a scant yard away from her.
       That might have worked, if Sandy had still been in action. But after that one shot -- it had fanned from the Whisperer's weapon, not the barkeep's -- there had been no movement behind the mahogany.
       The nearest of those feet, cased in a. square-toed fisherman's boot, rose to meet her as she tackled football fashion. The Whisperer knew something about the game himself, it seemed.
       Especially about punts. He made a beauty, with the redhead's jaw as the pigskin. There was power like a mule's in that kick. She was hoisted clear out of the line of her tackle.
       Back against the brass rail, she hurtled. Orange fire blotted out the room, spreading over everything in a jiggling screen. Grace's outflung arms flapped like a pair of loose sails and contacted nothing.
       The thud of running feet pounded through her reeling consciousness. She heard a shout, followed by the click of metal in metal. The swift hammer of heels on wood diminished along the deck outside. She shook her battered head, moaning.
       Instantly, a big hand found hers. Her eyes opened looking into Tim's. He drew her to her feet with a gentleness unexpected in a grizzled, rough-and-ready police veteran like Timothy Noonan.
       "All in one piece, Redsie?"
       "Sure! But -- but where -- "
       "They took us, alright. One of 'em got to my gun ahead of me and kept me covered. Jerry's out from a crack on the skull, but he's coming around. And Sandy -- "
       Sandy spoke for himself -- too well. Grace saw with a sick shudder the significant limpness with which the stocky, aproned figure was sprawled against his bar. One arm was outflung across the counter, fingers still clutching stiffly as if for his unused weapon; and his bloody head lolled against it. There wasn't much left of his face.
       "Poor devil! Where are they?"
       "Got clear, with Jerry's gun and mine and the barkeep's. And we're locked in. They fixed the door from the outside."
       As if to emphasize the helplessness of the situation, the mocking putt-putt-putt of a motor coughing to life lifted from the water under the ship's side. The pirates were making good on their get-away.
       Grace shouted.
       "My bag, Tim! There's an automatic in it! We can't let 'em hand us this big a berry!"
       The gift clasp, even in Tim's awkward fingers, worked perfectly now that it was almost too late. He had his red-beaded assistant's weapon in his hands while she still was talking. Like a misshapen greyhound, his massive body streaked across the room.
       Cra-ack!
       The shot splintered wood where it would do the most good, and another followed on its heels as quick as the veteran Agency chief's trigger finger could twitch.
       Grace, having reassured herself with a glance at the slowly reviving Jerry, was at the big man's shoulder when the shattered metal fragments of the lock rattled onto the deck outside.
       Through the battered swinging doors Big Tim plunged, with the redhead behind him. Fog, thicker than ever, blotted out the open deck so that it was invisible more than a few feet ahead. Instinct and memory had to guide him to the rail.
       Below, somewhere in the swirling gray cotton, the roar of the auxiliary motor began to draw away. Side by side at the rail, leaning over the Galleon's black side, the pair from the Agency strained their eyes for a glimpse of the escaping pirates. The fog was even gray, with no solid shadows moving in it.
       Flame sprouted twice from the automatic extended in Tim's hand. But he was shooting blind and his target must know it. The defiant roar of the motor, never slacking, grew fainter. The Whisperer was gone.
       "He -- he foxed us, Tim!"
       "Yep."
       They looked each other in the eye. "Tizner's launch will be plenty late, trying to find the Galleon in this pea soup. And that's the only way we could chase 'em, Redsie."
       "That's out, all right. Hey! Tizner! What about him?"
       They wheeled together, lurching up the obscured deck at a stumbling run. In crew quarters below, the racket might have been muffled. But the owner's cabin lay forward on the saloon deck.
       Where was Wally? Why hadn't the shots, the yells, the unmasked motor of the escaping launch, brought him into the picture?
       They readied the door marked PRIVATE, elbow to elbow. It stood open. Tim shoved across the high step, checked sharply, stood aside to let the girl behind him see.
       There lay an answer to their unspoken question. Wally Tizner, lean and elegant in his evening clothes, lay writhing weakly at the edge of the carpet. A chair was overturned near his desk. His ledgers looked like Florida after a hurricane. And blood, seeping from a jagged gash above the temple, was puddling the bare floor under the cabin's bunk with a dull drip-drip-drip.
       "Wally!"
       He moaned faintly. Then, with the slowness of effort, his puffy eyelids lifted. There was pain in every line of his twisted face as he struggled upward to one elbow.
       "Where-what -- "
       "It was a stick-up, Wally. Your 'crank' wasn't just writing notes to pass the time away. How'd they get you?"
       Tizner stiffened with understanding.
       "I was working over the books. Heard a step behind me. Turned. Something hit me. That's all. But you-you were on the job, Tim. They didn't get to the safe? They-those emeralds -- "
       "They're gone," Tim said slowly.
       "They can't be gone! I can't cover their value, Tim. It'll mean jail, if Mrs. Sylvester sues me! It-you saw the crooks, at least? You heard them talk? There's some clue?"
       There wasn't. Not a clue in a carload. Tim told him the story, glumly. Masked pirates. Unseen boat. Disguised whisper. Complete get-away. Tizner's lips twitched harder and harder with each disastrous detail.
       "Just like a wraith this guy was, Wally. Five wraiths. Nothing more tangible than that to check on."
       Tizner, still bleeding, shuddered.
       "But-but do something! Wireless the coast guard to watch all landings! Wireless my pier concession to send out speedboats all over the harbor! This blasted fog! Tim, you people can't walk out on me now!"
       "We don't aim to walk out," answered Timothy Noonan thoughtfully. "We aim to stand by until those stones get back where they belong. You needn't worry."
       No clues. No leads. A boatful of pirates and a fortune in cash and security gems vanished into nowhere! The wraith of Tim's figure of speech couldn't have done a better job on the lam.
       The afternoon sunlight, striking brightly through the office windows of the Noonan Detective Agency, made the whole fantastic holdup seem impossible. The night before couldn't have happened. And yet it had. Newsboys shouting now in the street below proved it had happened.
       "Read aft about it! 'Whispering Killer Murders And Robs On The High Seas! Floating Night Club Pirated!' Buy your papers here!"
       In the office, four people faced one another: the Agency's staff and its grim-eyed client. Wally, head swathed in bandages, sat opposite Big Tim and lighted one cigarette from the butt of another. Jerry strode the carpet, up and down. Grace sat at her desk in the corner like a red-headed statue.
       "There must be some way!" Tizner pleaded, for the hundredth time. "I kept the emerald angle away from the reporters this morning. But as soon as Wanda Sylvester hears the news, she'll be at my place wanting her stones. And if I can't produce -- "
       Tim shook his head.
       "We'll get these guys, in the long run. Every fence in town's being watched. When they try to dispose of the stuff, we'll have 'em. But that won't be to-day-nor to-morrow."
       "Isn't there any way -- "
       "Could you think of one?"
       Tizner couldn't. He rocked nervously in his chair, no longer the dapper gambler of yesterday. There was something like panic in his eyes.
       "I'm sunk! I'm ruined!"
       Jerry stopped pacing suddenly, while an idea seemed to catch up with him. He grinned. His fingers snapped.
       "Say! I've just been thinking. It's a funny thing they pulled this just the night your safe was fullest, huh? Almost looks as if Mr. Whisperer knew those stones would be there!"
       Tizner leaned forward quickly.
       "So?"
       "Who else could know they were left with you-except us and Sandy and the guy Mrs. Sylvester was with?"
       "Count de Villo?"
       "Count-nuts! He's got no more title than a goldfish! We've been wised to him before. One of those hand-kissing fakes that takes over Park Avenue women's bank accounts, that's all. It's just his kind that would go for swag like that."
       Wally Tizner chewed his underlip.
       "It does sound good. But-you never could hang it on him. He'll be alibied. He -- "
       Grace reached for the extension telephone on the corner of her desk. She had snatched up the thread of the idea in a fashion that startled even their Broadway-wise client. It was like watching the baton passed in a fast relay race.
       "I can fix that, gentlemen! It wasn't for nothing I spent my youth as a sob sister on the Banner." She was dialing the newspaper's number triumphantly. "There's still an hour before Clancey puts his five-star final to bed. Plenty of room for a fox trap on his front page."
       "Fox trap?"
       "Sure, Wally! It works this way. I tip of Clancey that I recognized a scar on the hand of one of those pirates and it put me wise to who he was. Also, that I'm going to be kept in your cabin on the Galleon and under guard, until the pinch has been made-so that I can't be gotten at to short-circuit my identification."
       The gambler's face was a perplexed study.
       "What good does that do?"
       "It brings the pirates back to the Galleon to-night to rub me out." She spoke into the instrument. "Hello. Banner? ... Give me the city desk."
       "But-but did you spot the scar?" Wally broke in.
       The redhead grinned.
       "If I didn't, we four are the only ones that know it. And cheese is as good a bait as any. They weren't wearing gloves. Can you imagine five guys that handy with guns, and not a mark on any one of them?"
       While Tizner digested that, she addressed the telephone again.
       "City desk? ... Clancey? ... Hello, Mongoose, this is Sergeant Culver's wonder child.... Listen, do you care who held up the Galleon last night? I can't name names till headquarters has run him in, but I know."
       Behind her, Wally snapped his fingers.
       "I get it! This wraith gent reads the story, falls for it, comes back to bag you-only we bag him! It's a swell idea!"
       "Clancey, here's your story," Grace was saying into the phone. "They're taking me out to the boat to-night for safe keeping.... Yeah, till I've identified a scar on the badman's paw.... Sure, sure, under guard ... Heck, go ahead and print it! They can't get me on the Galleon. Tizner himself will be part of my army -- "
       The fog was stealing in again. Horns tooted toward shore, bleak croaks in the gathering blanket.
       As the tender left the Galleon's side with another shore-bound load, the girl from Noonan's straightened from the railing and turned toward the boat's proprietor. Tizner had stuck by her like a guarding police dog all evening.
       "Almost the last load, Wally?"
       "Just about. Not much of a crowd to-night. That kind of publicity doesn't help this business any. Anyway, the whole world must know you're aboard under guard. What price chancing a slug if there's more trouble, my patrons would figure it. They don't want real thrills."
       Grace yawned.
       "Too bad you had to bring me out here before that Banner story hit the street. I'd like to see how thick old Clancey piled it on. I'll bet he made me sound plenty like a gal all set to tell all."
       "Good for Clancey! That ought to be enough 'cheese' for your trap."
       "Can't help being. If I had recognized that scar, as published on page one, our man De Villo wouldn't dare leave me alive to identify it. And only we four know it's a frame-up. So I'll begin to figure I'm guilty myself if nobody comes to-night."
       Thicker and thicker, the fog was swirling in. Whisps became columns and the columns veils. The launch had gone. Stars, shore and water had all blotted out. Grace shivered, listening to the hollow slap of waves against the hulk. She spoke.
       "Nights like this, wraiths seem almost a possibility, don't they?"
       "Well, I hope our wraith can read. He'll bump right into Tim and Jerry, hiding down there in their power boat, as he comes out from shore."
       "And when the shooting starts, what with your deck crew ready to go overside and help, he doesn't stand a chance!"
       Wally grinned.
       "You're leaving out that dainty box of dynamite on my desk that you're going to toss down on him from above, if we can't surround him."
       "That, too. This is a trap as is a trap. The count'll never break through. Well, maybe I'd better be getting to your cabin. Almost time."
       They walked companionably along the deck. The mist was not yet as thick as when the Whisperer had showed the night before. But it already blurred the saloon's yellow portholes to a row of dim yellow moons.
       "Here we are. I'll be standing right outside, Miss Culver, so don't you worry. Gee, it's almost too bad the masked marvel can't see you!"
       "Why?"
       "All dressed up this way, you're sure something! Those diamond clips, and the sapphire pin, and the long earring dangles and -- "
       "They're all phonies. And you're beginning to talk like Jerry Riker. So"-she gave him a high-voltage smile as she stepped across the high threshold and began to close the door marked PRIVATE-"so I'm going to leave you to your guard duty."
       The cabin was comfortable, the mess of the previous evening's attack on Tizner all cleared away. Grace put down her bag-opened, this time-on the edge of the bunk. Her automatic, nested inside it, gleamed reassuringly.
       Past the only porthole, mist drifted in a thicker and thicker blur. "Pity the sailor on a night like this-" the redhead hummed, sitting at Tizner's desk. It was in apple-pie order now, except for the open-topped wooden box in which her dynamite-the last resource of attack when the Whisperer appeared below-lay ready.
       So now all there was to do was wait. Wait and think.
       She remembered the unrecognizable black silk hose that the pirate had worn for a face. She remembered Sandy, dead across the bar. And the speed of the whole show last night.
       This killer was a smart one. Maybe-too smart. That was what she was counting on. Waiting in the narrow cabin, she could feel her heart slap against her ribs, like waves against the Galleon.
       Culvers weren't built for waiting.
       By and by, she lit herself a cigarette. Its tip glowed and the match gutted out between her fingers. More mist rolled past the window. The smoke from her cigarette made it seem as if the night outside were stealing in.
       Suddenly, she was rigid in the chair.
       There had been no sound of an approaching motor on the water. Yet the soft noises at her door could mean just one thing!
       First had come a step, quick and furtive. Now a choked cry, in Tizner's voice. Then a muffled crash, a groan, and the dull sound of something about as heavy as a man's body hitting the deck.
       Grace dove for the bunk's edge in the same movement that carried her free of the chair. The automatic seemed to leap to meet her tingling fingers. Crouching back against the desk, she jerked toward the door.
       Not an instant too soon. It was moving inward rapidly, on the echoes of a clicking key. And in the narrow opening, blotting out the mists of the open deck, a man had appeared.
       A man with a stubby gun held hip high, with coat collar up and a soft cap down; and man with only a blank black space where his face should be!
       Memory of unlucky Sandy lent speed to the trigger finger of the girl from Noonan's. She took no time for second glance. This man killed fast!
       Clack! went the hammer of her automatic-striking dead and hollow. The redhead's heart seemed to freeze in her throat. Her clip had been emptied!
       Inside the cabin, stepping slowly toward her out of the fog, the Whisperer chuckled. Cold and eerie, the sound was like an echo from the night before. Hoarse words hissed after it.
       "Unloaded, Carrot Top! I knew you'd have your partners guarding the water to-night. It was too obvious. So I came out early, among Tizner's regular customers, just io see you!"
       He took another deliberate step forward.
       "I took care of that toy pistol of yours once when you put down your hand bag at the bar. Hours ago!" His rasped whisper was malignant, mocking.
       "There's a silencer on mine, you see. Tizner is-indisposed! And you won't reach toward that dangerous box behind you. So we won't be disturbed."
       Grace felt the edge of the desk bite into her hip, as she backed against it. With a heartsick gesture, she tossed the useless weapon onto the bunk before her.
       Her sherry-brown eyes stared straight at the grim black mask that was the killer's face.
       "You want my jewels, I suppose?" she breathed. One hand went up to her ear. She jerked loose the long tinsel thread that suspended the gold dangle. "Here. I'll give them up quietly."
       The Whisperer chuckled again.
       "Keep them. They're fakes, as I overheard you tell your gambler friend. But they'll dress up your corpse. I didn't come for junk. I want-silence!"
       The rejected ornament dropped instantly from its owner's extended fingers. Its gold ball landed harmlessly inside the open box of dynamite. The tinsel strand, crossing the box's side, straggled limply across the desktop. The girl from Noonan's scarcely glanced at it.
       "S-silence?" She stammered the word.
       "Permanent silence!" Low as the warning of a rattlesnake, the muffled whisper came. "You know who one of my men is. But when and if the flatties bring him in, their star witness won't have much to say."
       "That isn't true! I don't know!"
       "Listen, sister, I can read. I know why they've got you out here." The silenced automatic lifted slowly.
       Grace raised her half-burned cigarette and knocked the long ash from it. Then her hand seemed to go nerveless. The glowing butt felt from it, rolled across the desk toward the scraggly tinsel thread.
       "You aren't g-going to shoot me, are you?"
       The automatic kept rising.
       "I am, baby. Right now! I'm going to blast you straight to the hell where meddling cops belong!"
       There was a tiny hiss at Grace's back, like a sound of escaping steam or a sputtering fuse. Her eyes hardened quickly, fixed on the Whisperer's sinister mask.
       "All right. And there goes your dynamite. We'll blast to hell together-Wally Tizner"
       It was true, obvious.
       That tawdry ear ornament was one of the countless detective gadgets Big Tim's young assistant had invented: a disguised fuse. She had worn it for just this emergency, fired it with the glowing cigarette. And it was working.
       Up the side of the wooden box, climbing like an agile monkey, the sputtering flame streaked its swift, deadly way. Two seconds more, and the Galleon would be firewood and scrap iron.
       "You hellion!"
       Wally Tizner did just what she'd known he would do. He howled in mortal terror and flung himself forward.
       His lunging figure buried her from the desk as he clawed for the fuse. Grace saw it jerk free of the box before she leaped upon him.
       The savagery and speed of her attack made up in that first split-second for the difference in their weight and strength. Wally's trembling fingers still clutched the harmlessly sputtering tinsel, the cold sweat of terror still blinded him, when a wildcat dove for his relaxed gun arm.
       Before he knew what was happening, her claws were into him. One hand gouged and scratched. The other, incredibly strong for its size, twisted his wrist. Sharp heels bit his shins. Teeth sank into one side of his thinly masked face, and clung there.
       Outside on the deck, a staccato yammering of distant gunfire chattered through the fog. A battle was raging somewhere. But the stunned gambler had only one desire-to rid himself of the sudden devil who was tormenting him. He flung his arm out wildly, putting everything he had into the thrust.
       It loosened the girl from Noonan's with pile-driving power. But it loosened, also, his own grip on the automatic. Before his fingers could close in a new grip, the cold steel whisked from them.
       Slamming back against the wall, breathless from the violence of the blow that had flung her there, Grace shook the wild red hair back from her eyes. She held the silenced gat in a small, steady hand. Its cold muzzle covered him.
       Unmasked, the gambler's lean face was white and sullen. He glowered at the three detectives and the two hard-jawed coast guard officers who held him in that same empty saloon where loyal Sandy had gone down under the gun of the very man whose property he'd been defending.
       "We found their motor, Redsie," Jerry Riker said cheerfully. "Just like you guessed, it was aboard the Galleon all the while and ready to make sound effects as of a wraith boat approaching or escaping. In the deck crew's bunk room, it was, along with that missing canvas bag. We took it for evidence while the guards were rounding up the four hands below ... Two of 'em were slug-scarred, by the way."
       Tizner glowered.
       "You'd no reason to suspect me, you little -- "
       "Easy'!" Riker warned, fists doubling. And Tizner, even without the handcuffs he was wearing, wouldn't have felt like standing up to those big, raw knuckles.
       "I knew all along that scar story was a frame-up," Tizner growled. "We cooked it up together. Why should I come after you, with nothing to gain? This was just dumb luck!"
       The girl from Noonan's grinned.
       "Nope. Smart luck! The bad luck of a gent who was much too bright. There never was a newspaper story, Wally, because my phone was disconnected. But I got you off shore too early to learn that."
       "You-you were wise, even then?"
       "I knew we'd catch you red-handed, Wally, because you knew that if I weren't attacked after that publicity the whole theory of an outside killer blew lip. You were smart. Obviously, nobody but you would let me live. So you couldn't afford to let me, either."
       The killer's face worked.
       "It was the perfect set-up!" he said. "I'd have the emeralds to sell back to the Sylvester dame, without even the risk of a fence. She'd have kept mum and paid plenty to keep her jealous husband from finding out she was playing around out here with that little greasy count. And my skirts were cleared by hiring you three. It was perfect!"
       "Too lousy perfect," Big Tim growled. "Even if you and your ratty quartet of crew-crooks did have to make some quick costume changes on deck, and you tap your head for a little blood and then wrestle with yourself at the cabin door to-night."
       The coast guards were urging the last of their five prisoners toward the swinging doors. They were ready to get going. It was a. slow trip in to shore, what with the fog and all. The head guard turned to Big Tim.
       "Thanks, Mr. Noonan, for tipping us off this afternoon. Swarming aboard, like you said when the light from that opening cabin door gave the signal he was in action-that was just the ticket! Shake the lead out, you!"
       But Wally Tizner had one more thing to get out of his system.
       "Say, Redhead, whatever put you wise to me?"
       "A fashion hint. Wally. What's being worn by gentlemen for kicking ladies in the jaw. Except for that fancy footwork of yours at the bar last night, I might never have noticed."
       "Huh?"
       "You changed your shoes, all right. But you couldn't change in and out of those evening clothes fast enough to be found unconscious in 'em. And a braid stripe on black broadcloth went bad above those square-toed boots!"
       Jerry chuckled, much too merrily, as they started for the door again.
       "How true, Redsie, how true! But Wally doesn't need that smooth dope now. In the death house, they almost never dress up for a big night out."
--------
         *A GRACE CULVER CHRONOLOGY*
       "Scoop!" (August 1, 1934, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Dumb Blonde" (September 1, 1934, The Shadow Magazine)
       "War Paint" (October 1, 1934, The Shadow Magazine)
       "The Bigger They Are" (November 1, 1934, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Double Chocolate" (December 1, 1934, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Millions to Burn" (January 1, 1935, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Red is For Fox" (March 1, 1935, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Kitchen Trap" (June 1, 1935, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Thin Air" (August 1, 1935, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Bombproof Baby" (October 15, 1935, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Crime in the Air" (January 15, 1936, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Hit the Baby!" (February 15, 1936, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Phantom Pirate" (March 15, 1936, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Sign of the Devil Dog" (June 15, 1936, The Shadow Magazine)
       "The Tattooed Twin" (August 15, 1936, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Tunnel of Terror" (November 1, 1936, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Fur Will Fly" (December 1, 1936, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Appearance Money" (February 15, 1937, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Torch Song" (March 15, 1937, The Shadow Magazine)
       "Return Address" (July 15, 1937, The Shadow Magazine)
--------
         MYSTERY, ADVENTURE AND SUSPENSE FROM PAGETURNER E BOOKS
       *THE CLASSIC WOMEN DETECTIVES*
       The Legendary Women Detectives: classic tales of the world's greatest female supersleuths -- edited by Jean Marie Stine
       The Problems of Violet Strange -- Anna Katherine Green
       Madame Storey, Private Investigator -- Hulbert Footner
       The Experiences of Loveday Brooke -- Catherine Louisa Prikis
       The Amy Brewster #1. A Knife in My Back -- Sam Merwin Jr.
       Amy Brewster #2. A Matter of Policy -- Sam Merwin Jr.
       Amy Brewster #3. Message to a Corpse -- Sam Merwin Jr.
       Lady Molly of Scotland Yard -- Baroness Orczy
       The First Mary Roberts Reinhart Ominbus: The Bat; The Breaking Point; Where There's a Will -- M. R. Reinhart
       AGATHA CHRISTIE
       The Mysterious Affair at Styles
       The Secret Adversary
       THE CLASSIC GENTLEMAN-THIEVES
       ALIAS THE GRAY SEAL: THE JIMMY DALE OMNIBUS -- The First Two Books About the Legendary Fin-de-Siecle Gentleman Thief -- Frank L. Packard
       THE RAFFLES OMNIBUS: All Four Classic Novels Featuring the Famous Gentleman Thief -- E. W. Hornung
       THE LONE WOLF OMNIBUS: All Four Original Novels About the Sophisticated 1920s Jewel Thief -- Louis Joseph Vance
       THE NICK BANCROFT MYSTERIES
       August is Murder -- J. D. Crayne
       Death Sting -- J. D. Crayne
       Murder by the Book -- J. D. Crayne
       A Point of Murder -- J. D. Crayne
       THE CLASSIC 1920s GILLIAN HAZELTINE COURTROOM MYSTERIES
       The Diamond Bullet Murder Case -- George F. Worts
       The Hospital Homicides Murder Case -- George F. Worts
       The Gold Coffin Murder Case -- George F. Worts
       The Crime Circus Murder Case -- George F. Worts
       The High Seas Murder Case -- George F. Worts
       THE LT. MARK STODDARD MYSTERIES
       Corpse in the Abstract -- J. D. Crayne
       Corpse in the Camera -- J. D. Crayne
       THE CLASSIC SEMI-DUAL ASTROLOGICAL MYSTERIES
       The Ledger of Life Mystery -- Giesy and Smith
       The House of Invisible Bondage Mystery Giesy and Smith
       PETER RUBER'S MODERN PULP SAGAS
       Savage #1: Murder in Macao
       Zero Hour: A Novel of Adventure in China During the Early Days of WWII
       OTHER FINE MYSTERY CLASSICS
       The Lone Wolf -- Louis Joseph Vance
       Doctor Syn, Alias the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh
       Grey Shapes -- Jack Mann
       Four Just Men -- Edgar Wallace
       The Legendary Detectives: classic tales of the world's greatest sleuths -- edited by Jean Marie Stine
       The Legendary Detectives II -- edited by Jean Marie Stine
       The Scarlet Pimpernel -- Baroness Orczy
       The Elusive Pimpernel -- Baroness Orczy
       The Scarlet Pimpernel: "I Will Repay!" -- Baroness Orczy
         *BARGAIN MYSTERY EBOOKS IN OMNIBUS EDITIONS*
         (Complete & Unabridged)
       THE FATHER BROWN OMNIBUS: The Innocence of Father Brown; The Wisdom of Father Brown -- G. K. Chesterton
       THE RAFFLES OMNIBUS -- E. V. HORNIG
       THE SECOND MARY ROBERTS REINHART OMNIBUS: The Circular Staircase; The Confession; Dangerous Days
       THE THIRD MARY ROBERTS REINHART OMNIBUS: The Man in Lower Ten; The Street of Seven Stars; Sight Unseen
       THE FU MANCHU OMNIBUS: The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu; The Return of Fu Manchu; The Hand of Fu Manchu -- Sax Rohmer
       THE SAX ROHMER OMNIBUS: Fire Tongue; Dope; The Yellow Scorpion
       More Titles in Preparation
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