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I
stretched out at her side, over the cover. Her face pressed against
my chest. I put an arm under her and her head shifted to my shoulder.
My mouth touched her brow and slid down her cheek. I tasted tears and
a tragic mouth.

Presently
we slept, she under the cover and me on it. We slept in each other’s
arms like two lost babes in the woods.

The
sun was bright in my eyes. Gently I pulled my arm from under her. She
moaned and turned on her side and dug her face into the pillow, but
she did not awaken.

I
slipped off the bed: I was fully dressed except for shoes and jacket,
but with my back to the bed I stripped completely and put on the
fresh underwear, shirt and socks I had bought yesterday in Badmont.
My face looked back at me in the dresser mirror. The bruise on my
cheek had darkened still more and my eyes were unfamiliar. I didn’t
look like myself — older, harder, I wasn’t sure what
else. A shave might have helped to restore me to normal, but I hadn’t
brought along the razor Molly had bought me yesterday morning.

When
I turned to the bed, Molly lay flat on her back, staring up at the
ceiling. I said good morning. Her gray eyes rolled toward me; she
didn’t reply. She seemed far away.

“
I’ve
been thinking,” I said, “If I go home, I can’t
protect Carol any more than I could before I left. I can do more
staying here where I can find out in advance what Moon plans.”

“
You’re
asking for death.”

My
fingers knotting my necktie were bloodless. “Maybe I am. Maybe
that’s what I want. If I’m dead, they have no reason to
bother Carol and Esther.”

“
A
hero.” She said it without a sneer.

“
No.”
I got into my jacket. “Or I can kill Moon if that’s the
only way.”

“
You
can’t kill anybody.”

“
I
can make myself if I have to.” I looked down at her. “But
you’re getting out of here at once. I’ll go downstairs
and give you a chance to dress.”

She
pushed her cheek into the pillow and closed her eyes. She seemed too
tired to do anything but lie there. I went out.

On
the way to the bathroom I passed the stairhead. Somebody I couldn’t
see walked through the downstairs hall. Rufus or Milton or Beezie
guarding us? Would I be stopped if I strode boldly, out of the house
and got into Molly’s car? I had to know. I descended the
stairs. The hall and the sitting room were empty. I turned into the
lunchroom.

Only
one person besides Tilly was in the lunchroom, and that was Crooked
Nose.

His
head was turned toward the hall doorway. I saw him too late to duck
out of sight. His pale-blue eyes lay blankly on me. One shoulder
crouched over the counter. His body appeared coiled for sudden
action, but there was nothing in his face to show that he knew who I
was.

“
Good
morning,” Tilly greeted me. Her tone was almost friendly. “We
eat breakfast at the counter.”

Crooked
Nose lifted his coffee cup. The back of his head was to me now, but I
knew that he watched me through the fly-specked mirror behind the
counter. It struck me that he was as much afraid of me as I was of
him.

“
I’ll
have breakfast later, thanks,” I told Tilly.

I
skirted the wirelegged table and stepped outside and looked back.
Crooked Nose held his coffee cup to his mouth. He said something to
Tilly which must have been amusing. A couple of her chins quivered.

Two
cars were in front of the building— Molly’s coupe and
Crooked Nose’s Plymouth. George Moon’s Chrysler wasn’t
here. Had Moon left for Brooklyn already? It was twenty after nine
and Carol left for school at twenty to. Had he set out early enough
to pick her up as she walked to school?

Panic
swept over me. I strode across the front of the house to the archway
over the cinder driveway and turned to the parking lot. The Chrysler
was parked off the driveway.

“
Hi,
Bert.” Beezie sauntered toward me. He was freshly shaven and
sleek in his tweed loafer jacket and a tan shirt open at the throat.
That wasn’t an outfit for working on cars.

“
Where’s
Moon?” I asked.

“
Sleeping,
I guess. Want him for anything?”

“
If
I’m going to work here, I’d like to get to work.”

“
Relax
pal. We're getting us a vacation till a couple of things are
straightened out. We did all we could with the cars that’s here
and we’re holding off bringing new ones in.”

“
Why?”

“
What’s
the use? We got too many already we can’t do more work on. It’s
dangerous having them here in the open.”

“
Why
can’t we work on them?” I persisted, “We give them
a different paint job and change the seat covers and change their
appearance in other ways.”

“
Say,
you don’t know the kind of job we do.” Beezie looked up
at the second-floor windows. I did too, but there was nothing to be
seen. “You’ll see what a good job when we get working
again.”

“
When
will that be?”

Beezie
shrugged. “The boss gives the answers; He don’t tell us
much.”

“
Has
it anything to do with that bag they were talking about?”

“
The
boss gives the answers.”

On
the other side of the house a motor started. I listened to the car
back out to the road and then I saw Crooked Nose pass in his
Plymouth. He may or may not have been rushing away because I had seen
him.

I
told Beezie I was going in for breakfast. He didn’t tag after
me back to the house. Molly’s coupe now had the narrow parking
space in front of the building to itself. I got behind the wheel and
unlocked the ignition with the key I had borrowed from her yesterday
afternoon. The motor turned over sweetly and I kicked the starter. I
made the motor roar and waited for somebody to show excitement over
the fact that I was driving away. Nobody seemed to give a damn. I cut
the ignition and sauntered into the lunchroom.

Tilly’s
head lifted from a tabloid spread out on the counter. “Breakfast?”
she asked as if hoping that I wouldn’t bother her.

“
After
I wash up.”

I
went upstairs and turned at the stairhead to the bathroom at the end
of the hall. A door behind me opened and Rufus came out of his room.
He wore unlaced shoes and pants and nothing else. A towel was over
one arm and shaving equipment in the other hand.

“
Be
in there long, Bert?”

“
Only
a minute,” I said.

Rufus
faded back into his room as I pushed open the bathroom door. It
opened halfway and then something blocked it. “Anybody in
there?” I asked. When there was no answer, I sidled through the
opening.

George
Moon’s long body filled the bathroom. He lay on his face with
his head under the wash-basin and his legs behind the door. A thin
line of blood had trickled from a cut on his temple to the white tile
floor, but that wasn’t what had killed him. He must have struck
his temple against the basin when he had fallen with a knife in his
back. One cheek lay against the floor, and I saw half of his face. A
dead face.

I
couldn’t move. My brain jumped to things that didn’t
matter at the moment. I studied the bone-handled carving knife
between his shoulders and decided that it had come from the
lunchroom. He must have been standing at the wash-basin when somebody
had entered—somebody he did not fear to let come up behind him.
Then he had died quickly, without enough sound for anybody in the
house to have noticed particularly. He couldn’t have fallen so
precisely along one wall of the bathroom. The killer must have shoved
the body into that position so that the door could be opened wide
enough for exit.

A
car pulled up beneath the bathroom window. I heard Beezie sing out:
“Hi, Ed.”

The
sound of Beezie’s hearty voice roused me. I became aware of the
bathroom door still partly open. I slipped out into the hall and
closed the door and did not quite run to my room.

Molly
was out of bed. She had shed her pajama top and was opening the
waistband button, of the trousers. It was no time for embarrassment.
I shut the door behind me and when I looked at her again she had not
quite completed turning her back to me.

“
Moon
is dead,” I said. “In the bathroom. A knife in his back.”

She
stared at me over one bare shoulder. Her mouth was slack, her eyes
almost as lifeless as that one dead eye I had seen in the bathroom.

“
I
didn’t kill him,” I said. “I found him less than a
minute ago. Don’t stand there. We’ve got to get out of
here.”

She
nodded and started to turn to me. Then she remembered and crossed her
arms over her breasts. I faced the door. In the hall somebody walked.
I gripped the knob, and my split knuckles ached. Rufus had been
waiting for his turn in the bathroom. He must have heard me leave.

“
Who
did it?” Molly said thinly.

“
Any
of them. Maybe even Crooked Nose. He was in the lunchroom a few
minutes ago. Moon might have been lying there for a long time, or it
happened while I was downstairs. Whoever murdered him won’t
have trouble convincing the others we did it. We’re the logical
candidates. Can’t you hurry?”

The
steps in the hall returned. Were they coming from the bathroom or
from the stairhead? A door opened. Rufus’ door, it seemed —
from that end of the hall, anyway. I sought for the key to this door
and recalled that there wasn’t one.

“
I
think Rufus found him already,” I said and turned.

She
sat in her red wool dress on the edge of the bed. One stocking was
drawn halfway up a bare leg. She was frozen now, bent over and
holding the rolled stocking around her calf.

“
Are
you sure?” she whispered.

“
I
think so. Maybe we can get out through the window. It’s quite a
drop, but we’ll have to do it. For God’s sake, get that
other stocking on before it’s too late!”

The
door flew open. The sharp edge of it caught my head. I stumbled a
little and whirled and looked into Rufus Lamb’s gun. His chest
was still naked. He said; “Yeah, I heard that. It’s too
late, Bert.”

Milton
and his rifle were in the hall. He peered into the room and nodded.
“Should I get Tilly?”

“
Yeah,”
Rufus said.

Milton
moved toward the stairs. His rifle wasn’t necessary. Rufus’
automatic was enough. It looked like the one I had taken from Larry
last night. There was irony in that for anybody who wanted it.

“
What’s
that for?” I asked, nodding at the gun.

“
Step
back a little, Bert. That’s the stuff — I don’t
want1 you to hand me one of them socks of yours.” Rufus
regarded me rather sadly. “Maybe he asked for it, fooling
around with your missus. I figured you as a real guy, Bert. You burn
somebody down in a fair fight, even the boss, that’s one thing.
But a knife in the back!”

“
You’ve
got it wrong,” I said.

“
I
seen you go in the bathroom. A couple of minutes later I go in and
find the boss knifed “

‘‘
That’s
the way I found him too. I came to tell Clara. I was going out to
break the news to the rest of you when you barged in.”

“
Oh,
yeah?”

Molly
said: “I think Tilly knifed him.” She had rolled one
stocking all the way up and was holding the second in both hands. She
was hardly the same woman she had been a minute ago. Looking at her
now, I found it hard to think of her as having wept last night. Her
control was back; she was tough-fibered and alert. “Tilly will
be the boss now that George is dead,” she added and wiggled her
bare toes.

“
That
fat tub!” Uncertainty crossed Rufus’ face. He said
thoughtfully: “She and the boss was always scrapping. She was
always trying to tell him how to run things. Tilly has ambitions.”

Molly
and I were doing it again — the team of super-salesmen who
could talk a gun out of man’s hand. We would play them against
each other and all against Tilly, and we would come out of it the way
we had before. My stomach fell back into place.

They
were coming up the stairs. Somebody raced ahead of the others,
probably Beezie. The three of us in the bedroom listened to them move
to the bathroom. What little conversation there was at the end of the
hall was in inaudible mutters. The steps trickled toward us, Tilly
appeared first, looking as grim as any executioner. She waddled past
Rufus and leaned her massive hips against the dresser.

“
Why’d
you kill him, Bert?” she demanded.

“
I
think you did,” I said.

Her
chin jumped. She looked as if she’d been kicked in the stomach.
Then an unfamiliar voice said: “What the hell’s Breen
doing here?”

The
voice shouldn’t have been unfamiliar. I had heard it two days
ago in the Planet showroom when I had returned from lunch. He stood
in the doorway and peered at me over Beezie’s shoulder —
the slim man with the too-tight clothes and the empty face, the man
sent by Moon to warn me that my family would be harmed if I didn’t
hand over the bag. Ed Weaver he had said his name was, and while I’d
been in the bathroom I had heard him arrive and had heard Beezie
greet him as Ed. By any name he spelled death.