Ž3
Z3%,





DOROTHY BENNETT
in her first book has already succeeded in
breaking with the conventional formula
of the mystery story and in giving us a
novel and highly unique book which is
definitely stamped with her own attrac-
tive personality.
Dennis Devore, himself an enigmatic
figure, finds himself in a desperate posi-
tion when on opening his hotel-room
door at midnight he finds on the carpet
the body of a young woman he has never
before seen—the “White Flower” of San
Francisco night life. A stranger in San
Francisco, the cards seem stacked against
him until Kennedy, the hard-bitten po-
lice reporter, obtains for him the aid of
the young lawyer Peter Byrne and Peter's
able assistant and sister, Blake. Eventu-
ally the triumvirate of Peter and Blake
Byrne and Dennis, is able to penetrate
the mystery of the missing Spanish
shawl, the ten money-order receipts, the
strange relationship between Victor Far-
nese and A. Fersen, and to place the
connection between the murder of a wo-
man totally unknown to Dennis and a
year-old manslaughter charge.
Here is a mystery story possessing high
literary qualities, jº characteriza-
tions, rapid action and an intelligent and
solution-defying plot. The book has
emotion ...}suspense and Miss Bennett's
characters live so convincingly that their
fate is a matter of deep concern to the
reader, and he reads breathlessly on to
the final satisfactory climax.


----


MURDER UNLEASHED





MURDER
UNLEASHED
by Dorothy BENNETT
Concerning a vanished priest . . . a dead farmer
. . and the curious murder of the "White
Flower” of San Francisco's night life!
A. L. BURT COMPANY, Publishers
New York Chicago


rºsted AT THE Country Life Press, GARDEN city, N. Y., U. S. A.
copyRIGHT, 1935
By DoRothy Bennett
ALL RIGHTS ResERVED


CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I
Beginning of Wisdom
A Bird Named Peter
PAGE
I
9
Tricks
De Mortuis
Church of Saints Peter and Paul
“He Is Gone on a Journey”
The Long Leash
Delroy! Delroy!
The Honest Plowman
The Rest Is Silence
The Hounds of Fear
The Plugged Gap
Among Those Present
But Not for Love
The Beautiful and Blonde
Good-bye to Bianca
Danger Nearer to Dennis
The Marines
The Restless Grave
. I 5
23
30
37
52
67
77
86
94
103
II6
I29
I34
148
167
191
204


vi º CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
20 Dead Men Rise Up 216
21 Dennis Enters a Cage 226
22 Dennis Is Trapped 239
23 So They Came Out— 272
24 And Saw the Stars Again 290


MURDER UNLEASHED





*
Chapter 1
BEGINNING OF WISDOM
It BeGAN that foggy November night in San Francisco
when Dennis Devore stuck his key in his hotel-room
door, shoved it open onto blackness, and lit the light.
He stood on the threshold of the little snug, neat
room. It might have been anyone's room, or no one's,
so neat, so impersonal it was, with its bed neatly made,
sheet turned down, reading light over the headboard,
graceful walnut furniture, windows looking out onto
the dark and the scattering lights below the hill, where
Market Street and the downtown theater district still
crawled along like great gold snakes through the night.
Only a pocket-size radio standing on the table, a few
packages of cigarettes thrown around on cloisonné ash-
trays, and a pile of untidy books spilling over on the
bureau made it his.
He preferred it that way. Light travel, long journey.
He always felt nowadays as if he had to be free to get
up and go in a second, if he wanted to. He carried his
personal life in his dark and ruffled head. *
So now he looked with satisfaction around at his
snug and tidy den where he’d holed up for the winter.
And as he looked, he saw something dark and untidy—
like a solid sort of shadow—on the floor beyond the


2 MURDER UNLEASHED
º
central table. He stepped around to see better, and then
he stood staring down at the floor, eyes widening—
widening . . .
He put his hand out automatically and clutched the
edge of the table. His eyes still stared downward. They
were wide with horror, as a moonless night is wide
open to darkness. -
There was a woman on the floor—a woman he'd
never seen in his life before. She had red hair, loosened,
coming down to her shoulders—a very white face—
dark blue eyes that looked at him—and she was
dead.
He knew that. He couldn’t mistake it. She was dead,
and those dark sapphire eyes stared at him incuriously.
Her skin had the whiteness of milk, and her hair was
like flame playing over her head. She was beautiful, and
she was dead.
He didn’t quite know what he did in the next few
minutes. When he caught himself up again, he was still
looking down at her, and his hand had clamped the
table edge as if it had grown onto it. He couldn’t have
moved, then. But he'd gone through a very dark way
in that short time.
But now he had hold of himself again. What had to
be done would be done. He gave himself orders to move,
to break that intolerable vise of stillness and horror
that held him. And very slowly he went on over to the
telephone on the wall, took up the receiver, and said,
“Get me the Hall of Justice, will you?”
He listened a second, then, “Police department,


MURDER UNLEASHED 3
º
please. Hello—will you . . . you'd better send someone
over. There’s a woman dead here.”
It sounded for another second like a hoarse deep
crackle of machine-gun barrage at the other end of the
line. Dennis shrugged his shoulders wearily. He gave
the name of the hotel.
“How do I know?” he said. “I found her.”
He hung up. Then he passed one hand over his head,
in a puzzled gesture. He couldn't think. He only knew
that he had to keep that still figure within the edge of
his sight. It couldn’t hurt him, of course, but—he
couldn't quite turn his back on it. He discovered that
he was shivering, uncontrollable deep shivers like waves
that tried to wrench his sanity from its moorings.
He had to hold onto himself. He did.
There was something he'd forgotten to do. Notify
the hotel people. That was it. They’d have the police
busting down doors in a minute if he didn't.
He went to the phone again. Suddenly, desperately,
he needed communication with some outside help, the
sound of a human voice. He felt like a diver abandoned
on the ocean floor.
He raised the reassuring voice of the desk clerk
downstairs.
“Listen,” he said, “send the manager up here right
away, will you?”
“He’s just gone up in the elevator,” the clerk said.
“Told me he was going up to your room. The telephone
girl gave him some message. Anything wrong?”
Dennis said, “Thanks. I’ll let you know later.”


4 MURDER UNLEASHED
The still figure on the floor was always within range
of his vision. He mustn't lose sight of it. He’d go crazy
with a primitive, superstitious fear if he did. The powers
of darkness . . .
You had to face them boldly. Then they couldn’t get
you.
He knew that. He’d faced them.
There was a knock on the door. Life thundering out
its command to open and face things. A quiet, sharp
knock that meant to be obeyed.
Just as Dennis said, “Come,” hoarsely, the door
opened anyway and the hotel manager came in. He
stopped inside the room and looked at Dennis, before
he let his glance go around. His face was rigid, pitiless,
hard with distaste that anything had happened in his
hotel. His eyes were keen as lights shining in darkness.
“What's happened Ah!” he interrupted himself,
as those keen hard eyes came to the woman.
“Someone—killed.” Dennis found his voice dry. He
forced it out of his throat and found that it dried up
on him like one of the little California rivers sinking
into a sandy bed in summertime.
“Killed?” The manager took him up sharply. “You
said over the phone just now . . . dead.”
“Look,” Dennis croaked.
His hand pointed. There wasn't any need to say
anything else. They both saw it—a little dark river
drying on the taupe plush carpet. A little river of blood,
whose source had been the back of that silent, black-
clad figure. It had crawled a few inches and then sunk


MURDER UNLEASHED 5
into the carpet. Or else—she had been killed at its
farther end and had moved, before she died, in a con-
vulsive gesture of escape. Not a pleasant little stream.
Dennis thought wildly for a brief moment of escape,
of cottonwoods waving along a wide, sunny river, of
water so shallow you could wade across, seeing the sun
on the sandy bottom—of the wind in his face, the same
wind that waved the trees.
That was far away—months and sunny afternoons
away. It was a foggy November night, and he was in a
close little hotel room, and that beautiful, white-skinned
figure in the filmy black evening gown was lying at
their feet. The grave blue eyes questioned them, swept
them aside as unimportant. She looked as if she mustn't
be disturbed—as if she were listening to, were looking
at, something really important. Her whole attention
elsewhere, beyond them.
And slowly, beyond the horror and the superstitious
dread of death, Dennis began to feel stirring in his
heart an ache of resentment that something so beautiful
should die—should die before its time. The waste of
beauty—the pity, the pity!
What had she done? Did it matter? She didn’t de-
serve to die. No one so beautiful did. Not, his heart said
fiercely, even if she’d done things terrible or treacherous.
She'd given the world something in return, anyway.
She’d been—her own excuse for being.
“Who is she?” asked the hotel manager, still staring
at her.
Dennis's dark head came up on that with a jerk.


6 MURDER UNLEASHED
“How do I know?” he retorted. “I never saw her be-
fore in my life!”
“H'm,” said the manager.
On that exchange they ended, until the police arrived
about a minute later. The room seemed suddenly full
of very substantial men in overcoats and felt hats, of
deep voices questioning, commanding—of wide shoul-
ders, hard eyes, straight glances.
The passage with the hotel manager had been just a
preliminary. This was the main event.
There were two of them—Inspectors Sullivan and
Cassidy. Dennis didn’t have a chance.
The hardly veiled doubt of the hotel manager was
nothing to the unbelief expressed by Inspectors Sullivan
and Cassidy. Cassidy was a sharp-voiced man with a
driving manner. He asked questions and expected an-
swers. But Sullivan was like a smothering mountain
in bulk and in manner. He sort of loomed. His compara-
tive quietness was all the more impressive. Dennis felt
smothered by that watchful silence and that ominous
reticence.
They asked questions.
“Who is she?” Cassidy demanded, jerking his head
first at the woman and then at Dennis.
Dennis said wearily and a bit automatically, “I
never saw her before—in my life.”
“Huh,” said Cassidy, dropping this for the minute.
They crossed over to her, after warning the two men
watching them not to move or touch anything in the
room. They dropped to their knees and touched the


MURDER UNLEASHED 7
corpse gently. Dennis and the hotel manager, who
looked like a sharp black-and-white glossy raven in
his dinner clothes, looked on silently.
Cassidy's head went up like an alarm signal. His hard
blue eyes sought them.
“She’s still warm!” he rasped. His sandy face flushed
a bit with excitement. “She’s still warm, I tell you.
And the blood hasn't dried yet. This was done recently.”
Sullivan nodded. The massive head went up and
down once. -
Cassidy jumped to his feet, turned on the other two.
“Who did it?” he demanded. “Who did it?”
He was like a fierce little hunting terrier now, sharp
in excitement, merciless. He turned to both of them in
turn.
“I don’t know,” Dennis said. That brought the gaze
of those pitiless blue eyes on him then. He braced him-
self to meet them, and Sullivan's appraising deeper ones
in the background.
“Who are you, anyway?” Cassidy snapped.
“I phoned you,” Dennis said dully. “I–I’m in this
room. When I came home tonight—just now—I found
—that. I found her there.”
“Yeah?” Sullivan came into it now. “What's your
name?”
“Devore,” he told them. “Dennis Devore.”
It sounded like a silly sort of name now. He wished
he'd picked a better one while he'd been at it. At the
time, it had sounded good enough for what he wanted
to do.


8 MURDER UNLEASHED
“What time'd you come here?” Cassidy asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” Dennis said. “I was on at
the studio—broadcasting studio, you know—at eleven
forty-five, for fifteen minutes—”
“Broadcasting studio?” Cassidy picked him up.
“I’m a radio tenor,” Dennis said. “I sing over it
every night, at the same time.”
“Eleven forty-five to twelve, eh?” Sullivan said, ex-
pressionless. “That brings you to twelve o'clock. Go on.”
“I guess I left the studio just after twelve,” Dennis
thought back. “The next number was on when I left.
It was a one-o'clock program tonight. It took me, say,
fifteen minutes to walk home—I climbed the hill—and
came right in here.”
“Clerk might remember,” Cassidy said briefly.
“It was about twelve fifteen, I guess.” Dennis set
his guess at that. “Then I came in ” He set his
teeth on that.
“Lights on?” Cassidy said, glancing around the room.
“No, out,” Dennis went on, grateful for the shove
over that hard place. “It was all dark in here. I had
to open the door with my key and then turn on the
lights at the door.”
“The door was locked, eh?” Sullivan boomed in.
“Locked,” Dennis nodded. “But anyone could have
opened it—with a passkey. He did, just now.” He jerked
his head at the hotel manager, that unfriendly black-
and-white raven in smart glossiness.
“Did, eh? What for?” Cassidy asked.


MURDER UNLEASHED 9
The gentleman he indicated shrugged.
“The telephone girl passed on Mr. Devore's message
to the police to me,” he said. “The policy of the hotel
—well, there are some things we like to handle our-
selves. Unfortunate publicity, you know—”
“Some things you like to handle for yourselves!”
Cassidy took him up, snarling. “To keep to yourselves,
you mean! But not murder!”
The manager shrugged again and lapsed into silence.
“Go on. What about this passkey business?” Cassidy
was on Dennis's trail again, yapping at his heels, as it
were. “Why was it necessary?”
“It wasn't,” Dennis retorted. “He knocked on the
door, and before I could open it he'd shoved right in
on his key.”
“Before you could open it?” Sullivan said. “What
were you doing that took up your time, anyway?”
At that Dennis looked at him with the first faint shine
of a smile in his dark eyes, like a rather rueful sunrise
coming in on a cold and wintry day. A smile at his own
expense.
“Just—looking,” he said softly and huskily.
“I was afraid that Mr. Devore might have stepped
out, after—er—doing his duty by the police,” the hotel
manager struck in smoothly and nastily.
An unfriendly bird, Dennis decided dispassionately.
“Stepped out a second? Did you?” That was Cassidy.
“No, I tell you! I was in the room when he came in.
I told you—I was—just looking.”


10 MURDER UNLEASHED
Dennis had too much to do to hold his own with
these two men to think about the hotel manager just
In OW.
“Touch anything?” Sullivan asked now.
“Only the phone—and the table, I guess. And the
door, of course.”
“Fingerprints?” the hotel manager said.
“We'll see,” grunted Sullivan, turning from them.
“Coroner's men'll be here in a minute. Get the doctor’s
opinion. Not much doubt, though. Someone stuck a
knife in her—and it’s still there. Accounts for not much
blood shed.”
He turned softly, prowling lightly for all his bulk,
to the windows, staring down at the sills a minute, at
the latches still on the catch, at the dark fire escape
beyond going down into the night. He didn't touch
anything there, though.
Cassidy turned briskly to the hotel manager.
“Have to get list of people on this floor,” he said to
him. “Who're in these rooms along this hall, anyway?
Did they see anyone or hear anything? What were they
doing when she was killed here?”
The manager shrugged again, as one who gives up
riddles.
“If it comes to that,” he said, slowly, “I should be
glad to have an explanation of some things myself.
Why, for instance, should anyone select Mr. Devore's
room in which to do such a terrible deed—a murder?”
The implication wasn’t pleasant. No one pretended
that it was. You couldn’t gloss such a thing over. They


MURDER UNLEASHED 11
all stared at Dennis for a second like, he decided swiftly
and irrelevantly, hungry tigers picking out their special
steaks.
There was now a confused noise beginning in the
usually noiseless, plush-padded corridor outside.
“Doctor—coroner's men—likewise police reporters,”
diagnosed Cassidy quickly. “Let’s get going.”
Sullivan moved into action, slow, massive, somehow
like the fabled irresistible force joined to the immovable
body.
“We'll have to take your fingerprints,” he said to
Dennis, “if that’s agreeable.”
“Why not?” Dennis said. “Of course.”
Cassidy was letting in something that resembled a
pack of hunting hounds, eyes bright with excitement
of the chase, giving tongue impartially to any trail
that looked good. A blue-coat was helping him sort
out visitors at the door. Cassidy had underestimated
the population waiting outside. There were elevator
boys in trim blue uniform, plainclothes clerk, and a few
negligee guests from the same floor joining in the chorus.
The officially approved ones came in. Sullivan nodded
to one unobtrusive little man with a case.
“Prints,” he said briefly. The little man nodded and
set out things on the walnut center table. There was
something black and smudgy, like the sort of thing you
press an election rubber cross against to ink it. Dennis
reached out one hand. The little man seized it suddenly,
firmly pressed down his fingers one by one in a quick
rolling motion over the black stuff, transferring each


12 MURDER UNLEASHED
print to paper before he took another finger. Then he
dropped that hand, took the other one, and went
through the same procedure. Dennis was left with two
black-fingered hands. He was a bit ashamed and angry
with himself because his hand shook a little. There’d
been something so impersonal and ruthless in the pro-
cedure of taking his fingerprints that there was a sort
of degradation about it—about him, he felt.
It was sort of frightening. Was this the way they
treated prisoners—real prisoners? It was like being a
wild animal in a cage. No regard for your personal will
or spirit.
Someone came up to Sullivan, leaving the group
gathered at the woman's body in a buzzing circle. A
little man, with eyes like birds', bright and inquisitive
and not unfriendly, in a thin brown face. A black over-
coat almost too big for him draped him grandly. A
black felt hat tilted jauntily over the lean little face.
“Kennedy—from the Star,” he introduced himself in
a hoarse chirp. “Took me off a losing poker game—
Can we smoke, chief?” he interrupted himself and lit a
cigarette without waiting for Sullivan's approval or
disapproval. That huge detective glared at him, but
the undaunted intruder was conveniently blind and
deaf to certain rumbles from the big throat.
“Murder, eh?” he went on.
“And what else would it be, with a knife sticking in
her back?” broke in Cassidy with a certain bitter
Sarcasm.
“Trace the knife?” Kennedy thrust at him.


MURDER UNLEASHED • 13
“Sure—if you want to trace every breadknife the
chain stores have ever sold here,” Cassidy thrust back.
“You saw it—you can buy one like it for fifty cents.
We could indict anyone in San Francisco who ever
cut a loaf of bread, nearly, for having one in their
possession.”
“Yeah—and you could find out where it was last
sharpened,” the police reporter cut in. “I’ve got one
of those things myself—I’m baching it—and I’m here
to tell you they couldn't cut putty unless they'd been
darn near a grindstone, a good grindstone, for an hour
or two.”
Sullivan turned to Dennis.
“You can go in the bathroom and wash your hands
of that ink,” he said.
Dennis went through the crowd. He caught Ken-
nedy's half-whisper to Sullivan as he went. He tried
not to see what was on the floor or what they were
doing.
“Who's that guy?”
Sullivan rumbled an answer. Dennis knew what it
Was.
When he came back, Sullivan was waiting to meet
him.
“We’re going over to the Hall of Justice to report,”
he said. “You’ll have to come with us, Devore, and
explain why someone used your room for a murder
party. I'm curious myself.”
Dennis caught Kennedy's bright eye as Sullivan tried
to hustle a way for the two of them out of the crowded


14 MURDER UNLEASHED
room, without answering any of the questions that
blocked his way.
“Listen,” said that bright, keen little man intently,
not unfriendly, “you're in a bad way, kid. Anyone you
want me to call up?”
Then Dennis remembered someone.
“There's a man I know,” he said, “a bird named
Peter Byrne. If you'd call him up—I’d be glad.
Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. It's a swell story,” Kennedy re-
torted. “A bird named Peter Byrne, eh? Right! What is
he—a friend?”
“He’s a lawyer,” Dennis said hurriedly, as Sullivan
grasped his arm and made a way for them impatiently.
Kennedy whistled, keeping pace with them.
“They find a beautiful dame dead in your room, and
they haul you off to the coop,” he remarked apprecia-
tively. “You sure are in a tight place, kid. My boy,
you don't want a lawyer—you need a can opener, to
get you out of this.”
“Will you shut up?” growled Sullivan and swept
Dennis with him past the half-opened mouths and wide-
open eyes of elevator boys, half-dressed guests, and
other onlookers, down to the elevator, and so out to
the street.


1.
the Hall of ustice now.”
Chapter 2
A BIRD NAMED "
rne
r
*PETER
Peter Byrne, awakened by * $º wild ringing sometime
well after midnight, wonderetºed why there were such
things as telephones in this an; very imperfect world. He
was a wide-awake young rº, Xian when he was awake, and
he went in for sleeping jumfist as whole-heartedly.
After a few seconds Fºie decided to answer the call.
He collided first winb%h the bureau, whose location he
knew as well as he ktonew that of the nose on his face,
and then with the ºelephone chair. After that he was
ready for anything-lº sleep shaken out of him.
“Huh?” he saiºtă to the crisp voice over the line.
“What's that? Dºnnis Devore?”
“He’s a tenor ºver the radio—one of these midnight
canaries,” chirpºſed the shrewd, not-to-be-denied voice.
“Come clean, , "Byrne—he says you're his lawyer—a
lawyer, anywayry. And he's in a jam, all right.”
Peter forgot'ſ the midnight cold waves coming through
his pajamas, t attacking his bare feet. He clamored for
details. . ;
The voice, then identified itself more explicitly.
“I’m Ker nedy, doing police for the Star,” it said.
“Devore as ced me to call you. He's on the carpet at


15


16 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Not,” thought Peter grimly and a bit wistfully,
\º a bad place to be, at that.”
He couldn't think of any Dennis º he ‘. who
*a*~ *- io. However, he was Willing to
was a rºof ove, he radiº. 3. -
learn more i. long 3 he didn’t have to turn on the radio
and listen to this Devre canary at this time of night.
« y - ; he asked. -
º: ºº ” the shrewd voice sort of
- - t “There ought to be a
h r the honº. -
grinned at him ove ºn't got around to it yet.
law, I admit—but we ha 33
, time-
We will, we will. Just give us d
“Say,” said an indignant an nºy. rouse,
Peter Byrne, “what is this, anyw" -
- ... “I’m coming to it.
“Whoal” said Kennedy calmly I g
- is I said—but there
There's no law against tenors, ā’.
- *
- - - friend Dennis is up
certainly is against murder. Your " - -
tainly g e <nownst to him in
for entertaining a lady corpse unbe. when he got
his room tonight. He claims it was t said ‘Yeah?’ and
home from the studio. The police just b º:
- - out I:30 a. m.
hauled him off to the Hall of Justice—". by? The gong
Pacific Standard Time. Are you standiné.”
will indicate the police patrol, this time."
Whwhat: said Peter, inadequately, e to the end
And so, friends of radioland, we co m—and the
of another swell pogrom—I mean progra on at the
beginning of the next. It's probably gºin'. the truth
Hall of Justice now, where they're sockink
out of your client.”
About to say, stunned, “He’s not my clien
Byrne paused, on the very words.
Ttl’” Peter


MURDER UNLEASHED 17
The picture this shrewd chirper indicated wasn’t a
pretty one. Murder? Maybe so. A woman killed in this
Dennis Devore's room. And no one to stand up for
Dennis, whoever he was—and what a rotten name he
wore! thought a fastidious Peter—except a casual
pick-up acquaintance of a police reporter. And this
Devore had given him Peter Byrne's name. Sort of last
resort, maybe, because Peter couldn't place him at
that. Not even with all the details he’d just listened to,
that surely should excite any faint memory of this
Dennis whatsoever. It was, when you came to think of
it, sort of like an SOS coming out of the night to him.
And, as though accurately guessing the state of
Peter Byrne's mind about that time, Kennedy's cool
bird chirp changed to something colder and harsher,
more like a challenge.
“Well?” it said, slowly, deliberately, a bit contemptu-
ously, into the continued silence.
“Well what?” Byrne growled back at him.
“Are you in this or aren’t you?” the police reporter
wanted to know, still in that deliberate, rather deadly
voice. “That is the layout. Either pick up your cards
and play 'em or pass. I’ve told you all I know, Byrne.
Just that Devore handed me out your name. I told
him I’d get the situation before you. Are you in or
not?”
A muffled roar answered him. To anyone who had
ever spent an afternoon at the zoo it would be reminis-
cent of an aroused bear, shaking a shaggy head from
side to side, coming out to battle. Peter was getting mad.


18 MURDER UNLEASHED
His friends simply didn't go around bumping people
off and then getting insolent, cold-voiced police re-
porters to call him up at an ungodly hour at night to
bait him like this.
“Okay,” said Kennedy, perversely mistranslating
this roar. “I’ll slip word to the boys his lawyer is com-
ing around. You probably won’t be able to get your
client out of hock before morning, though. Might use
a habeas-corpus grip on 'em to make them give him
up if they're holding him too hard.”
Peter had quieted down to deadliness himself.
“I’ll get him out,” he promised simply and grimly.
“I want to talk to him myself.”
He hung up with a bang.
. The light went on in the hall then and revealed Peter
sitting there in blue-and-white pajamas, shaggy brown
head at one end of his attire, large brown bare feet at
the other. He blinked a startled pair of deep blue eyes
from under strongly accented eyebrow ledges. He was
impressive, built on the battering-ram principle.
His sister Blake was coming down the stairway.
She wore a striped flannel dressing gown of blue and
orange and brown, and a pair of blue bedroom slippers
with orange pompons. She had a bright head of boy’s
golden brown hair weirdly ruffled up now, and a sleepy
red mouth. Even when she was walking half asleep
she carried her head with a sort of pride that straight-
ened her slim body into a rushing grace.
“Blake,” Peter said, puzzled, “do you know a guy
named Dennis—Dennis Devore?”


MURDER UNLEASHED 19
“Heavens, no,” Blake said. “Who is he, and why?”
She dropped into the big chair by the hall table and
managed to wind herself up in its seat like a cat.
“I thought I’d brought you up better’n that,” Peter
grunted in great satisfaction. “I bet he's someone I
knew at Stanford. There's always a lot of fellows you
never remembered seeing in your life before, calling
you up and saying they were at Stanford with you,
when they want something.”
“What does he want?” Blake asked, to be agreeable,
seeing that her adored Peter was ready for a bit of
midnight conversation. -
Peter gave her the conversation, briefly.
“Guy's in jail. On a murder charge. Lady friend of
his killed. He says he never saw her before, stranger to
him. He gave a reporter my name to call up. Oh, yes—
and he's a radio tenor—sings over the radio.”
“Pete!” said Blake. She sat up. Her eyes were shin-
ing. Her bright boy's head lifted swiftly. “Go in and
get him!”
“With what?” said Peter. “My bare hands?”
“He gave your name,” Blake said softly.
Her brother grunted again.
“What are you doing down here in those clothes?”
he demanded. He rose slowly, impressive in his scantier
ones. “You’d better go to bed again.”
º “Where are you going?” his sister asked, preparing
to go.
! “I’m going to dress,” he said briefly. “They don't
allow pajamas down at the Hall of Justice when you're


20 MURDER UNLEASHED
calling there just for a short visit—not a week-end stay.”
“You lamb!” said Blake very softly and surely,
pausing on the turn of the stairway to smile down at
him before she disappeared.
That was about three o'clock in the morning. Peter
was patient, he was forceful, he pulled wires. But it was
around eight o'clock in the morning when the police
decided to release his involuntary client from further
questioning—for the moment.
They met in a small gray anteroom. Peter surveyed
the wilted figure with frank interest. Dennis gazed up
at Peter's more respectable and imposing heights.
“Hullo!” “Peter said. “You Devore?”
Dennis nodded. “You’re Byrne, aren't you?” He
hesitated a second. He gave the impression, to Peter, as
if he’d just held out his hand and then decided to snatch
it back swiftly. A gesture of the mind rather than of the
body.
He grinned faintly, instead.
“‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” he murmured.
Peter couldn’t help grinning back before he thought
about the seemliness of it.
“How'd you know me—of me?” he asked. He
dropped onto the strongest-looking chair and motioned
his client toward another. They settled down more at
ease. Peter produced smokes, with a guilty glance of
defiance toward the door. The dark head opposite him
bent down swiftly over a match held out, inhaled
luxuriously, exhaled a long wreath before it straightened
up again.


MURDER UNLEASHED 21
“Missed those,” he said simply. “You? Oh, I'd seen
you at the studio—you came in with a party one night,
remember?—and last night, when I couldn’t raise any
other name to save my life, you for some unknown
reason stuck out in my mind. Favorably,” he added
hurriedly and respectfully, looking at Peter's two hun-
dred pounds. “Perhaps it was because I’d remembered
what a devil of a good guard you were and I knew I’d
need a good fighter with me in this mess.”
Peter grinned again. Then he made his face sober.
“Well, what happened in there?” he nodded toward
the closed door.
“Plenty,” said Dennis.
His eyes were dull and impenetrable all of a sudden.
“You didn’t get fresh with them, did you?” Peter
asked. *
The wilted figure faced him indignantly.
“Fresh!” he echoed. “Do I look as if I was fresh?”
“You look as if you needed a shower and a shave,”
Peter commented frankly on his appearance. “And
breakfast.”
“Breakfast?” said Dennis wistfully. “What's that?”
“An old American custom,” Peter explained. “We
have it at our house every morning.”
“I’d sort of lost track of it,” Dennis apologized.
He got to his feet rather quickly, as if something had
just got into his mind.
“Well,” he said, “thanks very much—for all you've
done. Sorry to have bothered you, but—thanks.”
“What for?” Peter asked.


22 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Thanks for the lift,” Dennis said. “I–I suppose
this is where I get off. Good-bye.” He did hold out his
hand this time.
He couldn't very well make a graceful exit with two
hundred pounds of solid Peter at the other end of his
hand. He wanted to make a swell exit, too. He thought
he had just about that much left in him.
“I said we had breakfast at our house—every morn-
ing,” Peter repeated. “An old American custom.”
“Oh!” Dennis said. “As I said, I’d sort of lost track
of it.”


Chapter 3
TRICKS
AFTER Peter had taken care of the necessary formalities
they left the Hall of Justice and returned to Peter's
house, where Dennis was now being introduced to that
good old American custom, breakfast, at the Byrnes'.
“Tell us about it,” Blake said, leaning brown elbows
on the white cloth.
So Dennis told them about it.
At the end Blake's eyes were wide and almost as
dark as Dennis's own, and Peter's eyes had narrowed
like an armed force behind strong walls, ready, watchful,
wary.
Dennis watched Peter like a man at the end of a long
dangerous journey, beneath the walls of a strong and
safe refuge, wondering if those walls would take him in.
Peter came out of his fortress then, having surveyed
the countryside.
“What a beautiful jam!” he said with professional
joy.
Dennis grinned, a bit crookedly this time.
“That's what Kennedy said,” he reported. “My
boy, you don’t need a lawyer—you need a can opener!’”
“Well, Devore—where did you get that name, any-
way?” Peter paused to inquire en route.

23


24 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Pulled it out of a hat,” said Dennis.
“Never do,” grunted Peter.
“Oh, well—most people never get past the Dennis
part.” Their guest was still engrossed in pancakes and
coffee, but willing to do his part in polite conversation
at that.
“Well, Dennis,” Peter gave in, “what happened
down at the Hall, after that?”
“It was a great deal like being X-rayed,” he replied.
“Any little secret I’d ever had couldn't have stood a
chance with those birds.”
“But they do think you are holding something out
on them?” -
“Well, I must be cleverer than I give myself credit
for being, then,” Dennis said cheerfully. “They even
shared my baby days with me.”
“Well,”—Peter was being ponderous, but walking
softly—“they did find the body in your hotel room,
you know. And people don't 29
“Don’t they?” Dennis asked grimly and surveyed
the abashed faces about him. “I’m here to tell you they
did l’”
Something old and cold and wise had entered that
bright and gay little sun room in that minute. They felt
1t.
Things did happen that way. People were murdered.
Innocent men were accused. Innocent men had been
hung.
“We’ve got to get Dennis out,” Blake announced
firmly. “First, who was she? We must find out every-


MURDER UNLEASHED 25
thing—everything the police find out, and more. The
whole truth. Then, was she killed outside somewhere
and then brought into the room, or was she killed in
your room?” Blake went on keenly.
“The police think so,” said Dennis. “In the room.
They hardly suspect me of lugging her along under my
arm from the broadcasting studio.”
“Yes, but we have this advantage,” Blake pointed
out. “We aren’t narrow, like they are. We are free to
suspect anyone, and we aren't trying to pin it onto
Dennis, especially.”
“Thank you,” said Dennis, with that faint grin
flashing out. “Only I plop for the room, too. Because
why? First place, it's too darn risky doing it outside
and bringing her in. Second, I saw her. And I don’t
think she'd moved—much.”
Peter asked the same question the hotel manager
asked. But he asked it in a very different sort of way.
“But why,” he wanted to know, “your room?”
Dennis looked at him steadily with dark eyes staring
through him and far away beyond him.
“An enemy hath done this,” he said, under his
breath. “That's one answer. To put me in bad, maybe.
Whoever had a grudge against her may have known
me.”
“There's a link there,” Peter pointed out cautiously.
Dennis nodded, as though the interruption had been
hardly registered on his mind.
“And then—why not my room?” he went on. “No
one who's actually committed a murder can afford to


26 MURDER UNLEASHED
have a body around. Put it on someone else. Say it was
someone staying in the hotel—must have been—and
they knew I was singing every night except Sunday
from eleven forty-five to twelve at the studio. Room
would be absolutely free then. Smallest risk of any in
the hotel, probably. They arrange then for a murder
party between those fifteen minutes. Easy, if it's been
planned out. Wrong room. Lady enters it—it's in dark-
ness, you know. Killed before she realizes it's a trap.
Murderer goes out. Back to own room. Waits for alarm.”
“Clever!” said Blake, shuddering a bit.
Dennis cocked an appreciative eyebrow at her.
“Oh, yes—if you like cleverness,” he agreed. “Per-
sonally, I think it's a very overrated quality. I prefer
depth.”
“Quit sparring,” ordered Peter. “This brings up a
new line. Do you realize that it needn't have been any-
one you know, any enemy of yours? It might be an
absolute stranger!” -
“Ye-es,” said Blake. “But—let's combine both
theories. Keep the best qualities of each. She was killed
by someone who knew and hated Dennis, too, and she
was killed in Dennis's room because he was away sing-
ing over the radio at the time. That clear?”
“Perfectly,” said Peter. “Only—who did it?”
Dennis withdrew his gaze from the tablecloth that
he’d been staring at.
“Look here,” he began, “you're taking an awful lot
on faith. Me, I mean. Isn’t there—isn’t there anything
you'd like to ask—about me?”
y


MURDER UNLEASHED 27
“Well, but—I’ve seen you before,” said Peter. “Were
you at Stanford?”
He waited suspiciously for those familiar words of
a claim on him to come.
Dennis laughed.
“No, I went to your dearest enemy and rival,” he
retorted. “At Cal we look upon Stanford as a training
place for a good practice team for us.”
“Got it!” said Peter suddenly in great satisfaction.
“Last time I saw you, you were pushing your hand in
my face. It was two years ago, at the Big Game. I was
playing in the line, and you were a back trying to come
through with the ball. You straight-armed me, and
when I got up you’d wriggled past the second defense
and were about thirty-three yards to the good. I re-
member that play, all right.”
“I never did like guards,” said Dennis airily. “They
are apt to get in your way when you're in a hurry.
You did, even when you weren’t supposed to.”
“Only I don’t remember anyone on that team named
Devore.” Peter's relentless memory was still tracking.
“There wasn't any,” Dennis said softly.
“Oh?” said Peter as softly.
“No. But it would be easy, of course, to look up the
names of the team and find out who played in the back-
field,” Dennis said.
“Got no time,” said Peter. “I’m a busy man. Don’t
play kid games any more and get my face shoved in.”
“Well ” said Dennis softly but more huskily.
They heard a faint ring at the front door. Blake


28 MURDER UNLEASHED
opened one of the casement windows and leaned out
in the morning sunshine, peering down, trying to see
who stood below.
“It’s your police-reporter friend Kennedy, Peter,”
she reported. “He’s on our doorstep.”
She called down, and a minute later Kennedy came
in and nodded to them.
“How's tricks?” he asked. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Do,” said Blake. “Tricks are rather slow, at first,”
she told him. “You see, we don't know what's trumps.
Would you say—clubs?”
“I’d say spades,” Kennedy said. “For day after
tomorrow, anyway. Coroner's inquest. If the verdict is
death by someone unknown, you've still got a chance
on the outside, kid. But if it's death by the hands of
one Dennis Devore, the police'll take charge of your
case for you and your client.”
“A labor-saving device,” said Dennis, “the police
force.”
He tried to smile.
“Go in with us,” said Blake suddenly to Kennedy.
That hard-bitten gentleman eyed her suspiciously.
“Oh, yeah? How?”
“We want to keep Dennis out of jail and get the
right person who did the murder.”
“I’ll accept the invitation,” Kennedy decided, after
a second, grinning. “And it's not for your beaux yeux
either, guy,” he informed Dennis. “It’s simply because
I believe that a radio tenor is a subject for murder, a
murderee, not a murderer.”


MURDER UNLEASHED 29
“First, who was she?” Blake cut in ahead of Peter,
to his indignation. “We’ve got to know!”
Kennedy’s lean brown face hardened. He leaned
forward.
“Listen,” he said, “I’ll tell you who she was. She was
Bianca Fior! That mean anything to you? She played
in big-league company, and she could hold her own bel
side a battery of beauties like Helen of Troy or Cleo-
patra as a siren.”
“Bianca Fior,” Dennis only said slowly. “That
means white flower, doesn’t it? I told you I felt that
way when I saw her. As if I’d stumbled by mistake
into some kind of bloody fairy tale.”
“This isn’t being in a fairy story,” Blake said softly
and sharply.
“It’s better than being in a nightmare,” Dennis
answered.


Chapter 4
DE MORTUIS
“BIANCA was a home-grown goddess,” Kennedy said.
“Statue of Liberty of North Beach. There’s a lot of
mystery about her beginnings, and a lot about her end.
You see her like that big dame in New York Harbor,
big, beautiful—God, she sure was!—and with a past
and present like a sort of foggy mist around her. Who
was keeping her? The police'd like to know. They might
run up against something dangerous. Some big politi-
cian, maybe. An ex-rum-runner's gal, maybe. They're
moving cautious. Too many prominent men in her
background. Too much politics, maybe. They’d be a
lot easier in their minds if Bianca hadn’t been bumped
off.”
Blake nodded wisely.
“She was beautiful—and bad,” she emphasized.
“And we're going to find out about her. Peter, you’ll
take headquarters, won't you? And tackle Dennis's
inspector?”
“Okay by me,” said Peter. “What's his name?
Sullivan? I’ll find out about the inquest, too. I’ve got
to get to the office first, and I’ll go on from there.”
“That reminds me, brother,” Kennedy said to Den-
30


MURDER UNLEASHED 31
nis, “you've got to come clean with me. We need pic-
tures—lots of 'em. Papers are hollering for them. And
that's a funny thing. I looked around your room a bit
after you'd gone last night, and I couldn't see a single
picture, or letter, or anything of yours there. Just some
cigarettes and books. No wonder the lady mistook that
room for hers, or for an empty one. No one'd know
you’d ever lived there. Nothing personal around.”
“I don’t like a lot of truck,” Dennis said.
“I’ll say you don’t,” Kennedy said dryly. “Your
room would make the Sahara desert look all cluttered
up with Victorian keepsakes. But don’t let me trouble
you.”
“You don’t,” Dennis retorted, grinning. “Was that
all you had on your mind?”
Kennedy, under cover of lighting another of his
eternal fags, gave him a long, cool appraising look from
bright cold eyes.
“All,” he said briefly, puffing out blue smoke. “Just
to find the lady's stabber, and to cover police at the
Hall, and to get some pictures of one Dennis Devore,
radio singer, released by the police after an all-night
questioning.”
The bright little green-and-gold sun room had begun
to be filled with blue tobacco smoke since Kennedy had
come. He'd turned it into an office.
“Is that necessary?” Blake asked.
Kennedy nodded. “Play in with me, and I’ll play
in with you,” he said. “That's fair, and I’ve got to
hold down my job. Do I get them?”


32 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Yes,” Dennis said. “You’ll have to take them
yourself, though. I mean—the broadcasting studio
hasn’t any of me.”
“So I discovered,” Kennedy said. “We'll take 'em
on our way to our good deeds today. Stop by at the
office with me, and it's done. Where’ll we four meet
next?”
“What are you going to do, Blake?” Peter asked.
She raised innocent eyes to his. “I’m a lady novelist
looking for local color,” she said simply. “I’m going to
interview the hotel staff, on Dennis's corridor. To find
out about those other guests who didn't find a body in
their respectable rooms.”
Peter got up then, preparing to go.
“We part here,” he said, “then. Dennis, what are
you going to do? We've ruled you out of the Hall of
Justice and the hotel part of it.”
“I’ll have to go to the studio and settle up accounts,”
Dennis said. “I’ll bet you a nickel, even, they'll cancel
my contract.” -
“Or else raise your salary,” Kennedy grunted.
“You’ll be a great drawing card now, kid.”
“Oh, yeah?” asked Dennis coldly. “Because I might
be a murderer? If they offer to do that, I’ll fire my-
Self!”
He’d gone white around his nostrils. His eyes blazed
darkly, and he breathed a bit quickly. Kennedy watched
him, that inquisitive bird’s head of his on one side.
“I’d sure like to play poker with you,” he said.
Dennis cocked an arrogant eyebrow at him.


MURDER UNLEASHED 33
“Do you think I look like a professional card player?”
he asked, rather coldly still.
Kennedy grinned.
“No, you wouldn’t be as dangerous if you did. You're
scared, and yet you’re cool and dangerous,” —he em-
phasized his points with his lighted cigarette stabbed
into the smoky air, leaning forward—“and you're pick-
ing your way through this with the brains of a quarter-
back. The way you're using all of us—you remind me
of a great back I once saw picking his way through a
broken field at full speed.”
Dennis looked at Kennedy and finally smiled it off.
“I’ve often wondered what happens to great football
players,” he said, airy again. “Beyond becoming wres-
tlers or candidates for the Old People's Home.”
His eye lit on Peter in passing for an infinitesimal
instant, without expression. Peter blushed.
Kennedy said, “This one I'm telling you about got
in a jam, after he graduated. He ran down a man on a
dark night on the highway down near Salinas way,
and he didn’t stop. Didn’t even turn up till next morn-
ing to leave his name. Man died. He was some Italian
wholesale dealer up here, I think. Pretty important.
And this guy’d been speeding, evidently. They tried
him for manslaughter, and he got off pretty well—on
probation for a year, I think. Then he disappeared.”
Blake said, in a soft rush, “Oh-h-h!” and stopped.
“He didn’t stop, or come back until next morning?”
Peter inquired, expressionless. His big brown face was
like a rock.


34 MURDER UNLEASHED
“There was a girl in the car with him,” Kennedy said.
“Her name never came out. I think this football bird
I’m telling you about got her home okay.”
“Really?” said Dennis.
Kennedy stared at him. There was a short, intense
second of silence, almost unbearable to Blake and
Peter. Dennis went on smoking.
“I said I’d like to play poker with you,” Kennedy
remarked. His voice was that of the most lively admira-
tion.
He hoisted himself to his feet.
“Well, come on,” he said. “You’re coming with me
to the office, you said, for pictures.”
Dennis got up, too, in a swift motion that reminded
Peter of Blake's way of moving.
“After today,” he said, “there probably won’t be
any Dennis Devore, radio tenor. I—I hope you'll think
kindly of him.”
That irrepressible grin of his just faintly touched dark
eyes and sober mouth.
“He wasn’t a bad guy,” he gave him his requiem.
“De mortuis, you know.”
He turned to go, after Kennedy.
“Dennis,” Blake said suddenly, “where are you
going?”
“I don’t quite know.” Dennis wrinkled his brow
mildly. “I can’t live at the hotel—I suppose I'll get a
room somewhere.”
“I told you I was baching it,” Kennedy broke in
grudgingly. “I’ve got two rooms over on the north side


MURDER UNLEASHED 35
of the city. Lots of room there for two. Thought I told
you.”
“You didn’t,” Dennis said. “But thanks. I’ll ac-
cept.” His voice was brief and bitter.
“You needn’t thank me,” Kennedy growled as un-
graciously. “I like to have my exclusive story under
my eyes all the time.”
Clearly it wasn’t one of those hospitable impulsive
invitations. It looked regrettably like an invitation by
force majeure. Dennis had an ominous semblance to a
prisoner being led off to a dark dungeon that he hadn't
inspected and chosen himself.
“Be here for breakfast tomorrow,” Blake said hastily
and impulsively, as this aspect of it struck her.
Dennis nodded and smiled at her reassuringly and
followed Kennedy down the stairs.
Peter said, a bit heavily, in the silence, “I feel as if
I were riding a surf board. Things seem to happen fast,
when that Dennis guy is around. But—I don’t know.
It may be dangerous, but it's exhilarating.” He grinned
sheepishly.
“Yes,” Blake said. “I feel that way, too. Rather—
short of breath.”
“What are we in for, anyway?” Peter said, sobering.
“I don’t know,” Blake said. “But we sort of had to
do it, Peter. There didn’t seem to be anything else to
do.”
“Not at the time, no,” Peter agreed. “We just held
onto our surfboard and let it ride. But now—you heard
what Kennedy said. About that ex-football hero who


36 MURDER UNLEASHED
ran a man down and let him die in the road? If I
thought Dennis was the one he meant who did it, it
would be something else again. What do you think,
Blake?”
He was suddenly impressive again, with a stern
weight of integrity in him that bulked sheer as his big
self.
“I think,” Blake said slowly, “the only thing the
matter with Dennis is that he's too chivalrous.”
“What?” said Peter.
“Look how he acted about that Bianca woman, and
she's the one that's got him into all this trouble,” said
Blake sturdily. “I shouldn’t wonder—if he hadn’t been
too chivalrous at some other time in his career.”
“Well,” Peter said, “you'll cure him of that if any-
one can, I’m sure.”
“De mortuis,” said Blake softly, “mil nisi bonum—
indeed! I wonder just what he was thinking of-besides
Bianca.”
Peter began to laugh.
“I’ve just thought,” he explained to her questioning
eyes. “I’ve got two old codgers coming in to make a
change in their wills today. I’ll have to put 'em off.
They're in no danger. They’ve lived to their placid
eighties already—they can wait. Nothing's ever hap-
pened to them much. It's Dennis who needs to worry
about reaching the ripe age of thirty alive!”


Chapter 5
CHURCH OF SAINTS PETER AND PAUL
ANOTHER conversation was going on between Dennis
and Kennedy, on the front smoker of a Kearny Street
car going down into Market Street.
“What's the idea,” Dennis asked stiffly, “of the
third-degree stuff?”
“Meaning what?” Kennedy said, raising an eyebrow
and impassively puffing away.
“Well, I’m coming to stay with you, and it’s not for
your beaux yeux either, guy,” said Dennis bitterly.
“You practically blackmailed me into coming,” he
reminded his host.
“Better than being blackballed at your hotel,”
Kennedy grinned. “Listen, Devore—you want to keep
out of jail right now. That's your aim in life—or it
ought to be. Undercover stuff. And I’m not keen on
having a good story wandering around under other
people's noses—and eyes. I want to keep it to myself—
for a while, anyway. You stay under cover at my place,
where no cop'll think to look for you, and we'll both be
covered.”
“Why don’t you spill your story right now?” Dennis
asked. “Afraid? Or looking for fingerprints? There
aren't any—I can tell you that. Nothing for the cops
to compare, either.”

37


38 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Or anything else,” said Kennedy. “I noticed that.
You sure made a clean break. I don’t doubt someone
swiped the records and the prints and all that. They
would.”
He looked sidewise at his rather sullen companion.
“Her folks had quite a lot of influence down there,
didn’t they?” he asked, grinning.
“Will you shut up?” said Dennis in a restrained but
ferocious voice. “And go to—”
“The office,” interrupted Kennedy brightly. “Here
we are.”
They climbed off at Market Street, where the traffic
swirled around Lotta's slim fountain. They crossed
the street and went up into an elevator, then left that
and changed to another, rickety one.
“About that story,” Kennedy finally said. “I might
aim to keep it, and then produce it for what our British
cousins would label “Sensation in Court.” And then
again I might not. It all depends.”
“On what?” asked Dennis.
Kennedy grinned at him again.
“On people,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of 'em. Es-
pecially at the Hall of Justice. And they nearly all wilt,
innocent or guilty, when they get in there. Something
in it gets them. You didn't, and yet you had a lot to
be scared about—things like this coming out, for in-
stance. But you didn’t lose your nerve. I don’t think
you've ever lost your nerve. And yet this bird back in
Salinas did, according to the story. But it never did
seem reasonable to me that a great back, used to think:


MURDER UNLEASHED 39
ing quickly, would have lost his nerve so completely,
the way that bird did. He’d have thought things out
quicker. People are funny. But I know them. That's one
thing being on police does for you, anyway. You get so
you can’t be fooled about people much.”
“Oh,” said Dennis, thinking this out.
They got out and banged on a rickety wooden door
that reminded Dennis of a model speakeasy. A center
hole in it opened. A face appeared. Kennedy nodded at
Dennis, and the face withdrew. The door opened.
“Scotch,” murmured Dennis hopefully.
“No, Danish,” Kennedy said following him in. “He
doesn’t like to be disturbed, that's all. Danes are funny
that way.”
“I know,” Dennis nodded. “I had a Great Dane
once. He didn’t like to be disturbed, either—especially
when he had a bone to pick.” He fingered a scar on his
right wrist reminiscently.
He sat on a hard chair and looked around a very
bare room. It had great windows to the north and west,
and an unpainted kitchen table and a couple of hard
kitchen chairs in it. Otherwise it looked as if the car-
penters and plasterers had just gone away and nobody
else had moved in yet. Their host appeared in silence,
a round rosy face, and a wet and chemically-smelling
black rubber apron. He set up black apparatus, a
little way in front of Dennis.
Dennis stared at it calmly and curiously. Only his
eyes went black and impenetrably dull again, and the
white lines came around the base of his nostrils.


40 MURDER UNLEASHED
He thought in a vivid flash of Sullivan standing by
while a little unobtrusive man seized his hands, and,
finger by finger, rolled them in inked stuff. There was a
sort of degradation in having these things happening
to one, instead of making things happen as you pleased.
Like being an animal, and having to stand for whatever
people did to you! -
The flashlight went off then in a great sound, lots of
smoke and a bright light. The little man nodded to
them and disappeared into his warren. Kennedy got
up.
“We won't wait for the prints,” he said. “Thanks.
I guess they'll turn out okay.”
“They’d better,” Dennis said. He got up, a bit stiffly.
“Smoke?” Kennedy said and fished out a packet of
cigarettes. Dennis took one out carefully and lit it
from Kennedy's light. His hands didn't shake. He could
control his poised body more coolly than he could his
hot and impatient mind.
“We'll go all the way down in this crazy thing,” the
police reporter said when they were in the rickety
elevator again, descending slowly and cautiously. “No
use letting people know where you are, if anyone's
watching the front entrance.”
They got out in a basement of gray concrete and
walked through a sort of gray tunnel, landing outside
in the dirty sunshine of an alleyway. Kennedy looked
away carefully and quickly.
“Okay,” he said softly. “No one’ll pick you up here,
anyway.”


MURDER UNLEASHED 41
He signaled to a lurking plain dark taxi just on the
corner where the alley joined a main street.
“Our special brand,” he murmured to Dennis.
“Warranted not to talk out of turn.”
They got in the taxi without another word. Kennedy
leaned forward and spoke to the driver.
“We can stop by at your studio, kid,” he explained,
sinking back again. “You can fix things up there, and
then we'll go on to my place. I wouldn’t go back to the
hotel if I were you.”
Dennis involuntarily shuddered and then held him-
self rigid again, commanding his betraying body. He
saw a lighted hotel room, the graceful walnut furniture,
the bed with the sheet turned back—and, beyond the
table, that dark and untidy sort of shadow . . .
“I haven’t the least desire to go back there, I assure
you,” he said through stiff, dry lips.
Kennedy looked at him again, that sidewise, quick,
stab of a look from bright birds’ eyes.
“Don’t let it get you, kid,” he said more gently.
Dennis looked at him coldly with his dark head
haughty again.
“Nothing's ever “got’ me,” he said coldly. “Not
even getting my picture taken like a San Quentin
boarder!”
Kennedy shrugged. They stopped before the en-
trance to the studio building.
“I’ll wait here,” the police reporter said. “You won’t
be long, I guess.”
“Not if I can help it,” Dennis grunted, getting out.


42 MURDER UNLEASHED
He wasn’t. It was about five minutes later when he
came down the stairs to the street again, the hatless
dark head moving swiftly and surely through less sure
traffic of people.
“I told you,” he said only, getting in. “There goes
Dennis Devore, poor fellow! Canned.”
“By request?” Kennedy asked.
“Does it matter?” Dennis retorted. “Sure it was by
request—my own request. I asked for my time.”
“And you got the air,” Kennedy punned pitilessly.
“Well, there's one less radio canary singing. That's all
to the good.”
Dennis laughed. He was oddly released and happy.
“You never heard me!” he said. “That remark
proves it.”
“And I hope I never will!” Kennedy said grimly.
They were in the sunny north section of the city now.
Brown-faced, beautiful children with dark hair and
great soft dark eyes like deer played about the narrow
streets. The taxi went up, and stopped in that position,
still going up. They climbed out precariously.
“My joint,” said Kennedy. It was a new, clean-
looking apartment house—two stories, four apartments,
Dennis estimated swiftly. Better than he'd thought it
would be. And there'd be a swell view of the Gate,
glittering in noon sunshine.
There was. There was something else, too, that he
hadn't reckoned on. A grand piano in the small living
room. His eyes widened, seeing this. A swell grand


MURDER UNLEASHED 43
piano! He knew the sort of tone it would have—dark
and lovely, like itself.
“Cantabile,” he muttered reverently, like a sort of
Italian oath.
Kennedy's place was a surprise. He'd thought of
something bohemian, which meant dusty and rather
bare, like the camping place of a hardened old cam-
paigner. Or else cluttered up so you couldn't move.
This was—different. A grand piano. And the shelves
of the room covered with books of phonograph records,
music scores.
Kennedy was in the small bedroom. Dennis stepped
over and looked at some of the books of records. His
eyes stayed wide and dark with astonishment. He whis-
tled softly. Into those astonished eyes came the faint
flickering of mischief beginning again.
Kennedy came back again, slipping an overcoat on
quickly.
“I’m due at the Hall now,” he explained in a hurry.
“I’ll be back around six, I guess. You’ll stay holed up
right here till I get back. Get me? There's some stuff
in the icebox when you get hungry.”
“Aye, aye,” said Dennis a bit absently. His eyes
were veiled, but eager.
He surveyed the records gleefully when his host had
gone.
“Blackmail, eh?” he said thoughtfully. “So I'm to
stay in all day? We’ll see.”
He then proceeded to get drunk. He had a cocktail of
Gershwin's, consisting of the Concerto, and the Rhap-


44 MURDER UNLEASHED
sody in Blue, then a full-bodied draft of Wagner's Ring
taken straight, and blissful ecstasies from Beethoven.
He began tapering off with Mozart. When Kennedy
came back around six o'clock, he was sitting bright-eyed
and white-faced at the piano playing and singing,
lustily. -
His host muttered softly. Dennis turned around,
letting one finger pick up and trail the tune in the
meanwhile.
“I saw Sullivan,” Kennedy announced, discarding
coats. “He got after me for letting you go this morning.
He's just about made up his mind to take you in again.
The inquest is coming, and he needs a goat to sacrifice.
Threatened me with lese majeste and a few assorted
crimes, but I told him there wasn’t any warrant out
for you yet and he'd better wait till the inquest is
over. You're not to go out till then, either. You stay
right here, holed up.”
Dennis nodded, trailing a cigarette from the corner
of his mouth and turning loose on the piano.
Above the syncopated din his voice rose, melting,
tender. He was in the throes of sentiment.
Kennedy writhed, bearing up nobly. Finally:
“Do you have to do that?” he yelped.
Dennis looked at him.
“I have to do something,” he said gently. “I’m
bored.”
Kennedy sat down in the armchair and groaned
aloud.
“He’s bored,” he said bitterly and blankly. “Sulli-


MURDER UNLEASHED 45
van's after him, and that big stiff usually grabs what
he's after; there's a murder inquest up, and he's bored.
Did anyone ever tell you there was wirehaired fox
terrier in you?”
“No,” said Dennis truthfully.
“Well, there is,” Kennedy grunted. “If you wait till
I can get my things on again will you promise not to
sing? There's a roof-garden ex-bootlegger across the
street, on top of that apartment house. No one'll be
likely to look for us there.”
Dennis grinned and gave up the desecrated piano
reluctantly.
“It's blackmail,” Kennedy said as they went on down
the stairs cautiously. “And you know it. You looked
at my music stuff there.”
“Blackmail?” said Dennis. He raised an elegant eye-
brow. “Where have I heard that word before?”
The roof garden was cool. It had a view of part of the
city to the south and sloping down to the north, where
the dark Gate ran swiftly in the darkening evening.
There were nondescript potted green things around,
palms or rubber plants or what Dennis called hotel
foliage.
Kennedy talked to the proprietor, a dark-faced but
pleasant person with a picturesque version of a dinner
suit. Dinner began to come—chicken, taglierini, red
wine. They had a table at the edge of the roof, where
the wall came up to their shoulders as they sat there.
“What's that big building—the gray one?” Dennis
asked.


46 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Church,” Kennedy said. “All the Italians go to it.
It's St. Peter and St. Paul’s.”
Their host bent over them in an aroma of garlic,
dark mustachios highly perfumed, and greasy vest-
mentS.
“All,” he said, gutturally mysterious about it. “Yes.
But not one—no more. She will be there for Mass, and
she will never hear it. No more. Ah, bella—fior d’Italia!”
All of a sudden he wasn't a greasy, intrusive speak-
easy host trying to be mysterious. He was a poet, a
lover, a representative of a lover's race, mourning a lost
beauty.
“Who d'you mean?” asked Dennis, with quickening
breath. -
” “I mean her—the one they killed.” He turned to
Dennis as to a confidant. “You heard? They called her
Bianca—Bianca Fior.”
“You know her—about her?” Kennedy thrust in,
keen as a bright thin dagger's blade.
The man shrugged. His dark eyes looked at them
from beneath a dark fringe of hair. Honest, mournful
eyes.
“No one knew her,” he sighed. “Just—the house
she lived in, the restaurants she danced in. No one knew
her, signor, as she really was. Only I—a little. Two
nights ago, just before sundown, I saw her. She was
coming from the church, and she was weeping. I saw
that. She had been to speak to her friend, the priest.
Old Father Malletti. She came there sometimes.”


MURDER UNLEASHED 47
Kennedy looked at Dennis. His eyes were bright as
steel.
“Confession?” he barely breathed.
Their host shrugged again and mopped the table
absently.
“No, not Confession, I think. She went to the parish
house. Not to the church. I think old Father Malletti
knew all her sorrows. As a friend, not a priest, perhaps.
He would come to the door and stand on the stairs
watching her go away. He did so the last time. He
raised his hand. She did not dare to go too directly to
God, I think—that beautiful one!—but old Father
Malletti would dare to go for her. He is—a saint.”
He made the swift, almost invisible passage of one
brown, unwashed hand across his greasy white shirt-
front, and went back to his noisy kitchen region.
Dennis and Kennedy stared out at the thickened
darkness. In the closing night the tall gray church of
the Saints, Peter and Paul, stood impassively fronting
them.
Dennis cleared his throat finally.
“Well,” he said, “I’m not such a dumb dick after
all, am I?”
Kennedy stared at him pityingly.
“Kid,” he said, “for dumb luck, no. You ought to be
down on your knees.”


Chapter 6
"HE IS GONE ON A JOURNEY”
DENNIs yawned with immense exertion, through the
thick soft feathers of sleep smothering him. His head
drooped forward.
“Wake up!” said Kennedy hastily. “We’re going
places.”
“Now?” said Dennis wonderingly.
He sighed deeply and shook sleep away from him, and
obediently followed Kennedy down the stairs and across
the street. He stood swaying a little, wand-in-the-wind
fashion, waiting for Kennedy to take the lead into the
apartment house.
That bothersome, small, hard-bitten gentleman sized
him up wearily.
“Look here,” he decided, “can you stay awake long
enough for me to ask a question at the corner church?”
Dennis just nodded, or rather let his head drop down
once. It was too much trouble to open his mouth and
say yes.
He followed Kennedy, still half in his dream, to the
still-lighted doorway of the priests’ residence of St.
Peter and St. Paul's. Kennedy rang the bell. After a
minute the door opened. The housekeeper stood there,
48


MURDER UNLEASHED 49
*
light falling on her old-fashioned big white apron and
on her sturdy, lined face.
“Father Malletti?” asked Kennedy.
“Oh, you're wanting to speak to him?” the woman
asked shrewdly. “In particular? Well, I’ll have to call
someone, sir. I don't just know . . .”
Dennis heard the voices, saw the lighted faces, from
far away. Like people on a lighted stage.
The housekeeper turned. A tall young priest stood
there behind her. A beautiful masculine voice, like a
struck bell, thought Dennis, enchanted, spoke out
effortlessly.
“You wanted Father Malletti?” said the beautiful
voice. It came from the tall young priest. “Ah, he's
away. He's not here.”
“Where is he?” Kennedy took him up quickly.
“He is gone on a journey,” said the young priest,
“to the country. He went Saturday night. A former
parishioner of his was dying, and they sent a big, dark
car for him to come.”
“Where is this place?” Kennedy asked.
“It’s near Delroy.” The beautiful voice seemed to
hang in the air, sighing, over each word. Dennis listened
to the sound, not the sense. He was too sleepy. But a
word caught his ear.
“That's funny,” he said, after they'd thanked the
priest and had gone down the sidewalk again. “Delroy!
That's where—”
He yawned and forgot again.
“Aren’t we ever going to sleep?” he said plaintively.


50 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Or will we keep this up all night? The Chinese torture.
You're as bad as Sullivan.”
“That's where—what?” his active small tormenter
said.
“Oh–that’s where I’ve got a small ranch,” Dennis
answered. “I’ll invite you down some time. We’ve got
the best beds y:
“If Father Malletti doesn’t get back tomorrow morn-
ing,” Kennedy said, halting at their door, “I’ll take
you up on that right away.”
Something seemed to strike him then with a curious
kind of worry, as though something were—out of tune,
and he couldn’t locate the note.
“Some people,” he said slowly, “are a long time
dying, aren't they? A big, dark car coming . . .”
He shook his head. He was blaming himself for the
wrong notes. They were in his head, not in the things
he’d heard.
There was a wall bed let down in the living room for
Dennis. He was in it almost as soon as it was down.
A pair of Kennedy's pajamas draped him sketchily.
He tucked his head down into the pillow. The light
began to grow dim. -
“Delroy!” he said very drowsily. “There's a river
... and cottonwoods . . . cottonwoods . . .”
They were waving in the little wind. He saw the
shallow ripples of the broad stream, and the glint of
gold under them as the sun struck through to the ledges
of smooth sand underwater. A smile curved his
mouth. . . .


MURDER UNLEASHED 51
“Say,” Kennedy said, “I’m going to the Hall of
Justice to take the night shift. I may be back late, but
I’ll try not to wake you up. Can I trust you to stay
here while I’m gone?”
There wasn’t any answer. The bright light fell full
on the face of one who was far away.
“I guess so,” Kennedy grunted, turning off the light.


Chapter 7
THE LONG LEASH
“FELLow-MEMBERs of the Dennis Defense Society,”
said Blake impressively, “we are met here to-to-”
“To do honor to a man who,” rattled off Dennis
glibly, “I should say needs no introduction—a man
who has the welfare of this great country at heart—a
man who, under a cast-iron exterior, has a heart as
soft as a properly boiled egg—a man who—”
“Charter members of this society will please come
to order!” said Blake. “Silly nuts > 3
“Decline the nomination,” said Dennis. “I was only
calling attention to your cook. Under that Mongolian
exterior rests an artist. His pancakes are a poem. I,”
he said pensively, “should know.”
Blake succumbed. “Louie is an old-timer,” she said
carelessly, puffed with pride. She helped herself to a
cup of clear topaz coffee, sniffing delicately with pleasure
as she did so. “He says he used to wash gold in the
Sierra creeks, just after the forty-niners were there.”
“There's gold in them thar eggs,” said Peter, opening
one as if he expected to find a nugget in it.
Dennis grinned. He’d been absurdly blithe at an
absurd—to his reporter host—hour in the morning.
Ever since he'd gotten up around half-past seven,
52


MURDER UNLEASHED 53
rustled around the small apartment shaving, bathing,
and borrowing things from a Kennedy sound asleep,
and had finally shaken his indignant host awake to tell
him he had a breakfast date, he'd been, if not obnoxious
about it, at least fearfully glad-handed. He belonged,
said Kennedy bitterly, with one of those early-bird
exercises on the radio. The cheerful kind. And now
would Dennis let go his shoulder and let him get some
sleep? He didn’t give a hoot if he was going out to
run into the entire homicide squad, out for his blood.
Dennis, said Kennedy, growing eloquent, could go to
several places whose location Kennedy seemed to know
well. Or he could get taken up by the police if he wanted
to. Let the police, if so, do the worrying. He didn't owe
them anything.
“I’ll be back after breakfast, maybe,” Dennis said
reassuringly, giving that indignant limp shoulder a final
shake, this time meant in all friendliness of good-bye.
“Not,” said Kennedy, “if I see you first!”
“Your ties are rotten, anyway,” Dennis retorted.
“I had to wear my own.”
That final sally woke Kennedy up completely. He
spent some uneasy moments wondering just what
Dennis had decided to borrow from him before he
decided to call sleep a lost cause and get up and see
the worst.
By that time Dennis was knocking at the door of the
dark old Byrne house on Russian Hill, being let in by
Louie, the Mongolian image graven with nearly inch-
deep lines on his mahogany old face.


54 MURDER UNLEASHED
And the Dennis Defense Society had greeted one
another and were assembled for breakfast again by
Blake, in the little green-and-gold sun room. The day
was beginning with a little mist, a slight fog of San
Francisco, so they had a fire in the very small fireplace
by the north wall. Blake wore a creamy sort of silk
dress, with blue heavy beads around her neck. Peter
had blossomed out in a dark blue tie with minute red
dots in it, worn with his usual blue suit. This would
have signified, in a lesser man, an outbreak of vivid
whorls, lightning blazes, and patterned arrows—some-
thing, as the salesmen say, pretty dashing, sir. Dennis
gave the impression that he was actually wearing some-
thing of that sort anyway—red and gold, or blue and
orange in heavy bars. He wasn't. His tie was immaterial,
though. It was his vivid face, his eyes lit up in excite-
ment, his dark head poised, that gave that impression.
His spirit was wearing that sort of tie. All uncontrolled
color and dash.
Just about this time Kennedy said to himself, with
immense conviction, surveying the somehow crowded
room that Dennis had so blithely left behind him,
“Talk about serpents! I’d trade a wirehaired terrier in
the house for a serpent, a nice quiet serpent in my
bosom, any day!”
But Blake, curiously enough, at this time was looking
at Dennis across the table, seeing the altogether blithe
and somehow untouched spirit in him, and she felt a
sort of sadness coming on her. She couldn't explain it.
She only knew that suddenly she felt as though she


MURDER UNLEASHED 55
were growing old—and Dennis wasn’t. A sort of cold
feeling, as though she were lonely. She couldn’t under-
stand it. The merest touch of a loneliness of spirit.
She thought:
“Doesn’t he feel anything?”
It was like a curious sort of balance. As Dennis's
mind and heart and spirit went up, hers went down.
As though she'd lost him, a little. She didn’t want him
sad—but she wanted him with her.
Not so young and—untouched by sadness or mortal
pang.
Dennis himself didn’t know what was the matter—
he simply felt that all was right with the world, like a
lark charging skyward, as it were. At the very back of
his mind, beyond his own hearing, a sound like a
bell swung, clapping, “Delroy! Delroy!” at measured
intervals. Perhaps its vibrations came to him, making
him merry.
“Who reports first?” he asked, looking up. “We
must get to business.”
“I like that!” said Blake. “When I’ve been trying to
get you two to pay attention!”
Peter strolled into action, like a large rock detaching
itself from the landscape.
“Ladies first,” he said.
“I was going to.” Blake leaped to the invitation
before anyone could get in ahead. She planted her el-
bows on the table and stared at them with very blue
eyes. “You can’t guess what I’ve found out!”
“My dear child!” Peter protested beyond endurance.


56 MURDER UNLEASHED
“This isn’t charades. If we'd guessed, you wouldn’t
have had to go and find out anyway.”
“Well, then,” Blake sorted her thoughts, “I spent
the afternoon associating with the hotel servants. If the
hotel manager knew he'd have had me thrown out.
But the servants weren’t a bit averse to making some
extra money and to telling all they knew to a writer
lady. They were thrilled. I started in with the cloak-
room attendant—ladies' maid, you know—and gave
her a big tip. Then she smuggled the others in for
questioning. She wanted to know,”—she turned to
Dennis gravely—“if her picture would come out in the
paper.”
“I’ll take it up with Kennedy,” Dennis said. “If she’s
pretty, that bird would commit grand larceny to get
her picture.”
Peter looked from the rock ledges of his eyes at
Dennis, and then decided not to speak of pictures being
in the paper this morning. It didn’t seem tactful. He
remembered that Dennis had been practically sand-
bagged into having his taken yesterday.
“Bianca,” Blake was saying, “came up in the eleva-
tor to the fourth floor—your floor—alone, about eleven
fifty-five or a few minutes to twelve, that night. She
didn’t stop to ask the desk clerk for the number of
any room, or anything—she just crossed the lobby to
the elevator. She was wearing a black chiffon evening
dress, and a bright Spanish shawl over it. And she was
alone.”
“That means,” Dennis said intently, “that she was
*-


MURDER UNLEASHED 57
going to meet someone—a man—upstairs. We must
look for a man alone, then, in the corridor I was in.
He probably wouldn’t have associates.”
“Not in this kind of a deal,” Peter rumbled. “Re-
member, we’ve decided he had it all planned out—going
into the wrong room with her, and all that. He knew
what was coming. It wasn't a sudden impulse.”
- “That makes it terrible!” Blake said, in a softly
agonized rush of words. Her eyes darkened. That bright
figure, going to death—to a planned death . . .
Dennis nodded. Something of her shadow seemed to
have fallen on him. Or his spirit had come down to
meet hers, from its first wild swoop upwards this
morning.
“Who were my pleasant neighbors?” he asked grimly.
“Your immediate neighbors were”—Blake consulted
a scribbled piece of paper—“(1) a honeymoon couple,
on your right-hand side. She had dolls with long
sprawled legs stuck around the room, the chambermaid
told me. Just an ordinary good-looking young couple
in looks—she could hardly remember anything ex-
traordinary about them. They're on their way to De-
troit now, anyway—to Papa's mills or something.
“Then, (2) a shoe salesman was on your left side—
a traveling salesman. He had an exhibit of shoes down
in one of the smaller ballrooms. He's there now, for
the week, taking orders from the shoe men.”
“A man alone?” said Peter, keen-eyed.
“He’s a hearty-looking fellow,” Dennis said. “I’ve
met him in the lobby. Borrowed a light. Talked. About


58 MURDER UNLEASHED
º
himself and his business. Brown hair, rather full face.
I’m sure you can rule him out. He wouldn’t have stuck
a knife in Bianca—he might have playfully pushed her
out of the fourth-story window at the height of a wild
party, but he'd have been awfully sorry afterwards.
No, this was cold-blooded and cruel. It was all arranged.
That's what makes it so horrible. She came up in the
elevator to meet someone, in her bright shawl and
black dress, and they were laying for her.”
“By the way, that shawl ” Peter said.
“It wasn’t found?” Dennis asked. “Why, it wasn’t
in my room. I’d have seen it 92
“No,” said Blake. “Nor an evening bag. Any woman
would have had a dinky little bag with her, dressed as
Bianca was. The chambermaid says they didn’t find
a thing like that. They looked in the lobby, and the
corridors, too. The detectives asked them questions
about these things.”
“Make a note of it,” Peter said briefly to Dennis.
“Someone's got them.”
| That gentleman, bright-eyed, nodded. “Go on,” he
said softly.
“The entire corner next to the shoe salesman is a
suite of several rooms. It's taken by an old lady who's
had it for ages. She's a sort of cornerstone of the hotel.
She has a maid, too. But if she's turned from respecta-
bility, I’d expect an outraged earthquake to topple the
hotel walls down in retribution.”
“Always suspect old ladies,” Dennis said darkly and
helpfully. “I do. All the unlikely people, you know.”


MURDER UNLEASHED 59
“The hotel manager?” suggested Blake, wrinkling
her nose.
“If you'd seen his face that night!” Dennis sighed
in negation. “I’m afraid that's no good. He’d have
thought out a better way than doing it in a guest's
room. A man doesn’t deny his own character, even at
the moment of murdering. No, he'd have lured the
guest on to a ferryboat ride and then dropped him
overboard neatly. Without a trace, you know.”
“How about the elevator man who brought Bianca
up?” Peter asked. “He was alone with her up there
for a second or two—or more.”
“He’s a nice young lad,” Blake said, reminiscently
smiling and shaking her head. “Fresh as daybreak—
face, smile, manners, everything. He—if you're going
to reconstruct this thing from people's characters,
Dennis—would have gone for the point of anyone's
jaw with a straight right—anyone that he’d a quarrel
with. He wouldn’t have stabbed anyone in the back.
Least of all a woman. Besides, he's got an alibi. Or else
he's the author of the quickest murder in history. He
went right down again, after he'd left Bianca on your
floor, to take some other people up to the seventh.
The clerk noticed that. The people who went up will
swear to the exact time, too. One of the women in the
party glanced at her wrist watch, while they were wait-
ing for the elevator to come.”
“No-o,” said Dennis, half to himself. He leaned one
elbow on the table and draped himself thoughtfully on
it. His eyes were half closed in concentration.


º
º
60 MURDER UNLEASHED
“The man who did this,” he said, “wasn’t like any
of the people we’ve discussed. He was like this: He had
hell's own nerve, to do it this way. Do you realize that?'
It took all of it to do it—waiting for her, not knowing
whether she'd be late or not—or if other people would
get out at that floor with her. He bet on his luck. He’d
choose a room near as he could get it to mine—across
the hallway, say. I can see him,” said Dennis, in a
queer low voice that made them see pictures, too, in
the bright daylight, “with his door open just a crack,
listening for the elevator—making sure she was alone
on that floor—coming out of his room quickly—
‘Biancal’ coming to meet her with his arms out. He
was a friend, a lover. She didn’t have the least idea
she was going to meet an enemy. She wasn't on guard.
A woman like her would have been, otherwise. She was
a wise baby. He even,” said Dennis, in that monotonous
thread of a voice with scarlet and black in its even tone
'—“he even took off her shawl and laid it across his
'arm, very gallantly—helping her off with it, in my
room—and then she turned around, to see the room—
his room 33
“Dennis!” Blake broke it off, in a sharp gasp.
“Don’tl” -
“The séance,” said Peter, “is ended.”
He shook himself like a great dog when it comes up
out of deep water. He eyed Dennis a bit askance.
“I think we know now,” he said, “what the man was
like, Dennis. Your demonstration was very effective.
All I can say is that I hope for your sake he picked on


MURDER UNLEASHED 61
you just because you sing over the radio at stated inter-
vals. I wouldn't care to have anyone like that in my
intimate circle of enemies.”
“Was he?” Blake asked keenly.
“Known—as the police say—to me?” Dennis shook
his head. “He wasn't—favorably or unfavorably. I
haven’t got anyone like that in my past, thank heaven.”
“Well, is that all the bag?” Peter asked Blake.
“No,” she said. “It isn't. I was going to say, across
the hall from Dennis was, (I) a stage couple, those
musical-comedy people who're playing at the Columbia
in Honeyblossom this week.”
“Ah, they’d do it with their tongues,” breathed
Dennis.
Blake looked at him. He sunk back abashed, making
dumb-show promises of penitence and silence.
“And (2),” said Blake severely, “the Anstruthers,
and we’ve gone to dinner parties and met them there,
Peter, which I hope lets them out.”
Dennis showed signs of life again. Peter caught his
eye in sympathy. Dennis subsided, satisfied. Blake
glanced up from her notes, suspiciously, but seeing no
sign of communication attempted, went on.
“Then there's Dennis, what were you going to
say just now?” she pounced suddenly.
“I was only going to say,” Dennis murmured, “you
can bore people to death, too—at dinner parties. That's
one way of doing it.”
Blake snorted. A ladylike little snort. Peter grinned.
. “Then there's,” said Blake with immense dignity,


62 MURDER UNLEASHED
* -
“a Mr. Morgan, a very nice man, at the end room
across from your side. And he was down in the Etruscan
ballroom all evening dancing.”
“What a pity,” Dennis broke his silence drowsily,
like little bubbles of speech ascending from a recumbent
floating swimmer in a calm pool, “what a pity,” he
repeated, “that it wasn’t the Attic ballroom. Morgan—
Attic.”
“Den-nis!” said Blake. He opened his eyes to a frozen
atmosphere.
He broke the ice and got out of his perilous position.
“What,” he inquired intently, “does Mr. Morgan
do, besides being so nice?” -
“And besides dancing all night in the-uh, Etruscan
Room?” Peter wanted to know.
“Why,” said Blake doubtfully, “I don't think he
does anything, much.” She frowned down at her notes.
“The help all like him. And he's got money. He just
hasn’t any business. Maybe he buys stocks sometimes,
to keep him busy. But I suppose he plays around,
mostly. He knows a lot of people. Plays golf a bit.
Likes sailoring—has a nice little launch, or motorboat,
or some kind of an amateur ship, at the Yacht Club
anchorage. Gives parties. Goes to ‘em.”
“A clubman,” said Peter in a tone of complete
discovery. “There must be such beings. You always read
about them in the papers.”
“Noted,” said Dennis, nodding. “Or well known.”
“Ah,” said Peter, “but do we?”
“Of course you do,” said Blake briskly. “I told you


MURDER UNLEASHED 63
all there was to tell about him. He was dancing all
evening, anyway.”
“We'll file Mr. Morgan for reference, anyway,” said
Dennis soothingly, “though I agree with you that he's
probably harmless. How would a clubman dispose of
his enemies anyway, Byrne? I’m a bit at sea there, I
confess.”
“He’d just drop them,” Peter considered and gave a
verdict. “Not know them at all—socially, you know.”
“I don’t think Bianca was the sort of person you
could drop,” Dennis pointed out. “Not if she didn’t
want you to.”
Peter wagged a dubious head. “It’s supposed to cut
people to the heart,” he said. “Being dropped, you
know. They stagger out of their clubs—you've seen
them, in the movies
“If you two have quite finished your humor,” said
Blake, gently, “we’ll have some more business. That's
all my report. The other rooms were vacant. Those
were all your immediate neighbors, Dennis.”
Dennis smiled at her. “Thanks a lot,” he said.
“That's all right,” said Blake a bit gruffly.
Darn Dennis' You couldn’t get really mad at him,
Blake thought, balked. He disarmed you. He was doing
it now.
“The committee of the whole has read and approved
of Miss Byrne's report,” he said, “and orders it filed
for reference. And the chairman wishes to say that it's
a very nice report indeed.”
He turned briskly to Peter.


64 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Byrne?” He cocked an interrogative eyebrow at
that immovable but somehow forceful large person.
Peter smiled slowly. His blue eyes were very clear
and untroubled in the depths of their rock ledges.
“Do I hear the whip crack?” he asked. “All right,
here come the elephants into the arena.”
“You were to meet Sullivan,” Dennis reminded him
affably.
“What's Inspector Sullivan like?” asked Blake with
a proper awe of the constabulary.
“He’s like Peter, a little.” Dennis turned to her.
“That's why I wanted to send Peter against him. He-
looms. They remind one a great deal of two tall cliffs
standing face to face, and I feel a bit crushed and very
vulnerably puny between them. Man facing Nature,
and all that, you know. Peter, if not actually getting
anything out of Sullivan, could at least outface him.
I can’t.”
“The inspector doesn’t like you, Dennis?”
“I wouldn't say that,” Dennis considered. “Not me
personally, that is. He just wouldn't care much for
any criminal. Particularly one he thinks may be a
murderer. He just isn’t made that way.”
“But then—why didn’t he arrest you straight off?”
Dennis took another of his long looks into a darkened
future.
“The long leash has strangled many fool dogs,” he
said slowly. “I think that's the inspector's idea, in this
case. He's giving me all the rope there is—to get tied
up in.”


MURDER UNLEASHED 65
“Oh!” said Blake.
“Not entirely,” said Peter. “He’s after Dennis, sure.
But he told me he wouldn’t want to help hang an inno-
cent man. He's puzzled because some of the pieces
don’t fit in. He said, ‘You can tell Devore it was lucky
for him the windows weren’t open.” Don’t you remem-
ber >>
“But they were closed,” said Dennis, bewildered. “I
told you—the room was locked, and all the windows
were locked, too. Sullivan saw them.”
“Sure he did—and he saw the fire escape just out-
side them. And he said to himself, if you’d just staged
a murder there and wanted an out for yourself, wouldn’t
you have opened the windows and left the way to the
fire escape open, and then called the police? And when
the police came, you’d have said, ‘A thief's been in
here—and he's killed this woman!’ and you’d have
pointed dramatically to the open window, Dennis.
And that's what you didn’t do. You let the police come
into a closed, locked room and told them you'd found
it that way, and expected them to believe someone
else had done it. You blundered into the murderer's
trap. And, luckily for you, Sullivan had sense enough
to see it. Then he wondered if you were outsmarting
him, at that.
“He took your fingerprints. He searched the room
for strange prints, and he didn’t find any. He didn't
expect to find any. Anyone that smart wouldn’t have
left prints there. There weren't any prints at all on the
knife. But on the window latch, where he found your


66 MURDER UNLEASHED
fingerprints, he did find a set over yours. It was the
chambermaid’s. She was the last one to shut those
windows. So you hadn’t outsmarted him and closed
the window and put yourself into a trap so obvious
that he couldn’t help seeing it. It was the murderer
who’d put you there. And, luckily for you, Sullivan
saw that and you didn’t. Otherwise you'd have gone
clever and tried to get yourself out of it.”
There was a short but very full silence.
“Well,” said Dennis, summing it up at last, “I told
you cleverness was a very overrated quality!”


Chapter 8
DELROYI DELROYI
“Well,” said Peter, “we seem to be agreed that every-
one we’ve discussed in this case couldn’t be a murderer.
That helps a lot.”
The phone rang. Blake took the call on the French
extension phone by her chair and then handed the
instrument over to Dennis. -
“For you,” she said.
It was Kennedy. That noble soul had risen above his
injured feeling about the rape of his socks and shirts,
to answer the higher call of his profession.
“Dennis,” he said without preamble, “Father Mal-
letti hasn’t come back.”
Dennis said, “Then that means—Delroy.”
“Uh-huh,” agreed Kennedy. “I’ve been to the
church, and they're worried. Young Father O’Bannon
—that's the one we saw last night—sort of blames him-
self. But—well, he can’t give us any more help on the
details. That's all we’ve got to go on—a big dark car
coming, and a dying parishioner somewhere in the
country near Delroy. You say you know the place.”
“It's my inning,” said Dennis instantly. “I’ll go,
Kennedy, and if I find him I call you up. Okay?”
“There must be some white man’s blood in you,”
67


68 MURDER UNLEASHED
Kennedy said gratefully. “Sew it up tight, Dennis,
whatever the dope is, and I’ll remember this. I can’t
get away from the Hall just now.”
Dennis put the phone down, softly, thoughtfully, and
turned to his frankly interested host and hostess.
“There is news,” he said. “Listen.”
And he told them of the Italian ex-bootlegger's roof
garden just across the street from the gray bulk of the
Church of Saints Peter and Paul, and of old Father
Malletti standing on the steps and watching Bianca,
weeping, hurrying across the square—and later that
same night, a big, dark car coming and taking him
away. . . .
His voice faltered to silence. His eyes were dark and
somber, unlit by any light within. He saw pictures. He
sat with his hand propping up his chin—he saw the
old man going into darkness—Bianca's friend. . . .
“Father Malletti was a saint!” he protested. He
turned to Peter and Blake. “The Italian said so! No
one would hurt him!”
“Oh, Dennis,” said Peter reluctantly and slowly, but
with his terrible strong honesty, “sometimes saints get
in the way—of devils. And your murderer—you told
us so yourself—was a devil.”
“I think,” said Blake, on a queer high note of breath-
lessness, “we’d better get the car out, Peter. Can you
come with us?”
That stout-hearted gentleman shook his massive
head, still more reluctantly.
“I’ve got a case coming up in court,” he said. “But


MURDER UNLEASHED 69
—I’ll get a postponement! You can go on without me,
and I’ll follow later. That okay?”
“Swell!” said Dennis. “I’ll see you at Hasta la
Vista.”
“Wherever that is,” said Blake, once again cheerful
at the prospect of action, and persuading herself that
all would go well, since Dennis's face was brightening.
He told them, briefly. “I’ve got a ranch there. By the
Little San Ramon River. Hasta la Vista—it means,
“Until I see you again,’ or something like that. Sort of
a good-bye.”
“Ah, a landed gentleman!” said Peter lazily but
keenly.
“Not yet,” said Dennis. “A bachelor. Always have
been.”
He flashed that somehow grave, faint grin of his at
Blake.
“Come on,” Blake said, getting up.
He was light-hearted again. She felt her own spirits
going up recklessly. She put on her brown tweed coat
with the big badger fur collar sticking up all around her
face, and a snug brown turban on her bright hair.
Her eyes looked bluer and bigger, and her cheeks were
fresh and cool and pink, in the brisk breeze outside the
house. The fog was driving inland, in little puffs of
white across the city, in the fresh wind, and the sun
was out in a blue November day that was almost a
copy of spring.
They got out the old red roadster and waved good-
bye to Peter, standing there at the casement window


70 MURDER UNLEASHED
with his pipe in his teeth and his mouth drawn back
in a smile. Blake waved and smiled at him, but Dennis's
white flash of a smile was almost like a knife cutting
them away from him. He was glad to be out, and free,
and away.
“Dennis,” Blake said curiously, watching him drive,
“you love this place of yours, don’t you?”
“‘Where the heart is . . .’” said Dennis, and fell
silent.
But she could almost hear the little merry whistle
in his heart, not quite coming up to his lips. He drove
with the sound of it in his ears.
Through the warm dust of the Santa Clara Valley,
set out with small fruit trees on the brown fields in
even rows like rooted chessmen; through the little
towns, whose names rang like sweet-toned bells in the
sleepy noon sunshine, Palo Alto, San José, Gilroy,
San Juan, Salinas; through the dark and wooded Santa
Cruz mountain pass, to the salt marshes of the open
seaside county of Monterey, where the wind blew and
lonely cattle grazed; and so at last, about three o'clock
in the afternoon, to sunshine again, and the Little San
Ramon River winding across yellow fields in a flat
country, singing to itself, very sleepily, very softly.
Dennis's country.
There was a little whitewashed ranchhouse set up
among a few tall guardians of trees on a little knoll;
there were empty corrals a little to one side; there were
white chickens scratching in the dirt in a run set con-
veniently near the kitchen door; there was a wide


MURDER UNLEASHED 71
veranda across the front of the house, and a few bright
flowers, dahlias and chrysanthemums, lifting their heads
in the brief garden around the front steps.
“Darling!” said Blake approvingly, getting out of
the car a bit stiffly.
Dennis said nothing. He only looked. He stood and
looked at it all as if he were-hungry, Blake decided.
Dennis said, “I haven’t seen this place for—nearly a
year. I wasn’t quite sure—it would be here.”
The kitchen door opened. Blake caught her breath.
An almost perfect copy of Louie, the old, graven image
of a Mongolian, was out on the back stoop with a pan
of chicken feed in one thin brown claw. His white apron
was spotless. His head was brown and nearly bald. His
black eyes glittered from wrinkles numerous as those
in a thoroughly dried prune.
“It's Wong,” said Dennis briefly.
The graven image saw them. The black eyes glittered.
The thin brown hand clutched the tin pan. Wong drew
himself up.
“Moah bettah you come back!” Wong addressed the
errant young master in a thin, indignant high cackle
that suggested an extremely nervous hen. “Wotsa
mallah you! You think Wong he laise this chicken, laise
these egg, laise these applicots, bettah fo' nothing!
Wotsa mattla you, Dennis, fo' not coming back heah?”
The thin high cackle of a hen disturbed in her ma-
ternal duties beat on them relentlessly. Blake grinned.
Dennis was getting nicely done to a lobster red.
“Come on, Odysseus,” she said. “The speech of wel-


72 MURDER UNLEASHED
come seems to be drawing to a close. Wong's getting
out of breath.”
“Whew!” said Dennis.
The torrent died down to a mere muttered trickle.
The black eyes glittered balefully. The wrinkled old
face gasped for breath.
“You darned old heathen!” said Dennis.
Odysseus was home from whatever wars he'd been
engaged in, Blake thought.
Pretty soon Dennis came out of the kitchen and
grinned at his guest rather sheepishly.
“We stay here for chicken dinner,” he said. “And
Peter, when he comes. In the meanwhile messengers go
forth among the heathen, from house to house and
ranch to ranch, assembling the multitude and requiring
them to come out and say if any strangers have been
around Delroy, or if any big black car has been here—
if anyone’s dying, and wanting to be prayed for—if
Father Malletti's been here, and if he's gone. You see,
Delroy is more of a district than it is a town. There's
only a main street with a few stores on it, and hitching
posts and parking space for us rustics and cowboys
when we come in to order our sombreros and necker-
chiefs. We’ll inquire there, of course. But Father Mal-
letti wasn’t called there. He was called to some outlying
ranchhouse or shack around here.”
“We'll find out!” Blake sounded her battle cry.
“Sure we will,” Dennis echoed her blithely. “And
there goes the one who'll do it for us.”
A thin brown figure was scrambling aboard an anti-


* MURDER UNLEASHED 73
quated Ford roadster. The Ford roadster went bucking
down the dirt road, hitting each deep rut as it passed.
“Dennis,” said Blake admiringly, taking off the hat
from her hot forehead, “you have a genius for using
people.”
“Really?” said Dennis politely.
“Go on being like that,” said Blake, undaunted. “I
feel a distinct coolness in the air. Delightful.”
Dennis grinned and got down from his high horse.
“Sometimes I’ve been sorry I never had a sister,” he
said reflectively. “It would have been nice at times to
tie her to a post and play Indian-at-the-stake with her,
I’m sure.”
“Didn't you have?” said Blake.
“No, never. Neither sisters nor cousins nor any
aunts,” said Dennis briefly. “I’m an orphan.”
He got up quickly.
“Do you want a drink of water and to rest in the
shade here,” he asked, “or do you want to come down
and see the river?”
His tone was so hopeful that Blake got up, the obedi-
ent guest.
“Let’s go see the river,” she said responsively.
Dennis and Blake walked side by side through the
hot gold sunshine, feeling the warmth of the sandy
earth up through their shoes as they went, down to the
green-shaded water. The Little San Ramon rippled
in the sun brightly, like a shield held up, and the
cottonwoods stirred gently, and the world was warm
and golden and very peaceful. They had come, Blake


74 MURDER UNLEASHED
thought, from the autumn fogs of the morning through
spring to summer again, and it was rather unbearably
peaceful and lovely, as though this were a lost summer
—last summer's golden day, for instance, forgotten by
time. She told this to Dennis, and he nodded gravely
and stood looking a moment at the shifting river, from
where they were halted up from the bank.
“‘Tinkers to Evers to Chance,” he murmured. “I
see what you mean, Blake. Reverse play—going back
to last summer instead of forward. Maybe you're right,
and I'm making up for the summer I missed here.
Time’s justice doing me right.”
He smiled at her.
“I always see what you mean, Blake,” he repeated.
He caught her hand suddenly and swung it as they
went on again to the river.
Then his eyes went far away, absently, again.
“I’m thinking of Father Malletti,” he said softly. “I
didn't expect to find him in my house, all ready for us,
exactly, but—well, Delroy's such a wide county. He
might be anywhere around here, and what chance have
we of picking up his trail? Just—chance, that's all.”
Dennis dropped her hand.
They walked on in silence. They came to the bank
of the Little San Ramon, and Blake sat down on the
soft sand, while Dennis propped himself along the trunk
of a cottonwood tree and stared at the stream going by,
dazzling his somber eyes.
After a while, Blake said softly, urgently, “Dennis?”
He didn’t turn around. “Yes?” he said.


MURDER UNLEASHED 75
“There's something else,” Blake said. “You’re put-
ting me off, Dennis. You’ve something else in the back
of your mind, always. What is it? We’re friends, Dennis.
Peter and you and I. You can trust us.”
He turned around then in a roughly impatient, single
movement that yet held appeal.
“What are friends, Blake?” he asked. “I haven’t got
a thing to give you—you and Peter. Nothing that’ll
satisfy you. You know—you must have guessed—I’m
the hit-and-run hero Kennedy was talking about. The
man who ran into someone down near Salinas here a
year ago last July, and didn’t give himself up till next
day, and all that. I was lucky—I got off with probation.
Lucky! How'd you like to report every doing of yours
twice a week to a hard-boiled probation officer? It
makes you feel like a beast in a cage. You want—space.
Freedom. Loneliness. Well, after a year I got ‘em.”
“And what are you going to do with them, Dennis?”
“Oh, I’m not a woman hater,” he said more calmly.
“You needn’t be sorry for me, Blake. I’m not soured on
life, or anything like that, and I don’t think all women
are crooks because one of them took me for all I had.
She was in a tough place, and she used me to get out
of it—that's all. She was engaged to a fine guy, and she
was a flighty little piece who wanted some fun. He was
away right then, so we went around together a lot.
And one night we were coming home, along about two
in the morning, and she was driving 52
Blake gave a sharp gasp.
Dennis eyed her wearily.


76 MURDER UNLEASHED
“I thought you knew,” he said, uninterested.
“Something you said—well, anyway, Kennedy guessed
—she was driving lickety-split, and all of a sudden she
bumped something, and she began to cry out about
hitting someone. But she didn’t stop—she stepped on
the gas. And by the time I could get her stopped, we
were on a side road. So I made her come back, and we
saw another car stop and pick him up, taking him to a
hospital, I guessed. She was just about crazy then,
thinking she'd have to tell all this to her fiancé—he was
a nice guy, but very strict—so I drove her home and
then came around to the town to report it. And they
took me up, for hitting him. He was dead.
“That's all, I guess,” Dennis reviewed past history
dispassionately. “I’d probably have done the same
thing if I’d been in her case. I don’t blame her. No, it's
just that I feel like the name of that ship the Canadian
captain had—the one the Coast Guards sunk. I'm
Alone. I prefer to be. I feel safer that way.”
“You pig!” said Blake.
Dennis bowed.
“At your command!’” he said.
“I wish I had a mustache to twirl,” he added plain-
tively. “I always feel not having one at such moments
as these.”
Blake laughed—she couldn’t help it—above an im-
mense gulf of loneliness.
i:º


Chapter 9
THE HONEST PLOWMAN
THEY had no news of Father Malletti—no news of him
anywhere. Neither of his coming, nor of his staying,
nor of his going from there. Not from the dusty, sun-
parched, incurious little town, or from any of the neigh-
boring ranches. Peter, who'd come down by train and
been gathered into the red roadster at the station at
five o’clock that afternoon, thoroughly scouted the
idea of there being any news.
“This is the last place they'd take him to,” he as-
serted, driving them off the main paved highway into
the dirt road to Dennis's ranch. “If he was ‘taken”
anywhere at that, instead of being legitimately sent for.
They’d never give the real name of a place in such a
case.”
Dennis disagreed. He shook his head wearily, stub-
bornly, unconvincedly.
“I’ve got an idea they did,” he said simply. “They
made a slip there. Someone was thinking of this part
of the country, and the name came out. It's so pat,
somehow. Why Delroy, anyway? It’s miles from San
Francisco. It’s not so—well, convincing, if you want.
Why not just say there was someone sick in San Mateo,
or Palo Alto, or any of the near-by peninsula towns?
No, they were thinking of this country, and they had
77


78 MURDER UNLEASHED
to say it—it came out almost against their will. It
was in their thoughts so deeply.”
They left it at that.
“Maybe you're right, Dennis,” Peter finally was
forced to say. “Maybe even your devil can make a
mistake.”
“Don’t call him mine,” Dennis said.
The quiet words were a horror of loathing.
“Sorry!” said Peter. He drove along a little way, big
hands loose on the wheel, obviously deep in thought.
Then it had to come out. -
“And yet, you know,” he said slowly, “perhaps
there's a connection. Have you thought of any, Den-
nisf’”
Dennis looked at him with wide dark eyes of aston-
ishment.
“Why, what could there be?” he asked.
“Well, this,” said Peter, jerking his head at the sur-
rounding sun-soaked and monotonous country through
which their dirt rut of a road led. “Delroy! Doesn’t it
occur to you that both you and he seem to have this
country in common? It's your own home stamping
grounds—and yet he chooses it for a bait for Father
Malletti—if he is playing that game. Anyway, someone
summons Father Malletti to this place. Is that the some-
one who killed Bianca, Father Malletti's protégée, and
so involved you in the case, Dennis, because he did it in
your room?”
Peter turned those deep blue eyes, small-looking in
their depth of eye-socket bone, on Dennis intently.


MURDER UNLEASHED 79
“An enemy hath done this,” he quoted, keen-eyed.
“Do you remember saying that, Dennis, yesterday
morning? What more is your enemy going to do to you?
He involves you, it seems to me, whenever he can.
He has plans for you. And they aren't at all nice plans.
He wants you to get out of his way.”
“A—a sort of sideswipe of revenge at Dennis, when
he's doing his dirty work,” Blake contributed breath-
lessly. “Oh, he is a devil! Dennis, don't you really
know him?”
“I wish I did,” said Dennis simply. “You make me
feel as if I were standing in a lighted room with all the
shades up and someone watching me from the darkness
outside.”
He raised his head from the comfortable leather
back of the car seat, at a sudden thought.
“And if there is someone like that watching me,” he
said reflectively, “he knows more than you do about
what's ever happened to me—down here. You’d better
know, too. I’ve already told Blake.”
Then he told Peter what he'd told Blake about the
hit-and-run episode of a year ago.
Peter was silent, at the end, but not unfriendly—just
thinking it over. Then he nodded.
“That was all there was to it?” he asked.
“All,” said Dennis straightly. “Exactly as it hap-
pened. And it couldn't have any bearing on this thing
that's happening now. It's ended for good. I just
thought—you'd better know about it, Byrne.”
“I see,” Peter accepted it then. “I’m glad you told us.”


80 MURDER UNLEASHED
“I wanted to,” said Dennis. “Before Kennedy or the
police told you. Sullivan’ll get onto it sometime.”
They were at Hasta la Vista now. The sun was
setting. It was all red and dark gray in the flat west
country behind the tall elm trees around the house.
The little white house had a flicker of red color on it,
changing momentarily.
Wong met them. Dinner, he informed his straying
master sternly, was on the table. He kept a beady eye
on Dennis like a nervous hen ready to pounce on an
errant and rather senseless chick. Dennis ushered his
guests about.
“We,” Blake said pointedly to Peter, who wanted to
linger and look at things, “are starving. Dennis and I
had only a couple of hot dogs, coming through San
José.”
“Wong!” yelled Dennis, at the head of the table in
the small room lit by two bright oil lamps. “We’re
here!”
“He’s not so swell at pancakes,” he said modestly to
Blake, of the old retainer, “but he’s a shoutin' bearcat
on hot biscuits and chicken.”
Ten minutes later Blake looked up and caught
Dennis's eye blissfully.
“Yes,” she said. “He is, isn’t he?”
The shoutin' bearcat cackled in delight.
“You’re adopted,” Dennis said to her. “That's our
war cry.”
“Smoke?” said Peter. He passed cigarettes around,
and they lit up.


MURDER UNLEASHED 81
Wong fired a high-pitched and weirdly accented string
of syllables at Dennis. That gentleman cocked an un-
accustomed ear and finally got it.
“Man coming to see me,” he announced briefly.
“After dinner.”
“What kind of a man?” asked Blake.
“Well, if we had any hills around here, he’d be a hill-
billy,” said Dennis, rather puzzled. “You know the
type. Long and lean and lanky-looking, never washes,
does a bit of plowing sometimes, helps out in fruit season
or cattle driving. Got too much sun in him—all ambi-
tion and get-up been baked out of him long ago.
Name's Bowden, I think. Lives in a sort of shack and
on an acre of ground.”
“Wonder what he wants to say,” Peter said.
Dennis shrugged.
“I think I’ll phone Kennedy,” he said, getting
up. “Promised to report to him. No news yet, any-
way.” -
“Maybe,” said a Peter soothed and a bit facetious
from the extraordinarily good combination of hot bis-
cuits, chicken, and cigarettes—“maybe your honest
plowman can tell you a tale.”
And that was the way Kennedy first got the “Honest
Plowman” phrase of the later, terrible headline stream-
ers. Dennis repeated it to Kennedy for a jest, and
Kennedy remembered it—afterward.
Peter and Blake strolled out to the small front yard
to finish their cigarettes in the fresh, nearly frosty air,
while Dennis was inside phoning.


82 MURDER UNLEASHED
“What do you think of this guy, anyway?” Peter
demanded.
“I don’t know,” said Blake, a bit troubled. “I feel
as if I’d known him for a long time.”
“That's the trouble,” Peter grunted. “You can’t get
far enough away to see him good. To see what he's
really like, I mean,” he grumbled.
“No,” said Blake. “You can’t take him or leave him
—he's already there.”
Dennis came up to them. In the gloom of the evening
his face looked white.
“I talked with Kennedy,” he said. “He says—he
says the police know Bianca's real name. She was
Mrs. Victor Farnese!”
“What of it?” asked Peter.
Dennis's emotion seemed a bit unaccounted for.
“I forgot you didn’t know,” he said dully. “Victor
Farnese was the man we ran over on the Salinas high-
way a year ago. The man they thought I killed.”
He looked at them, puzzled, tortured, through the
dusk.
“Things don’t come to an end, do they?” he asked
huskily. “They don't—ever—end.”
He swayed a little. Peter put an arm around his
shoulders. s
“Well,” Blake said, looking quizzically at the lately
doubting Peter, “thunder clears the air, anyway!”
Dennis shook himself.
“It gave me a jolt,” he said more practically. “What
in hell is Victor Farnese's name doing here? He's been


84 MURDER UNLEASHED
or the sheriff of this here county—and along just about
that time you come along, drivin' like all get out.
Couldn’t see who was in the car—saw your headlights
comin’. And just for a minute—just for a bare minute—
saw somethin’ in the road, in your headlights. It looked
like a man on the highway. He was layin’ down.”
“You mean—you saw us hit Farnese?” Dennis said
quietly, from a dry throat.
“No,” Bowden drawled. “I mean when your head-
lights was on ahead. Say thutty feet ahead of you.
Looked like somethin’ was laying there—like a big
shadow—before you ever got on to it. Then you came
by, hell-for-leather, and passed me, an’—whatever it
was, and I heard your girl screamin’ out.”
Dennis couldn’t speak. He was thinking of shadows—
of another dark shadow he'd seen in a hotel room—on
a floor. . . .
Peter cleared his throat. “Dark night?” he asked.
“Dark as hell,” said Bowden. “No moon, ner fog.
If you didn’t want to be seen . . . Dark as tonight's
goin’ to be.”
“Listen,” said Dennis desperately. “Listen. Do you
mean—we ran into a dead man on that highway?”
His visitor shrugged, faintly seen.
“I ain’t sayin’,” he said. “Only—it looked like a man
might, layin’ down.”
“Did you touch it—afterwards?” asked Peter. “Was
it—Farnese?”
Bowden shrugged again, less clearly seen than ever.
“No use,” he said. “Figured whatever it was, you'd
i


MURDER UNLEASHED 85
hit it square. People'd be comin', right away, and I
didn’t want to be there. Less I knew—”
“But you came and told us,” said Blake. “Why?”
“Always meant to,” said Bowden lazily, “sometime.
Never got over here till now. Heard you was back.
Last year Hell, nobody'd care now. You wouldn't
spill it. Thought you'd like to know, though. Might be
—sort of restless in your mind.”
“Well,” said Peter dryly, “we’ve got news for you,
too. Mrs. Victor Farnese was murdered night before
last in Dennis's hotel room in San Francisco!”
For a minute their self-invited guest stood motion-
less, soundless. As if Peter's words had cracked a hard-
baked crust of indifference, were slowly entering his
mind, becoming sensible, believable. . . .
He cried out once, a hoarse cry, astonishment, denial,
belief They heard him; then he was gone, swifter
than shadows.


MURDER UNLEASHED 87
He ran after Dennis, as well as he could see to follow
him.
“Blake,” said Blake to herself, breathlessly, “you
stay here.”
Then Blake started to run, too. She and Peter and
Dennis ran smoothly, recklessly, over sandy ground,
stumbled over heavy plowed ground broken beneath
their feet, ran breakneck down a little rounded hill to
halt, half-sobbing for breath, at the shelter of its valley.
The keen night air had turned warm and heavy to their
bodies, the breaths they labored to draw into their
aching lungs were unbelievably heavy and smothering.
Dennis grasped each one by the arm to get their
attention, and then pointed up to the opposite slope.
“House,” he gasped huskily. “His. This is—south
gully. We go—up.”
Peter groaned. “We would,” he said bitterly, drawing
great drafts of air into his big chest. “My legs weigh a
ton.” -
Miraculously, all of a sudden they had their second
wind. They made it to the top of the opposite hill,
slowed to a more sober pace, but not suffering so much.
Dennis didn’t seem to mind that they'd come on against
orders—even Blake, he didn’t so much not notice as
take for granted there. He was too keen on something
else. On getting his answer. He’d sort of broken loose
on his own hook at last. º
The shack was set on the top of the round foothill
between two humps of it, protected by some chaparral
bush from the winds. It was dark. Dennis didn’t even


88 MURDER UNLEASHED
knock on the door. He pushed it, and it swung open.
“Matches?” he asked Peter. “Or a flashlight, any
of you?” -
Peter struck a match. Dennis looked around quickly,
before it should go out, and located the oil lamp on the
table. He bent over it, and it slowly flared into bloom,
and Dennis's intent, stern face showed above it, the
eyes veiled under level brows, the mouth grave and
calm.
He looked at the one room slowly, fully—iron stove,
bunk-cot, table, cooking things hung up, shelves, dirty
rough clothes hung up on nails in a corner.
“He hasn’t got back yet,” he said. “Perhaps he's
scared to yet. Meanwhile—”
He went over to the clothes and began going through
them methodically, gravely intent, searching with a
curious abstract young sternness, as if he were a rather
scornful but just young judge searching out truth from
an unsavory case. He put his hands into the blue denim
overall pockets, lifted out bits of twine, crumpled ciga-
rette papers, once a pocketknife, other uninteresting
odds and ends. He didn’t find anything worth looking
at twice. Then he looked under the soiled pillow of the
bunk-like bed, under the thin mattress, ruffled the
blankets—Bowden evidently had no use for sheets—
and put it in order again deftly, quickly.
Peter and Blake found seats, he on the kitchen table,
she on the one kitchen chair, and watched Dennis
without saying anything. There really wasn't anything
to say. This, as he'd told them, was his business. Tracing


MURDER UNLEASHED 89
a year-old lie, a year-old injustice, to its hiding place.
They didn’t blame Dennis for making free with his
neighbor's shack in his absence. Bowden, if he'd been
telling the truth, had been making pretty free with a
good year of Dennis's life by holding out his informa-
tion. Peter privately thought he'd like Dennis and
Bowden to meet again. It would be a swell fight. He'd
second Dennis.
Meanwhile he waited. And Blake with him.
Dennis finished with the bed and stood in the center
of the room, looking around. He ran one hand through
his already ruffled head and surveyed the ground with
a certain puzzlement. Then he turned to the interested
witnesses watching him.
“It must be here,” he said. “Don’t you see?” appeal-
ing to them as a judge would instruct a jury, patiently.
“He didn’t come over to tell me about Farnese's death
out of kindness. He wasn’t that kind of a guy. He had
something to get out of it. What? I’ve got to find some-
thing—or make him tell 33
He turned suddenly to the kitchen table where Peter
was throned, and ordered him off peremptorily.
“Beat it,” he said, and was hauling out the one
battered drawer, shallow but filled with odds and ends
of untidy things, with the industry of a terrier after a
promising rat, before Peter was halfway off his perch.
The drawer was the record of a rather messy sort of
life—a futile, unpathetic sort of life. It had kitchen
knives and forks and spoons of tin and of thin cheap
silver plate worn through, mixed up with a couple of


90 MURDER UNLEASHED
Love Nest magazines on cheap rough yellowed paper
that had been handled a great deal by unwashed hands,
and there were a few letters on cheap blue-lined station-
ery written by women who had evidently joined the
Love Nest Letter Writers’ Club and could find nothing
better in life for a romance than a correspondence with
such men as Bowden, and he with them. Dennis's very
hands expressed a disdainful distaste, looking over the
scrawled things, but he didn’t neglect them. He read
them and then put them by silently, and then rum-
maged around among the string and paper and maga-
zines, to come up with a crumpled bit of blue paper.
He held this out, curiously, with a different look dawn-
ing on his intent face.
“Hullo!” he said. “Recognize this?”
“Money-order receipts,” confirmed Peter.
“Look at the dates,” ordered Dennis. He passed two
or three of the crumpled things over. Peter looked at
the dates and place of buying them, stamped in a round
circle on the scraps of paper. He looked at the amounts.
They were, as far as he looked from the collection in
his hand, all for ten dollars, even. They were all sent
from the post office at San Francisco. He whistled. . . .
Dennis was tearing things apart in the drawer and
bringing up more of them for inspection.
“Why, we’ve stumbled onto a little fortune,” said
Blake, eagerly. “Or does your plowman send these
home to his old mother, Dennis?”
Peter and Dennis began spreading the receipts out
on the table. They sorted them out. They counted them.


MURDER UNLEASHED 91
•
There were eight. They were all for ten dollars. They
were all from San Francisco. It didn't make much sense.
Bowden wouldn’t have gone up to the city to send these.
Where’d he ever get the money, anyway? And he didn’t
have anyone to send them to, at that. Dennis only
laughed a bit scornfully and harshly at the idea of that
sun-scorched, wind-beaten person sending ten of his
precious dollars out every month to a dear old white-
haired mother. He just couldn’t see it somehow, he told
Blake.
Then they began looking at dates again. There was
something funny about those dates. They weren't
recent.
“Why'd he keep these?” Blake asked them, her eyes
going wide and bluer in the flare of the oil-lamp light.
Her hair caught the light like a short-haired halo
around her young face. Her gold-touched hair got in
Dennis's eyes like a light. He couldn’t ask her to move
away from the lamp, though. That would be silly. He
said:
“Bowden was the kind of person who didn’t throw
anything away, Blake. For one thing, he was too lazy
—just stuffed things in drawers and kept 'em. Too
stingy, another thing. I guess he always had a sneaking
idea any little bit of string or paper or anything was
worth something. He was the kind of person that can't
make a clean sweep of things anyway—sort of clutters
up his life with truck all the time, until he dies.”
None of them noticed that they were speaking of the
absent owner of the shack as though he were himself


92 MURDER UNLEASHED
in the past tense. They had such a disdain of the man
that they simply didn’t accept him among them there.
They knew he wouldn't come in while they were there,
anyway. They were sure of it. He was too mean-spirited.
They'd seen him. He was afraid.
“Got it!” said Peter triumphantly.
The big head bent over the tidy rows of blue slips.
He put out one big finger and pointed as he explained
along the rows.
“Got the dates—see?” he said. The finger moved
along the rows as he spoke. “They're a month apart,
except for a gap of one here and here, and over here
and here. The first one is for August, of a year ago.
It's not too improbable to assume that the gaps repre-
sent missing receipts that are lost, I think. He must
have lost some, in this rather careless system of book-
keeping. In other words, there were twelve receipts for
ten dollars each, covering a period of exactly a year.
They began, you see, about a year ago, and ended this
July.”
He looked up then at the funny sound that came
from Dennis.
“That mean anything to you?” he asked. “Think,
Dennis.”
“Think?” cried Dennis furiously, hopelessly. “I don’t
have to think! I know damn’ well what it means—do
you think I'd forget those dates so easily? They were
last year, the year I was convicted of manslaughter and
put on probation for Farnese's killing!”
Silence quivered about them. Peter broke through it.


MURDER UNLEASHED 93
N
“Well, what does it mean, Dennis?” he asked
hoarsely.
Dennis stared at them, his face white and bitter as
the bitter and unbelieving hurt in his voice when he
spoke, slowly:
“Don’t you see? Don't you see? Someone—must have
known he was there on the highway when I ran over
Farnese that night. They knew Bowden was there—
und they didn't know how much he'd seen, maybe.
And they approached him—and he sold me out for ten
dollars a month—someone sent him the blackmail
price of his silence all the time my sentence was due
to run. Then I was free—this July—and they quit
sending any more money—and he thought he'd get
even on them, and waited—he waited for four months
to tell me, when I finally came back here.”
The slow, hurt voice stopped. They stared in silence
at the silent blue slips of paper.


Chapter 11
THE HOUNDS OF FEAR
“THEN what?” said Peter. “Then what?”
He wanted to be doing something, to be in action.
The muscles of his big body tensed, relaxed, like a man
stretching himself after sleep. It was hard to be sitting
there when something was going on—outside. He
wanted to be in on it.
He went to the door and opened it, and Dennis and
Blake came to stand at his elbow. In the dark night
they heard the rising wind charging up the hillside,
rustling the bushes near the shack, dying down again—
and getting up again.
Somewhere out there was Bowden, in the dark and
windy night, a man afraid—running, perhaps, or hiding
—Dennis couldn’t forget the way he'd cried out, the
way he'd run.
They couldn’t hope to find him now. They didn’t
know where he'd gone. They could only wait, hoping
he'd come back at last.
The wind tore around the corner of the hill, and the
night came alive again with its rush.
“The hounds of fear!” said Dennis softly. “The
hounds of fear out night-running. You sicked them on
him, Peter. He won’t come here. He's—running.”
- 94


MURDER UNLEASHED 95
Peter let the door slam shut, and they turned back
to the table and the oil lamp again.
“No, he didn’t expect to hear that Farnese's wife
was dead,” Dennis went on in that same soft voice, as
though he trod down a dangerous trail warily. He seated
himself at the table and put his elbows on it, resting his
head on his two fists. He lifted his head and put his
chin on his hands at rest instead, and grinned a crooked,
unamused grin at the other two.
“Professor Dennis in his famous séance perform-
ance,” he remarked. “Shall I give it to you now?”
“All you’ve got,” grunted Peter, dropping down onto
the side of the bunk. He drew Blake down beside him,
and they sat facing Dennis like an attentive audience.
“Here it is, then, as far as we’ve gone,” Dennis said.
“We think we’re almost as much in the dark as before.
Maybe so. But do you realize that every time we find
out something—even a trail that goes blind on us—we
find out something more about the man who put it
there? Our devil who killed Bianca.
“This is the plot. And you were right, Peter, this
evening when you said it did involve me. It's getting
clearer now all the time. It begins 'way back a year ago
last July. Farnese was killed. I think our devil killed
him. Why? We don’t know that. Maybe it's not im-
portant. A local quarrel. Anyway, it happened here, and
I was the fall guy. Only Bowden saw him lying on the
highway, before I hit him. Bowden was paid blackmail
to keep quiet, and I went on trial for the killing. Okay
so far?”


96 MURDER UNLEASHED
He cocked an eyebrow at his audience. Blake nodded,
quickly, beyond speech. Peter nodded a massive head
slowly.
“Neat,” he said. “I give him that, anyway.”
“Is that all?” asked Dennis. “Wait till you hear
what I give him. That guy’s good—in his way.
“Now we come to recent events. Bianca was killed
by our devil. Very coolly, very systematically. I told
you what I thought about him then. She was killed
because she was Farnese's widow, and she'd heard at
last that he didn’t die—of an accident. The same man
who killed him found out he had to kill her, to keep the
first murder quiet. Otherwise, why the long wait? It
doesn’t make sense. If he was just finishing off the
family, why didn’t he do it all at once, a year ago?
He was a friend of hers—a lover—and she was about
to find out he killed her husband. So she was killed.
In my room. If it ever came out that Farnese was dead
before I hit him, people would think, maybe, that I’d
killed him on purpose a year ago, then run over him
to disguise it as a manslaughter accident, and that
I'd killed his widow to keep her quiet about it after-
wards. See? Our murderer saw that. He was a neat guy,
at that, Peter. He didn't want to leave any loose ends
if he could help it. And he thought he could help it
along by adding me to the cast once more. The police
would suspect too much of a coincidence like that,
maybe, he'd think. I give him a swell mark on that.
At first I thought he was a loose performer, letting me
in for that without any seeming motive to back me up.


MURDER UNLEASHED 97
>
-
>
“Then,”—Dennis dropped that dark head down to
his hands again, and that determinedly light voice
went dark on him, too—“then Father Malletti came
into it. Have you forgotten him? I haven’t, for a second,
all this night—not even when we were running after
Bowden, across the fields in the dark and the wind.
He's been at the back of my mind. I can’t help it—I
think I’m going to meet him sometime. I’m going to
meet him,” he repeated, and stayed for a second lost
in some dark dream. “It’s a funny thing—I even seem
to know what he looks like. And I’ve never seen him,
either. Maybe I've just made up a picture of him out.
of my mind. An old man, going into darkness—I can’t
get him out of my mind.”
Dennis shivered, once, sharply, then stayed still.
“What does he look like, Dennis?” Peter said quietly.
“He’s got dark eyes that go right through you,”
Dennis said. “They’re very stern eyes. I’d be afraid,
only—there's his mouth, and his smile. It lights up
his face, when he smiles. He's got a thin face, and a
great beak of a thin nose, beautifully arched, and a thin
mouth. I think he had a quick temper, when he was a
young man, but he's gotten over that now. He's worn
down past the flesh and the passions to the light of the
spirit. It burns in him like this oil lamp burning here
in the dark. He's got thin white hair, too.
“For the rest,” said Dennis thoughtfully, face
propped in both his hands, staring ahead of him,
“he’s a rather tall, thin old man in a long black robe.
That's all, I think. All I see of him.”


MURDER UNLEASHED 99
Dennis shook his head.
“I don’t see anyone killing Father Malletti,” he said
simply. “It wouldn't do any good to them. He'd be
with them all the rest of their life. It would be too much
like killing themselves. And they can’t buy or beg his
silence. He’d speak out anything he thought should be
spoken out, if he were free. No, I bet they're sort of
puzzled what to do about it themselves—whoever
“they’ are. I bet they're—just waiting.”
He spoke with an assurance that, strangely enough,
Peter and Blake didn’t contest. He was like someone
who knew the path, in a strange country, and led the
way unhesitatingly. In a bit of a hurry, in fact, anxious
to arrive at some unknown destination.
“That's it so far,” he explained to them again. “I
told you we know a lot more about our unknown than
we did!”
“What, for instance?” Peter suggested.
“Well,” Dennis considered, “I told you before that
he had hell's own nerve, and that he was a cool, canny
customer; I'm not taking any of that back. Only he's
canny this way—he wants to let someone else take the
credit for him. Me, for one. He’s got nerve, but he's
not taking any risks he can avoid. Then—you're right
about this, Pete—he's got Delroy as a well-known
country to work in. Farnese was killed in Delroy;
Father Malletti was lured to Delroy; Bowden lives in
Delroy; he knows something about me, and I come
from Delroy. But he sent his money orders from San
Francisco; he's not a native here. He lives up in San


100 MURDER UNLEASHED
Francisco, where Bianca lived. And—he's someone
who's got free access to my hotel floor, and can get to
my room easily from where he lives—in my hotel.
That narrow it down a bit? Think of a guy like that
we know.”
“I will,” said Peter grimly.
“He is a devil,” said Blake softly, passionately.
“I don’t know,” said Dennis thoughtfully. “He’s
pretty bad, sure; but I don’t think he's so inhuman any
more, the more I know about him. I think he's very
humanly puzzled, say, about what to do about Father
Malletti; if he's of the faith of Father Malletti, as he
may be—Bianca was—he's probably thinking he's got
a lot more than he can handle now with a priest on his
hands. I think there’s things he’d stick at, and this is
one of them. You know, the more I see of life,”—Dennis
regarded them very thoughtfully indeed—“the more
I'm inclined to think there aren't any stage ‘villains’
in that sense of being what I’d call “rapiers of wicked-
ness,’ that have a delight in evil and in their skill in it
—like keen blades made only for fighting, and for
being wicked. I think perhaps there’re only two really
wicked classes of people in the world, though—and
those are the cruelly stupid, and the stupidly cruel.
They aren’t rapiers, they're bludgeons. They smash
things in the first place because they're clumsily wicked,
not really meaning to act like the rapiers of wicked-
ness.”
“Is this a bludgeon's work or a rapier's, Dennis?’
asked Blake with fascinated attention. “This case?”


MURDER UNLEASHED 101
s
-
“Rapier’s.” That was Peter's judicial opinion, briefly.
“I vote bludgeon,” Dennis said. “Look at the case
already! We’ve spotted holes in it as big as our heads!
There's Father Malletti, for one. He can’t be held si-
lenced forever. The other way—well, our human devil
doesn’t want to take it. Then there's Bowden—he's a
big gap in the defense. When we get Bowden, we'll
make a hole in it you can see through! Those are two
gaps that ought to be plugged, and aren't. And, if
he’d been a rapier, he’d have done for Farnese more
skillfully. All these later events, my sentence and Bian-
ca's murder, have been the outcome of him smashing
around regardless, trying to cover up his own traces
through the general wreckage of lives he's made. He's
cruelly stupid. And he's failed.”
“What about Bowden?” Peter asked. “Where does
he belong?”
“Bowden belongs to the stupidly cruel, I think,”
Dennis answered. “He’s the kind that would set dogs
onto a stray cat for the fun of it. That's the way he
felt about setting us onto the trail of a man who'd
been paying him money for silence, and who thought
his safety was bought a year ago for good. Bowden
wanted to have some fun with him, harrying him out of
safety.”
“Well,” said Peter grimly, heavily, “he sure started
something.”
Dennis nodded his dark head gravely.
“Yes,” he replied. “More than he wanted, or meant


102 MURDER UNLEASHED
to. He's the one who's being hunted now. He's afraid.”
And on the silent chill of that last word, they heard
the wind rising around the top of their hill, and, in the
night, the hounds of fear baying in the windy dark
outside.


Chapter 12
THE PLUGGED GAP
“So YoU see—” Dennis made a gesture with one
hand that spread the whole case before them on the
worn kitchen table like a pack of cards, or like the blue
money-order receipts that lay spread out there already.
“And here's another gap he left, our devil,” he said
as afterthought. “How'd these receipts get here? They
should have been left with the sender. But the murderer
didn't want to have anything to do with them—even
to tear ’em off and then throw them away, or burn
them. He was afraid he'd get careless about one of them
one day, and maybe the orders would be traced and
one receipt found in his possession. He was, you see,
always afraid, even though he reasoned to himself that
he'd made everything safe. So he left 'em on the
original orders, and they were preserved through
Bowden's shiftlessness, or craftiness, and came to us.
He couldn't, really, make anything safe, no matter
how hard he tried. It's all coming up again. Like earth
on a restless grave. Poor devil!”
Blake shuddered—she couldn’t help it. Peter con-
sidered Dennis thoughtfully, deeply.
“You talk as if you were getting to know him—to be
sorry for him,” he said at last. “Even for Bowden, too,
103


104 MURDER UNLEASHED
with his hounds of fear pursuing him. You make them
too—humanly frail, Dennis, for us to have much anger
left for them. Only pity. Is there anyone on God’s earth
you couldn’t make friends with, Dennis?”
Dennis grinned. “I don’t care much for the police,”
he said. “Or for Sullivan, if it comes to that. Or for that
hotel manager.”
He got up and went to the door again and stood
listening to the wind outside.
“It’s getting cold here,” he said. “No reason why
you should have to stay here all night. You and Blake
go back to my house; you can stay there all night, if
you want, or drive back to San Francisco if you have
to be there in the morning. Bowden won’t come back
here as long as there's a light in this place. I’ll go back
across the gully with you to the house—if he's watching,
he’ll know we’re all gone. Then I’ll leave you there and
come back here quietly and maybe catch him. And if I
do, he’ll tell what he knows.”
He opened the door a little, and the keen, damp
night air came like earthy darkness into the lighted
room.
“You’ll get cold, Blake,” he said. “You’d better
have something over your dress.”
“She can have my coat,” Peter growled and began
getting out of one sleeve.
“I am cold,” Blake admitted. “Talking of
graves ” and promptly shivered again.
“Here, take my coat,” Dennis said. “It’ll fit you
better—it's not a circus tent like Peter’s.”


MURDER UNLEASHED 105
>
He had it off and slung it around her, draping it over
her shoulders, while Peter was still getting his off. He
did it up carefully, putting the lifted collar up to
Blake's cool round chin.
“Dennis,” Blake said impulsively, “I think you’re
wonderful, the way you don’t fuss about my being here.
You don’t treat me like a girl in that way. You let me
in for things like you do Peter. I love it. Most girls
miss these sort of things. But you don’t treat me like
that—like a mere girl.”
“How else would I treat you?” asked Dennis, sur-
prised.
Something faintly demure come over Blake's vivid
face.
“I’ve been told,” she said softly, “there’re—other
ways.”
“Not by me,” boomed Peter. “I need a kid sister as
long as I can keep one—they're handy things to have
in a house.”
“You old Victorian!” scoffed Blake.
They stepped out into the night and waited while
Dennis turned the lamp down and it flickered into
darkness. For a second, it was totally dark around them.
Then the shapes of things came out a little, darker
bushes and the hill against a paler sky. Bright points
of stars appeared overhead. They got their bearings
and began to walk away, down the hill. Blake put her
hands through Peter's and Dennis's arms, and they
walked in step, stumbling once in a while over shadows'
that turned out to be solid clumps.


106 MURDER UNLEASHED
As they went down into the gully the sweet, frosty
air of November came around them; the earthy smell,
the smell of wet winter coming on, and the smell of
dead dry grass rotting on the fields, and of leaves turning
to mold, was in their nostrils. It was like a sort of nos-
talgia; it was a season smell they all loved, for the same
reason. Peter said it wistfully, lovingly, the stolid
giant made articulate.
“Football weather,” Peter said, drawing the keen
and fragrant air deep into his capacious chest like a
loved draft. The other two sighed wordlessly.
Then Dennis began to sing absently, not caring how
much noise they made to let Bowden know they were
gone. . . .
“Sweet—and lovely . . .”
Dennis heard himself singing softly, in the starry night
beside Blake wrapped in his coat.
After a few seconds—“Radio singer!” said Blake
bitingly, under her breath.
Dennis stopped. Then:
“How do you like this?” he said expressionlessly.
He began again. The cold night flowered into beauty.
Something sharp of point as a needle went through
Blake's heart.
“Drink to me only with thine eyes,”
sang Dennis,
“And I will pledge with mine . . .”


MURDER UNLEASHED 107
It was like being kissed. Only Dennis had done it to
hurt her.
“I sent thee late a rosy wreath,”
—the old song was like a record that couldn’t die, so
beautiful it was, all these hundred years—
“Not so much honoring thee,
As giving it a hope that there,
It could not withered be.”
You couldn't withstand beauty like that. It was a
knife at your heart. It was someone you loved singing
to you. It was something that wouldn’t ever die. How
could Dennis be so unmoved by it, making it so beauti-
ful? He sang as if his love were on his lips, as if all the
tenderness of the song were on his warm, young mouth,
and his arm through hers didn’t even tremble. He was
happy, making such sorrow of love, such a havoc in
the hearts of others listening to him. Was that what it
was to be an artist? Blake was learning.
“But thou thereon didst only breathe,”
sang Dennis,
“And sent’st it back to me-e-e;
Since when it grows and smells, I swear,”
the deathless love song rose triumphantly,
“Not of itself but thee!”


MURDER UNLEASHED 109
“only—then I’ll remember what even worms come to
in time. Dust. And then I can't help thinking how
brave men must be, so casually brave, to go on living
and to love life so much, knowing that at the end of it
there's—nothing. Dust again. Some people have con-
solation. They think there's something more. Maybe
there is. I don’t know. I do know, though, that we have
to die in this life, and that’s a terrible thing to have to
happen when it's a life like this. And they're so brave.
They accept it so casually. How can I think they're so
rotten, even the worst of them, when I see them going
on to that? I don’t know,” said Dennis carefully,
“what it’s all about, but I think they're—splendid,
anyway.
“Oh, Peter,” Dennis went on with a quiet passion,
“think how you’d feel knowing things are going to
end for you. No more days like today, no more nights
like tonight, for you ever! No more the sun shining in
your face and the wind in your hair, and you driving
along the dusty warm roads of Delroy. No more running
down the fields in the cool autumn night, and the smell
of the earth in your face, and the black frost rising to
touch your cheeks as you run!”
Peter gave a deep murmur of sound and drew a deep,
deep breath, earthy of frost and autumn, into his lungs.
“When I think of that,” said Dennis, “I doubt if I
could kill a fly. I’d want to give everything a chance.
Even a murderer, who doesn’t give anyone a chance.
It’s just that—I don’t know what it's all about,” he
repeated.


110 MURDER UNLEASHED
At that suddenly forlorn note in his voice, it was
Blake's turn to press her arm against his, hard, once.
“Only,” said Dennis more cheerfully, “it’s splendid,
all of it. I wouldn’t want to miss any of it. And when I
think of that, and that our murderer made Bianca miss a
lot of it, and Farnese, too, whatever kind of a guy he
was, why then I feel like asking Sullivan for an invita-
tion to see the hanging at San Quentin—the private
showing. Bianca—she wasn’t meant to miss any of it.
She loved all this, too—every day, every hour. I don’t
care what she was, or what she did—she didn’t deserve
—death. I don’t think anyone really does. Peter, you
don’t want to die?”
Peter murmured, like a cello string plucked hard, as
if Dennis had picked out a chord on his heart.
“Well, that's the way I feel about this,” said Dennis.
“There may be other worlds, other faiths—I think
there must be. You can see some of 'em up there now,
all these bright stars. And maybe there are other lives,
too, but all I know and love is this one. Maybe there
are others, though. Perhaps,” said Dennis lazily, the
wind in his face bringing the smell of smoldering dead-
leaf smoke—“perhaps God lets us out on a long leash,
after all, and this life is it.”
They went on a little silently; then, after a while,
they began to talk softly together, in comfortable
pauses. But they could feel that they were friends
now truly, because they had talked of immortality to-
gether. -
Blake and Dennis began to bicker, idly, as two


MURDER UNLEASHED 111
*--
-
-
players will toss a tennis ball back and forth across a
net, purely for practice and enjoyment.
“You scrap so beautifully, Blake,” sighed Dennis.
“I almost wish we'd never get home.”
“Good God, are we only going to your place, Den-
nis?” Peter boomed. “I thought we were halfway to
San José by now!”
He brought up short in the dark and stood drawing
great deep breaths, half puffing them out and in again.
The others stood waiting for him.
“It only looks farther than it did,” said Dennis
helpfully, peering at the dark earth around them.
“Coming back always does. Besides, you didn't notice
landmarks before—you didn't have time, anyway. You
were just about flying. The house is right around the
dark clump of things to the left, and you can see the
tops of the elm trees around it mixing in with the stars
up there. And there's the light from the kitchen window.
We’re here.”
“Well, if Bowden doesn’t know we're out of his place
and back here again, he must be deaf,” said Peter con-
tentedly, as they came through the yard and around
by the lighted kitchen doorway.
“He knows, all right,” Dennis said grimly. “And I’ll
know some more too, when I get back there. I’m going
to get an overcoat—that shack's darned chilly, and
it’ll get colder later on in the night.”
Blake slipped out of his coat and handed it over.
“Thanks a lot, Dennis,” she said casually. “What
was that bumpy thing in your side pocket—a gun?”


112 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Cigarette case.” Dennis showed it to her, grinning.
“Think I want to shoot myself accidentally some day?
I can get someone else to do it for nothing!”
“D–Dennis,” Blake said, wide-eyed, “don’t you
think I mean, hadn't you better let us come back
with you? If there's sh-shooting 25
“The perfect host,” said Dennis. “I’d invite you all
for it, only—there's not going to be any. You must
come down when the duck season's on, or when Wong
and I are out for the jack rabbits and ground squirrels.
Don’t let me forget.” He grinned again and opened the
door to the dark hallway.
“Wong sleeps in his own place, that lean-to beyond
the kitchen,” he said. “There's room here, if you're
staying. I'd like to have you. Wait'll I get my other
coat—it's in the hall closet ” He broke off suddenly,
with an almost ludicrous expression of astonishment
on his face.
“Why, no, it isn't!” he said, bewilderedly. “It’s in
the hotel with all the rest of my things, waiting to be
packed off by me, I suppose. I bet that hotel bird's
hopping! You know, I keep forgetting—that it's a
year since I’ve been here. I suppose—I suppose things
do change. Even here. I would have thought—if I’d
thought about it at all—that I could have gone in the
dark to any place on this ground and picked up my
stuff where I used to leave it. My coat in the hall closet,
my car in the garage, the bumpy place where it leaves
the garage floor for the dirt road, the squirrel gun
standing in its place in the tool shack outside—it all


MURDER UNLEASHED 113
comes back so clearly, as if nothing had happened in
between to push it back into dimness. Only—a lot's
happened. Well, I don’t get my coat, but maybe there's
chicken and stuff in the icebox like there used to be.”
“Philosopher!” said Blake warmly, approaching the
icebox cordially. “Maybe there is.”
There was.
“Help yourself,” said Dennis, waving his hand
largely. “Wong won't mind, and if he does, why, who's
the boss here, anyway?”
“Wong,” said Peter.
Dennis laughed. “Right the first time. I'm only the
young master. I forgot you had a Louie in your lives.
He’d die for me if he thought I needed it, but he
wouldn’t let me put on any airs in my own house.”
“He probably knows what's good for you,” Peter
observed.
“And you,” said Dennis, “with your mouth full of
my chicken!”
He looked at his watch and got up.
“Make wassail,” he said hospitably. “It’s five to
eleven now, and I’m going back to get Bowden. He's
had lots of time to come in by now.”
“Want us?” Peter rumbled. Dennis shook his head,
smiling. -
“I think we'll take you up on spending the night
here then, and make an early start back to the city in
the morning. There's an inquest due there tomorrow—
it may have slipped your mind—and if the chief witness
doesn't show up there’ll be ructions, especially in the


114 MURDER UNLEASHED
detective bureau. As your lawyer, Dennis,” Peter
sighed, “I feel as if I were just hanging onto the tail of
a kite!”
“This is our only chance,” Dennis reminded him,
“to do anything on our own hook. It's the long leash,
and I’m going to take advantage of it. Otherwise—I
may be watching you hopefully through a nice thickness
of wire mesh up at the jail while you say that while
there’s life there's hope, and you’ll carry it up to the
State Supreme Court, and other polite things like that
to cheer me up! No, thank you. We’ll do what we can
on our own first.”
“Sure you don’t want company?” Peter tried again.
“Quite sure,” Dennis said. “Thanks. It may scare
him off if he sees or hears a crowd of us coming. I’ve
got a better chance of getting him, going alone this way.
So long >> -
He stopped at the doorway and turned halfway back.
, “—rather, hasta la vista,” he said, smiling at them.
A curious gracious courtesy fell on him all at once, like
the mantle of the old dons who had lived in his sunny
county, who had listened to the gentle stately courtesy
of the Little San Ramon River rippling through the
long sunny afternoons. As though the sight of guests
reminded him, for a brief second, of other, more gracious
days.
“My house is yours,” said Dennis gravely in the old
formula and was gone, armed only with the cigarette
case bumpy against his side pocket.
“Dennis ” Blake began, a bit lost.


MURDER UNLEASHED 115
|-
Peter shook his big head at her and laid a big brown
hand reprovingly for a second on her arm.
“His play,” he said. “Don’t spoil it.”
So Blake—she didn't forgive herself for that—stayed
back for once, and Dennis went on alone.
He went down the yard, through the dark fields,
across the south gully—and as he looked up he saw a
dim red glow in the sky, beginning at the top of the
hill. So he began to run, and he reached Bowden's shack
as the flames took hold of the wooden walls and began
to roar in the wind. He went in and saw the broken
oil lamp on the floor and Bowden sprawling in an atti-
tude of surprise, arms thrown out. He knelt beside
Bowden, and saw, in that second before the flames
drove him out again, that the top was blown off from
Bowden's head and the greater part of his face with it.
That gap had been effectively plugged.


Chapter 13
AMONG THOSE PRESENT
About one o'clock that morning Dennis got Kennedy
on the phone in the press room of the Hall of Justice.
“Shoot,” invited that debonair gentleman cheerfully,
when his caller announced himself.
“Don’t be funny,” said Dennis. “I’ve got a lot to
tell you.”
“Well, my ears are still in working order,” said that
slightly exhilarated person still more airily. “I guess
they must work automatically. The rest of me has signed
off for the night—eyes see red and black spots in front
of 'em, complicated by red, white, and blue round
things that look to me like poker chips. Hands can’t
handle a pencil any more—they make funny motions
like shuffling 25
“Kennedy,” said Dennis hoarsely, “do you have to
be drunk just now, when I need you sober?”
It was just a last shot, but it seemed to work. There
was a slight but electric pause at the other end of the
line. Then Kennedy's voice again, crisper.
“Not,” said that cool voice, “if you need me that
bad. I’m as sober as a judge, Dennis. Spill it.”
Reassured, Dennis went on talking. He told about
Bowden's visit to Dennis's garden, of the visit to the
116


MURDER UNLEASHED 117
.
shack, and the finding of the blue money-order receipts
—and the conclusions drawn therefrom.
“Blackmail, eh?” Kennedy commented. “You’re
shattering my illusions, Dennis. I thought all rustics
who had anything to do with the soil were one hundred
per cent pure at heart before they came to the big city.”
“You wouldn’t think that,” said Dennis grimly, “if
you'd ever lived around in the country, as I have.
Your “simple’ sons of the soil can be mean as dirt,
some of 'em. They get a lot of time to think up things
to do, I guess. Well, anyway, Bowden was blackmailing
this bird—we found that out.”
“Go on—he didn’t come in?” Kennedy murmured,
as though he were writing it all down at the other end,
of the line.
“Not till I went out with the others,” Dennis said."
He kept his voice steady, along a monotonous tone, for
fear it would shatter itself to pieces. He didn’t let him-
self think, he just went on talking to Kennedy, as
though oral contact with him even at that distance
kept him from seeing the fearful cliffs of danger plunging
down on either side of his path. “Then I came back—
alone. It was about eleven o’clock. He was there. He
was there, Kennedy—lying on the floor. Someone’d shot
him—so close it blew off most of his head. And the oil
lamp had broken, and fired the place. It all went up.”
“Whew!” said an appreciative Kennedy. “It’s lucky
I’m talking from a private booth! I took the call here
instead of on my press-room phone as soon as I heard
it was a long-distance call. I had a hunch, all right.


118 MURDER UNLEASHED
|
Besides, it was too noisy there—the press room's a
merry hell tonight, a dozen extra reporters sent in to
cover the Hall, and the Hall is humming from top to
bottom like a wasp's nest that someone's kicked open.
Dennis, the Farnese and Malletti cases look like the
biggest thing since the Trojan War! If these rats around
here thought I was holding anything like this out on
them, they'd mob me. About this Honest Plowman
accepting money for silence,”—Kennedy was talking
now as though he were writing it down straight for
the hot metal of the print.
“He was a dirty blackmailer!” said Dennis hotly.
“What's the idea?”
“Under your hat, Dennis. Sure he was. Only he's dead
now, and this case is very, very alive. And we're not
going to impeach our only good witness, since he's
dead, by implying that he was a pretty worthless sort of
skunk. We're going to play him up for a martyr. His
testimony may come in handy one of these days, and
by that time he'll be almost canonized by the Star.
Another thing—keep off the subject of those money
orders and receipts to the sheriff and any police officers,
yet. Let the federal post office at San Francisco keep
the original applications in the murderer's handwriting
safe there, until we get more of a line on this case. I
don't want these press-room rats climbing aboard our
ship—they might swamp it. And the police would grab
them without a thank-you from you. They're worth
something.”
“Sullivan’ll be here soon,” said Dennis, reminded.
$4 •


MURDER UNLEASHED 119
-
“The sheriff's gone to head him off at Monterey, near
here. He's down following some clue or other, and
Henry's letting me talk to you—he's the deputy, and
I told him it was important, and he knows me.”
“Sullivan? Yeh, I know,” Kennedy's voice grinned.
“Someone saw an old man with a black gown on coming
down the street, and they phoned the San Francisco
police and it turns out to be Mrs. McGuire, aged eighty,
widow woman who's lived there all her life. They’re
getting hundreds of calls like that that always come in
on a ‘missing’ case like Father Malletti's disappearance.
Well, good luck, Dennis, and I’ll be seeing you, maybe
at the inquest tomorrow. Thanks a lot for this stuff.”
“Inquest?” said Dennis. “Which one—Bianca's?
I'm afraid I’m unavoidably detained, Kennedy, from
going to anyone's inquest unless it's for Bowden’s.”
“This is a previous engagement,” said Kennedy.
“What would keep you, anyway? Where's your friends,
the Byrnes?”
“How do I know?” said Dennis wearily. “I haven’t
seen 'em since the sheriff and his deputy detained me
in Delroy. One thing that's keeping me here is an
adobe jail they've got here. That's where I’m phoning
from. And the sheriff has gone in to get Sullivan to
explain to him that I can’t attend any inquest. I’m
wanted here.”
“Hey, they can’t do that!” protested Kennedy.
“You tell them 25
* “Can’t they?” said Dennis. “You tell 'em. They
want a lot of telling, anyway. They want to know how


MURDER UNLEASHED 121
hadn’t been able to talk much about what had hap-
pened on the knoll of Bowden's shack. They'd got the
main line of it from his phone call. It was too late to
do much about it. The shack was nothing but hot wood
ashes in a few minutes, and the main fire had already
died down when Dennis had come back to them. The
undersheriff and his deputy had come and looked over
the place where the shack had stood, and raked over
the pyre of hot wood ashes, and the two of them had ,
searched the surrounding ground pretty thoroughly by
lamp and torchlight, without saying much, but, like
good hunting dogs, as it were, with a subtle current of
silent communication between them. And then they'd
found the squirrel gun, where someone'd thrown it
in the bushes, roughly hidden, and they'd shown it to
Dennis, still without saying much, their eyes reserved,
judgment withheld.
Dennis had identified it as his. They wanted to know.
where he kept it. It was usually kept in the tool shed,
eh; Well, it wasn’t there now. They poked around a
bit to make sure.
With this observation, and still more silence, they’d
phoned and got the sheriff out of his bed, and received
orders. They informed Dennis that they had to hold
him. Dennis went a bit wild-eyed at that and said
something about its getting to be a habit with the po-
lice, and then quieted down suddenly. The lanky under-
sheriff was looking at him with grieved blue eyes from
a thin tanned face. He expected his acquaintances to


122 MURDER UNLEASHED
keep their composure better when being carted off
to the jail. It made for uncomfortableness otherwise.
Dennis couldn’t go back on him.
Only, “Have you got them?” he whispered to Peter
fiercely, as the flivver engine started and all other noise
was undercovered by it.
“What?” said Peter.
“Those money orders,” Dennis said. “You took
them.”
“I put 'em in my pocket,” Peter said.
“Don’t give them up,” Dennis said. “We may need
them.”
“I won’t,” said Peter simply as a rock.
Then Dennis looked at Blake. He hadn’t before.
Blake was holding onto Peter's big arm hard with
both hands and not saying anything. She smiled at
Dennis—a small white smile, beyond tears, beyond
words, beyond anything but a sort of still white bravery.
As if there weren't anything left of her but that smile.
And the undersheriff and his deputy drove off in their
flivver and took Dennis away with them, leaving a
rather wild-eyed Peter and Blake behind . . . talking
... talking . . . till their voices husked on them.
They didn’t get anywhere, at that. They went over
and over it again, past the ground that Dennis had
already led them over before. They accepted that as
tried territory now—that Bianca knew her husband
had been killed, and she'd had suspicions—or near proof
—or something—and all the rest, even Bowden's mur-
der, followed from that.


124 MURDER UNLEASHED
, “Yes, I see that,” Peter said.
“Well, I think we're wrong about that someone. We
think he's a San Francisco man who killed Bianca, too.
And who killed her husband, Victor Farnese. Suppose
he isn’t? Suppose he was here in Delroy all the time?
Suppose he is someone who knew Dennis's movements,
who'd do anything for Dennis, who knew Farnese was
murdered, and that Dennis might be accused of murder
instead of just plain manslaughter about that? So-he
killed Bianca to protect Dennis from the charge of
murdering her husband. He killed Bowden for the same
reason. Suppose Bianca was going to put it on Dennis?
And suppose Bowden was in on it, too?—perhaps she'd
paid him for saying it was Dennis killed him. He'd
have turned traitor or liar for money. We know that.
}Maybe he thought it up himself, and put Bianca onto
Dennis, thinking he could blackmail Dennis over it
)later!”
“The honest plowman!” murmured Peter in admira-
tion. “Well, grant that—for the sake of argument. It
was going to be a put-up job on Bowden's part to get
money from Dennis, scare him on threats of this faked
evidence to buy his silence. Who was the obliging friend
who put out Dennis's enemy, Bowden, and his danger,
Bianca”
Blake was white and blazing now. She didn't need a
blanket about her. She was on fire, whitely.
“Who,” she retorted, “knew as much about Dennis's
affairs as he did himself? Who loved Dennis so much
he'd take anything on himself to get him out of a thing


126 MURDER UNLEASHED
blame Sullivan and those birds for giving him the cold
eye on this.”
“If he’d had witnesses—Dennis, I mean—tonight
when he went back there, or if he hadn’t gone back,
he’d have been safe, with Bowden dead,” Blake said
swiftly. “It was chance, just chance, that we didn’t all
go back with Dennis.”
“Chance,” said Peter heavily, “and his own insist-
ence.”
“Don’t blame yourself for that, Peter.”
“I’m a fine lawyer! I let him walk right into it!”
He raised his massive head and tried to smile at her.
“All right, go on. Why did Bowden get his tonight,
after we'd gone there to see him? Explain that, Sher-
lock, if it wasn’t our First Murderer.”
“Because,” said Blake, “Wong was afraid—of what
would happen when Dennis and Bowden did meet.
He’d heard Dennis say tonight he was going to get an
answer from Bowden. He knew that Bowden was a lot
more dangerous than Dennis imagined. He had a picture
of the two of them meeting, and Dennis flaring up, and
Bowden cool as a rattlesnake, and as nasty-tempered—
he thought Bowden was a danger to Dennis, and so he
put him out of Dennis's way. That's one way of showing
your love for a man—killing his enemies off.”
“With Dennis's squirrel gun?”
“With Wong's squirrel gun,” corrected Blake. “He’d
been using it for a year by himself. He probably didn't
even think of it as Dennis's any more. He took it
because it was handy, and he was used to it. That's all.”
t


MURDER UNLEASHED 127
l
“And now he's sleeping it off while young master's in
jail?” asked Peter. “A—a sort of communistic crime,
you might say. Wong commits it, and Dennis goes to
jail for it. You might call that an involuntary act of
brotherly love on Dennis's part, too, Blake.”
Blake smiled, a curious little smile.
“I don’t think you'll find him asleep,” she said. “I
don’t think you'll find him there. I think he's going to
hide himself in the nearest big Chinese city quarter.
He thinks they’ll be after him, not Dennis.” -
“So you think there's a First and a Second Murderer,
do you?” asked Peter grimly. “The First Murderer
killed Farnese, and the Second Murderer killed Bianca
and Bowden, and skipped. Well, we’ll see about that
skipping part right now, anyway.”
He went out, and Blake sat by the stove and shivered
in spite of the fire until he returned, a few minutes later.
“Gone,” he said, nodding his head in a heavy sort of
gloomy satisfaction. “You’re right about that, Blake.
Hadn’t slept in his bed, either.” He shivered. “Gosh,
it's bitter outside—that damp frost.”
He took up a bit of rolled newspaper from the wood
box and opened the lid of the stove to begin stoking
again.
“Local paper,” he said, talking idly to take Blake's
mind off things. “News of all the county. Want to
read? It's yesterday’s. Here’s a shipping column, from
the Monterey Bay harbor. “Among those in today from
San Francisco—’ let's see whom we know who has a
boat in Blake! Blake, do you remember Morgan;


128 MURDER UNLEASHED
The guy on Dennis's hotel floor? His yacht Margarita
came in yesterday. William Morgan, of the Hotel
Ancaster. Must be him.”
Peter gave a harsh croak of laughter. His hair was
wild on his head; his eyes were deep storm blue.
“Among those present,” he said grimly. “Do you get
it, Blake? This man was in San Francisco when Bianca
was killed—he was at Delroy when Bowden got his,
in this county. He had access to those places. He's at
home in Delroy. You've got competition for the post of
Second Murderer. He might even be the First one, too,
if our original theory holds. He was here tonight. You
see, Blake, among those present tonight was also-the
murderer.”


*
|
º
Chapter 14
BUT NOT FOR LOVE
DENNIS was writing to Blake. He sat on the edge of his
cot in his little cell in the Delroy jail, and put a blunt-
pointed pencil to lined paper, industriously. The light
came in shyly from among piled-up gray clouds rapidly
getting darker and grayer outside, in the early morning.
“Darling,” wrote Dennis, dark head bowed closely
over his inadequate tools, “do you wish me to be seri-
ous? At six o'clock on a cloudy November morning? I
belong to a generation that would cheerfully die for
you, but won’t be serious for you. We aren't Heming-
way’s ‘Lost Generation’ of the war and post-war period,
which was so deadly serious about everything, including
the road to ruin. We're the generation after that, and
we don’t think they left anything that’s worth taking
so seriously. There's the third post-war generation .
coming up now, of course; my young brother and sister
would belong to it, if I had them, it’s about nineteen
years old now and it's going back to the old ways.
They believe in girls with long skirts and little shining
topknots of hair done up on the backs of their necks,
with a few silky straggles at the ears and the nape.
They believe in love at first sight, and in lots of things
that we thought died with the war, and the years after-
. 129


130 MURDER UNLEASHED
ward, and that perhaps didn't. Perhaps all those things
are coming up again, like flowers out of fire-blackened
ruins. Perhaps that young third generation's right, and
things like that don’t die. . . and radio tenors sing true
things, about everlasting and extremely sentimental
love. Wouldn’t that be funny, if true? I’d have to
revise my life, Blake. Or all that's left of it. It may be
shorter than I think, at that. I had a talk with Sullivan
this morning, earlier. Yes, Inspector Sullivan, of the
homicide bureau. He was down here chasing a line on
Father Malletti's disappearance, and naturally was
interested in the recent events on my place. He seems
to connect them.
“He came charging in with fire in his eyes and a shot-
gun in one large beefy hand, and I thought for a minute
he was carrying out his own private economy program
and was going to save the city the expense of a trial
for me. Then he asked me if I recognized the gun, so I
said, ‘Sure, I recognize it. It's the one Wong uses to
shoot jack rabbits and ground squirrels with. It's
twelve-gauge, with a hand-carved walnut stock I made
myself. It used to be mine.”
“‘Sure you didn’t borrow it?” he says, very quiet and
sarcastic. “And that it wasn’t yours again—for an hour
last night? I’m going to warn you anything you say can
be used against you, Devore.”
“Do you mean I’m under arrest?' I said.
“‘I mean you’d better be careful what you say.”
“That was a fine incentive to open my heart to him!
Peter would have been proud of the way his client
|
|


MURDER UNLEASHED 131
-
*
clammed up on this occasion—I think he thinks I’m
too talkative, anyway. I can see your large and laconic
brother eyeing me with approval for once, Blake. My
communication with Sullivan after that consisted
chiefly of ‘Yea, yea’ and ‘Nay, nay,’ and not so much
of them, either. I did unbend enough to inquire if this
was to be my rather permanent address, so you'd
know where to send mail to me, and it seems we are
going up to San Francisco this morning (business as
usual) for the inquest on Bianca, may she rest in peace,
with Sullivan for my guard, and I’m not to be charged
here until that's over. So we’ve got a few minutes of
time, tell Peter. And tell him how funny it seems that
time stretches out to hours and years sometimes, and
then contracts to a few minutes, like an elastic band.
It always seems to be doing that, lately. Most confusing.
Since last night (Last night? No, it must have been
about a million years ago, Blake. And now I’m the last
man on earth, remembering it, and you coming across
the fields, and ‘Drink to me only.” Surely you’ve for-
gotten?) Anyway, ask Peter if he remembers such a
very long time ago. He'll be a famous judge yet.
(That's in the future, and the future seems very close
to me. Time has contracted again, and I can reach out
and touch tomorrow with my fingers.) But he's getting
some swell practice on my case! Everything seems to
happen while I’m around, doesn’t it?
“(Yes, that's what Sullivan commented on very
freely this morning, around three o'clock. It seems he's
been riding up and down this coast line on wild clues


132 MURDER UNLEASHED
since yesterday, in a police car from San Francisco,
and it hasn't improved his temper any. He knows I’ve
got a manslaughter record here too, now—they can
always identify me by a scar on my right wrist, and
they did.)
“You know, I’ve been thinking about Father Mal-
letti—and other things—all night. Do you remember
I said that about “an old man, going into darkness”? I
nearly had the horrors last night, thinking of that and
other things, and then I thought how that was wrong.
It wasn’t darkness, where he was. Father Malletti
carries his own light with him, where he goes. So don’t
worry about that too much, Blake. I’m sure it's all
right! I wish I could be as sure, about myself. Only
I’m not exactly a saint.
“Sullivan’ll come back soon, and then we'll go back
to San Francisco in the police car. I’m writing this to
keep from thinking of anything more after last night.
Henry—the undersheriff here—has promised to smuggle
this out to you. I told him he could read it first—he
ought to, you know, being an officer. He doesn’t say
much, but he's a good guy. We used to play baseball and
go swimming and hunting, before I went to college.
We were in the same grades in grammar school and at
Delroy High School.
“So now we're going to say good-bye to Bianca.
She was beautiful, she reminded me of a gorgeous
Venetian sunset painted by Turner in the '80's. She
was like a foreign country. But you, Blake, are like a
- picture by our own William Keith, of a California hill-
:


Chapter 15
THE BEAUTIFUL AND BLONDE
Blake and Peter sat at breakfast under the electric
lights of the depressing Delroy hotel dining room at
seven o'clock that same rainy morning. Blake was read-
ing a letter, and Peter sat watching the landscape of
her face where sun and windy clouds chased by chang-
ingly.
“Love letter?” he asked.
“Not nowadays,” said Blake. “It’s from Dennis, and
he says I remind him of a William Keith painting of a
field, and he calls me “darling’ once.”
Peter shook his head.
“Nothing to that,” he admitted. “You haven't got a
case. What else does he say?”
“Dennis has discovered the Einsteinian theory of
the relativity of time,” Blake reported. “He says it's
like a rubber elastic band.”
“Does he, by any chance,” Peter asked, “come down
to current events?”
He looked up from his coffee to see Blake's blue eyes
brimming deeply.
“He’s going up to San Francisco with Inspector
Sullivan,” she said, trying to be casual about it. She
134


MURDER UNLEASHED 135
helped herself to coffee. “They’ve started by now.”
Her voice went suddenly gruff on her. She took a toq
hot sip hastily. “He says you're mistaken about Wong,
and to get onto Morgan as soon as you can.”
“We will,” said Peter, very satisfyingly solid about
it. He sat back, thinking it over. “Blake,” he said,
“what about Dennis, anyway? Does he mean so much?”
Blake's eyes were two blue meadows, abloom with
lupin.
“I used to have a picture of Dennis in his football
uniform,” she said simply. “I cut it out of the roto-
gravure part of the Sunday paper, and stuck it up in
my mirror when I was in high school. I’d forgotten his
name, but not him when I saw him.”
“No!” said Peter, surprised. “I didn’t know girls
really did things like that.”
“You’d be surprised,” Blake said, grinning. “I’ll bet
there was many a damsel about my age or even in their
later teens who had your picture, Peter, up in their
mirrors. You looked keen with your football uniform
on and your hair all mussed up, and your eyes frown-
ing.”
“No!” breathed Peter again, uneasily. “You don’t
say so!”
“I do say so,” Blake retorted. “Don’t be so bashful
about your snapshots going into so many boudoirs,
Peter. You and Dennis seem to have missed all this
bleacher stuff—you must have played football for the
fun of it. And what a lad Dennis is for getting his picture
in the paper, isn’t he? I don’t wonder he didn’t want


136 MURDER UNLEASHED
to give Kennedy another shot at it. I suppose the
papers simply spilled it all over their pages when he
was on trial here for killing Farnese. Poor Dennis!”
“Sullivan knows,” Peter said glumly. He set down
his cup and eyed it with disfavor. “I don’t mind drink-
ing brown boots,” he said mildly, “but I do draw the
line at burnt rubber in my coffee. I loathe the taste of
burnt rubber!”
He got up. His broad shoulders made the depressing
little small-town dining room look littler and grayer
than ever.
“Sullivan knows,” he repeated, “that Dennis has a
record here. That he's been going under a partly as-
sumed name—Devore—instead of his own, whatever it
is. That he's made the San Francisco police look more
or less foolish by not yielding up all his information
about his past to their first hurried vacuum-cleaning
method. I don’t blame him much for that—he thought
he could get away with it, and maybe he would have,
if this hadn’t occurred just now. But with Bowden's
killing, and the burning of the shack, the police have
just that much more reason to suspect Dennis's holding
out on them at first. Oh, I don’t envy Dennis when
Sullivan and the rest of them ask him frankly and fully
for any stray bits of information they think he's still
got up his sleeve!”
“What can we do?” Blake asked, pushing away her
almost untouched cup of coffee. It may have been made
partly of burnt rubber and brown boots, but it was
tasteless to her.
1 *


MURDER UNLEASHED 137
.
.
.
Peter shrugged. He got into his overcoat and helped
her into her brown tweed coat with the tall spiky fur
Dennis had liked about her face. Only her cheeks
weren't so fresh and pink now, nor her eyes so freshly
blue. She was pale under her brownness, and her eyes
were more deeply purple—blue, but older and tireder
and bigger.
“What can we do?” Peter said. “Nothing much.
I went to the jail before breakfast, Blake, and they
wouldn't let me see him. Sullivan must have been in
there then. Wait till the inquest's over—I can do more
then, as his lawyer. He's in Sullivan's hands now.”
Blake shivered and drew the fur up around her chin.
“Large beefy hands,’” she quoted distastefully. “Oh,
Peter—you don’t suppose—”
Peter laughed mirthlessly.
“Listen,” he said. “I may not know much about
Dennis, not even his last name, but I’m learning.
Think of this, Blake—we've known him, man and boy,
for just about forty-eight hours, or two days and nearly
three nights, and already we've pretty well torn up
our routine by the roots for him. We’ve chased down
here to Delroy with him, we've gone man-hunting with
him, and we’ve spent a nearly sleepless night over him.
Kennedy's a police reporter, as tough-hearted as they
make them, and he's bunked Dennis and kept his
record from the police as long as he could. And, from
the indications, his friend Henry at the jail here is
running a free-delivery mail service for him, and I’ll
bet the sheriff's wife has probably cooked him a better


138 MURDER UNLEASHED
breakfast this morning than we got here at the hotel.
No, I don't know what's going to happen to Dennis,
but I wouldn't worry over him. I’d do all my worrying
over his guardian angel, trying to keep up with him
nowadays.”
Blake smiled mistily.
“Peter, you are a dear,” she said with conviction.
She laid one brown-gloved hand on Peter's overcoat
arm. “Where do we go from here?”
“To see Morgan and his yacht,” said Peter staunchly,
“before that guy can pull up his anchor and beat it
back to the city. Let's go!”
They went.
By the time their car came into Monterey the sun
was shining, and the marvelous blue bay, deeply blue
as the sort of stuff in bluing bottles, and edged by a
snowy line of white surf breaking on a white sand beach,
lay incredibly lovely before them. Big white clouds
sailed by in a blue sky. Smaller white yachts, slim and
graceful, danced on the deep blue bay. A little gay wind
ruffled the waters. It was the sort of day when nothing
dark and terrible could happen. It made them, as a
final magic, believe in it... in spite of everything they
knew.
They walked down past the old customhouse, and the
old and mellow adobe houses left over from the Spanish
California days, a hundred years and more ago. Time
was gracious in this little sunlit city by the bay. A
hundred years ago, señor, was only yesterday here.
One slept in the sun, and when one awakened, the sun


MURDER UNLEASHED 139
º
.
was as warm, the air as clear, the bay as blue, as—
yesterday, under another flag and another people.
Waya con Dios, said Monterey softly, watching other
cities rise to the skies, and foreign wars being fought,
and airplanes landing on pontoons in its bay—and then
turned over and slept again. It didn’t really change.
Blake felt it, too. Her eyes cleared, her face lightened,
she gave a little joyful skip or two as they walked on
down to the fishing pier and the white yachts.
“The Margaritaf’’ Peter asked, of a brown-skinned
fisherman.
The other pointed. “End o' the wharf, there. She
come in yesterday morning.”
Nets, brown like dried seaweed, were drying along
the beach and the wharf. The pungent, salty scent of
them with its reminiscent sardine smell clinging on, too,
reminded them of seaweed brought home from its
native element after a day's picnic, and hung proudly
at first, then forlorn and forgotten, in their rooms when
they were children, to be thrown out ignominiously
at last. These scents had memory’s dear and devastating
power. They were by the sea again, and they were
children again. . . . No, they weren’t. They were Blake
and Peter grown up, and their friend was in jail, and
they were going to see a man they suspected of being
a murderer. How did things happen that way, anyway?
The bright blue-and-gold day clouded like sunshine
threatened by dark storm clouds. Things turned out so
differently from what you expected they’d be, when you
grew up. Blake sighed.


140 MURDER UNLEASHED
Peter had halted before one of the slim white launches,
tied up close to the wharf.
“Hello on board!” he boomed. “The Margar ->
A man's sunburnt blond head had popped up out of
the companionway. Peter's voice died, then it picked
up again to a roar.
“—Billy Morgan!” he shouted world-shakingly.
“How in >>
The Margarita's owner showed more of himself. He
was simply dressed in white duck pants and a white
sweatshirt and a fine coat of brown skin. He stared at
Peter from ingenuously frank blue eyes. The eyes
wrinkled into a grin, that spread over his pleasant young
sunburnt face.
“Hey, it's Pete Byrne!” he yelled back. He leaped
out of the companionway to the deck, and thence
clambered up to the wharf. He thumped Peter reck-
lessly. “Hey, Pete! I haven’t seen you since we left
Stanford, you old sourdough! And you never looked
me up afterward—I told you to. What's the idea?”
“Always meant to,” mumbled Peter. He looked
around a bit sheepishly, to find Morgan staring at
Blake like a friendly pup waiting to be spoken to.
“My sister, Blake,” he muttered. Blake smiled. She'd
been standing back, hands in her pockets, head on one
side, gauging this affecting reunion of two old college
pals. It seemed to be genuine. She was horribly dis-
appointed, but she smiled generously, and young Mor-
gan responded beautifully, like a friendly pup who's
had the kind word thrown to him at last. He liked pretty


MURDER UNLEASHED 141
.
girls. It was written on his admiring and extremely
frank face.
“Your boat?” inquired Peter, going ahead grimly
with his duty anyway. He eyed it stolidly, deep eyes
steady. “Nice,” he said. “Any objections >>
“Sure she's mine,” said Billy Morgan. “She’s a
beauty, too. Came down from Frisco yesterday—just
getting ready to pull out again this morning.”
“I’d love to see it,” said Blake softly.
She was surprised at the reaction she got. A red tide
of hot crimson, red as a rose, swept over young Billy
Morgan's face. His eyes went hotly bluer than ever with
discomfort.
“I’d like to show you over,” he said hurriedly.
“Love to, Miss Byrne, but—you see, the old tub isn’t
quite in showing shape just now.” His miserable eyes
pleaded with her surprised cool ones. “I’ve just come
down from the city in her, and—er—I’d love to show
you over some other time. Will you? When I get back?”
“Of course,” said Blake, holding him there. At the
corner of her eye, beyond him, she saw Peter going
into action. He dropped down lightly, for all his bulk,
to the white holystoned hardwood deck, and from
there addressed his involuntary host nonchalantly.
“You don’t mind if I go over it?” he asked offhand-
edly and disappeared down the companionway to the
cabin.
Billy Morgan, to Blake's secret surprise, seemed
rather relieved at that. If she’d been he, and if he were
hiding anything pertaining to Bianca's or Bowden's


142 MURDER UNLEASHED
murders that he'd rather they didn’t see, she wouldn’t
have taken a chance on Peter's passing it up. This
man Morgan had been with Peter at Stanford, on the
football squad with him—he should have known that
Peter on attack was dangerously quick, even with
his apparent rocklike stolidity. His mind worked
quicker than most people thought it did. That was
partly why he was dangerous to go up against, apart
from the way he handled his bulk.
Meanwhile she chatted agreeably with the unsus-
pecting suspect, until Peter, a bit more flushed of face,
came running up again to the deck and, jumping off
again, made it to the wharf. Here he wrung his host's
hand in his own large brown paw enthusiastically,
accepted invitations for a visit and a yacht trip in the
near future, swept Blake under his wing again, and beat
it in an atmosphere of all-around good-fellowship.
“Well?” said a tense Blake, at the end of the wharf.
Peter leaned against a barrel and began to laugh.
“She is blonde and beautiful,” he said, grinning.
“What else did you expect her to be?”
“Was that why he wouldn’t let me—”
Peter nodded. “She came down with Billy from
San Francisco, and naturally it embarrassed the poor
fellow—he's been raised right, Blake—when another
fellow's sister was going to find her there.”
Blake sighed. “Anyway, he didn’t look like Dennis's
‘devil.” What happened?”
“She’s beautiful and blonde,” reported Peter obedi-
ently, “and when I saw her I was struck dumb. She


MURDER UNLEASHED 143
.
,
was in a blue satin wrapper sort of thing, and they'd
been having breakfast there. Her hair was down over
her shoulders, and her mouth was very red. She smiled
at me. So I hissed at her, “What's your name?’ and she
hissed back, “June Oliver! I'm with the Honeyblossoms
at the Columbia’—and she put out one delectable finger,
all pink and pointed and shiny at the top, and put it
to a ravishing red mouth and disappeared through a
doorway, as we heard poor Billy’s voice making valiant
conversation above. She's bored with him already, I
bet.”
“So that’s how it’s done,” mused Blake. “These
girls have a great advantage over us. If any nice-looking
male hissed at me, instead of hissing back my name and
address I’d be obliged by a long line of scandalized
Byrne ancestors to smack him down; or else you'd do
it for me, I suppose. I’ve half a mind to join the chorus
and see life.”
“Yes, you will!” growled Peter.
Blake dropped the subject—for the time being.
“Well, what's Morgan like, really?” she demanded.
“Apart from being a nice young man with a taste for
chorus girls. Is he—could he be—our murderer?”
Peter shook his head positively.
“No chance,” he said briefly. “I knew him when—
and all that. He may have blondes in his past, but
nothing else dangerous, I’ll swear. You saw him, Blake.
You can guess what he is. Father's head of a big stock
company, Billy plays at the business, sort of ten-
o'clock-to-three-o'clock hours with three hours off for


144 MURDER UNLEASHED
lunch and the afternoon for golf stuff. He doesn’t need
to work, so he plays.”
“You ought to know him,” said Blake with a sigh.
“You were a dear old college pal of his, if what I heard
was true—or the half of it.”
“Sure I was,” said Peter, grinning again. “Sure he's
a good guy.”
“What do you think of him compared to Dennis?
He's an old friend of yours, served a four-year stretch
with you, and Dennis is a dear old pal of exactly two
days’ existence, as far as we are concerned with him.
How does Dennis stack up with him? Would you back
either of them as a murderer?”
Blake was a bit tense, but determined to see this
through. She had to know.
“Morgan f" said Peter slowly, thinking this over.
“He’s a good guy. I told you that. How do I know if
he’d be a murderer? I don’t think it would ever occur
to a guy like that that you could ever solve a problem,
or have an out from a hard situation, by murder. He
isn't conditioned to such violent responses to situations.
Let me tell you, half of their living, with birds like
Morgan, is being conditioned to things in a certain way
—the conventional way. Dennis, on the other hand,”—
Peter gave his slow, deep-eyed grin again—“Dennis,
you might say, is a streak of lightning. I don’t think
anyone's ever thought of lightning as being conditioned
to anything except lightning rods. Dennis's particular
genius is that no one will ever quite know what Dennis
will do in a particular situation. Not even Dennis.


MURDER UNLEASHED 145
.
.
>
But I do think he's got a lightning rod somewhere
around in his spirit that would keep him from murder.”
“Peter, darling,” said Blake softly, “sometimes you
frighten me. You say things that are so extraordinarily
true. The sort of thing that Dennis might say, just like
that. Only you're not Dennis. You're not clever—but
you're deep. You're what Dennis means when he says
cleverness is such an overrated quality. He's talking
about simplicity and depth—like a clear pool.”
“Someone's been kidding you,” said Peter, with that
untroubled smile of his.
“So,” said Blake, “we cross one more suspect off
our list. Bowden, Bianca, Morgan, and Dennis says to
cross off Wong. He says men don’t die for love any
more. Don’t they? Maybe he's right, after all.”
“I don’t know about Wong, but we’re right about
Morgan, I’ll tell you that,” said Peter. “For one thing,
he wouldn’t have knifed a woman in the back.”
“He might have,” said Blake stubbornly. Peter
shrugged.
“The Margarita's moving!” he said. “He’s got the
engine warmed up. I guess he's going to make the run
back now.”
They gazed at the slim white launch slipping off its
moorings, edging slowly out from the pier, barely adrift
in the crowded harbor.
Blake laughed suddenly. “Do you remember those
rotten puns Dennis made?” she asked, a bit wistfully
but with her eyes shining. “They were so terrible I
liked them! I was thinking how true one of them was—


146 MURDER UNLEASHED
the Morgan-Attic one. It did turn out to be that sort
of a ménage.”
“He ought to be hung for them,” Peter agreed, with
a fatal absent-minded facility of phrase.
Then Blake broke down. For a terrible moment, tears
reached as high as her heart. She couldn’t help it.
She heard Peter's voice from a long way away, while
she stood there drowning in that dreadful slow tide.
She stood there looking—not seeing anything—until
her eyes caught the white Margarita as that shining
thing put to sea, lightly as a feather floating on the
blue water.
The tide receded. It might come again—would, she
knew—like a sort of terrible awareness of what was
happening, was going to happen, to Dennis, to herself,
to life. But for the moment she was King Canute, and
the wave had obeyed her.
She looked out to sea and grabbed Peter by the arm.
The Margarita was curtsying to the harbor, putting
about in a graceful arc of a gesture, her wake white-
trained behind her. A woman was on the deck now,
looking about her. Her gilt head was bright above a
slimly wrapped heavy Spanish shawl, fringed and cov-
ered with embroidered red roses.
“Peter,” said Blake, “look! She's wearing a shawl—
a Spanish shawl!”
“What of it?” asked Peter, following that gay slim
figure in the heavy silk with his leveled blue gaze.
“This!” said Blake huskily. “Don’t you remember?
Bianca had a shawl, too—and it was a white one, with


MURDER UNLEASHED 147
-
-
red roses on it! He couldn’t get rid of it—so he gave it
to her to wear, thinking no one would connect him to
it!”
“Lots of girls wear those kind of shawls,” said Peter.
“White—with red roses?” asked Blake swiftly.
“How come it's the same colors?”
“Listen,” Peter said, “you may be right—they never
found the shawl. But Morgan never gave it to this girl.
You may be right about his being a murderer—Billy
Morgan—and I may be wrong about that. He may
have knifed Bianca. I don’t know what devils a man
may have in him; I don’t think anyone really knows.
But I am sure—I’m dead sure—that Morgan, even if
he was a murderer, would never on this earth give an-
other girl a shawl that he’d swiped from dead Bianca.
I’ll lay anything on that.”
When Peter spoke like that, it was so. It had reached
a far integrity inside him incorruptible as gold, unshak-
able and earthquake-proof as the center of the earth.
“But,” said Peter grimly, “I practically made a date
with her, and I’ll get the truth out of her. I’ve got her
name and theatrical company, and I’ll look her up.”
“Peter,” Blake said suddenly, in a curious husky
gasp, “of course! Don’t you see it—her theatrical ad-
dress? She's a member of the Honeyblossom company—
and don’t you remember, we found that among the
people on Dennis's hotel corridor, right across the hall
from his door, were a musical-comedy couple from the
Honeyblossom company? These people were all—Den-
nis's neighbors that night.”


Chapter 16
GOOD-BYE TO BIANCA
MoRGAN might or might not be a murderer; but Wong
wasn’t. Dennis knew that as unshakenly as ever Peter
reached rock-bottom truth in himself.
Then where was Wong?
To Blake, in his note, Dennis made light of Wong's
going; but he couldn't make light of it to himself. He
sat in the back seat of the big police touring car, going
up the peninsula highway to San Francisco at a sixty-
mile clip, and he went over and over that in his mind.
Sullivan sat beside him, twice as large as life in a big
rough overcoat. Could he tell him about Wong? He
didn't know. He might think—what Peter and Blake
had already figured out. That Wong was a killer. Or
that Dennis himself had put Wong up to killing Bowden,
if not Bianca.
So Dennis sat a bit huddled, and silent, in his corner
of the car and thought, “Where's Wong?”
Father Malletti had disappeared; now Wong had
gone. Was there any connection? Had Wong gone
willingly? Or had he gone—as Father Malletti had gone?
He didn’t know; but he'd have given five years of
his life, or his good right arm, to know that Wong was
all right. Dennis had stayed away from him for one
forgetful—seeming year; he'd come back as casually as
148


MURDER UNLEASHED 149
if it hadn't had much meaning for him, to be greeted
by Wong again; but Blake had known, what Dennis
now knew, that every Odysseus wants to find home
unchanged when he comes back to it after one or many
years. Dennis loved his place and all that was in it,
though, like Odysseus, he'd been loving it at a distance,
and he knew that Wong was his family. He didn’t
want him to be mixed up in murder. He wanted him in
his proper place, wherever young master roamed and
whatever he got mixed up in. And he wasn’t in that
place now. It was disturbing.
He could take care of himself and take what was
coming to him, Dennis thought—but he couldn’t take
care of Wong. Darn families! They were the dickens of
a responsibility. They took the half of your curse upon
them, whether you wanted them to or not. -
Only he couldn’t quite still that queer ache in his
heart.
So they came up the straight white road through the
rain-clouded peninsula towns, past the Stanford fields,
brown turning to a spring green in the November rains,
past the tall avenue of eucalyptus trees at the deserted
track of Tanforan, past the fields of the flower growers,
the round hills of South San Francisco and the green
graveyards there, into the wet gray streets and the
gray hills of San Francisco, and the rain-washed purple
violets and the dull burning of chrysanthemums on the
corners under the big umbrellas, and the hurrying
crowds, like the waves of the sea coming up from the
foot of the shining gray streets.


150 MURDER UNLEASHED
Their siren cut through noise and traffic like the bow
of a big liner through a choppy sea; they raced across
the city in a shriek of sound that assaulted the populace
as physically as ever the weight of their big dark touring
car could.
Dennis saw blurred things he knew flash by—the
clock on the corner as they crossed Third and Market,
at Kennedy's place of business, the Star Building;
slim copper-brown flash of Lotta's fountain, as they
crossed the busiest corner in San Francisco, and the
traffic held back for them on both sides; faces looking
up, all along the sidewalk, startled, pale, seen and
passed in a second; Kearny Street, the Hall of Justice
tall and gray on their right-hand side; the Italian quar-
ter beyond, as the hills began to climb to the north; the
narrow gray hill streets, the gay-awninged restaurants,
the children, brown-faced and beautiful, playing shrilly
all along the streets, the fruit stores spilling over with
bright oranges and red apples and bananas, lavish
Florentine style—this was Bianca's country. Even the
furtive little places with close-shut doors and blank
windows, the soft-drink places, the pool parlors—these
were Bianca's sort of things. She was a home-grown
goddess, and the patroness of such places; the petty
bootleggers as well as the gay restaurants flourished
under the protection of her heavy-fringed shawl. Ceres
for grain, the goddess of the harvest; but Bianca Farnese
for red wine, the goddess of the grapes, Dennis thought,
in California.
Her people were out to do her honor; it was more


MURDER UNLEASHED 151
like the winter festival of the death of a goddess than
a real funeral, Dennis thought. Perhaps it was incredible
that Bianca could die, or that she wouldn't come again,
in the spring, out of the hillside vineyards of Napa, out
of the warm brown dust of the Santa Clara Valley,
when the fruit trees were white in April like great
sheets spread out over the brown earth. This was
solemnity, but it wasn't really a funeral; it was a
form.
Yet she'd been killed. Didn't any of these beautiful
brown-faced children with the dark hair and the great
dark eyes, didn’t any of the bovine-eyed beautiful
madonnas, the sleek fat men, the thin, keen men—
didn't any of 'em know how Bianca died, by whose
hand? Wasn’t there a whisper of the murderer's name
running through the quarter? It seemed incredible,
incredible as Bianca's being dead, that they had no
suspicion of her murderer. In a case like this, there were
always whispers of names—among one's own people.
But none of them knew. If they had, they’d have told
the police, in this one case. For Father Malletti was
missing, and he was concerned in it, too. Dennis saw
how quiet they were, standing in the streets, filling the
street before the place where Bianca lay dead. He saw
the storm-hush over them, and he knew then why it
was that they weren’t mourning Bianca more. For
Father Malletti was missing. They were attending
Bianca's funeral and her inquest, but they were thinking
of Father Malletti. There would be women as beautiful
as Bianca with every spring, and like pagan goddesses


MURDER UNLEASHED 153
watching him to see how he took it. Brace up, Dennis!
Only—he'd had no sleep the night before, he'd kept
seeing terrible things, and he was tired, and the heavy
drenched air dazed him, sickened him with its sweet-
ness. He was deeply afraid of death, of the dead, a
primitive fear far inside of him.
But fear saved him. He was drugged by it. He moved
forward dully, automatically, to the heap of flowers in
the center of the expensively decorous, carpeted room.
Guided by Sullivan's hand on his arm, he came to the
side of the flowers, spilled in a rug of red and white
over the casket, and raised his eyes and looked at dead
Bianca's face.
There wasn't any shock. There was only, after a
second, a sort of blessed relief. She was dead, but she
wasn't—different. Her eyes were closed. But the beauti-
ful lines of brow and cheek and chin remained, the lips
were folded in marble calmness, her hair was as red as
red gold. Was this what he'd feared? All the panoply
of death, yes; all the paraphernalia and the majesty of
death; he’d feared these. But the paraphernalia and
the majesty of death led only to this—to sleep.
The utter peace of untroubled sleep was on that calm
face. She wouldn’t ever wake. She was done with them
all.
Dennis looked at her fully, took leave of her, un-
hurried, at peace himself again. You couldn’t be afraid
—of her. He didn’t know whether she was in a far
country, or whether she had gone out for good like a
light blown out, but he knew that there was nothing


MURDER UNLEASHED 155
Peter was more than twenty miles away—he was nearer
two hundred, if he was still at Delroy or at Monterey Bay.
And the inquest might decide whether the police
would hold his client or not.
Sullivan and Dennis emerged from the spectators
like divers coming through the breakers. They came
out at the center table. Sullivan began whispering to
the coroner, after he'd put Dennis at a chair a bit
apart from the other witnesses. The jury, a group of
respectable-looking citizens, gazed at him with intense
curiosity. The press table began whispering and writing
furiously. Dennis felt fearfully and terribly conspicuous.
Peter would have made a darned good windbreak then.
Sullivan came back and dropped heavily into the
vacant chair between him and the rest of the witnesses
and lawyers. The coroner, a small round man, partly
bald, with a clever, round face, turned to the witness
he’d been questioning in the stand. This was a fresh-
faced young man, with very blue eyes and very sooty
brows and lashes, and a very rugged sort of chin and
tenderly humorous, cynical mouth. His cheap suit was
all right, quiet and brown, and his tie was something
terrible. Dennis liked him. He thought he knew him.
“Who’s that?” he whispered hoarsely to Sullivan.
“What’re they doing?” Sullivan, he thought, might as
well make himself useful as a guide as well as the guard
for Dennis that he evidently was.
“Filling up time until we came,” Sullivan informed
him behind one huge hand. “He’s taking all the hotel
people now. That's the elevator chauffeur, Malloy.”


158 MURDER UNLEASHED
“She jist said ‘Fourth, please,” Malloy remembered
in a low voice.
“There was no further conversation between you?”
“No, sir. There was not.”
“How was she dressed?”
“She had on one of them white shawl things, with
her hair coming down to her shoulders,” Malloy
said.
“Did she wear any jewels?”
“Sure, she might have, sir. I wouldn’t know,”
Malloy said in a troubled voice.
“Her hair was shining right in your eyes,” thought
Dennis. “You wouldn’t have seen them if she had been
wearing diamonds.”
He rested his arm on the rather dusty oak table and
regarded Malloy intently with his chin resting in the
palm of his hand.
“Well, what happened then? Did you take her up to
the fourth floor?”
“Of course,” said Malloy a bit blankly, looking at the
coroner with frank surprise. “Why wouldn't I?”
The shadow of a grin went around the room.
“I didn’t think you'd take a guest to the basement
if she asked for the fourth floor,” explained the coroner
a bit testily. His baldness turned a bit pink, too. “I’m
asking you this merely for the purpose of the records.
We must have a definite statement of events. Suppose
you tell us just what happened when you took the de-
ceased up to the fourth floor.”
“I stopped the car, opened the door, and the lady


MURDER UNLEASHED 159
got out,” Malloy said. The big hands moved again,
uneasily, in his lap. “That was all, sir.”
“How long did you stay with the car up there after
she got out?”
“Not a second, sir. I shut the door and went down-
stairs again—the light was on from the lobby.”
“Did you notice anyone—anything unusual at all—
in the hotel corridor as you opened the door for her,
and in the time she took stepping from the car?”
“No, sir. There wasn’t anything.”
“Where was she when you went down again? Had
she stopped in the hall, or had she kept on walking
down the corridor, do you know?” -
“She walked right off, sir. To the right. I could see
that. She didn’t have to stop at all to look around.”
“You didn’t notice any room doors open, or ajar?
Were the lights in the hall on as usual?”
Malloy paused briefly, to answer both questions. He
raised his dark blue eyes, sooty-lashed, in a level look
at the waiting room.
“The doors were all shut, sir, as far as I could notice.
The lights were on jist like they always were-are.
The last I saw of her, she was going down the corridor,
and I saw the back of her red hair and her white shawl
going away down the hall.”
Dennis caught his breath. It made a harsh sound like
a rasp in his throat, and he hoped Sullivan and the
others hadn’t noticed. He couldn’t help it. He thought
somberly, “Down the hall—into darkness. Into—my
35
TOOII] . . .


160 MURDER UNLEASHED
That was the last anyone had seen of her—except the
murderer. The red hair shining, and the slim white-
shawled back, walking like a goddess—into darkness,
in that soft-lit corridor.
The others hadn't noticed the sound he made. Only
Malloy with his grave dark blue eyes looked at Dennis
briefly, and the two of them held that look level for a
second.
The coroner was asking, “Did you see what time it
was when you got down to the lobby again?”
“No, sir. I did not. There was a party—a lady—
could tell you—”
“We'll call her later. Let's get on with your testi-
mony. You took the deceased up to the fourth floor,
had no communication with her except the words
‘Fourth floor, please,” and left her there walking away
to the right-hand side corridor. Then you immediately
brought the car down to the main floor level again, as
you saw the light signal on your board. That right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No communication!” thought Dennis scornfully, of
the little dry-voiced coroner. “You fool! She didn't
have to say things to you. She stepped into that guy's
elevator and out again, and he'll never forget her as
long as he lives. There'll be a sort of brightness dazzling
him all the rest of his life.”
However, you couldn’t say things like that to a coro-
ner. Dennis sighed, and shifted his elbow more com-
fortably, and dug his chin in, and followed events
closely.


MURDER UNLEASHED 161
They were coming to him now.
“You took these people up to the seventh floor,” the
coroner was repeating. “You passed the fourth floor
twice, once coming up and once going down. Did you
stop on the return trip going down?”
“No, sir, I did not.”
“At any floor?”
“No, sir,” Malloy said patiently.
“Did you hear or see anything on the fourth floor on
either occasion you passed it?” -
“No, sir.”
“Or on any further trip you made?”
“No, sir.”
It was like a patient litany, in a gray Celtic voice.
The coroner gave up.
“Well, we come to the arrival of the hotel guest in
whose room the deceased was found,” he commented.
“At what time, Mr. Malloy, was it, should you say,
that Mr. Devore entered the hotel lobby”
“It was afther twelve o’clock a bit—more than a
bit,” Malloy answered, consideringly. “I’d say—around
twelve-fifteen, sir.”
“You’ve heard the testimony of the manager of
Station KDO, the broadcasting station,” the coroner
reminded the jury and the interested room, “that
Mr. Devore's program ended at twelve o’clock, and
that he left promptly.”
“Oh, my cat's whiskers,” commented the equally
interested Dennis gleefully to himself. “They had to
drag that guy in. I bet he was about ripe for murder


162 MURDER UNLEASHED
himself, being hauled away from the studio like that
on a busy morning.”
“Leaving the broadcasting studio, which is situated
in the Market Street district,” the coroner went on
precisely, “and arriving at the Hotel Ancaster, on the
hill district to the north of Market Street, would be a
trip of about five minutes on a street car, or about
fifteen minutes' uphill walk, that is, if the walker were
a young man and brisk.”
He shuffled papers for a second.
“That is, the times twelve o'clock at the broadcasting
station and twelve-fifteen arrival at the hotel would
agree, if Mr. Devore had walked from the studio. We
have the hotel clerk's testimony, you’ll remember, that
it was actually ‘some time’ after twelve—that is, not
directly after twelve—that Mr. Devore came in, al-
though he didn’t know the exact time. He did not stop
at the desk for his key—he apparently had it with him.
Mr. Malloy, will you tell us anything you remember
about his arrival? Anything—you can think off.”
“You mean,” Dennis thought grimly, “did I come
in all wild-eyed and ready to kill any visitor I had.”
Malloy didn’t look at him.
“He come in—well, prompt,” he replied, echoing the
manager of the studio unconsciously. “Like he always
does—as if he was going places, and in a hurry.”
“Indeed?” said the coroner. “What was his appear-
ance? His clothes?”
“He didn’t have a hat,” Malloy said. The room
leaned forward at that. It sounded promising—coming


MURDER UNLEASHED 163
in in a hurry and without a hat on a foggy midnight.
Malloy disappointed them, and so, to a degree, did
Dennis.
“He hardly ever wears a hat,” that honest young
man informed them. “At least, I’ve never seen him
with one, all the times I’ve took him up and down in
the car.”
“Was he wearing an overcoat?” the coroner asked.
“No, sir,” Malloy said. “Sometimes he wears one
and sometimes he don’t, but he wasn’t that night.
That's why I thought he’d been walking, let alone the
time he come in. He wasn’t cold-looking, he was brisk-
colored like he’d been walking up the hills in the fog.”
“That's why I walked,” said Dennis to himself.
“It was a swell way to get warm that night.”
“All right. Then what happened?” The coroner made
His favorite move again. “Tell us just what happened,
what was said, everything.”
“Well, Mr. Devore, he come—came—charging in
like he does, and walked across the lobby, and into the
car. There were two others, a couple, came in then, and
I took them all up together. They got off at the third,
and he went on to his floor, and just said “Thanks’ when
I opened the door for him to get out there. He walked
off down the right-hand side of the corridor, to his room,
I guess.”
“Oh, yes,” thought Dennis. “It was—to my room,
all right.”
He wanted to bury his head in his hands at that
memory. He’d been feeling swell, a sitting-on-top-of-


164 MURDER UNLEASHED
the-world sort of feeling that comes to brisk young
men who’ve been walking up San Francisco hills at
midnight in the fog and lights and sounds of a city in
their eyes and ears, and then he'd opened the door of
his room—onto darkness and murder and nightmare
happenings. He wanted to bury his head in his hands
and shut it all out. He couldn’t. He sat there with his
eyes dark, no reflections at all in them.
There was the slight stir of concluding testimony
through the crowded room—a shuffle of movement, a
murmur of whispers.
“Er—one moment, Mr. Malloy,” said the coroner,
looking up dryly as the witness moved tentatively, too.
“One more question: Do you recognize Mr. Devore
from among those in the room now?”
Malloy's deep Irish eyes rested on Dennis for a
second.
“Sure I do,” he said. “That's Mr. Devore there,”
and he half pointed at him. The room made that stir
again, as everyone turned to look in Dennis's direction.
He stood up, automatically. The coroner seemed to
expect it of him. He felt like Exhibit A being shown off.
“Is Mr. Devore wearing the same suit he was wearing
three nights ago, when he came into the hotel just after
twelve o’clock, can you tell me?” the coroner asked
hopefully.
“I think so, sir,” Malloy answered conservatively.
He looked at it intently. Dennis looked down at it
fondly. He liked that suit. He'd paid a lot more for it
than he should have, and it didn't look aggressively


MURDER UNLEASHED 165
expensive, and it stood up under hard wear like a
thoroughbred. It was dark, almost black stuff, but with
a little pattern of white running through it like light
on a black night. It had been his constant companion
these past three days and nights, too—he'd gone to two
jails in it, gone man-hunting in it, he hadn't had it
off him now since he’d dressed at Kennedy's and
borrowed shorts and socks and things from that ele-
phant-memoried gentleman yesterday morning, and
it was still good enough to stand the gaze of the coroner's
jury and the spectators. He loved it. He always felt
for it as a man does who has paid more than he should
have paid for a good dog or any thoroughbred who is
worth the money—that he'd got a lot more than his
money out of it.
So Dennis looked down at it fondly, and the coroner's
jury and the crowd and the press table looked at it
with more varied emotions, among them fascinated
horror. This might be . . .
“Looking for bloodstains,” Dennis thought. “I sup-
pose they'll call it the ‘death suit.”
“Thank you, Mr. Malloy,” said the coroner now.
“That will do.”
There was the slight stir, more decisive now, of a
concluding witness. Malloy stepped down and came to
the long oak table and dropped down heavily at his
chair up near the front. The hotel clerk, a dapper
gentleman who, Dennis had always felt, should have
been a radio announcer, got up when his name was
called again, went up and was sworn in again and briefly


166 MURDER UNLEASHED
asked the same questions that had preceded Malloy’s
dismissal.
“Do you recognize the man who came into the lobby
at a few minutes after twelve that night?” He did, and
pointed Dennis out, by name.
“Is he, do you know, wearing the same suit he was
wearing when you saw him come in that night at that
time?” The hotel clerk thought he was. He hadn’t
noticed him especially. Thank you, that was all. He
stepped down, dapperly.


Chapter 17
DANGER NEARER TO DENNIS
THEY called the lady who'd looked at her little diamond-
set wrist watch as the elevator with Malloy and Bianca
in it had reached the fourth floor that night. She was
slim and cool and blonde and very well dressed, with
nice make-up, a small blue hat, a tailored dark blue
suit, and a brown fur that even Dennis thought might
be a couple of sables around her shoulders.
“And what time was it, Mrs. Armstrong, when you
looked at your watch that night?”
“It was—just—three minutes of twelve.”
Her voice was cool and low and somehow amusedly
detached in spite of its levelness. She didn’t look at
Dennis all the while she was on the witness stand. She
carried her good manners and her breeding into even
the distasteful duty of an inquest on murder, and she
extended her manners even to a person suspected of
that murder. Dennis wanted to thank her for that.
The coroner did, but not for that. He thanked her for
adding another link to the evidence which might form
a chain to snap around Dennis or around some “person
unknown.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Armstrong.”
“Not at all.”
167


168 MURDER UNLEASHED
She stepped down and sat quietly at her place again,
gloved hand against her chin, listening.
“Madam Chairman,” thought Dennis. “Or Madam
President. She'd listened to meetings a lot.”
They called the hotel manager next.
Dennis didn't know much about him, except that his
name was Fersen, he was a Swiss of some sort, and he
didn’t have any use for Dennis at all.
Dennis didn’t blame him much for that last. No hotel
manager wants to see his hotel in the papers with an
“X Marks the Spot” caption on it.
He was a rather pleasant-looking sort of man, brown
done in tones of autumn coloring—face a bit full, but
nice easy smile, brown well-brushed hair with a mere
hint of red in it, brown shining eyes with a bit more red
in them, figure square and very well dressed, square
hands that he occasionally used to gesture with. A
man who wanted to be pleasant, ordinarily—to get
along with people. Yet a man accustomed to getting
his own way, to being a bit of a disciplinarian, as a good
hotel manager had to be. He could be, as Dennis had
found out, brusque.
“You know this man—Devore?” the coroner asked
as a form of beginning, indicating Dennis.
“I know him—yes,” Fersen said guardedly.
“As a guest of your hotel?”
“He was.” The answer was brief but somehow pretty
comprehensive.
It sounded, thought Dennis uneasily, as if he hadn't
quite realized what he was implying. It sounded as if


MURDER UNLEASHED 169
he'd fired Dennis out of the hotel, wouldn’t have him
on any terms—as if he'd found out something about
him—murder, maybe.
“He isn't there now?” the coroner followed that up
quickly.
“I haven’t seen Mr. Devore,” the hotel manager
stated distinctly, “since the night—the body of Mrs.
Farnese was found in his room. He apparently hasn’t
returned to claim his luggage or any personal belongings
awaiting him.”
That was that. It did sound bad.
“He thinks I was scared to come back to a place
where I'd killed a woman,” thought Dennis resentfully.
“He knows better than that! I didn't kill her! Only—
he's making everyone else think that, on purpose.
Why?”
It wasn’t tangible. Nothing definite. The man was
answering questions—yes, and truthfully. It was only
in the way he was answering them—giving Dennis the
worst kind of breaks, the worst implications.
It wasn't only unfriendliness: he was being deliber-
ately nasty about it, in his pleasant way. The very way
he said “Mr. Devore” in quotes was a sort of sneer.
He didn't believe in the name, and he made everyone
else see that Dennis had a last name that sounded like
a chorus boy's dream.
He told of the hotel's brief but too lasting relations
with Dennis. Mr. Devore had come in about three
months ago—he didn't say from where, or if anyone
had recommended the hotel to him. He’d registered
33


170 MURDER UNLEASHED
from Los Angeles. That wasn’t a crime in itself, of
course, but unidentified lone gentlemen with pasts
might very well come from Los Angeles. Every San
Franciscan in the coroner's room knew that the best
murders of past years had, in fact, taken place in Los
Angeles. Even New York columnists had commented
on it. A round half a dozen could come to mind—the
Phillips hammer murder, the terrible Hickman crime,
the chicken-farm murders, Mrs. Patty's killing, whose
murderer is still being hunted—oh, there was quite a
list to choose from. And Los Angeles was a swell place
to come from if you had to come from somewhere, so
to speak. In that big, sprawling, tourist center of a city,
trails and the beginnings of trails might be conveniently
lost and never traced back.
Mr.—er—Devore, in fact, had conveniently come
from Los Angeles out of nowhere, with no friends, and
had established himself at the Ancaster with no further
recommendations. They all got that.
They were meant to get it, Dennis discovered in a
helpless anger. It was put that way deliberately. Good
Lord, did this man, this respectable man, hate him, the
unrespectable, so much? It was like a class war. He
knew why I.W.W.’s went blind with rage and surged
to burn and destroy. It was a helpless feeling, seeing
society, respectable society, down on you like that. It
was the anger of the cornered.
They were told further about Mr. Devore. In strict
answer to the questions put by the coroner, the hotel
manager told them that he had no friends visiting him,


172 MURDER UNLEASHED
“No.” -
“Could you tell us about when you were in your
office that evening—the approximate times?”
“I was working there from about eleven o’clock on—
until I was interrupted by news of what had happened
on the fourth floor.”
“Did you leave the office for any extended time dur-
ing that time—between eleven o'clock and, let us say,
the interruption?” the coroner asked briskly.
A slow red began to creep up the well-fleshed cheeks
of the hotel manager. His hands fiddled a second with
each other, then one of them began to turn a solid
signet ring around his third left finger. The coroner
hastened to turn away any coming signs of a storm.
“I’m asking this,” he explained precisely, “in order
to get everyone's action quite clearly set out during
that evening—everyone of whom we have any definite
knowledge, or whose actions might interest or influence
the murderer. If, for instance, you had left your office
open during quite a period of time, might not someone
have passed unseen by your hallway, taken the service
elevator or even the stairs, to the fourth floor, and there
committed the killing?”
The hotel manager quieted down at this.
“He’s a hot-tempered bird,” diagnosed Dennis.
“Not used to having to explain himself or what he
does.”
“I see,” he was saying more graciously. He smiled,
that easy and, in other circumstances to Dennis, rather


MURDER UNLEASHED 173
charming smile. He was making himself pleasant. He
unbent to explain:
“I didn’t, at any time during that evening, leave the
office for a long period of time. Twice I stepped into
the lobby, once in response to a telephone call from
the desk clerk to meet a friend and greet him, once to
listen to the music from the dining room. Anyone who
used the corridor to my office would have had to pass
me then. No one did.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fersen. How about someone coming
up from the basement offices to use the back elevator
or the stairs?”
“It’s impossible for a guest of the hotel”—those
brown eyes with the red shining in them lit on Dennis
briefly for a second—“to wander into the basement
unnoticed. Any stranger would have been seen at once.”
“There are only two ways to get to these stairs and
the elevators, I understand from the chart of the hotel
—by the corridor running past your offices on the
ground floor, and by entering them at the basement
level?”
“That is so. And one other way. You could enter
them from the higher floors.”
“You suggest?”
“I don’t suggest anything.” The hotel manager
spread those hands of his briefly in depreciation. “But
it has occurred to me that one might get off from the
front elevator at some floor—say the second, the sev-
enth, any of them—and walk the length of the hotel


174 MURDER UNLEASHED
to use, not the service elevator which is run by an
employee, but the service stairs, in order to go up—or
down—as he chooses, unnoticed. It would be less con-
spicuous than using the front stairs, which are for guests
and are more likely to be noticed.”
The coroner digested this for a moment. Then:
“You said ‘down,” he pointed out. “Do you think
anyone, on the night of the murder, used those stairs
to go—down, from Mr. Devore's room on the fourth
floor? He would have had to go, assuming he was a
guest and not an employee of the hotel, past your
office to reach the lobby. You have pointed out that
the basement descent would have been too perilous for
a stranger or one obviously out of place there.”
The hotel manager shrugged—a pleasant shrug.
“I don’t know,” he pointed out in his turn. “It’s too
mysterious for me to say that.”
“He’s got something up his sleeve,” Dennis thought
to himself, watching that well-tailored part of his
clothing instinctively. “Wonder what it is.”
The coroner went back to events instead of sur-
mises.
But for a second Dennis didn’t hear what he was
asking. He was sick and cold with a wave of sudden
fear that had swept over him. He knew what the hotel
manager had been doing, what he'd had up his sleeve.
The whole room had known. He had cut anyone—any-
one not a recognized employee of his hotel—off from
using the back elevator and the service stairs. The
murderer had gone up—must have gone up—by way


MURDER UNLEASHED 175
of the lobby and the front elevators, in full view of
anyone there.
Dennis had gone up like that.
There wasn’t, it seemed, any “unknown” in this
case who could have slipped in conveniently.
A hotel, even a crowded popular one, was like a safe.
It was pretty well guarded at its strategic points, under
a casual exterior of smooth service.
That put it up to Dennis. He’d gone up to his room
and then said he'd found a murdered woman in it.
Had he had time to do the killing? He hadn’t done it
before he left for the radio station—Bianca, according
to most competent witnesses, had come in at about
five minutes to twelve. Dennis had been in the radio
station then. That ran like clockwork. No question of
false time there. Bianca had been walking along the
corridor to Dennis's room then. Malloy had been bring-
ing the elevator down to the lobby. Well . . .
That left the problem of time and Dennis to the
period after he'd left the station. Bianca’d been in his
room all that time. Waiting for him? He knew she’d
been killed then. But no one else—no one except the
murderer—knew that. She might have been waiting
for him. He came back, and it was about fifteen minutes
past twelve, and she was dead. Somewhere in that time
it had been done—it had taken only a minute or two.
But no one knew that, except Dennis and the murderer.
Even his friends didn't know that. They just took it on
faith. . . .
Dennis's eyes darkened there, thinking a second of


176 MURDER UNLEASHED
Peter and Blake—and of Kennedy. He wished Peter
could have been here with him. It wasn’t any use wish-
ing that, though. And at that, it was a pretty selfish
wish. Peter might not want to be standing by with a
suspected murderer in the full light of an inquest. It
was asking a lot.
Well, then (his thoughts scurried briefly like mice
surprised in the dark by a light flashing on them),
Bianca had been dead at twelve-fifteen, even if only
he and the murderer knew that. What time had Dennis
come up to his room, and what time was it that he’d
phoned for the police? It sort of hung on that, he
thought. -
He wasn't counting on anyone's malignity to corner
him there especially. He’d underrated the contemptuous
hatred felt by one sort of man for another, a different
type—the hatred of the respectable for the patently
unrespectable artist, the substantial for the unsubstan-
tial, the man of property for the man to whom property
was something binding, who didn’t, deliberately, want
any ties like that.
He’d underrated the hotel manager.
The coroner asked the hotel manager:
“Mr. Fersen, you were, you say, in your office when
the telephone girl from the public switchboard rang
for you. Will you tell us just what was said in that call,
and what time you received it?”
“I don’t know,” Fersen said deliberately, “that I can
put an exact time to it. Doubtless, as it went to the
police station, the police noted the time. I should say,


MURDER UNLEASHED 177
however, it was about twenty-five minutes past twelve
that the telephone girl notified me that Mr. Devore
had put in a call for the Central Police Station, and
that he seemed to be having some trouble in making
his meaning clear to the officer answering.”
The room sort of rose in a whisper of sound, like a
wind getting up among trees.
“Er—we'll go into that message more exactly,” said
the coroner. “Twenty-five minutes past twelve, you
said? Thank you!”
“Satisfied,” thought Dennis a bit dully. “They all
are. Was it that late when I phoned? Must have been.
I must have just stood there, looking at her . . .”
He remembered, from a long, long way off, how it
had been that night. He'd held onto the edge of the
table and gone 'way under for a while. Then he'd
thought of telling someone—the police. Then he'd got
onto himself and made himself walk across the room,
away from Bianca's body, conscious of it—at his back.
It must have been around that time that he finally
phoned, and got through to that deep-voiced, question-
asking officer. Then he’d stammered it out—there was
someone dead here, in his room—at the Ancaster—
how'd he know what it was about? She was dead—
maybe he'd said “murdered,” but, funny, he didn’t
remember that, quite.
Anyway, the hotel manager was saying that. The
phone girl had told him that Mr. Devore was ringing
up the police and claiming that battle, murder, and
sudden death were prevalent in his room. She'd im-


178 MURDER UNLEASHED
mediately rung up the manager and told him. The
manager's instinctive reaction had been to safeguard
the good name of his hotel. He'd wondered about calling
the hotel physician, decided against it until he knew
more about just what had happened, he'd gone up by
the service elevator run by a hotel employee, and left
that interested man at Dennis's door while he knocked
on it, wondered at the silence behind it, and in a sudden
spurt of unease had thrust his passkey into the lock
and had opened the door—on Dennis and Bianca's
corpse, there on the floor.
“What did Mr. Devore have to say about this dis-
covery?” asked the coroner keenly.
“Why—he didn't say much, as I remember it now,”
Fersen hesitated. “He seemed—dazed.”
“Dazed, eh?” Everyone looked at Dennis, dark head
bent a little, gaze on his hands locked idly together,
lips set tight.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” thought Dennis furiously.
“D'you think I see murder's work every day? It's your
callous guy you ought to suspect, not the man who's
bowled over by a glimpse of the body.”
“Then what happened?”
“Mr. Devore began to tell me—to protest—that he'd
never seen the woman—the deceased—in his life be-
fore,” Fersen said smoothly. Too smoothly. The
coroner's jury and the crowd caught it. There was a
little whispering sound like a laugh going over the room.
It was—funny, at that, maybe. My Most Embarrassing
Moment! He'd found a strange woman in his room,


MURDER UNLEASHED 179
murdered. It didn't sound true, somehow. A protest
seemed faintly farcical. Sure, he must have known her.
The hotel manager obviously hadn’t believed Dennis,
and he'd made the room see the impossible side of the
crime—that Dennis hadn’t known Bianca, even as a
casual acquaintance. It didn’t sound true, told like
that. It sounded as if Dennis had just lost his head
then and had protested too much. If he’d come out
and said it was an accident—or that they'd both been
drinking—or that they'd had a scuffle . . .
Only he hadn’t. He’d tried to get out of it, to hush
it up. Dennis saw the coroner and his jury and the
whole room going away from him, its belief or sym-
pathy or even will to comprehension withdrawing like a
tide that left him stranded there. He felt defenseless
and very lonely, rather like a mussel left exposed at
low tide.
He bent his head and stared studiously at the lower
knuckle of the third finger of his left hand. He knew
without looking about him what was going on. Sullivan
was shifting his heavy bulk in the chair next to him,
preparatory to taking the witness stand soon. The
motherly-looking lady juror with the placid face and
the comfortable width had decided that he was a mur-
derer—that white-faced, desperate young man, poor
thing!—and was staring at him with interest and repul-
sion mingled in her kindly, rather faded blue eyes.
The hotel manager Fersen, having done his duty nobly
by the city and by his hotel, was stepping down jauntily,
sure that everyone knew that the Ancaster had cast out


18O MURDER UNLEASHED
Dennis even before the police had decided to take him
in among themselves.
The coroner decided to go catch minnows for bait for
a while, and the bigger fellows could lie unmolested on
the bottom of the stream with their tails waving gently,
facing upstream in position. He called the service eleva-
tor man who'd accompanied Fersen upstairs to Dennis’s
door. That obviously thrilled person, exhilarated by his
brief contact with the live wires of a murder case, gave
negative information. He'd taken no one up or down
that evening except a few employees, all of whom had
accounted for every minute of their time and their
errands to the manager. He'd seen no one around the
corridor on Dennis's floor while he waited outside until
the police came. The telephone girl came, red-lipped,
blonde-haired, furred, a good deal like a hotel guest—
a good imitation, Dennis thought.
No, she hadn’t had a call from Dennis's room all
evening except—the murder call. Her voice dropped.
The room swayed forward.
“Murder?” emphasized the little round coroner.
His eyes were very keen behind his spectacles. He wasn’t
a fool, Dennis realized. He was a clever man.
“Cleverness,” thought Dennis forlornly, “may be
awfully overrated and a surface quality, but it sure
does count, Peter. He may be able to get your client
hanged on it, regardless of any deeper superiority you
and I may possess.” -
That would be a joke on—Peter, he decided.
“Well,” said the telephone girl, “he asked for the


MURDER UNLEASHED 181
police, and when I got the police and plugged him in
through the outside board he began saying there was a
dead woman in his room, and would they come around
right away.”
“And?” prompted the coroner, head poised like a
bird—a rather choosy bird selecting his worm.
“And they said they would,” said the telephone girl
simply.
There was a subdued snort through the room. The
coroner's bald spot got pinkish again.
“I mean—what further conversation did Mr. Devore
have with the police about this dead woman—did he
say, actually, that she'd been killed, or murdered, or
did he make any reference as to who she was?” the
coroner said brittlely.
The telephone girl got brisk, too. It was the sort of
manner she assumed with too impatient customers,
Dennis thought.
“No, he didn’t,” she said a bit snippily. “He said—"
she was dead. She'd been killed in his room, and he'd
found her there. And for them to come at once. So they
did.”
“Very well,” said the coroner. He couldn’t ask too
leading questions of the witness, of course. He couldn't
say suggestively, “Did he actually say she'd been killed
with a knife wound in her back, done with a kitchen
knife at exactly seventeen and a half minutes past
twelve, by one Dennis Devore?”
He’d already tried to lead her to suggest that Dennis
knew the woman was murdered as soon as he saw her.


182 MURDER UNLEASHED
That he had accidentally shown too much knowledge
of it over the phone. The hotel manager had sort of
backed him up in that. But the telephone girl had on
the whole thrown him down on it. And she'd had the
first-hand knowledge of the call.
She'd plugged in for the hotel manager, gasped out a
story that had sent him upstairs, and—that was all
she knew until the police came. She hadn't taken the
time of the call.
“I bet the rest of the Ancaster got rotten phone serv-
ice during those minutes,” Dennis decided.
A uniformed policeman took the stand, his blue and
silver spick-and-span in that rather grimy room. He had
a broad face rather rarely done in pink, and a deep
voice that Dennis found reminiscent. It was the sort of
official voice he'd often found in policemen, especially
ones with rarely done reddish broad faces.
They'd met before—over the telephone. At exactly—
lemme see—twelve twenty-three p. m. on the night
of the murder.
The coroner encouraged him gently. The policeman
fixed his hard-boiled small blue eyes on a distant target
at the other end of the room and fired words at it.
“I was on duty at the switchboard, sir, and took the
call from the Hotel Ancaster. I made a note of the time
when I had done so. The call was from a Mr. Dennis
Devore, and asked the police to come to the hotel at
once as there was a dead woman in his room. There
was nothing said of killing or murder at the time by
Mr. Devore.” The cop took a breath and went on:


MURDER UNLEASHED 183
“I then asked Mr. Devore what had happened. He
said he didn’t know. He had found the deceased there
when he came home.”
“Er—thank you, officer.”
“I then notified the detective bureau, and Inspectors
Sullivan and Cassidy, homicide squad, answered the
call.”
“Thank you, that'll do.”
Inspector Sullivan was called next. He got up, leaving
the seat next to Dennis empty, and a few more people
got a good look at Dennis. Inspector Sullivan's testi-
mony, given in a quiet voice, was depressingly familiar
to Dennis. It was becoming as familiar, that story, as
the well-known linked chain of his leash is to a dog.
And it was closing around his neck. There'd been no
one up there, around his floor and in his corridor, who
hadn’t had a right to be there, it seemed. There'd been
nothing suspicious. Only Bianca going into his room,
and Dennis calling the police. That left it up to him.
Circumstantial evidence? Of course, but what else was
there in this case? There was Father Malletti's dis-
appearance, and the murder of Bowden, the “honest
plowman.” Murdered near Dennis's ranch, at the time
when Dennis was alone near there, with a grudge
against him, and with his own gun handy. There was
Dennis's former record, concealed from the police.
“A bad habit—finding bodies,” thought Dennis,
shielding one side of his face with his hand. “They'll
hold me, sure. All that about Bowden and the rest'll
come out at this inquest. The police don't care if they


184 MURDER UNLEASHED
do tip their hand all at once. They've got me, haven’t
they? They should worry about the surprise element.
It'll all come out, and then the jury'll turn in a verdict
mentioning me as recommended for further investiga-
tion, and they'll hold me. And the murderer's going
loose and laughing somewhere. While Bianca's being
buried. At that, I can’t blame the jury. That's three
killings I’ve already been mixed up in-Farnese's,
Bianca's, and Bowden's. Three strikes and you're out,
in any man's league.”
He sat up suddenly, dropping his hand away from his
face, at hearing the last question from the little coroner:
“Have the police, Inspector Sullivan, found out any-
thing bearing—or that might bear—on the murder of
Bianca Farnese in any events or acquaintances of her
life?”
“She was a home-grown goddess,” Kennedy had said.
“Statue of Liberty of North Beach.”
She was Bianca Farnese, from a rather bloody and
gorgeous sort of fairy tale.
She had been the patroness of gay restaurants and
little furtive bootlegging parlors.
Many men must have loved her.
There wasn’t one of them that had come forward to
say anything that might give up her murderer; there
wasn’t a restaurant where she'd danced and given her
patronage that could tell of her true loves and hates.
She’d been seen with this man and that man; she had
lived in an apartment near Powell Street, on Nob Hill;
she had had a pretty good bank account in the savings


MURDER UNLEASHED iss
department of a big national bank; she might have been
a light-o'-love, but to most people she had been more
like a lighthouse that flashed its beams in their face,
blinding them to anything behind that blazing light
of her beauty, her vitality, her generousness.
Now that she was dead, that blinding, powerful light
flashed off, a lot of people had scurried for cover like
beetles seeking the friendly dark of an under-stone,
before the fiercer light of publicity and the police would
be flashed on them. Already some of their letters had
been recovered, and frankly indignant and terribly
respectable gentlemen had had to explain pettishly that
she had been only a “friend.” The letters may have
mentioned money. Well, they had “loaned” Mrs.
Farnese some money once when she was ill, and she
had asked for it. The letters may have mentioned
appointments. Yes, these suddenly frank gentlemen had
replied, wiping their foreheads, Mrs. Farnese had wished
to consult them about buying bonds, and had written'
to make an appointment at so-and-so's restaurant so
they wouldn’t be interrupted in their business talk.
Or they had gone home with her after dinner for a cup
of coffee and a quiet business talk. The city chuckled,
and the police, after a long hard stare at the victims,
had reluctantly given up most of the clues of the letters.
None of these scared and reluctant gentlemen, dragged
so painfully to light as “friends” of Mrs. Farnese, had
had anything to do with her murder, they decided.
Some of them had alibis, and some of them had acquired
wives since their acquaintanceship with Bianca, and


186 MURDER UNLEASHED
some of them, just plainly, weren't murderers. They
were gay young men who could have afforded Bianca
a lot more than they relished the publicity attending
her murder.
“There wasn't,” as Sullivan explained to the rather
mirthful room hearing these primly official disclosures,
“a murderer among them. We made sure of that.”
There was a deep disgust in his voice.
“You suggest, then,” said the coroner, “that although
there were undoubtedly many men in Mrs. Farnese's
life, there was no one affair serious enough to cause her
killing?”
“I do that,” said Sullivan stoutly. “She may have
played some of her men friends for easy marks, but the
ones she played around with could afford it. And there
was no suggestion of blackmailing any of them, in
any of the letters they wrote her. It was, on both sides,
I should say, a casual sort of affair, a companionship
more than usual in such cases.”
* “Friends with her victims,” thought Dennis, eyes
shining. “Oh, clever Biancal She rooked 'em, and they
loved it. She was civilized, and she picked civilized men
for her sort. All except one. One was a wild beast in
her civilized kingdom. One of them killed her. He pre-
tended to love her—maybe he did love her. Only she
found out about Farnese, and so he killed her. He didn’t
play the same game or the same rules as the rest. He
was wild, under all his pretense of being civilized.”
“Then, Inspector,” the little coroner said, “can't
you give us any information from Mrs. Farnese's life


MURDER UNLEASHED 187
that might lead to a suggestion of who her murderer
was P’’
“The police are still investigating Mrs. Farnese's
life,”—Sullivan on the witness stand crossed his knees
comfortably and went on blandly—“but we have no
information as yet to make public—except this: that
the man who killed her probably wasn’t in the limelight
at any time while she lived, as a friend of hers. Other-
wise he wouldn’t have dared to kill her and think he
could get away with it like that. He must have known
that every acquaintance and incident of her life would
be dragged up by the police after her death, and anyone
unquestionably linked with her would be subject to a
thorough questioning, if not being put actually under
suspicion of the murder. For that reason, then,” Sulli-
van took a deep breath and continued his speech, “we
are inclined to think he was someone who has, so far,
kept his connection with her a secret. None of the men
we've questioned as friends of hers, according to the
letters they wrote her, fill the bill in points of time,
place, and other circumstances of the killing. Also
they've been questioned by the police as to their rela-
tions with Mrs. Farnese, which questioning usually
brings complete results,” said Sullivan dryly. “It’s
only occasionally the police don’t find out the whole
truth of a man's story in their questioning.”
His eye lit on Dennis for a moment, in passing. Was
there—could there be—a sort of flicker of light deep
in their small dark depths, like a passing signal? It had
never occurred to Dennis before that Sullivan might


188 MURDER UNLEASHED
be a kind of sportsman, feeling a sort of unprejudiced
admiration for anyone who could beat him at his own
game. But then, reflected Dennis philosophically, Sulli-
van could afford to feel that kind of admiration—he
had, after all, finally hooked Dennis. It was easy to be
a sportsman if you were on the winning side. You felt
large and generous toward your opponent then.
It would be, anyway, in a split second now, Sullivan's
inning. Because Sullivan's statement had put it entirely
onto some “unknown,” and the whole room knew that
Dennis had strenuously denied any acquaintanceship
whatever with Bianca Farnese. There couldn’t be a
more dark unknown in anyone's life than a man who
protested he'd never seen the woman in his life before
until the time she was found dead in his room. The more
Dennis made that statement stick, the more, paradoxi-
cally, would he be under suspicion of her murder. He
would fulfill Sullivan's sketch of the “unknown” then,
to perfection.
Sullivan stepped down from the stand. Dennis was
going to testify next.
The coroner was calling out his name.
Dennis felt the way he’d felt only once before in his
comparatively carefree life—once when he was in an
airplane and the darned thing had suddenly gone wonky,
off balance, and begun to stagger and flounder wildly
around in the blue air, about five thousand feet up;
and the pilot, a friend of his, had pointed with a grin
to Dennis's strapped-on parachute and then to the
terrible emptiness below, which was coming up rapidly


MURDER UNLEASHED 189
to meet them. He'd known fear then, the dreadful cold
fear of utter cowardice, forced to walk off like that
onto nothing. His friend was waiting for him to jump, -
before he'd leave the plane himself; and he had to do
it, by himself. It wasn't so bad, once he'd jumped. It
was the decision over himself first that took strength.
He’d thought then that if he won over the feat that
weakened his physical self to the stuff of water he'd
never know such fear again in all his life. It didn’t
come twice, that sort of thing. He'd be over it, having
conquered it once. Once he'd jumped, it was all right.
He'd won. He felt good, and as if nothing could ever
touch him in that way again. He thought he'd won a
sort of inoculation of sheer mental bravery over physical
fear, forever.
But now he knew that a man could feel that same sort
of fear twice. Even if he'd won the first time. Maybe he
would go on feeling it, like this, whenever something
extra frightening had to be done and he had to force
himself to go ahead and do it. He was cold and weak
again, with that fear that was almost unashamed, so
strong, so crying out in him.
Things didn’t ever end. You never won completely,
once, for all the rest of your life. You always had to go
on fighting as if every previous fight had never happened
before. He knew that now.
He was standing up, one hand resting on the back
of the chair, before he went up to the stand to tell away
his life, his liberty—his precious liberty that meant his
life. He knew now that the long leash had come to its


190 MURDER UNLEASHED
end, that it was tightening, tangling around him. He
knew the unbelievable story he was going to tell them
all, and how they'd take it. It was the end of his liberty,
and so of his life, because when he was in jail no one
would bother to investigate any other trail but his. No
one except—Peter, maybe, and Blake. What could they
do? They could only follow him, and he'd come here,
at last.
He didn't blame any of them. He saw now, for the
first time, that his story of what had happened was
unbelievable, except on the grounds of his guilt or
guilty knowledge.
Things didn't happen that way, unless you made 'em
happen. Men didn't get murdered all around you, and
you not involved . . . unless ... someone was involving
you. No one would believe that, though. Only he and
one other knew that was true.
Dennis swept weary eyes briefly over the crowded
room, the jury with the shocked and kindly faces in it,
the miscellaneous group of witnesses gathered around
the shabby oak table. He gave up with a heavy motion
of one hand and started up to the witness stand. The
coroner was calling him, impatiently, repeating his
name: “Devore! Devore!” Then Peter grabbed him.


Chapter 18
THE MARINES
“QUIck,” said Peter, “before the gendarmes mass.
Where are we?” -
“H-how'd you get here?” asked Dennis huskily,
instead.
“Flew, you fool. Don’t waste time. Where are we?”
“Returns coming in from all counties. Landslide
against me, I guess. No final count.”
“You testified yet?”
“Just going to.”
“What's the coroner like?”
That gentleman was getting ready to go into action
and separate the huddle into its component parts. He
objected to having unannounced meetings going on in
the middle of an inquest, particularly with suspected
persons taking part in them.
“He’s an er—er,” explained Dennis quickly but
satisfactorily, with a side glance at that worthy. “Not
an error, though. He knows his stuff, but he's awfully
slow at a getaway.”
“Good enough,” said Peter, taking his hands off
Dennis and straightening up.
The room, which had been seething a bit like a windy
sea, began to subside.
191


192 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Mr. Coroner,” Peter rumbled above it, standing
staunch as a rock in the midst of the excitement, “I
represent Mr. Devore here, and I’d like to talk with
my client and with you and Inspector Sullivan before
we go on further in this inquest. We haven’t had a
chance to confer yet.”
“Sure you can,” said Sullivan. “You can begin with
us, Byrne. We'd like to hear it.”
“Good enough,” said Peter again and went on up
front. A policeman, uniformed, moved unobtrusively
to a place a bit behind Dennis's chair, as if he'd just
happened to drift there in the shift of the crowd. The
three men bent their heads close together over the
coroner's part of the big table, where his papers were
massed. You couldn't hear what they were saying, but
you could hear the tone of the voices. Peter spoke first,
quite a while, deep voice urgent. Then Sullivan spoke,
a little shorter. The coroner snapped them up on some-
thing, dry and businesslike, as if he'd stamped an okay
with his signature on a signed paper, like a formality
that ended the conference. They broke it up then.
Peter came back to Dennis, with Sullivan dropping
into his chair on the other side. The coroner arranged
his papers, regardless of the stares and whisperings
that roved around him.
“Er—,” he said, raising his partly bald head again,
“we’ll have Mr. Devore as a witness now.”
Peter laid a hand on Dennis's arm as he started to
get up.
“You can claim immunity from testifying,” he said


MURDER UNLEASHED 193
in a whisper, “if you want. Or you can waive immunity,
as you please. Because you're the one witness they're
liable to try to pin it onto.”
“Immunity?” said Dennis, widening his eyes inno-
cently. “What's that? Do you want ’em all to think
I did it?”
He grinned at Peter, and before Peter could stop him
he was up and going forward. Peter gave a subdued
grunt, whether of satisfaction or of disturbance no one
could tell, and leaned back to watch his client. Dennis,
he thought, wasn't afraid to take it, anyway. For any-
one whose previous private life bore investigation as
little as Dennis's did, he wasn’t backward, Peter real-
ized, about it.
Dennis, on the other hand, walking up to the witness
chair, simply felt as if the marines had come. Perhaps
not in the very nick of time, but enough in time to
avenge his dead body, which was satisfactory to him.
A man doesn’t like to go down in a crowd of enemies
and be totally forgotten, and no one even know of the
fight he's put up. It's even more satisfactory to have
a monument of dead enemies erected over him, and he
felt that Peter would attend to any details like that in
an elegant manner.
He put up his right hand and was sworn in. He seated
himself and waited for the opening shot. It sort of
ricocheted and hit him from an unexpected angle. Yet
it was only a mere routine question, after all. No one
in the room, with the exception of Peter and Inspector
Sullivan, and maybe Kennedy if he was there among


194 MURDER UNLEASHED
the reporters, could have known of its unexpected effect.
Even the little bald coroner couldn’t know.
All he'd said was, “What is your name?”
“Er—er!” stumbled Dennis helplessly for an agoniz-
ing second. He turned red, and the room began to titter.
He'd forgotten how many names he was supposed to
have, and which one he went under here, anyway.
They all knew him as Devore, of course. What in the
devil was the proper name to give now? Spring a totally
new one on them? He thought that might have a bad
effect. But after all, he was under oath.
He caught Peter's eye and stopped fumbling. His
mouth closed more firmly. Peter was rising from his seat.
“Mr. Coroner,” said Peter massively and very re-
spectfully, “my client's professional name is the name
that he is known by on legal contracts and in business,
and with your permission, the police have agreed to
accept that name as his proper one in this case—that of
Dennis Devore.”
The coroner caught Sullivan's small but wise elephant
eye. Sullivan nodded an equally massive head. Peter
sat down. For a man who had no idea of what Dennis's
real name might be, he'd done pretty well on the spur
of the moment, he felt. Of course a broadcasting artist
could have a professional name, without any rude
questions arising from that fact. It wasn't, then, an
alias.
Dennis gave his name. Dennis Devore. His—er—
former address, the Ancaster. The coroner asked him if


MURDER UNLEASHED 195
he was returning to that address. Dennis said yes, all
his things were there. He’d had every intention of re-
turning to it. The hotel manager stared stonily in front
of him at that.
Dennis didn’t care. He was still a bit stunned from
one amazing fact that had just penetrated his brain:
Devore! He was Dennis Devore here! The coroner kept
calling him that. Sullivan didn’t rise and expose him.
There were no questions about his manslaughter record
down at Delroy.
Dennis realized in one dizzy second that the police
weren’t telling all they knew. Neither was Kennedy.
He must have kept it quiet, as he'd said he might unless
something broke to make it worth his while to spill the
whole thing. That encouraged him. It sounded as if
they wanted to keep things under cover, after all. For
the benefit and surprise of some other person.
The coroner asked questions that brought Dennis
step by step over the route of that night when Bianca
died in his room. That journey of his had been pretty
well mapped out—by the manager of the radio broad-
casting station KDO, by the hotel clerk, the elevator
man Malloy, the telephone girl, the hotel manager, the
police. Now in Dennis's low dark voice it gained a new
interest. He answered questions quietly and briefly, but
the room leaned forward and saw pictures as he spoke.
He’d gone up—he'd tried his door—it was locked—
he’d had his key with him—he'd put it in the lock and
turned the knob, and the door opened—the room was


196 MURDER UNLEASHED
-
dark—it was a bit stuffy, the windows were all closed—
he'd turned on the lights.
“What did you do then, Mr. Devore?”
“I thought of opening the windows,” Dennis said.
“Did you open the windows?”
“No.” Sullivan slouched in his seat. Dennis went on:
“I—I meant to, and then–I crossed the room, and saw
—her. The body. Lying on the floor.”
“Just a minute,” the coroner said. “You heard noth-
ing when you came in?”
“Nothing,” Dennis said tiredly. His dark eyes looked
at the breathless room without interest, as if he didn’t
see them all there. As if he saw things, pictures, in his
mind instead. -
“How was the body lying?”
“On its back. Her—the face was upward.”
“Did you touch it?”
“No.” It sounded like a dark wing drooping, that
low word.
“Did you see any cause of death, or know she was
dead?”
“I knew she was dead,” Dennis said simply. “I
didn’t see anything—I didn’t know how she died.”
“You didn’t know it was—murder?”
“No.”
It was a dark whisper of a word again, lower.
“What did you do then, Mr. Devore?”
“I called the police.”
“By telephone?”
“Yes, through the hotel board.”


198 MURDER UNLEASHED
“How did you learn it? From the police?”
“No.” Dennis grinned that brief glimmer of a grin
over mouth and eyes, as he looked at the press table.
“I learned it from a reporter.”
There was a subdued but appreciative deep chuckle
from the press table. Sullivan turned the nicely done
color of rare beef under his brownness of face.
“Er,” said the little coroner a bit hastily. There was a
polite silence, all waiting for him to speak.
“You can tell us nothing, then, of the circumstances
under which the deceased was found in your room that
night?”
“The circumstances,” said Dennis grimly, “were that
someone took her in there and killed her. That's all I
know. I’d like to know more about it myself!”
“Quite so,” said the coroner. “We er—appreciate
your feeling on this subject. We should all like to know
more. Er—can you tell us under what circumstances
you came to San Francisco, Mr. Devore?”
Dennis leaned forward in the confidential attitude of
one about to tell a longer tale. The room subtly became
relaxed, as those about to listen to a life story. He put
his elbow on his knee and rested his chin against his
fist.
“It was about three months ago,” he said engagingly,
taking them all into his confidence. “A friend of mine
who's a radio engineer suggested that maybe I could
sing over the radio. So I did.” He grinned, as though
it were as much of a surprise to him now as it had been
then. “They offered me a contract. So I went first to
i


MURDER UNLEASHED 199
Los Angeles, and then came up here, and got a try-out
at KDO, and I’ve been here ever since.”
“Until this happened,” he thought.
He was a Native Son, eh? They knew all about him
now. The whole room felt sort of friendly to Dennis,
as though they'd known him quite a while. There
wasn't anything fishy in his story. His life history was
as clear as crystal. He'd explained everything, in those
few simple sentences.
Only Peter, and Inspector Sullivan, and maybe the
wise little coroner perceived that Dennis had offered
the courtroom his whole life all wrapped up in three
months, with a fine frank gesture of confidence. His
history hadn’t gone back beyond that.
But then, most people in the room, if they'd stopped
to think about this point, wouldn’t have believed that
Dennis could have much of a history by now. There
didn’t seem time for it. The motherly-looking juroress
was beaming on him. She knew that her feminine in-
stinct had been vindicated. That nice young man a
murderer! It wasn't likely, and she'd known it all along.
Dennis, however, cocked a cynical dark eye at all
this sudden relaxation toward him. He didn’t dare take
it too much to heart.
“Fine!” he thought. “If I could break it off now
What's the use? Now comes the grand exposure. Recent
events are going to trip me up so hard I’ll discover a
new universe. I could have made it, too, if—all those
other things hadn’t happened.”
The little coroner was rustling papers again, with a


-
-
*
MURDER UNLEASHED ... 201
death in a hotel room on the night of the 3rd of Novem-
ber in this city. The circumstances leading to her
arrival in that room and of her death are unfortunately,
at this time, er—obscured. The manner of her death,
however, was made plain to you by the physician of
the police department who examined her immediately
after the discovery of her body, and, as he has testified,
not more than an hour after her death. The cause of
death was the wound made by a knife blade entering
her back in such a position, stripped of technical ver-
biage, as to cause almost immediate death. The knife
remained in the wound and was exhibited to you.
Efforts to trace it have not been, so far, successful.
There seems to be no doubt, ladies and gentlemen of
the jury, that this adequately describes the cause of
death. The immediate cause, or agency, that is. What
further cause there may be—er—you've a pretty good
idea, as I’ve said, of how the deceased came to her death.
“Er—it's been represented to me, by officials of the
police department who are working on the case, that
this death of the woman Bianca Farnese which we’re
engaged in investigating may be—undoubtedly, I
should say, was—involved with—other recent occur-
rences. I suggest, therefore, ladies and gentlemen, that
you bear this in mind when fixing not only the immedi-
ate agency of death, but also if you wish to fix any
definite responsibility for the manner of her death on
any person or persons. That definite responsibility
will in due time, we trust, be legally placed by—er—the
courts, with the aid of the police department. I can


2O2 MURDER UNLEASHED
only suggest this—you are quite free to return your own
verdict under the circumstances—but at this time—
er . . .”
The jury nodded gravely. That last “er” meant
more to them than the whole speech together. It meant
all that the coroner meant it to mean. The police had
clues, and didn’t want to be burdened by a ready-made
defendant handed over to them. The jury, in fact,
“got” the coroner neatly. He and the police wanted a
free hand. All right, they'd get it.
“The long leash,” whispered Dennis irrepressibly to
Peter. “He wants it, too.”
He got it. The coroner's jury consulted briefly, came
back, announced when questioned that Bianca Farnese
had come to her death through violence, specifically by
a knife wound made by the hands of a person or persons
unknown.
The courtroom broke up in a great rush of sound.
Dennis turned to Peter.
“How'd you do it?”
“This is an inquest, not a trial,” Peter reminded him.
“That's all they had to do, really. Just say how she
died, not who did it.”
“Yes, I know,” said Dennis impatiently, “but how’d
you get them to fall in with that? You know Sullivan
wants a definite charge on me so he can hold me.”
“Ugh,” grunted Peter absent-mindedly, gathering
papers.
“Listen, Indian,” said Dennis threateningly, “that
reticent ugh-ugh stuff you’ve been pulling doesn't go


MURDER UNLEASHED 203
3 *
with me. Explain in words of more than one syllable.
“I made a dicker with the police and the coroner,”
Peter said. “I offered to hand over the facts about the
money orders and Bowden's last words. Kennedy’s
held all that back until he had something to follow
and spring on 'em all at once. In fact, with a great
price, I'm afraid, obtained I this freedom for you.”
“What price?”
“We’re going to have Sullivan come to lunch with us,
and then we’re going to Tell All.”
“Well,” Dennis sighed, “I don’t care if I do!”


MURDER UNLEASHED 205
come in and say something to Sullivan and the coroner,
and the situation changes. I’ve brought information
that lets you out. If it lets you out, it must implicate
him in some way, if it’s anywhere near the truth. He
can't afford to have any glimmering of the truth come
out. Not even the beginning of a trail to him. He's
been so careful about that! The coroner and the police
both let you off easily—too lightly, in view of the in-
formation they must have on your recent doings.
Follows, then, that my information supersedes theirs.
Therefore he knows they’ve got it now. Q.E.D. The
family jewels are in the old safe, and the fake butler
knows it now.”
“Don’t be so darned logical, Peter,” Dennis pro-
tested. “You take away any appetite I might have had
for lunch, if that’s a satisfaction to you!”
The room was pretty well cleared by now. Sullivan
remained by them, heavily putting on his overcoat.
Dennis grinned fleetingly.
The three of them turned to go, and Dennis put a
hand on Peter's arm, dragging him back.
“Where's Blake?” he asked hurriedly.
“She’s bringing the car back from Monterey,” Peter
said. “I came up by plane from the Hotel Del Monte
grounds there.”
Dennis dropped his hand, freeing Peter. “Oh,” he
said.
“By the way,” said that sisterless gentleman, follow-
ing Sullivan's broad shoulders out of the room, “Mor-
gan's a washout, Dennis.”


206 MURDER UNLEASHED
“I thought so,” Dennis said, “when you didn't say
anything about him. Oh, well!”
He shrugged and went on behind the two of them,
thinking what a battle-cruiser line he had in front of him
now—Sullivan and Byrne, both broad-shouldered, tall,
heavily built, alike in their rough-coated overcoats
swinging along, in their soft felt hats jauntily pulled
down over their right eye. Dennis thought the two of
them were enough for any battle line.
It was sort of nice, and a relief, after all, to have
Sullivan with them. It had been pretty hard on Peter,
scouting alone for Dennis.
“Where’ll we eat?” demanded Peter, as they stood
on the outside steps beside Sullivan.
“Somewhere where it's quiet,” Sullivan said. “These
places around here are all crowded now. We don’t want
the world listening in on us.”
“I know a place,” Dennis remembered. That faint
glimmering grin began in his eyes, but his face was
grave. “It’s a swell place, near here. On a roof.”
They found themselves following his lead, along the
narrow and crowded hill streets. Dennis climbed the
stairs, nodded affably to the dark-faced proprietor in a
way which chased some of the anxiety out of his large,
dark, mournful eyes at seeing Sullivan there, and chose
the same table among the potted plants that he'd had
with Kennedy. They not only had a quiet table to
themselves—they had a space around it entirely left to
them, too. Peter looked all right—respectable, solid,
but not official; Dennis was obviously a bosom friend
-


MURDER UNLEASHED 207
of Alexandro, the boss; but no plainclothes suit could
disguise Sullivan as anything but an officer of the
police.
The other patrons, under the striped umbrellas and
among the stranded sort of palms and things scattered
about, gave them a respectful assurance of privacy and
a sudden lowered tone of voices.
Dennis dropped into a chair with an air of homecom-
ing and looked around for landmarks outside, under the
blue and windy sky of a rainless November day. The
warm wind ruffled his hair pleasantly, the sun was warm
on his face. It was a swell day.
“What’ll it be?” asked Peter.
“Some of the same,” said Dennis, taking no chances
with the rather illegibly written bill on the table. “And
coffee,” he added. The proprietor flashed him a smile,
and departed, heavily, to his kitchens.
“That's the guy who saw Bianca coming out of the
church there, down the street, the night Father Malletti
disappeared,” Dennis told them in a hushed voice.
“He told Kennedy and me about it night before last—
remember? It was in the paper next day.”
“All I know,” said Sullivan bitterly, “is what I read
in the papers. And at that, the little rat of a Kennedy
has been holding out on us, it looks.”
“Well,” Dennis murmured, “there’s a lot in them
just now.”
“Suppose,” Sullivan suggested, “you tell us what
isn't in them yet, Devore.”
“All right,” Dennis surrendered with a sigh of relief.


208 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Here's the layout, as far as we've gone. Shall I tell
'em, Pete, or you?”
“You,” said Peter briefly, beginning to eat.
So Dennis put his clenched hands on each side of his
face, sunk his chin in them comfortably, and began to
talk, ignoring the slowly congealing food in front of him.
He told of their visit to Delroy, of Bowden's coming
into their garden at dusk, and of Bowden's strange and
last words about Farnese. “He said Farnese was lying
on the highway, Sullivan, for a target for any car to
hit. He was dead before we-I—hit him!”
“We'd know a lot more if we could get a line on
Farnese,” Sullivan commented. “He’s been dead more
than a year, though.”
“But his widow,” Dennis pointed out, “was killed—
only the day before yesterday, Sullivan! That case is
still alive, still recent. It must be. Farnese isn't resting
easy in his grave, after all. Bowden was right. It's—the
restless grave, betraying his murderer after all this
time.”
“Yeah,” Sullivan said only, “but who?”
Dennis shook his head. He went on, but he couldn’t
get any answer to that question. He went on to the
visit they'd paid Bowden—“I told you all about that,
except finding the money orders and why we actually
went there that night, when you saw me in the Delroy
jail,” Dennis commented virtuously at this point.
Peter grinned. Sullivan was turning that dull red
again, under his tan. He laid down his knife and fork
and looked at Dennis.


MURDER UNLEASHED 209
“All,” he repeated. “Sure you did—all except any-
thing that counted. We'd get somewhere, maybe, if you
thought to inform the police about this case once in a
while. We're in on it too, you know. It isn't your private
case. We want to find out what’s happened. That's our
business. If I find out that you or that little squirt
Kennedy have been holding out anything more on me
after this, I’ll shake it out of both of you at the Hall of
Justice. Well, go on. Those money-order receipts—
where are they?”
He picked up his knife and fork again.
“Peter's got the money-order receipts,” said a more
subdued Dennis. “Hand ’em over, Pete, will you?”
This ceremony was accomplished with no other for-
mality than a grunt of acknowledgment by Sullivan.
That large, solid gentleman had been shaken to his
foundations by a gust of official wrath, and it took his
bulk a little while to acquire calm again. He stowed the
compact small packet away in his inside breast pocket
carefully.
Then Dennis went on, picking his way carefully
among the many pitfalls that seemed ready to trip up
the unwary who went in threat of official displeasure.
He told about the second trip, alone, back to Bowden's
dark shack in hopes of catching him there—and its
result. Its lack of result, all clues ended in that swift
murder and blaze.
“Damned amateurs,” observed Sullivan, still sim-
mering, “to let Bowden go like that! Our only direct
line on the case! We wouldn’t have done that. We’d


MURDER UNLEASHED 211
“Wong disappeared,” said Dennis simply but rather
desolately. “I told you who Wong is, didn't I? He's a
great friend of mine, anyway. He's I’ve known
Wong for as many years as I can remember back.”
Dennis's voice had suddenly thickened. He cleared it
huskily and said, “You go on, Peter, and tell him. I
wasn’t there at the time, anyway. I was with the sheriff
and Henry back at the jail then.”
“There's nothing to tell,” said Peter, devastatingly.
“That's all that happened. I went out to look for him
where he was supposed to sleep and he wasn’t there.
Bed hadn’t been slept in. We waited—Blake and I–
until morning and then got the car and went in to
Delroy, to the hotel there. He hadn’t come back by
then.”
“Why'd you go to look for him just then?” asked
Sullivan keenly.
“Blake thought he wasn’t there,” Peter said. “So I
went to look. And he wasn’t. We’d been talking things
over, and Blake said that Bowden was shot with a
squirrel gun that Wong had been using for the past
year; it wasn’t Dennis's gun any more; and that
Bowden was Dennis's potential enemy, and he'd been
killed before he could blackmail Dennis. She-we-
thought that the same person might have killed both
Bianca and Bowden, because they were both dangers
to Dennis—they might both have raked up that old
scandal of Farnese's killing, and have blackmailed
Dennis about its being a first-degree murder charge,
if they knew that Farnese was dead before he was hit
>


212 MURDER UNLEASHED
by an automobile. And we thought that the person who
put them both out of the way was—Wong.”
“Listen,” said Dennis hotly, “you tell me anything
about Wong that we can use against him in this case,
and I’ll pay you a million dollars—cash. That's what
I think of Wong!”
“Then why did he skip?” demanded Peter.
“Probably so he wouldn’t have to listen any longer
to you two theorizing,” said Dennis ungratefully.
Sullivan lifted a heavy hand, checking argument.
“This is a sweet case,” he said, in heavy sarcasm.
“You say the only reason you can figure out, Devore,
why they ever picked on you as the fall guy is that you
ran over this dead man Farnese a year ago. Hell, that's
no real reason for anyone to hate you so they'd try to
pin another killing, a woman's murder, and then an-
other, Bowden’s, on you. And get this—there are no
direct clues to the killer, if there is only one killer, except
these bits of paper in my pocket. The absence of direct
clues suggests a homicidal maniac's lack of logically
reached conclusions, to my mind. You see, a maniac's
mind leaps ahead in gaps that a normal man's mind
has to have bridged. A normal man has to have pretty
good solid reasons for his acts. Or,” said Sullivan
meditatively, “maybe we’re the crazy ones, not to
bridge the gaps with significant clues, probably staring
us in the face.”
“This is sweet,” said Dennis with interest. “Either
the killer's crazy or else we are, with betting odds on us.
Sullivan thinks we're cuckoo, Peter.”


214 MURDER UNLEASHED
Malletti's going away, do you?” Dennis went on. “I
swear I don't—” -
“Listen, Devore,”—Sullivan pointed his pipe at
Dennis, all lethargy gone from him now—“if I’d
thought there was any chance of you knowing where
His Reverence was, you wouldn’t be sitting here offering
to let me know things—you'd be begging me to take
the information as a free gift, down at the Hall of
Justice.”
“Don’t you really know where he went?” Peter asked
gravely.
“No,” said Sullivan. “Nor who took him there. But
whoever it was,”—the big man knocked his pipe out,
preparing to get up—“the curse of Cromwell on him.”
“It will be,” said Dennis. “I’m quite sure of that.
Or an even worse one on him now. The curse of him-
self. Because we know one more thing about our killer
now.”
“What's that?” Peter asked, as they went on down
the stairs again.
“We’ve one more thing to add to the killer's descrip-
tion,” Dennis said, “if Sullivan's right about the gaps
he's left in his crimes. The very absence of clues. We
must look for a man with the light of unreason in his
eyes at times. The light—”
Dennis stopped there, groping for words, on the very
edge of some great discovery, he felt. There was some-
thing—he almost knew . . .
They were in the street now, and they saw the tall
gray Church of Saints Peter and Paul, with a crowd in


Chapter 20
DEAD MEN RISE UP
DENNIS sat up and hastily held his head with both
hands. He opened his eyes, and the light pierced them
like a sharp bright sword. He closed his eyes. He was
sitting, he'd discovered, on the edge of the curbing in a
practically deserted street. Peter was the only human
object looming around anywhere.
“How's your head?” Peter asked.
“It’s a rotten head,” Dennis said, sick and dizzy
with pain. “What happened to it?”
“A bullet tried to make connections with it,” Peter
said, “but just missed the train. It just grazed you.
You're lucky, Dennis.”
“I was born to be hung, I guess,” Dennis agreed.
He winced as a frightful noise began at the other end
of the street and mounted to shatter his head to pieces.
Sirens screamed in death agonies, and their echo beat
in his brain relentlessly, against his too thin head. It
made him feel sick. -
“Sullivan's called out the gendarmes,” Peter said.
“That bullet was meant for him, Dennis, and you took
it. He's very peeved.”
“Well,” Dennis groaned, “don’t let him roar at me,
Pete. I can’t stand it.”
216


MURDER UNLEASHED ,,217
*
He got to his feet in one swift act of will, saw the
street swerving and whirling around him, and felt
Peter's arm holding him up as he drooped. Funny, it
was his head that was hurt, but his legs felt stiff and
the world was rocketing around him. A police rifle
squad in a touring car roared past them, siren sobbing
and then screaming again, and Dennis shuddered. *
“Do they have to do that?” he inquired piteously. . .
“Yes, but we don’t have to listen to it,” Peter said
more practically. “Let’s go somewhere.”
Dennis became aware of a soft, insistent hissing
somewhere. He opened both eyes in a heavy gaze and
saw the dark-faced proprietor of the roof garden hover-
ing around, apron anxiously clasped in both not too
clean hands.
“Signor,” said this person, weepingly, “this is very
bad. They shoot you, yes?”
“Yes,” said Dennis.
“Ah-h-h,” said that somehow comforting dirty and
dark person, conveying everything in one simple word:
sympathy, execration, promise of brighter things to
come, and dolefulness for what had happened to a
patron of his. Dennis felt encouraged. He felt still more
encouraged when the proprietor bolted and came back
with a bottle and a glass, into which he poured some
of the contents of the bottle.
Dennis drank it, and the world got more stable, his
head became subdued, and he was able to take a faint
interest in light and sound again.
“Thanks,” he said, more firmly.


MURDER UNLEASHED 219
Madness! Dennis stopped abruptly, racking his
already aching head for something—something that
eluded him. He sighed.
“How's the head?” Sullivan asked.
“I have got,” said Dennis very carefully, “the father
and mother of all headaches.”
He sank onto Kennedy's davenport when he had the
door unlocked and they came in.
“Do I look interesting?” he inquired.
“You look like a ghost,” Peter said bluntly, standing
over him. “The guy who shot you ought to see you now.
He’d think you’d come after him to get him, and he'd
probably babble it all out.”
“Get some iodine and gauze,” said Sullivan briefly.
“We don’t want to go to the Central Emergency unless
we can help it. No use letting too much information out.
If it's all right with you, Devore, we'll treat it right
here. It’s a scratch.”
“It's all right with me,” said Dennis. “What hap.
pened, anyway?”
“What didn’t?” said Peter, sticking a cigarette in
the invalid's mouth and striking a match to it. He sat
down on the nearest chair arm, and his blue eyes shone
joyously, reviewing battle. “One second we were ahead
of you, in the crowd, and then—there was a big, dark
car coming by, slowly, from the funeral, I guess—
looked that way—and I just happened to look up at it
and see—I don’t quite know what I saw.” Peter's brow
was puzzled, but his eyes were very candid. “You know
how it is when something—dangerous happens and you


MURDER UNLEASHED 221
nered, but they won’t go out and look for it like that.”
“I told you our killer wasn't—usual,” said Dennis.
He sat up suddenly, regardless of a racking pain that
tried to put him off his balance. He swayed and regained
control. His eyes brightened. He had an idea.
“Listen,” he said. “Sullivan doesn’t know why that
guy shot at him and missed. But I do!”
“One reason,” said Sullivan,—“why he missed, I
mean—was because you shoved in and took it for me,
Devore.”
Dennis tried to shake his head impatiently and gave
it up with a faint groan. He had to be content to sit
back again and let his tongue do all the talking without
any help from his eager but pain-bound self.
“I mean why you were shot at all!” he said. “You’re
right—people don’t go around potting officers. It's
against the law, or something. Inhibition, maybe. Any-
way, I know I’d a sight rather take a shot at an un-
official guy than at a cop. Retribution comes too fast.
I guess, when the gendarmes get used as targets.
Therefore, get this—our killer wasn't shooting at you,
Sullivan. This may be a blow to you, but he wasn't.”
“Well,” said Sullivan, with a suspicion of a grin,
“he made a darn' good imitation of it. It had me
going.”
“No, he wasn’t shooting at you,” Dennis insisted,
slowly, “although he probably thought he was, at that.
He was right, if he only knew it.”
“Listen yourself,” said Peter, getting worried. “Do
you want me to get a doctor, Dennis?”


MURDER UNLEASHED 223
He reached out a languid hand and flicked with one
finger the upper left side of Peter's suit.
“The receipts!” said Sullivan, in a voice like dyna-
mite going off.
“I told you,” said Dennis, a bit wearily, “I felt like
a safe when the fake butler is picking away at the lock
and the family diamonds were inside. Only—I wasn’t
the safe this time, Peter. You were. And you nearly
got burgled, at that. He was aiming, you see, at your–
or Sullivan's—heart, so he'd get what you had in your
valuables-carrying pocket just over it, and at the same
time get what you had in your head. A thrifty guy. He
darn’ near made it, too.”
“How'd he know?” asked Peter softly but thunder-
ously.
“He guessed,” said Dennis. “Same as I’m guessing.
Only you’ve got to admit it's a swell guess at that.
He may have been one of the customers up on the roof
with us, and seen Sullivan stick the things in that
pocket, but I doubt it. I just think he was at Bianca's
funeral and saw us, going by, and guessed—and took
a chance on it. But he mistook Sullivan for you, and
not only that—he missed.”
“Then that shot was meant for me, and you took
it.” Peter took this into the fastness of his mind, re-
volved it around thoroughly, and then looked at Dennis
again. “I won’t forget that.” -
“Don’t be dumb,” said Dennis. “What could I do?”
“All the same,” said Peter, “it was fine of you 55
“No, it wasn’t,” Dennis interrupted firmly, in his


MURDER UNLEASHED 225
“All right, he can,” Dennis said. “And if he wants
to do it up properly, how about a little more of that
nice red wine across the way to do it with ? I could do
with some of it right now.” -
“Got it,” said Peter. “Brought it over in my coat
pocket. Not the inside pocket, either.”
He went to Kennedy's midget kitchen to get some
glasses, leaving a Dennis considerably brighter. Dennis
after a second broke into a whistle, found his head could
stand it, and the thin sweet whistle broke into fuller
song, as a thin brown twig breaks to flower.
“Or leave a kiss but in the cup.”
Dennis sang, very thoughtfully eyes far off,
“And I’ll not look for wine!”
“You bet you won’t,” agreed Sullivan. “Not while
you're with me. You'll take it straight. Have some
respect for the police.”
“Do you know,” said Dennis, sitting up and taking
a glass from Peter's hand, “I’m beginning to!”
His tone was that of such honest astonishment that
even Sullivan couldn't take offense. Peter laughed, and
Dennis after a second began to laugh, too.
At last he said firmly, “I’ve got to get my things out
of that hotel manager's clutches. But,” a bit dizzily,
“not just this minute. Give me a couple of hours to
tear off some sleep, and I’ll tackle anything. Even that
fish-faced guy.”


Chapter 21
DENNIS ENTERS A CAGE
He woke up to the soft bloom of lights, stretched him-
self in a long, beautiful ache of sleepiness, all pain gone,
and yawned with his mouth very wide open and his
eyes very tightly closed. -
There was something very nice going on; it was
strangely like something he knew and loved; it was just
outside the edge of his mind now. It was like the Little
San Ramon River singing sweetly to itself through the
sunny days, down by the river banks. It came closer
to his consciousness and resolved itself into Kennedy’s
dark-toned piano, playing “Home to Our Mountains.”
Dennis decided it was the loveliest song he'd ever
known, except perhaps one. He lay there listening and
presently decided that he wasn’t sleepy any more. He
turned over to the light and lay there on Kennedy’s
comfortable davenport, idly drinking the music in, and
watching Kennedy's lean brown fingers going over the
ivory-and-black keyboard in a pool of light.
“There in our younger days,”
played Kennedy,
“Peace had its reign.”
226


MURDER UNLEASHED 227
The swirl of music stopped, like a pool dammed up
for speckled trout to lie in, and Kennedy fingered the
last phrase slowly, more pointedly, with one intent
finger.
“Peace had its reign,”
sang that dark and lovely piano in a final intent word.
Then Kennedy turned around on the bench to look
at his guest, lighting his eternal cigarette and letting the
song trickle away into silence. -
He cocked an eyebrow casually at sight of the ruffled
bandaged head and the general wild state of affairs in
the visitor's still-white face, where even sleep hadn’t
smoothed out all the recent damage done there.
“Wirehaired pup,” he said, “where'd you get the
scratch?”
“Oh, that,” said Dennis, sitting up and dismissing the
subject with a casual hand to his bandage, “a guy shot
at me. Where did Peter Byrne and that bird Sullivan
go, Kennedy?”
Kennedy shrugged.
“They didn’t tell me,” he said. “All I know is that
I came home for a few hours of peaceful rest, as I’m
accustomed to before I go on what is now a practically
twenty-four-hour shift at the Hall, and I find a big
flatfoot of a cop standing guard outside my place on
the stairs, and you with a souvenir of war on your brow
sleeping it off inside. Where’ve you been, and what
doing, Dennis?”
“I’ve been to the wars,” said Dennis.


228 MURDER UNLEASHED
“I’ll say,” said Kennedy. “I hope you got the first
shot in, that's all.”
“Sullivan doesn’t think so,” said Dennis a bit grimly.
“You see, it was really meant for him, only the guy
thought he was Peter. So he took a shot at him when
he was standing across the street, after we came out
from lunch on that roof place. But he missed—he only
got me.”
Kennedy sat up straighter and whistled softly.
“I might have known it,” he said, eyes bright.
“That was what all the row was about a couple of hours
ago in this district, and nobody down at the Hall would
give out any dope to the press-room gang on it. We
were all het up about it—thought Father Malletti’s
kidnaper had been found, not to mention Bianca's killer
and Bowden's little shotgun pal. None of the cops would
talk—they’d been told off not to. I’ve been chasing
around on that for the afternoon. And I come home and
find the story all neatly wrapped up and asleep on my
couch, with a cop guarding my front door for me!”
He laughed soundlessly.
“I might have known it!” he jeered at himself.
Then he eyed his visitor very pointedly indeed. “Peace,”
said Kennedy, “has had its reign here as far as I'm
concerned. I think I’ll order in a machine gun and a
pair of sandbags to prop up against the windows.”
“What d'you mean?” asked Dennis.
Kennedy pointed the end of his cigarette at Dennis.
“You go down to Delroy,” he said, “and people get
bumped off, burnt up in shacks with their faces blown


230 MURDER UNLEASHED
his story—and why you weren’t served up on toast to
the coroner there. In fact your lawyer Byrne asked me
about it before he went in there, and I told him to
play those money-order receipts. He did, eh?”
“He did,” Dennis said. “He’s a swell guy, Burne is.
He played 'em like a professional card sharp. That's
why I'm here.”
“Instead,” said Kennedy, “of being safely in the city
jail.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dennis thoughtfully.
“Being shot at's no fun—at the time. But all the same,
it's the breaks of the game. The breaks,” he repeated,
very thoughtfully indeed, dark eyes looking into some
dimly lit future.
“Things are beginning to break, eh?” said Kennedy.
Dennis nodded. “I think so,” he replied. “I think
our killer gave a lot more away than he took. Listen!”
Dennis gave his favorite exclamation and prepared to
indulge in his favorite indoor sport of talking. “How's
this look to you? We've made an alliance with Sullivan
—treaty of peace, dancing around the council fire, and
all that—up at Alexandro's roof place at lunch. We told
him everything as far as we've gone about this case—
“That must have been a treat to him,” Kennedy
interrupted.
“He wasn't pleased at first,” said Dennis pensively.
“But I persuaded him it was all for the best that we'd
kept some things dark before. Anyway, we told him
everything then, kept absolutely nothing back—Pete
even handed over the money-order receipts—by request


MURDER UNLEASHED 231
—and then we went downstairs, stood looking at the
end of Bianca's funeral Mass going away from the
church, and somebody going past slowly in a big, dark
closed car takes a shot at Sullivan. Peter sees it in time,
yells, and I jostled Sullivan. But that shot wasn’t really
meant for him, anyway.”
“Well,” Kennedy said judiciously, eyeing his smoke
circles, “I can only say it looks a lot to me, Dennis, as
though you and maybe Sullivan and Byrne had included
a lot of Alexandro's good red wine in your peace pow-
wow. People are getting more thrifty nowadays. They
don’t let off shots unless they’ve got a pretty good bead
on someone at the other end of the line.”
“You wrong us,” said Dennis. “All of us.”
“All right,” said Kennedy. “Go ahead.”
Dennis elaborated on his theory of Sullivan being
shot at in mistake for Peter. He had a good listener.
Kennedy sat in a deceptive quietness, brown head bent,
body tense.
“Yeah,” said Kennedy at last, “I see.”
He lit another cigarette off the end of his lighted butt.
Kennedy was working again.
“I see,” he said again, slowly, “and it’s possible. It’s
darned clever, too. Dennis, just how much of all this
stuff do you believe, anyway?”
“Believe?” said Dennis. “All of it. Why shouldn't I?
It's my theory, isn’t it?”
“Well,” Kennedy said, “I just wanted to make sure.
You talk a lot, you know.”
“And so do you,” said Dennis indignantly. “And


232 MURDER UNLEASHED
so, for that matter, has Peter Byrne been talking—
recently.”
“I make my living by talking,” Kennedy said briefly.
“Over the phone at the press room. Phoning stuff in
to men who can handle a typewriter more flossily than
I can. As for Bryne—sure he talks a lot at times, but
it's always a bit surprising to hear him—like the stunt
Moses did with the rock, making water gush out of it.
He talks, but you’ll notice he always says something.
Your talk reminds me of a fountain playing, purely for
decorative purposes—beautiful, but not so strictly
utilitarian and necessary as the water from the living
rock in the desert. At that, Byrne's been putting on a
few accessory jets and frills, probably influenced by
you, Dennis. What I meant to say, though, was if you
do believe all this stuff of yours about the killer leaping
ahead so quickly in his reasoning, and if you have
traced him almost as quickly as he does things, like
the way you got onto this shooting, the real purpose
behind it, like a flash—why don’t you put on a big
spurt, Dennis, and instead of being one step behind him
leap ahead of him and think out his next step before
he takes it, for once. You've got the brains—no one
else has even kept up with him as you have, up to this
time. All it takes is a little extra pace, to reason out his
next move.”
“You think I lack logical reasoning power, too?”
said Dennis. “That's why I'll be able to do it, I suppose
—because I skip a lot, too. That makes it unanimous,
I must be cuckoo.”


MURDER UNLEASHED 233
“It might work,” said that cynical person, his host.
“On the theory—set a nut to crack a nut.”
“I’ll do it!” said an aroused Dennis. “You wait and
see! But first,” he amended, “I’ve got to go over to the
hotel and get my things. Coming?”
“I’d like to,” said Kennedy with conviction. “Al-
though I don’t see what could possibly happen on such
a peaceful errand as that. But I’ve got to get some sleep
before I take on the night shift, if I’m not going dead
on my feet. When the fire engines go by I’ll know what's
happening, time enough. How’re you going to get past
that cop on the stairs, anyway? I'll bet he's got his
orders to stop you from going out, as much as to stop
anyone from going in here and getting you.”
“I’ll walk by him,” said Dennis. “He doesn’t know
me from Adam. With a pleasant greeting.”
And he did.
The officer, brave in blue and silver, responded hand-
somely to a cheerful “Hullo, Sergeant,” especially as
Dennis sauntered down the stairs waving a nonchalant
cane, wearing a raglan coat hanging loose from his
shoulders, and with a felt hat sitting pretty on his head,
concealing any betraying bandage there. All the
accessories came from Kennedy. The officer, who’d had
Dennis described to him, hadn’t heard any of these
things mentioned. He stood aside and let this blithe
young man pursue his pleasant and apparently very
casual way down the steps to the outside door.
Dennis found the disguise had been so useful in one
case that he didn’t discard it in another. He hailed a


234 MURDER UNLEASHED
taxi at the corner and was driven downhill and up dale
to the heights of Nob Hill and the Hotel Ancaster.
He entered the pleasant little lobby, more like a
private living room than a hotel public place, at tea
time, and no one noticed him especially. The clerk over
at the desk was murmuring soothingly to some people
there, the music from the hotel orchestra came faintly
from behind the closed doors, where people were having
tea in the many-windowed, lamplit, flower-decorated
Etruscan Room, the soft lights of the lobby glowed
enticingly. Tea time. It was a pleasant hour.
Dennis had his own key still in his pocket, and he
didn’t want to talk to the clerk. He crossed the lobby
to the elevator, and as he felt the soft thick plushiness
of the taupe carpet underfoot he thought of Bianca
walking across that same carpet, under these soft lights,
going up to his room, three nights ago. And he thought
of the last time he had entered this hotel himself, that
same night, later. And of how he’d felt then, careless,
unknowing of what was to come, in a hurry.
The elevator door clicked open, and Dennis stepped
in, to meet Malloy's astonished eyes.
“Whisht!” said that shaken young man.
“Whisht yourself,” said Dennis, leaning against the
wall of the cage in a reassuring way. “Take me up
like a good fellow, and don't talk so much about it.
Unless”—he looked straight into those dark and Irish
blue eyes, sooty-lashed, in their rugged setting of face—
“unless you think I did it.”
“You mean about killing the lady?”


236 MURDER UNLEASHED
stared defiantly from narrowed black lashes into
Dennis's dark ones.
“He’s quite right,” said Dennis. “No one did, besides
me. Except the murderer. What do you think?”
He looked at Malloy, broad and big in his dark blue
uniform, there alone in the elevator with him.
“Malloy,” he said, “suppose one of us two is a mur-
derer. What do you think then?”
The silence seemed icy cold, in that little closed cage
lit by the glaring electric globe above them. They
stared at each other.
“What do I think?” said the boy bleakly. “Would I
risk my mortal soul to do such a thing? And would I
be afther kidnaping a priest?”
“No,” said Dennis. “I shouldn’t think so. But—did
you kill her, Malloy?”
The tired dark voice persisted. There was a feeling
like an icy cold wind coming up around them, in the
elevator cage, a cold from the far, inhuman spaces of
the ends of the earth, from the naked North itself.
Malloy stood up to the last truth.
“No,” he said. “Whatever you want me to swear by,
I’ll swear. I didn’t kill her. I No, I didn't.”
Dennis's hand dropped away from the wall. He
sighed.
“I didn’t think you did,” he remarked. “Then that
leaves—me, doesn’t it? Me and—the murderer.”
“Have you got any clues on him, Misther Devore?”
Malloy said humbly, still a bit shaken. º
“Clues?” said Dennis. “What are clues? The kind o


MURDER UNLEASHED 237
things any street sweeper can pick up in the streets?
Bits of string, and paper, and a cigarette butt? Sure,
you can have all of those you want, out of the waste-
paper baskets they empty and burn down in your
basement!”
He leaned against the wall again and looked in front
of him darkly.
“Or are clues the things you don’t do? The only
reason I wasn’t arrested at the first go of this was
because I didn't open and close a window here, and a
dick was bright enough to see that. Is that a clue?”
“I wouldn’t call it that,” offered Malloy, frankly
puzzled.
Dennis grinned at him suddenly, gravity gone again.
“Neither would I. The kind of things I call clues is
going along a dangerous place and seeing where some-
one's been—someone who hasn’t any business to be
there, and who was there—a killer. Seeing, not from
what kind of cigarettes they smoked, or stuff like that,
but from what they did, what kind of people they
were, what kind of things they could do—what they
were capable of and coming at last, slowly perhaps,
but inevitably, to—them. A man can’t help leaving a
vital imprint on a thing that's as close to him as–
murder. It's too much his own work, his forces have
been engaged in it so.”
“Is it fingerprints you'll be meaning, sir?” asked
Malloy.
* “It is not,” said Dennis, grinning again at him. “And
will you let me out of this jail and keep your mouth


238 MURDER UNLEASHED
closed about my being here? I’m just going to clear
away my stuff and then see Fersen and pay my bill
here, and I don’t want the whole force charging up to
restrain me as a dangerous character.”
“I’ll do that,” said Malloy, his face lighting up in
relief at hearing something from Dennis that was put
in straight words meaning action.
Dennis stepped out into the softly lit corridor and
stood there, seeing the dark shape of his door dimmer
down the hallway. This was the hallway down which
Bianca had come to meet her murderer.
He opened his door and went in.


244 MURDER UNLEASHED
of about the same thickness as the first Lucy-made
standard, “we listened to your entire program. We
particularly enjoyed your singing ‘Sweet and Lovely.”
Didn't we, Lucy?”
“That was the last song on my program,” said
Dennis, remembering back. “If I ever come back here
again, I’ve got a new program ready. Did you—did you
happen to look out of your door at any time while I
was singing? Or about that time, you know?”
“No,” said Mrs. Appleby very decisively, “we didn’t.
There wasn't any occasion to go out of our rooms. Did
we, Lucy?”
“No’m,” said Lucy. “We were listening to the radio
all through the program, Mr. Devore.”
“Oh,” said Dennis. “Thanks. I just wanted to know.”
“The police,” said Mrs. Appleby, “asked us that
question, too. Didn't they, Lucy? I soon put them right.
They didn't find out anything about that killing from
us.”
“No,” sighed Dennis. “I’m afraid not. I just asked.”
“There,” said the old lady triumphantly. “Now you
see how I mean to do it, Lucy. These are much better.
I’ll show you—where are the old sandwiches?”
“I’ve eaten them,” said Dennis simply. “They were
awfully good. And I don’t feel hungry a bit now, I'm
afraid. I really must be going.”
He rose and stood waiting.
“Well,” said the old lady, rising reluctantly, “if you
must. I wanted to have a nice talk with you, young man.
Some other day—it's been very nice to have had you.”


MURDER UNLEASHED 247
the unfamiliar hat on his head. Fersen's eyes followed
the gesture automatically, and widened still more as
he saw the neat white wound stripe of a gauze bandage
uncovered by Kennedy's concealing hat. Then those
eyes began to narrow in a determined way. Fersen was
over any flurry he may have felt at suddenly seeing his
unannounced and troublesome visitor.
Dennis recognized that ominous narrowing of his
eyes—he'd met it in other people before the storm broke
—and he forestalled it.
“I’ve just been up to my room,” he said pleasantly,
“and it really looks very well now. I congratulate you
on your nice, efficient organization here. Too bad you
couldn't have removed any body before the police came
and disturbed the place so.”
“The floor covering,” said the hotel manager coldly,
recovering himself and sinking into his chair with no
gesture of invitation to Dennis to do the same, “was
handed over to the police department by their request,
if that’s what you’re referring to. The Ancaster man-
agement has no wish to hide any clues to such a serious
thing as murder, as you’re evidently hinting.”
“That's fine,” said Dennis heartily, choosing a big
chair himself. The office, he thought, was pretty well
done—it looked just the club sort of place where two
comfortable business men might get together over their
cigars. A few posters with bright colors conveying news
of conventions, black-and-white posters announcing
symphony concerts and other musical events, and a


248 MURDER UNLEASHED
few gayer resort pictures, one showing a man golfing
on a green turf, supplied the only hotel-profession at-
mosphere around.
“I’m glad you think that,” said Fersen pointedly.
His square and very well-kept hands held the arms of his
office chair rather hard on each side of him, though
he was leaning back at his ease otherwise. His hands
and his voice were the only things that gave away his
distaste for his visitor. “I should have thought that
under the circumstances the fewer clues left for the
police the better, if I had been you perhaps.”
“What circumstances?” said Dennis.
Fersen showed his nice white teeth in a surprisingly
animal gesture of drawn-back thinned lips for a fleeting
second. Dennis, evidently, as he'd done to other and
not so well-polished persons, was getting under the top
layer of civilization and culture to the more primitive
person underneath the hotel manager's exterior.
“I think you know them,” said Fersen, recovering
himself again, but with an effort, perhaps, this time,
“as well as I do. Better, should I say?”
There was a nice and calculated deadliness in his
smooth voice. Dennis responded beautifully.
“If you're going around saying things like that,”
he said hotly, “it’s about time I came back here!”
Fersen's eyes lit on the suitcase by Dennis's side.
“You don’t think you’re coming back here to stay,
do you?” he asked coldly.
“I know I’m not!” retorted Dennis, the light of
battle vivid in his eyes. “You don’t think I’d stay in


250 MURDER UNLEASHED
“Right here,” said Fersen crisply. He reached among
the drawers of his desk and drew out a paper. “I’ve
made it up already. I told the clerk to let me know when
you were coming, so that I could see you personally
about it.”
He tossed the statement carelessly and contemptu-
ously across the broad desk in Dennis's direction. That
hot-headed young man took it up and smiled, narrow-
eyed, with a contempt that made the hotel manager's
look like Grade C, slightly rancid.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You weren’t going to miss
me. I was going to ask to see you personally and tell
you to go to hell, anyway.”
Fersen made a sound slightly like a strangled snarl in
his throat.
“That covers it,” said Dennis, putting a bill on the
paper and shoving them both back across the smooth
wood desk. “Do you mind signing for it?”
His voice was bland and innocent again. Fersen took
out his fountain pen, shook it slightly, scribbled his
signature across the paid bill. The second of action had
given him back his poise again. He was the man of
business, the older and much more suave man of the
world regarding unpolished youth again. He looked at
Dennis with veiled and slightly shining brown eyes
in a pleasantly blank and fleshy face. His lips even
smiled, slightly, showing a white edge of teeth behind
them.
Dennis had regained some of his own poise again. He
felt that perhaps he'd been a bit uncouth.


MURDER UNLEASHED 251
His eye fell on one of the brighter posters along the
wall, the poster with the blue-sky background and the
man in white knickers swinging at a golf ball on the
green turf, with the ocean in the distance behind
him.
“I see you've got the golf-tournament poster there,”
he said chattily. “That was for last week-end, wasn’t
it? Saturday and Sunday—let's see”—he leaned for-
ward, making bright conversation with his unwilling
host, “November 1st and 2nd, it says. At Del Monte.
Do you like golf?”
“Do you mind getting out of here?” asked Fersen,
restrainedly. “I might remind you that you’re no
longer a guest of this hotel. I’ll have to ask you to
leave at once.”
“Or you'll call the police,” said Dennis, but with an
absent air of near-hostility that didn’t do him justice.
He was thinking to himself behind the light words.
Something had caught like a jagged bit of torn silk at
the corner of his mind. Some word had awakened a
memory—a wonder—a puzzled effort at remembrance.
He had it. Del Monte, of course. He’d heard the name
before today. From Peter. Peter had flown up from Del
Monte grounds, he’d said, in time for the inquest. Peter
must know Del Monte pretty well. He wondered if
Peter played golf much. If he was there often—for
week-ends, as lots of sportsmen were. It was a swell
hotel for a week-end.
He rose reluctantly and took up his receipted bill and
looked at the signature across the bottom of it. In spite


252 MURDER UNLEASHED
of all the hotel manager's wrath at the time of writing,
the letters were small and distinct and beautifully
written. “A. Fersen” said the neat and lovely signa-
ture there. “Paid. November 6th.”
But Dennis saw it through a darkness and a coldness
that made him feel physically sick. It was November
6th, and a Thursday. Bianca had been killed on a Mon-
day. This last Monday, November 3rd. The golf tourna-
ment at Del Monte—Peter's Del Monte—had begun
on a Saturday, November 1st. Two days before Bianca’d
been killed here. It was on the evening of the 1st of
November, a Saturday, that someone had taken Father
Malletti away, in a big, dark car. Down to Delroy,
they'd said. Delroy was in the same county as Del
Monte. Anyone who knew Del Monte pretty well
would have known the county about there well, too,
on drives and trips. Dennis stood there staring at the
comfortable, well-furnished, dark-shining brown walnut
office, with the big, overstuffed armchairs and the
taupe carpet and the brown-shining head of the hotel
manager across the desk from him. But his dark eyes
didn’t see any of it. He was cold. This was the ultimate
fear. He’d reached it at last. His eyes were dark with
emptiness beyond any shadows. Something'd burnt out
in him. He was cold, and sick, and shaken, and weary
to death of the wickedness he'd caught a glimpse of,
had been trailing all this time.
Nothing mattered. Nothing really mattered. He
wanted to turn his head to the wall and die quietly.
His spirit was already dead. Only it was so damned
/


254 MURDER UNLEASHED
“That woman!” said the hotel manager, and the
words were somehow spitting with his unconcealed
contempt.
“Her name,” said Dennis, “was Bianca Farnese, and
she was a human being, and she's dead now. You're the
second person I’ve met today who's called her ‘that
woman.’ Her name was Bianca.”
Fersen's nerves, under the strain of the past few
minutes of sparring, suddenly snapped.
“Don’t call her name in here!” he ordered brusquely.
“Bianca—Bianca—Bianca,” said Dennis very dis-
tinctly, and vanished suddenly—indeed, to the some-
what distraught hotel manager, like a light blown out.
That sorely tried gentleman wiped a wet and well-
fleshed face with an immaculate white handkerchief
wielded by a square, well-kept but slightly trembling
hand, and gave a hearty Swiss curse.
Out in the corridor again, Dennis leaned against the
wall and grinned a fleeting grin. He felt a lot better.
That last rally had done him good.
“That was a low brawl!” he rebuked himself. “It
reminded me a lot of two cats spitting at each other.
Here, of all places. Peter wouldn’t have approved of it.
All the same . . .”
The glow of brief battle began to fade again. Dennis
felt as though his teeth were going to chatter. He felt
entirely defenseless and extremely cold again—that sick
cold that made him craven. He wanted to hide from
what he knew was coming.
“All the same,” he said steadily, to himself, “you'll


MURDER UNLEASHED 255
have to face it. Peter or no Peter. He could have done
it. He knows Del Monte. His car is red and a roadster
—he would have taken one just the opposite from his,
dark and big and closed. He c-could have done it. He
went down to Delroy, to meet us. He knew what Bow-
den told us. He knew where my squirrel gun was—I told
him. He and Blake weren’t together in the house all
the time I left them there—he said he went upstairs.
It fits in. Oh, damn it, it fits in! He d-defended me when
he didn’t have to-”
Dennis broke off. “I feel like a cur trying to bite a
man who's given him a good dinner,” he told himself
soberly. “But I’ve got to go on. I’ve got to.”
He went on, there in the dim corridor.
“He may have known Bianca,” he reasoned. “Peter's
been around town for a year since he left college, and
he knows plenty of people in this town. He may have
met her—the most beautiful and rather notorious
woman here. And if she did treat him a bit lightly, he
wouldn’t take it like the others did. He's got more to
him. He won't take too rough treatment. Pete's—
dangerous.”
Dennis sighed and changed his place against the wall.
“He knows the Ancaster,” he went on, very monoto-
nously now, as though dulled by emotion. “He’s gone to
dinner with people who live on my floor—the An-
struthers. They're—very respectable people. I count
them out. They haven’t the feeling for murder, or for
much else. He knows the Ancaster, and he saw me
singing one evening in the studio, and knew I was there


256 MURDER UNLEASHED
on a scheduled time every evening. He happened to
think of that—when he wanted to. Only—Farnese?
How does he come into it?”
Dennis was frightfully tired. He hardly felt that he
wanted to go back a whole year, yet he had to. He
moved his head restlessly against the sustaining wall.
“He comes,” he said to himself meticulously, “be-
cause Peter loved Bianca, maybe. "Way back. It was
such a strong passion it lasted. He may have hit
Farnese rather hard—and Farnese died of it. He may
not have meant to kill Farnese at all. Just to hit him.
A man could die of Peter's blow, if Peter was very
angry.”
That faint grin flickered up through unimaginable
deeps again to Dennis's haggard face and dark eyes.
It lingered a second, and then went out, for good.
“He would be,” said Dennis simply, “if he knew I
was standing here and trying to trace back his life so
I could swear it away. I could hardly blame him for
that.”
He let his breath out again in a long shallow sigh, as
though his life were slipping easily away there with it.
“Farnese's skull was fractured,” he went back re-
lentlessly like a tired ghost driven back and back again
to a scene. “They said the automobile had done it.
I thought he'd been hit by a club, or something. But a
man hit by Peter, hard, and falling on a cement high-
way, could have his skull fractured, very easily. Far-
nese might have been down at Del Monte when Peter
was there, a year ago, and Bianca too probably, and he


MURDER UNLEASHED 257
may have tried to blackmail Peter. Or threatened him.
Anyway, he got his skull fractured. Then it would have
been very easy to dump him into an automobile and
go along the highway with him out from Del Monte
until the road was lonely enough to let him out and
leave him there on the highway. Then I came along.”
His mind cut ahead again. The field opened up, all of
it, so damnably easy. He almost hated that clear mind
of his now. It saw too much.
“Morgan was a friend of Peter's, and Peter clears
him,” he thought, dragging the thought out almost
against his will. “I’m nearly charged with murder, and
Peter defends me. He doesn’t want anyone else charged
with it. I’ll say that for him. He doesn’t want to put
murder onto anyone else. Manslaughter's—different,
of course. And there was Blake. He didn’t want Blake
to be in on a murder case a year ago, with her brother
involved. No, that all fits in, too.”
But at the thought of Blake, such an agony seized
him that he couldn’t go on. Not to any conclusion. He
just stood and suffered in a dumb stricture of agony
like an animal’s, with no means of expression or of relief
for himself. It was hardly endurable. You just held on
as best you could. It was like something dying, very
slowly, very painfully, inside of you. You couldn’t do
anything. You just endured—and after a while it
became better. You'd lived through that, at least
Dennis gasped. His face was wet. He became aware
that he'd passed through something like a mortal
sickness and was on the other side of it for the present.


258 MURDER UNLEASHED
He was better. He felt a bit more alive again. He lifted
his head.
He hadn't moved. He was standing in the corridor
of the Hotel Ancaster, in the dimly lit dusk apart from
the lobby, and he'd gone through all that without any
movement of his body except that of his drooping
head against the wall. Funny, how you could travel in
spirit such strange and terrible ways, while your own
material self didn’t even budge a step. He felt—con-
valescent, now. Terribly weak, but not so bad. He felt
more alive. Even—hopeful, with the irresistible if un-
stable hopefulness of a man who'd just passed through
a serious illness and was getting better. His head was
clear and bright, if he did feel a bit weak.
He’d go on.
Maybe something would happen
That irrepressible hopefulness urged him on, like
life springing up again from a recently frozen, hard
winter ground.
But he had only the blind, unreasoning conviction
that it couldn't be like that. Peter Byrne couldn’t be a
murderer. All the same, his clear mind pulled him that
way; something blind and dark and stubborn tried to
pull him the other way. He couldn't give in to it. He
wanted to too much.
He came into the lobby again, and a young man in
a dinner suit, with a fair sunburnt head, turned away
from the desk and saw him at the same minute. Dennis
knew him, but slightly. He was Morgan, on the same
floor with him. The man Peter'd traced to Monterey


MURDER UNLEASHED 259
Bay, near Del Monte, this morning, and the man
Peter'd let go clear of the case with the explanation
that he was a friend of his and out of it.
Morgan nodded to Dennis, saw his suitcase, and
crossed over to intercept him.
“Hello,” he said, being sociable in his nice way that
made Dennis feel about a million years older than this
fair-haired boy who always seemed just out of college.
“Leaving us?”
He took out his cigarette case and offered Dennis a
smoke.
“Thanks,” said Dennis. “Yes. I'm on my way. I
think maybe I'll rest up a bit—at Del Monte, maybe.”
“A swell place,” said young Morgan. “I was down
there this morning—near there, anyway. Ran into
Pete Byrne and his sister Blake down there. She's a
pretty kid.”
“Yes,” said Dennis carefully. “Very.”
“Which is lucky,” Morgan said, “because Peter likes
to have pretty girls around him.” He grinned, frankly.
“Oh,” said Dennis, “does he?”
“Well, he’s in there now with a very golden-haired
girl,” Morgan indicated the doors of the Etruscan
Room with his head. “She’s in the chorus of a musical
play here. At the Columbia. Pete's squiring her.”
“There's a very pretty girl in Fersen's office.” Dennis
made conversation automatically, while his mind di-
gested this information about Peter liking pretty
women. “I saw her just now.”
“And that's all,” said Morgan disgustedly. “She


260 MURDER UNLEASHED
goes home promptly at six every day. Never stays in
the evenings.”
* “Why don’t you offer to take her home?” Dennis
retorted.
“I have,” said young Morgan simply. “I offer to
nearly every night. I even offer to talk business—hotel
business—with her while we're going home. It doesn’t
work.”
Dennis cocked an impolite and incredulous eyebrow
at that black and white and gold butterfly with the
nice grin talking hotel business. “Business?” he said.
“My dad's buying in,” Morgan said. “Syndicate,
you know. Fersen's managed this place for years for
some old birds who never bother their heads about it
much. He's a darn' good manager. We'll keep him on.
The Ancaster'll just join a chain of hotels under the
syndicate, that's all. And I’m sort of keen to start
in here. Funny, isn't it? I think I'd be pretty good at
it, though. I like playing host, you know. Of course, to
start with I’d be in a "way-down-under job and work up.
I wouldn’t mind that.”
“No, I think it'd be okay for you,” Dennis agreed. “If
you like this kind of work, you'd be swell at it. Playing
host.”
“Oh, as a host,” said Morgan, “or nearly so—I’d
like to tell you we liked your singing here the other
night, Devore. Monday night, it was.”
Dennis stared at him in a sort of whiteness.
“I wasn’t here,” he said stiffly. “I was at the studio
most of Monday night.”


MURDER UNLEASHED 269
“Oh, no,” said Dennis, in a very small voice, with-
out any feeling at all in it. As if horror had dulled it.
As if he were looking at something he wished he hadn't
had to look at. He'd caught up with it. “No,” he said,
in a futile defiance again. “It couldn't—he couldn’t do
that. Not with Wong. That's why he wanted >>
He made a gesture, a forward movement to fling
this thought away from him. It wouldn’t go. Dennis's
face was white again, as white as the bandage over his
dark head. He had to move—to move quickly—his face
was ablaze with a sort of white impatience and fear.
Only he couldn’t go—yet. He had to stay. He didn’t
know where Sullivan was, either. He had to wait in
this dim corridor away from the too lighted lobby, away
from Peter, from young Bill Morgan, from any too
curious eyes, until the promised policeman came, to
station himself at that door he'd promised protection.
Only he couldn’t wait. There wasn’t any time. This
was Thursday, and Father Malletti had been gone since
Saturday. An old man—he couldn’t hold out. Not any
longer. And Wong was there, too.
Dennis at this moment saw with rather abstracted
eyes something that said “For Fire Only” on the wall
beside him. It seemed to be the sort of thing you pulled
down, like a hook. It reminded him of something.
“Kennedy said this would be a nice friendly visit
here,” he thought. “He didn’t see what could possibly
happen here. I didn’t, either. At the time. But now—
if he's listening, he'll be able to hear the fire engines
going by, all right.”


270 MURDER UNLEASHED
He then knocked out a small pane of glass, pulled
some sort of a small lever down, and released it again.
Then he waited, leaning stilly up against the alarm
box. He fished around for pencil and paper and began
writing.
Pretty soon he heard the fire engines outside. They
seemed to be making quite a bit of noise as they stopped
outside the hotel. There'd be a great deal of noise and
confusion within and without, firemen rushing around
in odd places where they usually weren’t, and perhaps
a little water spilled around. There'd be protection.
No one would go stealthily around—he couldn't—when
there were firemen rushing around each corridor rescu-
ing people. There'd be guests’ heads popping out of
doors with inquiring expressions. It wouldn't be any
time for a killer who liked the shade and quietness to
pick for another killing. Dennis thought he'd arranged
it quite neatly, after all.
The first of the firemen rushed into the lobby. They
had oilskin coats and long drooping-looking hats on,
and one of them had an axe. Dennis stepped out to
meet them.
- “I’m expecting Inspector Sullivan around here in a
minute,” he said. “Would you mind giving him this
note?”
He walked on quietly out of the lobby, leaving behind
him a folded note which, when opened five minutes
later by a white-faced Sullivan, turned out to be a hotel
statement, marked “Paid. November 6th” and signed


MURDER UNLEASHED 271
in a small and lovely handwriting by A. Fersen. Under
that Dennis had written hastily in pencil, “This is a
sample of my handwriting. Dennis Devore,” in a
much more sprawling hand, as requested.
Dennis was nothing if not obliging.


Chapter 23
SO THEY CAME OUT-
DENNIs came out to the sidewalk and said to himself:
“He may be dead! And if they find him there—I can’t
take any chances. I’ve discovered too many bodies
already. Oh, it's damned clever! Even Peter would say
so. If they found Father Malletti—dead—or dying—
in my house at Delroy, I'd lose my last friend on that.
And someone meant me to. And break my neck over it,
too, into the bargain.”
He was walking down the steep hill street now, going
like a river unconsciously with the descent down into
Market Street, at a pretty stiff pace. All the street
lamps were lit, soft gold globes in the dark and misty
night, and the Path of Gold flared softly and brilliantly
and beautifully high overhead all down Market Street
to the Ferry Building and the bay. Dennis felt as
though he were an invisible ghost walking among all
these people going by, hearing bursts of laughter, sounds
of brief conversation, noise of cars and traffic whistles
and street cars rushing by. He thought: “I can’t go to
Sullivan or Kennedy or anyone—for if they find Father
Malletti dead in my house, I’m done for. Someone has
seen to that. And I haven’t much money—I paid out
my hotel bill, and I’m pretty short, and the banks
aren't open now. What'll I do?”
272


MURDER UNLEASHED 273
He halted at a particularly busy corner, staring about
him as one awakened, and saw the slim copper shaft
of Lotta's fountain in the middle of the intersection
where three streets met, and across the street the
clock, and Kennedy's tall gray Star building with lights
in every window shining through the evening.
“There!” thought Dennis with a wild relief. He
plunged into the traffic with an abandon which whit-
ened several more hairs in the head of an already iron-
gray traffic officer there, made it to the opposite side
unscathed, coming up to the sidewalk again like a dog
who has breasted a strong current, and disappeared
around the corner of the building before any official
action could be taken.
Here he stopped and caught his breath in a great sigh,
almost a sob, of relief. It was the alleyway where he'd
come out with Kennedy the other day—days ago—
and there was the discreet taxi hovering, or rather sleep-
ing near, its entrance, the driver huddled over the
wheel reading a newspaper.
Dennis wrenched the door open and said:
“Quick! Get her going, will you? I’ve got to get down
country to Delroy tonight!”
The driver raised a dispassionate thin face and sur-
veyed his uninvited passenger.
“Can’t be done,” he said. “This cab belongs to the
Star.”
“But this is on Star business!” said Dennis crisply.
“Step on it, guy.”
“Got a press badge? Or an order from the desk?”


274 MURDER UNLEASHED
the man inquired more alertly but still suspiciously,
not stirring.
“Listen,” said Dennis calmly but desperately, “you
know me. I came here with Kennedy, the man on po-
lice, the other morning. You took me to Kennedy's
house. I haven't got time to get any orders—this is
urgent.”
“Yeh, but—way down to Delroy!” the driver de-
murred. -
“I’m with Kennedy, I tell you!” Dennis insisted.
“Yeh, but how do I know if Kennedy is good for a
long ride like this?”
“You’ll know!” said Dennis ominously. He reached
forward and picked the man out of his seat with one
hand clamped on his shoulder, and as he'd heave a
javelin on a long throw he sent him sprawling through
the opposite door. The driver spoke, once.
“Things,” said Dennis to him, “are just beginning
to happen. That was nothing at all.”
He drove away with the startled driver's expressions
of astonishment half heard above the roaring shift into
high. That was at San Francisco, at the beginning of
night. Say six o'clock. Afterwards Dennis couldn't re-
member much about that ride except the way the
engine droned so monotonously, so reassuringly, and
the way his right foot got still and numb on the ac-
celerator. Sometimes he was conscious of the towns
going through, the little wayside towns with the lights
in the streets and the houses, and sometimes he knew
there were wide fields on either side of him, and the wind


278 MURDER UNLEASHED
had his sweet life written on it in deep lines of nostrils
and straight-set thin mouth.
Dennis found himself on his knees, beside the bed.
“O God,” he said to himself intensely, “if he’s
dead—let him into his heaven.”
He laid a tentative hand on Father Malletti's, lying
there so frail. It was warm. Faintly warm. Like the
merest flicker of life hanging on. Father Malletti had
come to the end of the long leash of life, with very
little farther left for him to go. Dennis recognized that.
The sunken eyelids opened, heavily, slowly. Father
Malletti's deep eyes looked out at him, from great dis-
tances. They were dark eyes, like Dennis's, but deep-
set in the arched caverns of their sockets.
“Alive!” thought Dennis. “Alive. Alive.”
He hardly dared breathe for fear of blowing out that
flickering bit of life before him, deep in the depths of
Father Malletti's dark eyes. He feared that the pound-
ing of his heart would be too gusty for the frail craft
of Father Malletti's life, when he touched him with
hammering pulses beating through his fingers.
He got up, a bit unsteadily, and went out through
the door quickly. He left the lamp in Father Malletti's
room, and lit matches, groping his way to the stairs
again. He lit the lamp in the cold kitchen and started
putting wood in the stove. He couldn't think very
clearly. Father Malletti was here, and alive, and that
was wonderful—but where was Wong? He was afraid
for Wong.
He worked quickly, methodically, making some beef


280 MURDER UNLEASHED
a “Yes.” Only a very hopeful person could have
translated that faint sign so.
“We'll get him,” he said confidently. “Drink this,
sir.”
They finished the cup of broth. Dennis took Father
Malletti's thin cold hands in his vital warm brown ones
and rubbed them gently. He took off Father Malletti’s
shoes and rubbed the cold feet evenly and gently till
he felt the warmth creeping into them. He put a white
woolen blanket over the thin blackness on the bed,
and Father Malletti lay there drowned in whiteness
like snow, only his dark eyes alive, watching Dennis.
Then Dennis turned to go. He wasn't sure that Father
Malletti understood what he was saying, but he felt
that he owed it to him to explain anyway.
“I’m going to hunt for the other,” he told him. “I’ll
be back, soon, sir—before you can get cold again. I’ve
got to go.”
He turned back again, slipped the overcoat from his
shoulders, laid it over the white blanket carefully, and,
satisfied with his work, departed.
He’d searched the two bedrooms upstairs. He'd been
in the kitchen. He went, kitchen lamp in hand, through
the rest of the house. There wasn't anything there ex-
cept the dim furniture. Was it Wong that Father
Malletti had meant? He wasn't there. Or was it—an-
other? The other—the killer. Dennis frankly didn't feel
like meeting him yet. Things were too darned uncertain.
Father Malletti was just on the edge yet, and he might
slip' backwards into the cold again. Wong was some-


MURDER UNLEASHED 281
where, and he might need help. And Dennis was only
one person—not really a fighting outfit, just a rescue
squad. He needed reinforcements.
He wondered a bit dizzily why he hadn’t thought of
that before. He’d just gone ahead. Something inside
of him had driven him on, regardless. Had taken
charge of him for a while, all down the road to Delroy.
He hadn’t, in fact, been quite—responsible. He’d been
like those monomaniacs, people with just one idea in
their heads at a time. His idea had driven him down
here, alone, without leaving any definite word to any-
body. Dennis wondered vaguely why he'd been im-
pelled to do it so at the time.
He came out of the kitchen door and surveyed the
landscape, holding the lamp up. The whitewashed tool
shed and the outhouses were dim bulks against the
dark. The black frost caught his breath in a terrible
damp chill, as though he were breathing ice. He left
the kitchen steps and went on across to the sheds and
lean-tos, and there was no one there. So then he thought
that Wong was dead, after all, and the terrible cold chill
fell on him silently, freezing all feeling, all tears.
He came back to the kitchen, went up to Father
Malletti again, stoked wood downstairs, all in a silence
that wouldn’t let him go. Then he went to the phone,
called San Francisco, got Kennedy on the line again.
“It’s Dennis,” he said.
“Wait a second,” said Kennedy at that. “I’ll take it
in a closed booth.” -
He waited till that crisp and indomitably cheerful,


MURDER UNLEASHED 283
longest he'd ever known. Longer than hospital nights,
when he'd broken a leg once. It was the longest and
darkest night.
He sat down by Father Malletti and sometimes he
felt his face and hands and feet to see if they were cold,
and sometimes he stirred to give him water or a bit
of broth. A long time later Father Malletti looked at
him more clearly and spoke in the lingering remnants
of a tone of lifelong authority.
“What are you doing here, then?”
It was like a ghost summoning one to judgment.
Dennis answered it straightly:
“This is my house, sir. Someone brought you here,
and I found you. Someone wanted to know what Bianca
Farnese told you, last Saturday night when she saw
you.”
Father Malletti considered this, eyes closed. Then he
spoke.
“She asked me,” said Father Malletti, “whether a
dead man can live again. What do you make of that,
now? I thought myself”—the thin breath labored to
bring out each word—“it was a riddle.”
“Either a riddle or a miracle, maybe,” said Dennis.
But his eyes were bright in thought. “What did you
tell her?”
The deep old eyes shone darkly alive as Dennis's
own eyes, in that sunken mask of an indomitable old
face.
“I told her,” said Father Malletti, “the best way


MURDER UNLEASHED 285
You're different—you don’t have to worry about going
to heaven, or if there is any heaven, sir.”
“Haven’t you any faith?” said Father Malletti
sternly.
“I don’t know,” said Dennis. “I prayed for you when
I thought you were dead here, sir. I prayed that you'd
gone to heaven. I think that's a pretty good act of
faith, to pray for another person's entrance to a place
you hardly believe in yourself.”
Something almost like a laugh came into Father
Malletti's piercing eyes.
“That’ll hardly be counted against you,” he assured
his host a bit dryly. He fell silent again.
After a while:
“When I was a young man,” said Father Malletti,
as though to himself, “I was a great swimmer. I loved
to swim in the ocean, when it was a fine day or a rough
one. Many a time . . .”
He lay there smiling a bit. Then he roused himself
again.
“You’re not of our faith?” he said again.
“I’ve never thought much about it, sir.”
“You will,” said the old man surely. “You will.”
He didn’t speak again after that, but fell into sleep
again. Dennis thought that saints were very single-
minded people.
After a while he heard false dawn being heralded from
just outside by a sleepy cock, and he roused himself to
go down to the stove again and stoke. He unwrapped
himself from his blanket, thrust it sleepily away from


286 MURDER UNLEASHED
him, stumbling in its folds, and went nearly in total
darkness, eyes closed sleepily, down the stairs he knew
so well.
He came into the kitchen, bent over the oil lamp
again, struck a match—heard a slight sound, and re-
mained, head bent, hand poised, above the globe as he
looked up.
The kitchen door was opening. Dennis waited. The
man who Dennis knew would come was there, pale face
looking at him for a second.
“You!” said Dennis softly.
He wasn’t surprised.
The match flared and went out. He dropped its
blackened stem from his fingers. The door had closed,
He knew that by the cessation of cold draft along the
floor, by the slight thud of its jamming.
He was alone in there with a killer. The pale face
still looked at him, the eyes burned brightly, in a sort
of inhuman, unswerving, even dispassionate hatred. It
was no use arguing with that sort of look—no use plead-
ing, or playing for time, or doing anything but fighting
now. Those eyes didn’t see—reason. They hated, and
watched their chance . . . in the dark.
Dennis in the dark poised himself on his toes, ready
for attack, hands held up to his chest, ready to launch
himself. This was the last great line smash, maybe, and
he wanted to make it good. He wasn’t afraid. Not any
more. He was in the game now, and he wanted to play
it. He wanted to fight, and play a good game. He was
impatient for the signal.


288 MURDER UNLEASHED
*
gasping for breath. He was shaking, and his heart was
hammering like a loud clanging bell in his body. He
wanted air and plenty of it. He went to the door, opened
it, stood there dizzily, heard someone say:
“Reach for heaven, guy!”
He sidestepped automatically, lunged forward, hand
stretched out stiffly, in a last effort of command over his
sagging body. His hand struck someone's hard chin and
shoved it out of the way.
There was a bright light there now. He looked with
nearly darkened weary sight down at the man he'd
spilled, and, in the bright glare of the automobile head-
lights trained on them, saw too late that he'd stuck his
fist again too hastily into the face of his friend Peter.
He felt himself falling forward helplessly. He felt a
heavy hand on his shoulder, yanking him to his feet.
It spun him around, and as his dark head fell forward
on his chest he saw Sullivan, and slid down to his feet.
A little while later he was talking to Peter.
“He looked at me,” said Dennis, “at the inquest, and
afterwards in the hotel, and his eyes were red as a
cornered rat's. He was a very pleasant man,” said Den-
nis dizzily, “only his eyes were red like a rat’s.”
“Dennis, come to,” said Peter, shaking him. Dennis
opened a pair of dazed dark eyes and found himself in
some sort of semidarkness that shifted and moved a
little, with his head on Peter's broad shoulder.
“You’re so beautifully sane, Peter,” he said drowsily.
“I do like blue eyes. There aren’t any shadows or red


Chapter 24
—AND SAW THE STARS AGAIN
It was afternoon in San Francisco.
“Dennis,” said Kennedy, “doesn’t it strike you as
somewhat of a miracle that Father Malletti was kept
alive, on a wild sea coast, from Saturday to Thursday—
when he was placed in your house, in his condition?”
“Why—no,” said Dennis wonderingly. “I didn't at
the time.”
“How is Father Malletti?” asked Blake of Sullivan
softly. -
That massive gentleman smiled on them affably.
“Getting along fine,” he said. “He’s got Father
O’Bannon with him now. That was a smart trick of
yours, Dennis, to get Father O’Bannon to identify that
hotel-manager rat Fersen as their visitor that Saturday
night, by listening to his voice in the next room.”
“He didn’t see Fersen’s face that night,” said Dennis,
“but I knew a man with a voice like Father O’Bannon’s
had a good ear.”
He smiled in great satisfaction at Sullivan. “As long
as you give me credit for suggesting that, I’ll take it,”
he said. “But to tell you the whole truth, I don’t re-
member that part of it at all. When was that?”
Peter grinned. “That was in the police car coming
290


292 MURDER UNLEASHED
and reporters and such gathered around Fersen, trying
to get him to talk—it was the biggest night the Star
has ever seen. They didn't even issue any early editions
until the other morning papers had all come out, so
there wouldn't be any leaks. A couple of huskies from
another paper tried to break in by the alley, and there
was a swell fight. No one could get in or out after we
came home with the bacon. And you were sleeping
away on the couch in the same room with all of this
rumpus about Fersen!”
“He didn’t talk?” asked Dennis.
“Not unless you call that snarl of his articulate,” said
Peter. “I don't care much for it myself.”
“Well,” said Dennis, “this is it. There were two
brothers—must have been brothers, or else why the
change in name of one? One was Victor Farnese, a
wholesale produce dealer of San Francisco. The other
was trained in Switzerland, near Italy, for a hotel
career. He came out here after a while, probably in ac-
cordance with his brother's suggestion. He got a hotel.
He was a pretty good man at his job. But there was a
flaw in him, a big one. It found him out. He and his
brother Victor agreed to cook the hotel's accounts; they
fixed it up on Victor Farnese's bills. I’ll bet Farnese was
the moving spirit in this, for two reasons—he was first
on the ground here, knew the lay of the land, and also
he was the one who either suggested that his brother
change his name or actually picked it out for him. In
fact, I know he did. Fersen never picked out that name
for himself. So,” said Dennis, “they fiddled with a lot


MURDER UNLEASHED 303
them. But you put the policeman at their door, didn't
you, Sullivan?”
“Sure I did,” said Sullivan. “And Fersen, after the
excitement of the fire, came up and touched off some
fireworks about that, too. You were sure getting under
his skin, Dennis.”
“Yes, I meant to,” Dennis said. “He was worried.
He’d taken a shot at Sullivan and got me. Then you
remember Peter said that about my being like a ghost.
That I’d scare the murderer if he saw me. He probably
thought he’d gotten me. The police veiled my end in
mystery, as you'd say, Kennedy. They didn’t give out
any information about this particular shooting. So
when I came into Fersen's office, and he saw me, and
at first didn't see the bandage around my head—I had
your hat on, Kennedy—he went up in the air. He looked
at me as if he'd seen a ghost. I remembered what
Peter'd said. I was a ghost, and he saw me there. For a
second. But all this,” said Dennis carefully, “isn’t
much good without a motive, is it? Why should Fersen,
that nice soft-living pleasant man, want to kill Victor
Farnese a year ago, and then his widow Bianca, and
then stop Bowden’s too loose mouth Farnese was a
wholesale produce dealer. Fersen was the manager of
a hotel which he ran to suit himself. He didn’t have to
show his accounts to prying eyes. Not till lately. The
hotel's going to be bought by Morgan's father and some
of his friends. That meant an accounting. Morgan told
me that, quite innocently. Then I remembered Fersen
had been working late, alone, in his office the night


MURDER UNLEASHED 305
“Which one?” asked Blake.
“Ah, you'll know,” said Dennis. “If you're listen-
ing.”
He whistled, very softly. the first bar of “Drink to
me only” as they all strolled out to the grass-covered
terrace on the highest level of the hill-built house.
“What country, love, is this?” said Dennis to himself,
as though he were trying to remember something he'd
forgotten. It ran through his head. “This is Illyria,
stranger. Stranger? No, not any more.”
Peter and Blake stayed in the doorway, watching
him.
“Are you really in love with him, Blake?” Peter
said.
“Well,” said Blake, thrusting her hands deep in her
pockets, regarding Dennis, “he’ll have to have someone
to save him from being too chivalrous again. And then
think of yourself, Peter. Life would be very dull for you
without Dennis. You ought to be grateful to me for
keeping him in the family permanently.”
“I’ve felt like a three-ring circus since I saw him,”
agreed Peter.
“Besides,” said Blake deeply, “I simply can’t bear
the thought of his marrying anyone but me. It must
be love.”
“I’m always waiting to see what he’ll do next, or
what'll turn up next,” observed Peter with anticipation.
“We'd better find out his proper name, by the way, if
he’s going to be our relative.”
“Does it matter?” asked Blake.


306 MURDER UNLEASHED
“No,” said Peter, consulting himself with surprise.
“I suppose it doesn't.”
Dennis looked at them from the goldfish pond and
smiled and began to come over the grass to them. “I
wonder what he'll do next,” said Peter.
They stared in fascination at his ingenuous face.
THE END


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