ARTES SC1ENTIA VERITAS





V


BOOKS BY LESLIE FORD
THE GIRL FROM THE MIMOSA CLUB *
MURDER COMES TO EDEN
INVITATION TO MURDER
WASHINGTON WHISPERS MURDER
THE BAHAMAS MURDER CASE
MURDER IS THE PAY-OFF
DATE WITH DEATH
THE DEVIL'S STRONGHOLD*
THE WOMAN IN BLACKS
HONOLULU STORY
THE PHILADELPHIA MURDER STORY
ALL FOR THE LOVE OF A LADY
SIREN IN THE NIGHT
MURDER WITH SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY
THE MURDER OF THE FIFTH COLUMNIST-
OLD LOVER'S GHOST
ROAD TO FOLLY
THE TOWN CRIED MURDER
FALSE TO ANY MAN





THE GIRL FROM
THE MIMOSA CLUB





LESLIE FORD
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK


© Copyright 1957 by The Curtis Publishing Company
A-1.57 H
828
~Q Q Q I *5 <^<-' ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK
MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT
THE PERMISSION OF CHARLES SCRIBNEr'S SONS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 57-7646


THE BALTIMORE POLICE
WITH RESPECT AND WITH MANY THANKS
FOR THEIR GREAT HELP AND
CONSTANT HUMOR
—Leslie Ford





THE GIRL FROM
THE MIMOSA CLUB





CHAPTER
1
Johnny Brayton squeezed his car in to the curb between a snow-
ball stand and a beat-up cart of canteloupes, sweet corn and lima
beans, turned off his engine and put the keys in his pocket. He but-
toned the second button of his fresh seersucker coat, picked up his
coco straw hat, put it on with unusual care, picked up his shiny
new briefcase, opened the street-door and eased his decently black-
shod feet to the blistering pavement. He grinned suddenly. When
he got around to writing his future memoirs, this was where he
would start. He could see the first page of the deluxe edition.
"The eminent career of the Honorable John Summerfield Brayton,
17th (or whichever) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United
States, began on Sunday morning, the 25th of July, in the lousy purlieus
of the Pine Street Police Station for Women in the City of Baltimore.
"A graduate of Gilman Country School, Princeton University and
the University of Virginia Law School, and having served his country
the required two years, dodging onerous duties with distinction, the
future Chief Justice passed the Maryland Bar Examination with no
distinction, and at the age of twenty-six entered the practice of the law
as yard bird in the presumably respectable firm of Cadbury, Dewar and
Grimes.
"His first distinguished appearance in his chosen profession was on
that Sunday morning, temperature 96 degrees, relative humidity 100
per cent, when he was summoned to represent a police haul of night-
spot sitters and strippers, on behalf of his firm's lucrative client, Balti-
more's brilliant impresario Solly Herman, lowdown proprietor of a
lowdown joint trading as the Mimosa Club, raided the night before,
while the Honorable John S. Brayton was sweating it out at a Little
Season dance in honor of one of Baltimore's richer but less promising
debutantes at the Elkridge Kennels."
9


He got the rest of the way out of his car, shut the door and backed
against it to avoid too intimate contact with a horse, bells a-jingle,
hitched to a cart full of watermelons. Perched on the emerald mound
was a little colored kid holding a half-cut melon. "Hi, mister!"
"Hi there." Johnny Brayton grinned back at him, feeling sud-
denly at home, and amended his memoirs from "lousy purlieus" to
"colorful precincts." Then he grinned again, unbuttoned his seer-
sucker coat and tossed his coco straw hat back through the window
onto the car floor. If he couldn't impress a six-year old colored kid
on a cart load of watermelons, he wasn't likely to impress either his
present clients or the court. That was further apparent the minute
he entered the station house doors.
"—You the kid Grimes sent to spring the Mimosa gang?"
The nervous character in a green, short-sleeved, open-neck nylon
shirt, green slacks, pointed black-and-white perforated shoes, chew-
ing a sodden cigar, who'd eyed him with a sinking heart as he came
through the doors, caught up with him before he reached the police
desk.
"Mr. Grimes sent me to represent them," Johnny said with dignity.
"Okay, chum. I'm Joe Anselo. You don't have to worry. Just take
it easy." Joe Anselo was clearly trying to reassure himself, not John
Brayton. "—Solly said I was to tell you, don't make a production,
just get 'em the hell out of here. Quick an* easy, see? I got the
dough." He shoved a wad of bills into Johnny's hand. "You don't
do nothin' but plead 'em guilty, pay the fines an' get 'em out, see?
This here's a lady judge. They ain't pullin' nothin' on her like they
would on a man, see? Cripes, it's hot."
Anselo wiped his fish-belly brow with a hairy arm. The sweat
looked cold to Brayton.
"You got it, Mac, ain't you? The big deal's on at Central, which
the dicks got Solly on a numbers charge. So as he don't want any
stink over here. Just get 'em out and stick around till I shove 'em
in taxis, see? And there's one we got to go easy on. Miss Reeves.—
Miss we got to call her, account of Solly got this torch. H-bomb.
It's her first time in. You got it, ain't you?"
"I've got it, Mac," Johnny said amiably. He heard a commotion
and looked at the far end of the room along a passage beside the
wide oak staircase. A female turnkey was unlocking the silver-
barred gate. He saw his first clients. The golden girls of the rose-
colored spots. It took him a full moment to readjust.
a
10


He turned back to Anselo. "They . . . look different in daylight,
don't they."
Anselo shot him a suspicious glance. "You a comedian, Mac?"
"No." Johnny stuffed the wad of bills into his briefcase. "Just
understating what I assumed must be a fact. If the Mimosa Club's
still in business."
"Okay, I get it. That's the courtroom. No crackin' wise in there,
see?" He was sweating again. "You sure you—"
"Leave it to me, chum."
Johnny Brayton moved toward the courtroom door with an ease
that he hoped Joe Anselo mistook for confidence, and in another
moment had made a further revision of his future biography. For
"first distinguished appearance in his chosen profession" read "his
first job was purely routine." Quick, and easy. The woman judge
wore her judicial black robes, the officers of the Racket Squad
(Morals Division) gave their testimony, the four strippers and five
sitters pleaded guilty and were fined and dismissed. The girl Miss
Reeves was a blonde in a red dress, ten dollars for disorderly con-
duct. In fifteen minutes it was over and nothing left for the legal
representative of Solly Herman, trading as the Mimosa Club, but to
pay up and go on home and have his breakfast. Or so he thought
until he went out into the station house lobby and saw Anselo and
Miss Reeves.
Anselo spread his hands helplessly. "Look, I'm tryin' to get her
to come on. I got the taxi. Come on, Miss Reeves."
"I won't," Miss Reeves said flatly. She had on the red off-the-
shoulder evening dress she'd slept in and red shoes. She was standing
there, her hands on her hips washerwoman-fashion, her long bobbed
blonde hair tossed back, chin up, her blue eyes flashing under lashes
an inch thick with mascara. "You tell Solly Herman I'm through.
He told me the one thing you didn't worry about in Baltimore was
cops. They're fixed. Nobody ever goes to jail. So I've just spent a
whole night in one and I'm through. Anyway I've got a friend
coming."
"Not Solly, Miss Reeves. He's—"
"Not Solly. My maiden aunt. We always pick each other up after
Saturday night jail. It's an old family custom."
Counsellor Brayton moved peaceably in. "You go on, Joe. I'll stick
around with Miss Reeves till her aunt comes."
ii


"Don't bother," Miss Reeves said. "I'm quite at home here by
now, thank you."
"Okay, okay." Anselo retired down the steps to his other charges.
Johnny turned back to the girl in the red dress. "It's possible your
maiden aunt hasn't got the word yet, Miss Reeves," he said gravely.
"She will have. As soon as I can borrow a dime to call a cab.
I left my bag at the Mimosa Club."
"Why bother the poor old lady?" The counsellor's tone was
eminently reasonable. "My car's across the street. I'll be happy to
drop you anywhere you'd like to go. In the public interest, if you'll
allow me to say so. It's Sunday morning. That rig you've got on ..."
Up to that point neither gravity nor reason had impressed her.
He saw her hesitate now, looking down at her bare shoulders and
slinky red skirt.
"Well ... all right," she said reluctantly. "If it isn't too much
trouble."
"None at all." He smiled at her. "Unless you live to hell and gone
out in the country. But you look like an urban type, to me."
She laughed suddenly. "It's just a few blocks."
"Let's go then."
Her laughter, light and crystal-clear, surprised him. Then in the
door, looking down into the street with the children around the
watermelon carts and a dignified group of colored people obviously
on their way to worship, she hesitated again, drawing back.
"Now what's the trouble?"
"—Nothing. I ... I just feel so naked. Like I had a bikini on in
church."
"Allow me." John Brayton took off his seersucker jacket. "Your
cloak, your Majesty. I'd rather you didn't walk through a puddle
on it." He laid it round her bare shoulders.
"Oh, thanks! It's silly ... but I just didn't think about how I'd
look. Let's hurry, shall we?"
"It's that dark green one-tone job across the street."
He hadn't meant that he didn't want to be seen crossing the
street with her, but that must have been the way she took it, be-
cause she flashed down the littered concrete steps and was across
the street and in the car before he was half-way there.
"Park Avenue," she said. "Just above Monument, on the right
hand side. I'll show you."
12


He'd expected a downtown fleabag of some kind, but Park
Avenue didn't surprise him. A lot of the fine old houses, built wall
to wall solidly lining both sides of the once elegant street, had been
turned into rooming houses. He started the car and swung east on
Mulberry, waiting for her to say something. But she didn't. She sat
huddled down, her eyes straight ahead. Her silence made him un-
comfortably aware of himself, sitting expectantly behind the wheel,
ready with his superior wisdom to advise and counsel the repentant
Magdalene, assuaging her remorse. Aware also that he was beginning
to feel a little silly.
He glanced at her and was surprised, even startled, at the delicate
sensitive lines of her face, lost in a concentrated reverie that was
entirely unselfconscious and had nothing to do with repentance
or remorse. And certainly nothing whatsoever to do with Johnny
Brayton of the Baltimore Braytons.
The damned girl's just thinking.
It struck him as so funny that he laughed aloud.
She looked up at him then. "What's the matter?"
"Nothing. Just that you're a funny girl. That's all."
"I don't feel very funny.—It's straight ahead, in the middle of this
block. The red brick house with the new white trim."
He was surprised again as he saw the house, with its white
marble steps and polished brass rail, in one of the blocks that had
escaped the blight or been recovered from it. The fashionable dentist
all the Braytons went to had his offices in the brownstone mansion
a few doors along. He drew up to the curb. Miss Reeves put her
hand out to open the car door.
"If you wouldn't mind waiting, I'll dash in and put something
on and bring you your coat. I don't want to shock my landlady. I
won't be but a second. And . . . thanks a lot! I'm very grateful.
Really."
"Now wait a* minute, Miss Reeves," Johnny Brayton heard him-
self saying. He took her hand and laid it calmly back on her lap.
"Today's the first time I've been in court—"
"I thought so." Her blue eyes lighted suddenly. "You were so
solemn ... so according to the book."
"That's plenty from you, young woman.—And how did you
know? I thought this was your first time too."
She was still amused. "Well, it was. But my ... I mean, I've seen
'3


when he turned left to get to Howard Street, to avoid the church
people on Cathedral, and saw a dingy shop with a pile of Sunday
papers on a box in front, he pulled over to the curb. After all, it
had been his idea, not hers. No point in being rude just because the
girl had been in jail. He'd hand her the paper, collect his coat and
that would be that. Simple, no complications. Quick and easy.
Then when he was paying for the paper he heard himself saying,
"You don't happen to have any cream, do you?"
The man went to the Coke machine and took out a bottle. "Watch
it," he said. "The cap's loose."
"Stick it in a bag, will you?"
Johnny Brayton got back in his car. The side view of her face
there beside him had slipped back, blotting out the image of her as
one of the Mimosa gang—the wide-open thoughtful blue eyes, the
complete lack of embarrassment, or of consciousness of him as any-
thing but a person offering her a lift. The more he tried to shake it
out of his mind the tighter it stuck. It was like the memory of a
time in Quebec once when he'd heard a brief snatch of an unknown
melody through an open window that someone had closed ab-
ruptly. He'd never heard the rest, and it haunted him for months.
// she'd just said something, he thought. It struck him then that
what she'd said had been very clear. She'd agreed to the coffee, there
in front of the house, just as the easiest way to get rid of him.
Remembering her entire lack of enthusiasm, he grinned, a little
lop-sidedly, and wiped his forehead with a sticky shirt sleeve. A girl
like that, used to heels .... The skin on the back of his neck
crawled, cold in spite of the heat. Now he'd thought of it, his
I-brought-you-home, you-owe-me-something routine didn't seem
quite so debonair or amusing. In fact it was now obvious the thing
to do was go in and have coffee, with dignity and decorum—let
her see he wasn't a heel, just a casual decent guy with nothing in
mind, nothing at all—and be on his way.
He parked across from the white marble steps, put the paper
under his arm, picked up the bag with the bottle of cream in it,
got out, holding the cream carefully, backed against the door to
close it, and heard the sudden screech of scorching rubber as a car
braked to a surprised stop, virtually against his chest.
"JohnnyI Why for heaven sakes! Of all people! What on earth
are you . . . where's your coat? I thought you were in court this
morning!"
16


a leak, the way his hands were throttling it instead of Camilla Anne.
"It is cream," he said calmly. He dropped the sodden bag and
wrapped his handkerchief around the bottle. "Cream for coffee."
"Why, Johnny!" Her face lighted teasingly. "Why John Brayton!
It is one of those girls! That's where your coat is! Why . . . you
wolf in lawyer's clothing! I'm gonna tell! I'm gonna tell on you!"
"Look, Camilla Anne. Some day, somebody's going to put a
bullet hole right through your offensive little skull. Now shut up,
will you? What I do is my business, not yours."
"Well, it is my business," Camilla Anne said hotly. "Look at
you! Sunday morning! Disgracing yourself and disgracing the
Family! And you needn't think I won't tell! I'm plenty broad-
minded, but I'm not going to let you walk out of the arms of a
woman like that and sit down at Mother's luncheon table with all
her guests—"
"That's enough, Cam." His voice was dangerously quiet. "You've
got a filthy mind and a foul mouth. Go scrub both of 'em. And tell
my mother to count me out for lunch. Any reason you care to give
is fine with me."
He walked abruptly away, across the street and up the steps into
the vestibule, leaving her there staring avid-eyed. Let her stand. Let
her stare. Let her take down the street number and hot-foot it to
his father and the Family. The Family was always capitalized, the
way Camilla Anne said it. He heard her then, door slam, engine
roar, gears grate. The hell with you, Camilla Anne.
How in God's name Ma puts up with her I'll never know. That
was the automatic reaction to every encounter with Camilla Anne.
A few times she'd been such strong poison that even his mother had
gagged. Then all she did was close her eyes a moment, to open
them, tranquilly clear again, with never a word spoken. With the
thought of his mother—"To our serene and lovely Ma," was the
way the four of them always addressed their joint presents to her—
he was conscious for an instant of the vague anxiety, formless, a
sort of hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach, that he'd been
aware of lately whenever he thought of her. It disappeared as he
looked down at the bank of brass mail boxes on the wall, hunting
for Miss Reeves of i-B. But there was no Miss Reeves. In the slot
for i-B the card said "Miss Kerry O'Keefe." She probably shared
an apartment. He pressed the bell and waited, and heard a door
click open at the back end of the hall.
18


and delicate head above her slender body in a simple white cotton
dress, as soft and cool as snow.
"It isn't Miss Reeves. It's Kerry . . . Kerry O'Keefe." Johnny
Brayton spoke her name gently.
She nodded, her lashes drooping again. "I should have told you."
"Kerry. You're so lovely, Kerry. Why ... do you do it?"
In an instant her eyes darkened. "Do what? But let me guess.
Work for Solly. Well, perhaps it's for the same reason you do. Or
don't you call it working for him representing him in court? He
wouldn't be in business five minutes if he didn't have a smart lawyer
on his payroll."
"Sorry," Johnny said. "The mistake's mine."
She laughed and took the cream bottle. "Just so we get things
straight is all. No big pots calling little kettles black. And any-
way, I've quit—you haven't. So let's skip it, shall we? I've put the
coffee outside. You go on, I'll bring the eggs and stuff."
He stood a moment looking around him. "Who's the decorator?"
he asked, as she came back with a tray with bacon and scrambled
eggs on it.
"O'Keefe." Her eyes lighted with amusement. "Nothing a girl
can't do when she gets two rooms, bath, kitchen and a garden cheap
if she'll take it from scratch because the landlady's run out of money
remodelling the rest of an old house. And I'm proud of my garden.
I never expected to have a tree all of my own."
"So you're not urban. You're really a country girl at heart." He
smiled gravely at her.
"Small town, anyway.—Except that my tree's a mimosa. Maybe
you'll feel defiled sitting under it."
"I said it was a mistake. You said let's skip it."
"Sorry. The mistake's mine." Her laughter made him think of the
sunlight glancing through the feathery foliage of the tree.
"It's self-service, al fresco." She'd plugged the coffee pot and
toaster in from a kitchen outlet down to the table under the window.
And afterwards, when they'd pushed the dishes back through the
screen into the sink, they sat in the yellow deck chairs under the
tree, the golden hours weaving a gossamer web. Johnny Brayton
watched her gravely, aware that something profoundly important in
his life was happening to him there in the summer stillness. At
what point he knew he had fallen in love with a girl he knew
nothing about he couldn't have told, but he did know it, and know
20


the same magic was moving in her heart as deeply as his own. Only
once he touched her, just the snowy fold of her skirt, awkwardly, as
he'd never touched a girl before. And only once he asked her a
question, where she was born.
"That's odd, you know," she said lightly. "It was twenty-two
years ago. I've told so many people so many places, from Nome to
Puerto Cabello, I've even got myself mixed up. But I know where
you were born. Right here in North Baltimore. Nobody could miss
that."
"Stuffy, you mean?"
"No, I don't. Just nice and casual. Sort of civilized, I guess."
"I was afraid you'd think I was a heel, pushing my way in. You
didn't want me to come, did you?"
"Not very much. For lots of reasons."
"But you're not sorry, are you?"
She shook her head. "Glad, really."
"Look, Kerry. You've got to quit—"
"We said we'd skip that, didn't we?" she said evenly. "Let's
talk about you, not me."
"There's not much. I passed the bar and got a job three weeks ago.
Apprentice lawyer. I'd starve if I didn't live at home ... just around
in Mt. Vernon Place. There are four of us—a brother and sister
married, and my favorite kid sister, nineteen, about to be. When the
lad gets out of the Army. He's okay, very old Baltimore, or his
family is. Stuffy, I guess."
He grinned at her, but she shook her head, laughing. "It wasn't
me that said it."
"I guess family ties are stronger here than most places," Johnny
Brayton said. "And I don't mean Old Family stuff. Maybe it's
because kids are a part of things. As soon as you can climb on a
pony you're taken in hand and older people start showing you the
way to go. Handing on their traditions to the new people coming
along. So your parents' and grandparents' friends are yours too.
Maybe it's a mold you get set in. Some people call it a code. It's hard
to explain."
And why am I trying? What is it I'm doing? Whistling in the
dark? The picture of his regal and uncompromising grandmother
Mrs. John Summerfield came into his mind—with a companion
piece entitled "Camilla Anne Informs The Family."
"Isn't your father a doctor? A very well-known one?"
21


knowing, mercifully not, that there'd be a time when he would
stand in that same door torn with agony, saying "I wish I'd rotted
in hell before the day I ever met you" ... a time deep behind the
sable wings of the rain-cold night when he would have to choose
between this girl and his mother, and the words he'd so lightly
spoken—"For her you could tear any one of us in a thousand pieces"
—were the bitterest of gall and burning pain.
She came part way toward him, her face a little pale.
"Johnny—you've got to go now," she said quickly. "I'm sorry,
but I've . . . got to get downtown. About a ... a job."
The golden glow shattering, the tenderness freezing in a sudden
sick despair, made Johnny Brayton's voice harsher than he meant
it, his words more brutal.
"You mean, the female sitter goes back for—"
"That's right!" Her eyes flashed cobalt fire and her chin went up.
"And I'd like you to leave and leave at once."
She ran back up the steps into the house.
"Oh Kerry." He followed her, sicker with himself than he was
with her. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. It's just that something's
happened to me today I didn't know could happen ... not like this."
"I... didn't either. And I... I'm sorry."
"Not sorry, Kerry—"
"I didn't mean that. I mean, about this morning . . . and about
now. I know it must seem so ... so horrible to you. But I can't help
it." She clenched her fists tightly. "I have to have a job. I have to
work—"
"But not this kind of work, Kerry. My God, you don't under-
stand—"
"I understand all right. I know what your family would think—
how dreadful it would be for them. In a place like Baltimore—as
you've told me. But it can't be helped, Johnny. So just go away.
You've had your coffee, and here's your coat. The rest was just . . .
just midsummer madness."
He shook his head. "This is for keeps, Kerry. My family'll—"
"Your family'll think you're stark raving mad. So please go." She
thrust his coat into his hands. "And thanks, so much I I don't know
what I'd have done."
She went quickly through the arch to the door and opened it.
"Listen to me, Kerry."
"I can't, Johnny. I've got to hurry. Really."

23


"When'll you be back?"
"I don't know."
"Then what's your phone number?"
She hesitated. "I'm not always here. But you . . . you could leave
a message." She gave him the number. "Goodbye, Johnny."
As he turned back she closed the door quickly. There was noth-
ing he could do but stand there looking helplessly at it, the mirrored
disk a sightless eye as cold as it was blind.
24


CHAPTER
3
He was moving blindly himself as he went down the steps, almost
colliding with the man in tan slacks and brown linen coat there
who half grunted an apology and moved off down the street. It
wasn't until Johnny was waiting for the traffic light at the corner
that a sudden memory flashed into his mind and Kerry's pallor and
frantic hurry, her taut voice and clenched fists, focussed suddenly,
their meaning plain. The sweat broke out, clammy cold, on the
palms of his hands as he swung around to look back.
Sergeant Trumper of the Rackets Division had turned and was
walking slowly up toward her house.
"—This fellow Trumper . . ." Johnny could hear Mr. Grimes,
his first week at the office. ". . . Coming in here at three o'clock.
Rackets Division. I want you all to take a good look at him. He's
a cool cookie. Don't let him get you in any casual conversation
at a bar."
Watching him now in the side view mirror, Johnny saw him
reach the house, slowing down as he passed it. The light changed
to orange. Johnny shot through it and turned left, cursing himself
for a fool as he remembered that Cathedral was a one-way street
and he had two extra blocks to go before he could get back to her.
In his own sweaty anxiety he remembered Joe Anselo's as he'd tried
to hurry the girls out of Pine Street, and the all-too-smooth coopera-
tion of the police. He was sick with apprehension, and sicker when
he got around in Park again. The detective was gone. Kerry
O'Keefe was gone too.
// he's taken her bac\ to Vine Street . . . But he hadn't. Barging
over there, he found that out, his relief turning clammy cold again
25


as the desk sergeant said "By the way, mister, aren't you the lawyer
Solly Herman had over here this morning?"
His voice had taken on a different tone. "Why don't you go
down to Central Headquarters? That's where she'd be if they've
taken her in for questioning.—If you all are so worried about her."
I'm just tying her tighter to Solly Herman. He was surer about
that as he glanced back, going out, and saw the desk sergeant
quietly picking up the telephone. I'd better call Mr. Grimes. No. I
hadn't. I'd better leave it lay. I'd better go on home and sit tight.
He put his car in the old carriage house in Peabody Alley behind
the house in Mt. Vernon Place and sat, his elbows on the wheel, his
head in his hands. When he closed his eyes, her face was there.
It was her face as it had been, fresh and clear, the silken lashes
drooped, her cheeks warm, when he first saw her coming out of the
kitchen, and changing then as it had changed, lighted with laughter
or grave as it had been as she listened to him under the tree, the
ache that was pain but not pain growing inside him, profoundly
new and incredibly lovely.
/ guess I never 
ew what love was all about before.
He got out of the car, started across the garden to the back door,
remembered Camilla Anne and turned back, through the carriage
house into the alley and along it to Cathedral Street and up toward
Mt. Vernon Place. Then as he was about to cross it he stopped, his
jaw hardening. The hell with Camilla Anne. He turned right
toward his home, halfway along the block.
The Braytons' was the second of the pair of brownstone houses
there, built with a common cornice and common interior wall but
separate entrances. In other places they might be called a double
house. In Baltimore they were two units in the row-house tradition
that holds, grim or handsome, for mansion and tenement. With-
out space between for even a wayward ailanthus seedling, their
only rear access through the alley in back, the pair were set between
the Barton Jacobs and Walters houses, in the solid unbroken facade
of brick, brownstone and granite forming the once sacrosanct, still
distinguished block, on the south side of the plaza that sets off at
the Charles Street intersection the magnificent column that was
the nation's first monument to its first president.
Half-way along, Johnny saw the familiar figure that brought the
familiar clutch that always stopped him. He braced himself, resist-
ing the instant impulse to turn back. It was instinctive, common to
26


all four of the Brayton children, what the sight of their father always
did to them, a mechanism to protect them from the uncanny per-
ception, the amused, faintly mocking smile that seemed to comment
on nothing but their baser traits, reducing to absurdity all their pa-
thetic attempts at self-respect. As if we were a lot of comic frogs up
for dissection. It was his younger sister's passionate outburst for
some reason Johnny had forgot, remembering only the frustration
and the violence. I hate him! He's just a sadist, that's what he is!
Just clinical, Johnny thought as he saw him now, a tall slender
man, immaculately elegant in a gray raw silk suit, a panama hat
in his hand, coming down the brownstone steps toward a shining
limousine standing at the curb, a uniformed chauffeur holding the
door open.
Johnny felt the flush at the back of his neck. He knew he'd been
seen. When his father got over to the car he'd stop and wait for
him. And the reason Dr. Brayton had not already stopped was
apparent. It was what Johnny's grandmother Mrs. Summerfield
called That Woman Next Door. His father was pretending not to
see their neighbor Mrs. Inga Remstad coming down the steps of the
other of the two houses, the one nearer Johnny. And Mrs. Remstad
was not an easy woman not to see.
It wouldn't hurt him to spea\ to her. You can't be that choosy
about your neighbors. Not any more you can't. But Johnny felt
better. It was an effect Mrs. Remstad always had on him. There
was a kind of warm earthiness about her that was partly flesh and
partly spirit. She was a handsome woman, voluptuous even, but
there was something else, a responsive gaiety that twinkled in
her eyes, as Scandinavian blue as her hair was yellow. If she didn't
move in the Braytons' rarefied circles at least she and Johnny were
friends, and had been since he was ten and his baseball went through
her conservatory window, second floor back. And if she rented the
first and third floors of her house, she wasn't the only householder
on Mt. Vernon Place who did so.
"Hi, Mrs. Remstad." He stopped, waiting for her to reach the
sidewalk.
"Hi, Johnny." She smiled at him. But instead of going on she
stopped.
"That's a very fancy new car you've got, Doctor." Her voice was
low and throaty, husky in a spine-warming way. But what aston-
ished Johnny was the impish malice in her smile as she stood there,
27


forcing his father to look around. "The sick business must be look-
ing up, these days."
"Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Remsen. It's not my car—"
"'Course not. I see it's got a Texas license. And the name's
Remstad, Doctor." She winked at Johnny and went along.
He's angry. It was only a spark, instantly vanished, but for
Johnny Brayton a revelation. His father wasn't wholly exempt from
human passions. That such a trivial assault on his dignity should
bring that out was an added shock, and an instant release. For the
first time in his life Johnny faced his father without fear and with-
out awe.
"Well, Johnny." The ironically dissecting eyes were on him once
more. "I'm told you had your . . . baptism of fire today." Dr. Bray-
ton paused, faintly amused. "—In court, I mean."
Johnny raised his own brows slightly. "Hearsay evidence is never
trustworthy, sir," he said easily. "As for court, it was routine."
He saw the flicker of surprise, even interest, in his father's eyes—
another spark instantly vanished, because Mrs. Remstad was re-
turning. She was there as the Texas car left the curb and Johnny
reached the bottom step.
"It's just too hot," she said. "We're in for a storm, I guess."
She glanced up at the sulphur murkiness of the sky and along
the street at the car. "—That was real mean of me." She was ap-
parently upset about it. "I just don't know what got into me."
"I wouldn't worry." Johnny grinned at her.
"I'm not worrying." Her pink and white face, usually smiling,
was set, stubbornly resentful. "But I just get tired of being treated
like I wasn't here. Like I was dirt. I've lived next door to you
people twenty-six going on twenty-seven years—before you were
born—and you're the only one speaks to me on the street."
"Oh, Mrs. Remstad. My mother—"
"Your mother's a perfect lady. I have to give her that. It's your
father that's got so high and mighty. Specially now he's got this
fancy car and shoffer."
"Well, he doesn't—"
But Mrs. Remstad was really wound up. "I'm not in his class.
I don't pretend to be. But I got feelings, like anybody else. You
people don't know I'm on earth. But you'd be surprised what I
know about you. Watching you go out and come in all these years.
Like you kids out skating ... I'd see you duck behind the bushes
28


when he came home. And that Texas car here all the time. I'd
get pretty sick of it if I was you. But here comes your grandmother's
car."
She recognized it before Johnny did. There was something dis-
turbing about such watchful interest. She must be horribly lonely in
there, he thought uncomfortably. That the day would come when
the watch Mrs. Inga Remstad kept would have a shattering signifi-
cance in their lives was an idea as fantastic as it was remote to him
then.
"Johnny . . . ask Madam if she's ready, will you?" Occam, his
grandmother's driver and general custodian for forty-odd withered
years, was leaning over the front seat. "Tell her we have two more
parties and a storm's coming up."
"Well, so long, Johnny." Mrs. Remstad moved on.
Johnny went up the Brayton steps and opened the front door.
"Hi, Gran," he said. He remembered Camilla Anne again and
stiffened for the attack direct.
"Hello, dear." His grandmother Mrs. Summerfield was sailing
through the double doors of the gold-and-white front parlor, a hand-
some old Turk with a glint in her eye and a handsome smell of fine
old bourbon on her breath. "That woman, Johnny ... what did she
say to your father?"
He looked at her blankly, not having expected that. "Why,
nothing, actually. Just that—"
"He looked as if he smelled a polecat." Mrs. Summerfield was
highly amused. "His own fault. He should have bought that house
when he bought this. In '29 they were giving them away. If he
doesn't like a trollop—"
"You don't know she's a trollop, Gran."
"I know your grandfather's eyes used to light up when he saw
her. A showgirl of some kind. You'd know more about that than I
would, I expect"
Johnny's jaw hardened. He'd expected a frontal assault, not a
surreptitious smash with a blunt instrument from ambush behind
Mrs. Remstad. Then he saw the reason. His mother was in the
parlor door. His heart plummeted. Her face was white, her dark
eyes as drained as the flesh around her lips.
"Mother ... Occam's waiting. Help Gran down the steps, Johnny,
please."
"I don't need any help, but I'd enjoy an escort."
29


She took his arm and marched through the door and down to the
sidewalk. The attack direct came then.
"Disgracing the Family, eh?" Mrs. Summerfield was still amused.
"Occam, Johnny's disgracing us. With a stripper. Or a sitter. Which
is it, Johnny?" She patted the old man's arm. "But don't you
worry. I'll give him the money to buy her off.—A rake in the
Family."
"Not a rake, Gran." He managed to speak quietly. "And it isn't
funny."
Her eyes bored into his, an angry flush darkening her cheeks.
"And not a damned fool either—or are you?" She got in the car.
"Shut the door. If you have to fall in love, do it with somebody of
your own kind. Your sister's engaged to be married. Do you want
an open scandal to ruin that? Her brother running with jailbirds?
And your mother looks like death on a pale horse as it is, with this
Richwitch woman always here. If you have to be a fool don't you
dare to let her know it. I'm ashamed of you Johnny. Go on, Occam."
As Johnny went back up the steps, aware of Mrs. Remstad look-
ing down at him as she closed her upstairs windows, his anger
drained out of him. What did you expect, you 
ew it was coming.
The hall was empty, suddenly darkening, still with the ominous
stillness that comes before the storm breaks and the lightning leaps.
He stood an instant outside the mahogany panelled room across
from the parlor that the young Braytons called the Common Room.
"Ma?"
"She's gone upstairs, Johnny." Old Horace was coming out to
turn on the lights and close the windows. "She isn't feeling so
well, I expect. She doesn't want to be disturbed."
He went up the marble staircase curving handsomely to the
second floor, and past his father's study door, on the side of
the house next to Mrs. Remstad's. His mother's sitting room was
across the hall on the other side. He put his hand on the doorknob,
hesitating, as if in some way he'd forfeited his right to walk in
through the door that was so warmly, with so much love and
affection, always open to him and his brother and sisters. It was her
face, down there in the hall, the drained eyes and white flesh around
her lips. He raised his hand and knocked on the ivory panel. The
first time I've ever knocked. It's Father. He's the only one who
always 
oc\s. That came up out of his mind without his ever
having been consciously aware of it before.
30


As he knocked again, a curious incident slipped into his mind.
It had happened in the Spring when a well-known painter was
visiting them. "Your mother is an extraordinarily beautiful woman,"
he'd said to Johnny, and his father, standing near them, had
glanced over at her with a flicker of surprise and sudden interest in
his eyes, as he'd looked at Johnny a few minutes ago.
She's probably in her bedroom. He turned the doorknob, opened
the door quietly in case she was resting, and saw her then at her
desk, the pen in her hand racing across the blue note paper in
front of her. He opened the door wider and stepped onto the pale
eggshell cotton carpet. Before he could speak she was up like an
arrow, as swift and as straight, whirling around at him, the fires of
all hell blazing in her dark eyes.
In the stunned instant that Johnny Brayton stood there, unbe-
lievably staring, he saw her hand relax on the back of the chair,
her eyes close. She let herself down into the chair again, her pallor
softening as she moved her hand across her forehead.
"Oh, I'm so sorry, Johnny," she whispered.
She opened her eyes. "You startled me, love," she said lightly.
"And I certainly must have startled you. But please, darling." She
smiled and got up. "Forgive me ... it's been a difficult day. Would
you mind if we don't—"
"Look, Ma." He was still too dazed to sound as he'd planned,
casual and adult in explaining what had happened, explaining Kerry,
matter-of-fact in reassuring her that there'd be no open scandal to
ruin anybody's life and plans. "I want to tell you why—"
"Oh, don't, love. It was quite all right. Camilla Anne told mc
you'd met an old school friend." There wasn't a shadow in her
eyes, dark with a translucent depth like the brown-black water of
a cypress garden, as she looked at him with a tranquil smile. "There
was nothing world-shaking about the luncheon, sweet. A few visiting
doctors and an assortment of your sister's future in-laws, charming
people if somewhat unbending for my taste. But she adores them. I
don't think they approve of her trekking off for weekends at Army
camps. Nor do I. But Camilla Anne assured us it's entirely correct
these days."
She smiled at him. "But I wish it was over. The child's so happy.
It's the first time in her life she's really been confident of herself.
It would break my heart if anything happened to hurt her."
She came across the room to him. "Johnny dear. I'm tired, love.


I don't feel like talking. So do you mind? Tomorrow. But not
now."
"Okay."
She took his face between her hands, cool on his burning cheeks,
bending it down to kiss his forehead. "I love you, Johnny." She
smiled at him, her eyes swimming with sudden tears but her voice
serenely steady. "There's chicken in the ice box and I told Bessie to
save you at least half a pecan pie. And I sequestered the bottle of old
Scotch a future in-law brought. It's in your room. Good night, my
lamb."
"Good night, Ma."
He stopped in the doorway. "I just don't want you to think I'm a
complete bastard, Ma," he said quietly.
"I should think I have more valid information about that than
you, love." She smiled again. "And I assure you it's never occurred
to me that you were, or are, or could be. There must be some mis-
take. It's probably the heat." She looked out of the window. "The
storm's passing us. Too bad. We really need the break. Good night,
dear."
She closed the door. He heard the latch click and then the bolt as
she locked it quietly.


CHAPTER
4
Johnny Brayton went slowly up to the third floor. If his mother's
locking her door behind him wasn't meant directly for him, the
effect was the same—as what she'd said to him was in effect what
his grandmother had said.—His sister's happiness, her new con-
fidence. It'll brea\ my heart if anything happens.
At the top of the stairs he paused a moment, listening to the
faint incessant murmur of his aunt Miss Elizabeth Brayton's tele-
vision in the room in front of his. The 1840 house had been solidly
built or they'd all have been as somewhat more than fey as she was,
sitting there glued to the TV panel, seldom coming out except to
wander vaguely around the house at night, careful to tiptoe as she
passed her brother's door. He went on into his own room. The air
conditioner was on. It was cool and quiet, the storm passing over,
the summer twilight touching the framed picture of his younger
sister Lolly, the changeling child. It had been taken when she was
first engaged and the heart-glow was in her eyes, dark like their
mother's, the new confidence shining in her small pointed face,
very moving to Johnny as he looked at it.
"They don't have to worry. I wouldn't ever hurt you, baby."
He said it aloud to her, remembering the terror-ridden nights
she'd heard the ghosts tapping, until their mother had the fireplace
chimney in her room above her father's study closed up so the
swallows couldn't nest in it.
Tap, tap, tap . . .
He looked around, startled, and saw his door opening. If it had
been a ghost he'd hardly have been more surprised than he was to
see the wraith-like figure of Miss Elizabeth Brayton peering in at
him.
33


throat, her mouth flooding with salt unshed tears. I never fyiew you
could just fall in love, all of a sudden. I've got to see him. Maybe I
can tell him.
She heard the other tread then, coming swifdy along the hall.
Through the one-way glass she could see the man in the brown linen
coat, and opened the door before he knocked.
"Well, he caught me flat-footed." Sergeant Dave Trumper, as-
signed to the Rackets Division at Central Headquarters, Baltimore
City Police, stepped in and pushed the door shut. "I didn't expect
you'd get rid of him that quick."
He went across the living room, shut the dutch door into the
garden and tilted up the blue Venetian blinds. The deck chairs were
still by the iron table under the tree, still with the warmly intimate
air he'd noticed over the cedar fence the half-dozen times he'd come
and found the two of them still out there, unconscious of him or
of time.
"If I'd thought he'd recognize me I'd have stayed in the car.
What'd you want to drag one of Solly Herman's law boys back
home with you for?"
"I didn't drag him home," Kerry said warmly. "I had to get out
of Pine Street without Joe Anselo—"
"I know. I was in the captain's office. But I didn't expect him to
spend the day."
"Neither did 1.1 didn't even expect him to come in. But I didn't
want him to get curious and ask about me.—Coffee?"
He nodded, watching her go out to the kitchen, his bleak sea-
grey eyes expressionless. He took off his coat, hung it on the back
of a chair and stood there, waiting. When the sharp jab at the
doorbell came he moved silently across the room to the door, look-
ing through the glass. Kerry O'Keefe standing breathless in the
kitchen heard the urgent knocking, then the feet bolting out along
the hall. Trumper came back.
"Your friend Brayton. Come to tell you to cheese it, the cops."
He took a cigarette out of his coat pocket and lighted it. "You've
sure fouled the deal up, Officer O'Keefe. Unless you've resigned."
She came in and put the coffee on the table. "Resigned, or been
fired?"
"You? Fired?" He filled his cup and reached for the sugar bowl.
"You're the Rackets Division's fair-haired girl today, lady. I'd 'a
told you before if I'd thought you were interested. I thought you'd
35


decided to wait and read about it in the Sunpaper tomorrow morn-
ing."
She flushed at the sardonic twitch at one corner of his thin lips.
"It was a three million dollar take-in station you uncovered for
us in the room behind the ladies' john. We're proud of you. Espe-
cially when it wasn't what we sent you down there for. It was a
fine job, Officer O'Keefe. A very fine job."
Kerry bent her head quickly to keep him from seeing a different
kind of flush on her cheeks. In the six months she'd worked with
Sergeant Trumper this was the first word of praise she'd heard.
There'd been a solid wall of antagonism that she'd thought at first
was personal and learned slowly was a basic antagonism to women
in police work. It was no place for women . . . and especially you,
O'Keefe, you're just not the type. His flat face, expressionless as old
leather, had never relaxed to make a tough job easier for her. It
wasn't until last night, in the instant of panic when the cell block
gate clanged shut behind her, that she'd ever imagined she could
feel a wild rush of gratitude, much less affection, for him. So praise
from him had real meaning.
He was stirring his coffee intently when she came back with a
cup for herself and sat down on the sofa.
"Look, Kerry." It was the first time he'd ever called her anything
but O'Keefe or Officer O'Keefe. "For God's sake—what do you
think you're trying to prove?"
His face hadn't changed but his voice was curiously gentle.
"Why, nothing. Not a thing, Sergeant Trumper."
"Sure you are. I'm not the greatest detective in the world but I
can see through a rookie cop like you. What do you think I've been
doing the last three hours?—Cooling my heels, stalling 'em off at
Headquarters, because every time I came here I looked through the
fence at you and this guy out there under the apple-blossom tree.
And you didn't even know when I knocked the top off the garbage
can. I saw the guy. What are you going to do, Kerry? Let him
break his heart and break your own? You want to let him go on
thinking you're a lousy tramp?"
"—Could I . . . tell him?"
"Not and stay with Rackets you can't. His firm represents other
outfits we've got an eye on. That's why I'm asking you."
"Asking me what?"
"If you're going to keep your job or get your guy."
36


She looked at him, her eyes widening.
"Because that's the story, kid. I saw you two out there. That was
the big deal, Kerry. It don't come along more'n once, maybe twice
in anybody's life. You going to kick it in the teeth? Look. I got a
wife and three kids. You tell me I can have J. Edgar's job tomorrow
if I dump 'em and I'll laugh in your face. They're what I live for.
And look at you last night. When that gate shut, I was sick at my
stomach."
She felt the rush of gratitude and the real affection again. "I . . .
I heard you say you were going to stay around all night. And thanks,
Dave. I ... I thought I couldn't take it, till then."
"I was scared you'd fold and give the show away."
"I know. You're just so damned tough, aren't you?" She laughed,
blinking to keep the sudden moisture out of her eyes.
"Sure I'm tough. I got to be. But you don't. Why don't you quit—"
"I'm not quitting." Her chin went up. "When the Inspector
picked me out for special training I promised I'd stay a year—"
"Oh, for Chrissake, Kerry. Nobody expects a woman to keep a
promise."
"Maybe that's one of the things I'm trying to prove. You don't
expect a woman—"
"I expect a woman to act like a woman, and—"
He saw her eyes light then as the phone rang, until she heard
the second ring. "So you gave the guy your number. Or Reeves'
number." He got to his feet. "Okay if I get this? I told 'em I'd be
here."
She heard him answer and listen. Then he said, "—Okay, took
it like a soldier." And a pause before he said, "That's what I'm
finding out. I'll call you."
He came back. "Your boy friend's combing the jails."
"Oh, no!"
"The desk sergeant at Pine Street just phoned in. Says he told
Brayton to try Headquarters. We get any more people interested,
you're going to be under cover like the Washington Monument."
He looked at her silently for a moment. "That was the Chief,"
he said evenly. "He wants to know if you can take it or if you
can't."
"I can take it. I promised a year. I'm not quitting."
"Okay, Officer."
He reached in the pocket of his coat on the chair and took out a
37


packet of papers. "Here you are." He tossed them over to her. "Your
new credentials. You're a gal called Kitty Kelly, an out-of-work
hostess from a Miami joint. Description on the back page."
He got up. "How long's it going to take you to pack?"
Her face was pale as she looked at him silendy.
"—You're going away, Kerry. Till the heat's off. You're a fool
not to quit. But it's up to you, and it's whole hog or none."
Kerry got blindly to her feet. "How long, Dave?"
"Till your hair grows out of that blondine bleach, for one thing."
The poor little devil, he thought. He went over to the garden door.
"I'll bring your chairs in."
"Dave . . . could I tell him I'm going?"
He shook his head. "He'll find out—if he's still interested after
Miss Reeves answers his calls. Why you wanted to remind him of
her—"
"Because I'm not allowed to give anybody the other number, and I
couldn't say I didn't have a telephone, could I? He knows I'm not
a tramp."
"He did while he was here. When he gets home it'll be easy to
forget. I don't know his family, but I know plenty like 'em."
"If you'd just let me tell him ..."
"Listen, sugar." His voice was gentler again. "What good's it going
to do to tell him? You told me once your family raised hell when
you decided you'd be a policewoman. What do you think he and his
family are going to do? You say it's prejudice. Okay. You've never
run into the real old-time prejudice we got here in Baltimore."
"I can't help that. I'm not ashamed of my job. I'm proud of it. My
parents may not like my job but they wouldn't think much of me if
I quit it now. They're Quaker stock. They don't go back on their
spoken word."
"I'm just telling you. You say to him, Look, sweetie, I'm not a
female sitter, I'm a female cop, and all you'll see of him is the rubber
on his heels—down the back steps over the fence through the alley up
to the Belvedere bar to celebrate a narrow squeak. You're butting
your head against a stone wall, sugar. But if you're crazy enough
to stick at your job, start packing. And give me a key so I can
check your tape. If any of Solly's crowd leaves a name we'll be
pretty sure they haven't figured you. You're driving, aren't you?
Got a gun?"
She nodded, blind again.
38


when he got home from the office and called, and he hurried over,
his heart in the pit, expecting to find her name gone from the mail
box and a For Rent sign out. Instead he saw a colored girl of about
ten, watering her garden, chanting a count of twenty with the hose
on each plant.
"Hi," Johnny said, over the fence.
"Hi," the child said. "She's not home yet, if you're hunting her.
I'm in charge till she comes."
"You wouldn't like to let me know when she does come, would
you?"
The girl grinned, rolling bright brown eyes. "What for? Is it
ro-mance?"
Romance sweetened with a small down payment closed a deaL
Not galvanic action on the part of the white knight on a white
charger, but assurance of some kind. It paid off the night of his
brother Pug's birthday party when Kerry had been gone five weeks
minus two days.
"Johnny." Old Horace met him at the door. "There's a child in
the kitchen—"
He stood gaping as Johnny bolted past him. The child was there.
"Tomorrow evening. She phoned Mumma to open the windows and
start the refrigerator."
It was a reprieve so radiant that not even the prospect of Camilla
Anne could dim it as Johnny went up the stairs three at a time,
whistling as he showered and got himself into a dinner jacket, re-
membering too late he hadn't got a present. Even the aubusson
carpet in the gold-and-white front parlor looked brighter as he
crossed it. They were all gathered in the back parlor, his father, the
charming host even to his own family, taking the martini pitcher
around. Except to Gran. Strictly a bourbon and water man. She was
sitting erect and stately, her blue-white hair immaculately coiffed, a
sapphire-and-diamond dog collar glinting above her lowcut blue
evening gown. His step was blithe as he approached the double
doors and caught the almost imperceptible break, infinitely small,
in the conversation, a kind of wary hush quickly covered.
"Hi, Johnny."
"Hi," Johnny said. "Hi, Gran." He went over to her and bent to
kiss her cheek. He'd seen her eyes narrow as they'd fixed on him, so
he was not surprised to find it cool to the touch. "You look very
handsome this evening, ma'am."


Camilla Anne trapped that one and whipped it to second. "Grand-
mother's the most handsome and distinguished-looking older
woman in Baltimore, / think."
His sister Meg's eye met Johnny's.
"Gran still likes a little water with her bourbon, Cam," Camilla
Anne's husband Dr. Pierce Brayton Jr. said.
"At my age you take it any way you can get it, Pug," his grand-
mother said dryly. "—Thank you, dear," she added to Camilla
Anne.
Johnny went to kiss his mother. Her cheek was softly warm.
"Hello, love." She was sitting in the fireside chair, a needlepoint
tapestry resting in her lap. She smiled up at him and took his hand
affectionately in hers.
"Where's Lolly?"
"Visiting Camp Dix. Extra liberty this weekend."
"Rather extraordinary." He heard his father's silken voice. "It's
taken two world wars to make camp following respectable."
Johnny stiffened with sudden rage. His mother's hand tightened
on his. "She's staying with friends of mine on the post, if any of
you are alarmed," she said tranquilly.
"You've always had a peculiar sympathy for the military, Mar-
garet," Dr. Brayton remarked.
It sounded pleasant, but somehow, Johnny realized, it wasn't.
Perhaps it was his mother's silence, or the sharp contraction he saw
in his grandmother's eyes, that made it seem so. It was the nearest
he'd ever heard to the slightly mocking amusement in his father's
voice when he was speaking to their mother. Or perhaps it was be-
cause he was turning to Johnny that the familiar tone had crept in.
"Good evening, Counsellor. A martini?"
"Thank you, sir."
God, how I hate him.
He took the glass and turned to his brother. "Skoal. Many happy
returns. I'll owe you a present."
"No gift shoppies over on Park, I guess." His sister Meg's hus-
band, Joe, a nice uncomplicated red-headed lad who worked in
his uncle's insurance business, grinned cheerfully at him. "I got a
friend says you haunt the alleys looking for the blonde—"
"May I have a touch more bourbon, Pierce?" Mrs. Summer-
field's voice broke the abyss of silence. Joe reddened and looked
43


blankly at Meg, her head bent to count the stitches in the child's
sweater she was knitting.
Light if light were needed illumined Johnny Brayton's mind.
Nobody's told old Joe. The conspiracy of silence has left him out.
The conspiracy of silence. Nobody, not even Camilla Anne, had
said a word to him since the Sunday crisis. But it was obvious
there'd been plenty of discussion when he wasn't around. He could
see it in the way his sister's head was bent over her knitting and the
sharp warning in Pug's eyes as he looked at Camilla Anne. His
grandmother was going calmly on.
"—Your lady from Texas, Pierce," she was saying. "What's hap-
pened to her project? Margaret tells me she's been in town again."
"I told you she'd been and gone a dozen times, Mother," Margaret
Brayton said without looking up from her needlepoint.
"Mrs. Rich witch, you mean?"
Johnny glanced at his brother. The offensive edge to his voice as
he'd asked that was surprising. He and Meg were the two who'd
learned quickest that silence was the best defense against their
father's subtle torture.
"Ristwich is the name." Dr. Brayton corrected him without
amusement or mockery. "But I'm afraid you have a right to resent
her activities, Pug. It's too bad she had to publicize her plans for
the Hopkins. She seems to have a sense of proprietorship that would
be offensive to any self-respecting institution. So nothing's happened.
I'm still hopeful we can work it out. If we can't, I'm wasting a good
deal of time."
He paused a moment. "Her other idea, to endow a project of
mine, is definitely out. I wouldn't consider moving it West." He
looked over at his wife. "I also regard my present marriage as com-
pletely permanent. Not soluble, even in aqua regis, if I may put
it that way. Not for all the oil of Araby."
In spite of himself, Johnny Brayton was moved by an aspect of
his father he had never known to exist. He looked at his mother,
expecting to see a quiet smile in her dark eyes, accepting the tribute.
But she wasn't smiling. She wasn't even looking at him. Her
head was bent over her work as if she hadn't heard or didn't know
it was her he was speaking to. For once Johnny was grateful to
Camilla Anne.
"I think that's just the sweetest thing! Mother! You're blushing!
You're actually blushing! It's simply divine!"
44


But she isn't blushing. Johnny felt a cold hand closing, tightening
everything inside him. He was the only one who wasn't delighted,
the only one who saw her hand quiver as she folded the needlepoint,
her dark head still bent over it.
"Why don't we all go in?" She looked up then, her face ivory
clear, serenely exquisite. "Take your glass with you, Mother, and
anyone else, if you wish."
They followed her across the hall into the dining room, Johnny
last. His heart was numb. It was strange none of the rest had seen.
Stranger that he'd never until then seen the significance of her
turning on him, hellfire blazing, the Sunday afternoon he'd knocked
at her door. Father always foocfe. He'd come that close to it but
had left it there. // was because I fooc%ed. She thought it was him.
That's why she turned on me.
He stopped in the dining room doorway, a kind of semi-paralysis
creeping over him, as he remembered the blazing fury. She hates
him. My God, she hates the living hell out of him. Our serene and
lovely Ma . . .
He watched her take her place at the head of the table, all her
graceful warmth intact again, or seemingly so in the softer lights
of the candles burning in the tall silver candelabra at each end of
the table. And suddenly Johnny's mind was moving again, his eyes
moving from her to the elaborate silver epergne on the Empire
plateau in the center of the long mahogany table, filled with flowers,
the dangling crystal cups in silver baskets filled with bunches of
purple grapes. He looked at it, seeing it for the first time. It had
always been there, always filled, even when he and Lolly were the
only ones left at home. It was only when his father was away that
it was moved off, over to the sideboard. It's a screen. It's so she
can sit at the end and not have to loo\ at him. Night after night.
My God, how awful. . .
Something moved then, uneasily chill, in a corner of his mind as
his father's words came back to him ... Regard my present marriage
as completely permanent. Not soluble even in aqua regis ...
What did he mean? It was corn. Pure corn. That's not his stuff.
What was he doing? He's trapped her. He was serving notice she
can't get away.
Johnny Brayton put his hand up and rubbed his brow to try to
clear his head, like a sleepwalker painfully awaking. He glanced
at his mother again. For an instant there was a shadow on her
45


CHAPTER
6
"Just wanted to see if you'd changed your mind, Officer."
Dave Trumper came through the arch into the living room and
turned back to Kerry, something almost like warmth in the silent
reappraisal he was giving her. The blonde pony pigtail was gone.
The blue-black sheen of her cap of short-cropped curls and the
glossy black of her unplucked brows made her blue eyes a deeper
more velvet blue and gave her skin a softer glow.
She smiled and shook her head. "I haven't changed it."
"Not when the guy's begging you to marry him?"
Her cheeks turned a deeper rose as she went out to the kitchen
to bring in the coffee she'd put on as soon as she brought her bags
in round four o'clock, knowing he'd be coming, and for what
purpose.
"Is there a new assignment?" She let the other question go.
"The Coral Seas. We've got a tip it's being used for a narcotics
drop for runners from South America. Three ships due the middle
of next week. You'll start tomorrow night. If you're still with us."
"I'm still with you. I said a year, Dave."
"That was before Brayton proposed via tape recorder.—And I
guess I better tell you what I did."
If it had been anybody else she would have thought he was em-
barrassed. "What did you do, Dave?"
"Well, he came down to see me."
Kerry laughed with sudden amusement. "Just tell me."
He gave her a dour grin. "I thought I'd scared him. I didn't want
him hunting you. But he was downtown, combing the joints. I had
my wife call him, cloak and dagger stuff, three a.m. She told him
17


you were okay, out of town till the heat was off, and you'd let him
know when you got back. So it's up to you." He grinned again.
"I'm doing my best for you, sugar. My advice is same as before. The
Coral Seas is a client of theirs. And like I told you—"
"I know. When he finds out I'm a policewoman—"
"That's right. Most people think policewomen go round in uni-
form and flat-heeled shoes, tough old biddies. Or they get 'em
mixed up with the crossing guards helping kids get home from
school. Nobody'd think you got on your working clothes right
now." He glanced at her cobalt-blue checked wool suit and high-
heeled blue pumps with something like approval. "Okay, lady. Call
me up when you change your mind."
Kerry picked up her bags to take them on in to her bedroom.
She put her overnight case on the chest of drawers, her eyes and Hps
suddenly soft as she opened it. It was a trick job with a false bottom
her brothers had given her as a big joke. And not as funny as
they'd thought. She released the hidden catch to lift the leather-lined
inset, and took out the only paper she'd carried that indicated she
was other than Kitty Kelly, an out-of-work hostess from a Miami
cocktail lounge. It was the strangest love letter a girl ever got, in
two typed paragraphs under a Baltimore Police Department letter-
head, a transcript the Inspector's secretary had sent her while they
were still checking the tape-recorded calls. The date at the top was
September 17th. Below it were the two messages she knew by
heart.
"Kerry," the first one said, "how can I ask a voice on a tape
recording that's pretending it's another girl to marry me? But I
need you, Kerry. I love you so much. You've got to quit this lousy
job and marry me. We'll go some place else and start from scratch.
I'm going nuts without you, Kerry."
The second said, "Mr. Brayton, Miss O'Keefe. Your voice is all
I've got, Kerry. Please come back. You're all my life. We'll work
things out. I'm asking you again—will you marry me, Kerry? I
never knew what it meant to be in love before. Please come back."
She bent her head, transmuting the cold type into the velvet rose-
colored warmth that came into her heart every time she read it.
Then she slipped the sheet back. She was closing the case when she
heard the rap on the door. She glanced in the mirror, smiling at
herself. Trumper again, back to see if she'd changed her mind. She
knew what he was doing, actually—needling her, not to make her


them to drag you to jail again, for the love of God? You just
don't understand! You don't realize what the hell you're doing!"
He was shouting at her then, saying bitterly angry things he
didn't mean, goading her finally beyond endurance.
"Stop it! Just stop it!" She blazed up suddenly, lashing back at
him, her cheeks burning, blue eyes as black as pitch. "You tell
me you'll marry me. On what? You've already said your take-
home pay is $40.56 a week. You've said Mr. Grimes only takes
people with families to feed and clothe them. Apprentice lawyers
in Baltimore aren't paid enough to live on. So what am I to do?
Quit my job and get one in a department store to pay the rent
and help feed us? Would that be respectable enough to suit you?"
She burst into tears then. "Oh, Johnny, I'm sorry! I didn't
mean it. But if you think I'm so horrible, just go away. Go away
and leave me alone. It's your family you love, it isn't me!"
He was still sick, but part of it was the sickness of his own
defeat. What she'd said was true, and the irony of it was espe-
cially bitter. If she were any one of a dozen other girls he could
think of there wouldn't be any problem of take-home pay. His
grandmother would subsidize him, as she did Pug doing his intern-
ship and his sister, Meg, not lavishly but enough to pay the rent,
keep a car and produce their young. It was the first time in Johnny
Brayton's life that he'd come smack up against the economic facts
of it.
He put his arms around her, holding her tight, waiting for the
storm of tears to be over. "I don't think you're horrible, Kerry.
And it's not because I love my family better . ."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I understand all that—"
"But the rest of it is true. I shouldn't have asked you to marry
me when I can't support you. But I can go somewhere else.
Grimes'll be glad—"
"No, you can't," she said quickly. "He took you for a year. You
can't just get up and say you've changed your mind."
She brushed the tears out of her eyes. "I know it all seems so
horrible to you, Johnny. But it isn't, really. Men don't make passes
at me. Even in the Mimosa Club I had a lot fewer than I've had
at cocktail parties or dinner next to some pillar of society. But it
isn't that even. You'll just have to take me as I am. If you can't bear
it—"
50


"If I have to bear it, I'll have to, Kerry. Until I can do something.
I can't live without you. It's been hell while you were gone."
They made it up then. It was an uneasy truce, a kind of con-
spiracy of silence of their own. She didn't tell him where she was
working, he didn't ask. He hurried up to her apartment for a
few minutes after the office whenever he could get away, before
the six o'clock deadline she set for them. On Sundays the whole
day and the whole evening was theirs. The rest of the time he
worked like a lead dog in an Arctic sledge. He wasn't happy but
it was better than nothing, and made him work harder than he'd
known he had it in him to work. And the fact that he wasn't
walking on air as he'd done the night of Pug's party saved him
even though he wasn't aware of it. His grandmother, watching
him, watching and waiting, held her hand.
And because his mother was as quietly serene as she'd ever been,
the night of Pug's party passed out of his mind, something he'd
dreamed. Or perhaps it was Mrs. Richwitch, coming back and
forth with such increasing regularity, her car and her chauffeur
calling for his father, so that he was almost never home when
Johnny was, that made the house seem more peaceful than it had
ever been. Until the week before Christmas, when reaching for
the stars he'd caught a shining handful only to look behind him
into the naked face of his own fear.
At one-thirty a. m. his phone rang. He sat bolt upright in bed,
his stomach turning over, the barred gate at the Pine Street Station
before his eyes again, and reached for the phone, heart-sick, expect-
ing to hear Mr. Grimes.
"JohnnyI" It was Kerry O'Keefe, her voice urgent.
"What's—where are you, Kerry?"
"Don't, Johnny . . I'm all right. I wanted to call you right away
so you wouldn't worry if you heard it on the radio. There was
a raid. Three of us got away. I'm not in jail, I'll be home in five
minutes. So go back to sleep, darling. You'll see it in the paper."
He saw it in the morning, a late flash on the back page. "Rackets
Squad Raid On The Coral Seas."
"Police raided the Coral Seas Club early this morning. A large
quantity of uncut heroin was found in the possession of two men
being held at Central Station.
"Rackets Division spokesmen said they believe the club has been
used as a narcotics drop for supplies coming in through the Port
5'


of Baltimore for some time. Officers cleared the club management
of any complicity. FBI agents working with the Rackets Division
were present at the raid."
Johnny Brayton was sick, also sore. He was more so as he read
the chatty article on the same page, with a picture of Major-General
Robert Wood Preston. The title was "Tubby Preston Omits The
Brass."
"Out at Friends School yesterday he was plain old Tubby on his
annual visit to his home town. With a twinkle in his blue eyes he
admits he thought the cavalry was still the place to ride a horse
when he quit school three weeks before graduation to join up. He
didn't find any hayburners, but there were plenty of tanks to take
apart. He went on to learn about mechanized warfare, and learned
so much that at forty-eight he's one of the youngest major-generals
in (continued on page 22)"
Johnny didn't bother to turn inside to page 22. The contrast
between the raid, with Kerry O'Keefe getting away just in time
not to be hauled off to jail, and the general, a friend of his family,
the guest of honor at a dinner at his grandmother's two nights
earlier, was a kind of last straw.
Another came when the phone rang a minute later.
"Johnny . . Nelson Grimes." Mr. Grimes was very cheerful.
"We've got some more girls at Pine Street. Drop around and—"
"Sorry." Johnny cut in curtly. "Get somebody else. I didn't go
into the law to foul its skirts on a pack of jackals."
He heard himself, appalled, and heard the appalled and also
dumbfounded silence thundering in his ear. My God. He took a
deep breath.
"Sorry, sir. If it'll embarrass you to fire me, I'm glad to resign."
"—Now, Johnny." Mr. Grimes, when he recovered, was smoother
than owl's grease. "That . . ah, that's the spirit I like to see. Ah . .
never beat about the bush. I'll send Dakers. You come have lunch
with me today. We've got old Parsons here. He's very pleased
with your job on the FTC reports. One o'clock, Crooked Lane
Club."
Johnny put the phone down, still shaken. Then he thought,.
Well, I'll be damned. He grinned suddenly, ate his breakfast and
set out, a free man . . which no doubt had a great deal to do with
that part of the rest of his day that ended abruptly and f righteningly
at seven-forty-five o'clock.
52


At five-fifteen he was at Kerry's apartment. "Kerry! We're set!"
He grabbed her in his arms, swinging her off the floor.
She stared breathlessly at him as he let her down. "I . . thought
you'd be—I mean, I've been dreading—"
"Listen, girl. The worm turned. And Mr. Grimes invited me to
lunch."
Kerry blinked. "Is that such an honor—"
"Hush and listen. Mr. Parsons was there. Senior partner of our
correspondents in San Francisco. When Grimes left he said what
about coming to the Coast when my year's up? How much was I
getting? When I told him he stared at me. He'll start me at seventy-
five hundred."
"Oh, Johnny!"
"He's going to write Grimes a letter but I'm not to tell him till
later."
He took her in his arms again, his face grave. "Will you marry
me, Kerry? In July? Promise me, Kerry. You do love me, don't
you?"
"I promise you, Johnny. I do love you—very much."
The golden peace was there again, until he released her and said,
"What did happen last night?"
"Oh, Johnny, don't let's start all that again. I don't want to talk
about it. And you're going to be furious . . I'm going home for—"
"Till the heat's off."
"That's right! What am I supposed to do—starve till July?"
"I'm sorry." He took her face in his hands. "I didn't mean it.
It's . . just the way any guy would feel. I love you so much. You're
not leaving tonight?"
She shook her head. "Tomorrow."
"Then we can celebrate." He bounced back among the stars.
"There's a place called the Fiesole. I saw their card on my mother's
desk. I've got to go home—I want to tell Ma about the job. I'll
get the car and—"
"I'll take a taxi and meet you there. I know where it is.—Now
please, Johnny—don't start getting sore again. It's just some arrange-
ments I've got to make. And I won't go if every other minute—"
"Sorry, sweet." He kissed her again. "Seven-thirty, as close as
you can make it."
Crossing Mt. Vernon Place he quickened his buoyant strides.
"Hi, Mrs. Remstad." The blonde lady next door was coming
53


down her brownstone steps. He greeted her warmly, in love with
all the world. "I haven't seen you for ages. You been away?"
"Yes. But I came back."
He stopped short. "Hey, what's the matter?" In the glow from
the flood lights on the Monument her face looked old and washed-
out, and her voice sounded dead, all the lilting warmth gone from
it. "You haven't been sick, have you?"
"No. Not sick. I just don't have the heart to go any place. Like
on a cruise, I mean. But you look like you got pink clouds to
walk on, Johnny."
"I have, Mrs. Remstad." Johnny laughed. "She's just said she'd
marry me. Just a few minutes ago."
He saw her jaw drop and her eyes open wide. "But Johnny . .
your family. What's your family going to say?"
If Mrs. Inga Remstad's jaw had dropped, Johnny Bray ton's
dropped farther. She saw it and flushed scarlet.
"Oh, I wouldn't have said that for anything, Johnny. I . . I
don't mean to butt in on your business. But.. I take walks at night,
when I can't sleep. I've seen you with her, over on Park, Sunday
nights. And I've seen her come out alone. She's an entertainer some
place, isn't she? I can always tell 'em. I used to have an act myself
once."
She was embarrassed, shifting her feet, her eyes fixed past him.
"That's why I figured your family wouldn't like it. Specially your
father in that fancy car."
Johnny looked around. It was there, Mrs. Richwitch's chauffeur
huddled at the wheel. He hadn't noticed it till then, and he started
to move on, to avoid another meeting like the last one. But Mrs.
Remstad didn't move.
"I was surprised myself, because when I saw her with you she
looked just like . . like one of your own friends."
You're always seen, love.
"And I . . I wanted to talk to you. Johnny. You're like I was,
sort of. We had a farm, in northern Minnesota. We had all sorts
of stuff to eat, wild ducks, geese, deer in winter, all the fish we
wanted and stuff we grew. Everything but money. Any money my
father had he hid. Under a slab of stone in the root cellar. He didn't
trust banks. Then when my mother died and he married again
it was a hard life—too hard for me. So a Wild West show came
through and they let the locals show off and the man said I could
54


come with them. That's how I got in the show business. I was
pretty good, too."
With her pride a little of Mrs. Remstad's gloss came back.
"But what I'm saying is, it was in the flush days. This fella and
me in my act was making money hand over foot. They'd throw it
at you, the stage covered like winter oats. Everybody was in the
market, except me. I kept mine in my sock, like Pa. Then when
the bust came, this broker was running around like he had fits,
saying My God, now's the time to get rich—if you had any dough.
Me, I had it. I just kept enough so if I had another accident, because
this jerk I had the act with went off his nut once and shot me
and blew his brains out. We had a sort of take-off on a Western."
Mrs. Remstad glanced up at the Braytons' door and lowered her
voice.
"To make a long story short, what I'm getting at is if you want
to marry this girl and they don't like it and you need any money,
I got it and I'd be glad to let you have it. I know young lawyers
don't make anything. I staked too many of 'em. That's why I say
you're like I was. You got everything as long's you stay home, but
they won't give you the dough to marry on if they don't like it.
And I'd be proud to help you. You're the only one's been decent to
me. You sent me postcards from camp one summer. I guess you've
forgot, but I never have. And a May basket once."
Did I? He'd completely forgotten. Small crumbs of bread cast
on the waters of a lonely life.
"Thanks, Mrs. Remstad. Thanks a lot. But we're all set now.
I'm going to get a better job."
"Oh, that's fine, Johnny. But don't you let anybody talk you out
of it. You just marry her and don't say a thing. Specially to your
parents. But I didn't mean to keep you this long. It's just that I . .
I got no more use for all the dough I got. Well, 'night, Johnny.
You go easy but you stick to it."
Johnny let himself into the house. As he shut the door old
Horace came in at the back in his Sunday suit.
"I didn't 'spect you home, Johnny. Lolly's having dinner out
an' the Doctor's just getting ready to go."
"Where's Ma?"
"She didn't say. She just left."
Even though it was on her desk Johnny had seen the Fiesole
card, it would never in the world have occurred to him that that
f
55


"I was afraid you'd got a shock of some kind," she said quiedy.
"I thought I'd better get you out, if they were friends of yours.
What about Gino's? It's just around the block."
He was grateful, warmly and intensely grateful. But he couldn't
tell then or any time the rest of the evening whether she knew it
was his mother. Or whether she'd heard them. Or what she'd heard
sitting there before he came.
57


CHAPTER
7
In February, only four months and three days left till July, Kerry
was back. If the joy of having her was racked by the agony of her
job, Johnny Brayton's own job didn't give him much leisure to
worry, and because there was hope it was no longer a grind. A
working agreement to keep the peace gave them Sundays together
and anytime he could drop in between five and the six o'clock
deadline. When he couldn't and was working late she'd drive up to
Mt. Vernon Place after she got off. He'd meet her down on the
other side of the Monument, across from the Peabody Institute,
drive home with her to put her car in the alley garage, wait till he
saw her lights go on and walk back home through the silent streets.
It was always his Kerry, not Miss Reeves. She had a bottle of
flower mist and cotton in the glove compartment, so the make-up
was gone, her hair combed back down to its glossy close-fitting cap
again.
It was also in the glove compartment that he found her gun
one day. It was a Sunday toward the end of April. They were out
in the Valley eating a picnic lunch in a field under an oak tree
and he'd opened the compartment to find some cigarettes. Her
heart sank as he came back with it in his hand, his jaw hard.
"Kerry—what's this?"
"That? Why, that's a gun, Johnny." She kept her voice light,
determined not to lose her own temper. "The permit's in my bag
if you'd like to see it."
"Do you know how to use it?"
She took it and released the safety. "See that splotch of fungus
on the oak? The top one in the center?"
5*


The gun cracked and the grey-green dust splattered.
He looked at her oddly. "Where'd you learn to shoot, pardner?"
"My father and brothers. Tin cans on stumps. Then at school."
She didn't say the school was the Police Academy or mention the
target range at Central Headquarters.
"My mother's the only other gal I know that could have hit that
bull's-eye that neat."
I've got to be more careful. It was excitement that made her for-
get to take it out of the compartment the night before. For the
last two weeks she'd been working with Sergeant Burns of the
New York Racket Squad, Dave Trumper behind the scenes, at a
place called the Hay Ride Club, tipped off that a character badly
wanted in New York and elsewhere was holed in there. Last night
she'd caught the first sign that the tip might be right. There was
always excitement, mounting tension, among all of them when it
seemed likely they were closing in on any job. And it was that
that made her neglect to look through the one-way disk, three
days later, before she opened her door.
That was a Wednesday. Johnny had been and gone and she was
hurrying to get dressed and do her makeup before Sergeant Burns
came to pick her up. They had bracketed their man, by a simple
thing, his habit of eating sour rye bread sprinkled with carroway
seeds and his addiction to a brand of expensive Scotch whiskey far
different from that dispensed to its regular clients by the Hay Ride
Club. All they had to find out was who the midnight snack was
taken to.
"Maybe tonight," Kerry said to her unrecognizable self in the
mirror. "But just calm down, Officer O'Keefe." She put on some
extra rouge, tightening the screw of one dime-store earring as she
heard the rap at the door. She glanced at her watch. It was early
but Burns was probably as tense as she was, even if he didn't show
it. She ran out, putting on the other earring as she went, dropped
it as she got to the door and stooped down to retrieve it with one
hand as she opened the door with the other.
"You're early—"
As she caught the fragrance of Parma violets she stopped short
and looked up quickly. A woman's feet, elegantly shod, were what
she saw first. It was a lifetime, her heart still as a stone, before she
got herself unsteadily erect to see the handsome figure in a grey
suit and silver-blue mink stole with the violets held by a diamond
59


cluster, the blue-white hair under a small close-fitting hat of blue
silk violets, the determined jaw, patrician nose, and the sharp old
eyes, cold grey as a shark's, that were fixed on her.
"Miss O'Keefe? I'm Mrs. John Summerfield. You know my
grandson, I believe. I wonder if you'd allow me to come in a few
moments. Unless it will make you late for your work, of course."
There are moments too awful to do anything but rise to them
face to face.
"Please come in, Mrs. Summerfield." Where her voice came from
and how it managed to sound as steady as it did, she never knew.
"Sit down, won't you?"
She saw the old eyes take complete inventory of the room with-
out an apparent movement of the regal head, and return to her,
moving very deliberately, beginning at her gold sandals, up the
tawdry cheapness of the beaded evening dress, reaching her face,
ending on the single dime-store earring dangling against her jaw.
Kerry stood quietly, her own face as expressionless as the stony
face examining her.
"I've been anxious to meet you, Miss O'Keefe. I've had such con-
flicting reports about you. Originally you were a . . a blonde."
Mrs. Summerfield sat down, majestically erect, the soft fragrance
of the violets stirring the air as she moved. Kerry was aware of her
eyes doing another detailed appraisal of the room.
"You rent your apartment furnished, I presume."
"No," Kerry said. "Everything's mine. Including the paint."
"Then perhaps I've been misled, Miss O'Keefe."
Mrs. Summerfield was no less forbidding, but in some way less
openly offensive. "Perhaps it's your . ." Her eyes moved to the
beaded dress again, up to the mascara'd lashes, meeting Kerry's,
the Medusa steadiness unchanged as she hesitated. "Your present—"
"Get-up, I believe is the word, Mrs. Summerfield." Kerry sup-
pressed an almost irresistible desire to laugh, and saw the shark's-
eyes dart at her.
"Thank you. I see now that we understand each other, Miss
O'Keefe. So I'm sure you'll understand my concern for my grand-
son, and understand why I felt it necessary to have a private investi-
gator supply me with some information about you."
For the first time Kerry's eyes wavered. If they'd found out she
was a policewoman it could wreck the Hay Ride job.
As Mrs. Summerfield watched her there was a glint of satisfac-
60


tion in her own eyes. "During the time you were employed at the
Coral Seas Club," she added. "And what concerns me is what
possible interest you can have in my grandson. You don't by any
chance think he can . ."
She moved her gloved hand, not sure how to say it.
". . Raise your standard of living . . let's say? Because I can
assure you, my dear child, that that's a forlorn hope. It'll be a good
many years before he can feed and clothe himself. And I should
very much regret having to change the provisions I've made for
him. It's conceivable, of course, that you've fallen in love with him.
In that case I can't believe you'd deliberately destroy his chances
of advancement. You must realize how far apart your worlds are.
I should imagine it must cause you as much embarrassment as
it does him, not to be able to invite you into his home, to meet
his family and his friends. If he's ashamed of you now, Miss
O'Keefe, when he's apparently fascinated by you, it's hardly likely
he won't suffer far more acutely at a later date. I'm thinking of
your happiness as well as his."
"Thank you, Mrs. Summerfield." Kerry had relaxed again. Either
the private detective hadn't found out she was a policewoman or
had kept his mouth shut not to jeopardize his relations with Head-
quarters.
"You've never been abroad, have you, Miss O'Keefe?" Mrs.
Summerfield was quite pleasant.
"No, I never have."
"From the pictures on your walls, I'd judge you might find a
few years in France and Italy very interesting. If it were arranged
so you could live in reasonable comfort—even in luxury, Miss
O'Keefe, I'm sure you—"
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Summerfield." Kerry rose abruptly.
"It's a little absurd to pretend you're sensitive, Miss O'Keefe,"
Mrs. Summerfield said easily. "Not with the evidence I have of
your . . professional activities."
She got to her feet. "Women have to be practical, my dear child.
In a currency that has nothing to do with moonlight and roses.
Think it over, Miss O'Keefe. And if you should prefer something
more bizarre than a trip abroad, as you easily may considering your
present choice of occupation, it can be arranged. Life in Baltimore
is not that, I'm afraid."
"On the contrary, Mrs. Summerfield," Kerry said. "I think it's
6/


exceedingly bizarre. Like your being here now for example. And I
hope you'll forgive me if I find it offensive as well as bizarre. So
if you'll excuse me . ."
She went to the door.
There were few times in Mrs. Summerfield's life when she was
speechless. And then not for long.
"The truth's frequently offensive, my dear." She followed Kerry
and stopped in the doorway. "But I'm not trying to offend you.
I'm merely asking you to consult your own interest as well as my
grandson's. All for love or the world well lost is very fine indeed
until there are bills to pay and your clothes get seedy and your
former friends avoid you. Think it over. It's purely a business
proposition. My number's in the phone book. I shall be at home
until five o'clock tomorrow evening. I shall expect to hear from
you before then. I shall be most reluctant to take any further step."
Kerry closed the door and stood for an instant, waiting for some
kind of reaction, of anger, shame, remorse, something. There was
nothing. She had no feeling of any kind. It was not until she got
home that night, the lingering fragrance of the Parma violets still
in the room, and looked at herself in the mirror, that the reaction
came. She put her head down, hot with shame. How horrible. How
horrible she must thin\ I am. How could she help it! But it would
have been the same thing if she'd 
own I was a policewoman.
I ought to tell him, she thought. But when Johnny came for a
few minutes around five-thirty the next night she didn't tell him,
or tell him that Mrs. Summerfield had given her till then to make
up her mind.
So Johnny Brayton went whistling up the brownstone steps at
five minutes past six without warning.
"Hi, Johnny dear." Camilla Anne greeted him gaily from the
front parlor. She was holding one end of a rope covered with laurel
leaves, Horace holding the other, fixing it across the open double
doors of the gold-and-white room.
He stopped. "Hi. What goes on?"
"Pilgrimage, darling. You know. House and Garden tour. Annual
event. I promised Mother if she'd open again I'd do the work and
be hostess-in-chief. I expected Lolly'd help, but she's scooted off
again. And Grandmother's upstairs. You'd better take her a spot
of bourbon. There's no admittance here."
"Gran can have my bottle."
62


He took the steps three at a time before she could decide she
needed more help.
"Hi, Gran." He met her at the top of the staircase. "What about
a quick snort with me on the third floor?"
She looked at him, not offering her cheek, not smiling. "No
thank you, Johnny." She pulled on her gloves. "I'm taking Camilla
Anne home for dinner now. Your mother's in her room. She'd like
to see you, I believe."
He looked at her, surprised but not alarmed. She was crotchety
at times. "Okay, lady. May I assist you down the stairs first,
ma'am?"
"No, Johnny."
He waited nevertheless till she was safely down, turned blithely
to his mother's door and opened it. "Hi, Ma." He took a buoyant
step into her sitting room and stopped, his feet frozen into the pile
of the eggshell carpet. "Mother!"
She was sitting erect by the table in front of the window, her
body rigid, her eyes with great deep circles under them, wells of
agony in the deadly pallor of her face.
He sprang across the rug toward her, his heart curdled with fear.
"Ma . . what's the matter? For God's sake, what is it?"
When he was almost to her she rose quickly, her body taut, her
eyes on him compelling him to stop. She moved her hand, flicking
it back to the table, to the white square of paper lying there. She
flicked it forward at him.
"—Is this true, Johnny? Is this the girl you go to see? Is this the
girl you've fallen in love with?"
Her voice, not raised, was coming quietly from the depths of
hell.
He stared at her, his hand moving in a slow-motion arc to take
the glossy print she held face up in her hand. Her face was so
ghastly that it held him in a Medusa grip as he took the picture,
moved his eyes down then, and froze again in the sudden depths
of a hell all his own. It was Kerry. Kerry coming out of the Coral
Seas Club, the name spangled over the cut-out, by the door just
behind her, of a larger than life-size almost nude stripper, holding
a filmy black petticoat in one hand and a glass of champagne
bubbling in the other. And Kerry . . He closed his eyes, sicker
than he'd ever been.
r
63


"Is it true . . or isn't it, Johnny." His mother's voice was deadly
still.
"It . . is and it isn't, Mother. This isn't what she's—"
"Please, Johnny." She put her hand up quickly. "Please don't.
Are you . . are you living with her?"
"No! I'm not living with her! I'm going to—"
"You are going to marry her?"
"Yes. I am."
"Good." Her eyes were bright, deadly bright. "That's all, Johnny.
There's only one other thing. Never bring her here. Never let me
see her. Go now. That's alL"
"But Mother—"
"I said go, Johnny." Her voice was beginning to break as he
moved backwards. "—Oh God, I could kill him. I could kill him!"
She stumbled back into her chair, her head on her arms on the
table, her body shaking.
"Mother .. " He started back, but she flashed up, her eyes blazing.
"Go, I said! Go, Johnny! Leave me alone! And take that thing."
She thrust her hand out at the picture fallen face up on the
floor, the larger than life-size stripper obscenely vivid. "Take it
away. I can't bear it. My Johnny! My son! Go now, please. Go
away, love."
He bent down and picked it up, crushing it in his hand.
"Please, Mother—"
"No, Johnny." She'd drawn herself together again, her voice
serene, her face still ghastly. "Go now. And close the door if you
will, please. Tell Horace I won't be down for dinner. I'm not at
home if anybody calls. Thank you, love."
He closed the door and stood in the empty hall. There was no
sound anywhere except his Aunt Elizabeth Brayton's perpetual
television.
"My God, she could die there and nobody'd ever know it," he
thought with an irrelevance that was the measure of his shock.
"—No, I guess not." He saw Horace trudging up the back stairs
with her supper tray.
He trudged on up himself and met the old man in the third
floor hall.
"I won't be home for dinner," he said. "You'd better send my
mother a tray—a little later, not right now. Is my father home?"
64


given him as a present when he passed his bar exams and most
of his lunches came in on his club bills that his grandmother paid.
You brought nothing into this world, you take nothing out of it.
He didn't mean to be irreverent. It was merely a fact, in the kind
of death he was dying. The taste of the bitter hemlock of his
dependency on the old woman who'd put Kerry's picture in his
mother's hands was the bitter taste of his mangled pride. If he
hadn't been a fool it wouldn't have happened. He could see now
that they'd left his mother out of the conspiracy of silence. It
was literally true that Camilla Anne had told her he'd met an old
school friend, of course at his grandmother's direction. His mother
hadn't known. She'd known there was a girl, but she'd never ques-
tion the kind of girl . .
He closed his eyes and bent his head again. He could see his
grandmother bringing the horrible picture out. It was before
Christmas that Kerry was at the Coral Seas. That was how long
she'd been watching and waiting.
He started to push his chair back and get up when he saw the
envelope propped against the row of law books at the back of the
desk, "Johnny" written across it. The handwriting was his father's.
He got up without taking it and went over to the closet to get out a
suitcase. He thought then I might as well get the works, went back,
picked up the envelope and opened it. Inside was a leaf torn from
a pad. Memorandum from Dr. Brayton was printed at the top.
The memorandum from Dr. Brayton said: "Johnny, I hear you're
causing the ladies of the family some concern. Have breakfast with
me in my study if you will. I'm sure we can find a civilized way
to manage, to the satisfaction of all parties. I've had a good deal
of experience in these matters.—P. B."
There's always been a Mrs. Ristwich of one sort or another in
his life. He could hear his mother at the Fiesole again.
"—I doubt if you've had any experience at all in this matter,
sir." He touched his lighter to a corner of the note and dropped it
onto the carbonized stripper. "—The hell with you, Memorandum
from Dr. Brayton." He went on with his packing, taking as little
as possible, a half-empty tube of toothpaste he had to hunt a cap
for instead of a new one Horace had put there.
His mother's door was locked when he went downstairs. He'd
known it would be, and slipped the note he'd written her under it.
"My dearest Ma, —She's not like that. I tried to tell you about her
66


the Sunday I met her. I'd like to tell you, whenever you'll listen.
I love you, Ma.—Johnny."
He went down the stairway through the silent hall. The place
was full of flower arrangements, the doors all barred with laurel-
covered ropes to keep the feet of the unchosen from sacred carpets
and their hands from bric-a-brac.
67


she saw him, across the pavement, and hurried down, stopping for
a car to pass before she crossed. The headlights catching her face,
its rosy makeup gone, her bright hair pulled to a hasty bun on the
nape of her neck, made her look older than he'd ever thought her,
and in an odd way sort of raddled.
"You're not leaving, Johnny . .?"
She caught his arm.
"I'm leaving."
"Oh, no .. that's crazy." Her grip tightened. "Come on over and
sit down a minute." She went through the bushes to a bench on
the sunken walk around the interior gardens of the plaza and sat
down, pulling her coat around her, sticking her feet in the fancy
mules back under the seat. "What've they done to you, Johnny?"
She was so distressed, so whole-heartedly on his side, that it
was easy to unburden. Commensurate with proper dignity of course,
Johnny Brayton thought as he heard himself telling her, a little
stiffly, careful not to overstate his case.
"My grandmother showed my mother a picture of Kerry coming
out of the Coral Seas. My mother blew her top. Naturally. It's all
my fault. If I'd come clean when it all started, none of it would
have happened."
"That was the place they raided," Mrs. Remstad said. "She's
not a stripper. You can tell the way they walk, even when they
got their clothes on. I could tell she wasn't a high-class entertainer.
What is she, one of these sitters they got the heat on in the clean-up
drive they making all the stink about?"
Johnny Brayton stiffened, and relaxed.
"That's it," he said calmly. "But she's my girl. I don't give a
damn what she does."
"That's the stuff, Johnny!" said Mrs. Remstad.
He was aware again that when she was talking about show busi-
ness she was likely to lapse into a rudimentary speech she didn't
use when she was being the proper householder on Mt. Vernon
Place.
"—But you're just like 'em. You got pride. That's your trouble.
That's why you're clearing out. I offered you the dough. You could
of married her and they'd of all been behind you like a fire wall,
like it or hate it. But you were too proud to take my dough. Listen,
Johnny. You aren't cuttin' your own throat, walkin' out. It's the
girl's throat."
69


She picked up his suitcase before he knew she was doing it and
was clacking across the street to his own steps when he caught up
with her.
"It don't do any good to go off half-cocked, Johnny. Like me.
I keep figurin' why should I sit here on this fancy street, nobody
speaking to me, when I should go places and do things? What the
hell do I get? It's a laugh. But I guess it wears you down, living
here. My heart don't seem to be in it, havin' a good time. 'Bye,
Johnny. Just take it easy."
Put your pride in your pocket, honey. He put it there and walked
back up the steps. As he got to the door it opened.
"Evenin', Mr. Johnny," Horace said. "You take your bag up
and I'll fix you somethin' to eat in the kitchen. There's plenty of
fried chicken."
The familiar formula that had greeted him coming home from
school or visits as long as he could remember relieved him of any
ignominy. One part of it was missing—"Your Ma's sure goin' to
be mighty glad to see you, Johnny. 'Deed an' she is, boy."—and *"
he felt the hollow place it left. But when he passed her door the
other side of the picture flashed suddenly into his mind. My God,
of course she's shocked. How couldn't she be? If he'd been frozen
sick himself, how could she, knowing nothing, coming cold on the
obscene cutout, how should she be anything but brutally, horribly,
unbearably shocked? But she'll listen to me. She's always listened.
When he went to sleep, feeling better now he'd seen it wasn't all as
lost as it had seemed before, the only hurdle he really had was the
Memorandum from Dr. Brayton.
It was bleakly in his mind the first thing in the morning. But
as he was tying his tie he learned that the age of miracles hasn't
passed, as commonly supposed. Also that the toad though venomous
can yet wear a precious jewel in her hair. With his coffee came
another Memorandum from Dr. Brayton folded on the tray.
"Johnny—I forgot the Garden Tour. C.A. asked me to be out
early. It seems my study is to be on view. May we breakfast another
time?—P.B."
"We may indeed, sir." Johnny glanced at the clock and reached
for the phone. He dialled Kerry's unlisted number.
"Hi, Kerry. Sorry to wake you—"
"Oh, Johnny, I'm so glad you did." Her voice always came wide-
awake and fresh as dawn. "I've got a long and bitter day—" She
7'


broke off, laughing. "What I mean is, I've got to shop. Shoes and
things."
His always instant alarm at any change in her routine wiped
out the pleasure of hearing her voice. "You're not—"
"No. No, precious." She laughed gaily. "Everything's beautiful.
It's just that I'm frantically busy. I was going to call you. I won't
be able to see you today or tomorrow . . but next week, Johnny?
I'm taking the whole week off to get a little springtime and fresh
air. I'll see you every minute you can spare. Is that agreeable to
you, Mr. Bray ton?"
He put the phone down, the gaiety of her voice still vibrating
through him. What if I'd seen her? What if I'd told her? In his
mind's eye he could see Mrs. Remstad, a blessing in disguise, a
guardian angel in clacking mules. He collected his briefcase and
went whistling out the door and downstairs, stopping at his
mother's door. Camilla Anne was just going to his father's study.
"She's gone, dear. To Gibson Island, for the day—to get the
house ready. Lolly's going to use it for a honeymoon cottage. Just
think, her wedding's less than a month away . . invitations out.
Or have you noticed, darling?"
It was a crack, but who cared, with the promised week so blithe
a thing? He smiled happily at Camilla Anne and went on down-
stairs. It was the last time he was to smile at her, and the promised
week was to be a living hell.
Kerry O'Keefe put her own phone down and hurried barefoot
to the kitchen to start coffee, her eyes dancing.
What if I'd told him? It was the nearest thing to a bad slip she'd
made for a long time. Unless he'd think the Baltimore City Police
had gone stark raving mad, assigning a female sitter to escort the
Women's League for Municipal Improvement on a House and
Garden Tour.
It was a crazy deal anyway. She could still hear Dave Trumper,
as grim about it as she was herself.
"So that's the way it is, Exhibit A," he said, heavy with disgust.
"They represent twenty-five districts out of the forty-eight states.
This Mrs. Parker's the head girl of the outfit. She heard the dean
of your college on Careers for Women in the Modern Municipality,
for God's sake. Our Miss O'Keefe's a policewoman in Baltimore,
says the dean. So you're tapped by personal request to the Com-
missioner himself. And we all figured it's easier to let you go than
72


try to explain. Nobody from the Hay Ride's out looking at Chip-
pendale rugs and vases. It sounds crazy right at this point, but they
figured the angles and this looks the safest."
"But I don't even know which houses are open, Dave."
"With these babes you don't have to know from nothing, sugar."
"And twenty-five of them." Kerry's heart sank lower.
"Plus one from Texas along for the ride. You meet 'em at nine-
thirty a.m. They got their own bus. And you can't spread your
gospel about The Lady Cops Your Daughter's Career. They been
told they're not to mention you being a lady cop. We figured a
little cloak and dagger'd seal their lips. The security angle, that
they understand."
And it hadn't been as grim as Kerry expected it to be. At the
famous gold bathtub at Evergreen she finally relaxed and began to
enjoy herself. Mrs. Parker the head girl was a nice and capable
woman, and all of them seemed to be walking encyclopedias of
period furniture, china, glass, flowers and trees. All of them except
the lady along for the ride.
There's bound to be a poison pup, Kerry thought tolerantly,
giving as wide a berth as possible to this one as she gave each
successive hostess a full resume of her life and times, particularly
of the fabulous collections owned by some woman named Alice
Rich, boiling in oil down Texas way. Or so Kerry gathered from
the farthest distance possible, fascinated with a Baltimore that was
the farthest distance possible from the one she best knew.
"You've been most helpful, Miss O'Keefe," Mrs. Parker said
round four o'clock when they were on their way down St. Paul
Street back to town. "I wonder if you're up to just one more? Or
are you dead on your feet, poor child?"
No bat's wing fanned Kerry's smiling face, no icy premonitory
shiver chilled her spine. "Oh no. I've had a delightful day. I'd love
to see another one."
"Well, I'm certainly glad," said the poison pup, with a touch of
rancor in her voice. "Because I talked to Alice Ristwich last night
and she said we simply had to see Dr. Brayton's house if we
didn't see a single other one."
No premonitory chill. Nothing but an instantaneous plunge into
the deepest pit. Kerry sat stunned, unable to speak, hardly able
to breathe.
"You can relax," Mrs. Parker said. "I merely thought we wouldn't
*
73


want to impose on Miss O'Keefe if she was tired. She's not as used
to this sort of thing as we are." She turned to Kerry. "So many of
us have know patients of Dr. Brayton. We'd have been sorry to
miss his house."
Oh, no. What can I do? Kerry closed her eyes. What if his grand-
mother's there? Even if she doesn't recognize me . . But it wasn't
that. It was the tacit unspoken understanding she and Johnny
Brayton had that as long as she was a sitter she couldn't be asked
into the house. Now she was crashing in . . It would have been
horrible enough before his grandmother's visit. It had a special
kind of ignominy now she'd been told she was not of their birth,
not of their breed.
I've got to do something. A sudden hope dawned on her as the
bus turned into the narrow crowded street on the north side of
the plaza, and died as suddenly as it swerved around the west end
of the gardens, and two cars pulled out from in front of the brown-
stone mansion and the bus driver swung deftly into their place.
There was little chance of her losing herself now. Still less when
Mrs. Parker said, "You take the tickets, dear."
Kerry took them, her feet and hands numb as she mounted the
steps to the open door.
"These ladies are from the League for Municipal Improvement
meeting in Washington." She heard herself introducing them as
she'd done in each house. Each time before she'd introduced Mrs.
Parker as their leader, but she didn't have a chance this time. The
poison pup had steamed ahead of everybody. Kerry heard her.
"My great friend Alice Ristwich said we must be sure to come,"
she was saying brightly.
Kerry heard a voice not bright but formally gracious.
"My father-in-law is devoted to Mrs. Ristwich. I'm Mrs. Pierce
Brayton Jr."
Camilla Anne, that Johnny doesn't li. Kerry was still at the
ticket table by the door. She slipped over to get as far in the corner
as she could while the rest gathered in the double door of the front
parlor. She heard Camilla Anne's voice muffled by the pounding
of the blood in her own ears, and turned back to the front door
to breathe the fresh cool air.
"—Can anybody get in?"
A large blonde woman in a green dress and mink stole had come
up the steps.
74


"Anybody's who's got a dollar." The nice girl taking tickets
laughed, and so did the blonde woman. As she went in, Kerry
heard a sharp break for an instant in the flow of Camilla Anne
Brayton's discussion of the Aubusson carpet. It went on again, but
it was definitely cooler.
"It's surprising the different kinds of people interested in the
houses, isn't it?" the nice girl said to Kerry. "I'm Polly Putnam.
You're from the Central Committee, aren't you?"
But before Kerry could answer Polly Putnam's face had lighted
and she got quickly to her feet. "Oh, hello, Mrs. Bray ton! We've
had streams of people. Lunch was divine."
Kerry caught her breath at the sight of the woman coming up
the steps. Oh . . she is beautiful. Her face was very pale, her dark
eyes somehow poignantly sad, until she stopped just inside the
door and smiled at Polly. And smiled at Kerry O'Keefe.
"I'm glad," she said. "You precious lambs, you both look
exhausted." She was still in the doorway. "Polly, would you think
I was a dog if I just slipped around the back way upstairs? I'm not
up to seeing many people." She moved back out, smiling at them
again. "You're angels to help out. Thank you so much, girls."
Kerry's heart sank lower. Not denying she was a helper made
her even more of an imposter. The girl at the table leaned forward
then. "Look . . the rest of the hostesses are out in the kitchen with
their shoes off having a drink. Why don't you slip out for a slug?
You look bushed."
Camilla Anne was dog-tired. She gave up and moved over to
the stairs. "—I'll be right here if you have any questions." She
wanted to slip off her shoes for a minute, but Mrs. Richwitch's
friend was right there with her, more interested in telling her about
her own and Mrs. Richwitch's antiques than she was in looking
at the Braytons'. But there was always one or two on every tour.
Camilla Anne fixed a glassy smile on her face, closed her ears and
let her mind roam.
There's Mother leaving, sneaking around bac\. I hope she didn't
see that awful Mrs. Remstad. She's just being offensive, trailing
her min\s in here. But a dollar's a dollar. I wonder who that pretty
girl is Polly's talking to. She must be from the Committee. Some-
body I ought to 
ow. Her face loo\s familiar. I've seen her
somewhere. She tried to catch Kerry's eye to smile at her but
couldn't.
75


CHAPTER
9
It was the next night that was the night of May ist.
Johnny Brayton, late from the office, let himself in the front
door and paused for an instant. The heavy clouds gathering in a
chill drizzle sent lengthening shadows through the open rooms.
The house was curiously still, or the quality of its silence curious.
He put his hat on the table, only home for a moment to pick up
some papers to take back to the office library, and stopped again,
listening. The voice he heard seemed to be his father's, speaking
in a musical cadence, richly vibrant, as if reading something or
reciting. It came, or seemed to come, from the Common Room,
a place where his father never went. He was always, for as long
as Johnny could remember, closed up in his study on the second
floor whenever he was home. / must be nuts, Johnny thought.
Deeply puzzled, he went quietly along to the foot of the stairs.
A narrow fraction of light showed along the edge of the Common
Room door. He listened again.
Call her once before you go.
Call once yet.
In a voice that she will know:
"Margaret! Margaret I"
Something more chilling than the rain crept uneasily down his
spine.
Children's voices should be dear
(Call once more) to a mother's ear:
Children's voices, wild with pain.
Surely she will come again.
r
77


He went quietly on up the stairs then. But the chill sharpened.
He was more deeply perplexed when he looked in at the open
door of his mother's room and saw her hat and furs, gloves and bag
lying on a chair. It was strange she'd be down there listening to
him reading her love poems, feeling about him the way there was
no possible doubt she did feel. But it wasn't any of his business.
He went on upstairs. As he started to collect his papers he remem-
bered suddenly the night of Pug's birthday. / regard my present
marriage as completely permanent. . . Not soluble even in aqua
regis . . and the utter hopelessness on his mother's face that brief
moment at the dinner table.
He went back into the hall, listening again. All he could hear
was the sounds from the TV set in the front room. He went
quietly down the stairs, his feet silent on the marble treads. I'll act
as if I'd just come in. At the bottom he stopped, listening to the
strangely thrilling, almost hypnotic voice.
. . dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she.
She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.
There was a long pause. Then something like a torn sob broke
the silence, and he heard his father's voice again: "—Margaret!
Margaret!"
Johnny went noiselessly across the hall and switched on the
lights. "Hi . . anybody home?"
There was the sharp movement of a chair and the Common
Room door was torn open. His mother came running, swaying as
she ran, her face, terror-drawn, deathly pale.
"Johnny . . " She seemed about to faint as she reached him,
clinging to him, her heart pounding, her body cold, shaking like a -
dead branch in a freezing wind. There was no sign of his father.
It was almost as if a disembodied voice had done the reading.
"Hi, Ma. Let's have a drink upstairs." He made his voice cheer-
fully casual.
Her steps were so faltering that he would have carried her except
that he was afraid his father would come out and see him. Inside
her room he did pick her up, brushed her things off the chaise
longue and laid her down, cold and pale but not shaking any
more except for an occasional convulsive tremor. Her head lay
78


house. She knew that from the overtone, a muffled reverberation.
She looked quickly up and down the houses on either side of the
central garden, empty now in the chilling rain, then around to
see if the post officer had heard the shots and was coming. No
policeman was in sight. The reports seemed to have come from
the other side of the street and from somewhere above the first
floor level. The budded trees hid most of her view if anybody was
opening an upstairs window. She waited, listening intently, but
there was nothing, no confusion, no door burst open, no car stop-
ping. The only sound was from a dance orchestra somewhere and
a high soprano giving voice at the Peabody. No pedestrians were
wandering around in the rain, chilling to Kerry herself in the
trench coat one of the detectives had thrown around her as they
pushed her out of the Hay Ride Club as the near-riot broke loose.
She'd been running for her car when she heard the crash of shots
down there, and there'd been shouting and confusion. Here she
heard nothing at all. Nothing but silence and the swish of cars
on the wet pavement round the Monument, and the sound of
music in the dripping air.
She got back in her car and checked the time. It was eighteen
minutes to eleven when she'd looked at the clock on the dash. She'd
been out of the car when the second came. They weren't fired in
rapid succession, at least five or six seconds between them, not
crack-crack as they'd come at the Hay Ride Club. She sat there
restlessly, watching for the post officer or a police car, no idea now of
driving around for Johnny. Her job was to stay until an officer came
into sight, to see that nobody came running, or walking, from the
scene of an accident—or a crime. She watched the minute hand of
the clock move. One minute, two, three. It was moving to the
seventh minute when she saw a door burst open. The Braytons' door.
She stiffened sharply, opened her door and was out again. A woman
in a bathrobe was running down the steps, waving her arms, look-
ing frantically up and down the street. Kerry was running instantly,
through the rain, across the gardens, pulling the belt of her trench
coat tighter as she ran.
The woman was not Mrs. Brayton. It must be his aunt Eliza-
beth. My aunt's not bats precisely, just a gently harmless addict to
the dope dispensed via her TV set on the third floor. That flashed
through her mind as she reached the sidewalk and heard a voice
82


calling down from the second floor window of the other brown-
stone house adjoining.
"—What's happened, Miss Brayton? Do you want me to call for
help? But there's a policeman coming."
Kerry saw the post officer, running from Charles Street. She
stopped on the steps till he came up.
"I'm Policewoman O'Keefe. Assigned to Rackets. Inspector—"
"My brother's shot himself." Miss Elizabeth Brayton was sud-
denly calm. "I think it's most peculiar I don't hear any sirens. On
television when the police come there are always sirens."
The post officer's eyes rested steadily for an instant on Kerry's
face. "Look, get this balmy dame inside. I'm O'Brien. Here comes
Garrett. I'll leave him here at the door. Get her in and stand by."
"Their son's down by the Peabody. Can you send somebody for
him?"
Maybe he could get one of the people beginning to gather out
of nowhere, hanging curiously around the bottom step. The woman
next door was still leaning out of her window, but she was as silent
as the ones on the sidewalk.
"Don't you think it's odd about the sirens?" Miss Brayton asked
as they headed quickly for the curving stairs. "And odd about my
brother." She gathered her robe and nightdress around her knees
and streaked up to the second floor. She stopped there and moved
her hand out toward the door of the front room to the left.
"You'll find him there," she said, with gentle composure. "Excuse
me now, please. When the program's finished, I'll dress and come
down. If I'm to be grilled with the rest."
She faded quickly up to the third floor where the voice of tele-
vision was murmuring steadily on.
Kerry went across the hall. The door of the study was open, the
smell of burnt powder drawn out by the draft from the downstairs
door. She saw Mrs. Brayton first. She was sitting in a chair by the
fireplace, her back to the window, her hands folded in her lap.
She was still dressed, in a soft sea-green wool suit, her face, ivory
pale, as calm as the depths of the quiet sea, her eyes fixed on some
scene infinitely sad, infinitely remote. No tears, no despair. Noth-
ing but sadness. She was facing the desk set diagonally in the wide
angle of the fireplace wall and the inner partition, but she was not
seeing the terrible figure lying across it.
83


Kerry saw it now. The body of a man with silver hair, sprawled
forward on the desk, the left side of his head blooming horribly in
crimson death. His left hand was flung out in front of him across
the desk, the pen set tipped sideways. A revolver lay to his left
on the floor, as it flung reflexively from a lifeless hand to skid across
the polished surface of the desk to the floor. His right hand was
buried under him.
Kerry O'Keefe stood for an awful instant before she closed her
eyes, fighting down the nausea, struggling to keep from fainting.
Then she made herself move across the room, forcing her voice
steady.
"I'm a police officer, Mrs. Brayton." Then, because she was also
a woman, she said, "Your son will be here in just a moment."
"Oh, no!"
The instant alarm in Margaret Brayton's voice was so startling
that Kerry unconsciously moved back a step.
". . . Unless the police have called him," Mrs. Brayton added
quietly. "He's working downtown tonight."
Was that the first thing that disturbed her? She was to ask that
many times, desperately wondering if it hadn't been for that she
wouldn't have been watching Johnny Brayton and his mother a
moment later as intently as she was. But if it hadn't disturbed her
it would have been so natural to say "No, I saw him leave the
house." She didn't say it. Then, hearing Post Officer O'Brien
running up the stairs she went quickly out into the hall.
"Don't you think it would be a good idea to check the back
doors?"
He looked surprised but nodded at once. "You stand by. I'll take
any statements. Homicide's on the way. Garrett's at the front door.
He's sent a guy to look for Brayton."
Kerry went back into the study. She folded the sleeves of her
trench coat back more neatly and tightened the belt, feeling strangely
self-conscious, dressed like that in the room with death. Mrs. Bray-
ton had slipped back into her silent land. The room was silent as the
grave it was.
It's a beautiful room. Kerry's mind moved with her eyes search-
ingly around it. The marble fireplace with its shining andirons
where a fire had died was flanked with bookcases from the floor
to the carved cornice, the four-foot sections divided with fluted
84


pilasters of polished pine, satin-sheened and dark with age. The
heavy cherry damask curtains were drawn in sculptured folds over
the two broad windows looking down on the gardens of Mt. Vernon
Place. A great velvet-piled oriental carpet stretched from wall to
wall. Over the mantels and on tables were photographs signed by
the world's distinguished great. Her eyes, travelling from where
Dr. Brayton's head would have been as he sat at his desk, saw the
nose of the bullet buried in the broad grey back of a book in the
shelves against the inside partition wall. She stood there silently
until Officer O'Brien came in.
"All locked," he said curtly. "Chain bolted on the inside." He gave
an instinctive start as he saw the figure on the desk, and came
forward a little to look more closely.
He turned then. "My God, Mrs. Brayton." He was deeply moved.
"Why . . . why would he do it, ma'am? He always seemed so . . ."
"I know, Tom."
Margaret Brayton closed her eyes an instant. "I ... I was in my
sitting room at the back on the other side of the house. I heard some-
thing. It sounded like a shot. But I thought it must have been a
truck backfiring. The walls of these old places are so thick and the
doors were all closed. It wasn't till I went in my bedroom, in the
front of the house, just across the hall, that it seemed to me I smelled
burnt powder."
She let her head rest back.
"I came out in the hall. I could definitely smell it then. I knocked
at my husband's door. Then I opened it and saw him. It . . .
was so awful I couldn't believe it. It seemed to me like hours before
I could move ... get the phone to call the police."
"And Miss Brayton. Did you call her?"
"No. I didn't call her. She came down, just a few moments ago,
to go to the icebox to get something to eat. I'm afraid we forgot
her, today. The servants are out. She smelled the powder and came
in, and started running, out into the street hunting a policeman. I
couldn't make her understand I'd called them. She tends to be a
little ... a little fey, you know."
"I know, ma'am." O'Brien was looking at the gun on the floor.
"Was the . . . the Doctor was left-handed, was he?"
His voice sounded to Kerry O'Keefe as if he were doubting the
angels.
85


"Yes. He was."
Kerry saw his relief. She hesitated an instant. Did you say you
heard one shot? She started to ask that, but O'Brien interrupted
her at the sound of many feet in the hall below.
"You'd best go to your room, ma'am. They'll talk to you in
there." He was pathetically anxious to save her all he could.
"Thank you, Tom."
She rose and started for the door, but before she reached it the
room seemed suddenly swarming with men. But men silently mak-
ing way for her. Men used to death but never used to it. And
then came the instant that Kerry O'Keefe would never forget. As
Mrs. Brayton reached the door, Johnny Brayton was in it. Kerry in
the trench coat pushed off behind the detectives was invisible to him,
but she could see him, see his face, see the stunned horror on it
as he saw his father, and see, in the split fraction of an instant, the
greater horror as his eyes moved to his mother. It was only a tiny
fragment of time before he reached his arms out, protectively draw-
ing her into the hall.
"Come away, Ma. Come away."
Kerry stood, her heart frozen, her hands clenched tight at her sides,
not daring to breathe, her eyes closed then, not daring to look at the
faces of the men around her . . . waiting. Surely one of them had
seen what she had seen. Johnny Brayton's face when he looked
from the body of his father to his mother. The second dawn of
horror, the deeper horror, freezing his soul. As if he had shouted
it, aloud, with all his strength. Ma, you killed him. How could you
do it, Ma!
She opened her eyes then, very slowly, and looked around her,
hardly believing what she saw and heard. Every man setting about
his own job. None of them had seen. She let her breath out pain-
fully and edged back against the wall out of the way, shaking,
still freezing cold.
It's only because I know him so well. Because I know every ex-
pression. Every movement of his face. I read his eyes without his
having to speak-
She heard him almost instantly in the hall again, and one of the
detectives.
"I'd stay out if I were you, Mr. Brayton. Not very pretty to see.
We'll talk to you in a minute. Maybe you can tell us why he did
it. He was left-handed, wasn't he?"
86


to tell me it was Policewoman O'Keefe told him to be sure nobody
was in the house, nobody but my mother.—Kerry O'Keefe, the
tramp I got out of jail, that broke my heart, that I kept begging on
my knees to marry me and give it up. And all the time you were
laughing, talking about big kettles and little kettles, laughing be-
hind my back, waiting, just waiting for the chance to tear my
heart out. You don't know my mother. You've never even seen
her—"
"Oh, Johnny, stop it! Can't you see what you're doing? It's you
that thinks she killed your father! I don't ... all I know is what
I heard! Just let me tell you about Friday—"
"The hell with Friday. Tell the police, don't tell me."
He pulled himself together, his jaw hard, his eyes furious, his
voice scathing with contempt.
"Tell them I think my mother's a murderer. I should have cut
my tongue out before I spoke her name to you. Where's your tape
recorder? It'll back you up. You're a policewoman ... do your duty
and be damned with it. And the next poor sucker that wants to
marry you, just tell him he's welcome to you. Thank God I got my
neck out of the noose in time. Goodbye. You're free, Officer O'Keefe.
Free as the wind. I wish I'd rotted in hell before the day I ever met
you!"
She heard the door slam and his steps pounding down the hall.
The outer door slammed. She sat there on the sofa, her heart too
numb to feel. It was there she woke the next morning, cold and
miserably spent, to crawl wretchedly through the hours until she
went down to Central Police Station at eight o'clock, to crawl back
home again. She was there, the last rays of the sun creeping like
living fingers through the slats of the Venetian blinds, when the
phone rang. She dragged herself slowly into the bedroom and
picked it up.
"Kerry?" It was Dave Trumper. "Better sit down, Kerry. I've
got tough news."
Her heart soared like a lark rising to the sun. Tough news for
Trumper had always meant the collapse of a case, a whole fine
theory vanished into non-existent air, She waited, standing erect,
her eyes bright, lips parted, breathless, for him to go on.
"You caught the perfect murder, Kerry. Not suicide. Murder that
so damn near worked it makes me sick. If you hadn't heard that
second shot it would have worked."
92


Kerry sat slowly down on the side of the bed.
"And as you're the first officer on the scene of the crime you
report in at nine, the Inspector's office.—Try to get some sleep,
Kerry . . . it's tough on you now but it's going to be a hell of a lot
tougher before it's through."
At nine o'clock Tuesday morning she was in the small sound-
proofed room with burnt sienna curtains on the fifth floor of Central
Police Headquarters. At ten-thirty the Inspector of the Rackets
Division came back from the conference in the Commissioner's
room on the fourth floor. It was a summit conference, the Commis-
sioner, the Chief Inspector and the heads of the Detective and
Rackets Divisions listening intently to the autopsy report brought
up from the Morgue on the waterfront by the toxicologist from the
Chief Medical Examiner's Office.
"So what we've got is the perfect murder that missed by a hair,"
the Commissioner said, summing it up. "Like the Grammer case.
Sheer chance, or the grace of God . .. but we had a police officer at
the right place at the right time. We know what looked like suicide
was not suicide. It's impossible that Pierce Brayton could have fired
the gun that killed him. That seems to be all we know. Take it
from there, gentlemen. Rackets should stay with it on special assign-
ment, working with Homicide. You people cracked the Grammer
case. I guess this one won't throw you."
As the Inspector came in and sat down behind his desk he gave
Kerry a brief appraising glance. She was pale, her blue eyes a dull
grey.
"Well, there's no evidence of any second shot, Kerry. There's
one contact wound, one bullet track through his brain, one exit
wound, one bullet nose buried in a book on a direct line level with
his head as he sat there, one empty chamber. That's the story."
"You think I just dreamed it."
"I'm talking about evidence." The Inspector of the Rackets Divi-
sion was a lawyer as well as a policeman. "If we can't prove it to
the court or jury beyond a reasonable doubt, it's still the perfect
murder as far as the law's concerned. I'm talking about the gun the
Crime Lab. says is the one that killed him. What we've got so far
looks like conclusive evidence pointing two ways in opposite di-
rections."
He glanced up at Dave Trumper coming in.
93


"Contact wounds are conclusive evidence of suicide. Nobody's
going to sit motionless and let somebody jam a gun right against
his head and not even jerk while it's being fired. That's why this
was written off with no question . . . until you stuck your nose
in it. Then they make every test in the book. They come up with
conclusive evidence Dr. Brayton never fired that gun. Or any other,
but that one for sure. It hadn't been cleaned since all six chambers
had been fired the last time. But his hands were antiseptically clean.
No trace of nitrates or nitrites, Doc says. And it's a sure thing he
didn't wear gloves and take 'em off. So, it looks to me like there's
got to be this second shot that you say you heard."
"—That I did hear."
"Take it easy, sugar," Trumper said.
"What I'm saying is, the evidence of the gun says there was only
the one shot. But with the evidence of his hands, it doesn't make
sense. But unless we can prove there was a second shot, we're leav-
ing a big loophole for reasonable doubt. So that's where we start.
Special assignment, Trump. You and Kerry."
"Looks to me like Kerry's done her job," Trumper said im-
passively. "And one thing's sure. Nobody else on Mt. Vernon Place
heard a second shot. Nobody heard from nothing. Caspari combed
the street yesterday afternoon. Not even in the house next door.
The two old girls who're tenants on the third floor were dead to
the world. Didn't hear a thing. A couple of empty sherry bottles
gives 'em pretty good backing. The office on the first floor was closed.
Woman named Remstad owns the house, lives on the second floor,
and she clammed up. Caspari said he didn't know whether she
didn't like him or didn't like cops. So I went to see what I could
get out of her. It's cops, period. Chiefly Officer O'Keefe."
He glanced at her as he went on.
"Mrs. Remstad likes John Brayton—he speaks to her on the street.
She offered him money to get married on, and she's burned up
now the girl turns out to be a cop, not a sitter. That's the only
reason she talked to me at all. She'd just found it out last night.
And she didn't like me either."
He gave them a dour grin.
"I was tryin' to be sociable. She's got a collection of little china
animals—pigs, cows, chickens and stuff—in book cases both sides of
the fireplace. I picked one up. It didn't pick—glued down. She
said, 'See, that's so people can't walk off with 'em. The cheap ones
94


are over there by the windows. It's okay if you stick one of them in
your pocket.'
"So all I got was she saw John Brayton leave the house and'
saw Miss Brayton come out waving her hands. In between, she was
out in back in her kitchen, and she was eating and getting herself
some beer when she heard a sound. It could have been a truck or
could have been her TV. She had it on at this same Western Mis&
Elizabeth Brayton was looking at."
The Inspector shook his head. "No second—"
"Inspector, she heard a sound, period. And if Dr. Brayton killed
himself or somebody killed him it's okay with her. She said, 'You
can't expect me to weep any salt tears.' She's lived in that house
right smack up against the Braytons' twenty-seven years arid John
Brayton's the only one ever gave her the time of day. She'll neither
help 'em nor hinder 'em, she says. They mind their business, she
minds hers.
"But one thing I got, I didn't expect. There's a woman whose
car came for Dr. Brayton all the time. It's got gold-plated fittings,,
leopard-skin upholstery and a Texas license plate. It's the first
we've heard about—"
"That's Mrs. Ristwich's," Kerry said quietly. "She's a patient of
Dr. Brayton's. An oil widow."
The Inspector and Trumper looked at her and briefly at each
other.
"Homicide's checking," Trumper went on. "And one other thing.
Last night they had a whole flock of lawyers out at the Braytons'
place. One of the Homicide boys walked past a huddle of 'em on
the sidewalk afterwards. Heard one say something about holding off
a while. He said, 'Getting Enoch Chew's like pleading Guilty be-
fore she's accused.'"
"Who's Enoch Chew?" Kerry asked, when neither of them said
any more for a moment.
"He's the top trial lawyer in these parts, sugar," Trumper said.
"—A trial lawyer they're talking about . . . before they've got the
body back."
Kerry flushed, the tears springing out along her lashes before she
looked quickly away from the two dispassionate faces turned toward
her.
Trumper looked down at the Inspector's desk. "You got O'Brien's,
report there?" he asked without any apparent connection.
95


The Inspector riffled through the dozen or so reports in front
of him, the bare beginning that would add up until they made an
immense black-jacketed volume containing every item of informa-
tion, relevant or not, that came to hand. He handed Trumper Post
Officer O'Brien's, laboriously hand-written and turned in Saturday
morning.
"Listen to this." Trumper read it.
"Ordered to investigate report of suicide phoned in from Brayton
residence, West Mt. Vernon Place, Friday, May i, 11:24 p.m. Found
Policewoman O'Keefe on premises with Miss Elizabeth Brayton.
Miss Brayton said, My brother's shot himself. Informed by Officer
O'Keefe that John Brayton, the son, was in the vicinity. A crowd
was collecting. Instructed Officer O'Keefe to proceed inside with
the sister Miss Brayton and go to scene. Waited for Patrolman
Garrett. Instructed him to stay at door and send for John Brayton
if possible. Proceeded to second floor. Officer O'Keefe said an in-
spection of premises should be made. Instructed her to remain on
situs and did so. Found all cellar windows locked and barred, doors
locked and chain-bolted on inside. Checked first floor. Kitchen and
pantry doors to back porch bolted likewise. Windows secure. Second
floor, right rear sitting room locked. Entered through right front
bedroom and bath. Noted sitting room fireplace full of burned
papers, ashes cold. Center room front piled with boxes and wedding
presents, otherwise empty. Third floor check found Miss Elizabeth
Brayton watching TV in front right bedroom. Rear right bedroom
occupied by John Brayton recently occupied. Law book open page
811. Meat of half apple showing tooth marks still fresh, not turned
brown. Checked closets and bathrooms each floor. Checked attic."
Trumper tossed it back. "We're talking about you, sugar," he
said bleakly. He turned to the Inspector. "Everything O'Brien did
of any importance he did on account of Officer O'Keefe told him
to. He was thorough, but it was O'Keefe's idea. Maybe you lawyers
can twist things around and keep Kerry off the stand—if we get to
trial. Regulations say the first uniformed officer on the scene joins
Homicide till the investigation's complete, and that's O'Brien, police-
women not being in uniform. Or maybe you can stretch the rule
about a cop not making an arrest in his own or his family's quar-
rels. I don't know. But I know if you put O'Brien on the stand
instead of Kerry, he's so honest he's going to say it wasn't me, it was
Officer O'Keefe. She ordered the premises searched . . . and by
96


doing that she put the noose around Mrs. Brayton's neck. Because
that's sure where it is."
Kerry O'Keefe closed her eyes. Oh, Johnny . . . I'm sorry. I'm so
sorry . . .
Trumper motioned down at the reports on the desk.
"That's the trouble with those things. They're just a bunch of ob-
served facts. They don't say what's the feeling you had when you
observed them. You don't have to be in that house five minutes to
see John Brayton thinks his mother did it. Those things don't tell the
impression you get when the kid sister they call Lolly gets back from
some place down south and jolts to a stop in her mother's sitting
room, and nearly faints when her mother introduces Caspari and
me."
The Inspector made no comment. He was sitting, his chair tilted
back, his hands clasped behind his head, his glasses on the desk,
staring abstractedly into space.
"Those shots," he said abruptly. "Kerry. You're sure—"
"Oh, I'm absolutely sure! And I wish all of you people would just
stop nagging mel I wish to heaven I'd never—"
"Take it easy," Trumper said. "If you say you heard, you damn
well did. Nobody doubts your word. We're just trying to figure.
And nobody's going to beat your brains out, Kerry. You better get
out of this. Go on upstairs. There's plenty of work on my desk. Get
going, Officer."
He held the door open as she went blindly through.
"The poor little devil."
The Inspector nodded. "If we have to put her on the stand and
they get Enoch Chew, he'll tear her to ribbons. But if there's an out
I don't see it. What do you think about her?"
Trumper was silent a moment.
"The big deal she and this Brayton boy had's all smashed to
hell. She's in ribbons now. She knows she's the one that nailed the
killing on his mother. I don't think she'd leak to help him . . . but
I wouldn't stake a case on it. She's like the rest of us. She's human.
Why not send her to Pine Street on regular duty?"
"Wilmington wants to borrow a girl. Why don't I send her there?
We'll know she's safe."
Trumper nodded. "Hold off till the four-thirty shift leaves. There's
a waitress from a pizza joint on Thames Street saw the Braytons'
pictures in the paper, says she recognizes Mrs. Brayton and her son.
97


CHAPTER
13
John Brayton sat beside his mother in the courtroom, Enoch
Chew on the other side of him, his head bowed, listening, hardly
hearing the words being read.
"The Jurors of the State of Maryland for the body of Baltimore
City, do on their oath present that Margaret Summerfield Brayton,
late of said county, on the first day of May at the county aforesaid,
feloniously, wilfully and of deliberately premeditated malice afore-
thought, did kill and murder Pierce Brayton, contrary to the form
of the Act of Assembly in such case made and provided, and against
the peace, government and dignity of the state."
"How say you, Are you guilty of the matter wherein you stand
indicted or not guilty?"
"—I am not guilty."
His mother's voice was quiet but distinctly clear, her face as he
looked up at her tranquil, serenely lovely.
"Don't Johnny. Don't worry, sweet," she whispered, kissing him
goodbye as the matron came to take her back to the Pine Street
Station to the narrow room on the second floor. He could only
close his eyes and thank God she wasn't down in the cell block
behind the silvered gates that tore him with rage every time he went
there to take fresh clothes or went with Enoch Chew when he talked
to her, and had to relive that Sunday morning with Joe Anselo and
the girl in the red dress.
As he was reliving now the night his grandmother's lawyers
brought Enoch Chew to the house, the night of the day his mother
was arrested, charged with murder. An old-established extremely
99


into paternal kindliness. "She says she isn't guilty. At this time,
I'll be frank to say to you, I see no way of proving it. But, if your
personal feelings—"
Johnny flushed. "It's common decency, sir—"
"In a murder trial, Johnny, there's no decency of any kind. It's
this girl or your mother. Take your choice. All I want from you
is the plain basic facts. Where you met her and how." The rest I
can get from that old rogue your grandmother and this sister-in-law
I've heard about.
Johnny Brayton put his head in his hands. In his pocket was the
telegram his mother had slipped there for him to send just as the
police arrived.
"Don't worry. Don't come. It's what we feared. Pray for me, is
all I ask."
It was to Major-General Robert W. Preston.
While in the small sound-proofed office on the fifth floor, Dave
Trumper had just come back from a final check with Homicide
officers at the office of Alec Dobson, Assistant State's Attorney in
charge of the prosecution.
"He's crazy," he said, staring grimly at the smoke curling round
the tip of his cigarette. "He's opening with Kerry. Maybe he's got
to do it that way to establish the second shot. Maybe he's got to
do it that way. It scares the hell out of me. He thinks she's safe. He
thinks the Braytons won't want Johnny's past with a female sitter
he picked up at the jailhouse aired in public. He thinks the family
lawyers will ride herd on Enoch Chew."
He got up and stuck his cigarette in the aspidistra pot.
"So what did they hire him for?—If there was just some way
out of putting her on the stand at all. But I guess it's glamor. The
prettiest cop on the force to offset Mrs. Brayton who's sure an angel
to look at. Throwing Kerry to the wolves. It makes me sick. Like
that night she was jailed.—In fact this whole case worries me. I
keep waking up at night with a feeling we've been flimflammed.
When we open up the package that's got the thousand-dollar bills in
it, we're going to find a stack of oblong pieces cut out of last week's
News-Post. I don't buy this Ristwich dame, myself."
"Nobody did till Caspari turned up with that note Mrs. Brayton
wrote her husband," the Inspector said. "But it's out of our hands
now. Go on home, Trump, and get some sleep."
101


ing flamboyant, old man," too literally, not knowing that his whole
strategy, the only real hope he had for the defense, was to get the
girl O'Keefe on the stand with time left for him to cross-examine
her, to tear every shred of credibility and respectability from her,
before the weekend recess.
He glanced without seeming to at the three women he'd got on
the jury. Two were mothers of unmarried sons, one the mother of
a son married and divorced whose lips had tightened at the mention
of her son's ex-wife. None of them had daughters. With fifty-four
hours in possession of their minds before court reconvened on Mon-
day, the dragon-seeds of Kerry O'Keefe, the cell-block pickup,
scheming to marry another mother's son, embittered when she was
thwarted, would have plenty of time for sprouting. Female tenacity
would keep them watered to produce that reasonable doubt which
was the most Enoch Chew hoped for. He had won verdicts before
with such strategy in more hopeless cases with less to go on.
He leaned back, smiling a little, as the Assistant State's Attorney
rose and came forward.
"Police Officer O'Keefe."
Kerry heard her name and heard Dave Trumper sitting beside
her whisper "Take it easy, girl." She had never been on a witness
stand before. She rose, her feet moving the rest of her in a kind of
paralysis as she came forward, unconscious of the audible gasp that
went throught the packed benches.
Enoch Chew was conscious of it, in the benches and in the jury
box, even on the bench as Judge Sansbury's eyes opened with
surprise an instant before they swept over the room, silencing it.
But none of that was as important to Chew as what happened at
that instant to John Brayton sitting beside him. It was the first
time he'd seen her since the Sunday night in May two months ago.
Presumably he hated her. But for a tortured instant his eyes met
hers, suddenly pleading, as she stood, her hand on the Bible to be
sworn in, torture in her own eyes, her hand trembling, her face
suddenly pale.
Enoch Chew had himself been startled. It was the first time
he'd seen Kerry O'Keefe except in the pictures Mrs. Summerfield
had and a casual glimpse of her head bent down, shoulders drooping,
behind the prosecutor's table. He was not prepared for the girl he
now saw, recovering her poise, clean and fresh, her voice and chin
steady as she sat down, folding her hands in her lap, crossing her
103


CHAPTER
14
Kerry O'Keefe watched Enoch Chew moving toward her, his
smile kindly, full of paternal benevolence. A sudden panic, almost
like the panic she'd felt the night the cell block gate clanged shut
behind her, froze her heart, constricting her throat. She heard Dave
Trumper then, clearing his throat, and braced herself as she'd
done at the sound of his voice through the silvered gates.
She wasn't aware of John Brayton then, but Enoch Chew was
aware of him. It would take a miracle, he'd thought. A minor
miracle had happened, when he'd least expected it. John Brayton
had forgotten the jury, the judge and the crowded benches, even
his mother sitting beside him. He was conscious of no one but the
girl on the stand, the girl who'd betrayed them, his burning eyes
fixed steadily on her, no longer tortured but bitterly hostile. If he
stayed that way until Enoch Chew could point up die relationship
between the defendant's son and the defendant's accuser, it was
all he asked.
"I know how hard this is for you, so I'll be as brief as possible,
Miss O'Keefe," he said kindly. "And it is Miss O'Keefe, isn't it?
Miss Kerry O'Keefe? Not Mrs. O'Keefe?"
"Yes, sir."
"And not Policewoman O'Keefe. Mr. John Brayton never called
you Officer O'Keefe, did he?"
Kerry flushed sharply. "He didn't—"
"Now let's not have a sparring match, Miss O'Keefe." Chew
smiled, amused at her warmth. "Just a simple yes or no, my child.
We'll both be through a great deal quicker. Did he or did he not?"
"He did not."
105


his deservedly famous—I had almost said, infamous—histrionic
talent, my learned friend seeks to make it appear to the contrary, Mr.
John Brayton is not on trial before this court. His capacity here is
that of a junior member of a very brilliant, I might almost say
ostentatious, display of legal talent with which the defense seeks
to confuse and overpower us. Mr. John Brayton is not on trial before
this court. Let me remind you of that again, as I shall, I am afraid,
be forced to do more than once in the course of my distinguished
friend's forensic legerdemain."
Enoch Chew smiled, bowing slighdy.
"My friend from the State flatters me, your honor," he said
suavely. "I am perfectly aware that Mr. John Brayton is not on
trial. I would not for the world do him the dishonor of so imply-
ing. But Mr. John Brayton's beloved mother is on trial here, ac-
cused of the most terrible crime that one human being can commit
against another. And without the intimate relationship existing be-
tween this young woman and John Brayton, this gracious and lovely
lady would never have been dragged here to suffer this despair, and
this humiliation. And certainly my friend for the State cannot be so
blinded and befuddled by the charm and beauty of his own witness
to have forgotten in less than half an hour that it was he, not I,
who introduced Mr. John Brayton's name into this case . . not
directly and honorably, but indirectly, seeking to evade the truth
and its consequences . . when he asked this witness if she was in
Mt. Vernon Place the night of May ist on official business or busi-
ness that was not official."
He smiled with friendly irony.
"I do not wonder that the State's Attorney passed so quickly on,
evading the question What was your unofficial business there?
Because her business there was John Brayton. I can well believe
that my distinguished friend has spent many a sleepless night pray-
ing for some miraculous dispensation that would allow him to
escape from bringing John Brayton's name to this child's lips. But
no such prayer was answered, no such miraculous dispensation
granted him. Without the intimate relationship between this wit-
ness and John Brayton, this girl would never have been in Mt.
Vernon Place in front of the Brayton house that Friday night. And
none of us—this Court, this jury—would be here now. Because it
was this girl who first cried Murder when there was no murder—
and is no murder, and no murder case, nothing but a sickening
107


the State's Attorney to afford this witness all the protection at his
disposal. If necessary it will recess the Court to make it clear to
counsel on both sides. Objection sustained. Proceed, Mr. Chew."
"I'm afraid I've forgotten my own question." Enoch Chew turned
to the court stenographer with a deprecatory shrug.
"Refresh counsel's memory, please," Judge Sansbury ordered
acidly.
The stenographer read mechanically. "How long have you been
intimate with John Bray ton, Miss Kerry O'Keefe?"
"—Or, if the word 'intimate' embarrasses you, my child, I shall
be happy to put it in more euphemistic terms. How long have you
known John Brayton?"
"About a year."
"You do know him."
"Yes, sir."
"Point him out to me, please."
He paused as she bent forward. "Oh, I'm so sorry—I'm obstruct-
ing your view." He moved aside. "You can see him now? Point him
out, please."
She raised her hand, pointing, her head bending in a frail un-
happy arc for an instant before she drew herself quietly erect again.
Enoch Chew, aware of the jury's quickening excitement, was mo-
tionless, watching the whole focus of attention shift, alternating
between the white face of the girl and the face of the young man,
relentlessly carved in stone. He was offering them their choice
between the two . . for in spite of the State's Attorney he had suc-
ceeded in putting John Brayton on trial before that Court. It was
no longer the State of Maryland versus Brayton. It was John Bray-
ton versus O'Keefe . . and Enoch Chew's only hope was to keep it
that way.
"And you say you've known him about a year?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you recall the precise date you met him?"
"Yes, sir."
"It was Sunday morning the 25th of July of last year, was it
not?"
"Yes, sir."
"In another courtroom?"
"Yes."
"—Objection. It's quite immaterial where these young people
109


met. It's murder, not romance, that concerns us here, your honor."
"On the contrary." Enoch Chew spoke sharply. "We are very
much concerned with this romance—if that's what we should call
it. My friend for the State has tried to delude us into the belief that
this young lady is nothing but a police officer—a disinterested
observer who found herself unofficially in Ml Vernon Place.—
That she just happened to be in Mt. Vernon place the night of
May ist . . and just happened to hear, that night, what no one else
, heard, or could have heard. But she is not an observer. She is a
participant, greatly interested, highly prejudiced, intensely hostile
to the Brayton family. Her first meeting, and all her subsequent
meetings with John Brayton—where she met him, what she was
doing when she met him—these are the root and branch of that
hostility and that resentment and prejudice. They are the sole and
direct reason for her presence in Mt. Vernon Place that night of
May ist, and the one clear and valid reason for her extraordinary
conduct in the days following . . culminating in the fantastic testi-
mony she has given here today."
Judge Sansbury had leaned forward, with a puzzled frown. "The
Court regards these as very serious charges, if true," he said slowly.
"It overrules your objection for the present, Mr. Dobson. Counsel
may proceed, bearing that in mind."
Enoch Chew turned to the white-faced girl on the stand.
"You met John Brayton in another courtroom, Miss O'Keefe?"
"Yes, sir."
"In the Women's Court at the Pine Street Police Station?"
"Yes."
"The morning after the raid on the Mimosa Club in what is
known in Baltimore City as 'The Block'?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you know The Block, Miss O'Keefe?"
"Yes."
"Fairly intimately, would you say?"
"Fairly, yes."
"You've worked there, have you not?"
"Yes."
"You were working there the night of July 24th?"
"Yes, sir."
"At the Mimosa Club?"
"Yes."
110


"You were arrested there and taken to the Pine Street Police
Station? The Women's Police Station?"
"Yes, sir."
"And spent the night in a cell there?"
"Yes."
"And were fined ten dollars and costs in the Court there the next
morning? For disorderly conduct?"
"Yes."
"And Mr. John Bray ton came there?"
"Yes."
"As the legal representative of the proprietors of the Mimosa
Club, to pay the fines for the entertainers who were taken in the
raid?"
"Yes, sir."
"And he paid yours?"
"Yes."
"Was your hair black at that time, Miss O'Keefe?"
"No, sir."
"Was it blonde? Bleached blonde?"
"It was bleached blonde."
"These blue-black feather-cut curls you have now. Are they the
product of the dye-pot too?"
"No, sir."
"They are your own?"
"Yes."
"And did you have on this delphinium blue cotton suit and de-
mure white blouse and simple strand of pearls that morning, Miss
O'Keefe?"
"No, sir."
"But you had some clothes on. What were they?"
"I had on a red evening dress."
"Surely you didn't leave the Pine Street Police Station on Sunday
morning in a red evening dress, did you, Miss O'Keefe?"
"I had a jacket."
"Whose jacket?"
"John Brayton's."
"He loaned you his grey and white cotton seersucker jacket?"
"Yes."
"You'd known him before, Miss O'Keefe?"
"No, sir."
///


"You had just met him that morning, in the courtroom?"
"Yes."
"You did meet him, did you?"
"Yes, sir."
"Who introduced you, Miss O'Keefe? Now please, my dear child,
don't look surprised. The customary way of meeting a young man
is to be introduced to him. You say you met him. Who introduced
you?"
"Nobody."
"So you didn't meet him. You picked him up—or he picked
you up .. whichever way it was. It was a pickup . . was it not?"
"If you want to call it that."
"It's not what I want to call it. It's what it was. If a young woman
of your age knows The Block she should certainly—I would have
presumed—have some knowledge of basic popular semantics. You
know what semantics is? Or do you?"
"It's the science of the meaning of words, isn't it, sir?"
"I'm asking the questions, Miss O'Keefe. I'm just an ignorant
trial lawyer, my child. I've never even been arrested for disorderly
conduct, or had to borrow a jacket to leave the Police Court in
on a Sunday morning. But let's get on. You allowed yourself to
be picked up and loaned John Brayton's seersucker jacket. Did you
just walk off with his jacket?"
"No, sir."
"No. He went to your apartment with you, did he not?"
"Yes."
"Is that a customary procedure in your . . profession, Miss
O'Keefe?"
"No."
"Speak up, my child. Remember, we do not have the fantasti-
cally developed sense of hearing that the State's Attorney would have
us believe you are endowed with. Is it customary for you to take
men from the Police Court home to your apartment?"
"I didn't ta him home. I didn't want him there."
"No. Because you knew this was his first case . . as you told him.
You were only twenty-two years old, but you were familiar with
courtrooms. He was not. I suggest, Miss O'Keefe, that you thought
he was a struggling young lawyer not worth your while until you
found out he was a member of a distinguished Baltimore family.
That's the truth, isn't it, Miss O'Keefe?"
112


"—Oh, no, please!" Margaret Brayton started up from her chair
beside Johnny. "Oh, please don't!"
Judge Sansbury rapped sharply, a court officer moved quickly for-
ward. But Johnny had drawn his mother back into the chair. There
were white ridges standing out along his jaw. This was the fine
hand of his grandmother, sitting rigidly there in the front bench
behind him. He hadn't known, but he should have known. He sat
there sick, his hand tight on his mother's arm, as Enoch Chew
went deliberately back to Kerry.
"You heard the protest drawn from the lips of the lovely lady
sitting here charged with a terrible crime against the father of her
children. You heard her cry 'Oh no! Please don't!' . . trying even
in this hour of her own agony to save you, the girl who first cried
Murder against her. Because she's seen this foul thing.—A photo-
graph of the girl who was trying to marry her son." He thrust it at
her. "It is your picture, is it not, Miss O'Keefe?"
Kerry's hand trembled as she took it, her eyes moving down to
it. She started violently, the color draining from her face.
"It is your picture, is it not?"
"Yes."
"Thank you. I'd like this marked and entered as evidence. And
I should like the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to see it at this
"time."
Chew watched the jury as each of them looked at the enlarged
photograph of Kerry leaving the Coral Seas, the already larger-
than-life cut-out of the stripper, her black petticoat in one hand, the
bubbling glass of champagne in the other, the back drop for the
girl who bore little or no resemblance to the girl sitting pale and
shaken on the witness stand.
How horrible. Oh, how horrible. Kerry closed her eyes, trying to
keep down the faintness that blurred the faces of the packed benches,
except the Braytons' . . Mrs. Summerfield, sitting rigidly erect
in the front row, Pug Brayton by her, the small dark girl she knew
must be Lolly. Next to her was an empty seat where Miss Elizabeth
Brayton had been, beyond that the other sister and her husband.
Only Camilla Anne had not appeared.
114


CHAPTER
15
"And now may I ask you, Miss O'Keefe . . this extraordinary
profession you've chosen. You did choose it, did you not?"
"Yes, sir."
"Deliberately, of your own free will and volition, as we say?"
"Yes."
"And you've been to college. You are in fact a college graduate,
are you not?"
"Yes, sir."
"So you had many other opportunities to make a living?"
"I didn't want any other—"
"No. You enjoy this sort of thing." Enoch Chew motioned toward
the photograph going its second round of the jury box. "And your
parents, Miss O'Keefe? I presume you have parents."
"Yes. I have."
"Do they approve of your traipsing along the streets, an agent
provocateur, luring men—"
"That's not true—"
"Then I withdraw it, Miss O'Keefe. We have the photograph
in evidence for any conclusion that may be drawn. Do your par-
ents approve?"
"No, sir."
"They disapprove."
"They don't like my job, if that's what you mean, Mr. Chew."
"It's precisely what I mean, young lady." His voice and manner
changed, no longer benign and benevolently paternal.
"And John Bray ton, who loaned you his seersucker jacket—
did he approve?"
"5


O'Keefe. None of us here have the extraordinary powers of hearing
that you are pretending to be endowed with. None of us are able to
hear through stone walls. We're just ordinary mortals. So bear with
us, please, Miss O'Keefe.—In spite of the Brayton family's opposi-
tion, you did accept their son's proposal of marriage?"
"I didn't think about his family when I accepted him."
"But would it have made any difference in your answer?"
"Probably not."
"And when you did learn they were vigorously opposed, you
didn't offer to break your engagement . . . did you?"
"No. I didn't."
"Because you wanted to marry John Brayton, didn't you?"
"—Yes."
"Louder, please, Miss O'Keefe. You did want to marry him?"
"Yes."
"And when a member of the Brayton family came to see you, and
saw you, not this demure little lady the police are trying to put
forward to beguile and deceive us, but as you are in this photo-
graph we have of you in your working clothes—may I say—this
distinguished elderly lady imploring you not to ruin her grandson's
life, you told her she was offensive. Do you recall that, Miss
O'Keefe? 'Offensive' was the word you used?"
"It was offensive, to be—"
"I'm sure you so regarded it, Miss O'Keefe. That's my sole rea-
son for bringing the matter up. You found it deeply offensive. And
on the night of Friday, May ist, when another member of the
Brayton family saw you, you were at another one of these establish-
ments, were you not?"
"Yes. I was."
"A female sitter, again . . . except that you were standing, Miss
O'Keefe—leaning over the bar, were you not?"
"That's right." Kerry's eyes had begun to smolder again.
"And you were furious, weren't you?"
"Yes, I was. But not—"
"You were in a blazing fury. You stormed out into the street
and called John Brayton, demanded he meet you, got in your car
and drove to West Mt. Vernon Place. That's a fact, is it not?"
"I left the club. I didn't storm, because—"
"Because you regard yourself as a well-bred young lady . . .just
r
"7


would most earnestly beg you to let us believe that that second shot
was the product of an overwrought imagination. That, we could
understand. All of us, none of us denying the cross of human frailty
each of us bears, all of us could understand, and deeply sympa-
thize. But if that second shot was not the product of your distress
and unhappiness of that night, if you did not invent it, that night
of May the first, Kerry O'Keefe, you did then invent it in the days
following ... invent it deliberately, with malice aforethought, to de-
fame and to injure the people you believed had injured you. There
is no other alternative. I ask you again, earnestly, and with all the
gravity I am capable of, my child, to tell us the truth.... The second
shot that only you claim to have heard, that you invented on the
night of May the first. It was that night you invented it, was it not?
A simple Yes or a simple No is all I want."
"No."
"Then you invented it four days later, deliberately and mali-
ciously?"
"No. That's not true."
"Then I withdraw one of those qualifications. It was not deliber-
ate and malicious. It was the product of another passionate up-
heaval. Because I shall suggest to you that there was another. But
I shall let that rest for the moment. Let us go back to Mt. Vernon
Place. You had stormed out of the Hay Ride Club. You called John
Brayton. You were weeping, because—you say—your job there was
ruined by a member of his family. You asked him to meet you. You
didn't ask him to come to you. You got into your car and went to
him. Did you go to his house and ring the doorbell, Miss O'Keefe?"
"No."
"You stayed in your car?"
"Yes."
"Parked in front of his house?"
"No."
"Where did you park?"
"Across the plaza. On the other side, going west."
"Why did you do that? You were engaged to marry him. Why
didn't you go to his house and ring his door bell?"
"Because I didn't want to see him in his house."
"You preferred to see him outside, in the rain. It was raining, and
miserably raw, that Friday night, wasn't it, Miss O'Keefe?"
"Yes."
119


"Had you ever been in his house, Miss O'Keefe?"
"—Yes."
"Speak up, please. It isn't raining in this room, nor is Friday night
traffic swishing back and forth here. Nor am I asking you to make
yourself audible through thick brown stone masonry, Miss O'Keefe.
But I must ask you to speak audibly enough for the ladies and
gentlemen of the jury to hear you. And if at any time my questions
are too painful for you to answer, please tell me so, my child. I will
be happy to withdraw them.—You had been to the Brayton house in
Mt. Vernon Place?"
"Yes, sir."
"You had been there. How many times, Miss O'Keefe?"
"Once."
"Just one time? And you had known John Brayton for nine
months and eighteen days? How long had you been engaged to
marry him?"
". . . About four months."
"Speak up, please. You must remember when he proposed to you
. . . when was it?"
"In September."
"So you'd been engaged to him for eight months—not four."
"No. I didn't ... I didn't accept him until Christmas."
"Why not? Weren't you in love with him? Or did it take you
that long to find out what a very substantial catch you'd managed
to make for yourself? Or what was the reason?"
"It was my job."
"Because he didn't like it?"
"Partly."
"But nevertheless you had become engaged to him at Christmas.
Were you taken to his house at that time?"
"No."
"Because he was ashamed to take you there. But they couldn't
keep you out. Not Miss O'Keefe. You went there anyway. When
was that?"
"It was the Maryland House and Garden Pilgrimage, April 30th."
"Please don't try to hide your embarrassment, Miss O'Keefe. It
does you honor. Unless of course you neglected to pay the one dol-
lar admission. You surely didn't go in without a ticket, did you,
my dear?"
"I had a ticket."
120


"So that the one time you entered the Brayton house was when
it was opened for the general public with other distinguished man-
sions in Baltimore, and in Maryland, for the benefit of the Ham-
mond-Harwood House in Annapolis. And did you make your
presence known to any member of the Brayton family, or any of
the hostesses assisting them?"
"No, sir."
"You just handed in your ticket and slipped in, and pried around
in a house you had never been invited to. And you were very
pleased with yourself, weren't you, Miss O'Keefe?"
"No."
"No. You were ashamed, really, weren't you? Most unhappy.—
Or were you happy?"
"I wasn't."
"And you hated yourself, and you hated the Braytons—did you
not?"
"No. I didn't."
"Oh, come, my dear child. If you had a mirror in front of you
at this moment, you could see what all of us here can plainly
see. Your burning blue eyes and burning cheeks tell the truth your
lips are trying to deny. But I don't want to distress you. Whatever
impulse made you commit such a shameful breach of good manners,
most of us can still understand how you might be intensely curious
about the home of the man you were engaged to. But let's get on.
—The very next day you were across the plaza from the Braytons'
brownstone mansion the raw and rainy night of May first—waiting
for John Brayton. What time did you get there?"
"Before ten-thirty."
"Was he standing there eagerly in the rain, waiting for you, Miss
O'Keefe?"
"I got there quicker than I thought I would."
"And you saw him come out of the house, some time later?"
"About five minutes later."
"And did you sound your horn?"
"Yes. But he didn't hear me."
"He has only ordinary hearing.—Or was there considerable
traffic?"
"There was some traffic on Charles Street. It was raining."
"And what did he do?"
121


"He went toward the Washington Monument. I usually parked
down across from the Peabody Institute, toward St. Paul Street."
"So you were in the habit of meeting in Mt. Vernon Place."
"At times, yes."
"Many times?"
"A good many."
"Why, Miss O'Keefe?"
"Because he worked all day, and it was late when I got off—too
late for him to come to my apartment."
"So you met in the street."
"We met in my car."
"But you didn't follow him down there, that night of May the
first."
"No. I remembered I still had my makeup on—"
"And you didn't want him to see you that way, so you just let
him go hunting in the rain."
"I was going to pick him up as soon as I was through."
"You'd found a place to park right across the plaza from his
house?"
"There's a club there with a reserved entrance."
"So you were breaking a police regulation. But we'll let that go.
You were taking off your makeup. John Brayton had gone down
the street hunting for you. And you say you heard a sound."
"I said I heard a shot."
"There was no doubt in your mind that it was a shot, not a car
backfiring?"
"None at all."
"You're familiar with guns, Miss O'Keefe? Are you an expert?"
"I'm not an expert, but I know a shot when I hear it."
"So you heard a shot. And there was no question in your mind
that it was a shot."
"That's correct."
"Could you tell where this presumed shot came from, Miss
O'Keefe?"
"Not exactly."
"What do you mean by 'not exactly'?"
"I mean I could tell it came from inside a building. It wasn't in
the street. It was muffled."
"What did you do, Miss O'Keefe?"
"I opened the car door to get out."
722


"Why did you do that?"
"Because I expected to see somebody come out, or call for help,
or something, and I expected to see the post officer—"
"—Post officer. That's what vulgarians like myself would call
the cop on the beat, is it not, Miss O'Keefe?"
"Yes, sir."
"Thank you. I'm sure the jury don't mind being called vulgarians
either. But you didn't see anyone come out or call for help, did
you?"
"Not then."
"And somewhere in here is where you pretend to have heard
this second shot. Was it like the first?"
"Not exactly."
"It was different?"
"Yes."
"How long after you heard the first sound that you instantly
identified as a shot—how long after that did it take your over-
wrought mind to determine you heard another sound? How long
was that?"
"Several seconds. I can't say exactly how many."
"And you weren't really sure you'd heard it at all, were you, Miss
O'Keefe? Because you didn't say so, did you? But let me go back.
You've heard a shot. You've opened your car door and got out in
the rain. Is that correct?"
"Yes, sir."
"Now then, Miss O'Keefe. I want not what you thought you may
have heard but what you did. You got back in your car, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't want to stand in the pouring rain."
"Now come, please. Don't let's get in a temper. I suggest the
reason you got back in your car is that you weren't sure you had
even, in actuality, heard one shot—much less an echo of it, rever-
berating through the brownstone mansion, which I suggest—if
there is one tittle or iota of substance of any kind behind this fan-
tastic auditory dream of yours—is the one obvious and reasonable ex-
planation for it. —An echo, a reverberation. I suggest you thought
you'd made a mistake and that's why you got back in your car. Be-
cause you didn't know the shot came from the Brayton house at
that time. Did you?"
I23


"No. I didn't."
"So you weren't very much interested, really, were you, Miss
O'Keefe?"
"I was interested."
"But you weren't rushing up and down avidly yelling Murder,
were you? You were sitting in your car taking off your makeup,
waiting to read the Riot Act to John Brayton. Were you or were
you not sitting in your car, Miss O'Keefe? Answer my question."
"I was."
"And you sat there for how long?"
"It was eighteen minutes to eleven when I heard the first shot—"
"And you were worried about John Brayton's not coming."
"No. I wasn't."
"Why not?"
"I thought he'd run into a friend and stopped to talk, or some-
thing else had held him up. I knew he'd find me."
"And then you saw something, Miss O'Keefe. What did you
see?"
"I saw the Braytons' door open and a woman in a robe run out
onto the porch and look up and down the street."
"And what did you do?"
"I got out and ran across the garden."
"Toward John Brayton's house."
"Yes."
"And you saw the post officer coming."
"Yes. He was running up from Charles Street."
"But you got to the house ahead of him?"
"A little ahead of him."
"It was his job, not yours. You were unofficial. Why were you
there?"
"I thought there'd been an accident, and thought I could help."
"But you didn't wait to be invited to help."
"No, sir."
"And you didn't have to pay a dollar admission this time you
thrust your way into the Brayton house. You hotfooted it in there
and bolted up the stairs."
"Miss Brayton went up with me. That's where the smell of gun
smoke was coming from."
"And you burst into a room. It was a library, wasn't it?"
"I didn't burst. It was a library."
124


o'clock. You didn't go to the Detective Bureau. You went to the
Chief of the Rackets Division.—And that's when you cried Murder
for the first time.... That Monday morning—not Friday night, not
Saturday, not Sunday, but Monday morning—that's the first time you
even so much as whispered, or in any way intimated, to any mem-
ber of the Baltimore City Police, that you had heard, or thought or
dreamed you'd heard, any echo, or any reverberation, of that single
shot you heard in the night. Not until John Brayton broke his en-
gagement with you . . . not until then, Miss O'Keefe, did you un-
sheath those terrible claws to rend the family that had rejected
you."
Out of the corner of his eye Enoch Chew saw Judge Sansbury's
gavel raised for the final lurch of the minute hand on the face of
the courtroom clock.
"That's the black alternative I suggest you've given us here . . .
the black, pitch-foul alternative. Your pound of flesh, Miss O'Keefe
... a mother's head for the heart of the girl her son rejected."
The gavel came down. "The members of the jury will go to their
homes and avoid any discussion of this case until Monday at ten
o'clock when this Court reconvenes. Counsel will see me at once
in my chambers. Court is adjourned."
In the rising clatter of the packed courtroom Kerry O'Keefe was
the only one who did not move. She sat motionless in the witness
stand for an instant before she slumped forward. Dave Trumper
caught her as she fell.
"Police Witness Faints On Stand."
Kerry saw the headline on her landlady's extra on the hall table an
hour later as she got to her apartment. Under it was the photograph
of her coming out of the Coral Seas. "Defense Accuses Rackets Girl
Of Bias When Family Sought To Prevent Marriage To Son."
She went slowly along the hall to her door, holding the knob, her
forehead pressed hard against the cool wood of the door frame,
steadying herself an instant before she opened the door and went
blindly on into the room. She stumbled forward and slipped to the
floor, burying her head in the cushions of the sofa.
Oh, I wish I could die. I wish I could die. She whispered it softly
to the empty room.
**7


Enoch Chew was finishing his cross-examination of the young as-
sistant from the Medical Examiner's Office.
"So that you had no hesitation in telling Lieutenant Caspari to
tell John Brayton they could have his father's body the first thing
in the morning.—That sending it to the City Hospital was a pure
formality."
"That's right, sir. But I—"
"There are not buts about it, Doctor. It's what you thought and
what you said, is it not?"
"Yes, sir."
"That's all."
The toxicologist from the Chief Medical Examiner's Office fol-
lowed him to the stand.
"On the 4th of May of this year, Doctor," Alec Dobson said, "you
had occasion to examine the body of Dr. Pierce Brayton, whose
death occurred on Friday, May the ist. Why was there this delay?"
"The senior examiners were out of town. You've just heard that
the first medical officer to see the body believed it was suicide. At
the request of the police authorities, made before the body reached
the City Hospital, it was transferred to the Morgue and held there for
closer examination by senior examiners when they returned."
"And they informed you why the body was to be held?"
"We weren't there to be informed, sir, at that time. We were in-
formed on Monday morning that an officer had heard two shots
and that the possibility of a crime might exist."
"Did you find evidence of a second shot?"
"Not directly. By inference, we did. If I may explain, sir."
He pointed to a greatly blown-up photograph of a wound sprawl-
ing over the glossy paper.
"This is why the first medical examiner assumed that death was
self-inflicted. What you see here is the annular abrasion or con-
tusion. That is this arc of bruised skin around the bullet hole. But
you can see it's separated from the edge of the hole and the bruise
by a narrow band of intact skin. This lesion is caused by the sudden
slapping of the skin against the gun muzzle as gases from the dis-
charge of the bullet enter the hole and expand beneath the surface.
Like a blast in a confined area. That's why you get all the blood and
tissue you see.
"You can also see what we call 'sight marks.' Those are abraded
points where the skin was blown against the foresight at the end
/29


of the gun barrel. Whenever they're present they're unmistakable
evidence of close-contact wounds. You can see the margins here are
lacerated. They were torn by the explosive escape of gases from the
discharge.
"This is certain evidence that the gun was pressed firmly against
the head when it was fired ... and in the absence of other evidence,
clear and certain evidence of suicide. It stands to reason no man is
going to sit perfectly still while someone jams a gun against his head
and fires."
He turned to another photograph.
"Here you see the nose of the bullet buried in the back of a book.
You can also see that the book is on a level with the head of the
person seated at the desk. The track of the bullet through the head
is level, the exit wound directly opposite the wound of entrance. De-
cedent was known to be left-handed. All evidence pointed to a
self-inflicted wound. And, as you've already heard this morning
from the Crime Laboratory personnel, there was no external evi-
dence of a second shot having been fired. There was equally no in-
ternal evidence of more than one shot."
"You are coming now to what you referred to as inference, I
take it, Doctor?"
"Yes, sir. To inference established when we made exhaustive
microscopic and chemical tests of the body. Particularly decedent's
hands. As you've also heard from the Crime Laboratory officer, the
gun that fired the one bullet that was identified as the cause of
death was dirty. It had been fired, the entire six rounds, and had not
been cleaned before the identified bullet was fired from it. It was there-
fore evident that had decedent fired the gun, which was found near
his body—what might be called the murder gun—his left hand must
show definite traces of the fact in the form of nitrates and more par-
ticularly nitrites, or burned powder. There was no such evidence.
Decedent's hands were almost antiseptically clean, with evidence
showing they had been washed with a surgical detergent very
shortly before death."
"So that that constituted positive proof that death was not self-
inflicted? That someone else had fired the death shot or shots? In
short that it was murder? Not suicide but murder? Is that correct,
Doctor?"
"Yes, sir."
"You couldn't have been mistaken?"
130


"The sergeant then suggested that a blank shell not made with
black powder could be contrived by removing the lead nose from
a .32 caliber shell of the same type as the murder bullet, using some
substance, possibly a bit of tissue, or a paste, in place of wadding, to
hold the powder in place. I assured him that we were thorough and
accurate in the Morgue laboratory. If there had been any foreign
substance of any kind in the brain, we would have discovered it.
I suggested that perhaps a wad of hair could be used, which would
not be a foreign substance. This he tried. But the hair burned in a
tight wad. When fired it was still so solid that it made a hole in the
wood floor of the gun shop.
"But the sergeant then came up with the one substance that could
successfully be substituted for wadding and that would disintegrate
in such a way that we could never discover or suspect its presence
in the wound."
"What was that, Doctor?"
"Blood. Blood put in place of the wadding and allowed to dry.
The sergeant used his own blood. He was able successfully to fire
a blank shell of the kind I've described that would leave absolutely
no detectable trace and would give precisely the effect of a direct
contact wound. This is why we've called this killing the almost-per-
fect murder."
"Thank you, Doctor."
Enoch Chew came forward as Dobson took his seat.
"Just one question, Doctor. It is quite clear there is no evidence
of a second shot, is it not?"
"None whatever, sir."
"Thank you, Doctor."
Chew started to return to his table, and turned back.
"Don't you think you and the Inspector and the sergeant in
charge of the Gun Shop are rather wasting your time, Doctor?
With such extraordinary creative imaginations as you all appear to
have, there's a far more lucrative field open to you. Murder fiction,
I have in mind. You're a great loss to it, all of you. That's all, thank
you."
The State's Attorney came forward again. "These photographs,
Doctor. Are they creative, imaginative fiction?"
"No, sir. They are conclusive and incontrovertible evidence of
murder. They are not fiction but fact, sir."
"Thank you."
132


He glanced around at Enoch Chew, who shook his head, smiling.
He was still smiling when Kerry O'Keefe was recalled to the stand.
As she turned toward the jury the faces of the men on it were
guarded, the women openly hostile. The whole atmosphere of the
court room was distinctly changed. It's as if I'm on trial, not Mrs.
Brayton, she thought. She tried not to look at Johnny Brayton
seated next to his mother, Mrs. Brayton's face pale but still gravely
tranquil, movingly serene. She might have come from her own
home, not from the narrow barred bedroom above the cell block
at Pine Street.
The Assistant State's Attorney's face was the only friendly face
she saw. He came forward, smiling pleasantly at her.
"Officer O'Keefe.—Or perhaps Miss O'Keefe, as my learned
friend for the defense prefers to call you . .. and as I shall call you,
so there won't be any confused notion in anyone's mind that Officer
O'Keefe and Miss O'Keefe are not one and the same person. There
is another point that should be made equally clear. I'm afraid my
distinguished friend, quite unwittingly and not with any malice,
certainly, may have left the impression in some minds that there
was something wilfully disreputable in your being at the night spots
on The Block and elsewhere in Baltimore City."
His smile said "Absurd of course, but you never know."
"Now let's get this straight. You are a member of the Baltimore
City Police Department, are you not, Miss O'Keefe?"
"Yes, sir."
"Assigned to the Rackets Division?"
"Yes, sir."
"For what would commonly be called undercover work?"
"Yes."
"And it was to conceal your identity in that capacity that you were
arrested with the rest of the outfit at the Mimosa Club and spent
the night with them in the Women's Jail at Pine Street Station,
was it not?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you did not enjoy it, did you, Miss O'Keefe?"
"It wasn't pleasant. But it was part of my job."
"So that this disgraceful business"—Dobson smiled again—"of a
young lawyer's unconsciously recognizing you as a lady and offer-
ing you his coat is not as disgraceful as it has inadvertently—I repeat
—been made to seem. And what you accomplished at the Mimosa
'33


Club was the destruction of a three-million dollar a year take-in sta-
tion for the numbers racket, was it not, Miss O'Keefe?"
"I object—"
"Overruled," Judge Sansbury said curtly.
"I helped, sir. I didn't do it alone."
"But it was you, Miss O'Keefe, who spotted the existence, and
the location, of this three-million dollar a year station, was it not?"
"Yes, sir."
"And at the Coral Seas Club—"
"I object, your honor." Enoch Chew was suave and patient.
"Overruled, Mr. Chew." Judge Sansbury's eyes were beginning to
snap. "We listened to you at great length on the subject of these very
establishments. The State has every right to clear up any possible
misconceptions of the facts you brought out."
"—At the Coral Seas Club, Miss O'Keefe. Where this picture of
you was taken. The papers said the police were surprised at finding
that one of the customers there the night of their raid had narcotics
in his possession. Is that true, Miss O'Keefe?"
"No, sir. We had been watching the place for over two months,
trying to catch the man we thought was receiving narcotics there."
"And you were instrumental in the success of that operation,
were you not?"
"My superior officer thought so, sir."
"And it was in the disguise of a female sitter that you were able
to accomplish these things? Four men taken, with enough heroin to
destroy the lives of hundreds of young people—"
"I object, your honor."
"The Court would suggest that counsel reserve his social com-
mentary, and proceed with the facts," Judge Sansbury said evenly.
"Four men are in prison for many years each, as a direct result of
your sitting at the Coral Seas Club. That's correct, is it not, Miss
O'Keefe?"
"That and the work of other members of the Department."
"Your modesty does not diminish the extraordinary job you did
there, Miss O'Keefe. But to go on. Let's get to the Hay Ride Club,
where you were also a sitter. What was the object of your being
there?"
He looked patiently round at Enoch Chew who shrugged and
kept his seat.
"The police had information that an escaped prisoner wanted for


night of April 30 I found out that they were going to a woman sup-
posed to be one of the sitters. It was so dark there that the disguise
was simple. But we couldn't take him then because we knew he'd be
armed and dangerous for the people in the Club."
"All right, Miss O'Keefe. What about the night of May 1st?"
,36


"That's when you ..." Dobson moved back to the table and con-
sulted his notes. "I'm sorry," he said amiably. "I recall now that I
got the impression that you . . . I've forgotten the precise words,
but the record will show them when the ladies and gentlemen of the
jury start their serious deliberation of these matters, so I won't take
the time to ask to have them read now—I seem to recall that 'shame-
less' was one of them. A shameless breach of good manners, for
you to go to the Brayton house on a Garden Tour. And that it was
curiosity about a house you'd never been invited to enter, definitely
excluded from, in fact. Something of that sort. Is that view of
what you did correct, Miss O'Keefe?"
"No. It is not."
She looked directly at John Brayton then. But it was Enoch
Chew she saw most clearly, saw the surprise flick into his eyes and
the flush of suppressed rage on his face. So he doesn't know this.
Camilla Anne didn't tell him the truth about this either. And he's
furious. She saw it only for an instant, as Enoch Chew settled back,
his brows raised, a little bored, somewhat amused.
"Why were you there, Miss O'Keefe?"
"I was there because the Commissioner of Police had been asked
by an important organization of women, meeting in Washington,
to allow me to be their official escort on the Baltimore House and
Garden Tour. The women were asked not to say I was a police-
woman, but we assume that one of them—not a member of the
organization—did tell and that it was Mrs. Brayton Jr. she
told."
"And did you pry around in the Brayton house, as I believe has
been suggested, Miss O'Keefe?"
"No. I handed in the tickets, introduced the women and stayed
as near the front door as I could get. I got out as quickly as I could
and sat in the bus till the rest of them came out."
"Nevertheless you were upset by this incident, as my distin-
guished friend for the defense has so ably pointed out."
"I was indeed. I was very much upset. It was a hideous position
to find myself in."
"Especially as another member of the Brayton family had already
been to see you, as my learned friend has also indicated, without
naming her. That was Mr. John Brayton's grandmother, was it
not?"
'39


"But of course you couldn't tell that to this lady who offered you
the trip abroad. Or to John Bray ton. Why not?"
"Because the law firm he's employed by represents the Mimosa
and the Coral Seas Clubs. I didn't expect him not to do his
duty to his employers. But I couldn't let that keep me from doing
mine."
"And the Hay Ride Club, Miss O'Keefe—was that a client?"
"No. But that was too important. Only a very few people were in
on that, even in the Rackets Division. There was too much at stake.
It was too dangerous."
"Very well. We're back to the night of May ist, Miss O'Keefe.
You were at the bar of the Hay Ride Club, ready to give the signal
to the detectives waiting to close in on one of the FBI's ten most
wanted criminals. But another signal came, that six society slum-
mers had arrived. They came in the door, and you recognized Mrs.
Pierce Brayton Jr. They were high as kites, you've said. What did
they do, Miss O'Keefe?"
"They stood in the doorway laughing like zaneys. There's al-
ways a hush when a crowd like that comes in one of those places.
They don't belong there. They tend to act as if they're visiting the
monkey house at the Zoo. These people kept on laughing and pok
ing at each other, and then Mrs. Pierce Brayton Jr. stepped forward
and said 'Is there a policewoman in the house?' She called it out the
way they call for a doctor in the theater. There was a ghastly silence
then, and she looked around and spotted me over at the bar, where
it's reasonably light. She called out, 'Oh, Officer O'Keefe, there you
are!' Then they all doubled up, shrieking with laugher. It was abso-
lutely side-splitting."
"And you went storming out, we've been told. Jut what did you
do?"
"I was too petrified to storm anywhere. I just stood there. We
had six detectives in the room. Three of them moved in at once and
stood around me so I wouldn't be shot. They were the ones who
got me out."
"It's been suggested you were furiously angry," Alec Dobson said,
very quietly. "You say you were petrified. Were you afraid of being
shot?"
"I was afraid for the three nice guys, all of them with families,
standing around me, protecting me. They were the ones that might
141


Hay Ride Club. Why she'd lied about the Garden Tour, saying
Kerry had come alone . . . But it's my fault. I should have listened
when Kerry tried to tell me. Oh, God, take care of my mother. . . .
Enoch Chew sat there, his face placid, thinking fast. The lies
he had been told by his client's family had made a fool of him and
cost him the crowd and the jury. Before then, this police witness's
looks and her home background had been a shock. What else he
had not been told about, or had been falsely told about, he had no
way of knowing. It was adequate professional justification for with-
drawing. He wondered. Sitting back calmly, on the very verge of
washing his hands of the whole deal, his eyes rested on the anxious
faces of the other defense counsel and the lost face of the young
man sitting next to him. They touched Margaret Brayton's in what
could well be a farewell salute. Touched it, moved on, and moved
instantly back to it, a sharp needle of light pricking in his mind.
This gentle lady, this lovely woman who's loo\ing at you, not
bitterly, not in anger, but with pity in her heart.... His own words
of Friday whipped back at him. Margaret Brayton's face was tran-
quil. No sign of fear, none of apathy, nothing but a deep and
abiding calm was visible in it as she sat there, undismayed by any-
thing around her. Her hands were motionless in her lap, no pulse
beat quickened in her throat.
Look at her. By God.... Chew let his chair abruptly back on its
feet. By God either she isn't guilty or she'll carry it off. In the in-
stant a whole new pattern of strategy flared out in his mind. It's a
chance in a thousand. They'll believe her or they'll hang her. But
I'll take it. By God, I'll put her on the stand.
He waited calmly for Kerry O'Keefe to take the stand again.
"Mr. Chew," Judge Sansbury said. "You had risen—"
"To object, your honor. But if the Court please, I wish to present
no objection. I stand second to none in my applause for this young
lady's impassioned anger at the stupidity and gross irresponsibility
of the young people she so vividly described. It only intensifies our
sympathy for the emotional turmoil she was in, sitting in her car in
Mt. Vernon Place, less than an hour after that event took place."
Alec Dobson would have preferred to leave Kerry O'Keefe at her
point of dramatic impact. Now he came forward again.
"Miss O'Keefe. Just why did you go out to Mt. Vernon Place after
the tragic incident at the Hay Ride Club?"


Kerry raised her head, her face unconsciously softening.
"Where else would I have gone? I loved him, I thought he
loved me. He was the natural one for me to turn to."
Dobson glanced at the jury. "That's all, Miss O'Keefe." He waited
for her to step down. "—Call Mrs. Alice Ristwich, please."


if he doesn't wish to drive himself.' I thought it was funny, but she
sounded all right, to me."
"But Dr. Brayton did not come for dinner."
"No. He called me around half after seven and said he couldn't
come. His wife was emotionally upset and he didn't dare leave her
alone with the servants away."
Enoch Chew saw Mrs. Brayton close her eyes for an instant and
open them calmly as Mrs. Ristwich continued.
"He said, didn't I get the letter he'd written me, and I said I must
have just missed it. It was to tell me he was planning on flying
down home to see me the next day, but now I was here, we'd just
go together in my plane, early in the morning. So that's why, when
I heard on the midnight newscast he was supposed to have killed
himself, I knew it was a terrible lie.—When he had everything
to live for."
"Mrs. Ristwich, I have a letter here. Will you look at it and iden-
tify it. Then I wish it marked and placed in evidence."
She put on her glasses and examined the letter. "This is it. The
last letter he wrote me. April 29th."
"You've been very brave, Mrs. Ristwich. Your bringing this letter
was the act of a courageous and high-minded woman. I regret
that I must ask you to read it publicly here."
"I'll . . . I'll try.
"My very dear Alice,—I have a plane reservation for Sunday night
May 3rd. I long to see you. I shall spend a whole week with you, to
open your great heart to the future that is ours, yours with me, mine
with you. Let's have no guests. I want to be alone with you. I know
your impatience with the rigid restrictions of life in Baltimore.
You're not spoiled, no one less, but your heart has never been dis-
ciplined to these narrow confines. We will take long rides together
where we can tune our hearts to the vast creation of sky and plain
and explore our glorious future, and with your heart and your clear
proud vision find the way to make it ours. My love to you very
simply now, my dear.—Pierce."
The courtroom was silent as her faltering voice stopped. Tears
filmed the eyes of the women jurors, there was compassion on the
faces of the rest, gazing at the little woman weeping on the stand.
None of them looked at Margaret Brayton. Enoch Chew's eyes rest-
ing on her for an instant as he rose to cross-examine, sharpened
146


suddenly. She was as serene as ever, but there was a curiously ironic
light in her eyes, her brows almost imperceptibly raised.
He went to the witness stand.
"Mrs. Ristwich," he said briskly. "You knew Dr. Brayton's great
interest in medical education, did you not?"
"Yes, sir."
"If I am not mistaken, didn't you announce a glorious plan for
giving a very large sum of money to a local hospital?"
"That was my publicity agent announced it, before the details
were ironed out."
"—I'm sorry. I didn't quite hear, I'm afraid. Your what?"
"I mean the public relations man in my husband's offices."
"He published them, not you? And what happened to the glor-
ious plan?"
"It fell through."
"Because it was felt you insisted on running things? Isn't that
correct?"
"Well, we were still trying to work things out, Dr. Brayton and
I."
"—Which, I suggest, was the reason, and the sole reason, that
Dr. Brayton was coming to spend a week with you? This glorious
plan was the glorious future you were to explore under the vast
creation of sky and plain, with your great heart and great vision.
It—"
"No! That's false! It was—"
"So you've said, my dear lady. You've said it was marriage. But
Dr. Brayton does not say so. He was not free to say so. Dr. Brayton
was a married man, with a distinguished reputation, trying to
salvage a vast sum for medical education. I suggest it was your
glorious future as a great philanthropist he was interested in, Mrs.
Ristwich, not your person, charming as it is. May I now ask who ad-
vised you to come into this Courtroom to make this utterly fantastic
charge against this man's lovely wife, the mother of his four
children?"
"Nobody advised me. It—"
"Thank you. I was afraid it was your publicity agent. That's all,
Mrs. Ristwich."
Something Dave Trumper had said to Kerry as Court opened
came into her mind. I'm not as sold on that dame as some people.
She turned to look at him, standing against the wall under the
W


Alec Dobson handed it to the clerk and took it again.
"Is there a date on this letter, Lieutenant?"
"No, sir. But we dated it by inference, from Dr. Brayton's en-
gagement book."
"Is this that book, Lieutenant?"
"Yes, sir."
The book was numbered and submitted in evidence, and returned
to the witness.
He opened it and read: " 'March 28th. Dinner Sir Malcolm Parker.
8 p.m. Baltimore Club. White tie.' His secretary keeps this book,
sir. Engagements and whether the occasion is white or black tie."
"Which means this was a formal occasion on which he wore his
white tie and tail coat."
"That's correct, sir."
"And is there a later entry of that kind, calling for that costume?"
"No, sir. That's the last."
"From whom is the letter, and to whom?"
Enoch Chew glanced at Margaret Brayton again. She had not
fainted but sat there, eyes closed, her head drooping, her body limp,
descended into what dark valley of fear, what agony of hell, he
could only guess.
"It's signed 'Margaret.' It's written to 'Pierce.'"
"Will you read the letter, please."
Caspari read:
"Dear Pierce,—I'm writing this because I'm too infuriated to trust
myself to speak to you.
"The situation with Mrs. Ristwich has become intolerable. I can-
not prevent you from seeing her, but I do demand that her car
quit coming here to take you to her and standing by the hour at the
curb in front of this house. It has become a public scandal, and is as
intolerable to me as it must be to Mrs. R. if she has any sensibilities
of any kind. You might treat her and your own family with at least
some outward show of courtesy—until after Lolly's wedding at least.
The innuendoes and raised eyebrows of our friends have become
mortifying beyond my limited powers of endurance. If you can't
keep that woman in Texas you can at least keep her car away from
my front door. I shall go mad if it continues. I cannot bear it a great
deal longer.—Margaret."
"—You have had cause to see and talk to Margaret Brayton
149


CHAPTER
19
"NINETY MINUTE BATTLE FAILS TO SHAKE SUR-
PRISE WITNESS"
Kerry saw the headline on her landlady's Seven Star Final on
the hall table. Below it was a picture of Mrs. Inga Remstad being
hustled into a waiting car, Mrs. Enoch Chew on one side of her,
Chew on the other. "Defense Attorney Says Witness Needs Rest
After Vicious Ordeal. Will Spend Night At His Home."
She looked at the heavy type of the late news.
"In a stormy hour and a half session, the State fought tooth and
nail to puncture the last-minute testimony of Mrs. Inga Rem-
stad, next-door neighbor witness, whose surprise appearance vet-
eran court-observers regarded as a major upset. In a second dramatic
move, Enoch Chew, chief defense counsel, electrified the crowded
courtroom in the closing two minutes of the session by suddenly
resting his case for the defense.
"Charges of trickery, hocus-pocus, Houdini tactics and worse
were hurled by the prosecution. Charges of police persecution,
police inefficiency and political chicanery were hurled back by the
defense, in an embittered scene in which Judge Sansbury ordered
the jury from the courtroom and threatened attorneys for both
sides with contempt of court. The witness evidenced her stolid
Scandinavian background by sitting unmoved and unshaken
throughout. Mrs. Margaret Brayton, the defendant, sat quiedy, but
seemingly as surprised as her attorneys at her neighbor's appear-
ance on her behalf.
"It had been Chew's intention, he asserted, to place Mrs. Bray-
ton on the stand. In view of the tactics of the prosecution, however,
'55


he stated, he refused to submit her to an ordeal as vicious as that
to which Mrs. Remstad had been subjected.
"Arguments will be heard tomorrow. Judge Sansbury ordered the
jury to remain in seclusion at a downtown hotel, for the first time
during the triaL"
Kerry put the paper back on the table and went on to her door.
Part of her was still numb, as if the contempt and hatred in
Johnny Brayton's eyes pinioning hers across the courtroom had
been an actual physical weapon, paralyzing her heart as if it left
the rest of her free to move, outwardly normal. She was still sitting
in the corner of the sofa, the late twilight softly rose-colored
through the open garden windows, when Dave Trumper came at
eight o'clock.
He glanced at her bag and gloves still on the sofa. "What's the
matter, Kerry? I thought you'd be all set up."
"Is it over?"
"So near we don't have to go to court tomorrow."
He sat down heavily, a puzzled scowl on his face. "So she wasn't
in the house when the killing was done and she don't open her
mouth. Why? What in God's name does she think she's doing,
just trying to be convicted of murder? That's sure where she was
headed when Caspari read her letter. Up to then she had a prayer.
Then Wham and she was a goner. And a blind man could see
Remstad wasn't there because she loved the Braytons. Just sore
at the oil woman. I don't get any of it."
He took a sheet of paper out of his pocket and sat staring morosely
at it. "This is a photostat of the letter Caspari found, from her to
her husband. All it says is, Mrs. Brayton can't stand that car out in
front of the house and if Mrs. Ristwich had any sensibilities she
can't stand it either. It's a public scandal and if he can't keep the
dame in Texas he can damn well keep her car out from in front
of his wife's house. So what? Mrs. Brayton sits all through Rist-
wich's testimony and doesn't bat an eye, and she damn near passes
out when Caspari reads this letter. Everything else she sat through
like an angel painted on ivory. This kills her. And boy, did Rem-
stad kill us."
He shook his head, still staring at the photostat.
"Homicide's starting from scratch. We start right here. We
find out what's the dynamite that blew her sky-high. It's in this
letter, some place. And if this is a perfect murder it still belongs to
s
i56


wonderful. But somehow I thought I'd scream if she kept on saying
'It's absurd, utterly absurd.' Until last night, when you'd have
thought she'd be on her knees thanking God for Mrs. Remstad,
she was shaking with rage. And today she's been furious."
She broke off, seeing the reflected flashes from the photographers'
bulbs. "—Make her go home, Johnny! Don't let her start on Mama
tonight!"
He went out to let them in, his grandmother sailing past him,
her jaw set, eyes gleaming. Behind her were his brother and sister.
Miss Elizabeth seemed to have evaporated into parts unknown.
"Look, friends," he said. "Ma's bushed. Let's give her a break.
In other words, beat it, kids."
"Right," Pug said. "Come on, Gran."
"You may go. I'm staying. I'm going to see your mother. This ut-
terly disgraceful performance... in the name of gracious heaven what
was she thinking of? Needlessly dragging our names through this
revolting mess! Great merciful heaven, if it hadn't been for that
excellent woman next door—"
"Take it easy, Gran."
Johnny put his hand on her arm, but she jerked savagely away
and went swiftly up the stairs, the flower on her white hat shaking
with indignation.
"Look—I'm going," Meg said. "With a show of joyous relief,
for the benefit of the press." She started for the door and stopped,
came back quickly to Lolly and put her arms around her. "Don't
be so unhappy, baby."
"I'm not." Lolly's voice was taut. "You go on. Wave to Mrs.
Remstad. Somebody ought to try to act grateful to her."
The three of them stood for an instant at the foot of the stairs.
"You got a drink anywhere?" Pug asked. They went into the
Common Room. He poured himself a Scotch. "You can't blame
the old girl."
"But she's the one that's been so sure . . ."
"She had to be sure," Pug said quietly. "She had to be sure or
else it was her own fault. That's what's been driving me crazy
—wondering if Camilla Anne or somebody'd get around to what
Gran said in her cups one night. Round Christmas, the day after
her dinner for General Preston. She said 'If it hadn't been for me
telling him he couldn't hope to marry your mother he wouldn't
i58


She held his arm tight as he lifted her, swaying as she drank
the second whiskey. Then she stood erect, stiffening her shoulders.
"Help me through the hall, if you will."
They hadn't heard Horace coming to answer the doorbell or
seen him until they came out as Lolly was running down the
stairs with the bag. Or seen the man standing there inside, his hat
and briefcase in his hand. They saw him now.
"Sergeant Trumper to see you, Mr. Johnny."
Mrs. Summerfield's fingers dug into Johnny's arm like iron
claws.
"Oh, how do you do, Mr. Trumper?—I'm afraid that last drink
went to my knees. Now, if Occam's ready . . ."
Horace opened the door and she went on out. Johnny turned to
Trumper. He was frightened, and being frightened he was angry.
"Do we have to begin this stuff all over again—"
"You mean the stuff about finding out who killed your father?"
Trumper inquired evenly.
"I didn't mean that. I mean my mother. She's just—"
"What makes you think it's her I came to see, Mr. Brayton?"
Johnny flushed.
"I'd like to see her tomorrow, if she's up to it. Right now I'd
like to have another look at your father's study, if it won't disturb
anybody. And I'd like to see Miss Elizabeth Brayton."
His face was inscrutable.
Lolly put her hand on Johnny's arm. "I'm sorry, Sergeant Trum-
per. She isn't here. We don't know where she is." She went to
the hall table and took a brass key out of the drawer. "We've kept
the study locked. We want to get my father's secretary and his
lawyers in, to go through his things."
Don't want to touch them yourselves. How you hated that guy.
"If you'll give me a couple of days," Dave Trumper said. He
added, as unexpectedly to himself as it was to them, "The jury
freed your mother. She can't be put in double jeopardy. Why
don't you kids relax a little?"
"That's a good idea," Lolly said quietly. He was on his way up-
stairs when he heard her say, "Come on, Johnny, let's have a drink."
Inside the Common Room she was trembling violently. "Johnny.
Are you sure? Is it true she can't be—" She broke off and poured
them each a drink. "Here. Take this and sit down. Act relaxed."
"It's Aunt Elizabeth he's—"
160


"That's absurd."
Her laugh was high-pitched, bordering on hysteria. "My God,
I sound like Gran!"
She was laughing and crying at the same time. Johnny jerked
her to her feet, shaking her. "Stop it, Lolly. Stop it!"
"I can't bear it any longer!" She collapsed in his arms, sobbing.
"Not one word from him to say he was sorry the wedding was
cancelled—not a word!"
She ran then, streaking through the door and upstairs. Trumper,
coming out of the study, saw her reach the third floor. When he
got to the bottom of the steps he saw Johnny standing in front of
the fireplace, his elbows on the mantel, his head in his hands. Ser-
geant Trumper went quietly to the front door and let himself
out, so that neither the Braytons nor Horace saw that he was leaving
without the briefcase he'd had when he came.
Johnny heard the door close and looked around. But the hell
with Trumper. It was all the nights Lolly had sat there with her
empty heart, no word from the boy she loved, just from his family
thanking them for the return of her engagement ring. He remem-
bered the promise he'd made to her picture. They don't need to
worry. I wouldn't hurt you, baby. And he'd done this to his sister,
his mother, his grandmother, all of them, because Kerry O'Keefe,
the college girl policeman . . .
Then, as if the moment wasn't already bitter beyond its measure,
Horace came to the door. "Your phone, Johnny. Miss O'Keefe.
She wants to know if you could speak to her."
"No!" Johnny shouted at him. "I don't want ever to hear her
name again! Tell her to go to hell and stay there!"
Dave Trumper was shaving when Kerry called him at seven-
thirty the next morning.
"Did you figure something, Kerry?"
But he knew before she answered that Mrs. Brayton's letter
wasn't the reason she'd called.
"No, Dave." Her voice was dead level. "I've got something else. A
confession."
"Keep it," he said shortly. "I'll see you later." He put the phone
down hard. College girl cop. I knew she'd crac\.
He was still angry when he got to Mt. Vernon Place at nine
o'clock. The girl in the office on Mrs. Remstad's first floor was
just arriving. He stepped in behind her, rang Mrs. Remstad's bell
t
161


and started up the stairs. He was at the top of them when she opened
her door, in a house dress and apron, a white cloth covering
her shining hair, a dish towel in her hand.
"Oh. I thought that girl had forgotten her key again."
Her face had hardened into the sullen lines it had had on the
witness stand two days before. "What do you want? I'm busy now."
With no makeup on she looked older, almost haggard, her sus-
picion of the police the only thing that gave life to her face.
"Can I come in a minute?"
She held the door open grudgingly for him.


CHAPTER
20
There was a dishpan of soapy water on a table with a news-
paper under it, a carton beside it on the floor. Another table was
covered with the animal figures she was washing and drying. And
packing, apparently.
"Not leaving us, are you?"
"Wouldn't you?" She handed him the broken half of a brick
with a piece of paper, creased where it had been tied around the
brick, the red dust sticking to it. "—If you got this through your
conservatory window?"
Trumper flushed as he read it. It was foul with obscenity.
"Some psycho. You always get 'em."
"Sure," Mrs. Remstad said. "They been calling me on my phone,
all last night after I got home, telling me I lied for her and how
much did she and Mr. Chew pay me."
"Why didn't you call the police?" It was automatic with him.
The look she gave him was answer enough, but she added to it.
"How did I know it wasn't them behind it? Trying to scare me?"
"Oh, now look—"
"You never been a seventeen-year old kid trying to make a living
in Chicago and had the cops shake you down every payday or
close your show. Or pull you in on a morals charge. Or—"
"Okay, okay."
The phone rang. They both stood looking at it.
"I'll say hello and you can listen."
She picked it up, said "Mrs. Remstad speaking" and handed it
to him, watching his face flush again and harden before he slammed
it down. He dialled the Racket Squad's unlisted number.
163


"Put a check on Vernon 6-0000. See if you can catch some of these
filthy bastards."
"So I'm getting out. It's too bad I didn't leave her sink or swim
like she wanted to. It wasn't any of my business anyway. I don't
like being called dirty names. I'm sick of it. So sick I'd like to
die myself. And I said everything I got to say."
"I don't blame you, Mrs. Remstad," Dave Trumper said. "I'm
sorry. Just don't answer the phone for a while till we get a screen
working. I'll take this with me. Maybe there'll be a fingerprint."
He took the paper and the brick, borrowed a piece of her news-
paper and wrapped both up, not putting them in his briefcase. He
left then, sick, as he was always sick, at the psychotic backwash
after any spectacular murder, whether it got to trial or didn't.
Horace came to the door as he rang the Braytons' bell. "Mrs.
Brayton's upstairs. She said to bring you up if you should come."
She was at her desk, ethereally remote in a green linen dress,
writing a letter. She slipped it under the blotter and got up as
Trumper put his briefcase on the floor by the door.
"How do you do, Sergeant Trumper." She sat waiting.
"Your neighbor's having a pretty rough time of it." He was a
little angry, suddenly, at this gentle ivory as impervious as steel,
in contrast to the haggard unhappy face he'd seen next door.
"Helping you out's put her in a tough spot. She's having to leave
town till it dies down."
A flash of feeling that softened him shot through her dark eyes,
before the faintly ironic smile he'd noticed in the courtroom closely
followed it.
"You must think I'm very callous, Sergeant Trumper. I'm sorry.
It was extremely kind of her to come to my defense. I—"
"Would you tell me, Mrs. Bray ton, just what in hell—excuse me—
just what you thought you were doing? Were you just trying to get
yourself stuck in this new gas chamber we're going to have?"
He heard himself, as surprised at asking it as he was at the heat
he asked it with.
"You mean, unless I did kill him," she said calmly. "And you're
not quite sure I didn't, are you? I could see it in your faces yes-
terday. But truly, I did not. And I was as stunned as you were
when Mrs. Remstad took the stand. I had no idea she'd seen me
leave the house, or return to it.—And if I had killed him, I think
I'd tell you so, now, to keep you from dogging everyone else all
164


Til see what I can do. May I use the phone in your husband's
study?"
"The key's still down in the hall table, I believe."
He let himself in the study and dialled the Racket Squad. "Have
somebody see if Miss Elizabeth Brayton's still hanging out in Mike's
Bar over by the court house. Call Kerry. I'm on my way over."
He put the phone down and went over to the book shelves be-
hind the desk. In the bottom row were quarto volumes, only slightly
out of line, the way he'd left them the night before. But one
leather oblong was not a book. It was a briefcase. Or looked like
one. He drew it out and put the one in his hand in its place.
Over on Park Avenue Kerry O'Keefe let him in.
"The office said to tell you Miss Brayton's at Mike's Bar," she
said. "Not drinking. Watching TV. They've got color TV."
"You packing too?" he asked, seeing the clothes folded on the
sofa.
"Yes." She didn't look at him as she put his cup of coffee down
on the table. "I'm resigning. I wanted to tell you before I told
the Boss."
"This the confession?" He stirred his coffee. "Let's have it. What
did you do?"
"I called John Brayton. After you left here last night. To tell
tell him about . . . that."
She nodded toward the briefcase on the floor near the arch.
A slow flush was creeping up the back of Dave Trumper's neck.
"I didn't know you knew what it was," he said curdy.
"I saw the one the Commissioner had. I'm not trying to excuse
myself, Dave."
"You mean you tried to be an honest cop but love conquered all."
She flushed hotly. "Yes. If you want to put it that way."
"What did you tell him?"
"I didn't tell him anything. But that wasn't my fault. I'd have
told him if he'd talked to me. But he wouldn't."
Sergeant Trumper sat there blowing on his coffee.
"—Dames," he said at last. He got up. "Okay. Get your hat on."
Then he said, "Kerry, cops aren't any different from other people.
You take your oath. It don't mean this stuff they call our common
humanity slips off you like the skin of a snake. There's bound to
be a lot of times when it's tough going. You're just lucky Brayton's
a pig-headed ass, sugar. Come on. We're going down to headquar-
168


ters. You go up to the Sixth Floor. Write me a list of everything
you know or ever thought about the Mt. Vernon Place setup. I'll
be busy a while."
His first business was at the Crime Lab. He handed in the
brick, the string and the note. "Get the Dutchman to check this
himself. But fast. I'm coming back. If there's a print anywhere, I
want it"
Then he went down to the small room on the Fifth Floor and
put the briefcase on the Inspector's desk. "Can we run this off in
private? It's last night till ten-fifteen this morning, in Brayton's
study." He unzipped the case and took out the reel of tape. "I
don't know what I got. If any."
He didn't say that Kerry had almost queered the deal. If there
was a deal. It seemed for a long time there was nothing. It was
not absolute silence that they got, but it was silence in the normal
meaning of the word. The faint ticking of a clock normally not
heard in a room, the subdued sounds of traffic, the muted honk of
a horn in the street outside.
"It's a bust, I guess," Trumper said. Then suddenly he leaned
forward, listening intently.
They heard a metallic click and a long swish, as if a key had
turned in a lock and a door brushed over the velvet surface of a
rug. There was a moment of silence, and another swish, softer,
swish-swish-swish, more distinct as it seemed to come closer to
the sensitive microphone in the briefcase between the books in the
case behind the desk. Swish-swish-swish. It stopped then, and there
was another sound, very faint, followed by still another that was
hardly a sound so much as a vague sense of movement signified
by the lowering of the background sounds, as if something, a per-
son or a thing, had come in front of the small recorder, obstructing
the sound wave reaching it.
Then, so abruptly that they all started, another sound.
Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap.
There was a long silence. Then it came again.
Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap.
The Inspector's secretary got up suddenly, her face white.
"It sounds like his ghost. It gives me—"
"Sssh."
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
It came again, in eerie persistence, from the unwinding reel, until
169


—Mrs. Brayton in her sitting room. Her face, and her voice,
on the invisible television screen within his own mind. The ironic
smile, like the smile he'd seen in court when Mrs. Ristwich was
telling all.
He started, coming out of concentrated absorption, when Kerry
came in, moved a paper for her to put the coffee down, and swung
around as a clerk from Records came in and handed Kerry some
papers.
"I'll take those," he said curtly.
Kerry's eyes widened a little. She'd only meant to hand them
to him.
"Here." He thrust out one of the sheets. "Take this down to
Detectives. Tell 'em to haul him in, quick. He's a psycho."
When she came back he was putting on his hat. "I'll be busy.
Stick around."
"—Dave." There were two dull spots burning on her cheeks. "Am
I being—disciplined? Or excluded? Or both?"
He stopped at the door. "Say a cop makes a mistake, Kerry.
We've all done it. You put him on report, or you give him a chance.
Personally, I don't think you'd call Brayton again. But I'd be a
lousy cop if I staked a murder case on it. That fair?"
"Very fair. Thanks for telling me straight."
"You can go home at five if I'm not back."
She left at five when he wasn't back. At half-past seven he
called her at her apartment. "Put on a dark dress and a pair of
sneakers. Meet me in Mt. Vernon Place in half an hour."
He was feeding the pigeons by the fountain when she got there.
"We're going in the Brayton house, Kerry. Relax—he isn't there.
He's going out to see his grandmother after he puts his little sister
on the train. She's visiting a school friend, so he thinks. So does
his mother. But that's a dodge. Horace told me—he's the only one
in on it. She's on her way to Las Vegas to marry this lad of hers.
He called her this a.m. Been buried in the desert, special training,
for ten weeks, and didn't even know the wedding was off. He blew
his top. Then all of a sudden Mrs. Brayton tells Horace he and his
wife can have the night off to see their daughter who's having a
baby. So she and the loony sister are there alone. The mixture as
before. Come on, we go around through Peabody Alley."
"Mrs. Brayton doesn't know we're—"
"No. Horace only told me this stuff because he's worried about
r
171


leaving her alone. So I'm standing guard. He's letting me in at
eight-fifteen. Mrs. Remstad's phone is in her living room. She'll
get a call so she isn't spraying her African violets."
They were at the end of the alley.
"Wait till you see the servants leave. Stay in the garage. I'll give
you a signal.—You're coming along so if it's loused up I'm not
charged with being alone with lone women."
"Couldn't you get a warrant?"
"I could if I had the time and they didn't put me in a strait
jacket when I told 'em what for. Maybe that's where I belong.
It's crazy for sure. I don't believe it myself. And when I told
Horace I was standing guard, I wasn't kidding."
172


Trumper could see Margaret Brayton move quickly into the
narrow field of his vision, reach into the bookcase beside the pine
pilaster next to the fireplace, and move her hand again. And see
the four-foot segment of the bookcase as she swung it open like a
door, back against the segment where his second briefcase was,
cutting the sound waves from it. He saw her raise her hand then
to the solid wall.
Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Then silence as she stood there motionless.
She raised her hand again. Tap, tap, tap.
Trumper saw the wall swing slowly away, and saw the light in
the living room next door.
Kerry O'Keefe saw nothing. But she heard the stolid voice break
the eerie silence, her spine cold suddenly at its undertone of pain.
"I didn't want to come in here ever again. I wouldn't have if it
wasn't for that detective. It's got so all I can see is him lying there
dead. I wished I hadn't done it. I didn't hate him. I loved him. But
I couldn't stand him treating me like I was dirt for that woman.
Locking me out when I gave up thirty years of my life for him.
Twenty-six of 'em right here."
"—I'm so sorry, Mrs. Remstad. So desperately sorry. But Mr.
Trumper told me you were going away. I had to see you, to thank
you ... for saving me. And to tell you—"
"You don't need to thank me. I didn't do it for you. I got to die
myself some day. Maybe I can explain what I did to him. But I
couldn't explain why I sat and let you take the rap. Not when you
were trying to keep them from finding out it was me that did it.
First I didn't care. If you wanted to go on not letting your swell
friends know about me. If you were that proud—"
"It wasn't pride. It used to be. Very bitter pride. But—"
"I know. I felt kind of sorry for you when Meg was just born and
you come in here and found the door open. Before that I just
laughed. You were such a cocky, scrawny little thing, so proud of
being the great Mrs. Pierce Brayton. I never thought you'd stick it
out."
"I didn't stick it out because I wanted to. I took the children
and went home. My mother sent me straight back. She wouldn't
even let me tell her why I'd left. And he wouldn't give me a quiet
divorce. To get it, I'd have had to ruin him and ruin my children."


"Because this detective took a note somebody threw through my
window to get it fingerprinted. I never thought about mine being on
it too. And they got a record. He'll see I'm a crack shot and he'll
find out Pierce testified for me. And then he'll start thinking about
that letter you wrote to Pierce. They all thought 'Mrs. R.' was Mrs.
Ristwich. But you went all to pieces because you thought they'd
know it was Mrs. Remstad you meant. That's when I knew you
were trying to keep me out of it and you didn't hate me any more.
That's why I got up there. But that detective, he'll be back."
"Oh, no . . . no!"
"I wanted to tell you so you didn't think I did it for spite to
hurt you and the children when I won't be around here. I'm . . .
going away tomorrow. I just can't stand it here any more. You tell
Johnny goodbye. I always used to pretend he was my kid. If there
was only some way I could bring him back. I wished I hadn't done
it. I just couldn't stand him treating me like he did."
There was silence then. A long, long silence. There was no sound
that Kerry could hear, until finally she heard the soft swish and
saw the narrow line of light turn into darkness. She heard the click
of the key in the lock.
It was in an almost trance state that she saw Dave Trumper pull
the door open and the ball of light from his small flash bounce
over the velvet rug as he drew the briefcase out from the bottom
shelf behind the desk. In the same semi-trance she felt his hand
touch her arm. The light guided them back through the bedroom.
He opened the door softly, listened and beckoned to her again.
She followed down the back stairs and out into the garden. Trum-
per moved quickly across through the garage into the alley.
"—Trump."
"Shut up," he said roughly. "Christ, I don't want to do it. It's
my job.—How wrong can you be? I thought they'd hate each
other's guts."
She followed him through the alley, up Charles Street into Mt.
Vernon Place, past the Braytons' brownstone steps to Mrs. Rem-
stad's. He went up and rang the doorbell, not hers but her third
floor tenants'. He waited until a small anxious figure of an old
woman in a robe came peering down the stairs. When she opened
the door he had his billfold in his hand, his badge pinned to it.
He held it out.
'77


you are. Maybe if we ... if we could just start over. Start from
scratch."
"Oh, Kerry!"
He crossed the room to her. Then he smiled gravely and said,
"Miss O'Keefe, may I offer you my coat?"
It wasn't seersucker, but he started to take it off. "And who
buys the coffee?"
"Oh, Johnny! Oh, darling—I love you so!"
They started over. But not from scratch.
182


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