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“My God!” exclaimed the girl. “There’d be just as much sense to it if you’d all jumped out at me and yelled ‘Boo!'”

“This ain’t any way,” Alec Rush rasped, moving forward, grinning his hideous friendly grin. “Let’s go in where we can talk it over.”

Merely by moving his loose-jointed bulk a step this way, a half-step that, turning his ugly face on this one and that one, he herded the little group as he wished, sending the landlady discontentedly away, marshalling the others into the girl’s rooms.

“Remember, I got no idea what this is all about,” said the girl when they were in her living-room, a narrow room where blue fought with red without ever compromising on purple. “I’m easy to get along with, and if you think this is a nice place to talk about whatever you want to talk about, go ahead! But if you’re counting on me talking, too, you’d better smart me up.”

“Boosting, dearie,” Minnie said, leaning forward to pat the girl’s arm. “I’m at Goodbody’s.”

“You think I’ve been shoplifting? Is that the idea?”

“Yeah. Exactly. Uh-huh. That’s what.” Alec Rush left her no doubt on the point.

The girl narrowed her eyes, puckered her red mouth, squinted sidewise at the ugly man.

“It’s all right with me,” she announced, “so long as Goodbody’s is hanging the rap on me — somebody I can sue for a million when it flops. I’ve got nothing to say. Take me for my ride.”

“You’ll get your ride, sister,” the ugly man rasped good-naturedly. “Nobody’s going to beat you out of it. But do you mind if I look around your place a little first?”

“Got anything with a judge’s name on it that says you can?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t get a peep!”

Alec Rush chuckled, thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets, and began to wander through the rooms, of which there were three. Presently he came out of the bedroom carrying a photograph in a silver frame.

“Who’s this?” he asked the girl.

“Try and find out!”

“I am trying,” he lied.

“You big bum!” said she. “You couldn’t find water in the ocean!”

Alec Rush laughed with coarse heartiness. He could afford to. The photograph in his hand was of Hubert Landow.

Twilight was around the graystone church when the owner of the deserted coupe returned to it. The chunky girl — Polly Vanness was the name she had given — had been booked and lodged in a cell in the Southwestern Police Station. Quantities of stolen goods had been found in her flat. Her harvest of that afternoon was still on her person when Minnie and a police matron searched her. She had refused to talk. The detective had said nothing to her about his knowledge of the photograph’s subject, or of her meeting in the railroad station with the dark young man. Nothing found in her rooms threw any light on either of these things.

Having eaten his evening meal before coming back to his car, Alec Rush now drove out to Charles-Street Avenue. Lights glowed normally in the Landow house when he passed it. A little beyond it he turned his coupe so that it pointed toward the city, and brought it to rest in a tree-darkened curb-side spot within sight of the house.

The night went along and no one left or entered the Landow house.

Fingernails clicked on the coupe’s glass door.

A man stood there. Nothing could be said of him in the darkness except that he was not large, and that to have escaped the detective’s notice until now he must have stealthily stalked the car from the rear.

Alec Rush put out a hand and the door swung open.