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I
fell asleep again over the coffee. When I awoke, the tray was gone
and I was alone in the room. My eyelids were heavy and my head dull
and there was a gnawing emptiness in my stomach, but I had felt worse
the morning after a late party. I rang for the nurse. The same one
came in. She was a matronly woman in her fifties who looked like a
magazine drawing of somebody’s mother.

“
I’m
starved,” I said.

“
It’s
twenty to twelve. Can you wait till twelve?”

“
If
I have to,” I said. “What I want most is a phone. I have
to call my wife,”

“
I’m
sorry, Mr. Breen, but we have no phone attachments in the rooms.
We’re not like the big city hospitals. We have only ten beds.”

“
There
must be a phone somewhere in the hospital.”

“
I’m
sorry, but you can’t leave your bed till Dr. Cadmar examines
you.”

“
Well,
why the hell doesn’t he examine me?”

She
said patiently: “Dr. Cadmar has been called away. He’ll
be back soon.”

As
soon as she left the room, I slipped out of bed and went1 to the tiny
corner closet. I didn’t expect to find my water-ruined clothes,
but I hoped there would be a robe to wear over my ridiculous cotton
nightgown. There wasn’t. The door started to open. I scurried
back to the bed like a small boy who heard a parent approach his
room. I had the cover over me when Crooked Nose entered.

“
How
are you?” His pale-blue eyes were, after all, capable of
expression. They were mildly friendly now.

“
Good
enough,” I said, “Will you do me a favor? Phone my wife
and tell her I’m all right.”

“
A
little while ago the Crane girl spoke to her. I met her in the hall
and we looked in on you and saw you were asleep. She said your wife
ought to know you were safe and sound. She called her up from the
booth.”

“
She’s
swell,” I said. “How is she?”

“
Up
and about, like I said. That’s the way women are, more
resilient than men.” He sat on the chair beside my bed and
crossed his legs and pulled out cigarettes and offered me one. “Swell
looker,” Crooked Nose said. “What do you know about her?”

“
Molly
? “ The smoke felt good inside me. “Last night you told
me your name, but I’ve forgotten it.”

“
Booth
Mawrey.”'

“
You’re
a detective, you told me.”

“
Private.”
He rolled the tip of his cigarette on his lips. “Why don’t
you want to talk about Molly Crane?”

“
She
writes. She came with me to get a story.”

“
What
does she write for, a magazine or a paper?”

I
said carefully: “I think she freelances, sells her stuff to any
editor who wants it. But I’m not sure. Why don’t you ask
her if you want to know?”

Booth
Mawrey twitched his twisted nose and went to the dresser for an
ashtray.

“
A
private detective,” I said, “Who hired you?”

“
A
group of insurance companies.” He brought the ashtray to the
chair. “They don’t like to pay out money for stolen cars,
and the official police weren’t getting anywhere. Moon was
suspected of being kingpin, but he was too smart and had too much
political influence. I spent a whole month just trying to get a line
on members of his organization. That’s how I come to you. One
of Moon’s top men, Raymond Teacher, got hit by a car and a
woman named Mrs. Breen drove him to the hospital. Probably no
connection, but my job consists of chasing a hundred tangents in the
hope that one will lead somewhere. Right off I found out that Mrs.
Breen’s husband worked for a car dealer.”

“
That
also impressed Jasper Vital and Larry Goodby.”

“
Sure.
They didn’t know the setup in Brooklyn, so they saw the same
possibility I did. Redfern Motors could be an outlet for hot cars. In
stories there’s a lot of blood and thunder connected with the
detective business. Don’t kid yourself. It means hanging around
a house for hours or days and waiting for a break that mostly doesn’t
come. I thought I had one when a swanky heap pulled up to your house
and a couple of guys paid you a visit. One of them — I didn’t
know then he was Larry Goodby — was a mug if I ever saw one. So
when you and the mug came out, there I was right behind you.”

I
said dryly: “Lieutenant Woodfinch thought I’d made up
Larry to alibi myself. You could have told him Larry existed and that
I’d knocked him out.”

“
I
had a job to peddle my own papers,” Booth Mawrey smiled
bleakly. “Telling the police or the DA’s office anything
was the same as telling Moon. I was keeping myself under wraps. Of
course, I’d have spoken up if they were ready to burn you, but
they weren’t up to that.”

“
I
shouldn’t complain. You saved my life last night.”

He
brushed that aside with a wave of his hand. “Sheer accident. A
guy like me has to have connections. I picked up word about a car lot
near Badmont. As soon as I got there, I spotted the setup.”

“
It
couldn’t be missed once you knew, that they were in the stolen
car racket.”

“
Sure,
if you were looking for it. But that was one sweet location, just
inside the state and forty miles from the nearest New York town of
any size. There wasn’t much in that sparsely populated area to
take the New York State police so close to the state line, and at the
same time the car lot wasn’t so isolated that it would look
phoney. For practical purposes it was right outside a town —
Badmont. But the Badmont law, what there is of it, has no
jurisdiction there, and the same goes for the New Jersey State
police, and where there’s no jurisdiction there’s no
interest. You know the blind spot every eye has, where the muscles
meet. That car lot was in the blind spot of the police eye. And the
gang had sense enough not to steal New York or New Jersey cars.”

“
They
ran them up from Florida,” I said.

“
From
a number of resort places, though a lot came from the Florida east
coast, from Daytona Beach to Miami. I’ve known that for weeks.
In winter Florida is flooded with cars, from every state in the
union. They’d swipe a car and run it up over state lines all
the way to Badmont, changing the license plate every few hours. Some
of them were nabbed on the way, but not many. Out-of-state cars are
no novelty going south or north along the east coast during the
winter, and hot cars, came from so many different states that the
local cops were balled up. How effectively they worked it is proved
by the fact that they got away with it for a couple of years at
least.”

“
Jasper
Vital headed the Florida end of the job.”

“
That
was no secret to me,” Mawrey said. “I’d never seen
him, but I’d heard of him when I was getting a line on Moon’s
organization. I also heard that he figured Moon was taking too large
, a share of the profits and had come north with blood in his eye.
Well, like I said, I got to the car lot and knew what was what, but
proving it was something else.”

“
I
saw you looking at cars with a fountain pen flash.”

“
Was
that you who chased me?” He burst into laughter when I nodded.
“Boy, that’s rich! I saw somebody coming and did I scoot.
I was having a look at Chryslers, which have the serial numbers on
the door frames. I was trying to match the numbers I found with a
list of numbers of recently stolen cars.”

“
Did
they match?”

“
No.
Moon and his gang did a wonderful job on the hot cars. When trying to
find evidence that way got me nowhere, I saw my one chance was a
police raid and then an examination and checkup of every car there.
So yesterday I went to the New York State police zone headquarters
and laid what I had on the table. It was good enough for me, but not
for Lieutenant Batterman. He couldn’t pull a raid on the say-so
of a shamus without a single thing to back it up. But I had a card up
my sleeve. I’d seen you there that morning, and the Brooklyn
cops wanted you.”

“
So
the one honest man in the place was the excuse for the raid?”

Mawrey
grinned. “That’s the way it turned out. I didn’t
know you were honest. To me you were a reason for the cops to move
in. Batterman phoned Woodfinch and Woodfinch said you'd either been
kidnaped and were held there against your will or you were a material
murder witness who’d taken a powder. That was good enough. It
was night by then. We waited a few hours longer to be sure everybody
would be in that was going to be in. Lucky for you and the Crane girl
we didn’t delay it more than that.”

“
Very
lucky. How did you know what was happening at the reservoir?”

“
For
a few minutes the raid looked only half successful. I’d hoped
that we would nab Moon himself with the evidence. We caught only two
of them, Ed Weaver and Beezie Jones, if that’s his real name.
Weaver clammed up, but the kid went to pieces when he saw uniforms
and he talked enough to make us scoot up the hill. We skirted around
to the other side of the hill and up through the woods there and
swarmed over Tilly Ames and Rufus Lamb and Milton Curry. And here you
are.”

I
asked him for another cigarette. He held a light for me. I put my
head back against the pillow and blew smoke at the ceiling,

“
What
about the bag?” I said. “You must know what’s in
it.”

“
The
fact is that I never heard of it until you told Lieutenant Batterman
about it after we fished you out of the reservoir. Lieutenant
Woodfinch didn’t mention it to the newspapers and I’d
never spoken to him.” Mawrey ran the side of his thumb through
the deep cleft in his chin. “As for Tilly and Lamb and the
others, they aren’t saying. Even Beezie recovered from his
jitters and lost his memory. They never heard of a bag. They never
heard of a hot car racket. They never heard of a couple of men you
and the Crane girl say were murdered.”

“
Weren’t
the bodies found?”

“
Not
yet.”

“
Why
do they say they put Molly and me in the reservoir?”

“
That’s
the only charge they’re being held on so far. It was just a
gag, they say. Jasper Vital was one of her dearest pals, Tilly says,
and she wanted to make you confess that you’d killed him. No
harm, meant, of course; you’d have been pulled out before you
could drown. But I’m not worried about evidence. Those cars in
the lot won’t stand up under a thorough check. And sooner or
later one of the gang will start spilling his guts to cop a minor
sentence for turning state witness. That always happens when there’s
a gang.”

The
nurse came in with my lunch. Mawrey watched me eat. He waited until
the nurse left and then said: “The Crane girl isn’t a
writer.”

‘‘
No?”

“
She
claims she’s your girl friend. She says she was on the way to
pick you up in her car when Larry slugged you. You saw a chance to
pretend you were snatched by Larry so that Moon would let your wife
and kid alone. She says that then she went to Tilly’s with you
because she’s that way about you.”

I
said nothing. Humbly I bowed before a super-salesman. If ever I went
into the business of selling broken-down jalopies, I’d want to
hire her to persuade customers that they were practically new cars.
She could sell anything.

“
Don’t
worry, Breen,” Mawrey said with half a leer. “The police
haven’t anything to gain by telling your wife of your
extra-marital activities.”

I
think I blushed. “So why bring it up?” I said.

“
There’s
something else. Lieutenant Batterman called up her father this
morning to make sure she was who she said she was. Purely routine.”

The
lamb chop stopped halfway to my mouth. I waited.

“
Her
old man’s a doctor in Baltimore,” he said. “When
Dr. Crane heard it was the police asking about his daughter, he said
he wasn’t surprised that she was in trouble and wasn’t
interested and hung up.”

My
teeth closed over the bone. I chewed the meat off and spoke with it
in my mouth. “Dr. Crane doesn’t approve of his daughter
playing around with a married man.”

“
Is
that all it is?”

“
That’s
all,” I said and chewed.

He
studied me through smoke and then stood up. “Be seeing you,”
he said and went out.

The
only thing wrong with that meal was that there wasn’t enough of
it. I rang for the nurse and prevailed on her to bring me a second
helping of lamb chops and potatoes, and also a robe and slippers. She
conceded that a man with my appetite was strong enough to leave bed,
but I wasn’t to leave the room before Dr. Cadmar said so. In
robe and slippers I sat in the chair and meekly gnawed chops until
she left. Then I made for the door,

I
didn’t reach it. The door opened from the outside and four big
men oozed in. Booth Mawrey was one of them and the other three were
cops. With the car-lot in one state, Molly and I in a hospital in
another, and Jasper Vital murdered in Brooklyn, it was a
jurisdictional tangle. Lieutenant Batterman was there for the State
of New York, a sergeant named Harrison for the State of New Jersey,
Booth Mawrey for the insurance companies, and Detective Scavuzzo had
come up from Brooklyn for the City of New York.