and he was the best wing shot I have ever seen. I’d hunted quail with him a lot.

“Hey, Barney,” he asked genially, “what’s with you and these F.B.I, jokers?”

I just saved spilling the coffee. “Why?”

“A quiet type named Ramsey. He’s been in here twice pumping me about you. Where you came from, how long you been here, all that routine. You applied for a Federal job?”

“Oh,” I said. “Something like that. It’s indefinite yet.”

“Well, you’re in, boy. With the send-off I gave you, you can have Hoover’s job. You think that boy’s not honest, I said, there’s been a paved street in front of his house for two years now, and the last time I looked it was still there. . . .”

“You’re a real pal,” I said. I put a dime on the counter and went out, feeling uneasy for no reason I could pin down. Ramsey didn’t have anything to work on. That’s the reason he was poking around here asking silly questions. He was outside in the cold; the moat was filled and the drawbridge was up. But still I didn’t like it; he made me nervous with that knack he had of seeming to be there at my elbow every time I turned around, as if ubiquity were an end in itself. What was the name of that Russian detective in Crime and Punishment? Rock. Something like rock.

I shrugged it off; that was some private eye. Private eyes always had virile names like Rock and Mike. That way you could tell how tough they were.

I drove over to the store. It was twenty to three. When I went in, Otis was out in the showroom where he could keep an eye on the front door, rubbing down the wax on a runabout hull. He saw me and went on back to the shop. I looked around, wondering why I had come back; there wasn’t anything I had to do here. Otis had a key; he’d open it in the morning, and when I didn’t show up he’d call his boy to come in. They’d keep it going until she came back from wherever she was and whatever she was doing; in fact, he could probably take over and run it for her. He knew the business, and he was so honest Diogenes could have put out his lantern and found him in the dark. Maybe he didn’t know how to get out and keep a fire burning under those prospects, or how to work the publicity angles so they’d talk about you and know where you were, but he’d do a good solid job of running a business for her. . . . I stopped. What the hell did I care what she did with the place? She could grind it up for cat food.

I heard tires on the gravel outside, and looked around. Ramsey was getting out of his car with his briefcase in his hand. Maybe there are really several of him, I thought; there might be a Ramsey-duplicating machine somewhere that somebody’d forgotten to turn off. Well, in about another hour he could start looking around for somebody else to haunt.

He came in. “Good afternoon, Mr. Godwin,” he said in that courteous and unhurried way he had.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Ramsey.” We should have mint juleps and goatees.

“I was hoping I’d catch you in.”

Now what had he meant by that! Was he implying I did an inordinate amount of running around, or that he thought I was trying to dodge him?

“I’d like to take a few more minutes of your time, if you’re not too busy.”

“Certainly,” I said. We went back to the office and I sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk. He took the one in front of it and opened the briefcase.

“I hate to keep interfering with your work all the rime,” he said. “But I still have hope we may eventually stumble on to a lead as to who spent that twenty-dollar bill here. The mystifying thing is that just one should show up. There should have been more, somewhere in this area.”

I frowned. “The only thing I can see is that he must have been a transient.” I wondered what the devil had become of those I’d put on the bus. There should have been some action up there by this time, you’d think.

He nodded. “Yes, that’s a possibility, of course. Among others.”

I read you, Mr. Ramsey. This is the needle. Otherwise you wouldn’t have told me