her. You got me mad. I don’t like shakedowns and I don’t like being called a murderer. That’s all, damn you.”

I called Jerry Gunther from a pay phone in the lobby. “Two things,” I told the lieutenant. “First, I think I’ve got a hotter prospect for you than Donahue. A man named Joe Conn, one of the boys at the stag. I tried shaking him up a little and he cracked wide open, tried to beat my brains in. He’s got a good motive, too.”

“Ed, listen—”

“That’s the first thing,” I said. “The other is that I’ve been trying to get in touch with my client for the past too-many hours and can’t reach him. Did you have him picked up again?”

There was a long pause. All at once the air in the phone booth felt much too close. Something was wrong.

“I saw Donahue half an hour ago,” Jerry said. “I’m afraid he killed that girl, Ed.”

“He confessed?” I couldn’t believe it.

“He confessed…in a way.”

“I don’t get it.”

A short sigh. “It happened yesterday,” Jerry said. “I can’t give you the time until we get the medical examiner’s report, but the guess is that it was just after we let him go. He sat down at his typewriter and dashed off a three-line confession. Then he stuck a gun in his mouth and made a mess. The lab boys are still there trying to scrape his brains off the ceiling. Ed?”

“What?”

“You didn’t say anything…I didn’t know if you were still on the line. Look, everybody guesses wrong some of the time.”

“This was more than a guess. I was sure.”

“Well, listen, I’m on my way to Donahue’s place again. If you want to take a run over there you can have a look for yourself. I don’t know what good it’s going to do—”

“I’ll meet you there,” I said.

EIGHT

The lab crew left shortly after we arrived. “Just a formality for the inquest,” Jerry Gunther said. “That’s all.”

“You’re sure it’s a suicide, then?”

“Stop dreaming, Ed. What else?”

What else? All that was left in the world of Mark Donahue was sprawled in a chair at a desk. There was a typewriter in front of him and a gun on the floor beside him. The gun was just where it would have dropped after a suicide shot of that nature. There were no little inconsistencies.

The suicide note in the typewriter was slightly incoherent. It read: It has to end now. I can’t help what I did but there is no way out anymore. God forgive me and God help me. I am sorry.

“You can go if you want, Ed. I’ll stick around until they send a truck for the body. But—”

“Run over the timetable, will you?”

“From when to when?”

“From when you released him to when he died.”

Jerry shrugged. “Why? You can’t read it any way but suicide, can you?”

“I don’t know. Give me a run-down.”

“Let’s see,” he said. “You called around five, right?”

“Around then. Five or five-thirty.”

“We let him go around three. There’s your timetable, Ed. We let him out around three, he came back here, thought about things for a while, then wrote that note and killed himself. That checks with the rough estimate we’ve got of the time of death. You narrow it down—you did call him after I spoke to you, didn’t you?”

“Yes. No answer.”

“He must have been dead by that time; probably killed himself within an hour after he got here.”

“How did he seem when you released him?”

“Happy to be out, I thought at the time. But he didn’t show much emotion one way or the other. You know how it is with a person who’s getting ready to knock himself off. All the problems and emotions are kept bottled up inside.”

I went over to a window and looked out at Horatio Street. It was the most obvious suicide in the world, but I couldn’t swallow it. Call it a hunch, a stubborn refusal to accept the fact that my client had managed to fool me. Whatever it was, I didn’t believe the suicide theory. It just didn’t sit right.

“I don’t like it,” I said. “I don’t think he killed himself.”

“You’re wrong, Ed.”

“Am I?” I went to Donahue’s liquor cabinet and filled two glasses with cognac.

“I know nothing ever looked more like suicide,” I admitted. “But the motives are still as messy as ever. Look at what we got here. We have a man who hired me to protect him from his former mistress—and as soon as he did, he only managed