was blood in the vomit.

They stepped up to him, dead in a mess on the floor, and they saw that he wasn’t even holding the gun right.

At the corner of the street two men sat inside the closed truck among equipment and instruments. One sat at the short-wave radio; the other was fingering a Geiger counter. Suddenly the instrument crackled and ticked with a wild rush of discharges. Another ticker, standing nearby, did the same thing. The two men jumped.

“Christ Almighty, what in hell was that?”

Outside, a television repair truck turned the corner fast and lost itself in the traffic.

Chapter Four

The taxi wound slowly through the late-evening traffic. A thin spring rain had been drizzling all afternoon, almost like a fog, and the lights of downtown Detroit looked hazy. Catell and Selma sat in the cab, far apart on the back seat, not smiling.

“Hear the latest?” asked the cabby.

He didn’t get an answer. Catell looked at Selma, who had wrapped a fox stole high around her neck, as if to protect herself from the thick dampness in the air.

“Did you hear the latest about the killing?” said the cabby, a little louder this time. He was a determined man.

“Answer the guy,” Catell hissed. “Act natural.”

“Uh, no, I haven’t. What is the latest?” asked Selma.

“Remember reading about that killing in Highland Park a few days ago, where the cops shot a guy called Shoemaker? Well, they found out who the other guy was. The other guy who was in with old Shoemaker.”

Catell tensed and leaned forward a little, his hands curled on the back of the driver’s seat.

“Yeah?”

“Well, it turns out the other guy was a dame—beg pardon, a woman.” The cabby let that sink in, waiting for some sound from the back.

“Oh, really?” Selma said at last.

“That’s right. She was in the building all the time, disguised as a cleaning woman.” The cabby paused significantly and then said in a triumphant voice, “And here is the pay-off: After the cops had went out, what does she do?”

“What?”

“She goes up to that Shoemaker’s apartment, and she goes ahead and cleans up the mess there.”

“She did? What mess?” Selma asked.

“The mess, you know. A guy gets shot up, there’s a mess on the floor. Blood and so forth.”

“That’s terrible,” Selma said.

“I’ll say. Them molls are cold as ice when it comes to that kind of thing. Of course, she only did this to cover.”

“Cover what?”

“To cover up her real purpose, that being the hidden goods.”

“Oh, I see,” Selma said. “What were those goods?”

“Well, they didn’t say in the papers, but my wife knows the super’s wife in that building. In other words, I have what might be called inside dope.”

“And?”

“This friend of my wife’s, the super’s old lady, she figured Shoemaker for a suspicious character from way back. No visitors, no visible means of support, hardly ever went out—you know what I mean. Well, she’d go up to his place now and then, just to check. She’d look at the plumbing or the wallpaper, anything like that to check up on what was going on there. And what do you think she found?”

The cabby paused, but nobody said anything.

“She found stacks and stacks of road maps!”

“I don’t understand,” Selma said.

“Don’t you get it? Road maps! Where do you get road maps, I ask you, except you walk in a filling station and ask for one? That’s how he’d been collecting those road maps!”

The traffic got lighter on upper Woodward and the taxi speeded up. Selma didn’t say any more. She sat huddled in her corner of the seat, weary and withdrawn.

“So what was this moll picking up?” Catell asked.

“I’ll tell you what she was picking up! Remember I was telling you about all them road maps? Do you also remember that slew of gas stations that got stuck up around Detroit and vicinity the last coupla months? Well, the guy what done it, he’d walk in the gas station, ask for a road map, and then stick the place up. Now, do you still want me to tell you what was stashed away in that apartment there?”

“Never mind,” Catell said. “I can figure it. Schumach—I mean, Shoemaker had all the money from those gasstation holdups stashed up there, and his girl friend came to collect after he’d been shot, right?”

“You certainly are right,” said the cabby with a sense of achievement.

Catell sat back in his seat. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one for himself, and then offered one to