hotcakes now, but I had to eat them. If I walked out and left them, the waitress would notice me some more. She would remember me. “Sure, officer. That’s right. A big guy, blond, kind of a scrambled face. Something was bothering him, he acted funny.” I ate the hotcakes.

A plane had come in and the limousine was leaving for downtown. I went out and got in it. It made a stop at one of the beach hotels, about five blocks from the apartment building. I left it there and went into the lobby. A later edition of the morning paper was on the stand. I bought one, but the Butler story was unchanged.

I walked the five blocks. The air was fresh with early morning now and there was a faint tinge of pink in the east as I turned the corner at the building. No one saw me. I walked up instead of taking the elevator.

The lamp was still on in the living room, but she wasn’t there.

The bottle was on the coffee table, empty. Well, there’d been only about three drinks in it. As exhausted as she was, they’d probably knocked her out. The door to the hallway on the left was closed. She had gone to bed.

I stood looking around the living room. Had she gone to bed? You never knew what she’d do. Diana James was dead now because I hadn’t known. Maybe she had left. She had a thousand dollars in her purse and she was tough enough, and disliked me enough, to take a chance on it alone just to keep me from getting my hands on the money in those safe-deposit boxes. She’d do it for spite.

I walked softly across the deep-piled rug and eased the door open. Inside it, on the left, the door to the bathroom was ajar, but the bedroom door at the other end of the short hallway was closed. I put my hand on the knob. It was locked on the inside. She was there.

I went back and sat down on the sofa. I took the wallet out of my pocket and removed the three keys. I placed them in a row on the glass top of the coffee table and just looked at them.

I forgot everything else. They were a wonderful sight.

Here it was. I had it made. Nothing remained except a little waiting. The money was where it was perfectly safe, where no one in the world could get it except her. And I had her. When she woke up I’d take that thousand dollars out of her purse so there’d be no chance of her skipping out on me. I should have thought of that before. She couldn’t go anywhere without money.

Nobody would ever know I had it. Nobody, that is, except her, and she couldn’t talk. There was nothing to connect me with it. And I had better sense than to start throwing it around and attracting attention. They’d never trip me that way. I’d be a long way from here before any of it got back into circulation.

But there were still a few angles to be figured out. I thought of them. What was I going to do with it while I was taking her to California? I had to take her—not because I’d promised, but simply because I had to do it to be safe myself. If I left her to shift for herself once I got the money, she’d be picked up by the police sooner or later, because she was too hot in this area. And if they got her, she’d talk.

But what did I do with the money while we were driving out there? If I tried to take it in the car, there’d always be the chance she would get her hands on it and run. It would take at least five days. Any hour, day or night, she might outguess me and take the pot. She was smart. And she was tough, and she might not be too fussy how she got it back. She could pick up a gun in some hock shop and let me have it in the back of the head out on the desert in New Mexico or Arizona.

No, I had to leave it here. The thing to do was get a couple of safe-deposit boxes of my own, transfer the stuff right into them, and leave it until I came back from the Coast. I could sell the car out there