"Naw. She was everybody's girl. I've got others."

  "Well, then," I said, deciding to try cajoling him, "why not tell me where you were that morning when she was killed? If you're not sore."

  "I already told Mack Fisher. I was at a tourist cabin with another girl that whole night and morning. And don't ask me who she was. I had to tell Fisher and he checked and found I was telling the truth. Lost me one good gal. She's mad."

  "O.K.," I said. "And where were you the other day when Jim Brill was murdered? Did you tell Fisher that?"

  "Yes, I did," Ernie growled. He stood up and clenched his fists. "You know, Ginger, I'm getting sore at you again. I told Fisher and I don't feel like talking about it to you. And another thing, I've got an idea you hit me with a lucky punch."

  I reacted like a spring the instant his arm started to move. I was up out of my chair and inside his punch as he threw it, jamming my elbow into his stomach. He sat down again, squeezing his forearms against his middle. He bent forward till his forehead touched his trembling knees, and he began gagging.

  I stood over him and waited. He controlled his gagging and looked up, smiling weakly.

  "I never learn," he moaned.

  "Sorry," I said, not meaning a bit of it.

  "I've got nothing to hide," he said between gasps. "I was home here, drinking in this room."

  "Anybody with you?"

  "Joe, the butler. He saw me. He checked my alibi with Fisher."

  "Faithful old retainer, eh?" I commented. "Probably real loyal."

  "Look," Ernie said, straightening up painfully, "don't get me mad. I don't want to get slugged again."

  I heard the door behind me open. I spun around and saw a tall, rangy redheaded girl of about nineteen come through it. She stopped when she saw me. She was wide-shouldered, athletic, and a splay of attractive freckles spanned her tomboyish face. She didn't have an ounce of fat on her, not even where she'd have looked good with it.

  "Hi!" she said, coming over to me. "Have you been taking Ernie over the hurdles again?"

  "This is my sister, Grace," Ernie said, not getting up. "He doesn't remember any of us, Sis."

  "So I heard."

  "Sis has a case on you, Danny," Ernie said.

  "Really?" I said inanely. I was thinking of what poor Pat must have gone through with a goat like me around. "That so, Grace?"

  "Drop dead!" she told Ernie. But she gave me an oddly sultry look that was incongruous with her freckles and figure.

  "Don't pay any attention to this worm of a brother," she said to me. "I have better things to do with my time than being one of your harem."

  "O.K.," I agreed, with no trouble at all.

  "Elsie told me all about you, Danny," Grace said suddenly.

  "What did she tell you?" I asked, getting suddenly interested in Grace.

  "Just about how you were. She was my best buddy, poor cat. She liked to tell me about all her conquests."

  "Well," I said, sensing I wasn't going to get any more information there, "I'll be seeing you both around."

  I started out. Grace came along with me. When I glanced at her she grinned impishly, laughing at herself, and I saw that she was just a likable kid who would have liked to be like Elsie.

  "You must be real bothered," she said, "having amnesia."

  "I sure as hell am."

  "I miss Elsie," Grace said out of thin air, absently. "I don't run around much like she did. I wouldn't want to. But it was fun always hearing her talk about it. And we used to go lots of places together, when she didn't have dates, like to your place to play blackjack."

  We were out by my car. I leaned against the fender and looked at her.

  "Like gambling?" I asked her.

  "Love it. I lost three hundred dollars last night," she said, proud.

  "Not at my place."

  "Oh, no. I play for bigger stakes than your place can take. I just went up to your bar because Elsie wanted to go there to turn on the sex appeal for you."

  I got into the front seat and said over my shoulder, as though it was an afterthought, "What did Elsie say about me?"

  Grace leaned in the window, her face close to mine. Her eyes were big and cool-green.

  "All kinds of stuff. Mostly unrepeatable. What do you want to know?"

  I grinned at her. "How did I get mixed up with her, Grace?"

  "Oh, it just sort of happened. Buddy Crown was driving her into town one evening and you were out on the road hitchhiking. Your car had broken down on the way into town. They took you along in the front seat with them and dropped you at a gas station."

  Looking closely into Grace's eyes was like looking out at the ocean's horizon on a clear day. Her wide mouth was tilted at the edges, but too tightly. She was straining the act of not being interested in men a little too hard.

  "Elsie told me that by the time you got out of the car she knew she wanted to. get at you. So she took your pipe out of your jacket pocket and wouldn't give it back to you. She just wondered what you'd do about it."

  "And what did I do?"

  "You just picked her up off the seat of the car, with Buddy yelling at you. And you carried her over to a grass lawn and dropped her on her bottom. Then you picked up your pipe and walked away. Only Elsie said she could tell she'd got to you, by the way your hands felt when you carried her."

  Grace stopped talking and licked her full lips excitedly.

  I chucked her under her chin with a slow-motion punch. I couldn't help liking her. She was forcing so hard.

  Grace pulled her head out of the car window as I started the motor. She drew her shoulders back and her eyes contested mine.

  "See you around, honey," I told her jokingly. She stepped back and looked confused. I drove away.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I wheeled the car along a wide, tree-arched street in Bridesport and pulled up in front of a big, ancient boardinghouse with a wide, pillared porch surrounding it. Its white-painted board walls were peeling badly. An odd place for a man as wealthy as Patrice's father to live.

  A fat, aproned, motherly woman pointed my way up the steps to a room on the third floor. It was a big storehouse of a room, with books and magazines stacked on chairs, desk, table, and around the floor. A huge bear head and a many-antlered deer head overhung most of one side of the room. A rifle and gun-cleaning equipment lay on the white spread of a big, brass-framed bed. A big rack jammed with fishing equipment took up most of one yellow-papered wall.

  Sam Vandergrift sat on a cracked-leather swivel chair by the room's big bay window, comfortable and at home amidst all the room's clutter. He held a big Colt pistol on his lap.

  "Hello, Danny. Grab yourself a seat somewhere." He swung one big hand in the direction of the bed, keeping his main attention on something outside the window. He didn't shake hands and he didn't get up. I didn't mind. He was of the friendly school that greeted you without grabbing you. I pushed the rifle over and sat on the edge of the soft-mattressed bed.

  "Field rats out there have started detouring across our back lot," he said, motioning out the open window. "Bold sons-a-bitches. Knocked over one of 'em yesterday. Get a couple more and they'll wise up and stop doing it." He patted the Colt affectionately.

  "Quite a room you've got here."

  "Yeah. I moved in here six months ago, after Wilma got herself married off to Merle. With both my kids gone and my wife dead, I got lonely. I like most of the folks that stay here; they like me."

  "Why didn't you move in with Pat and me?"

  "Don't believe in it. Man should leave his kids alone after they're off his hands. That way you can stay good friends. Let 'em work out their own troubles their own ways."

  I felt embarrassed, but I said what I had to say: "I've certainly given one of your daughters her full quota of troubles."

  Vandergrift raised his hands, quavering slightly with the weakness of old age, in a shrugging gesture. "It's one of those things no father can or should control. Both Pat and Wilma got their share. Wilma's unhappy too. Thinks Merle doesn't love her. He doesn't. I knew that. He just wanted some of the Vandergrift dough."

  "Think I'm like that?" I asked.

  "Nope. If you did want my dough you'd have done what Merle did-gone to work in my mill. You value your independence too much to let somebody else tie you up with money."

  I ran my fingers appreciatively over the sweat-stained, grainy stock of the rifle on the bed beside me. When I spoke again I didn't look at him. "Maybe you'll be changing your mind about me, Sam. I've decided I'd like to go to work in your place after all-if you have a place there for me."

  Sam Vandergrift rested his pistol across the window sill and scanned his target area outside. He looked back at me and filled his cheeks with air, letting the air bubble out slowly, thoughtfully. "No," he said finally, "it doesn't change my thinking about you, Danny. I figured you'd be coming around to talk it over. You see, Pat called me on the phone this morning after you left her." He spoke deliberately, kindly. "She sounded happier than I've heard her in months. I hope you're going to be happy about it, too."

  "Well," I said reasonably, "only time will tell about how I'll feel about it."

  "Sure. You're a strong character, Danny. But you've led a wild life, without hampering. Sometimes a man can't change for his wife, even when he loves her a lot. Not when he waits till he's thirty."

  "Maybe it's still not too late."

  "Maybe."

  "What are you trying to do?" I asked angrily. "Talk me out of making up with Pat?"

  Vandergrift turned fully toward me and grinned wryly. "Guess I was trying to figure the future too far ahead, Danny. And that's something no man can do. You just do what you figure is right at the time and work out things as you go along. You go ahead and close out your partnership with Hull and then come around and we'll find something for you at the mill."

  "Thanks."

  "Ever bossed men around? Oh! I forget-you don't remember."

  "I guess I can do it as well as anyone else."

  "You'll make out. You're smart and fast." He suddenly laughed. "Boy, will Merle be mad when he hears you're going to work in the mill too!"

  I stiffened, feeling a prickling along my spine. "Why should he be mad?"

  Vandergrift raised his eyebrows and looked at me as though it should have been obvious. "He'll have a competitor for my job when I die. He won't like not having a clear field."

  "Hell," I said disgustedly. "Merle can be boss. I don't give a damn. I don't know that I'd want to be boss."

  He laughed again. "Don't let Pat hear you talk that way."

  Vandergrift glanced out the window as I mulled that over. Abruptly, he picked the Colt off his lap. I noticed his hand stopped quavering the instant it held the gun.

  "There go two of the sons-of-bitches!" he whispered, sighting at a moving target. He fired, sighted again quickly, and snapped another shot out the window.

  I leaped up in time to see two rats a hundred yards away tumble across the open lot and lie still.

  "Got 'em!" Vandergrift cried exultantly. "The old eye ain't bad, eh?"

  He dropped the Colt back on his lap and turned away from the window, giving me his full attention.

  "How's your amnesia, Danny? Any scraps of memory begun to return yet?"

  "No. Nothing. A total blank."

  "That's bad. Hoped it'd come back. Ain't good for a man to lose his past that way. You probably don't feel quite real, eh?"

  "Not quite. But maybe I'm happier this way." I took my pipe from my left jacket pocket. Vandergrift picked up his pipe from a stack of magazines and opened a tobacco humidor. We both filled our pipes from it and lighted them. "Sam, do you have any idea what's going on around here? About the reasons behind my getting clubbed and two others getting murdered within three days?"

  Vandergrift puffed at his pipe and stared at the ceiling for a while. "I've given it a lot of thought, Danny. But no definite conclusions."

  "How about indefinite ones?"

  "Yes, I have those. My… well, call it my guess… is that Jeff Hull is logically in the center of it all."

  I straightened on the bed and stared at the old man. "Not necessarily the guilty center," he warned me. "No. But maybe the pivot on which everything turns. Jeff's not too intelligent, and he gambles too much at that place that I hear some big syndicate gamblers are operating somewhere over in Sunbridge. His bar was in the red before you became his partner and put new money into it. And it shouldn't have been in the red. Business is too good."

  Vandergrift found his pipe had gone dead. He struck a match and re-lighted it. "This wholesale murder business just isn't the sort of thing that happens in a place like Bridesport. Oh, people have killed each other, certainly. But in the heat of argument or when they were liquored up. Not carefully and with a lot of attention to not being caught beforehand. This all seems to me like the sort of thing mobster characters like the ones that we've been trying to keep out of our county might indulge in. Somewhere, somehow, there's a link between what's happened and the big-time gamblers who've managed to get a toe hold around here."

  We both were silent, thinking that over. The fire in my pipe went out. I knocked the ashes into a big ash tray on the table by the bed. Vandergrift had given me a new line of thinking. I had a hunch it made sense, if only some missing pieces could be found and fitted in. But where to find them?

  There was a knock on the door.

  Vandergrift yelled, "Come on in!"

  It was Sheriff Mack Fisher. Vandergrift grinned broadly, exposing gaps between his yellowed teeth. "Howdy, Sheriff."

  Fisher smiled, really smiled, for the first time that I could remember. "Hello, Sam. Mrs. Nelson, next door, phoned me to complain you were shooting off that gun again."

  "That's right, Sheriff. Bagged two of the sons-a-bitches with two shots this time. Not bad for an old man, eh?"

  "You're not old, Sam," Fisher said admiringly. "And you're going to spend your next seventy years in our fair jail if you don't stop shooting guns inside the town."

  "Going to pull me in, Sheriff?"

  "No. Just doing my duty by coming up here and warning you, like I promised Mrs. Nelson I would. Wouldn't want her to vote for somebody else for sheriff next election, would you?"

  "I don't know, Sheriff. Maybe if they elected somebody else you'd have some time to go hunting with me again, like you used to."

  I took the watch out of my pocket and said it was time for me to go and relieve Jeff. Actually, my father-in-law's talk about big-time gamblers and Jeff's gambling had me aching to talk some down-to-earth facts with my "buddy."

  "I'll go along with you a ways," Fisher said.

  "Drop around again, boys," Vandergrift said as we left. "I'll let you take some pot shots at those sons-a-bitches."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Mack Fisher's car was parked behind mine. It was a black Ford sedan with a tall radio antenna and no sign oh it to identify it as the sheriff's car. We leaned against my car and I asked him, with a tinge of sarcasm, "Find any trace of the guy I shot up in the alley outside my bar last night?"

  "No. Must have been a superficial wound that a sleeve over a bandage would hide, just as I suggested."

  "Haven't you found out anything? No clues? What kind of law man are you, anyway?"

  If he took offense at my needling, he didn't show it in his tight-mouthed face. His huge wrinkled forehead wrinkled more, that was all. "Clues," he said, "are what you usually find in abundance after you catch your criminal. Any time a crime is committed, there are bound to be a dozen things that sew up the criminal. Witnesses who saw him at some place at an incriminating time. Obvious motives. The difficult thing is to find the first one, the one that points to all the others."

  "And so far, no first one?"

  "Well, as you know, your dear friend Jeff Hull seems to be tied up in this pretty badly. But so far, I haven't been able to get the hook I can pull him in with."

  I got into my car and slammed the door shut. "My thinking has started running along those lines, Sheriff. I'm going to have a little talk with Jeff." I found my hands were squeezing the steering wheel, turning my knuckles white.

  Mack Fisher stepped back from the car. "Happy hunting," he said. I could see in my rear-view mirror that he was still staring after me as I went around the corner and headed for the bar.

  I was surprised to find Salty behind the bar, serving them up for three men in dungarees.

  "What are you doing in so early, Salty? Where's Jeff?"

  "I dunno, Danny. Nobody seems to. I was passing by, little over an hour ago, and I saw th' place wasn't open yet. I didn't know what to think, Danny, so what would you have done?"

  "I better call up his wife," I said.

  "That's just what I did do," Salty announced triumphantly. "I went next door and called Mrs. Hull and she said Jeff left early this morning. Didn't say where he was going. So then I called your house, Danny, but you'd left already, too. So I opened up with my key. Been here since, but Jeff still hasn't showed up. Whaddya think, Danny? Whaddya-"

  "I don't know," I interrupted him. "Hang on here for a while."

  I walked back toward the office, thinking fast. Things were moving in on Jeff. Maybe he just ran out. The money I'd left in the safe! If he'd run away, that would almost certainly be missing too.

  I opened the office door and went inside, shutting the door behind me. I snapped on the wall light and headed straight for the safe.

  Because he was so still, I didn't see Jeff till I'd worked the safe combination and was swinging the door open. Then I turned a bit to get out of the way of the safe door. I saw him. He was sprawled on his side on the floor near the desk. The handle of a knife protruded from a big splotch of dried blood between his shoulder blades. His eyes were wide open, staring at me.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A chill spread through me like sudden death. I was frightened and cold. The world of sense that I'd slowly managed to draw into my brain was gone, leaving a blank as complete as the one I'd felt the moment I opened my eyes in Carol's bed.

 

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