They sat side by side on an upholstered bench that ran the length of the crowded room. The small tables were close together. The lighting was very subdued. There was a raised stage at one end of the room. They had sat through three floor shows. The floor shows were a bit too clever, too brittle, too self-consciously smart. And they had talked too much and too intently. She know he had brought her here in the forlorn hope that it would please her.

Jane looked furtively at his face. He was staring down at the red plastic swizzle stick, bending it between his fingers. He glanced at her quickly. “Recapitulation?” he asked sourly. “Over it once again? Maybe I’m being dull about this. I just don’t see it.”

“I’m not good with words the way you are,” she said, feeling the quick anger come. “I go by feelings, Howard, I can’t just add up and find totals. I don’t think about this with a lot of plus and minus signs. Here I am. Jane Bayliss. I was horn here. I’ve been as far away as Cleveland in one direction and New York in the other. I’m twenty-four and I’ve worked for five years. There was a notice in the paper when I was born. There’ll be one there when I get married, if I do. And a final one when I die.” She put her hand on his arm, digging her fingers in, looking intently at him, living to make him understand. “Howard, there’s got to be more than that. Life has to have some glamour and excitement and danger. I just get up and plow through the day and go to bed. You say let’s get married now. Sure. It takes me out of one trap and puts me in another home, babies and all that. There hasn’t been enough happened to me, Howard. I haven’t lived at all!”

The swizzle stick broke between his fingers and he put the two halves in the ash tray. “If you feel like that, it’s not much use then, is it?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

“I wish I could think of some way of giving you a taste of this glamour and danger stuff you talk about, Jane. Just one time the feeling that somebody is doing his damnedest to kill you. I’ve had that happen to me, and it wasn’t pleasant. I want nothing to happen. I want a home and love and you.”

She touched his hand. “I could lie. I could pretend. Honestly, Howard, isn’t it better to say what I think?”

He looked beyond her at the people at the next table. He stared for a moment and took her wrist and said in a lower tone, “Don’t look around.”

It took a great effort for her to keep from turning around. “What is it?”

On Monday morning Jane bought a Journal at the newsstand near her bus stop. She found herself on the first page of the second section. She was gazing light into the camera, frowning in an ugly way and looking mad as a hornet. It was hideous.

Beside her picture was a picture of the Expressway Bridge with the usual dotted line extending from the parapet down into the front yard of a rather grubby-looking house. There was a fat woman in the yard of the house, a tiny figure pointing at the big maltese cross at the end of the dotted line.

GIRL SPOTS KILLER, the headline said. She felt indignant. That wasn’t fair. Howard spotted the killer, if anybody did. She’d had one good look at the victim. The article hardly mentioned Howard.

She read with interest that the victim had a real name now. Walter Fredmans. Age, thirty-six. Resident of Los Angeles. He had served two terms in prison, one for auto theft and one for burglary. He had left the small apartment hotel where he lived about two weeks ago, checking out for good. He was driving a blue Kaiser sedan. Occupation, unknown.

Jane got to her office at nine. She worked as one of the secretaries in the claims department of an insurance company. Mr. Stoller, her boss, arrived at five after. He gave her his usual grave good morning.

She was hard at work on the bi-monthly summary when the phone rang. It was Howard.

“Oh, hi,” she said.

“Jane, did you see the headline in the paper? GIRL SPOTS KILLER. You know what it sounds like? It sounds as though you could give a positive identification. There’s a pretty good chance there’s a man in this town who would dearly love to see you as dead as Fredmans!”

“No!” she whispered, realizing in horror that it was true.

“I don’t know how you go about getting anybody put in protective custody, but I’m going to try. In the meantime, use every precaution, hear? Don’t go to lunch. That guy, if he can read, knows where you work. Wait for me tonight inside the building. I’ll be around as soon as I can make it.”

“I can get home.”

“You do as I tell you!”

“Now you’re roaring at me!” she said icily and banged the phone down. As soon as she did, it rang again. This time it was a long-distance call from a magazine. The editor said he wanted to send a staff writer and photographer to write up her experience with the murderer — and he wondered if she had any objection to being photographed in a bathing suit. She told him she wasn’t interested. Another man phoned and said he owned a place west of the city and he wanted to know if she could sing. She hung up on him. A woman called and said they were equipped to make a professional screen test of her at a nominal cost. A young man phoned and asked for a date. Jane phoned the switchboard and told them to please tell everyone that she had taken the rest of the day off.

After that she finished the report without difficulty, eating lunch at her desk.

At thirty seconds before five she swept her desk clear, centered the roller on the typewriter, thumped it down into its well, snatched her purse, and, at the stroke of five, put her hand on the doorknob and said good night to Mr. Stoller.

The elevators were crowded going down. When she got down to the lobby floor she looked anxiously around for Howard, but could not see him. She moved over into a far corner beyond the directory board and stood with her back against glossy, artificial marble and watched the elevators emptying the building. She looked so long and so anxiously for Howard that she kept imagining she could see him as he came sideways through the people hurrying in the opposite direction.

At five-thirty there was a less determined flurry of exits. Jane began to bite her lip. She began to feel conspicuous.

The October dusk came quickly. The lobby seemed bigger than before, gloomier. Jane was glad of the presence of the girl operator. There was a buzz and the girl pulled the doors shut and worked the lever that sent her upward. Jane hunched her shoulders, purse tucked under her arm, elbows in the palms of her hands. She shivered. Car headlights went by in the street. It was the time of day when traffic thinned.

A stocky figure appeared outside the glass doors, silhouetted by the street lights. Jane dropped her purse. It made a great crashing sound in the marble stillness. The figure shoved the door open and came in and it became a strong-looking old woman who turned and waited for a companion. Cleaning women, Jane guessed. She picked up her purse.

The women went through a heavy door that, said “Fire Exit.” Once they were gone, Jane hauled the door open cautiously. It was far too dark and creepy in there. Dim lights on the landings. Concrete stairs with metal treads. She let the door swing shut.

The elevator came down and a portly gentleman glanced at Jane and walked toward the night. The glass door swung shut behind him. The elevator operator looked at Jane.

“Face it, honey. You been stood up,” she said.

“I guess I have,” Jane said. “Do you know where I could phone?”

“Right down on the corner, honey, in the drugstore.”

“I mean, inside the building.”

“Get in, honey. There’s a phone in that crummy little dressing room they give us girls.”

The girl ran her up to the second floor. “Go all the way down there just as far as you can go and it’s the last door.”

Locatta and Dolan left. Jane replaced the chain on the door. She was hungry. She managed some sandwiches in the ruin of the kitchen. Then she changed to old clothes and started in on the apartment. She saved the kitchen until last. She got to that by eleven-thirty. At quarter of one she straightened up by painful degrees, digging herself in the back with her fist. She looked at the gleaming little room.

“Adventure,” she said sourly. “Romance, excitement, suspense. Phooey!”

Just before climbing into bed, she went over to the front windows. She pulled the edge of the drapery away from the window frame and looked down at the street. A taxi, roof light glowing, hurried by and turned down the next street with the faint complaint of tires. She looked up. She could see stars beyond the city mist. She looked down again, ready to shrug off her fears.

And felt as if she were about to scream.

It was a darkness across the way, a pocket in the night; you could not see into it. But something moved. A tiny red coal that came up in a slow arc and stopped, flared brighter for a moment, and descended in the same slow arc. It was a cigarette held in someone’s hand, lifted slowly to unknown lips.

She worked in darkness. She built a high precarious tower of most of the pots and pans from the kitchen. She built it in the sweating darkness, built it so that it touched the front door. If the front door should open, even an inch, the tower would fall thunderously into the dishpan. Someone had once brought her a Samoan war club. She found it in the back of the closet and took it to bed with her. She lay and strained her ears for an interminable time before exhaustion overtook her.

A great banging, clattering, tinny sound brought her out of her sleep. She jumped from the bed, blinking at the morning sunlight, clutching the war club.

“Who is it?”

“Me, Dolan,” came the answer. “For God’s sake, what’s going on in there?”

“Just a minute.”

She got her robe and put it on, and released the chain and opened the door.

Dolan looked at the litter of pots and pans. “Got something cooking?”

She knew she was blushing. “I got nervous in the night. I made a pile of them. So they’d fall over if anybody tried to come in.”

“I didn’t even try. I just knocked. A thing like that can upset a man.”

“I’m sorry, but there was someone standing across the street last night, watching this place.”

Dolan stared at the object on the bed. “What’s that thing?”

“It’s a Samoan war club. What are you doing here, Mr. Dolan?”

“Thought I’d check up on you on my way to the mines. And show you a copy of this morning’s Journal.”

She gave a quick look and sat down hurriedly. “But this is awful. He gave it back.”

“And kept the negative.”

“That’s stealing!”

“I like the caption: ‘Beauty sought by killer. Apartment rifled. Boy friend struck down. Today the slayer of Walter Fredmans, international jewel thief, roams the streets of—’ ”

“I’d really like to get dressed, if you don’t mind,” she said frigidly, and he left, grinning.

After Dave had gone Jane summoned the elderly bellhop and gave her dinner order. It was a full fifty minutes before the meal arrived. It was tepid food, indifferently served. When the man came to take the cart away, she asked if she could have a radio.

Ten minutes later when she opened the door he came staggering in under the weight of a mammoth and venerable table model, a thing of aged walnut, with mysterious lights and bands and tuning eyes. He plugged it in and turned it on. Many portions of it lit up. They watched it anxiously. Nothing happened. The bellhop turned dials at random and finally located a faint voice. He turned up the volume. The voice could almost be heard across the room. It was quarter to eight and the station identification announced that it was one of the major local stations, the one with the greatest power. The rest of the dial was silent. The old man asked if one station would be enough. She said it would have to be.

She listened with part of her mind to the news broadcast while she leafed through one of the magazines Dave had brought up. She came to abrupt focus and gave the program her full attention when she suddenly heard her own name.

“...Jane Bayliss by authorities for further questioning in the knife slaying of Walter Fredmans last Saturday night. Miss Bayliss visited her fiancé at City General Hospital this afternoon and has not yet returned to her apartment. This situation became known when Deputy Chief of Police Vernon Patricks requested station WBBO, seven-forty on your dial, to broadcast hourly appeals to Miss Bayliss to get in touch with police headquarters. A city-wide search is being conducted. Though there has been no official statement of alarm over the safety of Miss Bayliss, John Aarons, Fusion candidate for mayor in the coming elections, interrupted a formal speech given by him earlier this evening to the Galton County Women’s Club to ask why the present Commissioner of Public Safety had not made certain that Miss Bayliss had a police guard or that she had been taken into protective custody. Miss Bayliss, if you are listening to this program, you will be performing a public service by going to the nearest phone and calling police headquarters immediately.

“Today the residents of...”

Jane turned the dial quickly. Just as she reached out and started to lift the phone there was a knock at the door. She froze, replaced the phone with great caution, tiptoed toward the room door.

“Who is it, please?”

“Jane, it’s Dave again.”

She unlocked the door and he came in, looking apologetic. He had his hat in his hand and he turned it around and around as he talked. “I got there just a few minutes after seven-thirty, Jane. There were a couple of policemen by the desk. I went up and asked if I could see Howard. The policemen moved in on me and wanted to know what for. I got sore and told them I was a friend and I’d been a friend for years. They made me show my driver’s license and identification. They asked me if I knew where you were. I said no. Then they let me go see him. There was a cop in his room, too. Howard was worried sick about you. He wanted to get out of there and go look for you. They wouldn’t let him. I tried to catch his eye and calm him down. I couldn’t talk to him with the policemen there; you said not to let anybody know. I thought I could get the idea across by winking at him, but he didn’t tumble. He just said. ‘This is no time for corny jokes, Dave. See if you can make them give me my clothes.’ Then I took a look at the parking check. Here it is.”

Jane took it from him. She stared at it, turned it over, studied it. It was on heavy stock, orange-colored, roughly the size of a dollar bill, and folded once. She opened it up, read what had been written on the dotted lines.

She stared at Dave, her mouth open. “Why, it’s a pawn ticket for a mandolin! Why in the world would Howard give me that? He can’t even play a mandolin!”

“Look, I don’t know where he got it. All I know is, you aren’t going to get a car out of a parking lot with it.”

“I’m awfully sorry, Dave. I’ve put you to a lot of trouble.”

“That’s okay. Any other errands, girl? I’m a little late for a date with Connie.”

“No. Good night, Dave. And thanks.”

After he left she studied the pawn ticket again. It was from the Ace Loan Company on lower Harrison. It was date-stamped for the previous Thursday. The mandolin had been pawned for four dollars. She wondered how that ticket could have gotten into the drawer of the night stand beside Howard’s hospital bed.

Again she went to the phone. As she touched it, it rang. She smiled. There seemed to be a sort of conspiracy to keep her from phoning the police.

“Hello?... Hello!... Hello!”

There was no answering voice, but she heard a soft click as a phone was replaced on the cradle.

She hung up, trembling. She was sure that, by now, the elevator was clattering slowly upward to her floor.

Jane began to climb again, her heart thudding heavily, painfully. She risked a glance down the shaft. The hand was sliding upward again. She looked up. There were three more floors above her. That was all. She wished there were dozens. She felt as though they were driving her into an ever-narrowing space.

She tried to estimate how many of the hunters there were. There was at least one at the desk. One in the stair well. And probably two who had come up to her room. They had been in her room when she sent the call down from ten. And one of them had gone immediately to the elevator to check ten and the other one had alerted the man on the landing.

She hoped that beyond that last lighted landing there would be a dark flight that would lead to the roof. She kept climbing. The stairs ended right there, at the landing. A bulb hung from a cord and there was a skylight above it.

The sound of falling rain was clear up here. She tried the door cautiously at first, and then with greater effort. It would not open. She pulled so desperately that her hand and shoulders hurt. She had lost track of the number of floors. This could be twelve, or thirteen. If it was twelve, it meant that she would have to return to the landing directly over his head in order to get out onto the eleventh floor. She looked down. She could not see the hand. She waited.

Then the lighter made its scratching noise, then clinked loudly, and she saw the smoke, two floors below. She looked across the shaft at the stairs she would have to go down in order to get to the eleventh floor. She computed the man’s angle of vision. In order to get to the landing directly over him, she would have to pass where he might see her.

She sat down, trembling violently. She was sitting on the top step. This was a nightmare variation of hide and seek. She wanted to get up and hammer on the locked door and scream until there was no breath left in her.

She looked at her purse. She knew they would find some quick way to silence her once they caught her, and then they would take her quietly down the concrete stairs and away. And if she was taken this way, all the rest of his life Howard would never know exactly what had happened to her. Nor would she ever have the chance to tell him that she had changed her mind. He was enough for her now. He was all the mystery, all the glamour, all the excitement she wanted from life. It was suddenly important to find some way of leaving word for him.

She dug into her purse and found the stub of a yellow pencil, laid it aside and began to look for something to write on. She found a reddish piece of cardboard that was blank on one side. She had to write small.

“Please see that the police get this note. It is to be shown to Howard Saddler. Darling, they’ve found me here in the Farrington. I guess they are the same ones. I’m hiding but they’ll find me soon. I love you. I talked nonsense. Please forget it. I didn’t mean it. Jane.”

She hitched herself closer to the fire door. She glanced at the other side of the piece of reddish cardboard.

It was a parking-lot claim check, the Safety Parking Lot, just around the corner from her apartment, and the date stamp was for Monday afternoon.

She stared at it, and several things began to make sense to her for the first time. Howard had given her the right ticket. She had given the wrong one — the pawn ticket — to Dave. But the main question was: How had a pawn ticket gotten into her purse? Someone must have hidden it there. The lean, dark man who had been marched out of the night club with a knife in his back? Her purse had been lying on the bench beside her that night. The lean man had evidently anticipated violence, and had slipped the pawn ticket in her purse and snapped it shut. He had obviously intended to regain the ticket later. But he had been stopped from doing that.

Then his murderers, finding he was not carrying the ticket, had broken into the Taffeta Room to hunt for it, reasoning that the lean man had perhaps hidden it there.

This was no traditional morning office of the law, with its scarred golden oak, its yellowed pictures of the pistol team. This was a big room, done in pale, efficient green with many gray steel desks in military array, with banks of gray filing cabinets, with men who worked at the desks and used the telephone a great deal, with girls who walked briskly and found things in files.

Jane and Howard had to wait nearly an hour in the small fenced-off waiting room until a girl came and got them and took them to Sergeant Dolan’s desk somewhere in the middle of the big room. Two chairs had been placed near his desk. They sat down at Dolan’s terse invitation. Jane felt humble and a bit silly.

Dolan hung up the phone and smiled at them. “How is it going, kids? Tired of making statements?”

“Do you need more!” Jane exclaimed.

“No. We got all we need now. I could be official and mysterious and tell you to read all about it in the papers.”

“Please don’t!” she said.

“Well, it goes this way. We knew the killing was clean and professional, and we suspected that the body was that of a known criminal. We had that hunch. We didn’t know him, so he was from out of town. I talked to Locatta and got him to agree to go along with playing it stupid. Girl can identify killer. All that. I felt I could do it because I’ve got good men and I knew I could cover you every minute of the day. You were bait. You even spotted one of them outside your apartment. So imagine how I felt when you wiggled off the hook. That was a neat trick, that shoe-store stunt, and on account of you, three good men took a peeling they’ll never forget.”

“But how did they find me? Not your men. Those others.”

“They had a man at the hospital to pick you up if you came back. You lost them the same time you lost my people. After Dave Miles saw Howard here, the man wondered if Dave came from you. So he followed him back to the Farrington and asked some casual questions at the desk and got the right answers. Then they moved in on you.”

“And then you showed up.”

“Only because your friend Dave is a nice guy and has some confidence in us. On the way to his date he took the time to stop and phone us and tell us where you were. He was afraid you wouldn’t phone. Fortunately we sent a man in first to look around. He spotted something funny going on. He came out and gave me the word and I put in the call and got help. We were about to come in after you.”

“I guess I was pretty stupid,” Jane said.

“You got your name in the papers,” Howard said.

“Please! Sergeant, what about that mandolin?”

Dolan grinned. “It’s just a real good mandolin.”

“Please.”

“Fredmans had the entire loot from the robbery in Savannah. Quarter of a million dollars’ worth of flawless blue-white diamonds in the right sizes to peddle — from one-half to two carats. He didn’t like the size of his cut. He knew he couldn’t hope to get away with the whole thing. He wanted to bargain. So he bought a used mandolin, poured hot melted wax through that hole under the strings where it would run down and solidify around the diamonds he had dropped in there, so they wouldn’t rattle. Then he hocked the mandolin. Safest place he could think of. Then he got hold of his group and told them where he was and asked them to come around and talk business. He knew all of a sudden they were going to be too tough. He planted the pawn ticket in your purse. Look, kids, I got things to do. Thanks for your co-operation.”

Howard touched the top of his head gingerly. “You’re welcome.”