Estelle on the tar, a knife in her heart.” I dropped the spoon do and, while their
eyes were still on’the Mirror, I brou~
metal spoon across the two binding posts which carried the two leads to the push
button on the stage. The buzzer gave out with a loud beep! I broke the connection by
lifting the spoon for a split second, and brought it down again for a second beep!
“And that is how a man can-Catch him, Spade!”
Spade was at him before I yelled. The three cops had him helpless in no
time. He was not armed; it had been sheer reflex-a break for freedom. But he was not
giving up, even now. “You’ve got nothing on me. No evidence. Anybody could have
jimmied those wires anywhere along the line.”
“No, Jack,” I contradicted. “I checked for that. Those wires run through the
same steel conduit as the power wires, all the way from the control box to the
stage. It was here or there, Jack. It couldn’t be there; it had to be here.”
Page 86
He shut up. “I want to see my lawyer,” was his only answer.
“You’ll see your lawyer,” Spade assured him jovially. “Tomorrow, or the next
day. Right now you’re going to go downtown and sit under some nice hot lights for a
few hours.”
“No, Lieutenant!” It was Hazel.
“Eh? And why not, Miss Dorn?”
“Don’t put him under lights. Shut him in a dark closet!”
“Eh? Well, I’ll be- That’s what I call a bright girl!” It was the mop closet
they used. He lasted thirteen minutes, then he started to whimper and then to
scream. They let him out and took his confession.
I was almost sorry for him when they led him away. I should not have
been-second degree was the most he could get as premeditation was impossible to
prove and quite unlikely anyhow. “Not guilty by reason of insanity” was a fair bet.
Whatever his guilt, that woman had certainly driven him to it. And imagine the nerve
of the man, the pure colossal nerve, that enabled him to go through with lighting up
that stage
just after he looked up and saw two cops standing:
side the door!
I took Hazel home the second time. The bed was SI pulled down and she went
straight for it, kicking her shoes as she went. She unzipped the side of I dress and
started to pull it over her head, when s stopped. “Eddie!”
“Yes, Beautiful?”
“If I take off my clothes again, are you going to cuse me of another
murder?”
I considered this. “That depends,” I informed h “on whether you are really
interested in me, or in ti agent I was telling you about.”
She grinned at me, then scooped up a shoe a threw it. “In you, you lug!”
Then she went on shucki off her clothes. After a bit I unlaced my shoes.
FOREWORD
My next attempt to branch out was my first book:
ROCKET SHIP GALILEO. 1 attempted book publication earlier than I had intended to
because a boys’ book was solicited from me by a major publisher. I was unsure of
myself-but two highly respected friends, Cleve Cartmill and Fritz Lang, urged me to
try it. So I did. . . and the publisher who had asked for it rejected it. A trip to
the Moon? Preposterous! He suggested that I submit another book-length MS without
that silly space-travel angle.
Instead I sold it to Scribner’s and thereby started a sequence: one boys’
book each yeartimed for the Christmas trade. This lasted twelve years and was a very
strange relationship, as my editor disliked science fiction, disliked me (a
sentiment I learned to reciprocate), and kept me on for the sole reason that my
books sold so well that they kept her department out of the red-her words.
Eventually she bounced one with the suggestion that I shelve it for a year and then
rewrite it.
But by bouncing it she broke the chain of options. Instead of shelving it, I
took it across the street. . . and won a Hugo with it.
ROCKET SHIP GALILEO was a fumbling first attempt; I have never been