“It’s a real good alibi,” Skip agreed again. Privately he was surprised that Uncle Willy had thought up so original an idea.

“You know,” Uncle Willy went on, his tone warming, “at first when Big Tom nixed the idea of being in the can, I thought of going to a bar, talking to somebody there, making an acquaintance. But then I thought, hell, the bastard would be drinking and, with my luck, he wouldn’t be able to pick me out of a line of midgets when the time came. So then I thought, What’s the opposite of a goddamn bar? And the answer came, Why—Alcoholics Anonymous.” He beamed at Skip in pride. “I figured it out all by myself.”

True, Skip thought. Everybody at the A.A. meeting would be interested, observant, and sober. You couldn’t ask for a better batch of witnesses. “It’s okay,” he said.

Uncle Willy brushed some lint off his pants with a flick of the damp towel. “I’ll be hard put to keep from laughing, though. I’ll be thinking to myself of all that dough I’m making. Just sitting there and spinning yarns, and I’ll be making more money than anybody else ever did for one night at A.A.”

Skip glanced at him coldly. “You’re right.” He thought it over for a moment while he checked the stuff in his pockets, change and keys and cigarettes. “You never were a drunk. You’re going to have to make it convincing.”

“Oh, hell,” Uncle Willy said cheerfully, “I had a cellmate in Quentin had been on every skid row from here to Brooklyn. The stories he told, I could keep gabbing for a week. You know, the damnedest thing, he said one time when he was in Seattle—at that time they didn’t sell any liquor on Sunday, and this was Sunday—and he and some pals got some canned heat and strained it through a rag. Damned near blinded ’em.”

A faint honk sounded from the street beyond Mr. Chilworth’s house.

“That must be him,” said Uncle Willy. He straightened his coat, picked his hat off the table, and ran out.

Skip listened to his dying footsteps with a sour look. He lit a cigarette, went into the bathroom for a last look at himself, ran the powder puff over his darkened jaw, snapped off the light. Outside in the alley the fragrance of the lime tree lay heavy on the air. There was no light at this point; the last traces of twilight, dying in the west, gave his hands on the lock a ghostly grayness. Skip opened the garage. Inside to the left was Mr. Chilworth’s ancient Buick. Skip ran the jalopp out into the alley, closed the doors again, and drove away.