The drunk wasn’t offended. “That’s right,” he agreed, his voice thick. “Like me. For me that would have been just fine. I’d have been a stand-in for her if the guy had asked me. All he had to do was come to me and say, I’m gonna kill somebody, bud, and you want it to be you or this girl here? And I’d have said kill me, I’m no use for anything, let the girl live. She’s still got time to pull herself outa the mud.”

“You liked Doris, huh?”

He finished his drink before he answered. “Yeah, why not? Everybody liked Doris.”

“For what she gave you?”

The drunk glared. “You got me wrong, sister. I wasn’t interested in Doris for that. Oh, no. I was finished with all that, too— a long time ago. A…goddam…long…time…ago…”

His voice trailed off sadly and he looked out into nowhere, humming to himself.

2

2

Brady was aware that somebody was standing in back of him. He turned quickly, to face a round-faced, smiling man.

“Didn’t know this was where you relaxed,” the man said.

Brady forced a grin. “There’s no sign up says only bums and columnists allowed.”

The sleepy drunk on Brady’s right turned his head to look at them. Apparently what he saw displeased him. He grimaced disgustedly, then rose and departed.

The round-faced man laughed. “People hate cops instinctively, I believe,” he said. “It isn’t natural not to, don’t you think so?”

He sat down on the stool the fellow had vacated. He was a familiar figure in places such as Carrol’s, third-rate hotel lobbies, cheap beaneries, Salvation Army posts, the police stations and the night courts. It was all part of a job which he held down on the Gazette, a job writing a unique column, sponsored by a liberal-minded editor who saw it as a counterbalance to the dry rot of prosperity and happiness which papers have to ballyhoo in order to hold their advertising. “The Seamy Side” was the title of the column and it did an excellent job of presenting just that but Lowry, its author, took nothing secondhand. To fill the column with what he wanted in it he had to keep moving around.

“I don’t think about it,” Brady said.

Lowry caught the glance Brady threw in the blond young man’s direction.

“Still I’d give something to get my hands on the guy who murdered her,” the young man was saying. “How could anybody have done such a thing? Strangled that lovely throat. My God, it was like a flower stem, so white, so graceful. It’s horrible.”

“Young love,” Lowry muttered, hoping to draw Brady out.

“Or the ravings of the kind of guys they get down in the psychopathic ward,” Brady said sourly. “You know, cry over a little white rabbit, then slit it open and cry some more.”