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blackmailer was ever satisfied, but always came back for more. I advised him to refuse to pay, and to go to the police for protection.”
    “Mike!” protested Rourke , aghast. “You let that innocent, little guy go off alone to meet a blackmailer with twenty grand in his pocket?”
    “It certainly doesn’t sound like you or your methods, Shayne,” commented Painter suspiciously.
    “He got my goat with his holier-than-thou attitude,” said Shayne angrily, and, again, truthfully.
    “I asked him what he did when a woman came to him needing an abortion desperately just because she’d made one tiny mistake in the past. Know what he said?”
    “Being a reputable physician,” said Painter with unction, “I’m sure he would have refused.”
    “Exactly,” Shayne blazed at him. “He washed his hands of the whole thing. All right. I happen to be a reputable private detective. I want nothing to do with blackmail pay-offs. I told him so.”
    “Mike,” groaned Rourke again. “If you’d listened to me…”
    “How did he react to that?” interrupted Painter.
    “He insisted on going through with it.”
    “Did he?”
    Shayne said, “When he left my place at about nine-fifteen he was headed for the Seacliff Restaurant to keep a nine-thirty appointment with his blackmailer.” He chose his words carefully as he spoke, saying the exact truth, though certainly not the full truth.
    “Who was he meeting?” demanded Painter.
    “He refused to tell me. As a matter of fact, he insisted he didn’t know the man’s identity. I don’t know whether he was holding out or not,” Shayne continued truthfully. “He didn’t want me to interfere either before or after the pay-off, and claimed that all he had was a telephone number… which he also refused to turn over to me.”
    “He told me the same thing,” muttered Rourke . “When he came to me about it, I advised him the same way you did, Mike. But he was determined to make the pay-off tonight and end the affair. I thought he would be safer accompanied by you than going it alone. That’s why I sent him over to your place. And you turned him down cold, Mike?” Rourke’s voice was troubled, wondering. “Even when I told you the way I was indebted to him? That’s what sticks in my throat. That’s what I’ll never forgive you for. If you’d done as I asked, damn it, he might not be lying here dead.”
    “What do you think that has to do with it?” Shayne demanded angrily. “If he made the contact and passed on the money…”
    “But we don’t know he did,” Rourke pointed out. “When you refused to help, maybe he decided not to chance it alone. If he came home carrying that money with him, it would have been a perfect motive for murder.”
    Shayne said, “That’s theorizing. It couldn’t take him an hour to drive from my place here. The timing is right to indicate that he made the contact at nine-thirty, and then drove here.”
    Peter Painter was listening restlessly to the irritated exchange between the two men who had always been the closest of friends. Now he decided it was time to assert his authority.
    “You claim he refused to tell you who was blackmailing him, Shayne. What was he being blackmailed for? What did he expect to receive in return for his twenty thousand dollars tonight? That might be very important.”
    “He refused to tell me that either. Just that he was in a particularly vulnerable position as a doctor, and that the information could ruin him both socially and professionally, if it became public knowledge.”
    “Do you know what was being held over him, Rourke ?”
    “No,” the reporter confessed reluctantly. “He told me just about the same as Mike says he told him. Something that was worth twenty thousand bucks for him to keep quiet. And he wasn’t a wealthy man. Look at his home here. It’s not worth more than twenty-five, and I happen to know it’s mortgaged to the hilt.”
    “He told me that, too,” said Shayne quietly.