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face. She patted him comfortingly on the knee.
    â€œNow, don’t take it so hard, honey. It wasn’t your fault.”
    â€œWhose was it, then? How a guy can be so stupid and live so long! Fifty grand, and I do myself out of it! To do it to myself, that’s what kills me!”
    â€œBut you can’t expect to be perfect, Mitch. No one can be smart all the time.”
    â€œNuts!” Mitch grunted bitterly. “When was I ever smart?”
    Bette declared stoutly that he had been smart lots of times. Lots and lots of times. “You know you have, honey! Just look at all the capers you’ve pulled! Just think of all the people who are trying to find you! I guess they wouldn’t be, would they, if you hadn’t outsmarted them.”
    â€œWell …” Mitch’s shoulders straightened a little.
    Bette increased her praise.
    â€œWhy, I’ll bet you’re the best hustler that ever was! I’ll bet you could steal the socks off a guy with sore feet, without taking off his shoes!”
    â€œYou—uh—you really mean that, honey?”
    â€œI most certainly do!” Bette nodded vigorously. “They just don’t make ’em any sneakier than my Mitch. Why—why, I’ll bet you’re the biggest heel in the world!”
    Mitch sighed on a note of contentment. Bette snuggled close to him. They rode on through the night, moving, inappropriately enough, toward the City of Angels.

HENRY SLESAR
    THE DAY OF THE EXECUTION  
    June 1957
    A PROLIFIC WRITER of short stories and television screenplays, Henry Slesar was a mainstay of the early years of AHMM . He was also one of a limited number of writers who moved between the magazine and the television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents . This story was actually adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents , where it aired as “Night of the Execution.” Slesar wrote more than five hundred short stories in his career, including the popular Inspector Cross series; he also won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1960 for The Gray Flannel Shroud .
    When the jury foreman stood up and read the verdict, Warren Selvey, the prosecuting attorney, listened to the pronouncement of guilt as if the words were a personal citation of merit. He heard in the foreman’s somber tones, not a condemnation of the accused man who shriveled like a burnt match on the courtroom chair, but a tribute to Selvey’s own brilliance. “ Guilty as charged … ” No, Warren Selvey thought triumphantly, guilty as I’ve proved …
    For a moment, the judge’s melancholy eye caught Selvey’s and the old man on the bench showed shock at the light of rejoicing that he saw there. But Selvey couldn’t conceal his flush of happiness, his satisfaction with his own efforts, with his first major conviction.
    He gathered up his documents briskly, fighting to keep his mouth appropriately grim, though it ached to smile all over his thin, brown face. He put his briefcase beneath his arm, and when he turned, faced the buzzing spectators. “Excuse me,” he said soberly, and pushed his way through to the exit doors, thinking now only of Doreen.
    He tried to visualize her face, tried to see the red mouth that could be hard or meltingly soft, depending on which one of her many moods happened to be dominant. He tried to imagine how she would look when she heard his good news, how her warm body would feel against his, how her arms would encompass him.
    But this imagined foretaste of Doreen’s delights was interrupted. There were men’s eyes seeking his now, and men’s hands reaching toward him to grip his hand in congratulation. Garson, the district attorney, smiling heavily and nodding his lion’s head in approval of his cub’s behavior. Vance, the assistant DA, grinning with half a mouth, not altogether pleased to see his junior in the spotlight. Reporters, too, and photographers, asking for statements,