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fifteen.”
    “Well,” I said, “first I listened to see if I could get a heartbeat, then I pulled him in here and covered him and then I had to go down to the office and phone.”
    “Did you try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?” The technician wasn’t being inquisitive; it was too late at night and he was too tired for that; he was just going through a routine.
    “It didn’t occur to me,” I said.
    “A lot of things didn’t occur to you, mister,” the policeman said darkly. Like the intern he was going through a routine. Suspicion was his routine. But his heart wasn’t in it and he sounded bored already.
    “Okay,” the intern said, “let’s take him away. No sense wasting any time. When you find out what the family wants to do with the body,” he said, addressing me, “call the morgue.”
    “I’ll send a telegram to Chicago right away,” I said.
    The two ambulance men lifted the body onto the stretcher. “He’s a heavy old sonofabitch, isn’t he?” the driver said, as he let the cadaver down. “I bet he ate good, the old goat. Sexual advances. With a droopy old cock like that.” He draped a sheet over the body and strapped the ankles to the foot of the stretcher while the technician buckled a strap across the chest. The elevator was too small to handle the body lying flat and they would have to stand the stretcher up to fit it in. They took the stretcher out into the hall, following the policeman. I took a last look around the room and put out the light before closing the door.
    “Had a busy night?” I asked the technician pleasantly, as the elevator started down. Be matter-of-fact, normal, I told myself. Obviously it was perfectly normal for all three of these men to carry dead men out of hotels in the middle of the night, and I tried to fit into their standards of behavior.
    “This is my fourth call since I came on,” he said. “I’ll trade jobs with you.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll still be sitting here all night working an adding machine while you’re raking in the loot year after year.” Now, I thought, why did I use the word loot? “I read the papers,” I said quickly; “doctors make more than anybody else in the country.”
    “God bless America,” the technician said as the elevator came to a stop and the door opened. He and the driver picked up the stretcher, and I led the way across the lobby. I opened the door for them with my key and watched as they put the body into the ambulance. The policeman at the wheel of the car was asleep, snoring softly, his cap off and his head lolling back.
    The technician got into the ambulance with the corpse, and the driver slammed the door shut. He went around to the front and started the motor, revving it loudly. He had the siren going while he was still in first gear.
    “What the hell is his hurry?” the policeman standing on the sidewalk with me said. “They’re not going anywhere.”
    “Aren’t you going to wake your pal up?” I asked.
    “Nah. He wakes up if a call comes for us. He’s got the instinct of a animal. Might as well let him get his beauty rest. I wish I had his nerves.” He sighed, weighed down by cares which his own nerves were not strong enough to support. “Let’s get a look at the register, mister.” He followed me back into the hotel, his tread heavy, the law weighty.
    I unlocked the office door. I didn’t look up at the shelf over the safe, where the cardboard tube lay hidden behind the boxes of stationery and the piles of old magazines. “I have a bottle of bourbon in here, if you’d like a slug,” I said, as we went into the front office. Even as I spoke I admired the absolutely matter-of-fact way in which I was behaving. I was running on computers; all the cards were correctly punched. Data input. But it had been an effort not to look up at the shelf.
    “Well, I’m on duty, you know,” the policeman said. “But one small slug …”
    I opened the register and pointed