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changed his tastes; he was there to watch Latson squirm. It was an absolute certainty that the chief would show here, wanting to find out as soon as possible what Ronald Palmer was asking for his silence.
    Hating Latson as he did, Corday still had a twinge of sympathy for him. They were both public figures, politicians in a sense, and blackmailers were, of all criminals, the only ones they feared.
    Ernest himself brought the Bloody Mary Corday had ordered. He sipped it, looked at the paper. It would be something if the case against Ralph Guild stood up. One for the books.
    He skimmed the stories in the big News-Journal, the tabloid Tribune, the conservative World and the reformer Record. It was a rare thing for the city’s papers to all be in agreement on anything. But this time they were: Ralph Guild was guilty.
    The Record, trying for an angle, had a front-page editorial suggesting that room service men be licensed by the police, as hack drivers were. The Trib practically said that Hogan DeLisle—nobody used her real name—had been raped before she was shot.
    His lawyer’s mind automatically went over that story a second time. They were smart at the Tribune; when you first read their stories, you thought you saw grounds for a libel suit; but they were masters of the alleged-possible-no-statement kind of writing.
    Dave Corday wondered if there were courses in that kind of work in journalism school.
    And this took him back to his own school days, the bitter days of his undergraduate life, when he had washed dishes and worked a laundry route to get through; the almost as hard times when, a G.I., he and Elsa had lived in part of a Quonset hut while the Veterans’ Administration helped him get his law degree.
    Stop crying, Corday, he told himself. Those times weren’t so horrible. Elsa was wonderful, for one thing; she’d gotten jobs to augment the hundred and a quarter a month the government had allowed them; she’d cooked spaghetti and hamburger forty-one different ways—they had counted once—to keep them fed tastily and cheaply—she’d never complained.
    What had gone wrong? At what step in their lives had he written a brief when he should have admired a new dress, said no when he should have said yes, done something when he should have done nothing?
    There had been no big fight between him and Elsa. Just all at once, they were miles apart, drifted, and she was leaving him for Jim Latson. He remembered at the time thinking that Latson was a fool; no woman was worth what a divorce would cost the chief—
    But there’d been no divorce. Instead, there had been a new girl for Jim Latson, a girl called Hogan DeLisle—ridiculous!—and Elsa had gone out of town, to die on Kansas City’s Skid Row.
    She called me, Dave Corday thought. I couldn’t take her back—I’d have been laughed out of politics for that—but I should have helped her. With money, maybe—
    And there was Jim Latson. His long legs carried him into the bar as they carried him every place; a man going where he was going on purpose. There was no accident in Jim Latson’s life. He controlled it, himself, and the people around him.
    Dave Corday suppressed a grin. Life had caught up with Jim Latson. Oh, how it had caught up with him. Sooner or later all those little bits of evidence were going to come to light; the ballistics report on the gun should start it. You couldn’t tamper with those records; city regulations—put in by Latson himself—required all sworn personnel in the department to register their guns with the FBI.
    Latson had seen him, was hard-heeling toward him, smiling. But, as he approached, Corday ticked off the case against him.
    One, the bullets. Two, Latson’s fingerprints all over the DeLisle apartment (Latson had tried to cover that by frankly admitting that he had “dated” DeLisle). Three, the cruiser log placing Latson within six blocks of the Belmont at the time of the murder. Four—
    “Hi, Dave! Ernest, a martini and