Manatee City�s torrid dusty street lay in view of my office window. A few cars and clattering farmer�s trucks made a crawling stream of traffic or were angled in to the curb. The early afternoon Florida sun beat down with a vengeance. A few housewives had braved the heat to shop. I looked over the scene, but I was thinking of something else.

Wearing the pith helmet, lightweight pants and shirt that were the uniform of the Florida postman, Hank Rogers came out of Collins dress shop and turned in Si Harkin� feed store, his bulging mail bag looking heavy and hot. On down the street, a farmer and a lawyer met and stopped to talk a moment on City Hall steps. In the palm-studded park across from City Hall, kids were playing shrieking games, several old men were dozing on the benches, as if the blistering sun were only mildly warm to them.

Then I saw her come out of the Bijou. She was wearing a flowered print dress that looked cool and clung to her. She stood as if blinking against the blinding sunlight after the darkness of the theatre. She pushed her hand up through her clouds of blonde hair, and turned and said something to the girl in the box office. I glanced at the marquee of the Bijou. A mushy love story was playing.

She was coming down the street now, hips swinging, that blonde hair marking her progress. I couldn�t hear them, but I fancied farmers and merchants in doorways becoming silent and awkward, as such men are in the presence of such women, as they were treated to her momentary, passing presence. When she�d gone on down the street, they threw furtive glances at her, clearing their throats and gabbing on about the weather. It was like having a feather trailed across my funny bone.

She stopped at Judd Sloan�s store, looking over the mounds of citrus displayed outside. She went in, and I could see her, barely inside the doorway, reach over to the long, heaped vegetable display and pinch a head of lettuce. Just like a housewife, I thought. My funny bone was really aching.

I bawled, �Pennypacker!�

I heard his feet scurry in the outer office. When my office door opened I didn�t turn around. I let him stand there maybe two, three minutes. He cleared his throat. �You wanted me, Mr. Mountain?�

I went over to my desk and sat down, looking at him. A queer duck, Pennypacker. He wasn�t old, but had the appearance of smallness and grayness. Like a shadow. You weren�t sure even of what he looked like or the sound of his voice ten seconds after you looked away from him. An amateur biologist, he had a crude lab rigged up in a room off his garage, and spent a few evenings a week doing such stuff as cutting open frogs and watching their hearts beat.

But he had a hell of a warm-blooded wife.

I swung my feet up on my desk, popped my suspenders, and said, �William, I want you to go to Tampa.�

�Tampa? But, Mr. Mountain, I...�

�A quick, overnight trip, Pennypacker. I want you to look into that abstract for old lady Johnson.�

He looked like he was going to say something else. I didn�t want any argument. I kept seeing her blonde hair coming down the street. I glanced at the watch on my wrist. �If you scram, Pennypacker, you can make the three o�clock train. That�ll get you in Tampa early enough to get yourself a hotel room and a good night�s rest. See you tomorrow afternoon, William.�

He fidgeted another few seconds, said, �Yes, Mr. Mountain,� and went out. I could hear him asking Miss Hillwig for the Johnson file in the outer office. I wondered how much Pennypacker suspected, how much he knew. When you first met William Pennypacker you thought of him as a little gray timid mouse, darting only out of his hole when he was sure the cats were away. But I�d seen him once in a poker game. The little gink didn�t have a nerve in his body.

I heard him leave the outer office. I got up, stretched, wiped the sweat off my face. I squinted around the dump. Filing cabinet, leather couch, glass-fronted bookcase, desk, three chairs. All old stuff, drab and tiring. The Harvey Mountain Law Firm. That was me. Nuts, I thought. If it hadn�t been for my old man I never would have ended up in a two-by-two town as a lawyer. In a different line I�d have plenty on the ball to take me places. But it had been easier to go to law school on an allowance than to work for a living, and I�d coddled the old man along until his death. Now I was stuck in a crummy office in a rube town in the interior of tropical Florida.

I ambled to the outer office. Miss Hillwig, who completed the Mountain law firm, was at her desk typing a brief. She was a fence rail with a dried up cantaloupe for a face. She wore her hair like a cap, pulled back and knotted at the nape of her neck. I�d inherited her along with the rest of the dump. She�d been secretary to my old man for almost twenty years.

�Hot,� I said.

�Yes, Mr. Mountain.�

They yessed me, at any rate. The whole damn town yessed me. Some of them did it like they were yessing the memory of my old man, but they still yessed me. I was big. I was young. I could get mean with a few drinks, or without them, if you want to get technical. I like for people to yes me.

�We might as well close the office for the rest of the day, Hillwig,� I said. �Pennypacker won�t be back from Tampa until tomorrow.�

�So I understand.� She said it like it was something that had jumped out, like it was something she had wanted very much to say but hadn�t meant to say. Now that the words had popped out of her, her lips tightened.

�I don�t get you, Hillwig.�

�I think you do. Mr. Pennypacker�s wife...�

I sat on the edge of her desk and chuckled. I wondered again how much Pennypacker suspected, or knew. I didn�t give a damn. Pennypacker didn�t bother me; his wife took care of that department. In a town like Manatee City you reach the point where you�ll do anything for a little real excitement.

Hillwig�s mouth held that tight line. �I understand that it�s none of my business, Mr. Mountain, and it�s with difficulty � great difficulty � that I speak of this. But your father never would have liked it, you and... Mrs. Pennypacker. Why don�t you give yourself the chance to be the same kind of generous, God-fearing lawyer your father was? That�s what he dreamed of for you. What he wanted.�

�That�s why he closed his eyes to a lot of my more obvious faults?�

She girded herself with all her courage, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, �Yes.�

She needn�t have been so fearful about it. I tickled her under the chin with my forefinger, and laughed. �Hillwig, you touch me. Hillwig, I love you. Hillwig, how about a drink? I bet you could be a gay old gal with a few shots of bourbon under your girdle.�

She gasped, jumped out of her chair, grabbed for her hat and purse. Her lips curled inward, she started toward the door, not looking back. �Have a good afternoon, Hillwig,� I chortled. �See you tomorrow.�

She slammed the office door behind her.

I thought about Hillwig with eight or ten ounces of bourbon under her skin and sat down and had myself a laugh.

I was still chuckling when Hank Rogers, the postman, came in. His shirt was dyed in spots with wet sweat stain.

�Hot,� I said.

�Like the devil�s oven,� Rogers agreed. He laid a thin sheaf of mail on the desk, complained that his wife wanted a trip to the North Carolina mountains during the hottest part of the summer. I consoled Hank for having to stretch his dimes to cover trips like that, and he went out.

I picked up the mail, Bills. They reminded me of finances; it was an uneasy moment. Then I came to an expensive crinkly envelope. The engraved return read: �Hotchkiss, Hotchkiss, and Blackwell, Attorneys at Law, Portland, Oregon.�

It was addressed to William Pennypacker.

I thought for a second that he was trying to get himself a new job and leave Manatee City. But why a law firm in Portland, Oregon? I looked at the envelope, the lean white elegance of it, and my fingers started itching.

Pennypacker never received personal mail like this.

I held the envelope up to the light. Now why in hell would Pennypacker be receiving personal mail from a law firm as far away as Portland, Oregon? The strangeness of it fascinated me. I twisted and turned the envelope in my hands. I began to ache and wonder what the mysterious words inside the envelope said to Pennypacker.

A hot breeze touched its tongue through the window, giving the envelope a faint tug, making it seem alive in my hands. I tapped it on the desk; I ran my fingers along its edges. I licked my lips, and my hand jabbed itself out and closed about the letter opener. Carefully, I loosened the flap, took the letter out. The parchment bond crackled in my hands. I�d read the letter halfway through before the impact of it hit me.

I read it over two or three times. Pennypacker. Worth a quarter of a million dollars.

In that moment, something kicked its heels and turned over inside of me.

I tried to swallow.

My throat was dry.

Always before he�d been a queer duck, a little gray nuisance who had a blonde wife. But now Pennypacker swelled like an aching boil in my mind. I felt the ghost of his presence here in the office looming over me, dwarfing me. I saw the way he took his breaths, short and shallow, the way he walked with that mincing but dogged step. I clutched the edge of the desk and damned him and hated him because it was so unfair for a queer gink like him to have a quarter of a million when�I doubted if I had a quarter of a thousand.

If he were dead, and I were married to his wife...

That�s the way the thought crystallized and echoed through the dark hallways of my mind. I gagged on it that first time. I was shaking. I was swathed in sweat and limp. I got up and walked around the office.

I wouldn�t think it.

But I had already, and like a knife drawn over throbbing flesh the thought had left its mark across my mind. I sat down again, the sweat in rivers on my face now. The thought had given me new eyes, new ears. Like Pennypacker, the office had changed. It whispered to me. If before it had been drab and tiring, now it was a gray aching prison. The old desks, the ancient cuspidor, all the morass of hateful details that were the sum total, the very essence of my life. All my past, all my future right here in this damned office. The same rube town, the same grinding monotony until the day I died. And now it would be even worse, for the office would always whisper to me that once I had had a chance to escape it...

My teeth were on edge, like the time I�d staggered home and taken a slug out of the vinegar bottle, mistaking it for whiskey. I heard myself breathing. I sat there trying to get the thought to go away. If Pennypacker were dead and I were married to his wife...

The phone screamed.

I stared at it, wondering how my voice would sound. The phone rang again. I picked it up.

She was at the other end of the line, she of the flowered print dress, the swinging hips, the clouds of blonde hair. �Is Mr. Pennypacker there?�

�No, baby,� I said. �Your husband left very unexpectedly for Tampa on business.�

�Harv! If that Hillwig bag should hear you calling me baby...�

�She�s gone too. She won�t be back to the office until tomorrow and neither will Pennypacker.�

Her soft laugh was blonde silk. �I suppose William tried to call me to tell me that he was leaving.�

�He�s probably at the station trying to do just that right now,� I said. �He�ll phone from Tampa tonight to tell you that you weren�t at home when he ducked by for a bag and clean shirt.�

She said, as if she felt delicious, �Will we be home, Harv?�

�Why not?�

�You like the idea of being in another man�s house when he phones?�

�Sure,� I said, �how do you like the idea?�

She breathed, �Ummmm.� She dropped a kiss in the phone and we hung up.

I staggered to my feet. I made my way to my private office. My knees were weak. I clawed at my desk drawer, pulled out the quart of rye. I sat down and began drinking it like water. The sound of her breathing was still in my ear.

I knew I was going to kill William Pennypacker.

I tried to drink away the cold raw hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. The liquor wouldn�t warm me. The quart was nearly empty. I slouched with my hands dangling between my knees, my hair lank and limp on my forehead. The office swam and blurred. The heat wrapped me like a thick, sticky blanket.

I pushed myself to my feet, almost fell. For a moment I thought I was going to be sick. But one part of my mind was ticking away like an eight day clock, stone sober. I made it to my desk. I was thinking of ways and means.

I was a lawyer. I�d seen it happen before: The slavering man facing a jury that pronounced him guilty. I�d seen them carried or dragged from the courtroom. I�d heard their screams. I wiped cold sweat off my face. It couldn�t happen like that to me. I had to be smart. I had to make it very smart and very simple.

I thought of every way I�d ever heard of killing a man. And finally I knew how I was going to kill William Pennypacker...

The first thing was the letter. I stood up, waited for the office to steady, went to the outer office. It was still there, on Hillwig�s desk. I looked at it again. As advised in our letter of two weeks ago... There�d been another letter from the Portland lawyers. Two weeks ago, Pennypacker had known of the death of this cousin, Campbell. Why had he said nothing? I was sure he hadn�t, not even to his own wife. I�d have known from her actions if he had told her that kind of news.

But I knew Pennypacker. A queer nerveless duck. He was waiting for this present letter, for positive reassurance that he�d truly inherited a fortune. Nothing would have been more embarrassing to Pennypacker than to have told Manatee City that he was going to be rich and later perhaps have to retract the statement. And it also went deeper, into Pennypacker�s inner self. Like his lonely biology lab and the hours he spent cutting his frogs open and watching their hearts beat. He�d received a savory secret and he was keeping it to himself for awhile.

I went over to his desk. In the third drawer, beneath a dusty mass of legal-sized onionskin, I found that other letter of two weeks ago from Hotchkiss, Hotchkiss, and Blackwell, attorneys in Portland. I put both letters in my pocket, to burn later. Who could say that Pennypacker had ever received any letters from the Portland lawyers? Letters were lost enroute every day, and after they�d reached their destinations, they were often misplaced.

The gun was next. I remembered drunkenly that I�d sent Pennypacker off to Tampa, and it was a bad moment. But the gun was still there in a desk drawer. Pennypacker had been robbed once on a dark corner by a drunken citrus worker. He�d bought the gun the next day. He�d carried it often after that, packed it a few times to poker games. But he had dropped the habit and the gun had now lain unmolested in his desk for over two months. If he hadn�t been in such a rush to catch the Tampa train he might have remembered and wanted it. Since he was Pennypacker, I couldn�t be sure.

It was a twenty-live automatic, hardly larger than my hand. But it could take a man�s life � and it was registered in Pennypacker�s name...

I dropped the gun in my pocket. In the still open desk drawer, I scratched around until I had several old memos Pennypacker had written in his own hand. One of them had his signature.

I took the memos and I went back to my own office. I took another couple pulls at the rye bottle, set it on the desk, and set down. I spread the memos before me, got a clean sheet of paper and uncapped my pen. I studied the writing. He wrote a fine, neat hand. At first it was laborious, but in a little while I was doing it well, writing over and over: Willian Pennypacker, William Pennypacker, William Pennypacker...

I had already phoned her early in the evening. I�d told her to come to my apartment about eleven, that I wanted to see her. �Tell your husband you�re going to a show, and leave the house a couple hours early,� I�d said. �Or tell him you�re going to visit a sick friend.�

She said okay. She always did, though we had never tried to push our luck too far. Then I�d told her to wait in the apartment until I got there. I�d stressed that. �I might be a little late. But wait for me.�

At ten o�clock I walked in Ballard�s pool room on Main Street. The place was crowded, thick with smoke. The click of billiard balls was a jerky, senseless rhythm. The floor underfoot was carpeted with cigarette butts. It was Friday night, and a lot of farmers and citrus workers were in town. Voices rose and fell, angry or gloating as shots were missed or made. The creaking ceiling fans kept the soggy, hot air and smoke moving sluggishly.

I spotted Stan Crowder, a local dentist, playing nine ball at a side table with a lean farmer and a slick young man who could have given his place of residence as Ballard�s pool room.

I threaded my way over to the nine ball table. �Is this an open game?�

�Hello, Harv,� Stan said. �Sure, get your feet wet as far as I�m concerned.�

The farmer, leaning on his cue, nodded stolidly. The slick young man watched the rack boy. His name was Alf; he had black hair pasted down with pomade, dead white flesh, narrow sensitive hands with very long, very dirty nails. �Grab yourself a cue, Mountain,� Alf said.

I rolled a cue back and forth a few inches on the green cloth of the table to make sure the stick was straight. Waiting for Alf to break, I glanced at my watch, held it to my ear. �You got the time, Stan?�

�It�s five after ten.�

�Hell, it�s later than that!�

�Take a look at the wall clock,� Alf said.

�The wall clock is wrong,� I said.

Stan Crowder smiled. �Still arguing with signposts, Harv?�

When the place closed, I walked a few blocks down Main with Stan Crowder. We talked about the game some. The street was quiet, the sunbaked stores dark, their windows like blank dead eyes. An occasional car rolled past. Stan consoled me for the nine bucks I�d lost when he turned off on Elm. I told him goodnight, surprised that I�d been able to act so casual. My nerves were screaming.

Across the street from me, Pennypacker�s house was a dim, white shadow in the night. I stood close to a palm, scanning the street. I looked at every yard, every house, the sidewalks for as far as I could see in either direction. I knew the results if a chance, Unknown Human Being should begin watching me. I�d seen those chance witnesses sprung in court before. A man locking his door before retiring... Yes, I saw his shadow against the palm. Naturally I wondered. A burglar, watching one of the houses on our street? I saw him move out from the palm, cross the street, toward William Pennypacker�s house. The street light fell on his face. Yes, he�s here in the courtroom, that man over there, the man known as Harvey Mountain...

I shuddered, shook the scene out of my mind. It couldn�t happen that way. It wouldn�t. That was luck, and I was a lucky devil. But I didn�t depend on luck. I was careful. The street was dark, silent. Like a shadow swallowed by darkness, I was unseen.

I moved quickly. Across the street. Alongside Pennypacker�s house. He was alone in there. His wife would be in my apartment by this time, waiting as I had told her. Toward the rear of the house, I looked over the back yard, the garage. My gaze halted. The garage doors were open. After a moment, it sank in, putting my teeth on edge. Pennypacker�s car was gone. Pennypacker wasn�t at home!

I clenched my hands and cursed him. To have it happen like this. The time element had to be close, close enough to fool the doddering nitwit who was Manatee City�s coroner when Pennypacker�s body was discovered tomorrow. The blind chance of Pennypacker not returning until too late would spoil everything.

I damned him for it. I didn�t believe I could ever screw my courage up to murdering him again.

Then I heard a car coming down the street. I whirled, seeing its headlight glare. I slipped around behind the house, dropped behind a garbage can. I heard the car slow, its motor race as he changed gears, turning into the drive. The night grew white with light and I moved around further behind the huge metal can.

It was Pennypacker, all right, and I started trembling. I watched the car roll in the garage, heard the slam of a car door. I saw his shadow, heard the creak of the garage doors as he closed them.

He started toward the house, dimly seen in the night. He stopped. He stood a moment. My heart boiled up in my throat. I hadn�t made a sound, and yet...

Then he was turning back toward the garage. He had no idea I was there in the night. He�d stopped to deliberate. He was going in that long, clapboard room off his garage, his biology lab. To tinker a few minutes with his frogs and microscopes before retiring.

When he�d gone inside the lab, I waited a few seconds. I saw the light flash on, saw him come to the window and lower the blind. My lips felt numb. I was slobbering breath in and out.

He was seated at the lab table when I opened the lab door. He looked up, his eyes going wide, his face frosting in startled surprise. I closed the door behind me. �Hello, Pennypacker.�

He jumped to his feet, staring at me. His lab, a long, wooden table, test tube racks, a small steam table, electric oven, beakers and jars holding sickening looking things. And Pennypacker standing in the midst of it, backing away. As if he read everything in my face...

�I... I...� he said.

I forced a level note in my voice. �I was passing and saw your car turn in the drive. I wanted to have a word with you about that Johnson abstract. Of course, it�s late...�

�Late?� he said. He was breathing in and out, fast. He calmed somewhat, almost smiled. �No, it isn�t late. The Johnson abstract? That. Sure, I�m not at all sleepy...�

I had my right hand around the butt of the gun in my pocket. He walked over and sat down, reaching forward to toy with a graduated pipette that lay on the table as if he needed something to do with his hands.

I was close to him. My face was hot and slick. Like I was sweating grease. While he was still in the bent-over position, reaching for the pipette, my left arm shot out, scooped up his thin neck, jerking him close to me.

The pipette hit the floor and shattered. He reared up. If I had taken him less by surprise, he might have broken loose. I almost tripped. He punched backward with his elbows, smashing them in my stomach, kicking at my shins. Inhuman noises came from his throttled throat. I had his neck in the vise the crook of my left arm formed, tight, but careful, so that no marks should be made on his neck. With my right hand, I pulled the gun, jammed it to his temple, pulled the trigger.

He went limp. I let him slide to the floor. I heard rasping, animal breathings in the room, and knew it was me.

I steadied myself. On the lab table was a notebook, pen and ink. I ripped a page from the notebook, and as I�d practiced until it was in my fingertips, I wrote carefully: �My wife is deserting me for Harvey Mountain, my boss. I can�t live without her. William Pennypacker.�

A queer gink, they�d say. Unpredictable. And that rat, Mountain, stealing a man�s wife, driving him to suicide.

That was the way I was playing it. Involving myself in that way. Their minds would be so full of hatred and loathing for me for stealing his wife, it would never occur to them that I had murdered him.

Yet if it did, any of the available handwriting experts around Manatee City would state that Pennypacker had written the note. It was that clever a forgery.

I weighted the corner of the note with a small jar, in which was a garden snake pickled in alcohol. I wiped the gun with my handkerchief, pressed it in Pennypacker�s limp, dead fingers, sealing the suicide with his fingertips. I dropped the gun near his hand, his own gun, registered in his name.

I picked up his other wrist. His small gold watch was ticking madly. Twelve twenty two. I pulled the stem, set the watch at eleven forty five. I lifted his wrist, smashed it against the floor. The crystal of the watch shattered, as if in falling, his outflung arm had hit the floor with force. I bent, listening to the watch. It had stopped. At eleven forty five. William Pennypacker had committed suicide a whole quarter hour before I�d walked out the door of Ballard�s pool room.

When I went in the front door of my apartment house, the shakes had stopped. She was upstairs in my apartment, waiting for me. I took the stairs two at a time, burst in my apartment door. �Baby...� The word snapped off in my throat. There were three men in the room, whirling about to look at me. Sheriff Bill Tinkly and a pair of deputies. It was all wrong. It was as if I were suddenly two men, one of them standing off and looking at the other, watching him shrink from the sight across the room, watching his face turned green as he looked at the body of William Pennypacker�s wife...

The two deputies had grabbed me before I could move. I tried to speak. Bill Tinkly said, �We didn�t expect you to come back. Harv. Or were you planning it another way, to carry her body away and hide it instead of vanishing?�

I was unable to tear my gaze from her. She�d been beaten to death with the base of a bronze lamp. Her flowered print dress was twisted. Her clouds of blonde hair were clotted with blood.

�A man phoned us,� Tinkly said. �Wouldn�t say who he was, but they never do. They don�t like to get mixed in murder. He�d been walking by the apartment building, he said, on the sidewalk beneath your open window. He�d thought he heard a woman�s stifled scream, a woman saying, �Harvey, you�re killing me!��

Tinkly stood before me. �These sordid affairs often end like this, a woman playing around, her and the man having an explosive quarrel and one of them going nuts just long enough to kill.�

My face felt like cold lard. I wanted to say something, but what was there to say?

I thought of Pennypacker cutting his frogs open and watching their hearts beat.

As long as he�d been poor, it hadn�t mattered so much. He�d been willing for her to live. Then he�d known from that first letter from the Portland attorneys, that he was going to inherit a gob of money. He hadn�t told anyone, but not for the reasons I�d thought. But because he knew that as long as she was alive he�d never be able to spend that enticing fortune in any peace. She�d hog him for every penny; she�d drive him mad with her greed, and if divorced, she�d demand a settlement more costly than he�d believed murder to be.

A queer duck, Pennypacker. After the way she�d treated him, he couldn�t stand the thoughts of her hogging his fortune away from him. I�d killed him with her murder fresh on his soul...

My submissiveness had grown on the deputies. They�d relaxed. I gave my body a heave, broke away, slugging one of them, kneeing the other. I reached the hallway.

I was running. They were shouting. And yet I knew that the corridor was too long. There were three of them with guns. But I was looking ahead, to the long months of torture, the trial, of being broken inside an inch at a time, until finally they led me to the electric chair. I didn�t want that. Something inside of me wouldn�t take it.

So I squared my shoulders and held my head high, offering a perfect target. I knew Tinkly and his deputies wouldn�t miss.

I had made my kill perfect. The hell of it was, so had Pennypacker.