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“Ground floor, French windows, large grounds... I can see how anybody might slip in all right. But how about the noise?”

“The curse of civilization,” the secretary sighed. “A shot can be so easily confused with—”

“I know,” Finch cut in. “A backfire. Criminenty! If I had me a buck for every time I’ve heard a witness talk about backfires, I’d be retired and doing right nicely, thank you. But the shot wasn’t all. There was pretty much of a brawl in there.”

“I heard nothing, and most of the time I was here in this adjoining library.”

“You must have heard it. Hell of a rumpus.”

“Then it must have happened before I came in here, around six-twenty, or after I went upstairs to dress at seven-thirty.”

“Uh-huh.” Finch nodded abstractedly and walked over to the study door. The room was a shattered mess. Chairs overturned, ashstand spilled, telephone sprawling, clock...

Finch puffed harder on his corncob and strode over to the clock. It was electric, and the struggle had jerked it loose from the wall plug. “Hot ziggety zag!” he murmured. The clock had stopped at exactly 7:06.

Detective Lieutenants MacDonald and Finch, holders of the newest and oldest lieutenant’s commissions on the force, decided on another cup of coffee.

Finch glanced up at the clock in the all-night lunch wagon. “They say the stuff keeps you awake. But when you finish work after midnight, you’ll sleep all right.”

MacDonald frowned at the counter. “You know,” he said, “I had the damnedest thing happen to me tonight.”

Finch grinned. “Watch it, Mac.”

The younger officer half-answered the grin. “I know. You always say murder’s enough in the day’s business; keep it quiet after hours. But this is funny. I’d just like to know if it happens much.”

Finch stoked up the corncob and said, “Shoot.”

“I know it crops up in fiction, but it seems too blamed helpful to be a usual thing. I actually did have a corpse where the wristwatch broke in the fall and established the time.”

“Check with the medical evidence?”

“Close enough. You know doctors. But not with the one witness. Housekeeper claims she found the body an hour earlier, fainted, and didn’t get around to calling us for years. Puts me on a spot. I’d like to believe her; I’d like to believe the watch. Did you ever have anything like that?”

“Can happen. Matter of fact, something like it cropped up today. Electric clock pulled out of the wall, stopped at 7:06 sharp.”

MacDonald choked on a swallow of coffee.

“Too hot, Mac?”

“No. Only... That’s the same time as mine. The wristwatch. 7:06, exactly.”

Finch removed his pipe.

“What goes, friend?” a man down the counter called over.

Finch waved a greeting. “Hi, Barker. Damnedest thing. Mac and I were both out on homicide cases today, and there were stopped timepieces in both cases. But that isn’t enough: they were both stopped at six minutes after seven.”

Barker announced sharply that he would be violated in an unlikely manner.

“Me too,” Finch agreed. “Can you tie that?”

“Tie it? Friend, I can make it look sick. I arrested a Skid Row bum today for shooting the crum in the next room. He claims it was an accident and all he did was hear the shot — at exactly six past seven.”

“Criminenty!” Finch muttered. MacDonald was speechless.

“Wait a minute, friends,” Barker went on flatly. “That ain’t the half. While I’m booking this bum, a call comes in from a prowl car squad. They’ve just dragged a dentist out of his burning office. Toasted up pretty, he was, and a nice handy little smashed wristwatch to show he collapsed at I’ll give you one guess what time.”

There was a dead silence. Then Finch spoke, and with a certain quiet authority. “Barker, come over here.” He lowered his voice when the other approached. “Look. There’s something haywire, and if we three play our cards right we can make sense out of it. Four men don’t die at exactly 7:06 just for the hell of it. There’s a pattern here.”

MacDonald nodded, but Barker let out a snort. “Nuts,” he grunted.

“Look, Barker. I know you’re smart. You’ve got a sweet record of convictions, and we won’t talk about how you got ’em. But I’ve been in this game since you were kneehigh to a grasshopper, and I know a screwball setup when I see one.”

“Nuts,” Barker insisted. “It’s chance.”

“Four men’s too many for chance.”

“Friend, nothing’s too many for chance. I’ve been at Padrino’s joint when the red came up twenty-three times running, and me with my money on the black all the time till I switch to red on the twenty-fourth. Then bingo! she’s black. That cured me. There’s no patterns. It’s all chance.”

“Play in with us on this, Barker, and I’ll swear it won’t do your rating any harm.”

“Deal me out, friends. I got better things to do tonight than play games with you. Or maybe you wouldn’t understand about that? Anyway, I’ve got my murderer, all locked up and softened and ready to sing. So nuts to you, my friends.”

Finch scarcely glanced after the departing officer. He headed straight for the pay phone and dialed the familiar number. “Finch speaking, homicide... Look, boys, I need some dope. I reported a shooting tonight — Judge Westcott. Has the ballistics report come in yet?... O.K., when it does I want it checked with the reports on the cases of Lieutenants Barker and MacDonald... Check. Can you dig up now the report Barker just filed?... O.K., read me the high points.” He listened, nodding and adding an occasional query. “Thanks. And I want all the dope you can scrape up on a dentist that a prowl car found burned tonight... No, that’s all I know; you can dig it out of the records from that. All the details you’ve got on the man, and an extra careful autopsy. Five’ll get you ten there’s a bullet in that body; check it against the other three... No, I’ll phone back in an hour... Check.”

MacDonald started as Finch took his hat off a peg. “Where are you going? I thought we were going to talk this thing over?”

“You’re coming with me, Mac.”

“But where?”

“Son, I’ve sort of shown you the ropes, like, around this department. You know all about the vice squad and the chem lab and the ballistics department and the burglary division and God knows what else. But there’s one section you never saw before tonight.”

“And that’s where we’re going?”

“On the nail, Mac. We’re now headed for the Chula Negra café, sometimes known as the Screwball Division, L.A.P.D.”

MacDonald got the picture as a rapid walk took them up North Main Street to the Chula Negra. A scandal and political shakeup in the department a dozen years ago. A captain who was in it up to the neck but pulled enough wires to get clear. A lieutenant who took the rap.

Nick Noble, the lieutenant’s name was. He’d broken more big cases than any other man in the department, and half of them some completely screwball setup that usually has the police rocking on their heels. Like the university professor who objected to the existence of one-eyed beggars, and took measures accordingly.

Nick Noble’s wife was sick when the shakeup came. She needed an operation badly. She didn’t get it. Broke, disgraced, a widower...

“It’s no wonder he took to drink,” Finch said, “but it’s hell he had to do it the way he did.” Nick Noble was a wino, the lowest and soddenest kind of drunk that even the Skid Row of Los Angeles can exhibit. Nobody knew where he lived or what he lived on. Nobody knew anything except that he hung out at the Chula Negra and that he could still think.

The one thing that interested him beside his cheap sherry, the one hold life still had on him, was the fascination of his old profession. And he could still give cards and spades to any man in the department when it came to the freakish, the outrageous, and the unbelievable.