o be forced to sit there and listen to twelve of fourteen hours of
feminine snoring? It would be damned unlikely in view of what was a
cinch to be running through her mind.

Minutes later he heard her leave the bedroom, followed at once by the
muted roar of a running shower. After that had lasted a normal length of
time, the sound ceased and naked feet were audible on the bedroom rug.
There was more opening and closing of drawers, the whisper of clothing
being donned, and an irregular clicking sound like tapping glass against
glass which he finally interpreted as part of the ritual of alternately
combing and brushing hair while in front of the glass-topped vanity.

If there was anything of a panicky nature in her movements it would take
better ears than his to detect it. But for Alma Dakin to get away with
her kind of job required the nerves of lion trainer no matter what
pressures she was subjected to.

Kirk stretched his legs, dug a cigar from the breast pocket of his coat
and got it burning, then went back to the crossword puzzle with half his
attention, keeping alert for any significant sound from the other
apartment. His years as a minion of the law had adequately conditioned
him to the utter boredom that went with the ordinary stake-out.

Several times the subject left the bedroom, but he was able to pick up
sounds familiar enough to trace as emanating from the living room or
kitchen. But nothing she did was worthy of notice in the home-town paper
or even on the margin of a police blotter.

* * * * *

At 9:24 Alma Dakin again entered the bedroom. A hunch, or a sixth sense,
or whatever years of experience in a single field gives a man, told Kirk
that this time something would pop. He put aside the newspaper, placed a
sheet of blank paper on the cover of a historical romance lifted from
the spinster's nightstand, and got out a pencil.

A motor whined unexpectedly from the opposite side of the apartment wall
and he could hear a heavy object roll with well-oiled smoothness a short
distance across the carpet. He decided it was the bed being moved out
from the wall by mechanical means rather than muscle, and it was clear
to him now how she was able to get at that hidden radio, or whatever it
was.

For the second time that day Kirk heard that eerie humming--a sound, he
realized, that ordinarily would have been completely inaudible beyond
the girl's bedroom walls. Suddenly the hum wa