Liking the idea, and being afraid of the dark when it comes to anything resembling murder, I told the taxi driver I had had a vision and asked him to go to the address of the Homicide Squad on West Twentieth Street. There by good luck I found that Purley Stebbins, my favorite sergeant, was on hand, and he obligingly got what I wanted with only three or four growls. A phone call to a brother sergeant downtown brought the information that the death of Waldo Wilmot Moore had occurred around midnight on December 4. The body had been discovered by a man and wife on Thirty-ninth Street a hundred and twenty feet east of Eleventh Avenue. The wife had phoned in while the man stood by, and a radio car had arrived on the scene at one-nineteen A.M. on December 5. It was a DOA, dead on arrival, with Moore’s head crushed and his legs broken. The car that hit him had been found the next morning, parked on West Ninety-fifth Street near Broadway. It was hot, having been stolen the evening of the fourth from where it was parked on West Fifty-fourth Street. Its owner had been checked up and down and backwards and forwards, and was out of it. No witnesses to the accident had been found, but the post-mortem report, plus laboratory examination of various particles clinging to the tires and fender of the stolen car, had satisfied everybody as to what had happened. It was filed as a routine hit-and-run and was still open. After the phone call Purley went through a door, and came back in a couple of minutes and told me that Homicide still had it and was working on it.

“Yeah,” I grinned at him, “I can imagine it-conferences, minute clues subjected to severe scrutiny, ten of your best men turning over stones all the way-” Purley pronounced a word. Having granted my slightest wish, he sneered, “Come and take my desk and do it. Now give. Who’s your client?” I shook my head. “About that noise you use for a voice, I know how you got it.