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jail.”
    “Ah, Jesus. It’s almost four.”
    “If you don’t wake up, it’s going to be five and I’ll still be in jail.”
    There was a pause and then Greene said, “All right, I’m awake,” and his voice sounded crisp and alert. Maybe his wife had brought him a cold cloth. “Where are you?”
    “The Tenth Precinct on West Twentieth.”
    ‘“What’s the charge?”
    “They’re thinking about two of them. Suspicion of murder one and grand larceny.”
    “Jesus,” Myron Greene said again and then asked, “What happened?” I told him what I could, making it as succinct as possible. There was a brief silence while he probably sorted through his bag of legal tricks. “What have you told them?” he finally asked.
    “My name and address.”
    “All right,” he said. “I’m going to have to call some people and it’s going to take a while. I’ll try to keep our client’s name out of it and that may be difficult and time-consuming, so you’d better plan on spending a little more time right where you are. But I’ll try to get you out before they send the wagon around in the morning to take you downtown.”
    “I don’t like it here,” I said, “but I’d like it even less in the Tombs.”
    “I’ll get back to you.”
    “Do that,” I said and hung up.
    “You want to call anybody else?” Deal said.
    I shook my head. “No.”
    “Then let’s go down and talk to Sergeant Finn.”
    Sergeant Finn, the desk officer, still looked bored, even when they told him about the dead body of Bobby Boykins. He perked up a little though when they got around to the ninety thousand dollars and agreed that it wouldn’t do at all to turn me loose upon society and that they should hang on to me for a few more hours. By then they would have talked to someone in the district attorney’s office and the wagon would be around to haul me down to the Complaint Court at 100 Centre Street
    After that they made me empty my pockets and an elderly cop sniffed as if to see whether I’d been drinking, apparently decided that I hadn’t, and let me keep my cigarettes and matches. Then they took me back upstairs to the detective squad room.
    It was a medium-sized room, about fifteen by twenty, with four gray metal desks, a couple of typewriters, and a tacky-looking bulletin board with a reward poster on it offering $5,000 for the arrest and conviction of somebody who’d stolen $600,000. The walls were two shades of green—medium dark to about halfway up and then light green all the way to the white ceiling. The floor was covered with black asphalt tile and didn’t show the dirt much.
    Just off the squad room was another, smaller room with two desks, four chairs, and brown walls. They put me in there, closed the door, and forgot about me.
    I sat down in one of the chairs and felt sorry for myself, the way the falsely accused always do. The precinct didn’t have any cells, just a detention cage for the violent cases that was made out of green iron mesh, and I told myself that I was lucky they hadn’t put me in there because it contained nothing to sit on other than the floor.
    I had a fairly nice time feeling sorry for myself, smoking cigarettes, and wondering about how frightened I might become. When I got tired of that, I thought about Abner Procane, the thief who kept diaries.
    Not too many persons in New York suspected that Abner Procane was a thief. A few cops did, but they had never been able to prove it and after a while they didn’t even bother to try. Some of the racier types that I occasionally palled around with assumed that Procane was a thief, but because they couldn’t figure a percentage for themselves, they weren’t really interested.
    When I had got through telling Myron Greene on that pre-Halloween Friday about what I suspected Procane to be, Greene had replied, “Hearsay. That’s all you have. Pure hearsay.”
    “That’s sometimes all you need when you’re a reporter.”
    “Well, you’re not a