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customer. He told himself that this couldn't be. This didn't happen in his place. And then he saw the customer coming toward him with the razor uplifted. The owner wanted to move, to run. He couldn't. He wanted to raise his arms to protect himself but they were too heavy. They wouldn't move. He watched the customer, rabid-eyed, his face twisted grotesquely, rushing toward him and knew that he was going to die but couldn't seem to understand it. Absurdly, he found himself wondering what had gone wrong, how could this have happened.
    Then he saw the bartender pick up a bar stool and run up behind the customer and bring the stool down onto the back of his head. The customer's knees went out from under him but instead of falling, he half turned around. He saw the bartender with the stool raised and arcing toward him again. The customer said: “I got to have a necktie, too.” He stroked the glistening red blade across his own throat and looked down, smiling hideously at all the new blood before the stool hit him the second time and he went down.
    The owner stood there for a long time, looking around, while the customers who hadn't reached the door before it was all over, tried to help the others who had fainted or gotten knocked down. Nobody was doing anything about the woman with the severed arm.
    "Get a mop!” the owner screamed at the bartender. “Don't just stand here.” He made a deep sucking breath. He said: “My place! My God, my place, look at my poor place!"
    He leaned his elbows on the bar by the cash register and put his face into his hands and firmly but gently began to cry.
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THE PURPLE COLLAR by JONATHAN CRAIG
    There'd been a stab-and-assault in the Eighteenth's bailiwick the night before, and all leaves and days off had been cancelled until we caught the guy. My partner, Ben Muller, and I had been scheduled for relief at eight A.M., but at a quarter past four that afternoon we were still checking out leads. It's all in the day's work, of course, but there are some crimes you just naturally take more interest in than others; and when the stab-and-assault victim happens to be only nine years old, you don't mind the extra hours and loss of sleep at all.
    But at a quarter past four, Control gave the signals and coding that meant the killer had been apprehended, and that all off-duty detective teams should report back to their precincts.
    Ben, who was driving our RMP car, sighed and turned onto Broadway, heading back uptown to the Eighteenth.
    "I'd a little rather we'd grabbed the guy ourselves,” he said. “But now that he's nailed, I got no thoughts but bed. A cold shower, and then ten straight hours of sack-time."
    I felt pretty much the same way, and started to say so, when the dash speaker rattled and Control broke in again. This time the lady dispatcher's voice sounded a little sorry for us. The gist of the call was that a suicide had been phoned in from an apartment house at 905 West Fifty-third Street. The assistant M.E. and the tech crew were already there, but the detective team which would normally have handled the squeal was the same team which had just trapped the killer on a roof top. That meant they'd be tied up with him for many hours, and it was up to Ben and me to fill in for them.
    Ben touched the siren just enough to get us through the next intersection and fed the RMP a little more gas.
    "You and I made a mistake when we signed up with this outfit, Pete,” he said. “We should have taken the examination for fireman, like sensible men."
    I grinned. “Sometimes I think you're right,” I said.
    He turned west on Fifty-third. “The job keeps you young, though,” he said. “I will say that for it."
    "Maybe it's just that cops don't live so long,” I said. “You ever think of it that way?
    "All the time, Pete. That's another reason I wish I'd taken the exam for fireman."
    "You're too fat for a fireman. You'd never get up the ladder."
    "Who's worried about