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easy but you had to be a hard boy. Now we give more than our money’s worth. Now it’s gonna be a pleasure to work you over. Maybe we’ll do too good a job and kill you. Stranger things have happened.”
    And then they went to work.
    The big one held him while the other one hit him. Hit him in the chest and in the stomach. Periodically the character hit him in the face, too, purely for variety.
    It stopped hurting after a while. It became a dull, gray, continuous suffering. At long last the man lowered his fists and hefted the sap.
    Johnny could not have ducked the blow if he had wanted to. And by this time he didn’t want to anymore. Unconsciousness would be a blessing. His eyes tried to focus on the sap as it came down, ever so gently, against the side of his head just over his ear.
    And then the electrician came through with a perfect blackout, and the stagehands supplied a swift curtain.

Chapter Seven
    T HE BED WAS COMFORTABLE. Slowly, carefully, Johnny opened his eyes. It was something he didn’t want to do too quickly. You didn’t rush a thing like that. A man could get hurt, opening his eyes too quickly. He got them open at last, blinked, saw Lieutenant Sam Haig, and did the only thing possible under such conditions. He closed his eyes again.
    “Wake up, Johnny.”
    Sadly he opened his eyes again.
    “Took you long enough,” Haig said. “You know what time it is? Two-thirty in the morning. Why is it I always see you at two-thirty in the morning?”
    Johnny did not smile. “Cigarette,” he croaked.
    Haig handed him a cigarette, lit it for him. Johnny’s arm hurt when he moved it. His shoulder ached. And his chest felt as though it were held together by adhesive tape. He touched the chest and found out that indeed it was held together by adhesive tape. How about that?
    He smoked, ignoring the questions Haig was asking, and his mind began to find the old familiar channels again. He was in a hospital, wasting his time lying in a damn bed. A pair of hired heavies had put him there. And Haig wanted answers.
    Hell, so did he, Johnny. “How did I get here?” he demanded suddenly.
    “Quite dramatically,” Haig said. “You’ll be happy to know that. You came in an ambulance with the siren wide open. Must have hit eighty miles an hour on the way. They thought you might have been seriously injured. Silly of them. It would take more than a blackjack to dent that fat head of yours.”
    “Who found me?”
    “A beat cop. That doesn’t mean he has a beard and smokes tea. It means he walks around and kicks drunks out of the way. He went to kick you but he decided you weren’t drunk. He called in for help and they checked you into the hospital at a quarter to twelve. You’ll live, incidentally. No skull fracture, nothing too serious. A couple of ribs or something are sprung, so you’ll have to wear that tape around your handsome torso for a week or so. Who did it, Johnny?”
    Lane sighed. “A couple of bozos hired for the job. A pair of heavies from Hell’s Kitchen earning spending money. Hell, I don’t know who they were.”
    “You better give me the whole story, Johnny.”
    He nodded and his head ached. “Yeah,” he said unhappily. “I guess I better.”
    He gave it to Haig from the beginning and the big cop listened without changing expression. Johnny told about Jan’s first visit, about the threatening phone calls, about Carter Tracy’s phony alibi and earnest explanation. He explained about the meeting, then gave the details about the beating he had taken in the airshaft next to Jan’s apartment building. He left out one scene—the huddle in Jan’s cozy bedroom. That, he told himself, was none of Haig’s business.
    And then he was through talking and Haig was looking at him out of sad eyes and shaking his big head.
    “Something the matter?”
    “I could never be an actor,” Haig said. “Or a producer. Not in a million years. I could never get into the swing of things. I wouldn’t