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know? He said there was a busted pane in the washroom window. And he wanted to know if we’d missed anything.”
    “Have you?”
    He shook his head. “Not as far as we can tell yet.”
    “How about battery acid?”
    “We haven’t got any.”
    Well, he’d stolen it somewhere in this area, because he had it here at two a.m. He couldn’t have gone very far after it. Maybe Redfield had some ideas. I should be able to catch him at the office.
    It was at the rear of the courthouse, a dreary room floored with scarred brown linoleum and smelling of dust. The wall at the right was banked with steel filing cabinets, and across the room at desks near a barred window, Magruder and a bull of a man with red hair were doing paperwork. The wall at my left was filled with bulletins and “Wanted” posters. A large overhead fan circled with weary futility, stirring the heat. At the left end of the room there was a water-cooler and a doorway leading into an inner office.
    Magruder came over. I noticed he still wore the heavy gunbelt and the .45 even while shuffling papers. Maybe he wore it to bed. “What do you want now?” he asked.
    “I want to talk to your boss.”
    At that moment a lean-hipped man in faded khaki came out of the inner office with a handful of papers which he tossed on one of the desks. Magruder jerked his head at me. “Kelly, here’s that guy now.”
    Redfield turned with a quick, hard glance. “Chatham?”
    “That’s right,” I said.
    “Come in here.”
    I followed him into the inner office. An old roll-top desk against the wall on the left. On the right there were two filing cabinets, and a hat-rack on which were draped his jacket, a black tie, and a shoulder holster containing a gun. A locked, glass-fronted case held four carbines. One barred window looked out onto a parking area paved with white gravel.
    He nodded towards the straight chair at the end of the desk. “Sit down.”
    Without taking his eyes off me, he groped in the pocket of the jacket for cigarettes. He lit one, without offering them to me, and flipped the match into the tray on his desk. He was a man of thirty-six or thirty-eight, with an air of tough competence about him that matched the way he had sounded on the telephone. The face was lean, the jaw clean-cut and hard, and he had a high, rounded forehead and thinning brown hair. The hard-bitten eyes were gray. It was a face with intelligence in it, and character, but for the moment at least, no warmth at all.
    “All right, Chatham,” he said. “What are you after around here?”
    “Magruder told you,” I said. “You sent him to find out.”
    “I did. And you don’t make any sense. Start making some.”
    He irritated me, and puzzled me at the same time. Honest, hard-working professional cop was written all over him, and he hadn’t been able to resist a police problem, but why the antagonism? “Were there any prints on those plates?” I asked.
    “No,” he said curtly. “Of course not. And there wouldn’t have been any in the room, or on those jugs. You think the man who worked out that operation was a fool, or an amateur? But never mind him; let’s get back to you.”
    “Why?”
    “I want to know who the hell you are, and what you’re doing here. He went to all that trouble to use your plates Why?”
    The message was for me,” I said. I told him about the telephone call warning me to leave, and the earlier call to her and my efforts to find the booth with the noisy fan.
    He walked over in front of me. “In other words, you’re, not in town thirty minutes before you’re up to your neck in police business. You’re a trouble-maker, Chatham; I can smell you a mile off.”
    “I reported it to this office,” I said. “And I was kissed off. You’re trying to slough off this acid job, too, but you can’t quite make yourself do it entirely. What’s with it? I’ve seen dirt swept under the rug before, but you don’t look quite the type for it.”
    Just for an instant