in. He
threw the shock of black hair from his eyes, and continued: "Guys like
you never learn. Gotta work with a heater."

Griffin's opaque eyes shifted from the greyness which had encircled the
plane, and met the dancing grey ones of the detective beside him.
Griffin's lips mimicked the grin of the other. But his words were not so
light-hearted: "Look, copper! You just got lucky. If it weren't for that
dame.... Aah! I shoulda been smart. I shoulda known she'd of sung. No
dame can keep her yap shut! But get this. We ain't in yet! So be smart
and don't think Bud Griffin's fryin'. Not yet he ain't."

Jenkins was, for a detective, a rather amiable sort. In Griffin's case,
however, he could not help but give an occasional needle. The hoodlum
and murderer's bragging rasped on Jenkins' nerves.

"Now, don't blame the girl," Jenkins said. "She was just the last step
in my trail. The guy who really talked was Bud Griffin. There's a
character who'll never stop talkin'. If you hadn't talked to the
bartender in that joint on the waterfront, I'd have never found out
about Myrtle. But he knew Myrtle and the kind of girl she was; he knew
she only went for the hoods who had dough, and no guy who drinks beer
like you do and leaves no tips ought to have dough. So when Myrtle walks
in with a platina fox jacket and says you bought it, he gets mighty
suspicious.

"It was a cinch then, Bud. All I had to do was tell the girl she was
going to be named as an accessory after the fact, and she spilled her
load."

* * * * *

Pin points of flame suddenly danced in Griffin's eyes. His hands, lying
quiescent on his lap, curled into balls of bone and muscle. Griffin had
many weaknesses; of them all, anger was his greatest. For in the heat of
anger he would do anything, and not care about the consequences. It had
proved his undoing many times. His last surge of anger had resulted in
murder during a robbery. The victim had resisted Griffin and had been
shot in cold blood. As always, that anger showed in visible signs: there
came the pin points of flame to the eyes, the clenching of fists, and an
odd curling of the mouth. But Jenkins, either because he did not know of
these signs, or because he was so wrapped in his own glory, did not
notice the other's shifting movement.

When Griffin struck, it was with electric speed. Certainly, he had
nothing to gain by his attack on Jenkins. For had he thought it out
logically