own his empty glass. Gladys refilled it from the
shaker.

"My dear lady, that five thousand I unblushingly accepted from you was
only part of it," he confessed.

"There was also a fee of three thousand from Stephen Gresham, for pulling
the bloodhounds of the D.A.'s office off his back in the matter of Arnold
Rivers, and there was five thousand from Humphrey Goode, which I suppose
he'll get the Premix Company to repay him, for engineering the
suppression of a lot of facts he wanted suppressed. And, finally, my
connection with this business brought that merger to my attention, and I
picked up a hundred shares of Premix at 73-1/4, and now I have two
hundred shares of Mill-Pack, worth about twenty-nine thousand, which I
can report for my income tax as capital gains. I'd say I could afford to
treat myself to a few old pistols for my collection."

"Well!" She raised both eyebrows over that. "Don't anybody tell me crime
doesn't pay."

"Yes. In my ghoulish way, I generally manage to bear myself in mind, on
an operation like this. I make no secret of my affection for money." He
lifted his glass and sipped slowly. "Look here, Gladys; are you satisfied
with the way this was handled?"

She shrugged. "I should be. When I started out as Lane's blood-avenger,
I suppose I expected things to end somewhere out of sight, in a nice,
antiseptic death-chamber at the state penitentiary. You must admit that
that business in the library was really bringing it home. There's no
question that you got the man who killed Lane, and if you hadn't, I'd
never have been at peace with myself. And I suppose all that chicanery
afterward was necessary, too."

"It was, if you wanted that merger to go through, and unless you wanted
to see the bottom drop out of your Premix stock," Rand assured her. "If
the true facts of Mr. Fleming's death had gotten out, there'd have been
a simply hideous stink. The Mill-Pack people would have backed out of
that merger like a bear out of an active bee-tree.... You know what the
situation really was, don't you?"

She shook her head. "I know Mill-Pack wanted to get control of the Premix
Company, and Lane refused to go in with them. I don't fully understand
his reasons, though."

"They weren't important; they were mainly verbal, and unrelated to
actuality," Rand said. "The important thing is that he did refuse, and
Mill-Pack wanted that merger so badly that it could be tasted in every
ounce of food they sold. They got