n't want to remember the
frightful time he'd had stripping the gold rings from her fingers, and
the one gold tooth in her head....

The horror of it coiled in the blackness about him. His own teeth
rattled against the bottle when he gulped the second drink. He
snapped the switch savagely, but when he spoke his voice cringed into
the tube:

"I carried her into the storage room. I got the lid off one of the
acid tanks. The vat contained an acid powerful enough to destroy
anything--except gold. In fact, the vat itself had to be lined with
gold-leaf. I knew that in twenty-four hours there wouldn't be a
recognizable body left, and in a week there wouldn't be anything at
all. No matter what the police suspected, they couldn't prove a murder
charge without a _corpus delicti_. I had committed the perfect
crime--except for one thing. I didn't realize that there'd be a
_splash_ when she went into the vat."

Gregg laughed, not pleasantly. His wife might think it'd been a sob,
when she heard this record. "Now you understand why I went to the
hospital," he jerked. "Possibly you'd call that poetic justice. Oh,
God!"

His voice broke. Again he thumbed off the switch, and mopped his face
with the damp linen.

The rest--how could he explain the rest of it?

He spent a long minute arranging his thoughts.

"You haven't any idea," he resumed, "no one has any idea, of how I've
been punished for the thing I did. I don't mean the sheer physical
agony--but the fear that I'd talk coming out of the ether at the
hospital. The fear that she'd been traced to my office--I'd simply
hidden her rings away, expecting to drop them into the river--or that
she might have confided in her lover ... yes, she had one. Or, suppose
a whopping big order came through and that tank was emptied the very
next day. And I couldn't ask any questions--I didn't even know what
was in the papers.

"However, that part of it gradually cleared up. I quizzed Miss
Carruthers, and learned that an unidentified female body had been
fished out of the East River a few days after Dot disappeared. That's
how the police 'solved' the case. I got rid of her rings. I ordered
that vat left alone.

"The other thing began about six months ago."

A spasm contorted his face. His fingers ached their grip into the
dictaphone tube.

"Jeannette, you remember when I began to object to the radio, how I'd
shout at you to turn it off in the middle of a program? You thought I
was ill, a