The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

The tiny gold links of a locket chain were rising and falling with her labored breathing. Tracy frowned, reluctant to pry into her personal possessions. But the thought of the corpse on the rug swept away his sympathetic instincts. He drew the locket gently upward from the white cleft of her bosom.

He snapped the flat case open and stared at the scrap of photograph inside.

Sweetie herself. Taken evidently when she was a child of about fourteen. Self-possessed, mature-looking, very lovely.

He was clicking the locket shut when a peculiar thought stayed his hand. The eyes — they weren’t Sweetie’s eyes. Even in the child’s face, they were harder, clearer, devoid entirely of that shy reticence that had always been Sweetie Malloy’s chief charm. He saw now that the hairdressing was too modern; the scrap of dress that showed in the photo was a fairly recent style that was not more than five or six years outmoded. Sweetie’s own childhood belonged way back in the early nineties; it couldn’t possibly be her. Then who was this clear-eyed, defiant little beauty? Tracy’s memory told him he had seen this kid somewhere, was dimly familiar with the contour of the face, especially the reckless flame of the eyes. She’d be about twenty now. A grown woman.

He pried out the picture with the point of his penknife and his breath caught as he read the rounded, childish handwriting on the back of the photo: “To Mother from Lois.”

Lois... He knew the face now! His imagination filled out the promise of beauty in the face, matured and hardened the lovely mouth, added a nude body misted to a milky radiance under the glow of diffused lights... Señorita Lois; she used no other name. Poised in the perfumed darkness of the Club Español, dancing like a flitting white moonbeam behind the iridescent translucence of an enormous floating bubble.

Tracy closed the locket, replaced it gently around the neck of Sweetie Malloy. Poor, desperate, gray-haired Sweetie! Pleading guilty to murder, secretly conveying a dead body to her own home and bedroom — to save this same reckless-eyed child? It was only a guess, but to Tracy it seemed a guess perilously close to certainty.

A grim hatred for the charming Señorita Lois grew in Jerry’s mind. Without Lois there was no need at all for Sweetie’s desperate sacrifice. A childless Sweetie had no sane reason for attempting to frame herself to burn in the electric chair. But if she had a daughter... If her daughter had killed a man, had begged Sweetie in hysterical terror to save her... save her...

Jerry’s lean jaw hardened. All Lois had to do, apparently, was to lock her damned crimsoned lips and let her unsuspecting mother take the rap. Sweetie would never disclose the secret. Tracy himself, friend of years as he was, had never once dreamed that Sweetie’s marriage with drunken Jack Malloy had produced this pampered and sinuous darling of the Club Español. A damned, cowardly murderess, if his hunch was correct. A gal whom Jerry Tracy was going to pay a grim visit before this tragic night was over.

He reexamined the corpse on the floor. Except for tailor marks the clothes were empty of clues. But Tracy was patient with his searching and his patience was rewarded by a stiff, oblong pressure in the lining of the man’s coat. He found the hole in the inner pocket, ripped it wide with his forefinger, felt down through the lining and drew up the pasteboard. There were only two lines of print: