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policeman watching it gone, so that they could go back to selling pieces of themselves to whichever citizens were desperate enough to pay the ten cents.
    After a half hour, Casey got bored and, with a glance up and down the banquette, stepped into the crib for a closer look.
    The room was the usual size, ten feet wide and eight deep, with a low ceiling, and appointed with the usual iron-framed bed and washstand. It reeked of sweat, sour whiskey, urine, New Orleans' special bouquet of damp rot, and the odor of flesh decaying.
    The dead man was lying on his back on the greasy and stained mattress, his eyes open and fixed on the ceiling, his arms flung wide as if he was trying to fly away. Though his suit was the kind offered in the Sears catalog for a dollar, it was clean and buttoned, quite prim for that dirty and disheveled place.
    Though this didn't signify. Casey had been around enough to know that all sorts of men found their way to Robertson Street, drawn for reasons he never understood to the filthy trollops who populated it and the lewd acts they performed.
    As the patrolman stood studying the body and pondering the odd tastes of some men, the light through the doorway shifted and he noticed what appeared to be a scratch on the victim's forehead. Edging closer, he bent down to see more clearly a clean and simple line from the right cheek to the jawline on the left side, scrawled with something so sharp it had barely broken the skin.
    He was still peering at the wound when he heard the familiar creak of wagon wheels. Straightening, he stepped outside and into the relatively fresh air as the hack pulled up.
    With the casual efficiency of veterans, the mulatto driver and his Negro helper climbed down, carried their stretcher in and the body out, loading the cadaver in the bed alongside two others. They were hooking the clasps on the gate when the detective and the sergeant ambled up, their eyes a bit glassy.
    While the sergeant filled out the form the attendant produced, the detective stood by the hack, gazing morosely at the three bodies. Officer Casey stepped up to explain about the odd cut on the victim's face, then pulled down the sheet so the detective could see. The detective glanced at the wound, gave an absent shrug, and walked away to join the sergeant, who had finished with the paperwork. The two senior officers crossed the street, climbed into the Ford runabout, and chugged away. The men from the morgue fastened the rear gate of the hack, pulled themselves up into the seat, and drove off to their next call, leaving Officer Casey standing alone on the Robertson Street banquette.

    After a leisurely bath and a half hour dressing before her mirror, Evelyne Dallencort called down for Malvina to tell her eldest boy, Thomas, to fetch the automobile and bring it around front. As she descended the stairs, she stopped to listen to the son snickering as he told his mother about a body found on the floor of a bordello in the red-light district. From the sound of his voice, Thomas was taking a giddy delight in recounting the details.
    "Woke up and there he was lying dead on the floor," he was saying. "And ain't nobody got no idea how he got there."
    She heard Malvina mutter something in response.
    "How the hell you manage somethin' like that?" Thomas went on. "I mean, what a goddamn lark!"
    Malvina snapped back at the cursing. Thomas produced another blunt laugh as he let himself out.
    After a light lunch, Evelyne put on a Floradora hat with a veil attached and went out the front door, throwing back something breezy about shopping and then being expected for tea. She would telephone when it was time for Thomas to come carry her home. From behind his
Picayune,
her husband coughed, dabbed his dry lips, and nodded gravely. Malvina stood by with the blank face of a woman who knows much and says little.
    Outside, the Winton, nicely turned in deep burgundy with brass and wood appointments and black leather seats, rolled up to the