Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, December 1956 — page 50: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

of prayer. The thing about it was, - the impressive thing, she was say- ing the prayer to him, to Freddie Foley, and it made him feel big, big, like God, like everything in the world and the whole damn universe belonged to Freddie Fo- ley God, the trees and the river, the moon and the stars up there above the river, just every single thing there was. Freddie didn’t forget all this. You’ve got to give him credit. Even after he got away from home and got associated with Duke Gore’s outfit, he didn’t forget. At first, of course, he was just a sort of errand boy for the Duke, noth- ing that amounted to much, but the Duke always had an eye out for new blood, young guys with talent coming up, and he took a liking to Freddie because Freddie ‘was a hard worker who took things seriously and was always ready to undertake anything that was asked of him. A lot of these young guys were always shooting _ the angles and looking for short- cuts to where they wanted to go, but Freddie played by the rules and could be relied on to do a thing right, and Duke liked this. He’d make a point of giving Fred- die a good word now and then, just to let him know he was keep- ing an eye on him, and he kept giving him a little bigger cut in this or that operation. After a while Freddie was making a hell of a lot of money and had plenty of important connections besides. The thing that really put him in solid with the Duke, though, was the time he saved the Duke’s life, which was in all the papers at the time, and also later when Freddie was tried for it. The reason he was tried, he killed a guy who tried to kill the Duke and would have suc- ceeded, too, if Freddie hadn’t been around. This guy was someone the Duke had pulled a fast deal on, and he went crazy over it. He laid for the Duke on the street at a spot the Duke had to pass, and he got in behind the Duke with this .45 and was about to shoot him in the _back, but Freddie was there and shot the crazy guy first. Naturally the Duke was grateful for this, and he had his own lawyer handle Freddie’s case, and Freddie got out of it. The only real trouble they had was because Freddie didn’t have any permit for this gun he was carrying, the gun he used to kill the guy with, but they smoothed it over. Anyhow, after the trial, Freddie was really uptown, and he had all these connections and knew all these really classy dames who were mostly entertainers in various places, and you’d think that he might have forgotten Maddy. by that time, which you really could- n’t blame him for if he had, but he hadn’t. He got this big apartment with a lot of blond furniture and a bar and all, and he moved Maddy in. Of course he had a one-night 48 7 ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE Gomichbooksrco