In the daily life of a New York cabdriver

almost anything is possible, but what hap-

pened to David Marks was a horror story

that could only have been devised by a mas-

ter villain, one who combined brilliance

with desperation.

David Marks, twenty-eight, the bereaved

father of two young boys, taught English by

day in a junior high school. At night he

moonlighted by driving a cab through the

streets of New York City, still filled with

grief over the death a few months earlier of

his young wife.

The story began with an act of chivalry, or

so he regarded it. On a moonlight night in

spring he is hailed by a beautiful girl who

asks him to take her to Stamford, Connecti-

cut. If he would get her there by eight o clock

and keep the trip a secret, she would pay him

eighty dollars. Intrigued, David consents

and carefully omits the entry from his trip

log. He went that night, again a few nights

later, and finally a fateful third time.

The destination was a large white Co-

lonial house set back from the road in an

exclusive small settlement near Stamford.

The house was always dark and its grounds

deserted. Each time he was asked to park out

on the road and stay with the cab while the girl disappeared inside for exactly one hour.

She volunteered nothing about the nature of

her mission, and when he asked, she was eva-

sive and begged him again each time to keep

the trip a secret. When he drove her back to

the city, she would make him drop her at

some street corner and disappear just as mys-

teriously as she had originally appeared.

On the third trip to Stamford, she did not

come out after the specified hour had passed,

and David felt impelled to look for her. He

went into the silent house, and began to

search. He did not find the girl, instead

he discovered a dead man, murdered, shot

through the head. Most horrible of all, he

recognized the corpse and realized that he

himself would be the major suspect. He has

a motive to murder the man who had been

the hit-and-run killer of his wife. David

has been framed, and now he must find the

killer. Could it have been the girl--the beau-

tiful, mysterious girl? Now he knows he

must find her.