but that might be significant now in view of this. Was there somebody who could have found out he was going to do it? Was there somebody who knew about Diana James? You see the jealousy angle, don’t you? I mean—he had one girlfriend that we know of, so there might have been another.”

“I understand he was also married,” she said. “But go on.”

“Believe me, Mrs. Butler, I don’t enjoy this either.

But my orders are to find that money. The police are going to have their hands full trying to find a murderer, and building a case that’ll stand up in court.” I paused just a second; then I added, “I’m not interested in that angle of it.”

“You’re not?”

“No. Let’s look at it objectively. Up to the point of recovering the money and prosecuting the man who stole it, our jobs overlap. But if the man is dead, he’s beyond the reach of prosecution, so when we get the money back we’re out of it. That may sound callous to you, but it’s only sound business. The police are paid to solve murders; we’re not.”

I stopped. It was very quiet in the room.

“You see what I mean, don’t you?” I said.

She nodded slowly. “Yes. I understand perfectly.” She paused, and then added, “They must pay you well.”

“Well enough. But, again, it’s strictly business, if you look at it in the right way. I don’t think your husband was killed for that money. The motive was jealousy, and the money didn’t have anything to do with it. That being the case, we’re not involved. We get back what belongs to us. We drop it. You see?”

“And if you don’t get it back?”

“Then it’s a different story. People’s emotional explosions don’t interest us until they start costing us a hundred and twenty thousand dollars an explosion. Then we’re in it up to the neck, and we get rough about it.”

She nodded again. “Yes. I can see you would feel quite unclean if you ever became contaminated with an emotion.”

“It’s a job. Like pumping gas, or being vice-president of a bank. If I want to be emotional, I do it on my own time.”

She said nothing. She just continued to watch me.

I leaned forward a little and tapped her on the wrist, “But let’s get back to what we were talking about. Catching your husband would have been easy, if somebody hadn’t killed him. We’d have had that money back by now except that a clear-cut case of embezzlement got loused up with some jealous woman blowing her stack. She’s just making it tough for me—and for no reason at all, because she didn’t want the money in the first place. And when I find out who she is I can make it tough for her. Or she can get off the hook by being sensible. You see how simple it is?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is very simple. Isn’t it?”

She smiled. And then she hit me as hard as she could across the mouth.

Six

“Now that I’ve answered your question,” she said coolly, “perhaps you’ll answer one for me. What were you doing in my house?”

It had been too sudden. Even without having your mouth bounced off your teeth, it was a little hard to keep up. “I just told you.”

The big smoke-blue eyes were perfectly self-possessed now. “I know. You said I was wandering around on the lawn with a phonograph record in my hand, which isn’t a bad extension of the actual truth. So you must have been up there in my room when I was listening to the phonograph.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Certainly not. I know what I did. I went to sleep. And just in case you think I’m bluffing, I can even tell you the last recording I played before I dropped off. It was Handel’s Water Music Suite. Wasn’t it?”

“How would I know?” I said.

“You probably wouldn’t, at that. But just who are you? And what is your business, besides extortion?”

I was catching up a little. “Don’t throw your weight around too much,” I said. “Suppose the police started wondering just why his car showed up right in front of Diana James’s apartment.”

‘Did it?” she asked.

“You know damned well it did.”

She shook her head. “No. But it does have a certain element of poetic justice, doesn’t it?”

It was odd, but I believed her. About that part of it, anyway.

“I’m beginning to understand now,” she said, studying me thoughtfully through the cigarette smoke. “How is the accessible Miss James? As