as scheduled, but it was not until the bank opened for business this morning that the shortage was discovered.

I read the second one. It was dated three days later, and was a rehash of the previous story, except that the lead paragraph said Butler’s car had been found abandoned in Sanport and that police were now looking for him all over the nation.

I handed them back. “That was two months ago,” I said. “What’s the pitch? Have they found him?”

“No,” she said. “And I don’t think they will.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think he ever left his house in Mount Temple. Not alive, anyway.”

I put the drink down very slowly and watched her face. You didn’t have to be a genius to see she knew something about it the police didn’t.

“Why?” I asked.

“Interested?”

“I might be. Enough to listen, anyway.”

“All right,” she said. “It’s like this: I’m a nurse. And for about eight months I was on a job in Mount Temple, taking care of a woman who’d suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed. Her house was out in the edge of town, across the street from a big place, an enormous old house taking up a whole city block. J. N. Butler’s place.” She stopped.

“All right,” I said. “Keep going.”

“Well, his car, the one they found abandoned here—I saw it leave there that Saturday. Only it wasn’t Saturday afternoon, the way she said; it was Saturday night. And he wasn’t driving it. She was.”

“His wife?”

“His wife.”

“Hold it,” I said. “You say it was night. How do you know who was driving?”

“I was out on the front lawn, smoking a cigarette before going to bed. Just as the Butler car came out of their drive onto the street, another car went by and caught it in the headlights. It was Mrs. Butler, all right. Alone.”

“But,” I said, “maybe she was just going to town or something. That doesn’t prove he didn’t leave in the car later.”

She shook her head. “Mrs. Butler never drove his car. She had her own. He didn’t abandon that car in Sanport. She did. I’d swear it.”

“But why?”

“Don’t you see the possibilities?” she said impatiently. “He almost has to be dead. There’s no other answer. They’d have found him long ago if he were alive. He was a big, good-looking man, the black-Irish type, easy to see and hard to hide. He was six-three and weighed around two-thirty. You think they couldn’t find him? And another thing. When they run like that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred there’s another woman in it. Suppose Mrs. Butler found out about it, before he got away? He was going to have the money and the other woman, while she held still for the disgrace. What would she do? Help him pack his bag, to be sure he had plenty of handkerchiefs?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What about her?”

She shrugged and gestured with the cigarette. “Who knows who’s capable of murder? Maybe anybody is, under the right pressure. But I can tell you a little about her. This is probably an odd thing to say, but she’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Brunette, with a magnolia complexion and big, smoky-looking eyes. And a bitch right out of the book. Old-family sort of thing; the house is really hers. She also drinks like a fish.”

“You didn’t miss much while you were up there.”

“You mean the drinking? It was one of those hushed-up secrets everybody knows.”

“Then,” I said, “your idea is she killed Butler? And that the money’s still there in the house?”

“Right.”

“Didn’t the police shake it down?”

“After a fashion. But why would they make much of a search, when he’d obviously got away to Sanport and then disappeared?”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “But there’s another angle. You say he was a big guy. If she killed him, how did she dispose of his body? She couldn’t very well call the piano movers.”

She shook her head. “That I don’t know. I haven’t been able to figure it. But maybe she had a boyfriend. She still had to get back from Sanport, too, after she ditched the car. And, naturally, she couldn’t come on the bus. Somebody’d remember it. A boyfriend fits.”

“I can see Mrs. Butler rates, in your book,” I said. “So far, she’s only a lush, a murderer, and a tramp. What’d she do? Dig up your flower beds?”

“Opinions are beside the point. This is for money. What we’re trying to get at is