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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.

Chapter 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 bountiful as ever, I hope?”
    “She likes you too,” I said.
    She smiled. “We adore each other. But I do wish she would stop sending people up here to tear my house
    apart.”
    I remembered the slashed cushions. “So that’s who—”
    “You didn’t think there was anything original about it, did you? I can assure you that in almost nothing connected with Miss James are you likely to be the first.”
    I said nothing. I was busy with a lot of things. She knew the house had been searched before, but still she hadn’t reported it to the police. That meant she couldn’t, and that I was still right. She was in whatever it was right up to her neck. She couldn’t report me either.
    Her eyes were slightly mocking. “But I see you admit you had started to search the place. What changed your mind? I was asleep and wouldn’t bother you.”
    “It got a little crowded,” I said. “With three of us.”
    “Three?”
    “The