“Of what?”

  “I don’t know. I only know you can’t do that.”

  “I’ve already done it.”

  “But—look here, let’s call a doctor and—we don’t need to wait. Let the doctor do whatever’s necessary.”

  Peggy said, “It’s a job for the police. Do you notice that froth on her lips? And there’s an odor that I have been trying to place. Now I know what it is.”

  “What do you mean, an odor?”

  “Bitter almonds. That means cyanide. So does the color of the skin.”

  He looked at her dubiously. “You seem to know a lot about—suicides.”

  “I do,” Peggy said. “I’ve done newspaper work. Now, since we’re already in it this deep, let’s take a look around.”

  “What for?”

  “To protect ourselves. Let’s make certain there are no more corpses, for one thing.”

  She moved swiftly about the apartment, her quick eyes drinking in details.

  “If this is suicide, what you’re doing is probably highly illegal,” he said.

  “And if it’s murder?”

  “Then it’s doubly illegal.”

  She said nothing, moving quietly around the rooms. Her gloved hands occasionally touched some object with the greatest care, but for the most part her hands were at her sides.

  There was an odor of raw whiskey about the place, perhaps from the spilled drink in the kitchen. However, this odor was stronger in the bathroom.

  Peggy dropped to her knees on the tiled floor, picked up a small sliver of glass, then another. She let both slivers drop back to the tiles.

  In the bedroom, the dress Stella was to have worn was spread out on the bed. The plunging neckline seemed to go nearly to the waist.

  Kimberly, looking at the V-shaped opening in the front of the dress, gave a low whistle. “Peggy,” he said at length, using her first name easily and naturally, “this is going to make a stink. If it should be murder—I don’t see how it could be, and yet that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Suppose it’s suicide?” she asked.

  “Then there wouldn’t be too much to it—just a few lines on page two, or perhaps a write-up in the second section. And Old E.B. hates bad publicity.”

  “Are you telling me?”

  “Well, then,” he said, “do you think we really have to notify the police? Can’t we just call a doctor and leave?”

  “Do you want to be suspect number one in a murder case?” she asked.

  “Heavens, no!”

  “You’re filing nomination papers right now with that sort of talk. There’s the phone. Call the police.”

  He hesitated. “I’d like to keep us out of it altogether. Since she’s dead, there’s nothing we can do—”

  Peggy walked to the phone, dialed the operator, asked for police headquarters, and almost immediately heard a booming masculine voice answer the phone.

  Peggy said, “My name is Castle. I wish to report a death. We just found a body under very odd circumstances and—”

  “Where are you?”

  Peggy gave the address.

  “Wait there,” the voice said. “Don’t touch anything. Be on the lookout for a squad car. I’ll get in touch with the dispatcher.”

  The two officers were very considerate. They listened to the sketchy story Kimberly told, the story that very carefully left out all reference to Peggy’s suspicion of poison, and recounted barely the facts that Stella Lynn was a “friend of theirs,” that they had called on her at her apartment, had found the door open, walked in, and discovered her body on the floor; they didn’t know exactly what the proper procedure was under the circumstances but felt they should notify the police.

  The police looked around a bit, nodded sagely, and then one of them called the coroner.

  Peggy ventured with some hesitation, “Are you—have you any ideas of what caused death?”

  “You thinking of suicide?”

  She hesitated. “I can’t help wondering whether it might have been her heart.”

  “Had she been despondent or anything?”

  “I didn’t know her that well,” Peggy said, “but I gather she had rather a happy disposition. But—well, notice the foam on the lips, the peculiar color of her skin—”

  The officer shrugged. “We aren’t thinking, not right now. We’re following rules and taking statements.”

  There followed an interval of waiting. Men came and went, and eventually the Homicide Squad arrived with a photographer to take pictures of the body, and a detective to question Peggy and Kimberly in detail.

  Kimberly told his story first. Since it did not occur to anyone to examine them separately, Peggy, after hearing Don’s highly generalized version of the evening’s activities, confined herself to the bare essentials. The officers seemed to take it for granted that she had been Don Kimberly’s date, and that following dinner they had dropped in at Stella Lynn’s apartment simply because they were friends and because Stella Lynn worked in the same office.

  Don Kimberly drove her home. Peggy hoped he would open up with some additional explanation, but he was competely preoccupied with his thoughts and the problem of driving through the evening traffic, so it became necessary for Peggy to bring up the subject.

  “You told your story first,” she said, “so I had to back your play, but I think we’ve carried it far enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The police assumed I was your date for the evening.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that? We can’t help what they assume.”

  “Then I’ll draw you a diagram,” Peggy said impatiently. “I think Stella Lynn was murdered. I think it was carefully planned, cold-blooded, deliberate murder, cunningly conceived and ruthlessly carried out. I think the police are going to investigate enough to find that out. Then they’re going to ask you to tell your story in greater detail.”

  He slowed the car until it was barely crawling. “All right,” he said, “what’s wrong with my story? You and I were at the Royal Pheasant. We got to talking about Stella Lynn. We decided to run in and see her. We—”

  “Everything is wrong with that story,” she interrupted. “In the first place, someone knew you were going to the Royal Pheasant to meet Stella. That someone sent me an anonymous letter. Moreover, if the police check with the headwaiter, they’ll learn that I came in alone, using my press card, and that you came in later.”

  Abruptly he swung the car to the curb and shut off the motor.

  “What time did you get that anonymous letter?”

  “In the afternoon mail.”

  “What became of it?”

  “I tore it into small bits and dumped it into the wastebasket.”

  He said, “Stella didn’t work today. She rang up and told the personnel manager she wouldn’t be at the office. About ten-thirty she rang me up and asked me what our policy would be on paying out a reward for the recovery of all the gems in the Garrison job.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her it made a great deal of difference with whom we were dealing. You know how those things are. It’s our policy never to reward a thief. If we did, we’d be in the position of fencing property that had first been stolen from our own clients. But if a man gives us a legitimate tip and that tip leads to the recovery of insured property, we are, of course, willing to pay, and pay generously.”

  “You told her that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She told me she thought she had some information on the Garrison case that would interest me. I told her that on a big job like that hundreds of false leads were floating around. She told me that she could show me evidence that would prove she was dealing with people who knew what they were talking about.”

  “That,” Peggy said, “would account for the jeweled butterfly.”

  “You mean that was to be my assurance I was dealing with the right people?”

  “That was the start of it, but I think it has an added significance now.”

  “What?”

  “You are thinking Stella ran into danger because she was going to tell you something about the Garrison jewels. Now, let’s suppose you are right, and she was killed by the jewel thieves. They’d never have left that jeweled butterfly on her stocking. All those rubies, emeralds, and diamonds! It must be worth a small fortune.”

  He thought that over.

  “And,” Peggy went on, “if she’d been killed by an intruder or a burglar, he’d naturally have taken the butterfly. So it adds up to the fact that her death must have been unrelated to that Garrison job and must have been caused by someone who was so anxious to have her out of the way the opportunity to steal the butterfly meant nothing.”

  He looked at her with sudden respect. “Say, you’re a logical little cuss.”

  She said, “That’s not what women want. When men praise their brains it’s almost a slam. A woman would far rather be known as a glamour puss than as a thinker. Let’s check on our story a little further. Stella telephoned you this morning, and it was you who suggested the Royal Pheasant?”

  “That’s right. Surely you don’t doubt my statement.”

  “I don’t doubt your statement. I doubt your conclusions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you told me that two and three added up to ten,” she said, “I wouldn’t be doubting your statement, I’d be doubting your conclusions. You might actually have ten as an answer and know that the figures you had in mind consisted of two and three, but the total of those figures wouldn’t be ten.”

  “Apparently you want to point out that there’s a factor I’ve missed somewhere, that there’s an extra five I don’t know about.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “And what makes you think there’s this extra five? What have I missed?”

  “The anonymous letter I received in the afternoon mail had been postmarked at five-thirty P.M. yesterday. If you are the one who suggested the Royal Pheasant, how did someone know yesterday that you and Stella were to have a date there tonight?”

  “All right, let’s go,” he told her. “There’s a possibility the janitor hasn’t cleaned up in your office. We’re going to have to find that letter, put the torn pieces together, and reconstruct the postmark on that envelope. There’s also the possibility that your totals are all wrong and the postmark was a clever forgery. How come you noticed it?”

  “Because Uncle Benedict told me if you ever wanted to get anywhere you had to notice details.”

  “Who’s Uncle Benedict?”

  “He’s the black sheep of my family, the one who made his living by—” Abruptly she became silent. She realized all too keenly that she couldn’t tell Don Kimberly about her uncle Benedict. There were only a few people she could tell about him.

  Kimberly signed both names to the register and said to the janitor, “Let’s go up to E. B. Halsey’s office, please, and make it snappy. Do you know whether that office has been cleaned?”

  “Sure it has. We begin on that floor. That’s the brass-hat floor. They’re always out by five o’clock. Some of the other floors are later—”

  “And you’re certain Halsey’s office has been cleaned up?”

  “Sure. I did it myself.”

  “You emptied the wastebasket?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, we have to get that stuff. There was something in the wastebasket. Where is it now?”

  The man grinned as he brought the elevator to a stop. “The stuff that was in that wastebasket is smoke by this time.”

  “You incinerated it?”

  “Sure.”

  “I thought you sometimes saved it for a central pickup.”

  “No more we don’t. We burn it up. Everything in the wastebaskets is burned right here in the building. That’s E. B. Halsey’s orders. Don’t let anything go out.”

  They hurried to E. B. Halsey’s office. As the janitor had told them, it had been cleaned. The square mahogany-colored wastebasket in Peggy Castle’s secretarial office was completely free of paper. There was a folded square of cardboard in the bottom, and Peggy pulled it out in the vain hope that some fragment of the letter might have worked down beneath it.

  There was nothing.

  “I guess that’s it,” Kimberly said.

  “Wait a minute,” she told him. “I have a hunch. The way that janitor looked when he said the papers had been burned—come on.”

  The janitor evidently had been expecting their ring because he brought the cage up quickly.

  “All done?” he asked.

  “Not quite,” Peggy said. “We want to go down to the basement. I want to see where you burn those papers.”

  “It’s just an ordinary incinerator. Mr. Halsey said that he wanted all papers burned on the premises, and—”

  “I’m checking,” Peggy said. “It’s something important. I think Mr. Halsey will want a report tomorrow.”

  “Oh.”

  The janitor stopped the cage at the basement and said, “Right over to the left.”

  Peggy all but ran down the passageway to where several big clothes baskets were stacked in front of an incinerator. Two of the clothes baskets were almost full.

  “What’s this?”

  “Scraps that we haven’t burned yet.”

  “I thought you told me everything had been burned.”

  “Well, everything from your office.”

  “How do you know what office these came from?”

  The man fidgeted uncomfortably. “Well, I think that these two came from the lower floors.”

  Peggy nodded to Kimberly, then upset the entire contents of the baskets on the floor and started pawing through them, throwing to one side the envelopes, circular letters, newspapers, scratch paper—all the odds and ends that accumulate in a busy office.

  “We don’t need to look through anything that isn’t torn,” she said to Kimberly. “I tore this letter up into fine pieces. And you don’t need to bother with anything that’s typewritten. This was written in ink in longhand.”

  They tossed the larger pieces back into the clothes baskets. When they had sifted the whole thing down to the smaller pieces, Peggy suddenly gave a triumphant exclamation. “This is part of it,” she said, holding up a triangular section of paper.

  “Then here’s another part,” Kimberly said.

  “And here’s another.” She pounced on another piece.

  Kimberly found a fourth. “This piece has part of the postmark on it,” he said, fitting it together with the other pieces. “Gosh, you were right. It’s postmarked yesterday at five-thirty. But I tell you no one knew—.”

  Peggy caught his eye, glanced significantly at the janitor, who was watching them with an expression of puzzled speculation.

  Kimberly nodded and thereafter devoted his energies entirely to the search.

  At last they were finished with the final scrap of paper on the floor. By this time they had recovered four pieces of the envelope and six pieces of the letter.

  “I guess that’s it,” Peggy said. “Let’s go up to the office and put these together.”

  Back in the office, with the aid of transparent tape, they fitted the pieces into a hopelessly inadequate reconstruction of a letter that Peggy now realized was undoubtedly destined to be of the greatest interest to the police.

  The writer of that letter, Peggy knew, had it in her power to make Don Kimberly the number one suspect in the Stella Lynn murder.

  Would the writer come forward? She doubted it, but she thought it was likely that, since one anonymous letter had been written to her, another would be written—but this time to the police.

  And Peggy also realized that by falling in with Don Kimberly’s highly abridged account of the evening’s activities, she had nominated herself as suspect number two if the police ever should learn exactly what had happened.

  Peggy knew enough of E. B. Halsey’s temperament to know that her future at WEFI depended on not letting the police find out all that had happened—at least for now.

  E. B. Halsey, at fifty-six, prided himself on his erect carriage, his keen eyes that needed spectacles only for reading, and his golf.

  There were whispered stories about extracurricular activities. At times when he was with cronies whom he had known for years and whom he knew he could trust, it was understood Old E.B. could really let loose. There were rumors of certain wolfish tendencies he was supposed to have exhibited on rare occasion.

  These last tendencies were the most delectable from the standpoint of powder-room discussion at WEFI, and the hardest to verify. Old E.B. was too shrewd ever to get caught off base. He took no chances on a rebuff, and any amatory affairs he may have indulged in were so carefully masked, so skillfully camouflaged, that the office rumors, although persistent, remained only rumors.

  It was nine-thirty when E.B. bustled into the office, jerked his head in a quick, sparrowlike gesture, and said, “Good morning, Miss Castle,” and then popped into his private office.

  Ten seconds later he pressed the button that summoned Miss Castle.

  That was typical of the man. He had undoubtedly arrived an hour early so he could ask what had happened the night before, but it would have been completely out of character for him to have said, “Good morning, Miss Castle. Would you mind stepping into my office?” He would instead enter his office, carefully place his hat on the shelf in the coat closet, stand for a few seconds in front of the mirror smoothing his hair, straightening his tie, and then, and only then, would he settle himself in the big swivel chair at the polished-walnut desk and press the mother-of-pearl button that sounded Peggy’s buzzer.

  Peggy picked up her notebook, entered the office, and seated herself in a chair.

  E.B. waved the notebook aside. “Never mind the notebook. I want to ask you a few questions.”

  She glanced up at him as though she hadn’t been anticipating this interview for the past ten hours.

  “You were with Kimberly last night?”

  She nodded.

  “That was a nasty piece in the paper. I don’t like to have the company’s name brought into prominence in connection with things of this sort. A company employee dead. Body found by two other employees who are out together. Possibility of murder. It gives the company a lot of bad publicity.”