make his half good.'
'He sort of hinted to me,' Simon said, 'that Ufferlitz's backers might give him Ufferlitz's job. Then I suppose he might be able to make a better deal for both of you.'
'He might be.'
She was quite disinterested.
'Don't you care?'
'Christ,' she said, 'why should I get any gray hairs? If he makes a better deal, okay. If he doesn't, I won't starve. I'm pretty lucky. I've got a beautiful puss and a beautiful body, and not too much talent and goddam little sense. I'm never goнing to be a Bette Davis, and I'm not going to screw up my life trying to be a prima donna. I can eat. And that means plenty.'
'You don't care about seeing Jack Groom get ahead?'
'Why the hell should I? He can take care of himself. Don't let that spiritual-hammy act of his fool you. He knows all the angles. He can play politics and connive and lick boots in the best company.'
'I asked you last night,' said the Saint, 'but you wouldn't tell me. So I was still wondering if there was anything perнsonal between you.'
It was amazing that such a face could be so passionless and detached.
'He took me to Palm Springs one weekend, and he was lousy. He'll never have the nerve to try it again. But I've been a good business proposition, and that's a lot in his life.'
Simon tapped his cigarette over the ashtray. 'Then-you wouldn't kill anyone on account of him?'
'God, no.'
'Then why did you kill Ufferlitz?'
She was an actress. She sat and looked at him, without any exaggerated response.
'This should be good,' she said. 'Go on.'
'By the way,' he said, 'did you hear the news a little while ago? On the radio?'
'I heard some of it.'
'Did you hear about Orlando Flane bumping himself off?'
'Yes. Did I do that too?'
'I don't know. Can you think of any reason why he should kill himself?'
'Several. And he's all of them. He was a bastard from away back. And he was pretty well washed up in this town. He didn't have anything to live for for months, except Ufferlitz almost gave him a break.'
'And what do you think about Trilby Andrews?'
'I never heard of her. Who is she?'
'She isn't. She was.'
She leaned back with her glass in her hand.
'Hawkshaw Rides Again,' she said. 'Go on. You do the talking. I told you last night I could see it coming. I'm not a detective. Tell me how it works.'
He took another cigarette and lighted it from the stub of one that was only half finished. He refilled both their glasses from the shaker. Then he relaxed beside her and gazed up at the ceiling. He felt very calm now.
'I'm a lousy detective,' he said. 'I never really wanted to be one . . . Maybe all detectives are lousy. They only get anyнwhere because the suspects are lousy too, and it doesn't matнter how many mistakes a detective makes. You just blunder around and wait for something to pop . . . That's all I've been doing. I've thrown accusations all over the place, and been sure I'd strike a spark somewhere. You rush around and jump to conclusions and have kittens over every flash, and get gorgeously master-minded and confused . . . But in the end I've started to think.'
He was thinking now, while he talked, picking up the loose ends that his driving imagination had so blithely pushed aside.
'Byron Ufferlitz was shot through the back of his head, in his study, in his home, by somebody that he presumably knew pretty well-at least well enough to give an opportunity like that to. That gives the first list of suspects. None of them have very good alibis, but on the other hand nobody except the murderer knows exactly when it was done, so alibis aren't so important. I could have done it myself. So could you.'
'And you've decided that I did.'
'There wasn't any clue,' said the Saint. 'No clue at all. Every clue had been very carefully cleaned up. And I was too busy to see that the first clue might be there.'
'You'll have to explain that.'
'When you leave clues, you don't necessarily book yourself to the gas chamber. But when you clean up clues, you may do just that. Because the blank spaces show your own guilty conнscience. A clue isn't a death warrant, because it's only cirнcumstantial. If I dropped in here and killed you and went out again, I might leave a lot of clues-and none of them would mean anything. A scientific detective might sweep the carpet and put the dust under a microscope and find celluloid dust in it, and say, 'Ha! someone has been here who's been in conнtact with motion picture film; therefore the villain is someone from a studio.' So what? So are hundreds of people ... Or I might leave a book of matches from the House of Romanoff, and the inspirational detective would say, 'Ha! This is a man of such and such a type who goes to such and such places'- regardless of the fact that I might have bummed the matches from a chauffeur who bummed them from somebody else's chauffeur whose boss left them in the car. I might never have been in the House of Romanoff in my life . . . Now I don't know what was cleaned off Ufferlitz's carpet, or what matches were taken away, or anything else; but I do know one clue that was cleaned up that tells a story.'
'This is fascinating,' she said. 'Go on.'
'The ashtrays were emptied,' he said.
She sipped her Martini.
'There might have been fingerprints on the cigarettes. Or-or the make of cigarette would tell who'd been there--'
'I'm not such an expert, but I wouldn't want the job of trying to get fingerprints from old cigarette butts. They aren't held right-you might get bits of three fingers, but never one complete impression. On top of which they'd be smudged and crushed and probably fogged up with ash. It's a million to one you couldn't get an identification. As for telling anything from the brand of cigarette-that may have worked for Sherнlock Holmes, but you can't think of a brand today that isn't smoked by thousands of people. And most of them change brands pretty freely, too. But one thing could have stood out on those cigarettes, one thing that nobody could miss, that even the dumbest amateur would have had to do someнthing about.'
'What was that?'
He said: 'Lipstick.'
It was very quiet in the room. It was as if a section of the world enclosed between four walls and a floor and ceiling had been moved out into unrelated space. Ice settled in the shaker with a startling collapse like an avalanche.
'Of course,' she said.
'So it had to be a woman,' he said. 'It couldn't be Trilby Andrews, because she's dead. But it might very likely be someone that he'd treated the same way, who reacted differнently. She killed herself; but a different kind of girl might preнfer to kill him. Or, it could be someone who was squaring acнcounts for Trilby.'
'Either way,' she said, 'you came to me.'
He just looked at her.
She put out her cigarette and looked at the red tip where her lips had left their color. Then she turned to him again. Her eyes were strangely hard to read.
'So you're still a great detective,' she said. 'Now what happens?'
'We could have another drink.'
'Do you think I should give myself up, or would you rather turn me in and get some glory?'
'Neither. I may be a detective, but I'm not a policeman. I can be my own grand jury. From what I've found out about Ufferlitz since I began meddling with this, I'd just as soon leave everything as it is.'
A bell chimed somewhere in the house.
'Tell me the strings,' she said. 'Go on. I'm grown up.'
'There are no strings, April,' he answered. 'I feel rather satisfied about Ufferlitz getting killed. You see, some
