“You were up at Cape Cod when it happened,” confessed the Inspector. “This fellow Wayland killed his wife for her money, trying to cloud the issue with a phony religious-cult background. The body of Janet Wayland, a good-looking, rich, and slightly silly dame of about thirty-eight, was found mother-naked in the back bedroom of a house she owned, up on East Sixty-fourth. The place had been vacant for a year—her husband had lived at a hotel while she was away—and there weren’t any servants yet, but they had moved back in, anyway, a few days before. The woman was lying on a sort of sacrificial altar, tied hand and foot. The room was fixed up so that it looked like the nightmare of a Hollywood set-designer for B-budget horror pictures. And the idol above the altar was a big ugly stuffed monkey, its tail extending into a length of rawhide which had been soaked and then allowed to dry and tighten slowly around the woman’s throat. You can look at the official photos if you have a strong enough stomach.”

“Please leave my stomach out of this,” Miss Withers said primly. “What a weird, unbelievable sort of murder!”

“That kind we usually crack wide open in a couple of days,” the Inspector told her. “Usually the hard ones are easy. When we found out that Wayland stood to inherit more than two hundred grand from his wife, and that they’d been rifting—or at least that she had just returned from a year’s marital vacation in California—that seemed to cinch it. To top that, we learned that Wayland had been seen, in his wife’s absence, running around with a big sexy Swede secretary, a luscious piece. That was the clincher. We arrested Wayland for murder.”

“But what went wrong? Wouldn’t he talk?”

“He talked our arm off. Stuck to his story that he returned from a business trip to Albany and that as soon as he got in the house he smelled the incense and heard the music. There was an automatic phonograph playing one record over and over, right there in the murder room. Oriental music, by some Russian. . . .”

“Rimsky-Korsakoff? Probably ‘The Young Prince and the Young Princess,’ from Scheherazade.” Miss Withers hummed a bit of it.