“Something like that. Anyway, he claimed that he had to break down the door of the room to get in. The neighbors heard a crash, just a minute before he rushed out yelling bloody murder. The door had actually been bolted on the inside—we can spot things like that—and the window was locked too. Janet Wayland had been dead for about two hours then, and he claimed he had just got in at Grand Central. He even had the right seat-stub, too—but he could have picked up one of those at the station without ever getting on a train. We figured he’d bolted the door and broken it in some time before the murder, and then set up the door and crashed it again to make the proper noise at the right time.”

The schoolteacher frowned. “But Oscar—”

“Let me give you the rest of it. Wayland yelled for the lie-detector test as soon as we picked him up, but it came out haywire. He showed a guilty reaction to some of the key questions, but he gave the same reaction to three or four of the harmless ones—so that was that. We had to let him cool.”

“And no doubt started to bear down on the lady in the case?”

Inspector Piper grinned. “You know our methods. We began to dig around, and we turned one of our lady-killing cops loose on the secretary. Inga Rasmussen worked as a secretary in the main office of the company where Wayland is a traveling salesman—he makes a couple of hundred a week peddling big mining machinery all over the country. Lieutenant Bartz gave the girl quite a play, but after a week he reported that as far as he could see there was nothing in it. She had only gone out with Wayland because she was new in town and didn’t know anybody else. It had only been dinner and dancing anyhow, and while Wayland hadn’t admitted having a wife out in California, he also didn’t make any more than the usual polite passes in the taxicab on the way to take her home.”

“I wouldn’t even know about those,” confessed Miss Withers with a faint note of regret in her voice. “But do go on.”