“Oh, Oscar! One of my guppies is having young—or what do you call baby fish?”

“Puppies!” cried Inspector Oscar Piper, a little hysterically. “Guppies’ puppies! Of all the—”

“No need to shout. By the way, I’ve been giving some thought to that other matter. Something you said the other night gave me an idea. Of course it all depends on one thing and another—”

“What things? I sit here on a hot stove, and you double-talk!”

“Oh, whether there is a pay-phone in the ice cream store, and what kind of a job they did for me out at the printing plant at Dunellen, New Jersey, and what time the Goodwill Industries truck gets around—”

He began to burble again, but she promised to call back, and hung up.

A few moments later Miss Withers’s phone rang again. This time it was Lieutenant Bartz. “Just wondered if you were getting anywhere with your sleuthing,” he said cheerily. “Anything I can do to help? I’m worried—”

“I’m sure you both are,” Miss Withers said cryptically.

“That’s right. Inga and I are very anxious, because if the case doesn’t get settled, why then we can’t get married.”

“Exactly. Believe me, you’ll be the first to know. Or almost the first, anyway.” Miss Withers went back to her aquarium, where the female guppy was having trouble with her eleventh offspring. The viviparous mite finally had to be removed by a pair of tweezers, its mother wrapped in wet cotton and then replaced in the tank, whereupon she immediately produced numbers twelve and thirteen.

It was shortly after four o’clock when the schoolteacher received her long-awaited call. “This is Mac speakin’,” came the querulous, unsteady voice of a lifelong alcoholic. “It’s all set, ma’am. We made the pick-up this aft’noon.”

“Well, thank heavens!” Miss Hildegarde Withers immediately seized her capacious handbag, her umbrella, and then jammed on a headpiece which looked, as the Inspector had once said, as if it had been designed by somebody who had heard of hats but never actually seen one.

Her trip downtown, and her entrance into the office of the Inspector, were breathless. The little man looked up from his desk, which was littered with half-smoked cigars. “Come down to say goodbye, Hildegarde? Because Monday morning I expect to be sitting at a precinct desk—”

“Nonsense, Oscar. You’re not going to be busted, to use your own ungrammatical term. Because you’re going out right now and arrest George Wayland for the murder of his wife.”

“Oh, I am?” The Inspector snorted.