“I don’t mean boss you out loud. Did she ever try to get you to do her bidding without, uh, talking?”

She eyed him shrewdly, nodded. “Sure nuff. All the time. How you fine out about it?” She cackled uproariously. “She dippy, Mr. Striker, suh. I mean! She stand still like this, look at me hard, like this.” She placed one hand flat across her forehead as if she had a headache. “So nothing happen’, I just mine my business. Then she say: ‘Whuffo you don’t do what I just tole you?’ I say, ‘You ain’t tole me nothing yet.’ She say, ‘Ain’t you got my message? My sum-conscious done tole you, “Clean up good underneath that chair.”’

“I say, ‘Yo sum-conscious better talk a little louder, den, cause I ain’t heard a thing—and I got good ears!’”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “Did you ever feel anything when she tried that stunt? Feel like doing the things she wanted?”

“Yeah man!” she vigorously asserted. “But not what she wanted! I feel like busting dis yere mop-handle on her haid, dass what I feel!”

He went ahead investigating after he’d dismissed her, but nothing else turned up. He was far from satisfied with what he’d got on Miss Heilbron, incriminating as the book was. It didn’t prove anything. It wasn’t strong enough evidence to base an accusation on.

He cased the Youngs’ apartment that same evening, while they were at the wife’s broadcasting studio. This, over Perry’s almost apoplectic protests. And there, as if to confuse the issue still further, he turned up something that was at least as suspicious in its way as the mesmerism handbook. It was a terrifying grotesque mask of a demon, presumably a prop from the Chinese theater down on Doyer Street. It was hanging at the back of the clothes closet, along with an embroidered Chinese ceremonial robe. It was limned in some kind of luminous or phosphorescent paint that made it visible in the gloom in all its bestiality and horror. He nearly jumped out of his shoes himself at first sight of it. And that only went to show what conceivable effect it could have seeming to swim through the darkness in the middle of the night, for instance, toward the bed of a sleeper in the room above. That the victim would jump out of the window in frenzy would be distinctly possible.

Against this could be stacked the absolute lack of motive, the conclusive proof (two out of three times) that no one had been in the room with the victim, and the equally conclusive proof that the Youngs hadn’t been in the building at all the first time, mask or no mask. In itself, of course, the object had as much right to be in their apartment as the mesmerism book had in Miss Heilbron’s room. The wife was in theatrical business, liable to be interested in stage curios of that kind.