She laughed. “I knew you didn’t even look the first time you went through the motions. Come on, Chief; you’ve got to go get something to eat. The case will still be here when you get back.”

“How do we know it will?” Mason said. “I’ve been talking with Louise Marlow on the phone. She’s been in touch with Dane Grover and she knows Dane Grover’s mother. Dane Grover says he’ll stick. How does he know what he’ll do? He’s never faced a situation like this. His friends, his relatives, are turning the knife in the wound with their sympathy. How can he tell whether he’ll stick?”

“Just the same,” Della Street insisted, “I think he will. It’s through situations such as this that character is created.”

“You’re just talking to keep your courage up,” Mason said. “The guy’s undergoing the tortures of the damned. He can’t help but be influenced by the evidence. The woman he loves on the night before the wedding trying to free herself from the man who gave her money and a certain measure of security.”

“Chief, you simply have to eat.”

Mason walked over to the desk. “Look at ’em,” he said; “photographs! And Drake had the devil’s own time obtaining them. They’re copies of the police photographs—the body on the floor, glass on the table, an overturned chair, a newspaper half open by a reading chair—an apartment as drab as the sordid affair for which it was used. And somewhere in those photographs I’ve got to find the clue that will establish the innocence of a woman, not only innocence of murder, but of the crime of betraying the man she loved.”

Mason leaned over the desk, picked up the magnifying glass which was on his blotter, and started once more examining the pictures. “Hang it, Della,” he said, “I think the thing’s here somewhere. That glass on the table, a little whiskey and soda in the bottom, Fay Allison’s fingerprints all over it. Then there’s the brazen touch of that crimson kiss on the forehead.”

“Indicating a woman was with him just before he died?”

“Not necessarily. That lipstick is a perfect imprint of a pair of lips. There was no lipstick on his lips, just there on the forehead. A shrewd man could well have smeared lipstick on his lips, pressed them against Clements’s forehead after the poison had taken effect, and so directed suspicion away from himself. This could easily have happened if the man had known some woman was in the habit of visiting Clements in that apartment.

“It’s a clue that so obviously indicates a woman that I find myself getting suspicious of it. If there were only something to give me a starting point. If only we had more time.”

Della Street walked over to the desk. She said, “Stop it. Come and get something to eat. Let’s talk it over.”

“Haven’t you had dinner?”