“Poor Marie gave you her dental records thinking you were going to put them in a file marked ‘Adeline Head,’ so she could start building a new identity for herself. You put Marie up in your apartment, and to further build her trust, you made the call to Nancy for her, putting on a Georgia accent. You had her spy on Gail and me at the lake while you were changing into your flapper outfit. Gail must have called and told you where we were when she left me to get us sandwiches that morning.

“But the moment Marie gave you her dental records, you knew she could die in your place, once the Swing charts were completed and you were ready to clear the books on Martha Prentice of Oakland.”

I asked her with genuine curiosity, “Only why’d you kill Russ? Didn’t he still have some value to you?”

She shook her head. “The Swing chart has in it everything he knew or was going to know. The navy had decided to do the construction without him. You heard him at the Heritage Picnic. He’d learned too much about my contacts and not enough about discretion.” Her eyes turned to onyx. “And I couldn’t bear to screw him anymore.”

“But what did he think was going to happen on Grizzly Peak?”

She laughed. “Not that he was going to die, that’s for certain. He’d pretended to get drunk at the hotel to establish that he wasn’t fit to drive. He actually was pouring his pink gins into a sponge within his handkerchief. He reeked of gin because he was mopping his face with it. After you left him in the men’s room, he tossed the sponge into a fish tank.”

I recalled the tank full of dead tropical fish, and the sponge that lay within it.