A violet ink stain.

“Enough now,” said Martha. She turned to Gunther and gave him a pointed look. “The plane should be landing any minute now. Go take care of things. You understand?”

Gunther nodded and left the bungalow.

I said to Martha, “Before you go, there’s something that might be very important for both of you to know. You see this dried-up stain on the right side of the desk? That’s from this bottle of violet ink that spilled. The ink ran all the way to the edge, but if you look down, strangely enough, not one drop spilled onto the carpet.”

Martha said, “I’m not looking down at anything.” She kept her gun trained on me.

“Well, Gail, you can look. Like I said, there were violet ink stains on the letter I thought you wrote to Russ.” I’d figured something out. Something dreadful. And the only reason Martha was letting me talk about it was because she didn’t have a clue what it was. I tried to sound chatty. “I’m betting the reason the violet ink didn’t spill onto the carpet was because it spilled into something else first. Like this lower right-hand drawer. I think that when the bottle spilled, the drawer was open.”

Gail blinked at me. “This doesn’t seem very important, Ray.”

I told her, “At the Claremont, the last night of his life, Russ apologized for being late. He told me he’d had to stop off at his office.” I pointed to the pictures on his desk of me, Russ, and Gail flanked by the Nazi sympathizers. “I think he came by to pick up some of these photos. While I was on the bandstand, he was supposed to plant one of these pictures in my room, in case you needed to frame me somewhere down the line. Gail was in the picture, too. You could have framed her as well.”

Martha said, “Only if she didn’t cooperate, and she did. Gail, I think I hear the plane’s engines.”

I continued: “Here in his office, Russ had a brainstorm, one he couldn’t tell you about, Martha, because Gail and Toby Ackland were already with you. He decided he’d also plant a page from a letter he kept locked in this lower right-hand drawer. When found in my room, it would make it seem like Gail and I were co-conspirators because we were lovers, or vice versa.”

I quoted words that had upset me so much when I’d first read them that they were now branded on my brain. “ ‘I lie in my bed here and in Chancery Lane praying that love can travel through walls and reach you, and that you can feel my embrace.’ ”

Gail looked stunned. “How do you know those words?”