“All right. Call it two-thirds. Hell, I don’t care. Call it a hundred per cent. She’s in a jam. You’re going to try and save her. Now don’t get excited. Keep your shirt on, and look at the facts. She lied to you about the shooting.”

I said, “I’m not certain that she did.”

“No,” Mrs. Cool observed dryly, “you wouldn’t be.”

There was another interval of silence.

“You had some plan?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

She said, “We’ll pin the killing on Bleatie.”

“Not so hot,” I objected. “We’ve just established that there isn’t any Bleatie.”

“That makes it swell,” she said. “It gives the police a hard nut to crack. The way the thing stands now, there were two persons—Bleatie and Morgan Birks. We are the only outsiders who know Morgan Birks and Bleatie were the same people. Morgan Birks is dead. Therefore Bleatie is dead too. No one knows Bleatie is dead. They can’t ever prove it because they can’t ever find his body. We pin everything on Bleatie—if she pays us enough.

“Now, you walk in there and spill what you know, and everyone says, ‘That’s right. Clever of the boy, but we were right on the verge of reasoning it out ourselves. Another half hour and we’d have had it.’ But we go in there and start asking where Bleatie is, and pretty quick some damn flatfoot gets the idea Bleatie’s guilty of murder. Play it that way and you’ve got something.”

“But how could any flatfoot figure Bleatie’d kill anyone when Alma Hunter admits she raised the gun and pulled the trigger?”

“That’s where our ingenuity comes in,” she said. “If Sandra wants us to clear Alma Hunter of the charge, and I think she does, and pays enough for it, and I hope she will, we drag Bleatie into it by the ears. Alma Hunter was hysterical. She was excited. She doesn’t know what happened. She heard a shot, and she thought it came from the gun she was holding in her hand. Really it didn’t. It was fired by Bleatie, who was in the room.”

“What was he doing in her room?” I asked.

“Looking at her etchings.”

“And Alma didn’t know he was there?”

“No.”

“And Alma didn’t shoot at all?”

“No, of course not.”

“But suppose it’s her gun that’s on the floor?”

“No, it wasn’t her gun. She screamed, dropped her gun and ran. Bleatie picked up her gun, left the gun with which the killing had been done, and walked out into the night.”

“That,” I said, “is a pretty tall order.”

“We can make it sound plausible.”

“I don’t think I like your way,” I said. “I think I like mine. What’s more, the police won’t like yours.”