She almost threw the album into my lap.

She opened the book. I started turning pages.

The first picture was of Sandra Birks seated on a rustic bench with a waterfall in back, pine trees, and a stream running across the left foreground. A man had his arm around her shoulders. She was looking up into his eyes.

“That Morgan?” I asked.

“No,” she said, and turned the page.

She turned the leaves rapidly. “I don’t know just where it is,” she apologized. “I put these pictures in helter-skelter. We were on a vacation trip together and—” She turned two more pages, said, “There he is,” and leaned across me to point.

It was a good clear photograph of a tall, thin man with sharp features, glossy black hair combed straight back away from a high forehead.

“That,” I told her, “is exactly what I want. It’s a clear picture. Got any others?”

She slid the pointed tips of her crimson nails under the picture, lifted it from the corners by which it was fastened to the book. “Perhaps,” she said.

She turned two or three pages—pages that were filled with ordinary photographs, people in cars, people sitting on porches, people grinning inanely at the camera. Then she said, “Here are three or four pages taken on our vacation. Some of us girls went swimming together—you mustn’t look.”

She peeked down into the pages, giggled, turned four or five of them all at once, and then found another picture of her husband. “This isn’t quite as good as the other,” she said, “but it gives you a profile view.”

I took it, compared it with the other, and said, “This is fine. Thanks.”

“Are those all you need?”

“Yes.”

She continued to sit there on the bed, her lips slightly parted, her eyes focused on distance as though thinking something over. Abruptly she said, “Excuse me for a minute. There’s something I want to ask Alma.”

She jumped up from the bed and went out into the other room, leaving me holding the photograph album. I tossed it up to the head of the bed.

She was gone a couple of minutes. When she came back, Alma was with her.

“I thought perhaps you’d like to have one of the newspaper pictures,” Sandra Birks said. “Here it is.”

She’d clipped a picture from a newspaper. The caption read: “MORGAN BIRKS, ALLEGED PAY-OFF MAN FOR SLOT-MACHINE SYNDICATE, WHOSE PRESENCE IS SOUGHT BEFORE THE GRAND JURY.”

I compared the picture with the two photographs. The newspaper picture wasn’t clear but was quite evidently that of the man whose photograph I held.

Sandra Birks gave a little squeal and grabbed for the photograph book. “Oh, I forgot about this,” she said.

Alma Hunter looked at her questioningly.

“It has those swimming pictures in it,” she said, and laughed. “I left Mr. Lam unchaperoned with them.”