“Serve papers,” I said, and turned on my heel. I walked out through the outer office. Elsie Brand had gone to lunch. Alma Hunter was waiting for me in the car. “I had to use sex appeal on a traffic cop,” she said.

“Good girl,” I approved. “Let’s go to the Milestone Apartments, and I’ll do my stuff with Sally Durke.”

She turned to look back through the window in the rear of the car, at the traffic. As she twisted her neck free of the high collar of the silk blouse, I saw once more those dark, sinister bruises—the imprints left by thumb and fingers which had clutched her throat.

I said nothing. I had plenty of thinking of my own to do. She deftly swung the car out into traffic and drove to the Milestone Apartments.

“Well,” I said. “Here goes.”

“Luck,” she said with a smile.

“Thanks.”

I walked across the street, looked over the list of names on the side of the door, and pressed the button opposite the name “S. L. Durke, 314.”

I was wondering just what a competent operative would do if Miss Durke wasn’t at home. But before I’d decided on an answer, the door buzzer indicated Miss Durke was home and was willing to see visitors without a palaver through the speaking tube.

I pushed the door as the buzzer released the catch, walked down a smelly corridor to where a patch of pale light marked the location of the automatic elevator. I closed the door, jabbed the button for the third floor, and went up.

As I raised my fingers to knock on the door of 314, a girl in dark blue silk pajamas opened the door, and said, “What is it?”

She was a blonde, and I figured her as an artificial blonde. She was somewhere on the sunny side of thirty, with a figure that pushed out at me through the silk of her pajamas. She said again, impatiently, “Well, what is it?”

Her voice was the only harsh thing about her.

“I want to come in.”

“Why?”

“I want to talk.”

“Well, come on in,” she said.

She’d been polishing her finger nails. The buffer was on a coffee table near a couch. She walked back to the couch, made herself comfortable, picked up the buffer, critically inspected her nails, and said without looking up, “Well, what is it?”

“I’m a detective,” I told her.

Her eyes flashed up at mine then. For a moment there was a startled look on her face. Then she started to laugh. She quit laughing at the look on my face, and said, “You are?”

I nodded.

“Well, you don’t look it,” she observed, trying to soften the blow of her laughter. “You look like a darn nice kid with ideals and a mother. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings by laughing.”

“No, I’m used to it.”