“That’s all?”

“That’s all,” she said defiantly.

The inspector took a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

“‘At five minutes before two,’” he read, “‘a woman yelped under my window. I raised it and looked out. She was standing still, but someone else was going out through the break in the fence. I think it was a man. The woman was Mrs. Carlton Fairbanks. She was rubbing her arm. I watched her until she went back to the house.’”

Susie’s bravado was gone. She pushed back her heavy hair.

“Amos, the dirty skunk!” she said. “All right, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I can’t help you at that. There was a man there. I was trying the door to the stairs when he grabbed me by the arm. I yelled and he beat it. But I don’t know who it was.”

She stuck to that. He had been behind her when he caught her. He hadn’t spoken, and the rain was like a cloudburst. All she knew was that he let go of her when she screamed, and disappeared. She hadn’t said anything to Miss Adams. No use scaring a woman who had to be up all night. She had meant to tell Carl, but he was asleep and snoring. But she had had a shock. She hadn’t felt like going to bed. She had sat in the hall, and then Mrs. Fairbanks had been killed.

She pulled back the sleeve of her raincoat and showed her forearm.

“Take a look at that if you don’t believe me,” she said.

There were two or three small bruises on her arm, as if made by fingers, and they were already turning purple.

“I bruise easy,” she said.

Nothing shook her story. The sun had risen and birds were chirping outside when at last she was dismissed. With a warning, however.

“I think you know who the man was, Mrs. Fairbanks,” the inspector said soberly. “I want you to think it over. It is bad business to keep anything back in a case of this sort.”

She went out, and he looked at Hilda.

“All right, Miss Pinkerton,” he said. “What about it?”

“She’s a fine actress and a pretty fair liar,” Hilda said. “She’s protecting somebody.” She hesitated. “It may be the doctor. He lives across Huston Street, and he uses that break in the fence. But it might have been innocent enough. He’s in love with Jan Garrison. He may have meant to meet her. Or even”—she smiled faintly—“to look up at her window. I believe people in love do things like that.”

The inspector, however, had jumped to his feet.

“The doctor!” he said. “He’s in love with the girl, she inherits under the will, and he was alone outside Mrs. Fairbanks’s door for fifteen or twenty minutes. Where the hell is he?”

“He took an injured woman to the hospital. He may be home now. But he couldn’t have done it. The radio—”