“Well, women will think up some strange nicknames for men but Buzzy was Dr. Clayton. For a little while it looked like Carrol might have been Buzzy, especially as it seemed from the experience of our little friend here that Carrol selected the most attractive of his current crop of girls to be his own personal favorite, sort of like a sultan in his harem, you know. But there was something Doris’ landlady told us that seemed to eliminate Carrol. That was the last time Buzzy had called Doris had been on a Friday and then she hadn’t turned up all weekend. That meant a tryst some place together and weekends are when Carrol takes in most of his money at the bar and when he’s needed there the most. It didn’t seem as if he’d leave his flourishing business even for love.

“You probably don’t know about Miss Stafford’s experience with Carrol but it happened that he became very worried about the investigating she was doing and favored her with a call which also ended disastrously for him. That too made it look as if Carrol might have been the man as he was obviously afraid that Terry knew something. The answer to that is now that since he was blackmailing Clayton he couldn’t afford to have any sort of leak which might lead to the doctor, first because that would end a valuable source of revenue to him and second because he must have known that in dealing with Clayton he was dealing with no softy and that if Clayton suspected he had told anything he wouldn’t hesitate to get him.

“All these things still didn’t point to Clayton, of course. If I had approached this properly to start with I could have reached Clayton sooner but I was worried primarily about McKay and how to get him out of the mess instead of how to solve the murder. That was unfortunate because a really smart detective could have found what was phony about Clayton very quickly, I think.”

“When?” Brady interrupted.

“Almost as soon as the investigating began.”

“How do you figure that out?”

“This way. Clayton’s story was that when he came out of a patient’s house there was somebody waiting in the back of his car who held him up. This man, according to him, took his wallet and stole his car which he intended to use to drive off with a girl and murder her. Having committed the crime of robbery and planning the crime of murder, he was still indifferent enough to expose his face completely to the one man who might later identify him if anything went wrong when it would have been the simplest thing in the world to cover his face with a handkerchief, Jesse James style.”

“Something in that,” Brady conceded.