“And most important of all was the way you neglected the element of the patient Clayton was seeing at three o’clock in the morning. Didn’t it ever occur to you that it was odd that a fashionable doctor from Westwood Hills should make a call at three o’clock in the morning on a charity patient in a slum? Do they generally do that sort of thing? Not many of them, I’d say.”

“You mean he didn’t call on a patient? The Lawrence woman said he did. What would her angle be?”

“He did call on a patient. He most certainly did. It was the finest pretext in the world to be in the neighborhood of Carrol’s Bar at the hour when the girls were leaving. It probably also furnished a swell story for his wife. When he finished with the patient he was just in time to meet Doris Blair and take her for that ride. In answering that call he had a stall for his wife, for you fellows, for all of us. It came in nice and handy for him, you see, and I bet he felt smug about doing a good deed that helped him out plenty at the same time. But when Mrs. Lawrence’s baby got sick again a week later, and she phoned him in the middle of the night to come out again, he refused to come. In fact, he even hung up on her. That was a big mistake. It proved that he wasn’t all charity.”

“You found that out?”

“Yes. Didn’t you?” Lowry asked.

Brady looked shamefaced. “I got to admit we didn’t pick up that point. We weren’t interested in what happened a week later.”

They drove along in silence for a while, each lost in his own thoughts.

Brady broke it finally. He asked, “How’d you manage to find out about the house in Laguna?”

Lowry smiled. “I knew if he were having an affair with Doris they must have been going someplace together. They weren’t doing it in the treetops. You said you had checked all hotels and apartments and hadn’t come up with anything worthwhile. And then his daughter tipped me off about the house in Laguna.”

“His daughter?”

Lowry nodded. “Yes, a cute little girl, pretty as a picture. I feel pretty rotten about using her words as a hook to send her old man to the death chamber, but that’s the way it goes.”

“Where’d you find her?”