“Won’t you come in?”

She preceded him into the living room and sat down on the sofa right beside the suitcase with no apparent notice of it while girlish chatter continued to pour forth like whipped cream from a ruptured aerosol can.

“—just now heard you were in town, and then it struck me, I mean, that car I’d passed on the road, it did have California tags, and I was just positive I’d seen San Francisco on the dealer’s license plate holder, and I said I’ll bet anything that was Eric—”

She had crossed her legs,, revealing an interesting expanse of golden thigh, and Romstead reflected that if the front of that peasant blouse were cut any lower, she’d better never lean down or frothy conversation wouldn’t be the only thing to well forth. He wondered about it. Maybe she was a harmless fluff-brain, but he didn’t think so. She was forty to forty-five, and she’d been around. There were intelligence and tough-mindedness in there somewhere. He listened with grave courtesy while she said what an awful thing it had been and she wanted him to know how sorry she was.

“Are you moving in?” she asked then.

“Oh, no,” he replied. “I just borrowed a key to have a look.”

“Oh, I see.” She gestured. “I thought perhaps the suitcase was yours.”

“No.” He shrugged. “I just assumed it was his. It was sitting there when I came in.” Ma’am, there’s nobody here but us chickens, and you know we wouldn’t have searched it. “I wish I could offer you a drink or something.”

“You know, I could use a beer. He always kept some Tuborg in the refrigerator.”

“I’ll see.” He went out into the kitchen. There were several bottles of beer. He listened intently for the sound of the latches, but her continued chatter would have covered it if there were any. Somehow he’d have to get a peek into that straw handbag. He found some glasses and a bottle opener and poured the beer. He went back, and on the opposite side of the case from her there was just a fraction of an inch of brown silk showing where she hadn’t got all the robe back in. He handed her the glass and sat down.

“Thank you, Eric.” She smiled. “As I was saying, he was the most fascinating man I ever met—”

“You’d better run it through a laundromat before you wear it again,” he said.

“What?” Just for a second the confusion showed. “I don’t understand— Wear what?”

“The doily. It’s been shut up in a suitcase for two weeks with a box of cigars. It’ll smell like the end of a four-day poker game.”

“Well!” The outrage was just about to become airborne when it collapsed in a gurgle of amusement that gave way to laughter. “Oh, crap! So you had found it.” She lifted the hairpiece from her handbag, sniffed it, made a face, and dropped it back.

“It was a stupid thing to try, anyway,” he said. “Brubaker’s bound to have seen it when he searched the house, and he’ll know you were the only one who had a chance to get it back.”

She shrugged, took a pack of filter cigarettes from the handbag, and lighted one. “Brubaker could already make a damned good guess whose it is, but he’s not about to.”

“Why not?”

“He’d have to be ready to prove it, for one thing, unless he likes the odor of singed tail feathers. Also, he’d have to be damned sure it had anything to do with what happened to your father. Which it didn’t.”

“That remains to be seen. But he could sure as hell sweat some answers out of you about what the old man was doing in San Francisco and why he needed that money.”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t in San Francisco with him.”

“Sure. You just loaned him the rug.