So I’d left it there, and now I was doing my best to appear as though I was seeing it for the first time. “Gee,” I said, mouth agape. “That was the murder weapon?”

“You bet it was,” Todras said.

“Plunged right into her heart,” Nyswander added. “That’s a murder weapon, all right.”

“Death musta been instant.”

“Hardly any bleeding. No muss, no fuss, no bother.”

“Gee,” I said.

Jillian was on the edge of hysteria, and I was hoping she wouldn’t overreact. It was logical to assume she’d be shocked at the idea of her boss committing murder, but if their relationship was just that of dentist and hygienist there was a limit to the extent of her shock.

“I just can’t believe it,” she was saying. She reached out her hand to touch the scalpel, then drew back at the last moment, her fingertips just avoiding contact with the bright metal. Todras smiled fiercely and returned the scalpel to his pocket, while Nyswander drew a manila envelope from his inside jacket pocket and commenced selecting other dental scalpels from a tray of implements. He put four or five of them into the envelope, licked the flap, sealed it, and wrote something on its outside.

Jillian asked him what he was doing. “Evidence,” he said.

“The D.A.’ll want to show how the doc’s got other scalpels the same size and shape as the murder weapon. You get a good look at it, Miss Paar? Maybe there’s something about it, some nick or scratch you’ll recognize.”

“I saw it. I can’t identify it, if that’s what you mean. They all look alike.”

“Might notice something if you give it a close look. Todras, let Miss Paar here have another look at it, huh?”

Jillian didn’t much want to look at it. But she forced herself, and after a careful glance announced that there was nothing specifically familiar about the instrument, that it seemed identical to ones they used in the office. But, she added, dentists all over the country used Celniker tools, they were very common, and a search of the offices of dentists throughout New York would turn up thousands of them.

Nyswander said he was sure that was true but that only one dentist had a clear motive for killing Crystal Sheldrake.

“But he cared for her,” she said. “He was hoping to get back together with her again. I don’t think he ever stopped loving her.”

The cops looked at each other, and I couldn’t say I blamed them. I don’t know what had prompted her to start off in this direction but the cops dutifully followed it up, questioning her about this desire of Craig’s for a reconciliation. Then, after she’d improvised reasonably well, Todras took the wind out of her sails by explaining that this just furnished Craig with yet another motive for murder. “He wanted to get back together,” he said, “and she spurned him, so he killed her out of love.”

“‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’” Nyswander quoted. “‘By each let this be heard. The coward does it with a kiss. The brave man with a sword.’ And the dentist with a scalpel.”

“Pretty,” Todras said.

“That’s Oscar Wilde.”

“I like it.”

“Except that part about a dentist doing it with a scalpel. Oscar Wilde never said that.”

“No kidding.”

“I just put that in on my own.”

“No kidding.”

“’Cause it seemed to fit.”

“No kidding.”

I thought Jillian was going to scream. Her hands had knotted themselves into little fists. Just hang in there, I wanted to tell her, because this comedy routine of theirs takes their minds off more important things, and in a minute they’ll bow and scrape themselves offstage and out of our lives, and then we can work up an act of our own.

But I guess she wasn’t listening.

“Wait a minute!”

They turned and stared at her.

“Just one damn minute! How do I know you actually brought that thing with you? That scalpel? I never saw you take it out of your pocket. Maybe you picked it up off a tray while I was looking the other way. Maybe all those things you hear about police corruption are true. Framing people and tampering with evidence and-”

They were still staring at her and at about this point she just ran out of words. Not, I’d say, a moment too soon. I wished, not for the first time in my life, that there were a way to stop the celestial tape recorder of existence, rewind it a bit, and lay down a substitute track for the most recent past.

But you can’t do that, as Omar Khayyám explained long before tape recorders. The moving finger writes and all, and dear little Jillian had just gone and given us the moving finger, all right.

“This dental scalpel,” said Todras, showing it to us yet again. “This particular one wasn’t found in the chest of Crystal Sheldrake, as a matter of fact. Rules of evidence and everything, we don’t ever carry murder weapons around with us. The actual scalpel that snuffed the lady, it’s in the lab right now with a tag on it while the men in the white smocks check blood types and do all the things they do.”

Jillian didn’t say anything.

“The scalpel my partner’s showing you,” Nyswander put in, “was picked up on the way here when we stopped at Celniker Dental and Optical Supply. It’s an exact twin of the murder weapon and useful for us to carry around in the course of our investigation. That’s why my partner can keep it in his pocket and take it out when the spirit moves him. It’s not evidence so there’s no way he can be tampering with it.”

Todras, grinning furiously, made the scalpel disappear again. “Just for curiosity,” he said, “maybe you’d like to tell us how you spent the evening, Miss Paar.”

“How I-”

“What did you do last night? Unless you can’t remember.”

“Last night,” Jillian said. She blinked, gnawed her lip, looked beseechingly at me. “I had dinner,” she said.

“Alone?”

“With me,” I put in. “You’re writing this down? Why? Jillian’s not a suspect, is she? I thought you had an open-and-shut case against Dr. Sheldrake.”

“We do,” said Todras.

“It’s just routine,” Nyswander added. His weasel face looked craftier than ever. “So you had dinner together?”

“Right. Honey, what was the name of that restaurant?”

“Belevedere’s. But-”

“Belvedere’s. Right. We must have been there until nine o’clock or thereabouts.”

“And then I suppose you spent a quiet evening at home?”

“Jillian did,” I said. “I headed on over to the Garden myself and watched the fights. They already started by the time I got there but I saw three or four prelim bouts and the main event. Jillian doesn’t care for boxing.”

“I don’t like violence,” Jillian said.

Todras seemed to approach me without actually moving. “I suppose,” he said, “you can prove you were at the fights.”

“Prove it? Why do I have to prove it?”

“Oh, just routine, Mr. Rhodenbarr. I suppose you went with a friend.”

“No, I went alone.”

“That a fact? But you most likely ran into somebody you knew.”

I thought about it. “Well, the usual ringside crowd was there. The pimps and the dope dealers and the sports crowd. But I’m just a fan, I don’t actually know any of those people except to recognize them when I see them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The fellow who sat next to me, we were talking about the fighters and all, but I don’t know his name and I don’t even know if I’d recognize him again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, why would I have to prove where I was?”

“Just routine,” Nyswander said. “Then you can’t-”

“Oh,” I said brightly. “Hell. I wonder if I have my ticket stub. I don’t remember throwing it out.” I looked at Jillian. “Was I wearing this jacket last night? You know, I think I was. I probably dropped the stub in the garbage, or when I was cleaning out my pockets before I went to bed. Maybe it’s in a wastebasket at my apartment. I don’t suppose-oh, here’s something.”

And, amazingly enough, I showed Nyswander an orange stub from last night’s fight card at Madison Square Garden. He eyed it sullenly before passing it to Todras who didn’t seem any happier to see it, his smile notwithstanding.