Adrienne Wilcox had been dragged reluctantly from her bed by her daughter, and if she was surprised by Sanders’ desire to inspect her husband’s clothes, she concealed the emotion expertly. Sanders concluded that it was more likely that her apathy came with the hour. This was probably the earliest she had been out of bed in years. She left him alone to plow through closets, drawers, and laundry hampers once again. This time he emerged with his eyes glittering in satisfaction. Mrs. Wilcox had disappeared, no doubt back to her bed, apparently unperturbed by her husband’s predicament. He said his farewells to the maid who was vacuuming the front hall, the only sign of life in the dark, cold house.

By the time he got downtown again, the working day had begun in earnest. Dubinsky had surfaced, looking repellently undisturbed by lack of sleep. “I located the safety deposit box,” he said. “It’s in the Bank of Nova Scotia on Adelaide. The manager said he’d open up as soon as we got there. Where in hell have you been? No point in coming in until the banks opened, eh?”

Sanders glowered. “I’ve been working. Since 6:30 this morning. So cut the crap and drive us to the bank.”

Opening up a safety deposit box obviously caused the bank manager something akin to physical pain. Their possession of the key, their identification, and a hastily acquired court order were not enough to stem the flow of muttering. “Most unusual—we don’t do this sort of thing you know—absolute privacy—our customers don’t like to think—” He was clearly intent on getting rid of them as quickly as possible before anyone figured out that the police could get into someone’s box. Sanders wrote out and signed the receipt as slowly as he could, enjoying the man’s agonized dance of despair. He was damned if he was going to slink about because some bank manager didn’t like the look of him. Still, eventually they did depart, carrying a plastic bag which contained a small bundle of letters. Extravagant girl—hiring a safety deposit box to hold such a modest cache.

Less than an hour later Sanders walked into the room where he had spent so much time the night before getting so little out of a stony-faced Paul Wilcox. The intervening time had not served to wipe the stubborn glare from his eyes or the taut control from his jaw. Sanders smiled pleasantly at him and sat down. “I’m not going to bore you any more about that little matter of the tenders, Mr. Wilcox. We’ll leave our people in Fraud to deal with that. It’s not in my line of competence anyway. But I do have something here that I’d like to discuss with you.” And from his pocket he withdrew a small bundle of letters and spread them on the table in front of him. “They’re not all here, of course. I thought we could just go over some of the more interesting ones.” Wilcox stared incredulously at the paper laid out in front of him. His face whitened and then turned gray with shock; the smooth tight muscles under his cheeks and jaw spread and sagged, making his stern profile puffy and aged.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “She told me she’d burned them—all of them. She promised.” His face fell forward into his hands and he began to cry, with deep racking sobs of exhaustion and despair.

“Paul McInnes Wilcox,” said Sanders, his voice almost lost in the tumultuous hysterical weeping of the man he addressed, “I charge you with the murder of Jane Annette Conway.”

Eleanor walked into the Indonesian restaurant and looked around. There he was, sitting over by the wall, his back to her, reading a paperback. “Hi,” she said nervously, and sat down. “How do you like it?” She gave her head a funny little shake. “He said it was the best he could do without shaving my head. I don’t think he believed my story.” She grinned. “He seemed to think I had a very kinky boyfriend.”

Sanders looked at her critically. Her inch-long hair curled tightly all over her head. “I like it,” he said. “It looks good on you. Which is a damned good thing, because I’d be in real trouble if it didn’t.”

“You said you talked to the guys who did it?”

“Oh no. The guys who did it are back in Detroit or Montreal or wherever by now, I imagine. They were probably here to look after something else, and came in useful picking you up. I got a message from the guy who ordered it done.”

“Who is he?”

“How should I know?” Sanders laughed. “If I knew who he was, I’d be a hell of a lot more famous, or at least richer, than I am.” He stopped to order two bottles of German beer. “No. His communications are anonymous.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. Just that he was getting out of my life again—actually, our life. He’s lost interest in Wilcox and friends. That’s one more thing we don’t have to worry about right now.”

“Oh, sure,” complained Eleanor. “You weren’t lying on that cold hard floor for hours. And you don’t look like a French collaborator after the war right now, either.”

“Come on,” said Sanders. “Where’s your adventurous spirit? Besides, it’s cute and fluffy-looking. And anyway, when I saw that envelope full of hair, I was expecting much worse.”

“Where is my hair, anyway?”

“Tucked away safely. It’s evidence.”

“Sure. A trophy, you mean.”

“That too. Let’s order. Can you work your way through a Rijstaffel?”

Eleanor finally put down her knife and fork with a contented sigh, and then looked at the scraps remaining on the dishes arranged on the hot plate in front of them. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t eat another green bean right now. Although I could choke down another beer if one were put in front of me.” She pushed her plate to one side and leaned comfortably on the table. “You know, I find it hard to believe that Grant Keswick would kill a woman in cold blood like that. People really surprise you sometimes.”

“He didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Kill Jane Conway in cold blood—or even in hot blood, as far as that goes. His vices don’t seem to run to murder.”

“Then why do you have him locked up for it?” Eleanor shook her head impatiently. “And if he didn’t do it, then who did?”

“Well, actually, at the moment he’s locked up for trafficking, but he’ll probably be out on bail by tomorrow. And once we got into Jane Conway’s safety deposit box, it wasn’t too difficult to work out. Paul Wilcox had been her lover for some time, and he’s one of those guys who have a compulsion to commit themselves to paper when they’re in love. Surprising how many people are like that. Anyway, we have a small bundle of tender little notes that she carefully kept together. He tells his ‘darling Jane’ several times that his life would be perfect if only they could get married, but that he knows she understands that his career would be ruined if he tried to divorce his wife—who isn’t an understanding sort of woman, apparently. In one he explains to her that she will definitely have to get rid of the baby, and if she doesn’t feel like having it done here, he’ll pay for a fancy clinic somewhere else. Obviously nothing was too good for her.”

“Except marriage.”

“Exactly. But you can tell from her correspondence with her lawyer that she was hell-bent on divorce because she was planning on marrying again. It looks as if she kept those pictures and letters to blackmail Wilcox into marrying her.” He gazed deeply into the newly arrived beer for a moment. “It was obviously a mistake on her part.”

“It’s a damn good thing for Grant that she kept those letters and that you found them. My God, imagine if they still hanged them here!”

“I was never entirely happy about Keswick as anything but a pusher. I just couldn’t come up with a mental picture of him actually doing it. I mean, here’s a girl, in top physical condition—granted that she’s pregnant, of course—who runs miles every week and gets killed in daylight on a public running path, potentially in full view of anyone coming along. How does an actor who boozes and God-knows-what-else catch her?”