“Isn’t it,” I said sourly.

“It’s the money you took from Nugent’s desk the first time you went there, isn’t it?”

“To the penny,” I said. “I swear that’s the stupidest job I ever pulled in my life. I went in three times. The first time I took some money and jewelry and put back the jewelry. The second time I kept the money and went back for the jewelry. Then the night before last I went in for the last time and put the money back where I found it, and put the jewelry in the same drawer with it. It’s like that logic problem with cannibals and Christians.”

“I wouldn’t trust either of them, Bern. What did you do, go in in the middle of the night?”

“Around four in the morning. Not a Nugent was stirring. I came as Young Dr. Rhodenbarr, with my stethoscope in my pocket. It would have been pretty awful to get caught the one time I was making a delivery instead of a pickup, but I figured I had to set the stage.”

“You stole the key, right?”

I nodded. “You’d be surprised how often people keep the key to a locked drawer in one of the neighboring unlocked drawers. Well, it makes sense. Where else would you keep it? I don’t usually hunt for the key, because those locks are so easy to open, but I happened to come across it the other night and I figured it would be better theater if Nugent had to say he couldn’t open the drawer. It made it look as though he had something to hide. And, much to his own surprise, he did.”

“Why put back the eighty-three fifty?”

“I figured there could only be so many jokers in the deck. By the time we left last night, Nugent was beginning to recall moving the jewelry from his wife’s dresser to the desk. Since there was no other possible explanation, his memory was obligingly filling in the gaps. Poor bastard.”

“Well, he killed a guy, Bern.”

“And Doll stole a man’s baseball card collection, and how can we let such actions go unpunished? Well, the fact of the matter is that they did go unpunished. It didn’t cost either of them a dime. Doll walked out of there with her head held high, and Nugent gets to pay off Ray with money from an insurance company.”

“It was his money originally, Bern.”

“Right, and then it was mine for a while.” I shrugged. “I knew there was no point to this. That’s why I tried to get out of it. But between Ray’s nudging and your nagging, what chance did I have?”

“That wasn’t nagging, Bern. That was the advice of a caring friend.”

“Well, it had all the earmarks of nagging,” I said, “and it worked, so you can take the credit.”

“It wasn’t me, Bern. It was Raffles.”

I looked at her.

“Remember, Bern? Raffles leaped up in the air and arched his back and did all those weird things that he did, and it came to you in a flash.”

“Oh, right.”

“I mean, let’s give credit where it’s due, huh?” She waved to Maxine for another round. “Couple of things I’m not completely clear on, Bern. How’d you know Joan Nugent was drugged and unconscious when her husband came home? I never would have thought of that.”

“Neither would I.”

“Huh?”

“What I thought,” I said, “was that she and Luke were having an affair, and that they were going at it when Harlan stuck his key in the door. But wouldn’t they have been in the master bedroom? And if so, wouldn’t Luke have gone in the other bathroom?”

“Unless they started out posing, and one thing led to another, and they got carried away.”

“Or unless she had some compunctions about committing adultery in the very bed she shared with her husband. Still, it became clear that she didn’t have a clue how that corpse wound up in her bathroom. And Luke had a whole storehouse of pills in his apartment, and she had the abstracted air of someone who just might have ingested a mood-altering substance sometime or other in the course of her life, and it all came together.”

“What a scumbag Luke must have been.”

“Well, I don’t think he was ever on the short list for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award,” I said, “but he wasn’t here to give us his side of the story, either. The incident came out sounding like the next best thing to necrophilia, but maybe it didn’t start out that way. Maybe he got her stoned and they started necking, and she took off her clothes and they were, uh, embracing, and then the full force of the drug kicked in and she slipped out of consciousness.”

“And it didn’t occur to him to stop? I suppose he thought she was English. Believe me, Bern, the man was an insect. Look how he betrayed Doll Cooper. She left Marty’s cards with him, and he lifted them out from under her.”

“That was me, Carolyn. The attaché case full of cards was still under the bed when Luke got shot upstairs.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “So you’re the insect.”

“I guess so.”

“There was something else I was wondering about. Oh, right. The gun. Couldn’t they ever recover it?”

“From a storm drain? Have you got any idea how many guns get tossed down storm drains?”

“Lots, huh?”

“Put it this way,” I said. “If there really are alligators in the New York sewers, half of them are armed. Want to get rid of a gun? Just slip it down a storm drain. It’s like hiding a needle in a haystack.”

“I’d never hide a needle in a haystack,” she said. “It’s the first place they would look. Bern, why didn’t he leave the gun with Luke? I know he couldn’t get his arm through, but what if he tossed the gun so it landed in the tub?”

“And it would look like suicide.”

“Right.”

“Except it wouldn’t,” I said. “Not if you looked closely. Even if he managed to get his own prints off the gun, how was he going to get Luke’s on it? And if they ran a paraffin test on Luke they wouldn’t find any nitrate particles on his hand, nothing to indicate he’d fired a gun.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know what kind of gun it was, so I can’t say whether it would have fit through the hole. Even if it would, if I’d just shot a guy and he’d fallen where I couldn’t get a good look at him and I had no way of knowing for sure whether he was alive or dead, I don’t think I’d be in a big rush to throw him a loaded gun.”

“I guess it was a bad idea,” she said. “Oh, well. Gotta drink up and go, Bern.”

“Already?”

“Got a date.”

“Oh? Anybody I know?”

“It’s no big deal,” she said defensively. “Just a quick drink, a little conversation.”

“That’s how Borden Stoppelgard described his pursuit of Doll.” I looked at her. “It is somebody I know, isn’t it? Who is it, Carolyn?”

“Somebody I just met the other night.”

“Not Doll,” I said. “It can’t be.”

“Jesus, no. Marty would kill me.”

“He did seem quite taken with her, now that you mention it. Considering that she stole his baseball cards. Well, he’s a patron of the theater. Maybe he’ll wind up taking a fatherly interest in her career.”

“Or a sugar daddily interest, Bern. Anyway, she’s not my type.”

“Not Patience. Joan Nugent? What are you going to do, have her paint a portrait of you in a clown suit?”

“Nice, Bern.”

“Well—”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “it’s Lolly Stoppelgard.”

“Lolly Stoppelgard.”

“Didn’t you think she was nice?”

“Very nice, but—”

“But she’s married. That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

“Something like that.”

“You didn’t see the looks she was giving me, Bern.”

“No, that’s true.”

“And you didn’t hear what she said to me on the way downstairs. ‘Call me,’ she said.”

“So you called her.”

“Uh-huh, and in the long run I’ll get my heart broken, but that’s what hearts are for, and mine’s getting used to it. She’s really nice, isn’t she? Pretty and sharp and funny.”

“It’s a shame to think of all that wasted on Borden Stoppelgard.”

“Well, I look at it this way,” she said. “I figure he’ll be an easy act to follow.”