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“Some more questions,” I explained when she opened the door.

She admitted me without word or gesture, and led me back into the room where we had talked before.

“Miss Kenbrook,” I asked, standing beside the chair, she had offered me, “why did you tell me you were home in bed when Gilmore was killed?”

“Because it’s so.” Without the flicker of a lash.

“And you wouldn’t answer the doorbell?”

I had to twist the facts to make my point. Mrs. Gilmore had phoned, but I couldn’t afford to give this girl a chance to shunt the blame for her failure to answer off on central.

She hesitated for a split second.

“No — because I didn’t hear it.”

One cool article, this baby! I couldn’t figure her. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, whether she was the owner of the world’s best poker face or was just naturally stupid. But whichever she was, she was thoroughly and completely it!

I stopped trying to guess and got on with my probing.

“And you wouldn’t answer the phone either?”

“It didn’t ring — or not enough to awaken me.”

I chuckled — an artificial chuckle — because central could have been ringing the wrong number. However…

“Miss Kenbrook,” I lied, “your phone rang at two-thirty and at two-forty that morning. And your doorbell rang almost continually from about two-fifty until after three.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “but I wonder who’d be trying to get me at that hour.”

“You didn’t hear either?”

“No.”

“But you were here?”

“Yes — who was it?” carelessly.

“Get your hat,” I bluffed, “and I’ll show them to you down at headquarters.”

She glanced down at the green gown and walked toward an open bedroom door.

“I suppose I’d better get a cloak, too,” she said.

“Yes,” I advised her, “and bring your toothbrush.”

She turned around then and looked at me, and for a moment it seemed that some sort of expression — surprise, maybe — was about to come into her big brown eyes; but none actually came. The eyes stayed dull and empty.

“You mean you’re arresting me?”

“Not exactly. But if you stick to your story about being home in bed at three o’clock last Tuesday morning, I can promise you you will be arrested. If I were you I’d think up another story.”

She left the doorway slowly and came back into the room, as far as a chair that stood between us, put her hands on its back, and leaned over it to look at me. For perhaps a minute neither of us spoke — just stood there staring at each other, while I tried to keep my face as expressionless as hers.

“Do you really think,” she asked at last, “that I wasn’t here when Bernie was killed?”

“I’m a busy man, Miss Kenbrook.” I put all the certainty I could fake into my voice. “If you want to stick to your funny story, it’s all right with me. But please don’t expect me to stand here and argue about it. Get your hat and cloak.”

She shrugged, and came around the chair on which she had been leaning.

“I suppose you do know something,” she said, sitting down. “Well, it’s tough on Stan, but women and children first.”

My ears twitched at the name Stan, but I didn’t interrupt her.

“I was in the Coffee Cup until one o’clock,” she was saying, her voice still flat and emotionless. “And I did come home afterward. I’d been drinking vino all evening, and it always makes me blue. So after I came home I got to worrying over things. Since Bernie and I split, finances haven’t been so good. I took stock that night — or morning — and found only four dollars in my purse. The rent was due, and the world looked damned blue.