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Velma. Her home is very shabby except for a new radio, worth seventy or eighty dollars."
    "You ain't told me why that's something I should start screaming about."
    "Mrs. Florian--Jessie to me--said her husband left her nothing but his old clothes and a bunch of stills of the gang who worked at his joint from time to time. I plied her with liquor and she is a girl who will take a drink if she has to knock you down to get the bottle. After the third or fourth she went into her modest bedroom and threw things around and dug the bunch of stills out of the bottom of an old trunk. But I was watching her without her knowing it and she slipped one out of the packet and hid it. So after a while I snuck in there and grabbed it."
    I reached into my pocket and laid the Pierrot girl on his desk. He lifted it and stared at it and his lips quirked at the corners.
    "Cute," he said. "Cute enough, I could have used a piece of that once. Haw, haw. Velma Valento, huh? What happened to this doll?"
    "Mrs. Florian says she died--but that hardly explains why she hid the photo."
    "It don't do at that. Why did she hide it?"
    "She wouldn't tell me. In the end, after I told her about the Moose being out, she seemed to take a dislike to me. That seems impossible, doesn't it?"
    "Go on," Nulty said.
    "That's all. I've told you the facts and given you the exhibit. If you can't get somewhere on this set-up, nothing I could say would help."
    "Where would I get? It's still a shine killing. Wait'll we get the Moose. Hell, it's eight years since he saw the girl unless she visited him in the pen."
    "All right," I said. "But don't forget he's looking for her and he's a man who would bear down. By the way, he was in for a bank job. That means a reward. Who got it?"
    "I don't know," Nulty said. "Maybe I could find out. Why?"
    "Somebody turned him up. Maybe he knows who. That would be another job he would give time to." I stood up. "Well, goodby and good luck."
    "You walking out on me?"
    I went over to the door. "I have to go home and take a bath and gargle my throat and get my nails manicured."
    "You ain't sick, are you?"
    "Just dirty," I said. "Very, very dirty."
    "Well, what's your hurry? Sit down a minute." He leaned back and hooked his thumbs in his vest, which made him look a little more like a cop, but didn't make him look any more magnetic.
    "No hurry," I said. "No hurry at all. There's nothing more I can do. Apparently this Velma is dead, if Mrs. Florian is telling the truth--and I don't at the moment know of any reason why she should lie about it. That was all I was interested in."
    "Yeah," Nulty said suspiciously--from force of habit.
    "And you have Moose Malloy all sewed up anyway, and that's that. So I'll just run on home now and go about the business of trying to earn a living."
    "We might miss out on the Moose," Nulty said. "Guys get away once in a while. Even big guys." His eyes were suspicious also, insofar as they contained any expression at all. "How much she slip you?"
    "What?"
    "How much this old lady slip you to lay off?"
    "Lay off what?"
    "Whatever it is you're layin' off from now on." He moved his thumbs from his armholes and placed them together in front of his vest and pushed them against each other. He smiled.
    "Oh, for Christ's sake," I said, and went out of the office, leaving his mouth open.
    When I was about a yard from the door, I went back and opened it again quietly and looked in. He was sitting in the same position pushing his thumbs at each other. But he wasn't smiling any more. He looked worried. His mouth was still open.
    He didn't move or look up. I didn't know whether he heard me or not. I shut the door again and went away.
    7
    They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o'-shanter which wasn't any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be