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Cleaning staff have keys. Hoo boy, are you going to be tied up forever if you’re looking for your culprit in-house. This is one hell of a big house.”
    â€œI’ve known bigger,” Dalrymple said patiently.
    But Charlie’s boss was on a roll. She could feel the throb in the floor as his knee jumped like he was keeping time to his own private music. “Plus which, Gloria had a life, you know? A husband, neighbors, enemies? She could have buzzed them in the front door. And meantime,” Richard continued as if the policeman were not the man in charge here, “you’ve got my whole agency in this room and this is a business day.”
    Ironically, most of them would have been sitting in this room at this time on this morning anyway. Beginning with the second, each floor of the First Federal United Central Wilshire Bank of the Pacific had two common conference rooms. One small for staff meetings and another larger one for workshops with related businesses or product displays for sales conferences or whatever. They came with the lease and had only to be reserved. This, the smaller of the two, was reserved by Congdon and Morse on a regular basis two mornings a week. No one was about to tell Dalrymple that.
    â€œThen the sooner we get under way the better,” the homicide detective said, unperturbed and, Charlie would guess, unimpressed. “Now, I would like to ask a few questions. The first being, why the late, and seemingly unlamented, Gloria was referred to as a ‘witch.’”

5
    Charlie looked around at her colleagues, who were doing the same. Had one of them murdered Gloria at the end of the private hall, carried her down four flights of stairs, dragged her past the valet parking attendants—and anyone else using the rear entrance—and out into the alley and around the wall, and thrown her up to the top of the bushes? Wouldn’t that take more than one person? Wouldn’t there be a trail of blood? Nobody could do all that and clean up the traces completely without arousing notice at that hour of the morning on a business day.
    Charlie sat across from Luella Ridgeway—small, quick, wired, ambitious, nice. She had just returned from Minnesota after spending her vacation putting her aging father in a nursing home and closing up the family house. She looked exhausted. She kept herself slim and young-looking to survive, but there were gray roots in the part of her beige hair this morning. Charlie wondered what she’d ever do if she had to put Edwina in a home and close up the house in Boulder. At least Luella had siblings. You didn’t return from an ordeal like that and murder a receptionist.
    Then there was Dorian Black—cocky on the outside, insecure within. He watched Richard Morse for cues in this most unusual staff meeting. He might be dapper, but he was not muscular.
    Next was Tracy Dewitt, a big girl. She was Dorian and Luella’s assistant and a funny, pleasant person, but not too efficient. She was apparently a distant relative of the absent partner Daniel Congdon, and if it’s who you know instead of what you can do that’s likely to get you a job in the world in general, it’s the law in Hollywood. Charlie did not know Tracy well, but she couldn’t imagine what she’d have against Gloria worth killing for. And although Tracy was a large woman, her size was due more to fat than muscle.
    Then there was Larry Mann, Charlie’s assistant. His bulges were muscle, yet he was the kindliest, gentlest of people, incapable of harming another.
    Maurice the Lover, a handsome gentleman—but really past the age where he could drag bodies around and heave them into bushes. He might love some woman to death, but …
    And Richard Morse had been covering for Charlie at the Universal breakfast with Keegan Monroe and Mary Ann Leffler and the frantic Goliath producers at the time of the murder. (Charlie’s outrage over the