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afraid of him—”
    â€œWouldn’t any girl be, Inspector? And then there’s the publicity. I’m just getting started on my career, and the wrong kind of publicity—”
    â€œWell, you’ve got time to think about it,” the old man said with sudden kindliness. “I won’t press you now. Velie, see that Miss West gets safely home.” The girl rose, made an attempt to smile, and left with the mountainous sergeant. Harry Burke watched her slender figure twinkle down the stairs. He watched until she was lost behind the closing front door.
    The old man was rubbing his hands. “That’s a real development! This Armando is behind it, all right. And whoever this woman is he conned into doing the killing for him, that’s the way she got in. Armando had a duplicate of his house key made and provided her with it. And since she’s a woman he’s undoubtedly been two-timing his wife with, Glory never saw her before. That’s why she couldn’t leave us a direct clue. She didn’t know the woman’s name.”
    â€œShe obviously meant something by that word ‘face,’ ” argued Ellery. “So there must be something about the woman that Glory knew, or spotted—”
    â€œSomething about her face?” exclaimed Burke.
    â€œNo, no, Harry,” Ellery said. “It’s not anything like that, or she’d have specified. Face …”
    â€œHave you anything on the time she was shot, Inspector?” Burke asked.
    â€œAs it happens, we can place it to the minute. There was a small electric clock on her desk there, a leather job her left arm must have knocked off the desk as she slumped forward, because we found it on the floor, to her left, with the plug pulled out. That stopped the clock at 11:50. No, the clock isn’t here now, Ellery; it’s at the lab, though it won’t tell them any more than it’s told already. Ten minutes to twelve was the time she stopped those two bullets. Incidentally, Doc Prouty’s finding as to the time of death jibes roughly with the clock.”
    â€œIn connection with that,” Burke said, “I just remembered that as I was leaving here Wednesday night, Mrs. Armando remarked to me that she was expecting her husband home a little past midnight.”
    â€œThat means,” said Ellery slowly, “at the time she was shot, Glory knew Armando would be walking into the apartment in a matter of minutes.”
    â€œHe found her,” nodded the Inspector, “between fifteen and twenty minutes past twelve. If he left the West girl’s apartment at midnight, by the way, that would just about check out.”
    â€œIt also clears up one aspect of the clue Glory left,” mused Ellery. “Knowing she was dying, knowing her husband would almost certainly be the first to discover her body, she realized that he would also be the first to see any dying message she could leave. If she wrote down something that accused or described his accomplice, or involved him, he would simply destroy it before notifying the police. So—”
    â€œSo she had to leave a clue that would trick Armando into thinking it had no bearing on her murder?” Burke had taken out his pipe and was loading it absently from a Scotch-grain pouch.
    â€œThat’s right, Harry. Something obscure enough to fool Armando into ignoring it—perhaps as the start of one of the word-game puzzles she was eternally doing; after all, why should he figure it was a clue?—and still provocative enough to make the police follow it up.”
    â€œI don’t know,” Burke said, shaking his head.
    â€œIt’s too damned bad she didn’t leave something good and plain,” grumbled the Inspector. “Because all her fancy last-minute figuring turned out to be unnecessary. When she did die she fell forward among the papers on the desk, and the word she’d written on the top paper