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was.
    “Hello, Miss Meilleux. I’d like to see your employer.”
    She said nothing, just pulled the door back and stepped aside to let him pass through. Her stare never left him.
    “Who was that, Stephanie?” Muffy’s voice came from another room. “Please come back and finish my hair, for God’s sake.”
    Lockwood followed her voice and in a moment bestrode the bedroom entrance. Muffy was seated in a straight-backed chair, negligee
     hanging loosely from her shoulders, the line of her ripe breasts visible above the flimsy material. “I beg your pardon!” she
     shot out as her eye finally left the mirror and she saw him.
    “Excuse me, Miss Dearborn, but it’s important. Jacoby is dead.”
    “Jacoby?”
    “Jabber-Jabber. Your press agent.”
    “Dead? Jabber-Jabber dead?” her face went white. “What happened?”
    “He was shot.”
    “Shot? Jabber-Jabber?” Her hand arched toward her throat. “Oh my God. Who’s going to handle my publicity now?”
    Lockwood was hardly unfamiliar with the rich and the monumental self-concern of some of them, but they still possessed the
     capacity to disorient him momentarily. A man she’d known, a living, breathing human being she’d been closely involved with,
     and all she cared about was how his death would discommode her. He took a deep breath. “I’m sure you’ll manage,” he assured
     her, grimly. “More to the point, I think his death had something to do with your robbery.”
    “Jabber-Jabber—you mean he—?”
    “Stole the jewels? No, I don’t think so. But I think he may have known too much.”
    “I don’t understand.” Her voice turned nasty. “That little creep, who would have suspected—”
    “Maybe he had something to do with the theft, maybe he didn’t. What can you tell me about it?”
    “Nothing. I left this room for rehearsal, went off shopping, came back here and they were gone. That’s it.”
    “Room ransacked?”
    “Some.”
    “Anything else taken?”
    “Nothing, so far as I know.”
    “So it appeared as if they knew what they were looking for?”
    “How should I know? Crime’s not my business, Mr. Hook, it’s yours. All I am is a creative artist.”
    The Hook was angry with himself. Muffy Dearborn was obviously a completely spoiled, self-centered woman, caring about no one
     but herself. And yet she was also a creature of fair hair and glowing blond skin, of well-shaped, beautifully curving breasts,
     with perfect features, and lips that invited even as they repelled with the sentiments that issued from them.
    “Have you ever heard of Vernon Toomey? Two-Scar Toomey?” he asked.
    “Two-Scar—of course, I read the papers,” she said, for the first time a flicker of interest showing in her sky-blue eyes as
     they did a lightning tour of his body. “You don’t mean—I can hardly believe it—a racketeer I read about in the papers, like
     Dillinger, and suddenly he’s a part of my life? Is that what you mean? He stole the jewels?”
    “It could be. It was one of his men who gunned down Jabber-Jabber.”
    “My life can become rather exciting, can’t it, Mr.—uh—I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.” There was a hint of mischief in
     her look and a slight invitation in her voice. Evidently he had finally been admitted, however tentatively, into the elite
     world that was Muffy Dearborn’s.
    “Lockwood. Look. Isn’t there anything else you know? Do you have any idea at all of where the jewels might be?”
    Just as on the preceding night something seemed to register in Muffy’s face as he said that. But she shrugged. “How could
     I know? Wouldn’t it make more sense to interrogate Mr. Toomey?”
    “In time I will. But I think you’re not telling me all that you know, Miss Dearborn.”
    Her eyes blazed. “How dare you! One lousy item in that idiot Winchell’s column, and—”
    “I don’t know about that. It’s what I’m reading in you that worries me.”
    “Get out of here! Get out!” She had