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saved his neck.” She looked down at the dog, and then rose suddenly, still talking, and moved across the room to jerk aside the draperies in the doorway. The pretty secretary-companion was lurking there, mouth open and ears almost flapping with curiosity—and some other less obvious emotion too.
    “Well!” demanded the schoolteacher with some asperity. “Do you two girls take turns at eavesdropping?”
    The young woman flushed beet-red, but Natalie Rowan said easily, “She’s interested, naturally. Miss Withers, this is Iris Dunn—”
    “How do you—” Then Miss Withers gaped. “Not the Iris Dunn, the roommate who identified Midge Harrington’s body?”
    Natalie nodded. “You may think it odd of me, but I looked her up. Iris has been trying to help me uncover something in the Harrington girl’s past which might lead us to the real murderer. Come in, dear, and sit down. Three heads are better than one, I always say. Iris, shake hands with our new ally. She has X-ray eyes.”
    Miss Withers failed to mention that her hunch about someone being behind the curtain had been based on Talley’s looking toward the doorway and wagging his tail. Wasn’t it Sherlock Holmes who always explained his deductions only to have Dr. Watson say, “Oh, yes, of course, anybody could have seen that!”?
    The schoolteacher listened patiently while Natalie Rowan, warmed a little by the brandy, went on to disclose the details of a pitiful and seemingly abortive campaign, two lone women engaged in a desperate lost cause. “But after I knew Andy was innocent I had to do something!” the woman said. “You too must believe him innocent, Miss Withers, or you wouldn’t be here.”
    “I certainly feel that a man in Rowan’s position is entitled to the benefit of the doubt,” admitted the schoolteacher with native caution. “And even Inspector Piper admits there are weak links in the chain of evidence. What do you think of it all, Miss Dunn?”
    Iris shrugged her shoulders, and smiled a surprisingly frank, little-girl smile. “I’m only here because Mrs. Rowan is paying me,” she admitted. “And show business is tougher than usual this season. Not, of course, that I couldn’t have got an ingénue lead with some road company, only—” She stopped and smiled as if an extremely pleasant thought had just flickered through her mind. Then she said abruptly, “About the murder, I know from nothing.”
    “But she’s been very helpful, anyway,” Natalie said firmly. “Now isn’t it obvious that if Andy isn’t guilty then he was framed by somebody out of Midge’s past who wanted her dead and was willing to let an innocent man suffer for it?”
    “Midge was hell on men, anybody’s men,” Iris put in suddenly. “You couldn’t let her get a whiff of your date’s shaving lotion or she’d try to climb in his pocket.”
    “I see,” said Miss Withers. “Very enlightening. But apart from Andy Rowan, of course, just who were the men in Midge Harrington’s life?”
    Iris studied her fingernails. “During the five months we roomed together Midge wasn’t exactly the confiding type about her romances. She had lots of dates, but not many men she went out with more than once or twice. I’ve told Mrs. Rowan all I can.”
    “For this sort of investigation,” the schoolteacher admitted, “one should really have professional assistance.”
    “But I did go to one of the best private agencies in town,” Natalie put in. “They said they would take my money if I insisted, but it was a lost cause.”
    “The masculine mind,” sighed Miss Withers. “So you two started out alone.”
    “I’m afraid we haven’t got very far. After over a year, the trail is cold. Iris and I are about at the end of our rope.”
    “No clues, no leads at all?” pressed the schoolteacher hopefully.
    Natalie said, “When Midge Harrington was sixteen she was named correspondent in a divorce case brought by the wife of her dancing teacher, a man named