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having her just walk in here out of thin air and offer to help, just when things seemed so terribly hopeless … Do you believe in angels?”
    “Sure, the Broadway kind. They pinch you when you’re waiting for your entrance cues … Mrs. Rowan, should you? That’ll be your fourth brandy this morning!”
    “I’m not having a drink, dear, I’m pouring the rest of it down the sink. Because somehow I think I’m going to need my wits about me from now on.”
    Out in the foyer Miss Hildegarde Withers, who had slammed the door from the inside with the idea of doing a little eavesdropping of her own, nodded approvingly and then slipped out into the sunlight, letting the door close silently behind her.

“We boil at different degrees.”
    — Emerson
3.
    “G IVE A DOG A BAD NAME ,” observed Miss Withers over the breakfast coffee, “and he may live up to it. Or a man either.” She had been musing over the amazing number of famous murderers who had names befitting their deeds—Cordelia Botkin, for instance. And Martin Thorn and Augusta Nack, to say nothing of Herman Mudgett, Ivan Poderjay, and Dr. Crippen …
    Her companion, seated on the opposite chair, looked wistfully at the last piece of buttered toast, and then gave a faint wordless cry of anguish as she spread it with marmalade and bit into a corner.
    “Since this present puzzle has to be attacked with a shot in the dark anyway, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to play hunches? The only available suspects are Bruner, Sprott, and Zotos. Somehow I have a fancy for the name of Riff Sprott, as a potential murderer, I mean.”
    Talleyrand, the big apricot poodle, sulked in silence. He had never accepted the dictum that grown dogs eat only one meal, and that at night. His hot brown eyes begrudged his mistress every bite she took, and with the inborn histrionic talents of one descended from a long line of theatrical and circus performers, he pantomimed famishment.
    To no avail. His mistress—who had inherited him along with a lot of other trouble from one of her previous attempts at minding the Inspector’s business—was intently studying a weekly magazine of theatrical news, couched in what seemed to her almost a foreign language. Now and then she stopped to commit some phrase to memory. Noting her preoccupation, Talley reached out with elaborate caution and almost but not quite closed his whiskery jaws on the topmost lump in the sugar bowl.
    “Bad for the teeth!” Miss Withers snapped, without looking up. “Get down at once.” Talley gave her a reproachful stare, then let his furry body slide off the chair. Then he had a mercurial change of mood and danced off hopefully toward the hall closet.
    “You’ve already had your walk,” she told him firmly. “I’m afraid this is one excursion on which you’d only be in the way. I want to appear as Nemesis, not Mother Goose.” She put on her second-best hat, the one the Inspector always said resembled a runner-up float in the Rose Bowl parade, and then changed it for a more rakish bandanna. She would have liked to try the effect of a beanie, sweater and skirt, and bobby socks, but perhaps that would have been overdoing it. Starting out, she turned back and carefully draped a length of light chain around the door of the refrigerator. “Just in case,” she told the dog, “you are tempted to fall from grace again.”
    When she was gone the big poodle made a detailed prospecting trip underneath all the table tops, but it had been some time since the retired schoolteacher had had a visit from any of her former pupils, and nobody had parked any gum. The day, for Talley at least, had got off on the wrong foot.
    His mistress, however, felt a surge of hopeful confidence as she came out into the bright fall sunshine, heading briskly over toward the Park and then southward toward the theatrical district and Times Square. She had less than a week in which to perform a minor miracle—but as she reminded herself, the whole