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loaded down with two serapes, great home-woven blankets in demoniac colors and designs.
    Piper followed them back into the drawing room, closed the door. Mabie dropped his burdens, faced him. “Now what’s all this about the tea glass and a shot and—”
    “I’ll tell you both,” the inspector said. “Mrs. Mabie, have you any enemies?”
    She almost dropped the doll furniture. “Any what?”
    “Anyone who would like to kill you?”
    For a moment there was a look in her eyes as if she had heard some obscene four-letter word. “To kill me?”
    “That’s what I said. Look back into your past!”
    She smiled faintly. “Really, I’m afraid I haven’t had a Past! Why, no, I can’t think of anyone who would like to kill me. If it were the other way around …”
    “I’m serious,” Piper said. “Mrs. Mabie, you’re a rich woman, aren’t you?”
    She nodded.
    “And I’m her only heir,” the alderman cut in swiftly. “If that’s what you’re driving at. Piper, are you crazy?”
    Adele linked arms with her husband. “Go on, Mr. Piper.”
    “Well …” he hesitated. “Any cousins or anything like that who might resent your being left all this money?”
    “But—but I wasn’t! I mean, I made it. Don’t you know, Inspector, that I once owned the biggest chain of beauty shops in the country? And that I sold out for one million dollars when I was thirty—well, a couple of years ago. Then I went around the world and came back to New York where I met Francis and one thing led to another—”
    “You can ask anybody if we’re not the perfect couple!” Mabie put in. “We get on like rye and ginger ale, don’t we, dear?”
    “I’m not accusing you,” Piper said. It was his private opinion that Alderman Mabie would never murder for money, not when he could handle bridge and harbor contracts. A man sticks to his racket.
    “No triangle stuff, then? No former sweetheart with a grudge?”
    Mabie opened his mouth to speak, but Adele spoke first. “A woman making a million dollars has no time for anything else, Mr. Piper. It wasn’t until I came back to New York and met my handsome rising politician that I realized I’d been missing something … so you see!” Suddenly her face changed, a little drawn. “You mean by all this that somebody is trying to kill me?”
    Piper shrugged. “Your dressing case is usually unlocked, Mrs. Mabie?”
    She nodded, wondering.
    “One more question. What would a woman do who found a strange bottle of perfume in her luggage?” He looked at Mabie.
    “Toss it out, of course.”
    But Adele cut in. “She would not! She’d sniff it to see if it was any good! No woman on earth could resist the temptation.”
    Piper nodded, pleased. “That’s what you were meant to do, instead of the unlucky devil of a customs man—and one good sniff of prussic acid is all anybody needs. It’s good-bye in any language.”
    Nobody said anything for a moment. Mrs. Mabie’s pink fingertips toyed with the wrappings of the Mexican candy she had bought. “Somebody must hate me terribly,” she said. “To go to all this trouble …”
    “Looks that way,” Piper agreed. He rose to go. “And you can’t help me any, eh?”
    Adele Mabie hesitated, looking intently at the tip of her shoe. “Why—why, no, I can’t think of anyone. Unless—Francis, it couldn’t be that girl, could—”
    Piper intervened. “What girl?”
    Adele said, “Oh, just a silly idiot of a maid in Laredo who tried to put an end-curl in my hair and did this!” She showed the inspector a singed strand and then tucked it back into her smooth coiffure.
    “Yeah? What about this maid?”
    Adele Mabie flashed a sidelong look. “Why, Mr. Piper! You ought to know, because I saw you trying to pump her, right outside this room. How Miss Dulcie Prothero got onto the train I haven’t the slightest idea, but—”
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Piper put in. “That girl—why, she didn’t look like a maid.”
    Adele