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Carmel say, "I like him."
    He felt very pleased he had fooled them into thinking he was drunk. He giggled a little at the thought of his cleverness, bumped into a man, said, "Excuse me many times." He carried out his role so thoroughly he had to be helped into the phone booth.
    He spoke into the phone. "Crane & Company, novelties, knickknacks, knickers."
    It was Ann Fortune. She said, "I thought so."
    "I can't help it," he said. "I've been plied with drinks by a mysterious Russian lady."
    "I bet."
    "And by a man named Talmadge March. He's going to foreclose our mortgage." Ann said, "I've traced Delia."
    "Unhand us, Talmadge March," Crane said. Ann said, "I've traced Delia."
    "Huh? Delia? Oh, Delia. How?"
    "Simple deduction."
    Crane groaned. "Please. You sound like Philo Vance. Pretty soon you'll be dropping your g's."
    "If you come home I'll drive you to the Brookfield house."
    "In whose car?"
    "Peter March left one here for us."
    "For us," Crane repeated ominously. "I suppose you've been roistering with him all afternoon?"
    "Why, yes, I have."
    "Why isn't he at work?" he demanded. "Why does he have to fiddle around our little dovecot while I freeze, careening from ice cube to ice cube?"
    "Aren't you getting your metaphors a little mixed?"
    "What's a metaphor, if not to mix?"
    There was no answer, and Crane considered the telephone mouthpiece darkly for a moment. "I suppose I can come out. I suppose you called the office and got everybody aware of the fact I wasn't there, anyway."
    "I didn't call the office," Ann said. "But, how did — "
    "I simply asked the telephone operator to ring the best bar in town."

CHAPTER V
    That morning, after she had conferred with Beulah about dinner, Ann Fortune put on her black caracul coat, freshened her lipstick and called a taxi.
    "The nearest dairy," she told the driver.
    This was her first attempt at detection and she felt a little excited. She wondered if the trail would lead her into one of those situations she had so often seen in the William Powell-Myrna Loy movies: possibly to a penthouse with a suave villain from whom she would be saved in the nick of time by the arrival of Bill Crane.
    The only trouble was that she felt no confidence in the arrival of Bill Crane anywhere in the nick of time; he was more likely to stop for a drink on the way and come too late.
    Not that she didn't like Bill Crane; it was just that he didn't seem to take things seriously. Take the case they were working on: Richard March and John March dead from gas, and Simeon March accusing Carmel, his daughter-in-law, of having murdered them. It was a serious affair! But Bill, apparently, wasn't doing anything about it. He acted as though they were on one of those Long Island house parties he used to take her to in New York when he wasn't working. He acted...
    "This do, miss?" the driver asked.
    It was the Prima Dairy. She smiled a little at the squat white building. It didn't look like the sort of place Myrna Loy would be detecting in.
    However, she did find out something. Her smile almost disorganized the young clerk who took her order for milk and cream, but he retained possession of enough faculties to tell her that the dairy had the only rural service for Brookfield and Blue Lake in Marchton.
    Delia's note telling Richard to shut off milk deliveries must have been written two summers ago since Richard had been dead since February. Ann asked the clerk if he could find a Brookfield account in which the milk had been shut off for a week end around the middle of July of that year.
    The clerk discovered that a Saturday two summers ago had come on July nineteenth. Under Delivery Stop Orders on that date he found one for a Raymond Maxwell, 12 February Lane, Brookfield.
    Under the M file in the regular account book, the clerk found the house on February Lane was owned by a Charles G. Jameson, Brookfield real-estate operator.
    Bills had been paid by postal money orders, but there was a letter from Mrs Maxwell, opening