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know I never get things right when it comes to computers. The children laugh at me. I can play a videotape easily. Martin wanted me to be able to do that if he died, but of course ... of course ... he didn’t think he’d die, not really.”
    I asked, “Could you yourself make a home movie on a videotape?”
    She nodded. “Martin gave me a video camera for Christmas. It makes your own home films but I’ve hardly had time to learn how to use it.”
    â€œAnd he didn’t say anything about what was on that tape he meant for me?”
    â€œHe was awfully careful not to.”
    I shook my head in frustration. The tape stolen from the glass showroom was surely the one with the secret on it. The one passed to Martin, then to Eddie the valet, and then to me. Yet if the Broadway thieves, or thief, had viewed it—and they’d had all night to do so—why were they needing to rob Martin’s house ten hours later?
    Did the tape taken from the showroom actually contain Martin’s secret?
    Perhaps not.
    Was the second robbery carried out by a different thief, who didn’t know about the first one?
    I had no answers, only guesses.
    Marigold at that point tottered into the den as if coming to pieces in all directions. I had been used to Marigold for the four years since Martin had straight facedly presented me to his buxom mother-in-law, a magnified version of his pretty wife. Marigold could be endlessly witty or tiresomely belligerent according to the gin level, but this time the effect of gas on alcohol seemed to have resulted in pity-me pathos, a state that aroused genuine sympathy, not serve-you-right.
    In Bon-Bon’s house it was the police that turned up first, and Bon-Bon’s children who described down to the laces on his shoes the clothes worn by their attacker. He had stared with wide eyes through his black head mask while he’d pointed the orange cylinder at them and squirted a nearly invisible but fierce mist, sweeping from face to face and knocking them out before they’d realized what was happening. Asked about it, Daniel, the eldest child, described the black-masked man having something white tied over his face underneath. An elementary gas mask, I surmised. Something to prevent the robber from inhaling his own gas.
    Worthington had been attacked most strongly and had fallen unconscious first, and Bon-Bon—in the den—last. The gas had perhaps been exhausted by the time I arrived; a direct bang on the head had sufficed.
    Worthington had been right in guessing the police would offer no hope of Bon-Bon ever again seeing the missing goods. She felt less pain than I would have expected over the loss of tapes showing Martin winning the Grand National because, as she explained, she could get duplicates.
    Scarcely had the police notebooks been folded away than Bon-Bon’s doctor hurried in without apology, giving the impression he was making an exception, out of the goodness of his heart.
    It was the color orange that slowed him into frowns and more thorough care. He and the police all listened to Daniel, brought out paper, and took notes. The doctor told the departing detectives to look for villains with access to the anesthetic gas cyclopropane, which came in orange cylinders, and wasn’t much used because of being highly flammable and explosive.
    Slowly, after decently thorough peerings into eyes and throats and careful stethoscope chest checks, each of the family was judged fit to go on living. Sweet Bon-Bon, when her house was finally free of official attention, sat sprawling on the office sofa telling me she was utterly exhausted and needed help. Specifically she needed my help and Martin would have asked for it.
    So I stayed and looked after things, and because of that I saved myself at least another sore head, as thieves broke into my house on the hill that night and stole everything that could remotely be called a videotape.
    Â 
    On Monday,