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knock on her door, enter, glance over escape possibilities, and then kill her. He would have been back in Massachusetts no later than 5 A.M. , well in advance of any telephone call about her murder.
    “We sneaked a look at the speedometer on his car and checked it out with the garage where his car was last serviced. Nothing there, but a knowledgeable amateur can set back a speedometer. We showed his photo to every tollbooth attendant outside of New York and batted zero. But two days ago we found an attendant in a Trafton parking lot who recognized Madison’s face. One of those rare people who literally never forget a face. What’s more, he remembered that Madison’s license plates were daubed with mud, which was strangebecause it’s been a dry season, and he had to do some scrubbing before he could note down the number for his records. The parking lot was about ten blocks from Alison’s apartment. Apparently Madison was so terrified of his car being noticed by the police, or of getting ticketed for being parked on a street at that hour, that he made this one mistake. And so we were able to prove that he was in Trafton the night Alison was murdered.”
    Madame Karitska nodded. “Was that enough?”
    “No,” went on Pruden, “but it was enough to open things up.” With a faint smile he added, “We then applied for permission to exhume the body of Alison’s mother.”
    “Interesno,”
murmured Madame Karitska, with a lift of her brows.
    “It made Madison nervous,” said Pruden. “That man’s a superb actor but it began the slow process of breaking down his confidence, and before the results of the lab tests were back we hit pay dirt on Madison’s real identity. It turns out that he was born Norman Palos, and was an old hand at being a widower: he’d married twice before, each time to a young widow with money, and each time his wife had died of a heart attack in her sleep.”
    “Poison?” suggested Madame Karitska.
    “It certainly was in Francine Bartlett’s case. She’d inhaled it consistently for some months by way of a nose spray she used for asthma attacks. Madison had been a chemist; he doctored the vials. She may very well have died of a heart attack—it would weaken any heart to cope with increasing doses of arsenic—but there was enough poison still in her body to change the wholepicture. At that point Madison cracked and confessed to murdering the two of them, which saved us a good bit of time.”
    “Yes,” said Madame Karitska, and then, very simply, “I am glad he will not be allowed to do this again. He was a very evil man.”
    “You realize,” Pruden said, looking at her squarely, “how much I’m indebted to you for this.”
    “I realize,” she said imperturbably, “what you thought of my words when I spoke them several weeks ago to you in this room. You are more flexible than I supposed, Lieutenant.”
    “And very curious at this point,” he admitted.
    “I believe we were intended to meet,” she told him with a faint smile, “and I am a little curious myself. Have you something on your person that you wear every day and have worn for some years?”
    “You mean a reading?” he asked, and looked a little alarmed. “Well, I suppose—here, I’ll give you my watch. A high-school graduation present worn for fifteen straight years.”
    “Very good,” she murmured, and gave him a reassuring smile as he handed it to her. Closing her eyes she concentrated while Pruden watched her, half skeptical, half apprehensive. “Ah yes,” she said at last, “I see how it is. My instincts were sound, we are not strangers to one another at all. I get an impression of a very fine brain, a most intelligent man.”
    “Of course,” Pruden said flippantly.
    “But,” continued Madame Karitska, paying him no attention, “a rather inhibited man, a little narrow and literal. You have been too busy for love—a pity—but inside of fifteen months you will be married.”
    “That I refuse to