self some good playing with the company's stock? You bet you could!" she wound up triumphantly. "So don't go round thinking Billy boy didn't pay his way."
"Well, you've been spoiled. I'm not going to make you worse."
"What's the use of being so tight?" she demanded. "It's not like it had to come out of your own pocket. You've got an expense account to charge it to, haven't you?"
I said nothing. She frowned at me, at the run in her stocking, and at Rolff. Then she said to him:
"Maybe he'd loosen up if he had a drink."
The thin man got up and went out of the room.
IX
Dinah Brand pouted at me, prodded my shin with her toe, and explained:
"It's not so much the money. It's he principle of the thing. If a girl's got something that's worth something to somebody, she's a boob if she doesn't collect."
I grinned.
"Why don't you be a good guy?" she coaxed.
Dan Rolff came in with a siphon, a bottle of gin, some lemons, and a bowl of cracked ice. We had a drink apiece. The lunger went away. The girl and I wrangled over the money question while we had more drinks. I kept trying to bring the talk around to Thaler and Willsson. She kept bringing it back to the money she deserved. It went on like that until the gin-bottle was empty. My watch said it was a quarter after one.
She chewed a piece of lemon peel and said for the thirtieth or fortieth time:
"it won't come out of your pocket. What do you care?"
"It's not the money," I assured her. "It's the principle of the thing."
She made a face at me and set her glass where she thought the table was. She was eight inches wrong. I don't remember whether the glass broke when it hit the floor, or what happened to it. But I do remember that I took her missing the table for my cue to launch another attack.
"Another thing," I opened up, "I'm not dead sure I really need what you can tell me. I'd like to have it, but maybe I can get along without it."
"It'll be nice if you can," she replied, "but don't forget I'm the last person who saw him alive, besides the murderers."
Neither of us was talking as clear as it looks here.
"You're mistaken, my dear," I said. "His wife saw him come out, walk away and get shot."
"His wife?"
"Yeah. She was sitting in a machine across the street."
"How did she know he was here?"
"She says Thaler phoned her that Willsson was coming here—or had come—with a five thousand dollar check."
"You're trying to kid me. Max couldn't have known it!"
"I'm telling you what she told Noonan and me."
The girl spit what was left of the lemon peel out on the floor, further disarranged her hair by running her fingers through it, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and then slapped the table.
"All right, Mr. Knowitall, I'm going to play with you! You can think it's not going to cost you anything, but I'll get mine before we're through. You think I won't?" she challenged me, peering at me as if I were a block distant.
This was no time to start an argument, so I said, "I hope you do." I think I said it three or four times, very earnestly.
"I will. Now listen to me. You're drunk and I'm drunk, and I'm just drunk enough to tell the truth. I'll tell you anything that you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. If I like a per-
