Her back to me, Paige Carrington sat at Boom Boom’s desk sorting through some papers. I felt both foolish and angry. I retreated up the hall, put the trophy down on the magazine table, and slipped into my shoes. I walked to the study.

“Early, aren’t you? How did you get in?”

She jumped in the chair and dropped the papers she was holding. Crimson suffused her face from the neck of her open shirt to the roots of her dark hair. “Oh! I wasn’t expecting you until two.”

“Me either. I thought you didn’t have a key.”

“Please don’t get so angry, Vic. We had an extra rehearsal called for two o’clock, and I really wanted to find my letters. So I persuaded Hinckley-he’s the doorman-I persuaded him to come up and let me in.” For a minute I thought I saw tears in the honey-colored eyes, but she flicked the back of her hand across them and smiled guiltily. “I hoped I’d be gone before you showed up. These letters are terribly, terribly personal and I couldn’t bear for anyone, even you, to see them.” She held out her right hand beseechingly.

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Find anything?”

She shrugged. “He may just not have kept them.” She bent over to pick up the papers she’d scattered at my entrance. I knelt to help her. It looked like a stack of business letters-I caught Myron Fackley’s name a couple of times. He’d been Boom Boom’s agent.

“I’ve only been through two drawers, and there are six others with papers in them. He saved everything, I think-one drawer is stuffed full of fan letters.”

I looked at the room with jaundiced eyes. Eight drawers full of papers. Sorting and cleaning have always been my worst skills on aptitude tests.

I sat on the desk and patted Paige’s shoulder. “Look. This is going to be totally boring to sort through. I’m going to have to examine even the stuff you’ve looked at because I have to see anything that might affect the estate. So why don’t you leave me to it? I promise you if I see any personal letters to Boom Boom I won’t read them-I’ll put them in an envelope for you.”