Miss Howard only frowned and nodded at her feet. “It’s these blasted boots,” she said, and, looking down at them with her, I could see what the problem was: instead of wearing a sensible, light pair of shoes or slippers that would have let her get her toes into the gaps in the masonry, she-being a novice-had put on a pair of heavy, nail-studded climber’s boots. They weren’t unlike the ones the murderer John Beecham had used to climb walls, and I figured that that was where she’d got the idea.

“You need rope and gear for those,” I said, grabbing hold of the window frame with my right hand and extending my left arm to her. “Remember, Beecham was climbing sheer brick walls. And,” I added with a smile, as I pulled her onto the windowsill with me, “he knew what he was doing.”

She settled in, caught her breath, and just barely glanced at me sideways. “That’s a low blow, Stevie,” she said. But then the irritated face turned amused, in the way that her looks and moods always changed: suddenly, with the speed of a doused cat. She smiled back at me. “Got a cigarette?”

“Like a dog has fleas,” I said, reaching inside the room for a packet and handing her one. I took one for myself, struck a match on the windowsill, and we both lit up. “Life must be getting boring over on Broadway.”

“Just the opposite,” she said, blowing smoke out toward the park and producing a pair of more conventional shoes from a satchel that was hanging around her neck. “I think I’ve finally got a case that doesn’t involve an unfaithful husband or a rich brat gone bad.”

A word of explanation, here: after the Beecham case, all the members of our little band of investigators besides Miss Howard had gone back to their usual pursuits.