I tried to take her pulse. I don’t know why I made the attempt because God knows she looked deader than the Charleston, but people are always taking pulses on television and it seemed like the thing to do. I spent a long time taking hers because I wasn’t sure I was doing it right, but finally I gave up and said the hell with it.

I didn’t get sick or anything. My knees felt weak for a moment, but then the sensation lifted and I was all right. I felt rotten because death is a rotten thing and murder is particularly horrible, and I felt vaguely that there should have been something I could have done to prevent this particular murder, but I was damned if I could see what it was.

First things first. She was dead and I couldn’t help her, and I was a burglar who certainly did not want to be found at the scene of a far more serious crime than burglary. I had to wipe off whatever surfaces might hold my fingerprints and I had to retrieve my attaché case and then I had to get the hell out of there.

I didn’t have to wipe Crystal ’s wrist. Skin doesn’t take fingerprints, any number of inane television programs notwithstanding. What I did have to wipe were the surfaces I’d been near since I took off my rubber gloves (which I now put back on, incidentally). So I got a washcloth from the bathroom and I wiped the inside of the closet door and the floor of the closet, and I couldn’t think what else I might have touched but I wiped around the outside closet knob just to make sure.

Of course the murderer had touched that knob. So maybe I was wiping away his prints. On the other hand, maybe he’d been wearing gloves.

Not my concern.

I finished wiping, and I went back to the bathroom and put the washcloth back on its hook, and then I returned to the bedroom for a quick look at the disappointed pastel lady, and I gave her a quick wink and dropped my eyes to look for my attaché case.

To no avail.