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breath to indicate that her patience was at an end. “If you won’t let me have my purse, at least give me my comb and compact and lipstick. I’d like to go into the bathroom and wash my face, for obvious reasons.”
    “No bathroom,” I said.
    “My dear man—”
    “My dear woman,” I said, “you stay where I can watch you until you give me what I want. Unfortunately, I didn’t see you hide it. There were other things of more compelling and immediate interest to observe.”
    She said with sudden harshness: “Damn you! She was my sister! Don’t talk as if her death was just a cheap act for your entertainment.”
    I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way, believe me. I knew her too, slightly.” I hesitated, but whether I liked Mrs. Gail Hendricks or not, she seemed to be genuine, and I had to give her the break of telling her a certain amount of truth. I said, “I went to that place to meet her. She worked for us, you know.”
    The big, beautiful grayish eyes narrowed. “Worked for... What are you, a strippers’ agent or just a pimp?”
    I said, “You’re selling your sister short, Gail. I’m an agent, all right, but not that kind. And she was an agent, too. Did you think she was working in that joint for fun?”
    “No,” she said, “I thought—”
    “What?”
    She sighed. “Well, what would you think if your kid sister ran away from home in a... well, let’s call it a highly disturbed state of mind, and when you heard of her again, after several years, she’d dyed her hair and was stripping in a Juarez dive?”
    I said, “You thought she’d just hit the skids, is that it?”
    “What else could I think? When some friends—friends!—told me, with that ghoulish kind of sympathy, enjoying every minute of it, that they’d just been to Juarez and there was something I ought to know but they didn’t know quite how to tell me... Well, I couldn’t go alone, not into a joint like that, so I got hold of Sam, and we drove down together. He didn’t want to go, but I told him he owed her that much, we both did.”
    “Owed her?” I said.
    Gail moved her shoulders slightly. “A pretty little family triangle. You know, the attractive older sister—if I may flatter myself a bit—and the big horse of a younger sister, awkward and shy, and the tall, handsome young man. Sam was just doing it for kicks, or maybe he had an eye on her money—we both got quite a bit when Daddy died—but she was desperately in love with him. To her, he was the first man to see the true beauty of her soul underlying the gawky...” She stopped abruptly. “That was bitchy, I guess. She’s dead. I didn’t mean to make fun of her. Strike it from the record, please.”
    I said, “So you took him away from her. To save her?” She shrugged again. “Thank you, sir. I’m sure my motives were lovely, perfectly lovely. They always are. Anyway, she caught us and... well, never mind the details. I’ll admit she scared me silly. I thought she was going to kill us both. She had a gun, and she’d always been good with horses and firearms and fishing rods and things. But she just threw the damn gun out the window. In the morning she was gone. I tried to find her, and I did catch up with her once, in New York, where she was doing some modeling, but she slammed the door in my face. After that, I let it go. If that was the way she wanted it...” Gail gave that little shrug again. “The next time I heard, several years later, she was in Juarez. The rest you know.” She looked at me steadily. “If you’re a government agent of some kind—I suppose that’s what you’re hinting at—show me something to prove it.”
    I said, “We don’t carry badges. They have a habit of cropping up at inconvenient moments.”
    “I’m supposed to take your word for it?”
    “It would make things easier on both of us,” I said.
    “I don’t doubt it would make things easier for you!” she said scornfully. “But you’re