“Now will you answer my questions?”

“Of course. I was at Willsson’s with Noonan and the others. After I left there, around ten-thirty, I dropped in at her house to tell her I had to go up to Tanner. I had a halfway date with her. I stayed there about ten minutes, long enough to have a drink. There was nobody else there, unless they were hiding. When was she killed? And how?”

McGraw told me he had sent a pair of his dicks⁠—Shepp and Vanaman⁠—to see the girl that morning, to see how much help she could and would give the department in copping Whisper for Noonan’s murder. The dicks got to her house at nine-thirty. The front door was ajar. Nobody answered their ringing. They went in and found the girl lying on her back in the dining room, dead, with a stab wound in her left breast.