“You didn’t hear Mrs. Ellingbery testify that her suspicions were first aroused when somebody reported to her that on July the Fourth Tom Ellingbery was riding the roller coaster with another girl?”

I wish I could have jumped into the Brain-Finder and gone back about two weeks. I would have walked through the sidewalk while the coal was being poured.

“No,” I said finally.

The young fellow looked triumphantly at Mr. Youngquist, who looked as if he would like to be buried in ashes up to his ears.

“That’s all.”

Mr. Youngquist rallied and put Slim back on the stand. Then there was a recess. Mr. Youngquist and Mr. Rubicam and Slim and Mrs. Ellingbery and I went into a big huddle out in the hall. “That’s what comes of messing around with imbecilic things like this Brain-Finder,” Mr. Youngquist moaned. “Why didn’t we stick to straight law?”

“Because we couldn’t win that way,” Mr. Rubicam reminded him. “We didn’t have any real evidence.”

Well, they decided the only chance to win the case was to have Slim tell about and demonstrate the Brain-Finder. Slim didn’t like to do that; but we needed those five G ’s. That afternoon he told. The next morning we lugged it into court and set it on a table with the screen facing the judge.

There was a crowd in court that morning, thanks to a news story in the morning Herald . Slim groaned; crowds aren’t good for private investigators. I pricked up my ears when in marched Mr. Swanberg, our landlord, as austere as striped trousers could possibly make him, but with a beauteous blonde in a pink dress, clinging as if she was afraid he’d get away. That opened my eyes. Maybe the old iceberg was human after all,