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for Calvin persisted. A girl somehow eluded the doorman and when Calvin's man-servant opened his door at her knock, she pushed past him and furnished Calvin one of his most amazing experiences of the day.

She was a blonde, childish-faced girl of not more than eighteen, with her natural pink color covered with orange, her plucked eyebrows blackened, her eyelashes mascara-ed together in points to feign an effect of jet irradiance from her large, pale blue eyes. Her pouting lips were painted into extreme, crimson bows and her blouse was cut so as to display, under her opened coat, the full rounding of her bosom.

She gave her name as "Miss Nesson," and she might have been—Calvin thought—a younger sister or a cousin of the woman whose body he had seen in the flat by the lake. But she was not, as it proved. She had no concern for Adele Ketlar at all. If he had patiently studied the gallery of signed pictures, Calvin might have remembered that hers was the photograph labeled "Lola," which held one of the most conspicuous positions on Ketlar's wall.

It appeared to Calvin, when she started to talk, that she had come in defense of Joan Royle.

"She's nothing in Fred's life," Miss Nesson asserted loftily. "You come on him with her because she lives in his building—she moved in after him, the damn little broad."

Thus was Calvin warned that he must look for another interpretation of Miss Nesson's purpose, but he was slow to discern it.