The three girls looked at each other and at Freddie and at the Saint. There was an awkward silence. Nobody seemed to want to speak first; until Freddie scratched his head painfully and said, “I think I’ve known you longer than anyone, Esther, haven’t I?”
“Since last New Year’s Eve,” she said. “At the Dunes. You remember. Somebody had dared me to do a strip tease—”
“—never dreaming you’d take them up on it,” said Ginny.
“All right,” said the Saint. “Where did you come in?”
“In a phone booth in Miami,” said Ginny. “In February. Freddie was passed out inside, and I had to make a phone call. So I lugged him out. Then he woke up, so we made a night of it.”
“What about you, Lissa?”
“I was just reading a book in a drug store in New York last May. Freddie came in for some Bromo-Seltzer, and we just got talking.”
“In other words,” said the Saint, “any one of you could have been a girlfriend of Johnny’s, and promoted yourselves in here after he was killed.”
Nobody said anything.
“Okay,” Freddie said at last. “Well, we’ve got fingerprints, haven’t we? How about the fingerprints on that knife?”