QUESTION: You must have a good deal of courage, Miss Blake.
ANSWER: Enough, I hope.
QUESTION: I hope so too. By the way, Miss Blake, you might glance at this folder, if you will.
"That's where he flashed the morgue pictures at you, Cal?"
"Uh-huh. I was a—what's the term?—a cool customer. Oh yes—he's reading my intelligent comments now. Not bad for a beginner, don't you think? Like Lizzie Borden."
"Hush, dear."
"Well, Lizzie was a beginner too. What's more she had to operate on a breakfast of mutton broth."
Cecil Warner could wonder then whether it had been Callista's wry and thorny humor that saved her during the moments last August—there must have been such moments—when she had drawn that dark bottle forward on the shelf and perhaps set out a single glass.
IV
As Joe Bass emptied the ash tray and made gentle needless motions with a dustrag at the bookshelves, Judge Terence Mann glanced at the handful of doodle scraps he had taken out of their temporary shelter in the minute book at the close of the day. None of them pleased him now, except possibly his sketch of the fingerprint technician Sergeant Zane scratching the lens he wore in place of a head. Drawing the toxicologist Dr. Ginsberg with his smooth face modified into a chemical retort had not turned out well. There was no comedy in solemn Dr. Ginsberg, unless it might be in his very self-conscious aloofness, his volunteered declaration on the stand that he never listened to anything about a criminal case except the facts immediately pertinent to his specialty. He had said in effect: "That for your emotional involvements!"—but it was a valid attitude if you happened to be Dr. Ginsberg, and not very funny.