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violin’s still here, isn’t it? and I’d dearly love to have it. You know the duets we played together, what could be more personal?”
    Pruden hoped like hell that Ginny Voorhees wouldn’t ask how he knew the violin was still here; he brought his gun out of its holster, and waited.
    But Ginny Voorhees had refused that trap, and he had to admire her as she said firmly, “Yes it’s here, but I really feel strongly that her parents should have it. After all, they loved her for twenty-four years, but you knew her only—”
    The man’s voice hardened. “Nevertheless I’d like that violin very much, Ginny.”
    â€œIt’s just a violin she bought at the flea market for seventy-five dollars, Robert.”
    â€œExactly,” he said. “Now go and get it.
Now
.”
    â€œNo,” she told him firmly.
    There was silence, and Pruden had no idea as to what was happening until Ginny Voorhees said in a steady voice, “Surely that can’t be a
real
gun you just pulled out of your pocket, Robert.”
    â€œIt’s a real gun, and it shoots bullets,” he said in a hard voice, “and I’m ready to use it. I warn you, I’ll pull this trigger if you don’t get her violin for me now, this minute.”
    â€œRobert, what’s happened to you? You’re mad, you have to be crazy.”
    â€œCrazy?” he shouted. “You think I want to go on teaching stupid kids with no talent for the rest of my life? Damn you, it’s one of Stradivari’s Habeneck violins and worth a fortune, and I’ll kill if I have to. Where is it?”
    â€œI won’t tell you, it’s Darlene’s.”
    â€œMine now,” he told her. “If you don’t get it I’ll find it myself.”
    â€œYou’ll never get away with this, Professor Blake. The police—”
    â€œPolice?” he said scornfully. “Never. You won’t be alive to tell them, I’ll see to that, and after all, it was just a violin bought at a flea market for seventy-five dollars. The police will never know.”
    It was at this moment that Pruden, who had his own flair for the dramatic, walked out of the bedroom, gun firmly in hand, to say smoothly, “But the police already know, Blake,” and he had time to admire the dumbfounded look on the man’s face as Swope deprived him of his pistol.
    â€œAnd that,” Pruden told Madame Karitska later, “is why Darlene’s fiancé made no move to prevent the girl from rushing out into the street to be killed, on what pretext we’ll never know. It certainly wasn’t a dog . . . He knew the car was waiting up the street for that moment, and he timed it perfectly.”
    â€œAnd the driver of the car that hit her?”
    â€œAn ex-student of his, just out of jail and promised a very handsome sum of money to do it.”
    Madame Karitska, having known her share of evil, shivered. “It still remains very strange to me, my receiving no impressions of Darlene when I held her gold cross. I can only assume that her professor had recently bought it for her and had carried it around in his pocket for several days, and it was his obsession over the violin that came through to me. An obsessed mind blocks out personality. . . . Would he have killed Ginny Voorhees, too?”
    â€œI think he was just desperate enough to do it,” said Pruden. “He never expected resistance, and he’d dreamed of what that Stradivarius would bring to him as soon as he recognized it.” Pruden added wryly, “It’s a pity that Ginny Voorhees teaches art or I’d have nominated her for an Academy Award for the performance she gave. Brave girl! Incidentally, the Cahns would like to meet you sometime. Naturally I told them about you.”
    â€œBut I did so little,” she protested.
    Pruden laughed. “Then tell me how anyone else would ever have guessed that a violin was