4I was lunching out Sixteenth Street. As I went up the steps I was still a little dizzy from the events of the morning. It didn’t seem possible that anybody to whom Enoch B. Stubblefield had meant nothing at nine o’clock in the morning could find herself at half-past one in the vortex of one of the whirlpools of confusion and panic that seemed to swirl around him. And I knew I hadn’t heard the last of him, because, as I’d told Dorothy Hallet, Freddie Mollinson was going to be at lunch. It was merely a matter of timing that was in question . . . whether it would be with the sherry before lunch, or with the jellied madrilene, or the soft crabs and watercress salad, or the Strawberries Tzarina, that Freddie would pull the Stubblefield thorn from his still bleeding side. It was a sharp thorn,
