he cocktail glass to his lips. These vodka Martinis were
strong, and three of them before dinner was leaning way over backward
maintaining the tradition of the hard-drinking private eye, but Gladys
was working on her third, and no client was going to drink him under.

"So, in the privacy of his bathroom, he kicked out of his slippers, threw
off his robe, hid the Leech & Rigdon, probably in a space between the tub
and the wall that I found while we were searching the house, the night
before the shooting of Dunmore, and jumped into the tub, there to await
developments. As soon as he heard Varcek's uproar in the hall, he could
emerge, dripping bathwater and innocence, to find out what the fuss was
all about.... Do you know anything about something called General
Semantics?" he asked suddenly.

"Yes. Before I married Lane, I went around with a radio ad-writer," she
told him. "He was a nice boy, but he'd get drunker than a boiled owl
about once a month, and weep about his crimes against sanity and meaning.
He'd recite long excerpts from his professional creations, and show how
he had been deliberately objectifying words and identifying them with the
things for which they stood, and confusing orders of abstraction, and
juggling multiordinal meanings. He was going to lend me his Koran, a book
called _Science and Sanity_, and then he took a job with an ad agency in
Chicago, and I got married, and--"

Rand nodded. "Then you realize that the word is not the thing spoken of,
and that the inference is not the description, and that we cannot know
'all' about anything. Etcetera," he added hastily, like a Papist signing
himself with the Cross. "Well, some considerable disregard of these
principles seems to have existed in this case. Dunmore is seen in a
bathrobe, his feet bare and making wet tracks on the floor, his hair wet,
etcetera. Straightaway, one and all appear to have assumed that he was in
the tub, splashing soapsuds around, while Lane Fleming was being shot.
And Anton Varcek, who can be taken as an example of what S. I. Hayakawa
was talking about when he spoke of people behaving like scientists
inside but not outside their laboratories, saw Lane Fleming dead, with
an object labeled 'revolver' in his hand, and, because of his verbal
identifications and semantic reactions, immediately included the
inference of an accident in his description of what he had seen. That was
just an extra dividend of luck for Dunmore; it got the w