“But Crocker was wearing a dress every time I saw her yesterday,” Lynda objected.

She stopped talking as a female student walked by, one of the lost souls from the dorm who hadn’t gone home for spring break. The girl was tall with platinum blond hair reaching down the middle of her back. She wore very short red shorts (at least two months ahead of season) over long, muscular legs, a white T-shirt with no bra underneath, and Nike gym shoes. I barely noticed her.

“Besides,” Lynda said when the student had passed, “what about motive? What do you figure Molly Crocker had to do with the stolen books?”

“I don’t know, maybe nothing at all. This could be a simple crime of passion. It could have been her, not you, that Matheson referred to when he told Queensbury he had business with a lady. We ought to at least talk to her, find out if she knows anything. Her name is on my list from Mac anyway.”

Lynda had to admit it couldn’t hurt.

I went into the back of the Hearth Room, where Bob Nakamora was now holding forth on the subject of Sherlock Holmes on the radio.

“Orson Welles played Holmes in his own radio adaptation of William Gillette’s famous melodrama Sherlock Holmes when The Mercury Theater on the Air...”

After looking around for a minute from the doorway, I spotted Judge Crocker sitting next to Queensbury on a comfortable couch along the far wall. Even in the harsh fluorescent light of the Hearth Room she was a handsome woman. The blue jumper she was wearing seemed casual, comfortable and un-judgelike. Once again I noticed the mound of her tummy, big enough to make me wonder if she were pregnant but not big enough that I’d risk asking her about it.

Feeling conspicuous, I crossed the room and whispered in her ear. “Could you come with me for a minute?”

Molly Crocker looked at me, then at Queensbury, who seemed engrossed in the talk. She rose and picked up her purse, a dark leather contraption with a drawstring top. Not until we were walking toward the door did she speak in a low voice.

“Has something happened?”

There were a million ways to answer that. I settled on, “Nothing new. We just want to ask you a few questions.”

“‘We?’”

The presence of Lynda Teal right outside the door answered for me. Molly had met Lynda at breakfast, and apparently she thought I’d set her up for an exercise in ambush journalism.

“If you want to talk to me about Hugh’s death, I must tell you that I have no interest in being interviewed for your newspaper,” she told Lynda.

“I’m really the one who wants to talk to you,” I said. “Off the record. You could help us solve Matheson’s murder.”

“Mr. Cody, I think I made it quite clear earlier this morning that I highly disapprove of playing games with murder.”

“This is no game.”

“Then if you actually have any pertinent information about this homicide or any other crime you’re legally bound to tell the police.”

“So are you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Her tone of voice would have cut through diamonds.

While I was making a mental note to never do anything that might land me in Maximum Molly’s courtroom, the girl in red shorts walked by again. “I don’t think the hallway is the right place to discuss this,” I said.

After a token protest that there was no right place, Molly went with us to the Study Lounge on the same floor of Muckerheide. With its stuffed chairs and fifty-watt bulbs, the place is about as conducive to study as the drive-in theaters of my father’s youth, and occasionally is the site of similar activities. Not today, though. We had the lounge all to ourselves, thanks to spring break.

As soon as we’d settled into chairs I told Molly, “The number of your room at the Winfield was written on a notepad by the side of Matheson’s body.”

“Good grief, is that what this is about? I already know that. Your police chief - what’s his name, Hummel? - he told me this morning.”

Lynda, sitting where Molly Crocker couldn’t see it, rolled her eyes in the back of her head.

“Oscar talked to you as part of his investigation?” I asked Molly.

“Yes. I found him a rather unpolished personality.”

That was Oscar, all right.

I should have expected this. We’d left the notepad where we’d found it, like good citizens. Any idiot would have tried to find out whose number that was, and Oscar is no idiot. He just acts like it sometimes.

“Do you have any idea why Matheson had your number?” Lynda asked.

The judge turned to her. “I know exactly why, but I see no reason to tell you - on or off the record. As an officer of the court I’ve already told the proper authorities.”

“It’s really not that hard to figure out,” I said. “Matheson was a notorious womanizer. That’s an old-fashioned word that Chalmers used, but I don’t know of a better one. The two of you must have had a liaison at the hotel. The only real question is whether you left his room before or after the murder.”

Molly stood up, her body trembling. “That accusation is totally baseless.”

Fortunately, I wasn’t within slapping range.

“Jeff isn’t accusing you of anything,” Lynda said in a soothing tone. “He just got carried away for a minute. What he means is, did you go to Matheson’s room yesterday afternoon? And if you did, did he give you any indication that he was expecting another visitor?”

“Those are questions quite proper for the police to ask, Ms. Teal, and they already did.”

I gave up. “If you choose to stonewall us, Judge, I know there’s nothing we can do about it. Legally, whatever you had going with the victim is none of our business.”

“I had nothing ‘going’ with Hugh Matheson.”

Unexpectedly, she sat back down and went on in a more collected voice. “I’ve known Hugh for years, since law school. Apparently he tried to call me at the hotel a couple of times Friday night, but I was at Mac’s party. Anyway, on Saturday he missed me again because I was out to an early breakfast, so he followed me into the corridor after Kate McCabe’s presentation.”

“He just wanted to talk to you?” I said.

She nodded. “It was about a case he was involved in, a case that’s going to reach my court.”

“But that isn’t ethical, is it?” Lynda objected.

“Totally inappropriate,” the judge agreed with a shake of her head. “I told Hugh in the strongest terms possible that it was only our long friendship that kept me from reporting him to the ethics committee of the Cincinnati Bar Association.”

It was as neat an explanation for an embarrassing circumstance as I’d ever seen, maybe too neat.

“I find it hard to believe that a man with a five-speed libido like Matheson could resist putting the moves on an attractive woman like you,” I told Molly.

She laughed. “Thanks, I guess, but I never said he didn’t try. I turned him down years ago, before I even had my first gray hair. I wasn’t interested in being added to his list of conquests. And these days he prefers - preferred - younger women, so I was safe from his attentions.”

Lynda must have read something significant in that - is that a woman thing? - because she said, “How young?”

“How young is Renata Chalmers?”

It took a second or two for that to penetrate. But when it did, it hit hard. I gripped the arm of my chair. “Are you telling us that Renata and Matheson-”

Molly Crocker rose to her feet, looking away from me as I stood up at the same time. “I’m sorry. I’ve already said far more than I had any business saying.”

“Maybe so, but you did say it,” Lynda pointed out, leaving her chair as well. “Now you at least have a responsibility to make sure we don’t misinterpret and imagine the situation as any worse than it is.”

“The situation is bad enough,” the judge said, “at least by my rather traditional standards of morality. I really don’t feel comfortable talking about it.”