"Yeah. And a little spoiled." The cop whistled without making any sound. "Girl?" I nodded. "Where's she?" "Hattie Blaine's," I replied, after thinking it over. He looked out the window and shook his head. "Jesus!" I sketched in a little. The men listened. Black said, "I could send a cruise car up for her--and get her back here--" I shook my head. "I suspect--he'd bail out for sure, then. His life plan was based on the idea that what she had been--would be rubbed out. Forgotten. If you understand. But she went back to work." "The higher they are the harder they fall!" Black was grimly amused at the accuracy of the cliché. And the younger cop said, "It isn't possible to be smart all ways at once, is it?" "What do we do?" I asked. He looked at me some more. "Take a shower and put on dry clothes, Mr. Wylie. We'll figure for a while. These things can last hours." I did that. They didn't figure much. "The best we can do," Black informed me, "is to get set up there on the roof. The angle's bad--but we have two good men. If he shows signs of definitely going, we'll take a chance and try to rope him." They'd been out on the narrow terrace, talking to him. The young cop was fascinated. "He told us that he was working out a personal problem against a background germane to the problem and equivalent to the other stresses of his life. Something like that. What the hell does 'germane' mean?" "Appropriate," I said. It was near enough. "When those double-domes go nuts--they still keep talking in their double-dome lingo." "The nut," I said, "never realizes he's nutty. He thinks you are. That's why there're so many of them." The cop nodded. "I'd say--the majority of people, sometimes." He shrugged. "I guess when you get into the atom-bomb class of brains, you get pretty chinchy everywhere else." I shook my head. "The fact is otherwise. The brighter they are--the less likely they are to pull one like this. Only--they still do, occasionally." Captain Black absently tossed his smoking cigar butt into the artificial fireplace and stepped over the windowsill. We could hear him, down the terrace, talking to Paul--but not the words. "He got a family we could send for? Anything like that?" the young cop asked. I shook my head. "His mother died--not by what's called suicide, but by the psychological means that amounted to the same thing. He's a case of a dame-starved kid growing up with too much emphasis on dames and too little knowledge about what they're really like." The cop gazed at me with a different speculation. "Tough for you." "I can stand it. I like him. It makes me angry. And it's--embarrassing." "I'll say." Time passed. "They ought to have a gadget!" I talked to pass more time. "Something that they could shoot at a man on such a spot. A light, large net discharged by a Very pistol--maybe--that went too fast to duck and tangled you all up."