There is no activity more explosive than that of the chronic idler. Once out on Broadway, accordingly, I did not let the grass grow under my feet. Two minutes at the telephone and ten more in a taxicab brought me in touch with my old friend Doyle who was "working" a mulatto shooting case in lower Seventh Avenue as quietly as a gardener working his cabbage-patch. "What do you know about a woman named Vinnie Brunelle?" I demanded. He studied the pavement. Then he shook his head. The name clearly meant nothing to him. "Give me something more to work on!" "She's a young woman who lives by her wits. She keeps up a very good front, and now and then does a variety of the wire-tapping game." "I wonder if that wouldn't be the Cassal woman Andrus used as a come-on for his Mexican mine game? But _she_ claimed Andrus had fooled her." "And what else?" I inquired. Doyle stood silent, wrapt in thought for a moment or two. "Oh, that's about all. I've heard she's an uncommonly clever woman, about the cleverest woman in the world. But what are you after?" "I want her record--all of it." "That sort of woman never has a record. That's what cleverness is, my boy, maintaining your reputation at the expense of your character." "You've given birth to an epigram," I complained, "but you haven't helped me out of my dilemma." Whereupon he asked me for a card. "I'm going to give you a line to Sherman--Camera-Eye Sherman we used to call him down at Headquarters. He's with the Bankers' Association now, but he was with our Identification Bureau so long he knows 'em all like his own family." And on the bottom of my card I saw Doyle write: "Please tell him what you can of Vinnie Brunelle." "Of course I couldn't see him to-night?" Doyle looked at his watch. "Yes, you can. You'll get him up at his apartment on Riverside. And I'll give you odds you'll find the old night-owl playing bezique with his sister-in-law!" That, in fact, was precisely what I found the man with the camera-eye doing. He sat there dealing out the cards, at one o'clock in the morning, with a face as mild and bland as a Venetian cardinal feeding his pigeons. My host looked at the card in his fingers, looked at me, and then looked at the card again. "She got you in trouble?" was his laconic query. "I have never met the lady. But a friend of mine has, I'm sorry to say. And I want to do what I can to help him out." "How much did he lose?" "About thirty thousand dollars, he claims." "What was the game?" "It appears to have been one of those so-called wire-tapping coups."