4

From the other bed there were small sounds—sounds chiefly of rustling. There were also certain sighing sounds, and a small—obviously smothered—cough. Jerry North lengthened his breathing, approximated a mild snore. There was, from the other bed, the slight sound of someone turning over. This was followed by a somewhat louder sign. Jerry, under the covers, looked at the illuminated dial of his wrist watch. It showed twenty minutes of three.

“Oh, dear,” Pam North said, in the soft voice of one who, driven almost beyond endurance, is still considerate of those more fortunate, those who can sleep. There were further sounds. Pam had, evidently, turned over on the other side. There was a swishing sound. Pam had, undoubtedly, thrown off excess covering. There was silence for a few minutes, but Jerry did not sleep. Jerry waited. There was a louder sigh, and a longer sigh. There was a small sound of creaking. Pam was sitting up in bed, preparatory—it must be assumed—to pulling the covers back again.

“All right, Pam,” Jerry said, and sat up in his own bed, and turned on the light between their beds. At which Pam said, “Ouch!” and covered her eyes. “I tried not to wake you up,” Pam said and turned to look at him. He said nothing. “All right,” she said. “I tried to wake you up. Inadvertently.”

“I know,” Jerry said. “It’s all right. I’ll—”

“Jerry!” Pam said. “Of all the—no.” Jerry put his legs back in bed. “Anyway, not yet,” Pam said.

Jerry shook a cigarette loose from a package on the night table and held it out to Pam, who took it. He lighted hers, lighted one for himself.

“All right,” he said. “I don’t know who killed Jamey. And I feel the same way about it you do. And—I’m as wide awake now as you are. And—you’ve thought of something. At”—he consulted his watch again—“fifteen minutes of three.”

“I can’t help that,” Pam said. “And probably it’s all wrong. But—this posthypnotic whatever it is.”

“Oh, lord,” Jerry said. “Suggestion. You want to read the book?”

“Why should I?” Pam said. “It’s a very long book. And you’ve read it. Division of labor, sort of. That sharing which is part of every true—”

“Pam!”

“—except that some people can sleep through anything.” Pam said.

For a moment Jerry had the uneasy feeling that he had carried things too far. He looked at Pam. She wasn’t cross. Intent, but not cross.

“Whatever I knowest, thou shalt know,” Jerry said. “Or we’ll get the book and read it aloud to each other.”

“All right,” Pam said. “You can get somebody to break a clock. Could you get somebody to—kill?”

“You,” Jerry said, “think of the damnedest things. At three o’clock in the morning. No, according to Elwell, and he says that that’s the consensus.”

“Are they sure?”

“Of course they—” Jerry said, and stopped. “Well—” he said.

They were sure enough, and a long series of experiments had been made—including several by Elwell himself. But there was one flaw in all the experiments. They weren’t real—couldn’t, obviously, be real. The only real experiment would involve real murder, which would be carrying things rather far. So they had tried to duplicate reality without actually achieving it. They had tried it with rubber daggers—but rubber daggers would hardly feel real to anyone, let alone to a person in hypnosis when, many think, perceptions are heightened. They had tried it with real daggers, but the “victim” behind a barrier of “invisible” glass. But—was the glass really invisible? They had tried it with guns loaded with blanks. But—did the operator unconsciously reveal to the subject that the gun held only blanks?

Under these simulated conditions, some subjects apparently tried to kill. Most authorities doubted that, with actual killing possible, any subject would murder—unless, presumably, he had murder already in his mind.

“So?”

“Suppose,” Pam said, “this Mr. Hunter, under posthypnotic suggestion, broke a valuable clock because Jamey had told him the clock wasn’t any longer valuable. Was worthless.”

“All right,” Jerry said. “Supposed.”

“Suppose Jamey did know that he—he was going to die. That he—he wasn’t any longer valuable. To himself. That for somebody to kill him would be—what’s the long word?”

“Euthanasia. No, I doubt it, Pam. And—it would have been a dirty trick. Jamey didn’t play dirty tricks.”

“Oh,” Pam said, “he’d leave a record of some sort, exonerating whoever did it. Because—that would be the point, wouldn’t it? Of the final experiment? To prove that, under certain circumstances—very special circumstances—a person who had been hypnotized could be told to kill?”

Jerry doubted several things—one, that any explanation Jamey might leave behind would, legally, exonerate the person who killed him. Two—that anyone, most of all Jameson Elwell, would think the point important enough for so drastic a proof. Three—that it would have worked anyway.

“‘Hold then my sword and turn away thy face,

  ‘While I do run upon it. Wilt thou, Strato?’

and Strato did, as I remember it.”

“But before that somebody—I forget who—had said, ‘Not on your life.’ Said—wait a minute—‘That’s not an office for a friend, my lord.’” Jerry spoke with some triumph.

“It could be,” Pam said, “that Strato was the better friend, my lord. My God—I’m beginning to talk like Shakespeare.”

Blank verse, Jerry told her, is infectious. It happens even to writers of prose—unwary writers of prose.

“All right, Pam said. “What I said can still be true. And—the more somebody loved Jamey, the more likely he would be to—to do what Jamey wanted. Save him from—from long pain. Pain without hope.”

“I doubt—” Jerry said, and stopped. “All right,” he said. “I still don’t believe it. I’ll admit—” He stopped again. “Damn,” Jerry said, in a tone aggrieved. “He would have left a statement,” he said.

“Of course. In his files. Or—Jerry. Perhaps he made it orally—on the tape recorder and—and somebody wiped it off! Or whatever you do to a tape.”

“You can,” Jerry said, “think of the damnedest things.” He said if not without admiration. He ground out his cigarette and at once lighted a fresh one, having, it occurred to him, thought of a damnedest thing himself.

“Suppose this,” he said. “Suppose somebody—anybody you like; this man Hunter for example—killed Elwell, just in the ordinary course of events. And—”

“Jerry!” Pam said. “The ordinary course—”

“Ssh,” Jerry said. “You’ve had your supposes. This man doesn’t want to be caught. But—suppose he is. With overpowering evidence against him. He says it certainly looks bad but he doesn’t remember anything about it. And then—‘If I did it, it was because he’d hypnotized me and made me do it, and I can prove that he did hypnotize me often and once made me break a clock.’ I don’t know whether it would get him off entirely, but if he could make it stick it would be—well, an extenuating circumstance, at the least.”

He looked at Pam, who nodded, who said, “That’s a very good suppose, dear,” but seemed to be thinking of something else—something that smudged the clarity of her mobile face. He waited.

“Faith Oldham loved him,” Pam said, slowly. “We both felt that—as a girl might love a father. A very good father—a wise father. I think she might have done almost anything he asked, feeling he knew best. And—I wonder if he ever hypnotized her, Jerry? And if—”

Her clear voice faltered a little.

“I hope it isn’t that way,” Pam North said. “Will you get me a phenobarbital, Jerry?”

Bill Weigand got to his office at a little before nine Thursday morning. Sergeant Mullins had been there earlier; Sergeant Mullins had been active, on two fronts.

Precinct detectives, who had been active even earlier, had got the name of a doctor from Professor Elwell’s address book. Mullins, by telephone, had run the doctor to earth—specifically, to his hospital rounds. Yes, he had been consulted by Professor Elwell from time to time, over a period of years. If they wanted more than that—how did the doctor know Mullins was who he said he was? If he was, didn’t the police know that doctors do not talk about patients?

Mullins himself was patient, tactful. Professor Elwell was dead. So the point of secrecy was hardly relevant. He had been shot to death, so the previous condition of his health had nothing to do with the end of his life. So—

“Doctors are stuffy,” Mullins told Bill Weigand. “Wasted ten minutes getting around to it. No, he didn’t know Elwell had anything seriously wrong with him. Matter of fact, he hadn’t seen Elwell for some three years and then it was about nothing much, and Elwell seemed O.K.”

“What was it then?”

Not that it mattered.

“Cat bit him,” Mullins said. “You fool around with cats—Minor infection. Doc treated it.”

It didn’t matter.

“People ought to leave cats alone,” Mullins said. “Speaking of which—did you know Jerry North published the professor’s last book?”

“Yes,” Bill said and to that, after a considerable pause, Mullins said, “Oh,” in a certain way. “Not,” he added, “that they’re not nice people, Loot. Only—”

“This doctor wouldn’t know whether Elwell had been to see another man?”

“No. I asked him. He said he doubted it, but it was up to anybody what doctor he went to.”

Mullins had read from the preliminary autopsy report—read words over which he had stumbled slightly. Would Elwell necessarily have known that he was ill, or how ill he was? Not necessarily; in fact, probably not. In another few months—

“The accident?”

“Somebody,” Mullins said, “ought to do something about the Merritt Parkway.”

It was a statement with which Bill Weigand did not disagree. But it was not clear that, in the violent death of Elizabeth Elwell, twenty-four years and two months old when her life ended during the early morning of April twenty-sixth, the inadequacies of the Merritt had been much involved.

A Jaguar, being driven toward New York at around eighty, had gone out of control, crossed the center strip, crashed into a sedan headed east. A man and a woman, driving home to Norwalk after the theater in New York, and an after-theater supper, had been killed in the sedan. Elizabeth Elwell had been killed in the Jaguar—more exactly, had been killed as she was thrown from it to unrelenting pavement. Her fiancé, one Rosco Finch, in the Jaguar beside her, had been only slightly injured.

Finch and the girl had been driving back to New York after a party in Westport.

“Finch drunk?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mullins said. “Finch wasn’t driving. The girl was driving. She had a few drinks but not enough to make her drunk. If she had normal resistance. Concentration in the blood”—Mullins consulted notes—“a little less than a tenth of a per cent. Just lost control.”

It had not been on a curve, but on a straightaway. It had, however, happened just as the Jaguar came over the top of a Merritt Parkway hill. Something might, of course, have showed up ahead—a car moving slowly in the fast lane, for example. The Jaguar’s brakes had gone on just before it left the pavement and ploughed into the grass of the center strip. Finch didn’t remember seeing anything, but he wasn’t watching the road with much attention. In fact, he thought he had been dozing.

“Her car?”

It had been Finch’s car.

“But she was driving?”

“That’s what he says.” Mullins looked at Bill Weigand and raised his eyebrows.

“Nothing,” Bill said. “Oh, it’s usually the passenger who gets thrown out. But not always.”

“He was, apparently,” Mullins said. “First. Landed on the grass. It was soft, the way it is in spring. You think it ties in?”

It didn’t seem to.

They drove from Twentieth Street north to Forty-fourth, and across to the Harvard Club. Mr. Foster Elwell was waiting for them in the lounge. The lounge had an unawakened air.

Foster Elwell was a big man; an athlete who had softened with the years. There had, obviously, been a good many years—at a guess, Foster Elwell was several years older than his brother had been. He had a ruddy face and, probably, a blood pressure. He got out of a deep chair with the quickness of a man who rejected physical defeat. (Which conceivably, Bill thought, was not too good for him.)

He looked from Bill to Mullins and back to Bill, and his eyes questioned.

“No,” Bill said. “We don’t know yet, Mr. Elwell.”

“It’s a knockout,” Foster Elwell said. “I don’t mind telling you it’s a knockout. A thing like this. To happen to Jamey.” He shook his head. “Jamey,” he repeated. “Of all the people in the world.”

Which was almost always said; which was almost always poignant, as it was now. Somebody else—somebody far away—somebody read about in the newspapers. Such distant things could be believed.

“Any way I can help. Any damn way at all,” Foster Elwell said. “Get my hands on the son of a bitch who’d do a thing like that.”

“We’ll get him,” Bill promised, and hoped they would. They almost always did. Of course, there had been another Elwell and they hadn’t. Which was a coincidence without meaning. Which had better be.

“I’ll do anything I can,” Foster Elwell said. “I don’t know what it’ll be. My brother and I—we were close enough, but we didn’t see each other a lot. Know what I mean? Once a month, maybe—once every six weeks. Last time was—” He thought. “Labor Day,” he said. “He came out to the place.”

He knew of no enemies his brother might have had, of no circumstance in his brother’s life which might have led to this. Everybody liked Jamey; he couldn’t imagine anybody not liking Jamey. And the things Jamey did for people—

“Right now,” he said, “my son Jimmy’s in college because—” He stopped, as if he had started something he preferred not to finish. “All right,” he said, “I’m retired. We’ve got just about enough to live on decently. I don’t say we wouldn’t have put Jimmy—he’s our youngest—through college somehow, but all the same—And he helped with Janet. She’s married now. Fine young man but they’re out in Scranton and—”

He stopped.

“Getting along,” he said. “Have to expect it, I suppose. Fact is, this whole thing’s got me—fuzzy. Having a cocktail, Grace and I were, just like any evening and the telephone rings and—I tell you, captain, it’s a knockout. I know I sound like a meandering old fool. But—”

It was natural, Bill said, and that Elwell was not meandering. And what Elwell said about his brother echoed what everybody said.

“He must,” Bill said, “have been a fine man.”

“The best.”

“He had a good deal of money?”

“Yes. Funny thing, isn’t it? Here he was, a professor—supposed not to know about things like that. And here I am—or was—a broker. Supposed to know a lot. And he starts with his part of what dad left us and everything he invested in—wow! And I start with the same amount and—well, there you are. Doesn’t make much sense, but there you are.”

“Do you happen to know how he left his money? We’ll check up on that, of course, but if you happen to know?”

“Yes,” Elwell said. “Told me that last time I saw him. Split four ways—my kids, there’s Foster and Jimmy and Janet, and this daughter of his old friend. Girl named—” He hesitated.

“Faith Oldham?”

“That’s it. Faith Oldham. All to the younger generation. A great believer in the younger generation. Always doing something to help kids. And now some son of a bitch—”

It was evident, then, that something had occurred to the big man.

“Hey,” he said, and leaned forward in his chair. “What the hell’re you getting at? About how he left his money? Sounds to me as if you—”

Bill shook his head.

“Not getting at anything,” Bill said. “One of the things we always have to find out about. You can understand that, Mr. Elwell. A routine thing.”

“Better be,” Elwell said, but then leaned back. “Sure,” he said. “I realize you have to ask about it.”

About those who stand to profit, directly or indirectly. It was as good a time as any other, and Foster Elwell wouldn’t like it. Foster Elwell didn’t like it; said, “Now what the hell business is that—” and stopped. He said, O.K., he hadn’t spent all the previous day in Westport. He had driven in to New York to have lunch with a friend—“on business, I’ve still got a little business”—and back after lunch. He had lunched in midtown; he was not sure what time he had started to drive back, but it must have been around three, because he had got home between four-thirty and five. It had been about five-thirty, or a little later, that the telephone had rung, and it had been the city police to tell him. And if Weigand wanted to check up on him, he could ask the man he had lunched with and the man was—

Mullins jotted down the name of the man, as he had jotted down a number of things.

“Mr. Elwell,” Bill said, “did you know your brother was a sick man? A very sich man?”

Elwell shook his head. He said, “How sick?”

“He would have lived six months,” Bill said. “Perhaps a year.”

Elwell said, “Jesus,” and then, “What a lousy break.” And then, “I suppose it showed up in the autopsy?”

“Right,” Bill said. “You didn’t know about it? He never said anything about it?”

“No,” Foster Elwell said, and spoke in a dull voice. “Last time I saw him, he looked fine. Said he felt fine. And all the time—” He shook his head and there was uneasiness in his face, the shadow of fear. You get along and it comes closer; each new example brings it closer still.

“Did he know about it?” Foster said, and Bill Weigand said that Professor Elwell might have known and might not have known; that the assistant medical examiner said there might, as yet, have been no symptoms.

“Maybe he was lucky,” Elwell said. “Maybe it was a break, in a way. But—it hasn’t anything to do with what happened, has it?”

“Not that I can see,” Bill said. “Except the obvious—if whoever killed him had known how short a time he had to live the killer might have waited. But that’s only a guess, of course.”

The big man nodded slowly, as one does to note the obvious. There was a considerable pause and, since Bill thought Foster Elwell might be about to speak, Bill did not break it.

“Look,” Elwell said, “I said that as far as I knew everybody liked Jamey. That I couldn’t imagine anyone not liking him.”

“Yes,” Bill said.

“There’s one man who maybe didn’t like him much,” Elwell said. “You know about Liz?”

“His daughter? Yes. Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth,” Elwell said. “Everybody called her Liz. My time they’d have called her Beth, maybe Betty. Nobody thought Liz was pretty enough. Shows how we—” He brought himself back; shook his head dolefully at this new evidence of his tendency to meander. “This man she was going to marry,” he said. “Rosco Finch. Hell of a name, ain’t it? Says he wasn’t driving when it happened. Jamey thought he was. Matter of fact, Jamey’s been trying to prove he was. Hired some detective fellows.”

Bill said that that was interesting—damn interesting. And what had made Jameson Elwell think that?

“Maybe,” Jameson Elwell’s brother said, “mostly because he wanted to. He realized that himself. On the other hand, there are tricks about driving a Jag. Person who’s used to—oh, say a Buick. A Cadillac—has to learn the tricks. As far as Jamey knew, Liz hadn’t learned them.”

“But,” Bill said, “would he know?”

There was that. Jameson Elwell had realized there was that. On the other hand, he and his daughter had been good friends; usually, when something new interested her, she talked about it to him. And, she was interested in cars. And—she hadn’t talked about Jaguars.

It was, certainly, anything but conclusive. Foster Elwell realized that; his brother had realized that.

“Mostly, I guess,” Foster Elwell said, “it was just a hunch of Jamey’s. Partly because he didn’t want to think his daughter had killed two people, and herself, by being—irresponsible. But there was more than that—I’ll give Jamey that, and that he knew about the way minds work. His job, you know.”

Bill knew. He said, “Yes.”

“Ordinary person,” Elwell said, “tells you somebody else is a certain kind of person, and you say to yourself, ‘That’s just what he thinks.’ Know what I mean? Jamey said it and, damn it all, you believed him. At the bottom, I suppose, he was just sure that his daughter wouldn’t drink too much if she was going to drive, and wouldn’t drive too fast for conditions and wouldn’t lose her nerve. Tell you how he put it. He said she was ‘emotionally’ a good driver. And that drivers like that don’t go over the top of a hill at eighty, particularly at night.”

“Miss Elwell hadn’t been drinking,” Bill said. “At least, she had been, but not enough to matter. Unless she was particularly susceptible.”

“Not Liz,” Elwell said. “Show me one of them is, nowadays. I don’t say she ever drank much. But now and then—hell, now and then everybody has a few, if they’re normal. Liz never showed anything. Know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “But—it isn’t much to go on, Mr. Elwell. Your brother was fond of his daughter, probably. Didn’t like having to remember—well, that she was irresponsible. Had killed a couple of innocent people.”

“Sure,” Elwell said. “I said that. Also—he realized that himself. Wasn’t much he didn’t realize. Of course—the car was this fellow Finch’s. Mostly a man owns one of those jobs, he likes to drive it himself. Why he owns it, as much as anything. Also, he was driving when they left that evening, Jamey said. He looked down from upstairs and watched them drive off, and Finch was driving. Doesn’t prove anything about who drove later on. I’ll give you that. Look—I don’t suppose there’s anything to this. Only—put Finch on the spot a bit if Jamey was right, and could prove it. Wouldn’t it? Lose his license, for one thing.”

“More than that,” Bill said. “Possibly more than that, anyway. Might be vehicular homicide, if it looked bad enough. Did Finch know your brother was having the thing investigated?”

“Hell,” Elwell said, “I don’t know, captain. If these detective fellows went around to Finch and began asking him questions, he’d know somebody was interested. Maybe they’d tell you who. I don’t know. Maybe—you say it might be homicide?”

“Vehicular,” Bill said. “Yes, they might be that rough on him. And certainly he would lose his driver’s license for a long time. You happen to know what he does for a living? I mean, if he’s a salesman, travels by car—”

“He’s a golf pro,” Elwell said. “Fairly big time. Don’t you play golf, captain?”

“No.”

“If you did, you’d have heard of Finch,” Elwell told him. “Tournament player. Won quite a few. I suppose he drives from tournament to tournament. Most of them do. Be a bit of a problem if he couldn’t use a car, I suppose. So if he thought Jamey—but hell, you get what I’m driving at. Long way ahead of me, probably.”

Bill was at least up with him. It was tenuous. It was also interesting. Did Elwell know what firm of private detectives his brother had employed?

Elwell didn’t. Elwell had, Bill thought, told them all he did know—this subject to a detective’s reservations. (“A good detective is always more or less suspicious and very inquisitive.”—Manual of Procedure, Police Department of the City of New York.) Bill thanked Foster Elwell for his help, repeated expressions of sympathy, said they would get in touch with him if it appeared he might help further; left him in the lounge and went to a telephone booth. Mullins stood outside the partly open door of the booth.

Would precinct send a man to ask—Bill reached for Mullins’s proffered notebook and read a name from it—if he had lunched with Foster Elwell the day before, and, if he had, at what time he and Elwell had parted? And, how far had they got through the papers in Jameson Elwell’s office? Through, for example, his recent checkbooks?

They had. Was anything of interest? Did the name of any payee jump at them?

A few. Checks to Hunter, for example. Checks to one James Elwell. In both cases, these seemed to represent regular modest payments. “Like they were working for him,” the precinct man said. And one other payee had aroused some interest—Investigators, Inc. Bill knew? Pretty good size agency; supposed to be pretty much on the up and up.

Bill knew. The offices of Investigators, Inc., were in midtown. They might, Bill told Mullins, as well stop by there on their way elsewhere. “Sure,” Mullins said, “only if there was anything like that the State cops would of tumbled to it.” He paused. “You’d think,” he added. He considered further. “Only it would be sorta hard to check out,” he said.

Miles Flanagan of Investigators, Inc., said they would be glad to do anything they could that would help the police, as weren’t they always? As for example?

Bill gave him the example.

Flanagan pulled his lower lip over his upper, indicating judicial contemplation. He said, yes, he had read about the professor. He said that under the circumstances, without prejudice, because normally they didn’t give the names of clients—

“Come off it,” Bill Weigand said and Flanagan looked a little hurt, and said he was getting to it as fast as he could. But he did get there faster.

Professor Jameson Elwell had employed them to find out what they could about the accident—specifically, to unearth any evidence they could that Finch, not the girl, had been driving.

“Look,” Flanagan said, although Weigand had said nothing, “I told him it was cold—this was three-four months after it happened—and why had he waited so long? He said he realized it was late, and that I had an interesting psychological point about his delay—and I’ll be damned if he didn’t sound as if the point did interest him. I said we couldn’t promise anything, and he said he realized that. I said the chances were he was just throwing his money away—”

“I’m sure you were highly ethical,” Bill Weigand said. “So—you took the case. And, as you expected, it was cold and you didn’t get anything. Right?”

“For God’s sake, captain,” Flanagan said. “You’re in the business. You know how the cookie crumbles. If you think we didn’t work on it—but hell. The girl dead. The people they ran into dead. Nobody at the party they’d been at could remember which of them was driving. The girl got thrown out, but so did Finch.”

“You didn’t get anything?”

“Nothing to pin anything on. Finch had been drinking a good bit. The girl hadn’t. He thought pretty well of himself as a driver and he hadn’t had the Jag long. Sort of a new toy, which makes you wonder. But he says—”

“You did go to him?”

“Look,” Flanagan said. “I told you we worked on it. The professor didn’t say anything about not going to Finch. Sure we went to him.”

“As insurance investigators, I suppose?”

“Well—” Flanagan said. “It could be he thought that. Only—the insurance boys had already been around. Nothing we could do about that. So, it could be he thought somebody else was nosing around about it. Since he seems to be a pretty bright boy. You play golf, captain?”

“No.”

“Ought to. It’s a great game.”

“I’m sure,” Bill said. “He said it was the girl driving, of course?”

“Sure. Said just before they started out he decided maybe he’d had one more than he needed and asked her if she’d take over. If you drink, don’t drive. All very—law abiding. Says he was half asleep when it happened and doesn’t know how it happened, except maybe she dozed off too. Says she was a good driver, but not used to a Jag, and maybe that was it. Says he plain doesn’t know. Acts all broken up about it. I’ll give him that.”

“Or—scared?”

Flanagan pulled his lower lip again over his upper lip.

“Have it your own way, captain,” he said. “Oh—I read you. Have it your own way.”

“You reported this to the professor?”

“Sure—he was paying us. I said we were sorry and advised him not to waste any more money. Told him I didn’t think we’d ever get anything that would stand up. And—”

He paused.

“That’s all,” he said.

“Except one thing,” Bill said. “You were on this yourself?” Flanagan nodded. “You’ve been around,” Bill said. “What did you think yourself?”

“Off the record?”

“Off the record.”

“Because I wouldn’t want to slander anybody.”

“Because you wouldn’t want to slander anybody.”

“O.K.,” Flanagan said. “I think he was lying like hell, captain. I think he was driving and had had one too many and—well, could be he dozed off. And when he found out the girl was dead and he wasn’t, and that nothing could hurt her more than she was hurt—well. You can see what he might have done, can’t you?”

“Yes,” Bill said.

“Without liking it,” Flanagan said. “I don’t say it makes him the All-American boy.”

“No,” Bill said. “You didn’t tell him who was hiring you?” Flanagan looked hurt, and shook his head. “But he might have guessed?”

“Now how the hell would I know about that?” Flanagan said. He looked at Bill Weigand. He had surprisingly shrewd eyes. “I said he seems pretty bright,” Flanagan said. “Quite a bright boy, I’d say he is.” He paused again. “Might annoy him, mightn’t it?” he said. “Having his word doubted and all that?”