“I killed them. I killed them all.” His voice shook and he covered his face with brown-spotted hands.
Trewin waited, sensing that whatever this man’s connection with Eve’s death had been, there was no doubt that he believed his guilt to be real. Trewin sensed too, within himself, the spark of an idea, a hope that maybe after the months of anguish and loss over Eve’s death, there was something — he didn’t yet know what — he could do about it.
“I was a building inspector for the city,” Brennan said. “My job was to check on the safety of new construction. The Sports Arena was one of my assignments. I want to explain that I wasn’t some incompetent hack filling a job the clubhouse had found for him. I’m a trained engineer and when I took the city job I’d had years of experience in designing steel-frame buildings.
The arena had been designed by a reliable engineering firm I had worked for in my early days. The roof design involved space-frame trusses, a kind of latticework arrangement of steel that would distribute weight in all directions.”
“I know something about them,” Trewin said.
“When the roof was finished, I knew it wasn’t right. I went up there after a heavy rain and I found ponding. If construction isn’t carefully done, you get depressed areas in the roof and in a heavy rain the water doesn’t drain as it should — it just lies there like a pond and adds a burden of weight to the roof. It was out of the question that I should pass on the building until this condition was corrected. I discussed it at the office and somehow word got out that the arena wasn’t going to be approved.
“One day I arrived home to find a car parked in my driveway, a big expensive car. A man got out and walked back to meet me.
“ ‘I’m Sam Beasley,’ he said. ‘I’d like to talk to you.’
“He came around to the other side of my car and sat beside me in the front seat. I won’t go into everything he said, but the gist of it was that the arena roof had cost nine hundred and eighty thousand dollars to construct, and would cost another hundred and fifty thousand to correct. He laid an envelope on the seat between us and said it had fourteen thousand dollars in it. It was mine if I approved the building as it was.”
He stopped, took a pill box from his pocket, shook out two tablets, and washed them down, the water glass shaking in his hand.
“I can’t justify what I did. I took the money. I took it because that was what I had always done since I started to work for the city. I had to turn some of it over, but nevertheless I took it. I could have insisted that the roof be fixed and nobody would have opposed me, not publicly anyway. But I took the money. And seven young people died. Two thousand dollars each.
“That roof was designed for thirty pounds per square foot of live load. You remember that we had that heavy snow, a brief thaw, then a freeze followed by unusually heavy rain. So we had the snow load plus the weight of the ponded water, creating an unusual stress. The structural members might have held under either stress separately, but they couldn’t hold under both and the roof collapsed.”
“What is it you want from us?” Trewin asked.
“If the girl’s mother could come to see me, if I could try to convince her I didn’t mean harm to her daughter. I just went along with the system. I can’t die with this terrible guilt.”
Trewin thought for several minutes before he said, “No, she won’t be coming here. I’ll tell her what you told me, but she won’t be coming here.”
“Please, if you knew what it’s like, sitting here facing—”
“Mr. Brennan, there were seven young people killed in the collapse of that roof. Have the families of any of the others answered your letter?”
“No, none. People don’t understand the necessity for forgiveness.”
Brennan turned away and stared out into the dark which now waited on the other side of the window. Trewin stood and made his way through the hospital corridors toward the elevators, taking with him a new idea of death.
“I hired a detective agency to learn about Beasley’s movements,” Trewin told Rogers. “They tracked down somebody on Beasley’s secretarial staff. That’s how I found out about this trip the Beasleys were planning — and, as you see, I managed to get on the same tour.”
Van Alt pushed open the sliding door from the deck and followed Mrs. Murray into the lounge. Her reaction on seeing the group was pleasantly curious, as if instead of meeting the garden-club ladies she expected, their husbands had appeared. She sat down and placed before her the square of papyrus bearing the hieroglyphics Abdul had drawn.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said. “This looks like a summit conference. Although I brought this papyrus, as requested, I refuse to serve as recording secretary.”
“Mr. Trewin here has been telling us about his actions on the night of the murder,” Rogers began, “and we thought—”
“Has he indeed?”
“We thought you might be able to help us. But let’s have Mr. Trewin finish his story.”
“I was determined,” Trewin went on, “that Beasley should know he was going to die — and why. There would be no justice in Beasley going out and not knowing why. I also felt some justice in threatening him with those labels during the tour, especially when he was supposed to be enjoying himself.
“I had worked out a number of careful plans for killing him. But it was almost impossible to get him alone. I thought an opportunity might occur on our way to the sound-and-light show. I fell in beside him and said that since we were both involved in building we had a lot in common. This interested him and he indicated that I might not be the nonentity he had thought. We sat together during the performance and started to walk back together after it was over. I deliberately hung back so that the crowd would move on ahead of us. We were the last to leave the sound-and-light area and stopped on the forecourt steps to discuss the span lengths the Egyptians were able to get from limestone when we met Van Alt.”
Van Alt made a swift movement of his eyebrows, as if to say, “Now listen to this.”
“He said he could show us one of the longest still in place — twenty feet, he estimated, from column top to column top. I often wondered what those people could have built if they had had steel. And crooked building inspectors.
“As long as Van Alt was there, I wasn’t going to be able to do anything about Beasley, so I excused myself and went on ahead toward the boulevard. I left just in time because as I came out of the boulevard the lights in the temple area went out. I crossed the boulevard and sat in that cafe where the carriages are and ordered coffee. In about ten or fifteen minutes I saw Van Alt come out of the temple area and head down the boulevard toward the boat landing. He was carrying that.” He pointed to Hunter’s fly whisk. “It occurred to me that this was the opportunity I had been waiting for. I was about to cross the boulevard and reenter the temple area when I saw you” — he looked at Hunter — “come out of the area. A tourist carriage turned into the avenue of the sphinxes. I waited until it had turned the comer at the forecourt steps and gone out of sight. I was sure the place was now deserted, that nobody but Beasley remained behind, and I went in to find — and to kill — Beasley.
“In the moonlight everything was either brightly lit or in deep shadow. As I walked along the avenue with all those statues looking down at me, I thought of the thousands of moonlit nights that had passed over this place since it had been built. I wondered if others before me had entered the sacred premises with murder in their hearts.
“If you think, after all I’ve said, that I killed Beasley, you’re wrong. When I reached the steps of the forecourt, I saw him. He was lying at the foot of the obelisk, between it and the remains of a wall. Somebody had already done what I came to do.”