“Oh, no, it can wait until you’ve finished with them. I was looking for Mr. Kester. If the rest of you can spare him—”
Fuller put in caustically, “It seems to me, Mr. Fox, that you have your hands full right now, in view of your admission regarding the weapon found in the library.”
“It wasn’t an admission, Mr. Fuller. They proved it and confronted me with it. I am confined to this house and will be arrested as a material witness if I try to leave it. Sure my hands are full. Among other things, Mrs. Pemberton has engaged me to investigate the two murders. Is that correct, Mrs. Pemberton?”
Miranda, looking at him, allowed her head to move barely perceptibly, down and up.
“That’s correct, isn’t it?” he insisted.
“Yes,” she said, loud enough to carry six feet.
Fuller demanded, “You’re acting for Grant, aren’t you?”
“I am. That’s all right, I’m licensed. If I betray the interest of one employer to the advantage of another, they can take my license away and put me in jail — Mr. Kester, will you take me somewhere for a talk? I need to ask you some things that I would have asked long ago if someone hadn’t shot Mr. Thorpe with my gun.”
Kester looked at Miranda. She nodded. Kester said, “All right, as soon as I’m through here.”
Fox shook his head. “I’m sorry, but it’s urgent. It gets more urgent every minute.”
Fuller said emphatically, “I strongly advise you, Mrs. Pemberton, and you too, Kester, to use the utmost discretion in choosing—”
“Excuse me.” Fox’s eyes were into Miranda’s again. “I say it’s urgent. More so even than finishing my talk with you. If a bomb’s going to explode, don’t you think it would be better to light the fuse ourselves?”
She said, “Will you, Vaughn? Please?”
“Now?”
“Please.”
Kester got up, told Fox, “We’ll go up to my room,” and led him off.
If was Fox’s first trip upstairs. The upper corridor was broad and softly carpeted, and paneled in wood. The room into which Kester ushered him, a spacious chamber trying to look cool in white rugs and chair covers and counterpanes, was like an oven, with the late afternoon sun mercilessly glaring in. Evidently the household routine, which must have included drawn shades on the west side after lunch, had been disrupted by events. Kester lowered awnings, removed his coat and tossed it on a bed, and pulled a chair around to face the one Fox had taken.
“When,” he demanded, “did Mrs. Pemberton engage you to investigate this?”
“Outdoors a while ago.” Fox got up to remove his coat too, and sat again. “We have a lot of ground to cover, Mr. Kester, and we’ll have to cut corners and move fast. Are you on their list of suspects, or have you an alibi?”
“I have no alibi.” It was astonishing how chilly the secretary’s eyes could look in that furnace of a room. “Colonel Brissenden’s interview with Mr. Thorpe had just ended, and I had escorted him from the library and turned him over to Bellows to let him out the back way, the shortest way to his car. At the moment I heard the shot I was in the conservatory, on my way to get Mr. McElroy and the others, thinking they were on the front terrace. The sound of the shot paralyzed me. I am not a man of action. Then I started to run back to the library, and caught my foot in the rug in the hall and fell. I scrambled up and went on. Mr. Thorpe was there on the floor, on his face, and as I stood there staring at him a second, unable to move, there was a convulsive twitch to his legs and then he was still. My next action was to pay you a compliment.”
“Thank you very much. What was it?”
“I yelled for you. I yelled your name several times.” The twist on the secretary’s lips was presumably a smile. “I suppose I had been impressed by your handling of the job you had done for Mr. Thorpe.”
“We were pretty lucky on that. What direction did the sound come from? I mean the shot.”
“I don’t know. Of course I’ve reflected on it and have been questioned. I can’t say.”
“Did it sound as if it were fired in the open or in a confined space? Outdoors or in the house?”
“I can’t say that either. I’ve never heard a shot fired in a house. It sounded loud and close by.”
“Was there any smoke in the side hall? Or a sour smell? You know the smell.”
“I didn’t notice any. Colonel Brissenden says that the position of the body indicates that the shot was fired from the direction of the French windows.”
“Maybe and maybe not. He might have done a spin after it hit him. Who got there first after you?”
“Grant did. Then Bellows, and after him Brissenden. Then one of the gardeners came in through the French windows and Henry Jordan was right behind him. After that I don’t know, they came in a rush from all directions.”
“Was that blue scarf there on the floor when you first entered?”
“I don’t know when I saw it first. I didn’t even see the gun until I saw Grant looking at it and Brissenden telling him not to touch it— Speaking of guns, I’d like to ask a question.”
Fox nodded at the colorless eyes that looked as if nothing would ever make them blink. “Go ahead.”
“Who told you that the gun that killed Arnold was found in the library safe?”
“Derwin.”
“It’s incredible. Absolutely incredible. Do you suppose there’s any chance that he planted it there?”
“No. None of them. They found it there all right. Who has the combination of the safe?”
“Mr. Thorpe and I, and that’s all. That’s why I say it’s incredible. I haven’t opened it for over a week until this morning, to get the checkbook. I know I didn’t put that gun in there and to suppose that Mr. Thorpe did...”
“He must have.”
“He couldn’t have. Where did he get it?”
“I don’t know. According to Derwin and Brissenden, I got it and gave it to him, and that’s what he paid me that check for. They call it a strong inference, which shows how careful you have to be with inferences. Nothing would be easier, for instance, than to build up a strong inference that it was you who killed both Thorpe and Arnold. Sunday night you sneaked out of the Green Meadow Club, drove to the bungalow, fired through the window and were back at the clubhouse in bed by the time the police phoned to notify you. Your motive was obvious. You knew that Thorpe Control would drop forty points or more at the news of Thorpe’s death and jump back up again at the news he was alive. If you could swing a buy of, say ten thousand shares, that would make a profit of four hundred thousand dollars. Not bad at all. That’s why you didn’t make an effective search for Thorpe on Jordan’s boat Monday morning, to allow time for the market—”
Kester’s expression had exhibited no change whatever, but he interrupted indignantly: “He wasn’t on Jordan’s boat! I went straight to the cottage where he was!”
“Sure.” Fox nodded. “I know that, but the police don’t. I’m building up an inference for them. But even for me that doesn’t weaken it any. You went straight to Thorpe and stayed right with him, to make sure he wouldn’t disclose himself too soon. You were sure he wouldn’t anyway, knowing as you did how devoted he was to his reputation.”
Kester’s lips were twisted again for their substitute for a smile. “And then,” he said sarcastically, “I carried the gun around in my pocket for two days and put it away in Mr. Thorpe’s safe.”
“Oh, no. That would have been dumb. Somehow — this is a detail to be cleared up — Thorpe got hold of the gun and knew it was yours, and threatened to turn you over to the police. We have to have it that way to give you a motive for killing Thorpe. When you returned to the library after turning Brissenden over to Bellows, you stepped outside the French windows, fired from there, entered the house by the side hall, fell down to pretend you had tripped on the rug if any one appeared at that moment, got up and reentered the library, and yelled for me. As it happened, you see, your yelling for me wasn’t a compliment at all, it was an insult. I resent it!”