The detective looked over his notes and made a brief addition. When he resumed, it was with a definite objective. “Did you see any conflict between Fine and Tarn?” he asked.
“As I said, he tried to keep Tarn from coming in and he restrained him from pulling off the tablecloth.”
Horn waited.
“I suppose,” Denver continued, “that you are referring to what he said about his wife?”
“That’s it. What did you hear?”
“Others were closer than I was. What I heard from halfway across the room was Fine saying, ‘Keep your hands off my wife.’ ”
“Were those his exact words?”
“Yes.”
“But that didn’t break up the party?”
“No. It continued for more than an hour after that with Tarn clowning around as before.”
“You were the last to leave the party. Any special reason?”
“When the other guests began to leave, Fine asked me to stay until he got rid of Sam and Dolly Tarn.”
“Did he say why he picked you?”
“He didn’t have to. I’m young and athletic. Most of the rest of the guests were middle-aged and sedentary. Dr. Bell must be in his late sixties. Also, some of the others were friends of Sam Tarn.”
“Did you have any trouble getting rid of him?”
“Not real trouble. Sam was still rarin’ to go. As Thackeray put it:
No, he and Dolly didn’t want to leave, but Fine told them to go, that he and I had things to talk over.”
“Did you?”
“We talked for a while about the way Tarn changed the whole tenor of the party. Fine promised that sometime we would pick up the discussion where it had been interrupted.”
“Thank you, Professor Styx. You have been most helpful. You may go now.”
The detective rose and shook hands. Denver paused before leaving. “Do I gather that you suspect Fine of murdering Sam Tarn?”
“I would if he didn’t have an alibi. He seems to be the only person with a reason for killing Tarn. Everyone else liked him.”
“Yes, he had a way with him.”
Some events, even important or delightful events, pass quickly from our consciousness. Other events, even trivial ones, prey on our minds. We turn from them to other things. Then, during a lull in activity, we find we are thinking about them. Thus it was that two hours after his interview with Lieutenant Horn, Denver laid aside a text on humanism in the fourteenth century and found his mind pondering his half hour of questioning.
It wasn’t worry that brought the matter to his mind. He and his friends, the Fines, seemed in the clear. But the question remained: Who would kill such a hail-fellow well met as Sam Tarn — and why? He reached for the morning paper to study its account of the murder with some care. It read:
Sam and Dolly Tarn were returning to their suburban home at three o’clock last night when they were approached by a man wearing a ski mask. Mrs. Tarn had just unlocked the door when she turned and saw him emerge from the shrubbery. She screamed and ran into the house. She heard a scuffle and shots. She called the police and shouted for help. The man fled on foot, leaving Mr. Tarn bleeding on his own doorstep. Police rushed him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead of multiple gunshot wounds in the chest. Police are seeking a male Caucasian of average height and weight. They have no suspects but are questioning neighbors and friends of the dead man and are following up several leads.
Denver recalled the Tarn home, a house surrounded by bushes, several of them eight feet tall. Neighboring houses were evenly spaced three hundred feet from it.
The same pattern held for other houses in the block. It would be easy for someone to sneak up unobserved. Only the people directly across the street could have seen anything. At three in the morning, they were probably asleep.
Police had found no sign that the man had tried to break in. Their theory was that he had planned all along to kill Sam Tarn and was waiting for them. Denver agreed. And that meant that the killer was someone who knew Sam Tarn’s habits very well indeed.
Denver decided that he wanted a firsthand account of the events. A condolence call on Dolly Tarn seemed the best way to proceed. He put aside his work and started out.
Their place was within walking distance and friends’ cars would doubtless be cluttering up the street, so he decided to go on foot. That way he could get a better idea of the murderer’s possible escape route.
As he walked, his mind reviewed what he knew about the couple. Sam Tarn was a stockbroker, extremely wealthy and popular. Genial and handsome, he seemed the average man’s image of a successful young tycoon and the average woman’s image of a rich and dashing Prince Charming. He drove a Mercedes and Dolly drove a Volvo. They bought new care every two years. Sam made money easily and spent it freely. His better half helped him spend.
Dolly was a roly-poly woman with wonderfully round face, breasts, and hips. In another ten or fifteen years she would be fat, but now she was cute and cuddly, very cuddly. The middle-aged couples who formed the Tarns’ inner circle found them both irresistible.
Denver had liked them, but had limited contact with either; he was not a middle-aged millionaire.
When he reached their block, he found the area jammed with automobiles, as he had expected. He tried to picture the place at three in the morning. The newspaper account said the murderer had escaped on foot. No sensible person would go through this wealthy suburban neighborhood on foot very far. He would be much too conspicuous. Even in broad daylight, Denver felt out of place walking. In places like this, one’s feet only took one from garage to front door and back again. Where the garage was part of the house, there wasn’t even that exercise.
So the killer either lived nearby or had a car parked at no great distance.
As he turned into the path leading to the house, a small mob of visitors poured out of the front door. He knew most of them and exchanged greetings and conventional expressions of outrage at the murder.
A few visitors had remained, and he was greeted at the door by the cultured and stately Mrs. King, wife of a bank vice president. “I’m so glad you came,” she said. “Poor Dolly needs all the support she can get.”
She led him into a reception room where the bereaved widow rushed up to him as if he were a long-absent relative instead of a casual acquaintance. He found himself giving support in a literal sense, for she threw her arms around him, buried her head on his collarbone, and burst into tears. He was disconcerted, but not displeased, to be holding in his arms an extremely attractive woman with whom he had only shaken hands before. He patted her shoulder tenderly and she responded by squeezing her arms even tighter around him and letting her weeping subside into great slow sobs. No one paid any attention. It appeared to be her usual way of responding to sympathy.
Denver looked down and addressed appropriate expressions of condolence toward a small ear which was wedged against his neck. She responded with several quivers and an attempt to control her sobbing. There was, however, no relaxation of her embrace, and Denver began to feel embarrassed. He looked about for help but found none. He made the mistake of patting her shoulder again and she snuggled even closer, a thing Denver would have thought impossible.