“It seems impossible he could have got away without leaving a clearer trail,” he said.
“Who could have got away from what?” Hartman asked.
“The Bradford murderer.”
“Oh,” Hartman said.
“I’ve toyed with the idea that the man with the blue glasses wasn’t the murderer at all.”
“Oh?” Hartman tossed his cigarette stub out onto the water. He watched it bob up and down in the boat’s wake.
Doyle kept rowing steadily as he talked. “Suppose you were a friend of Nancy Bradford’s. You went upstairs and walked into that shambles. My impulse would be to get away — not to be involved.”
“But that couldn’t have been the way it was,” Hartman said.
Doyle stopped rowing, leaning forward on the oars. The boat continued to move slowly through the water. “Why not?”
“He spoke to her on the house phone,” Hartman said. He tapped the newspaper which lay on the seat beside him. “The doorman heard him say ‘Hello, darling. It’s me.’ He went right up. She must have been alive then, you see.”
“Maybe the man in the glasses was bluffing.”
Hartman shook his head. “If he was bluffing then he was involved anyway. No, it must have been that guy all right. Only the description of him just isn’t any use. He wouldn’t wear those blue glasses again. You can bank on that.”
Doyle nodded slowly. “I guess you’re right,” he said. He began rowing again.
“Those pine needles,” Hartman said, after a moment.
“What about ’em?”
“Well, he must have come from some place where he’d walked in pine needles. They stuck to his shoes — or maybe to the bottom of his trousers.” Hartman looked back across the lake toward pine forest behind the hotel. “Here, perhaps.”
Doyle laughed. “Pleasant idea! The Bradford murderer may have been around here all the time I’ve been vacationing.”
“It’s quite possible,” Hartman said. “There’s the brooch.”
Doyle stopped rowing. His grey eyes were fixed, unblinking, on Hartman’s pale face. It was odd that Hartman’s hair should be so bleached by the sun and yet his face was neither sunburned nor brown.
“What brooch?” Doyle asked.
“Why, Nancy Bradford’s brooch,” Hartman said. “It was found in a path in the woods here. Some local kid picked it up and turned it over to the cops.”
“They found it here?”
“That’s right. A day or two after the murder.”
“How do you know that?” Doyle’s voice was on a curious dead-level.
“Why... I guess I read it somewhere,” Hartman said.
“That’s funny. I thought I’d read everything about the case and I never saw anything about the brooch.”
Hartman moistened his lips. “Well, I must have read it somewhere,” he said. “I wouldn’t have any other way of knowing.”
“No,” Doyle said, slowly. “No, I suppose not.” He started rowing again, the rhythm a little slower than before. “If they found the brooch here you’d think the place would be swarming with detectives.”
Hartman’s smile was forced. “Maybe it is,” he said. “They wouldn’t necessarily come out in the open for fear of scaring off their man.”
“Yes,” Doyle said, “I suppose they would handle it that way. Since they have no way of identifying the man they’d just lie low till he made a mistake.”
“What kind of mistake?”
“I don’t know,” Doyle said. “Probably they don’t either. They’d just wait and hope.” He pulled on the right oar and headed the boat in toward the shore. “Good shady place over there,” he said, nodding toward a clump of willows whose branches spread shadow well over the water. When he had his bearings he started pulling on the oars again. He smiled. “You wouldn’t kid me, would you, Hartman? About being a radio writer?”
“Well, it’s a secret,” Hartman said, in a mock-confidential tone, “but I’m really a junior G-man.”
They both laughed.
Doyle pulled the boat into the shade of the willows. Then he shipped his oars and climbed to the bow of the boat. He lowered an anchor which was fastened to the boat by a heavy chain. Hartman looked over the side at a colony of water-bugs that flitted across the dark blue surface of the lake.
“Push that box of tackle forward and I’ll bait a line for you,” Doyle said.
There was a can of damp earth from which Doyle extracted worms. He fastened one to each hook on the two lines and handed one line to Hartman. They dropped the lines over the side and the little tan floats bobbed away from the side of the boat. Doyle hooked his line around one of the oarlocks and began filling his pipe.
“How would you go about it, Hartman, if you were a detective,” he asked.
Hartman shrugged. “There isn’t much to go on. The doorman’s description wouldn’t give you any particular physical type to look for.”
“Not much.”
“About all you’d have to go on from a physical side is that he is extremely strong. It was a man of considerable strength who beat those two into a pulp.”
Doyle held a match to the bowl of his pipe. “Not necessarily,” he said, after the pipe was going. “I believe it’s a medical fact that people who are worked into a homicidal rage often show evidence of strength far beyond their normal capacity. Something to do with the adrenalin glands.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Hartman said. He looked out across the water. “Say, looks like you had something.”
The float on Doyle’s line was ducking sharply below the surface. Doyle began to pull in the line. Rock bass don’t put up much of a fight. For a moment the silver scales of the fish gleamed in the sunlight and then Doyle hauled it aboard.
“There was a kind of savage cruelty involved in that beating,” Doyle said. “I think you could expect to see it crop up in the man in other directions.” When Hartman didn’t answer he glanced up. The blond man was staring at Doyle, who was holding the bass in one hand and wrenching at the hook in the fish’s mouth with the other.
“Stuck good,” Doyle said. He gave it another wrench and pulled it free, ripping out the side of the fish’s mouth with it. Then he took a short piece of bailing wire, jammed it through the fish’s gill and out through the mouth. He twisted the wire together so that the fish hung from a loop. He attached the other end of the wire to an oarlock and dropped the fish over the side so that it dragged in the water and would keep fresh there. There had been a kind of ruthless efficiency about it. He looked up and saw the repulsion in Hartman’s blue eyes.
“They don’t feel anything,” he said. “Cold blooded.” He rebaited his hook and dropped the line over the side. “You were saying you’d expect to see some evidences of a cruel streak in the man you’d be looking for — if you were a detective.”
“Yes,” Hartman said. “Yes — I think you could expect that.”
“Not a nice guy to find yourself with alone,” Doyle said.
“No... not nice at all.”
They fished in silence for a long time. The fish weren’t biting. Then Hartman glanced down the lake. The sky had taken on a peculiar copper hue. Doyle followed the direction of Hartman’s glance and whistled. “Looks like a thunder storm,” he said. “Maybe we better think about getting in. Those things get pretty bad out here on the lake.”
“Do you think we can make the hotel before it breaks?”
“We can try,” Doyle said. “Here, I’ll take in the lines and get things organized. You want to pull up the anchor and start rowing?”