Whitney blinked nervously. "It was the Judge's gun from the War. It was always kept there until—oh, God, I don't know what happened that day! But that's the gun"—he swallowed convulsively—"my brother used. Granddad brought it to me months later and asked if I wanted it back. I said yes because somehow that made it seem as if it had truly ended."
"Loaded?" Wells asked.
Whitney's eyes fell away from the chiefs cold stare. That was answer enough.
"World War Two issue, that would be a forty-five-caliber Colt M-nineteen-eleven-A-one." Wells absently moved the wad of tobacco in his cheek. "All right. So somebody took it sometime today." He scrawled in his notebook.
Max stood with his hands jammed into his pockets, his face thoughtful. "Miss Dora, you called Mr. and Mrs. Tarrant tonight and arranged for tomorrow's gathering here. And you must also have called the others."
Annie expected another outburst from Charlotte Tarrant. But the harried woman satisfied herself with a silent, vengeful look at Miss Dora.
"I did indeed. And that meeting shall occur as I have decreed." Miss Dora ignored Charlotte. "Why do you ask?"
"It would be very interesting to know," Max said slowly, "if that gun was taken after your phone calls."
Chief Wells's heavy head turned toward Max. "What do you have in mind, Darling?"
Max looked toward the piazza. "I'm not certain, Chief. It's just that the murderer may be getting scared—and that worries me."
Wells's jaw moved rhythmically. His huge hand dropped to the butt of the pistol holstered on his hip. His message was unmistakable. "You don't need to worry, Darling. I'll be here."
The St. George Inn was lovely, but it wasn't home. There was no pistachio ice cream in the freezer. The pantry lacked brownies laced with raspberry, and the supply of peanut butter cookies was dangerously low. Coffee, of course, they had in abundance, and the thermos had kept the Colombian decaf hot. But there was something terribly unsatisfactory about coffee unaccompanied by edibles.
"Want a cookie?" Annie asked. She hoped her guardian angel was dutifully posting a gold star because there were only
four peanut butter cookies left, and if Max took one now and so did she, that would leave only one for bedtime and one for breakfast and, as all peanut butter cookie lovers know, that would make a bummer out of breakfast.
"No thanks, sweetie. More coffee, though." Max held up his cup, but he never lifted his eyes from his papers.
Annie reached for a cookie. She was too cool, too disciplined to grab. Crunch. Pure pleasure. She looked up at the clock. Almost eleven. God, what a night. And she was still worried about pale, driven Harris Walker. At least he hadn't been arrested. Annie suspected Walker was free because he'd given the police permission to search his car and him. No gun turned up. So Wells told him to stay away from Tarrant House and left it at that. But, as Walker drove off, Annie knew he was looking back at the house.
There hadn't been, of course, any resolution to the break-in. The only certain fact was that the loaded gun was gone. Not a cheerful prospect.
And she didn't share Wells's conviction that all would be well so long as he was present.
She finished her cookie, then poured the coffee and bent over to kiss the tip of Max's ear. Surely it was time to quit work for the night.
"Oh, yeah," he said positively. But it was rather more of an automatic response than she had hoped for, and he kept right on writing on his legal pad.
Annie refreshed his mug and her own, then dropped onto the chaise longue. She yawned. "Maybe Wells is the murderer. You know, maybe the Judge caught him out in something and the chief slipped into Tarrant House that Saturday afternoon and shot the Judge and slipped right back out. Then Ross came in and maybe his mother had got there just before him and he walked in and she was holding the gun and—"
Max finished writing with a flourish, ripped off the top sheet, and leaned over the coffee table to hand it to her. "Here's what we need to find out."
She looked at Max's list.MAY 9, 1970
What was Whitney doing in the garage? He claims he didn't see anyone from the garage window, so why did he look puzzled when we talked about it this morning?
Why was Amanda upset? Who might know? Why was the Judge buying her a condo in Florida?
Did Charlotte know about Whitney's involvement with the woman a client was suing for divorce? Did she know about the Judge's decision to force Whitney out of the family firm? Did Charlotte and the Judge have a disagreement?
Why was Julia crying in the garden?
How upset was Milam about his father's assumptions in regard to the nature of his relationship with Joan Crandall?
Where was each person in the house at the critical time (approximately four o'clock)?
How could the Judge's study be approached?
What did Ross see?
The authorities described Amanda Tarrant's death as an accident, while believing it was suicide. Who was the last person to see her? What happened the day she died?
Miss Dora alibied herself when she said she saw Ross in the garden at the time of the shot. Was she telling the truth—about herself? Could she have been in the study? Ross wasn't here to say where he was.
No one could prove where Sybil was. Could she have decided she wanted not only Ross but their rightful place in Chastain? Did Sybil even then give a damn?
Annie took a bite from her peanut butter cookie. Either the sugar or the list produced a spurt of energy. With a flourish, she gave Max an admiring salute. "Right on, Sherlock." He had certainly winnowed through what they'd learned and come up with a succinct, to-the-point list of all the questions raised by their new knowledge.
Max accepted her tribute with an almost modest smile. "A good detective has to discard the irrelevant."
Was there a hint, just a hint, of complacency there? A suggestion that others (and we all knew who that would be) were bogged in minutiae, unable to ascertain what was meaningful?
Although Annie would never admit to competitive feelings with her live-in sleuth, she was just a tad irritated. Her eyes slitted. Grace Latham might expect to be treated like a dimwit by Colonel Primrose; Annie wasn't having any.
Grabbing her notebook, she wrote furiously. In a moment, she ripped out the sheet and thrust it toward him.
Max studied her conclusions, which were, she would have admitted had she been pressed, not organized well in terms of time and space, but they got to the damn point. After all, what really counted in murder? Motives, of course.
MOTIVES IN THE MURDER OF JUDGE TARRANT
Whitney—To prevent expulsion from the law firm. Does Whitney have the guts? Was it the cornered-animal syndrome? In re the torching of Charlotte's museum, was there some written evidence that could have convicted Whitney? What kind of threat would Courtney Kimball be? (Was the attack on her, no matter by whom, a desperate effort to maintain the facade of suicide—heart attack that had survived through the years?)
Charlotte—To protect Whitney. (If she knew about the Judge's plan to have the firm expel Whitney?) Actually, did she give that much of a damn about Whitney? Their marriage certainly didn't seem like a passionate one. What was it like twenty years ago? Beyond concern about Whitney, she apparently had no personal motive. And it was beyond belief that she would have torched her museum. Tarrant House and its occupants, past and present, were her only passion in life.