“Potassium bromide. If you’re a photographer you should know.”
“The hell it is. That stuff comes in large crystals. This is— Smell it.”
“I don’t think it has any odor,” Kimberly said.
“Well, this stuff does. Take a smell. And don’t get your nose too close to it. You might wish you hadn’t.”
Kimberly sniffed the bottle gingerly, then turned puzzled eyes toward the detective. “Why,” he said, “that smells... smells like—”
“Exactly,” Nelson agreed. “It smells like potassium cyanide. It is potassium cyanide.”
Abruptly he put the bottle down, put the cork back in place, and said, “I don’t want anyone to touch that bottle. I’m going to process it for fingerprints. I left my fingerprints around the neck of the bottle, but I didn’t leave them on the rest of it. And now, Mr. Donald Kimberly, I’m sorry, but I’m arresting you for the murder of Stella Lynn. Hold out your wrists.”
In a taxicab headed toward Uncle Benedict’s, Peggy studied the purloined pictures, trying to penetrate the details of the shadows.
Don Kimberly’s arrest had been a terrific shock. The statement of Mrs. Bushnell had been like a devastating bomb.
Peggy had a blind faith in Don Kimberly, but she couldn’t combat his arrest except by digging up new and convincing evidence. The morning newspapers would sound the death knell of her new job unless something could be turned up. She hoped her uncle had been able to get some fingerprints from that broken whiskey bottle.
The beach scene, Peggy concluded, was a picnic, and apparently it had been a twosome — just Stella Lynn and the young man in the bathing suit who appeared in the pictures. He had taken a couple of pictures of Stella. The costume Stella was wearing would not have been permitted on a public beach, so these pictures must have been taken at a private part of the beach. Had they been taken before the others or afterward?
The series of small cabins, all uniform in appearance, suggested a motel, probably somewhere along the beach.
The cab slowed to a stop at Uncle Benedict’s. “Wait for me,” she told the driver, and ran up the steps.
Aunt Martha came to the door. “Heaven’s sake, Peggy, give a body a chance to get there. You rang three times while I was putting my knitting down. What’s the trouble?”
“Nothing. Where’s Uncle?”
“Right here. Come on in.”
Peggy walked over to the wheel chair and kissed Benedict on the forehead.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked.
“Nothing in particular but I wanted to see if you’d found out anything about that broken bottle and—”
“Damn it, Peggy,” he said irritably, “I’ve taught you to lie better than that.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Everything. Never run your words together when you’re lying. Sounds too much like reciting a formula. Never let a sucker feel he’s hearing a rehearsed line. When you’re lying you want to be thoroughly at ease — never have tension in your voice. Keep your sentences short. Don’t intersperse explanations with lies. That’s where the average liar falls down. He puts himself on the defensive in the middle of what should be the most convincing part of his lie.
“Now sit down and tell me what’s handed you such a jolt. Tell the truth, if you can. If you can’t, tell the kind of lie that’ll make me proud of you. Now, what’s up?”
Peggy said, “They arrested Don Kimberly for Stella’s murder.”
“What evidence?”
“That’s the tough part. They found a bottle of potassium cyanide among his photographic chemicals, right over the sink in his darkroom.”
Uncle Benedict threw back his grizzled head and laughed.
“It’s no laughing matter,” she said.
“Makes him out so damned stupid, that’s all. There he is with a whole darkroom. Got a sink and running water and everything, eh?”
“That’s right.”
“How many more people did they think he was aiming to kill with cyanide?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose he had killed her. He’s scored a bull’s-eye. That was all he wanted. He’d done the job. He’s got no more use for poison. He’d wash the rest of it down the drain. Nope, somebody’s planting evidence. Seems funny the cops didn’t think about that. Perhaps they have. Maybe they’re giving this person lots of rope for self-hanging purposes.”
Listening to him, she realized the logic of what he said, and suddenly felt much better. She spread the pictures out in front of him.
Uncle Benedict’s eyes lit up. “Good-looking babe,” he said, studying the pictures of Stella in the bathing suit. “Dam good-looking.”
Aunt Martha, fixing a pot of hot tea for Peggy, snorted, “You’d think he was a Don Juan to listen to him.”
“Casanova, Casanova,” Uncle Benedict corrected her irritably. “All right, what about these pictures, Peggy?”
“What can you tell me about them?”
He picked up the pictures and studied them. Then he said, “This is the motel where they stayed Saturday.”
“Who stayed there?”
“This girl in a bathing suit and the fellow who’s with her.”
“Uncle Benedict, you shouldn’t say things like that without knowing. You don’t know they stayed there, and you can’t know it was Saturday.”
“I don’t, eh?” he grinned. “It sticks out plain as the nose on your face. This picture with the beach in the background was taken Sunday morning. Same car here as in the other picture. Put two and two together.”
“You’re jumping at conclusions and not being very fair to Stella.”
“Not as bad as what the coroner did, broadcasting a girl’s secrets that way. Ought to be ashamed of himself. Two months’ pregnant, and he puts it in the paper!”
“He had to do that,” she said. “It’s part of the evidence. It shows the motivation for murder.”
“Uh-huh,” Uncle Benedict said.
“What makes you think it was Saturday noon in one picture and Sunday morning in the other?” she asked.
“Use your eyes,” he told her. “Here’s a motel. See all those garages with cars in them?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the sun?”
“What do you mean, where’s the sun?”
“Look at your shadows,” he said. “Here, hand me that ruler.”
She handed it to him. His arthritis-crippled hands moved the ruler over the photograph so that one end was against a patch of shadow, the other end against the top of an ornamental light pole. “All right, there’s the angle of your sun, good and high.”
“All right, so what?”
“Look at the automobiles in the garages. Most motel patrons are transients. They’re hitting the road. They want to come in at night, have a bath, sleep, get up early, be on their way.
“Now, look at this one. Automobiles in almost every garage, and from the angle of the sun it’s either three in the afternoon or nine in the morning. Look carefully, and you can see it’s morning because here’s a cabin with a key in a half-open door. The key has a big metal tag hanging from it so tenants won’t cart it off, and it’s caught the sunlight and reflected it right into the camera. That car got away early. If it had been afternoon the key would have been in the office instead of the door. Only one car is gone; most of the people using the motel aren’t traveling and that means it’s Sunday. The guests are weekenders, people who came Saturday to spend a weekend. Spend it where? Not in a motel, unless that motel’s at a beach.
“Now look at this other picture. Warm, sunny day. Hardly any surf. See that wharf out there? Lots of fishermen on it. Those are people who came early and—”
“I don’t see any wharf.”
“Take a good look,” he said.