“And the deal in United Traffic?” asked the detective.
Mawson frowned a little. “It seems to me,” he observed slowly, “that you forget you are asking a lawyer for confidential information of his client.”
“I am,” the other agreed. “You may withhold it if you choose.”
“And not only that, but you are asking for information I do not happen to possess. My client instructed me to invest a certain amount in a certain stock, and I obeyed.”
“Have you the order — or a check or draft to cover it?”
At that the lawyer rose to his feet with a violent push of his chair. “Mr. Rankin, you are going too far,” he exclaimed angrily. “I have borne your insinuations—”
“You may refuse to answer whenever you choose,” was the tranquil reply.
“There is only one answer to an insult!”
“Then you do refuse?”
Their eyes met, and all at once Fraser Mawson was calm again. He resumed his seat. There was a new air about him as he did so — an air of resolve that seemed to have in it something of bravado; and it was reflected in his voice as he spoke:
“No. To both questions. You do not understand the nature of the relations between Colonel Phillips and myself. It has been ten years and more since he gave me any kind of an order in writing; that statement may be verified in a hundred ways. I had his power of attorney, and I myself drew all checks against his account in the National Park Bank — his personal account, of course, was separate. I handled all his business, speculations, investments, everything — directly, subject of course to his advice and instructions, which were always verbal. The United Traffic deal was handled the same as many others; he simply instructed me to take on a certain amount of that stock, and I did so; and when he finally told me to unload — I obeyed. That was last Wednesday. The loss was the figure I showed you yesterday in this book.”
The lawyer laid his hand on a loose-leaf volume, bound in leather and canvas, on the desk.
There was a moment’s silence.
“I see,” observed Rankin at length, slowly. “Carson trusted you implicitly, then.”
“He did.”
“And he has paid for it.”
There was no resentment, almost no feeling, in the smile with which the lawyer met this remark. And there was even a touch of indifferent condescension in his tone when he spoke after a moment:
“If you choose to think he has paid for it, Mr. Rankin, I shan’t argue about it. I am even willing to help you get the case a little clearer.”
He stopped, cleared his throat, and went on:
“What you are trying to do is to discover the murderer of Carson Phillips and bring him to justice. Very well. It is a difficult task. I know you have been successful in a few minor cases which interested you, but to speak frankly, Mr. Rankin, I’m afraid you’re in a little beyond your depth here. To get to the bottom of this will require something more than a curious dilettantism.
“Why do I say that? Look at the facts. Neither Fred nor Harry, according to your own statement, is to be considered. I will say in parenthesis that I agree with you. Leaving myself also out of it for the moment, you then have eliminated everyone who was present at the scene — and you are lost. The mystery is buried in a darkness which I think you would find impenetrable. Quite naturally you turn from that darkness to what you consider a ray of light. You suspect me.”
The lawyer paused to recover a sheet of paper that was being blown across the desk by the breeze from the open window, through which still came the sound of emory paper on steel as Harry Adams rubbed away at the golf clubs.
“Well?” said Rankin dryly.
“You suspect me,” the lawyer repeated. “But it seems to me your ray of light is obviously deceptive. Granting as a postulate that your suspicion is just, that I am in fact guilty, what then? As a motive you accuse me of embezzling half a million dollars. But granting that I did so, you can’t possibly prove it. What I have just said of the manner in which the Colonel and I transacted business has shown you that. There would be one hope left — if you could connect me with the actual deed. But you don’t even know how it was committed; all you know is that a poisoned needle was found in the Colonel’s abdomen; you have no idea how it got there, and no likelihood of finding out.”
The lawyer stopped abruptly, deliberately seeking the other’s eye. “And so,” he finished calmly, “admitting — which of course I do not admit — that I am the criminal, how the devil are you going to prove it?”
The detective returned his gaze without replying.
“By Jove, Mawson,” he said at length, “you’ve more nerve than I gave you credit for.” Suddenly his lips came together. “It won’t save you,” he added grimly and rose to his feet.
“Nerve? Merely logic.”
“Nor will logic save you.”
“I am not aware of being in danger.”
“We shall see.”
With that Rankin turned abruptly and left the room.
The question remained as before: “How the devil did he do it?”
Rankin pounded his brain with it for two hours.
Returning to the house, he encountered Harry Adams in the hall with a bag of golf clubs under his arm. The detective wanted to know where Fred was, and was answered by a voice from above on the stairway.
“Here, sir. Did you want me?”
“Yes. You two come with me to the library a moment.”
When they were inside, with the door closed, Rankin asked them to recount once more the incidents of the foursome on Saturday afternoon. Again they went over each detail, and back and over again, from the time they had driven off at the first tee until the Colonel’s second at the fifth, when all had ended in abrupt tragedy. Rankin bade them cudgel their brains for the minutest recollected fact, the slightest suspicious circumstance; every shot, every movement almost, of each member of the foursome was repeated, and considered — and it all came to nothing. They could recall no unusual action on the part of Fraser Mawson at any time; at the fifth hole he had taken four to get out of a bunker, just before the catastrophe, so all they could remember of him at that particular moment was a marked indulgence in profanity. He had not been near Colonel Phillips, then, just before the attack? As they remembered it, no.
Rankin at length falling into silence, the two young men began discussing the poisoned needle and the curious fact that it had entered the Colonel’s abdomen pointing upward; Harry appeared to hold some absurd theory in the matter and Fred undertook to explode it.
That done, they too became silent. Fred strolled across to a window. It was swinging open, and from the garden the hot summer breeze brought a mingling of heavy odors sifted through the sunshine. From somewhere in the rear of the grounds came the sound of a whirring engine, and a moment later an automobile rolled down the driveway — one of the men going to Brockville to meet the officer from Governor’s Island. Fred turned away from the window, moved across to the mantel and idly began to inspect an old portrait of some former Phillips that hung there; then his eye fell on the Colonel’s bag of golf clubs which Harry had set in a corner as he entered the room. Fred crossed to it and passed his hand back and forth over the shining irons. Mechanically he pulled out one of them and waggled it back and forth in front of him; and then, with a glance overhead and to either side to make sure of room, he swung the club far back of his head, raising on his toe, and brought it around with a mighty swing.
As he did so two things happened.
Canby Rankin leaped swiftly to his feet with an ejaculation of astonishment and triumph.