“Uh-uh; he’d have gotten away, if you hadn’t been on the job,” he told Ritter.  Then he picked up his own revolver and holstered it.  After a glance which assured him that Fred Dunmore was beyond any further action of any sort, he laid the square-butt Detective Special on the floor beside him.  “You did all right, Dave,” he said.  “Now, nobody’s going to have a chance to bamboozle a jury into acquitting him.”  He thought of his recent conversation with Humphrey Goode.  “You did just all right,” he repeated.

“So it was Fred, then,” he heard Varcek, behind him, say.  “Then he was lying about this evidence against Goode.”  The Czech came over and stood beside Rand, looking down at the body of his late brother-in-law.  “But why did he tell me that story, and why did he shoot at us when we were together?”

“Both for the same general reason.”  Rand explained about the two pistols and the planned double-killing.  “With both of us dead, you’d be the murderer, and I’d be a martyr to law-and-order, and he’d be in the clear.”

Varcek regarded the dead man with more distaste than surprise.  Evidently his experiences in Hitler’s Europe had left him with few illusions about the sanctity of human life or the extent of human perfidy.  Ritter holstered the Beretta and got out a cigarette.

“I hope you didn’t leave your lighter upstairs,” he told Rand.

Rand produced and snapped it, holding the flame out to his assistant.  “Dave,” he lectured, “the Perfect Butler always has a lighter in good working order; lighting up the mawster is part of his duties.  Remember that, the next time you have a buttling job.”

Ritter leaned forward for the light.  “Dunmore was a better shot with his right hand than he was with his left,” he commented.  “He didn’t come within a yard of me, and he scored a twelve-o’clock center on you.  Right through the necktie.”

Rand glanced down.  Then he burst into a roar of obscene blasphemy.

“Seven dollars and fifty cents I paid for that tie, not three weeks ago,” he concluded.  “Does your grandmother make patchwork quilts?  If she does, she can have it.”

“My God!” Varcek stared at Rand unbelievingly.  “Why, he hit you!  You’re wounded!”

“Only in the necktie,” Rand reassured him.  “I have a hole in my shirt, too.”  He reached under the latter garment and rummaged, as though to evict a small trespasser.  When he brought out his hand, he was holding a battered .25-caliber bullet.  He held it out to show to Varcek and Ritter.

“Sure,” Ritter grinned at Varcek.  “Didn’t you know?  Superman.”

“I’m wearing a bulletproof vest; Mick McKenna loaned it to me yesterday,” Rand enlightened Varcek.  “I never wore one of the damn things before, and if I can help it, I’ll never wear one again.  I’m damn near stewed alive in it.”

“Think how hot you’d be, right now, if you hadn’t been wearing it,” Ritter reminded him.