She shrugged.  “I should be.  When I started out as Lane’s blood-avenger, I suppose I expected things to end somewhere out of sight, in a nice, antiseptic death-chamber at the state penitentiary.  You must admit that that business in the library was really bringing it home.  There’s no question that you got the man who killed Lane, and if you hadn’t, I’d never have been at peace with myself.  And I suppose all that chicanery afterward was necessary, too.”

“It was, if you wanted that merger to go through, and unless you wanted to see the bottom drop out of your Premix stock,” Rand assured her.  “If the true facts of Mr. Fleming’s death had gotten out, there’d have been a simply hideous stink.  The Mill-Pack people would have backed out of that merger like a bear out of an active bee-tree....  You know what the situation really was, don’t you?”

She shook her head.  “I know Mill-Pack wanted to get control of the Premix Company, and Lane refused to go in with them.  I don’t fully understand his reasons, though.”

“They weren’t important; they were mainly verbal, and unrelated to actuality,” Rand said.  “The important thing is that he did refuse, and Mill-Pack wanted that merger so badly that it could be tasted in every ounce of food they sold.  They got Stephen Gresham to negotiate it for them, and he was just on the point of reporting it to be an impossibility when Fred Dunmore came to him with a proposition.  Dunmore said he thought he could persuade or force Mr. Fleming to consent, and he wanted a contract guaranteeing him a vice-presidency with Mill-Pack, at forty thousand a year, if and when the merger was accomplished.  The contract was duly signed about the first of last November.”

“Well, good Lord!” Gladys Fleming’s eyes widened.  “When did you hear about that?”

“I got that out of Gresham, a couple of days after the blow-up, when it was too late to be of any use to me,” Rand said.  “If I’d known it from the beginning, it might have saved me some work.  Not much, though.  Gresham was just as badly scared about the facts coming out as Goode was.  I can’t prove collusion between him and Goode, but Gresham was helping spread the suicide story, too.”

“Nice friends Lane had!  But didn’t anybody think there was something odd about that accident, immediately after that contract was signed?”

“Of course they did, but try and get them to admit it, even to themselves.  Nobody likes to think that the new vice president of the company murdered his way into the position.  So everybody assumed the attitudes of the three Japanese monkeys, and made respectable noises about what a great loss Mr. Fleming was to the business world, and how lucky Dunmore was that he had that contract.”

She looked at him inquiringly for a moment.  “Jeff, I want you to tell me exactly how everything happened,” she said.  “I think I have a right to know.”

“Yes, you have,” he agreed.  “I’ll tell you the whole thing, what I actually know, and what I was forced to guess at: