He lifted the cocktail glass to his lips.  These vodka Martinis were strong, and three of them before dinner was leaning way over backward maintaining the tradition of the hard-drinking private eye, but Gladys was working on her third, and no client was going to drink him under.

“So, in the privacy of his bathroom, he kicked out of his slippers, threw off his robe, hid the Leech & Rigdon, probably in a space between the tub and the wall that I found while we were searching the house, the night before the shooting of Dunmore, and jumped into the tub, there to await developments.  As soon as he heard Varcek’s uproar in the hall, he could emerge, dripping bathwater and innocence, to find out what the fuss was all about....  Do you know anything about something called General Semantics?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes.  Before I married Lane, I went around with a radio ad-writer,” she told him.  “He was a nice boy, but he’d get drunker than a boiled owl about once a month, and weep about his crimes against sanity and meaning.  He’d recite long excerpts from his professional creations, and show how he had been deliberately objectifying words and identifying them with the things for which they stood, and confusing orders of abstraction, and juggling multiordinal meanings.  He was going to lend me his Koran, a book called Science and Sanity, and then he took a job with an ad agency in Chicago, and I got married, and—­”

Rand nodded.  “Then you realize that the word is not the thing spoken of, and that the inference is not the description, and that we cannot know ‘all’ about anything.  Etcetera,” he added hastily, like a Papist signing himself with the Cross.  “Well, some considerable disregard of these principles seems to have existed in this case.  Dunmore is seen in a bathrobe, his feet bare and making wet tracks on the floor, his hair wet, etcetera.  Straightaway, one and all appear to have assumed that he was in the tub, splashing soapsuds around, while Lane Fleming was being shot.  And Anton Varcek, who can be taken as an example of what S. I. Hayakawa was talking about when he spoke of people behaving like scientists inside but not outside their laboratories, saw Lane Fleming dead, with an object labeled ‘revolver’ in his hand, and, because of his verbal identifications and semantic reactions, immediately included the inference of an accident in his description of what he had seen.  That was just an extra dividend of luck for Dunmore; it got the whole crowd of you thinking in terms of accidental shooting.

“Well, from there out, everything would have been a wonderful success for Dunmore, except for one thing.  Arnold Rivers must have heard, somehow, that Lane Fleming had been shot with a Confederate .36 that he’d bought somewhere that day, and that the revolver was in the hands of this coroner of yours.  So Arnold, with his big chisel well ground, went to see if he could manage to get it out of the coroner for a few dollars.  And when he saw it, lo! it was the .36 Colt that he’d sold to Dunmore about a month before.”