Yardman, and then Fred called Humphrey Goode, our lawyer.  Goode lives next door to us, about two hundred yards away, so he arrived almost at once.  When the doctor came, he called the coroner, and when he arrived, about an hour later, they all went into a huddle and decided that it was an obvious accident and that no inquest would be necessary.  Then somebody, I’m not sure who, called an undertaker.  It was past eleven when he arrived, and for once, Nelda got home early.  She was just coming in while they were carrying Lane out in a basket.  You can imagine how horrible that was for her; it was days before she was over the shock.  So she’ll be just as glad as anybody to see the last of the pistol-collection.”

Through the recital, Rand had sat silently, toying with the ivory-handled Italian Fascist dagger-of-honor that was doing duty as a letter-opener on his desk.  Gladys Fleming wasn’t, he was sure, indulging in any masochistic self-harrowing; neither, he thought, was she talking to relieve her mind.  Once or twice there had been a small catch in her voice, but otherwise the narration had been a piece of straight reporting, neither callous nor emotional.  Good reporting, too; carefully detailed.  There had been one or two inclusions of inferential matter in the guise of description, but that was to be looked for and discounted.  And she had remembered, at the end, to include her ostensible reason for telling the story.

“Yes, it must have been dreadful,” he sympathized.  “Odd, though, that an old hand with guns like Mr. Fleming would have an accident like that.  I met him, once or twice, and was at your home to see his collection, a couple of years ago.  He impressed me as knowing firearms pretty thoroughly....  Well, you can look for me tomorrow, say around two.  In the meantime, I’ll see Goode, and also Gresham and Arnold Rivers.”

CHAPTER 2

After ushering his client out the hall door and closing it behind her, Rand turned and said: 

“All right, Kathie, or Dave; whoever’s out there.  Come on in.”

Then he went to his desk and reached under it, snapping off a switch.  As he straightened, the door from the reception-office opened and his secretary, Kathie O’Grady, entered, loading a cigarette into an eight-inch amber holder.  She was a handsome woman, built on the generous lines of a Renaissance goddess; none of the Renaissance masters, however, had ever employed a model so strikingly Hibernian.  She had blue eyes, and a fair, highly-colored complexion; she wore green, which went well with her flaming red hair, and a good deal of gold costume-jewelry.