“Well, Cecil isn’t quite the languishing flower he looks,” Karen told him.  “He does a lot of swimming, and he’s one of the few people around here who can beat me at tennis.  And he has a motive.  Maybe two motives.”

“Such as?” Rand prompted.

“Maybe you think Cecil is a—­you know—­one of those boys,” she euphemized.  “Well, he isn’t.  He takes a perfectly normal, and even slightly wolfish, interest in the female of his species.  And while Arnold Rivers may have been a good provider from a financial standpoint, he wasn’t quite up to his wife’s requirements in another important respect.  And Rivers was away a lot, on buying trips and so on, and when he was, nobody ever saw Cecil leave the Rivers place in the evenings.  At least, that’s the story; personally, I wouldn’t know.  Of course, where there’s smoke, there may be nothing more than somebody with a stogie, but, then, there may be a regular conflagration.”

“That would be a perfectly satisfactory motive, under some circumstances,” Rand admitted.  “And the other?”

“Cecil might have been doing funny things with the books, and Rivers might have caught him.”

“That would also be a good enough motive.”  It would also, Rand thought, furnish an explanation for the burning of Rivers’s record-cards.  “I’ll mention it to Mick McKenna; he’s hard up for a good usable suspect.  And by the way, the news of this killing will be out before evening, but in the meantime I wish you wouldn’t mention it to anybody, or mention that I was in here to tell you about it.”

“I won’t.  I’m glad you told me, though....  Do you think there may be a chance that we can get the collection, now?”

“I wouldn’t know why not.  Rivers’s offer was pretty high; there aren’t many other dealers who would be able to duplicate it....  Well, don’t take any Czechoslovakian Stiegel.”

He moved his car down the street to the Rosemont Inn, where he went into the combination bar and grill and had a Bourbon-and-water at the bar.  Then he ordered lunch, and, while waiting for it, went into a phone-booth and dialed the number of Stephen Gresham’s office in New Belfast.

“I’d hoped to catch you before you left for lunch,” he said, when the lawyer answered.  “There’s been a new development in the Fleming business.”  He had decided to follow the same line as with Karen Lawrence.  “You needn’t worry about Arnold Rivers’s offer, any more.”

“Ha!  So he backed out?”

“He was shoved out,” Rand corrected.  “On the sharp end of a Mauser bayonet, sometime last night.  I found the body this morning, when I went to see him, and notified the State Police.  They call it murder, but of course, they’re just prejudiced.  I’d call it a nuisance-abatement project.”

“Look here, are you kidding?” Gresham demanded.

“I never kid about Those Who Have Passed On,” Rand denied piously.  Then he recited the already hackneyed description of what had happened to Rivers, with careful attention to all the gruesome details.  “So I called copper, directly.  Sergeant McKenna’s up a stump about it, and looking in all directions for a suspect.”