“Yes, but, dammit, they weren’t all in his shop, last evening.  Just me.  And one other.  The one who killed him.”

“On your way out from town?” Rand inquired.

“Yes.  I stopped at his place, about a quarter to nine.  I was sore as hell about the hooking he gave me on that North & Cheney, falsely so-called, and I decided to stop and have it out with him.  We had words, most of them unpleasant.  I told him, for one thing, that Lane Fleming’s death hadn’t pulled his bacon off the fire, that I was going to start the same sort of action against him on my own account.  But that isn’t the point.  The point is that when I was going in, this la-de-da clerk of his, Cecil Gillis, was coming out.  He got into his car and drove away, leaving me alone with Rivers.  He’ll be the first one the police talk to, and he’ll tell them all about it.”

“That does put you back of the eight ball.”  Rand dropped the ash into a tray and looked at it curiously.  It looked like the sort of ash he had seen at Rivers’s shop, but he couldn’t be sure.  “But if it can be proved that Rivers was alive after nine twenty, when you got here, you’ll be in the clear.”

“I don’t want to have to clear myself,” Gresham insisted.  “I don’t want anything to do with it, at all.  Here; I’ll pay you a thousand down, and two more when you have the case completed; I want you to get the murder cleared up before I can be publicly involved in it.  I say publicly, because this damned Gillis has probably involved me with the police already.”

“Well, Gillis isn’t exactly in a state of pure sanctity, himself,” Rand commented.  “As a suspect, the smart handicappers are figuring him to run well inside the money.  For instance, you know, there have been stories about him and Mrs. Rivers.”

Gresham snapped his fingers.  “Damned if there haven’t, now!” he said.  “You talk to Adam Trehearne.  He did business with Rivers—­there wasn’t much in his line Rivers and Umholtz were able to fake—­and different times he’s gone to Rivers’s shop and there’d be nobody around, and then Gillis would come in from the house, smelling of Chanel Number Five.  Mrs. Rivers uses Chanel Number Five.  Maybe you have something there.  If Cecil thought he could marry the business, with Rivers out of the way....  You’ll take the case, won’t you, Jeff?”

“Oh, certainly,” Rand assured him.  “Now, all they have on you is that there was ill-feeling between you and Rivers about that fake North & Cheney, and that you were in Rivers’s shop yesterday evening?”

Rand’s new client grimaced.  “I wish that were all!” he said.  “The worst part of it is the way Rivers was killed.  See, back in Kaiser Willie’s war, before I was assigned a company of my own, I was regimental bayonet-instruction officer.  And after we got to France, I always carried a rifle and bayonet at the front; hell, I must have killed close to a dozen Krauts just the way Rivers was killed.  And during Schicklgruber’s war, I volunteered as bayonet instructor for the local Home Guard.”