Gresham let himself out the front door; Pierre and Rand went out through the garage and got into Rand’s car.

“You have any idea, so far, about who could have killed Rivers?” the ex-Marine asked, as they coasted down the drive to the highway.

“I haven’t even the start of an idea,” Rand said.  He ran briefly over what he knew, or at least those items which were likely to become public knowledge soon.  “From what I’ve observed at the shop, and from what I know of Rivers’s character, I’d think that he’d been in some kind of a crooked deal with somebody, and got double-crossed, or else the other man caught Rivers double-crossing him.  Or else, Rivers and somebody else had some secret in common, and the other man wanted a monopoly on it and killed Rivers as a security measure.”

“Think it might be the Fleming pistols?”

“That depends.  I’ll have to see whether any of the Fleming pistols turn up anywhere in Rivers’s former possession.  Personally, I’ve about decided that the man who was drinking with Rivers killed him.  There aren’t any indications that anybody else was in the shop afterward.  If that’s the case, I doubt if the killer was Walters.  You know what a snobbish guy Rivers was.  And from what I know of him, he seems to have had a thoroughly Aristotelian outlook; he identified individuals with class-labels.  Walters, of course, would be identified with the label ‘butler,’ and I can’t imagine Rivers sitting down and drinking with a ‘butler.’  He would only drink with people whom he thought of as his equals, that is, people whom he identified with class-labels of equal social importance to his own labels of ‘antiquarian’ and ‘businessman.’”

“That sounds like Korzybski,” Pierre said, as they turned onto Route 19 in the village and headed east.  “You’ve read Science and Sanity?”

Rand nodded.  “Yes.  I first read it in the 1933 edition, back about 1936; I’ve been rereading it every couple of years since.  The principles of General Semantics come in very handy in my business, especially in criminal-investigation work, like this.  A consciousness of abstracting, a realization that we can only know something about a thin film of events on the surface of any given situation, and a habit of thinking structurally and of individual things, instead of verbally and of categories, saves a lot of blind-alley chasing.  And they suggest a great many more avenues of investigation than would be evident to one whose thinking is limited by intensional, verbal, categories.”

“Yes.  I find General Semantics helpful in my work, too,” Pierre said.  “I can use it in plotting a story....  Oh-oh!”

“The Gentlemen of the Press,” Rand said, looking ahead as the car approached the Rivers house and shop.  “There hasn’t been a good, sensational, murder story for some time; this is a gift from the gods.”