The men stopped. It was as though a motion picture had suddenly frozen on the screen. Gramps shrilled to Duryea, “Take him, Frank! Take him! Don’t you get it now?”
“Get what?” Duryea asked.
“He’s the one who killed Right and Stearne. Nab him. Those were his spectacles. An oculist can...”
Hilbers turned and made a wild dash for freedom.
One of the officers made a flying tackle, and grabbed his legs.
Gramps ran his fingers through his graying hair. “Yep,” he said, “I got to thinkin’ it over, drivin’ down. Shucks, son, that other yacht didn’t get in there until about six o’clock. The murder might have been committed before then. S’pose it was? Well, I got to thinkin’ that if Mrs. Right left the house with Hilbers an’ showed up in Santa Delbarra aboard Joan Harpler’s yacht, then Hilbers must have put her aboard the Albatross. His speedboat would do thirty-five or forty miles an hour. What was to prevent him from puttin’ Mrs. Right on the Albatross, then pretendin’ to go back, but instead circlin’ around, an’ goin’ up to Santa Delbarra?
“Hilbers had been gettin’ money from his sister. She had paid for part of the cost of his last speedboat. You get it? If Mrs. Right an’ her old man split up, Hilbers was goin’ to get pinched. But if Right an’ Stearne should get bumped off, Mrs. Right was goin’ to inherit a whole flock of iron men.
“Then Mrs. Right told him about how she’d made that crack about Nita Moline to Arthur Right — an’ that was Hilbers’ chance. He’d already got Right’s gun. Right might have gone to the bureau drawer for it, but it was gone when he got there.
“But when Hilbers got aboard the yacht, Right smelled a rat. P’raps he saw the gun in Hilbers’ pocket. He an’ Hilbers had a fight. Hilbers’ glasses went overboard. Then they fell down the cabin stairs an’ Hilbers shot. He had to do his shootin’ inside so the noise wouldn’t attract attention.
“When Stearne came back from mailin’ that letter, Hilbers was waitin’ for him. It was that simple, just a murder an’ suicide frame-up, an’ then a lot o’ dough. He didn’t know the law wouldn’t have let Right inherit from Stearne — that would have been a laugh — if his scheme had gone through.
“Then Hilbers sneaked back an’ went over to Catalina an’ was the devoted, loyal brother when the murder came out. You see he knew his sister would be hidin’ on the yacht, an’ he knew darn well that havin’ done that, she couldn’t afford ever to let the authorities know she’d been there. He just co-operated in manufacturin’ her alibi, an’ he was laughin’ up his sleeve all the time, because if everythin’ went right, he was goin’ to get his hands on a fortune, an’ if anythin’ went wrong, he had it fixed so she’d take the rap for the murder.
“I came down here as fast as I could. I couldn’t make such good time with my old jalopy, what with the trailer on behind. But I got here in time. He’d been in with his sister. When he heard the cops come up, he tried sneakin’ out. He was goin’ to leave sis to take the rap.”
Gramps ceased talking, looked at Duryea, then at his granddaughter. “How’m I doin’, Milred?” he asked.
“Swell,” she said. “Right according to the best Wiggins traditions.”
Hilbers said angrily to Gramps, “You’re cockeyed. Don’t think I’m so dumb I left myself that wide open. I staged that whole thing to look like a murder and suicide. I left a type-written statement with a darn good forgery of Arthur Right’s signature. You poor hicks never would have had anything on me if something hadn’t happened to that evidence.”
Gramps grinned at the district attorney. “That is where we shoulda got wise sooner, son. We had it all doped out, but we didn’t have guts enough to follow our convictions. About the only one who coulda ditched that confession and tossed the gun overboard was the Moline woman, but after she did that, she went to a lot o’ trouble to try an’ watch the yacht. Get the sketch? She knew the confession was a fake, an’ that it was a double murder. How did she know it? Because she knew Addison Stearne an’ Right could never have quarreled over her, because the minute Right made a crack Stearne would have I told him the true facts, that he looked on Nita Moline as his daughter. So when that Moline gal found the confession an’ the gun, an’ found her name was mentioned the way it was, she knew it was a murder. But even so, she didn’t want her name to get smeared, so she tossed the gun overboard, pocketed the confession, an’ then tried to keep watch to see who went back aboard the yacht.”
Gramps swung back to Hilbers. “But don’t think we wouldn’t have got you now. We was checkin’ up on everybody in the case. By tomorrow at the latest we’d have had a report on your eyes. When you dropped those glasses overboard, you as good as left your callin’ card.”
Duryea said, “I remember now, Hilbers, how much trouble you had finding the end of your cigarette with a match. You had to move the match back and forth.”
Gramps grinned triumphantly. “What’d I tell you?” he said to Hilbers.
One of the officers turned to Duryea. “Listen,” he said, glowering suspiciously at the weazened old man in the woman’s bathing suit, “who the hell is this guy?”
“That,” Duryea said, “is a relative by marriage who aspires to become a detective.”
“Aspires, hell!” Gramps Wiggins wheezed. “I’ve graduated.”