“Is it childish to ask why he went to all this trouble with ropes and beams? Why didn’t he just give himself the pleasure of hanging me by hand?”
“He went right back to the farm and told the old lady you had tried to kill him but he got away. The deaf-mutes confirmed the story in writing. She had already phoned the Arbana police about you. Schneider said he was going to get help, and drove away.”
“I get it,” I said. “If you found my body soon enough, you’d be able to establish that I killed myself after he left. ‘Slayer Suicides after Killing Father and Attempting to Kill Son.’”
“I’m glad you feel able to joke about it,” Gordon said with a certain nasty primness. “Did you kill Dr. Schneider?”
“I’ll answer questions on terra firma,” I said. “Go ahead and I’ll follow you down.”
Gordon went down the ladder like a cat, and I climbed down after him holding on tight. He went to the door and I followed him into the shaft of sunlight that came through it. I saw the shotgun lying in the chaff beside the door and stooped down to pick it up, balancing my head carefully.
“Drop it,” Gordon said, his hand inside his left lapel.
I straightened up in surprise. “For Christ’s sake. I paid forty dollars for that gun.”
“And it looks as if you intended to get your money’s worth,” Gordon said. “It was a trail of blood that led me to this barn. And I notice that you’re not bleeding anywhere.”
“You’re damn right I used it. Unfortunately, I didn’t hit him. He cut his arm and used the blood as bait for me. Like a sucker, I followed him to the barn and got a noose around my neck.”
“Stick to rabbits, Branch.” Gordon picked up the shotgun and broke it to see if it was loaded. It wasn’t, and he handed it to me.
I didn’t like his attitude. “Mr. Gordon,” I said, “I admire the bloodhound instincts which just saved my neck. But now you’re barking up the wrong tree. If you arrest me for murder, I’ll sue you for false arrest.”
Gordon’s teeth gleamed in the sun as if he was proud of them, but he wasn’t smiling. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Branch,” he said. “And you can start now. Why did you follow Schneider into McKinley Hall this morning?”
“How do you know I followed him in? Or do you hesitate to reveal the secrets of your fascinating trade?”
“It’s not your business, but I’ll tell you. After the War Board meeting, I tailed Schneider on the chance that he’d go looking for this evidence you were talking about. He went home in a taxi and his son met him at the door. They had an argument in German and finally the old man gave in. They came out to the green coupe parked on the driveway and drove into Arbana.”
“All very interesting,” I said. “But all it proves against me is that I was right.”
Gordon clipped me off. “Not quite. They parked near the campus and the old man got out and crossed the campus to McKinley Hall. I couldn’t follow him in because I had no key, so I stood in the shadow of a tree and watched all the back doors. A few minutes after Schneider went in, you came around from the front of the building and entered by the west door. I want to know why.”
“I’m not ashamed of my reason,” I said. “I got the idea that Judd had hidden his evidence in the Middle English Dictionary office, and I went to look for it. Old Schneider had the same idea. I found it and Schneider tried to hold me up. I knocked him out. But it’s obvious to me now that I should have let him shoot me.”
The irony was lost on Gordon. “Did you knock him out with a horseshoe?” he said. “And have you got the evidence you found?”
“Listen, Gordon,” I said. “I’ll answer questions after you find Peter Schneider, if you still want to ask them. Didn’t you see anybody else enter the building?”
“Just before I heard the shots I saw a man and a woman go in at the east end. The man looked like Peter Schneider and–”
“I knew it,” I said. “Peter Schneider and Ruth Esch killed the old man. I left him unconscious on the floor – without a hole in his head – and went down to get the policeman. While I was gone, they killed him and ran away with the envelope.”
“What envelope?”
“An oilskin envelope with information about the new A S T Program in it. Judd told me he found it in Schneider’s office. Schneider and his son were both spies, and Peter made off with the evidence.”
Gordon kept on looking like a stolid redskin. “You say that the two Schneiders were spies working in cahoots, and you also say that Peter killed his father. It doesn’t hang together.”
“Doesn’t it? Peter couldn’t get his father out of the building. Maybe the old man was weakening and Peter was afraid he’d talk to the police. He had no deep filial affections, I happen to know. And it was a chance to frame me for murder.”
“You’re good at explanations, Branch. But there’s no evidence.”
“What happened to Schneider’s bun? He had a Lüger which he tried to use on me. Even if I had killed him, it would have been in self-defense.”
“So you say. Did you assault a police officer in self-defense?”
“That was a mistake. I saw I was being framed for a murder and it made me mad. I guess I was a little crazy. Anyway, I thought I had to get away and I got away.”
“For a while,” Gordon said. “You’d have been better off in jail. Don’t attempt another getaway. I can shoot, and I can run.”
“And you can swim,” I said. “What a list of accomplishments! Go practise the aquatic art in some convenient lake.”
“I can also be unpleasant, if necessary.”
“You’ve convinced me.”
He snarled silently one last time and jerked his thumb towards the door. I stepped outside into sunshine that hurt my eyes, and he followed me. We left the barn with nothing dangling in it but the rope.
I felt good about that and about the bright sun on the autumn fields. But I resented his suspicion and the crack about being better off in jail. It implied that all my bones were sore for nothing.
As we started across the field, where Peter had pretended to stagger and fall, I said, “If I had spent the night in jail I wouldn’t have found out who killed Alec Judd.”
“So you know that, too” Gordon said.
“I know that Ruth Esch left McKinley Hall about a quarter to twelve last night.”
“Twenty minutes before Judd was killed, according to your own story.”
I said with heavy irony, “No doubt delayed-action murder sounds fantastic to the literal ear of the law, but I recently acted as guinea pig in a little experiment intended to prove its feasibility.”
Gordon turned to me with a glint in his sombre eyes. “You’ve got something there, Branch. I’ll have to examine that room.”
“There’s another possibility, too,” I said. “At least it may not be an impossibility. The receiver of the telephone in Judd’s office was hanging down when I went up there after he fell, and it seems he put in a phone call shortly before.”
“He did? Who to?”
“I don’t know. I tried to find out from the university operator, but she wouldn’t tell me what she had heard. She probably told Sergeant Haggerty – I know he was talking
“I’ll ask him,” Gordon said. “Who is Ruth Esch?”
“A German woman who just came to this country. Peter Schneider’s fiancée.”
“Red-headed?”
“And green eyes. About thirty.”
“Is that the woman the taxi driver saw at the bootlegger’s?”
“Shiny? Yes. Did Shiny tell you?”
“He recognized this woman as the passenger he had driven downtown just before midnight. She recognized him, too, and left the bootlegger’s immediately. That’s suspicious in itself.”
“Where did she go when she left the bootlegger’s? Peter was alone when he caught up with me at the farm.”