“My fault. That book. I don’t know who’s doing these murders—I can’t even guess—but he got the idea out of that damned book of mine. Just to be clever, I started something that—”
I said, “But it isn’t your fault, Hill. What you wrote in that book is true, in a way.”
“I’m going to burn that manuscript, Wunderly. What business has a fat old fool like me to give advice that—that gets people killed? Somebody’s committing murder by the book—and the worst of it is that the book’s right. That’s why I should never have written it…”
There wasn’t any use arguing with him.
“When was Lecky killed?” I asked.
“Just now. Less than fifteen minutes ago. While you were unconscious upstairs, probably.”
“The hell,” I said. “How do you know it was then? You said his wife just found him.”
“She was talking to him fifteen minutes before. He was in his study typing. She’d been in bed but waked up. She told him to come on to bed and he answered.
“Then just now—fifteen minutes after that—she heard the phone ring…my call. And it wasn’t answered, so she came downstairs and—found him dead.”
“Lord,” I said, “and she had wits enough to answer the phone right away and give you the details without getting hysterical?”
“You haven’t met Mrs. Lecky, or you’d understand. Damn! One of us ought to go over there, though. It’s almost light enough. Charlie could put his leggings on and—”
“Wait!” I said. “I’ve got—”
I thought it over a second and the more I thought about it the better it looked. It might work.
“Darius,” I said, “look, if whoever killed Lecky is among the group in the living room—and it must be one of them—then he just got back into this building five or ten minutes ago.”
“Of course. But how—?”
“Murderers aren’t any braver than anyone else. He wouldn’t have crossed an area where there were rattlesnakes loose without taking precautions. See what I mean? Whoever went over there and back would have put on puttees or leggings under his trousers.”
“I—I suppose he would. And—you think he wouldn’t have had a chance to take them off again?”
“I doubt it,” I told him. “He must have been just getting into the building when Paul Bailey let out that yell. And everybody converged on Bailey’s room. He’d have to go along to avoid suspicion; he’d be the last one to want to give himself away by being late getting there!
“And since then, he certainly hasn’t had a chance to be alone.”
Darius’ eyes gleamed. He said, “Wunderly, it’s a chance! A good chance.”
He grabbed my arm, but I held back.
“Wait,” I said, “this has got to be your idea—not mine.”
“Why?”
“Your position here, your seniority. Your work. Look some people may figure as you did just now—blame that book of yours for a share of what happened. But if you solve the murders, you’ll be exonerated. The credit for that idea doesn’t mean anything to me. I’d rather you took it.”
He stared at me hopefully but almost unbelievingly. “You mean, knowing I’m a bag of wind, you’d—”
“You’re not,” I said. “You’re one of the best astronomers living. And it was that phobia of yours—not your fault—that led you to write what you did. I agree you should never have it published. But in writing it—you stuck your neck out, as far as your colleagues are concerned. It means everything to you to solve the murders. It means nothing to me.”
His hand gripped my upper arm and squeezed hard. “I—I don’t know how to thank—”
“Don’t try,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We went into the other room and I walked over and stood beside Annabel while Hill announced the death of the director. He told them, quite simply, quite unemotionally, what had happened.
And then while they were still shocked by the news, he sprang the suggestion that each man in the group immediately prove he was not wearing protection of any sort on his lower legs.
“I’ll lead off,” he said.
He lifted the cuffs of his trousers up as high as the bottom of the lounging robe he was wearing over them, exposing neatly-clocked black socks.
Paul Bailey chuckled nervously. He had seated himself cross-legged in the morris chair, and his rather short pajama trousers were already twisted halfway up the calves of his bare legs. He said, “I believe I can join the white sheep without even moving.”
Chapter 8
The Last Battle
NONE OF us quite knew what had happened, at first. The sound of a shot, unexpected in the confined space of a room, can be paralyzing as well as deafening.
We heard the thud of the falling body before any of us—unless it was Darius—knew who had been shot. For Darius was the only one who had been facing Fergus Fillmore, who had been standing at the back of the group in a corner of the room.
Charlie Lightfoot and I were the first ones to reach him. The revolver—a small pearl-handled one—was still in his right hand, and the shot had been fired with its muzzle pressed to his temple.
Charlie’s gesture of feeling for the beat of Fillmore’s heart was perfunctory. He said wonderingly, “I suppose this means that he— But in heaven’s name, why?”
I nodded toward Fillmore’s ankles, exposed where his fall had hiked up the cuffs of his trouser-legs above the tops of his high shoes. Under the trousers a pair of heavy leggings were laced on.
“Mine,” said Charlie.
Hill said, “Isn’t—isn’t that the corner of an envelope sticking just past the lapel of his coat?”
Surprised, I looked up at Darius Hill. He was standing very rigidly, his hands clenched. But he was looking at the corpse; he had, to that extent at least, overcome his necrophobia.
Charlie took the envelope from Fillmore’s inside coat pocket. It was addressed to Darius.
And Hill, his face pale and waxen, but his voice steady, read to us the letter it contained:
“Dear Darius: Are you really a criminologist, or are you a monumental bluff? I have a hunch it’s hot air, my dear Darius, but if you ever read this letter, I apologize. It will mean that you were more clever than I—or perhaps I should say you are more clever than the book you wrote. To meet that contingency, I carry a pistol—for a purpose you have already discovered. It would be quite absurd for a man of my position to stand trial for murder. You will understand that.
“I am writing this at the desk in the hallway. As soon as I finish writing, I shall join you for coffee and a sandwich in the kitchen. Then I shall carry out the third step in the program which has been forced upon me by the necessity of keeping my neck out of a noose.
“I remembered your book, Darius, as soon as I discovered, early this evening, that Elsie was dead. She walked into Paul Bailey’s room early this evening while I was searching that room to get back the letter which Paul had held as a threat over my head—”
Darius Hill looked up from the letter and said to Bailey, “What letter is that, Paul?”
The bewilderment on Bailey’s face seemed genuine enough.
Then, suddenly, “That letter! Good grief, he thought I still had it. Why, I’d destroyed it months ago.”
“What was it?”