rtunates whose work is also
his hobby; he's a biochemist and dietitian--and Lane was in the gunroom,
on the second floor, working on his new revolver. Fred Dunmore was having
a bath, and Geraldine and I had taken our coffee into the east parlor.
Geraldine put on the radio, and we were listening to it.

"It must have been about 7:47 or 7:48, because the program had changed
and the first commercial was just over, when we heard a loud noise from
somewhere upstairs. Neither of us thought of a shot; my own first idea
was of a door slamming. Then, about five minutes later, we heard Anton,
in the upstairs hall, pounding on a door, and shouting: 'Lane! Lane! Are
you all right?' We ran up the front stairway, and found Anton, in his
rubber lab-apron, and Fred, in a bathrobe, and barefooted, standing
outside the gunroom door. The door was locked, and that in itself was
unusual; there's a Yale lock on it, but nobody ever used it.

"For a minute or so, we just stood there. Anton was explaining that he
had heard a shot and that nobody in the gunroom answered. Geraldine told
him, rather impatiently, to go down to the library and up the spiral. You
see," she explained, "the library is directly under the gunroom, and
there's a spiral stairway connecting the two rooms. So Anton went
downstairs and we stood waiting in the hall. Fred was shivering in his
bathrobe; he said he'd just jumped out of the bathtub, and he had
nothing on under it. After a while, Anton opened the gunroom door from
the inside, and stood in the doorway, blocking it. He said: 'You'd better
not come in. There's been an accident, but it's too late to do anything.
Lane's shot himself with one of those damned pistols; I always knew
something like this would happen.'

"Well, I simply elbowed him out of the way and went in, and the others
followed me. By this time, the uproar had penetrated to the rear of the
house, and the servants--Walters, the butler, and Mrs. Horder, the
cook--had joined us. We found Lane inside, lying on the floor, shot
through the forehead. Of course, he was dead. He'd been sitting on one of
these old cobblers' benches of the sort that used to be all the thing for
cocktail-tables; he had his tools and polish and oil and rags on it. He'd
fallen off it to one side and was lying beside it. He had a revolver in
his right hand, and an oily rag in his left."

"Was it the revolver he'd brought home with him?" Rand asked.

"I don't know," she replied. "He