he continued. "Until I walked in here not half an hour
ago and found Rivers dead on the floor, I'd had a suspicion that Rivers
might have sneaked into the Fleming house, shot Fleming with another
revolver, left it in Fleming's hand and carried away the one Fleming had
been working on. The motive, of course, would have been to stop a lawsuit
that would have put Rivers out of business and, not inconceivably, in
jail. But now ..." He looked toward the front of the shop, where another
photo-flash glared for an instant. "And don't suggest that Rivers got
conscience-stricken and killed himself. Aside from the technical
difficulties of pinning himself to the floor after he was dead, that
explanation's out. Rivers had no conscience to be stricken with."

"Well, let's skip Fleming, for a minute," McKenna suggested. "You think
this butler, at the Fleming place, was robbing the collection. And you
say he could've sold the stuff he stole to Rivers. Well, when the family
gets you in to work on the collection, Jeeves, or whatever his name is,
realizes that you're going to spot what's been going on, and will
probably suspect him. He knows you're no ordinary arms-expert; you're an
agency dick. So he gets scared. If you catch up with Rivers, Rivers'll
talk. So he comes over here, last night, and kills Rivers off before you
can get to him. And while Rivers may not keep a record of the stuff he
got from Jeeves, or whatever his name is--"

"Walters," Rand supplied.

"Walters, then. While he may not keep a record of what he bought from
Walters, the chances are he does keep a record of the stuff Walters got
from him, to use for replacements, so the card-file goes into the fire.
How's that?"

The flare of another flash-bulb made distorted shadows dance over the
walls.

"That would hang together, now," Rand agreed. "Of course, I haven't found
anything here, except the revolver I bought yesterday, that came from the
Fleming place, but I'll add this: As soon as Rivers found out I was
working for the Fleming family, he tried to get that revolver back from
me. Offered me seventy-five dollars' worth of credit on anything else in
the shop if I'd give it back to him, not twenty minutes after I'd paid
him sixty for it."

"See!" McKenna pounced. "Look; suppose you had a lot of hot stuff, in a
place like this. You might take a chance on selling something that had
gotten mixed in with your legitimate stuff, but would you want to sell
it right back