en to two, you say," Rand considered. "Look. A couple of days ago,
Rivers put out a new price-list to his regular customers. A lot of them,
in different parts of the country, order by telephone, and some of them
live in the West, where there's a couple of hours' time-difference. One
of them, calling at, say, eight o'clock, local time, would get his call
in at ten, Eastern Standard. If you checked the long-distance calls to
Rivers's number last night, now, you might get something."

"Yeah. And if he took a call after nine twenty-two, that would let
Gresham out. Even Farnsworth could figure that out. Sure. I'll check
right away."

"Who's at Rivers's now?"

"Skinner and Jameson, of our gang. And Farnsworth, and some of his
outfit. And the hell's own slew of reporters, of course," McKenna said.
"Aarvo's going back there, in a little. We're still trying to locate Mrs.
Rivers; we haven't been able to, yet. The maid says she went to New York
day before yesterday."

"I'll probably be around at Rivers's, later in the day. I want to check
on that Fleming angle."

"Uh-huh; I'll be there, in half an hour," Corporal Kavaalen said. "Be
seeing you."

They exchanged so-longs, and Kavaalen backed, and made a U-turn, moving
off in the direction of Rosemont. Olsen's voluble protests drifted back
as the car receded. Rand returned to his own car and followed.

CHAPTER 13

Rand found Gladys alone in the library. As she rose to greet him, he came
close to her, gesturing for silence with finger on lips.

"There's a perfect hell of a mess," he whispered. "Somebody murdered
Arnold Rivers last night."

She looked at him in horror. "Murdered? Who was it? How did it...?"

"I haven't time to talk about that right now," he told her. "Stephen
Gresham and Pierre Jarrett are on their way here, and I'd like you to
keep the servants, and particularly Walters, out of earshot of the
gunroom while they're here. It seems that a number of the best pistols
have been stolen from the collection, sometime between the death of Mr.
Fleming and the time I saw the collection yesterday. Stephen and Pierre
are going to help me find out just what's been taken. I have an idea they
might have been sold to Rivers. That may have been why he was killed--to
prevent him from implicating the thief."

"You think somebody here--the servants?" she asked.

"I can't see how it could have been an outsider. The stuff wasn't all
taken at once; it must have been m