"

"Dammit, I can't! Suppose she's satisfied that it really was an accident;
would I want to start her worrying and imagining things?"

"No, I suppose you wouldn't," Rand conceded. "You're not at all satisfied
on that point yourself, are you?"

"Well, are you?" Dunmore parried.

That sort of fencing could go on indefinitely. Rand determined to stop
it. After all, if Dunmore was the murderer of Lane Fleming, he would
already know how little Rand was deceived by the fake accident; the Leech
& Rigdon had told him that already. If he weren't, telling him would do
no harm at this point, and might even do some good.

"Why, I think Fleming was murdered," Rand told him, as casually as though
he were expressing an opinion on tomorrow's weather. "And I further
believe that whoever killed Fleming also killed Arnold Rivers. That, by
the way, is where I come in. Stephen Gresham has retained me to find the
Rivers murderer; to do that, I must first learn who killed Lane Fleming.
However, I was not retained to investigate the Fleming murder, and as far
as I know from anything she has told me, Gladys Fleming is quite
satisfied that her husband shot himself accidentally." In a universe of
ordered abstractions and multiordinal meanings, the literal truth, on one
order of abstraction, was often a black lie on another. "Does that answer
your question?" he asked, with open-faced innocence.

Dunmore nodded. "Yes, I get it, now. Look here, do you think Anton Varcek
could have done it? I know it's a horrible idea, and I want you to
understand that I'm not making any accusations, but we always took it for
granted that he'd been up in his lab, and had come downstairs when he
heard the shot. But suppose he came down and shot Fleming, and then went
out in the hall, and made that rumpus outside after locking the door
behind him?"

"That's possible," Rand agreed. "You were taking a bath when you heard
the shot, weren't you?"

Dunmore shook his head. "I suppose so. I didn't hear any shot, to tell
the truth. All I heard was Anton pounding on the door and yelling. I
suppose I had my head under the shower, and the noise of the water kept
me from hearing the shot." He stopped short, taking his cigar from his
mouth and pointing it at Rand. "And, by God, that would have been about
five minutes before he started hammering on the door!" he exclaimed.
"Time enough for him to have fixed things to look like an accident, set
the deadlatch, and have gone