“Don’t worry, I’ll get to the bottom of that. Can you give me a description of these men?”

“They were masked with handkerchiefs. They looked at me like local products, ranchhands or oilfield hoods. One of them has a bullet hole in the inside right elbow. I’d know two voices if I heard them again. The boy might tell you more.”

“I’ll let the sheriff talk to him.”

I stood up facing him. “You don’t sound very eager.”

He saw my intention of forcing a showdown, decided to stall it off. “These outbreaks of mob violence are hard to deal with, you know that. Even if the sheriff does get hold of the men, which isn’t very likely, we’ll never get a jury to convict them. Mrs. Slocum was one of the town’s most respected citizens: you’ve got to expect some pretty raw feeling over her murder.”

“I see. Mrs. Slocum’s death is murder now. And Reavis’s death is vigilante stuff, popular justice. You’re not that stupid, Knudson, and neither am I. I know a mob when I see one. Those killers were hired. Amateurs maybe, but they didn’t do it for fun.”

“We won’t get personal,” he said in a heavy tone of warning. “After all, Reavis got what was coming to him. Amateur or not, the men that lynched him saved the state some money.”

“You think he killed Mrs. Slocum.”

“There isn’t any doubt of it in my mind. The medical examiner found marks on her back, subcutaneous hemorrhages where somebody pushed her. And the somebody seems to be Reavis. We found his cap about fifty feet from the pool, behind the trees that mask the filter system. That proves that he was there. He’d just lost his job: motive enough for a psycho. And immediately after the crime he skipped out.”

“He skipped out, yes, but publicly and slowly. He thumbed a ride from me outside the gate, and stopped off at a bar for a couple of drinks.”

“Maybe he needed a couple of drinks. Killers often do.”

Knudson had the red and stubborn look of a man who closed his mind. It was time to play the card I had been saving: “The timing is wrong. The earliest possible time that Marvell heard the splashing was twenty after eight. It was 8:23 exactly when I picked Reavis up, and it’s a mile or more from the pool to the gate.”

Knudson showed his teeth. A faint reflection of the grimace passed over Maude Slocum’s face, which was intent on his. “Marvell is a very imaginative type,” he said. “I took another statement from him today, after he calmed down a bit. He couldn’t be certain when he heard the splash, or even if he heard a splash at all. It’s possible that Mrs. Slocum was murdered a full hour before he found her. There’s no way of establishing how long she was in the water.”

“Still, I don’t think Reavis did it.”

“What you don’t think isn’t evidence. I’ve given you the evidence, and it’s firm. Incidentally, it’s a little late for you to be telling me when you picked Reavis up, and going to bat for him. What happened, Archer, did he sell himself to you? I understand he was a very convincing guy.”

I held my anger. “There are other things. They can wait till you’ve done your phoning.”

With arrogant slowness, he took a cigar from his side pocket, asked the woman’s permission, bit off the end and dropped it in an ashtray, lit the cigar, blew out the match, puffed smoke in my direction. “When I need a door-knocker to tell me how to conduct my official work, I’ll send you a special-delivery letter.” He left the room, trailing cigar smoke; and came back from the hall immediately, holding Cathy Slocum by the arm. She twisted in his grasp. “Let me go, Mr. Knudson.”

He dropped her arm as if she had struck him. “I’m sorry, Cathy. I didn’t mean to be rough.”

She turned her back on him and moved toward the door, her low-heeled white fur slippers scuffing the rug. Wrapped in a pink quilted robe, with her gleaming hair brushed down her back, she looked like a child. Knudson watched her with a curious, helpless expression.

“Wait a minute, darling,” her mother said. “What are you doing up so late?”

Cathy stopped inside the door, but refused to turn. Her satin-covered shoulders were stiff and obstinate. “I was talking to father.”

“Is he still awake?”

“He couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t either. We heard voices, and he sent me down to see who it was. Now may I go back to bed, please?”

“Of course you may, dear.”

“I’d like to ask Cathy a question,” I said. “Do you object, Mrs. Slocum?”

She raised her hand in a maternal gesture. “The poor girl’s had to answer so many questions. Can’t it wait until morning?”

“All it needs is a yes-or-no answer, and it’s a crucial question. Pat Reavis claimed her as an alibi.”

The girl turned in the doorway. “I’m not a child, mother. Of course I can answer a question.” She stood with her feet apart, her fists thrust deep into the pockets of her robe.

“All right, dear. As you wish.” I got the impression that the mother was the one who usually gave in.

I said to her: “Reavis claimed he came out here to see you last night. Was he with you before I found you in my car?”

“No. I haven’t seen him since that trouble in Quinto.”

“Is that all?” Knudson said.

“That’s all.”

“Come and kiss your mother goodnight,” Maude Slocum said.

The girl crossed the room with an unwilling awkwardness and kissed her mother on the cheek. The older woman’s arms moved up around her. The girl stepped out of them quickly, and away.

Knudson watched them as if he was unaware of the tension between them. He seemed to take a simple delight in the forced, loveless transaction of the kiss. He followed Cathy out of the room with a set smile on his face, the glowing cigar held cockily in the middle of the smile.

I sat down on the settee beside Maude Slocum: “Reavis is sewed up tight. I see what Knudson meant.”

“Are you still unsatisfied?” she asked me earnestly.

“Understand me, Reavis means nothing to me. It’s the total picture that bothers me: there are big gaps in it. For example. Do you know a man by the name of Walter Kilbourne?”

“More questions, Mr. Archer?” She reached for a silver cigarette box on the table beside her. Her hand, badly controlled, knocked the box to the floor. The cigarettes spilled out, and I started to pick them up.

“Don’t bother,” she said, “please don’t bother. It doesn’t matter. Things in general seem to be going to pieces. A few cigarettes on the floor are the least of my worries.”

I went on picking the cigarettes. “What is the greatest of your worries? Is it still that letter you gave me?”

“You ask so many questions. I wonder what it is that keep you asking them. A passion for justice, a passion for truth? You see, I’ve turned the tables on you.”

“I don’t know why you should bother to.” I set the full box on the table, lit her cigarette and one for myself.

She drew on it gratefully. Her answer was visible written in smoke on the air: “Because I don’t understand you. You have mind and presence enough for a better job, certainly one with more standing.”

“Like your friend Knudson’s? I worked in a municipal police department for five years, and then I quit. There were too many cases where the official version clashed with the facts I knew.”

“Ralph is honest. He’s been a policeman all his life, but he still has a decent conscience.”

“Two of them, probably. Most good policemen have a public conscience and a private conscience. I just have the private conscience; a poor thing, but my own.”

“I was right about you. You do have a passion for justice.” The deep eyes focused on mine and probed them, as if a passion for justice was something she could see and remember the shape of. Or a strange growth in a man that could be X-rayed out.

“I don’t know what justice is,” I said. “Truth interests me, though. Not general truth if there is any, but the truth of particular things. Who did what when why. Especially why. I wonder, for example, why you care whether I’m interested in justice. It could be an indirect way of asking me to drop out of this case.”