“I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. His wife was very bitter. She said he had been given a doped drink in a bar and he had been drinking with a policeman. She said a police car was waiting across the street for him to start driving and that he was picked up at once. Also that he was given only the most perfunctory examination at the jail.”

“That doesn’t mean too much. That’s what he told her after he was arrested. He’d tell her something like that automatically.”

“Well, I hate to think the police are not honest,” Grayson said. “But these things are done, and everybody knows it.”

I said: “If they made an honest mistake about your daughter’s death, they would hate to have Talley show them up. It might mean several lost jobs. If they thought what he was really after was blackmail, they wouldn’t be too fussy about how they took care of him. Where is Talley now? What it all boils down to is that if there was any solid clue, he either had it or was on the track of it and knew what he was looking for.”

Grayson said: “We don’t know where he is. He got six months, but that expired long ago.”

“How about his wife?”

He looked at his own wife. She said briefly: “1618½ Westmore Street, Bay City. Eustace and I sent her a little money. She was left bad off.”

I made a note of the address and leaned back in my chair and said:

“Somebody shot Lavery this morning in his bathroom.”

Mrs. Grayson’s pudgy hands became still on the edges of the basket. Grayson sat with his mouth open, holding his pipe in front of it. He made a noise of clearing his throat softly, as if in the presence of the dead. Nothing ever moved slower than his old black pipe going back between his teeth.

“Of course it would be too much to expect,” he said and let it hang in the air and blew a little pale smoke at it, and then added, “that Dr. Almore had any connection with that.”

“I’d like to think he had,” I said. “He certainly lives at a handy distance. The police think my client’s wife shot him. They have a good case too, when they find her. But if Almore had anything to do with it, it must surely arise out of your daughter’s death. That’s why I’m trying to find out something about that.”

Grayson said: “A man who has done one murder wouldn’t have more than twenty-five per cent of the hesitation in doing another.” He spoke as if he had given the matter considerable study.

I said: “Yeah, maybe. What was supposed to be the motive for the first one?”

“Florence was wild,” he said sadly. “A wild and difficult girl. She was wasteful and extravagant, always picking up new and rather doubtful friends, talking too much and too loudly, and generally acting the fool. A wife like that can be very dangerous to a man like Albert S. Almore. But I don’t believe that was the prime motive, was it, Lettie?”

He looked at his wife, but she didn’t look at him. She jabbed a darning needle into a round ball of wool and said nothing.

Grayson sighed and went on: “We had reason to believe he was carrying on with his office nurse and that Florence had threatened him with a public scandal. He couldn’t have anything like that, could he? One kind of scandal might too easily lead to another.”

I said: “How did he do the murder?”

“With morphine, of course. He always had it, he always used it. He was an expert in the use of it. Then when she was in a deep coma he would have placed her in the garage and started the car motor. There was no autopsy, you know. But if there had been, it was known that she had been given a hypodermic injection that night.”

I nodded and he leaned back satisfied and ran his hand over his head and down his face and let it fall slowly to his bony knee. He seemed to have given a lot of study to this angle too.

I looked at them. A couple of elderly people sitting there quietly, poisoning their minds with hate, a year and a half after it had happened. They would like it if Almore had shot Lavery. They would love it. It would warm them clear down to their ankles.

After a pause I said: “You’re believing a lot of this because you want to. It’s always possible that she committed suicide, and that the cover-up was partly to protect Condy’s gambling club and partly to prevent Almore having to be questioned at a public hearing.”

“Rubbish,” Grayson said sharply. “He murdered her all right. She was in bed, asleep.”

“You don’t know that. She might have been taking dope herself. She might have established a tolerance for it. The effect wouldn’t last long in that case. She might have got up in the middle of the night and looked at herself in the glass and seen devils pointing at her. These things happen.”

“I think you have taken up enough of our time,” Grayson said.

I stood up. I thanked them both and made a yard towards the door and said: “You didn’t do anything more about it after Talley was arrested?”

“Saw an assistant district attorney named Leach,” Grayson grunted. “Got exactly nowhere. He saw nothing to justify his office in interfering. Wasn’t even interested in the narcotic angle. But Condy’s place was closed up about a month later. That might have come out of it somehow.”

“That was probably the Bay City cops throwing a little smoke. You’d find Condy somewhere else, if you knew where to look. With all his original equipment intact.”

I started for the door again and Grayson hoisted himself out of his chair and dragged across the room after me. There was a flush on his yellow face.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,”he said. “I guess Lettie and I oughtn’t to brood about this business the way we do.”

“I think you’ve both been very patient,” I said. “Was there anybody else involved in all this that we haven’t mentioned by name?”

He shook his head, then looked back at his wife. Her hands were motionless holding the current sock on the darning egg. Her head was tilted a little to one side. Her attitude was of listening, but not to us.

I said: “The way I got the story, Dr. Almore’s office nurse put Mrs. Almore to bed that night. Would that be the one he was supposed to be playing around with?”

Mrs. Grayson said sharply: “Wait a minute. We never saw the girl. But she had a pretty name. Just give me a minute.”

We gave her a minute. “Mildred something,” she said, and snapped her teeth.

I took a deep breath. “Would it be Mildred Haviland, Mrs. Grayson?”

She smiled brightly and nodded. “Of course, Mildred Haviland. Don’t you remember, Eustace?”

He didn’t remember. He looked at us like a horse that has got into the wrong stable. He opened the door and said: “What does it matter?”

“And you said Talley was a small man,” I bored on. “He wouldn’t for instance be a big loud bruiser with an overbearing manner?”

“Oh no,” Mrs. Grayson said. “Mr. Talley is a man of not more than medium height, middle-aged, with brownish hair and a very quiet voice. He had a sort of worried expression. I mean, he looked as if he always had it.”

“Looks as if he needed it,” I said.

Grayson put his bony hand out and I shook it. It felt like shaking hands with a towel rack.

“If you get him,” he said and clamped his mouth hard on his pipe stem, “call back with a bill. If you get Almore, I mean, of course.”

I said I knew he meant Almore, but that there wouldn’t be any bill.

I went back along the silent hallway. The self-operating elevator was carpeted in red plush. It had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea.