“I never again bought a so-called rarity and I never will,” Pinkwater concluded. “That’s not the business I’m in.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“But what if you did happen to acquire a book like that?” I pressed. “Say it just fell into your lap, something unique and worth thousands of dollars. Would you know where to resell it?”

“Sure.” That smile again.

Now I was getting somewhere.

“Well, where?”

“Woollcott Chalmers. He’d buy it.”

With a frustration bordering on despair, I thanked Mr. Clean and headed for the President’s Dining Room in hopes of at least getting breakfast out of this deal. On the way I pulled out my notebook and struck a line through the names of Reuben Pinkwater and, now that I thought about it, Renata Chalmers.

For all of Mac’s baloney about not having time to interview the people on his list, several shared his breakfast table - Judge Crocker, Dr. Queensbury, and Woollcott Chalmers. Kate and Renata were there, too, along with Al Kane, Bob Nakamora, and Lynda. So there she was.

As I joined them they were in the midst of an animated discussion that could only have concerned the late Hugh Matheson.

“He was a slickster, a trickster, and a damned womanizer,” Chalmers said with a fire in his blue eyes, as if daring anyone to disagree.

Judge Crocker, seated immediately to Chalmers’s left, concentrated on applying strawberry jam to a biscuit.

“Worst of all,” Chalmers added, “he was a poseur. Most of what he knew about Sherlock Holmes he must have picked up from some old Basil Rathbone films. And the fact that he’s dead doesn’t change any of that.”

“I fear that Hugh, rather like the victim in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, had a more-than-ample share of detractors,” Mac rumbled.

“Somebody must have liked him,” Lynda said, “or he couldn’t have been a womanizer.”

She wore a short-sleeved yellow and blue dress with a bright floral design that was giving me spring fever. I tried not to give her too much eyeball time.

Mac paused from attacking his extremely unhealthful hash browns long enough to praise Lynda for clarity of reasoning “bordering on the Sherlockian.” If she objected to his cheap flattery she didn’t say so, but then she’s always had a soft spot for Mac, regarding him for some mysterious reason as an adorable screwball.

“So who do you think killed Matheson?” Al Kane asked, directing the question at Chalmers.

“Perhaps some narrow-minded husband,” the old collector said acidly.

“One who just happened to be wearing a deerstalker?” Mac said. “Come now, Woollcott, you ask us to believe too much.”

“The way you talk about Matheson,” Kane said to Chalmers, “are you sure you didn’t do it yourself?”

Renata Chalmers sucked in her breath.

“Nonsense,” her husband snapped. “Why would I do a horrible thing like that?”

It was hard to read the look behind Kane’s rimless spectacles. He was either having a great time putting the old man on, or he was back to playing amateur sleuth and assigning Chalmers the role of villain.

“How about revenge?” Kane suggested. “That was a favorite motive of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if I recall correctly.”

“Watson,” Queensbury corrected under his breath.

Chalmers snorted. “Revenge for what? Revenge is for losers, not winners. If Matheson and I went after the same thing, I’m the one who inevitably walked off with it. Everyone knew that. I built a collection that Matheson would have paid a fortune to get his hands on, then I gave it away.”

“Stop it - stop it, all of you!” Molly Crocker’s voice was strained. Looking weary, she shoved strands of graying hair out of her eyes. “You’re all playing fun and games with the death of a man most of us knew. As a jurist and a human being, I find that distasteful and unconscionable.”

“I didn’t know the victim,” Bob Nakamora said, “but I think the lady’s right.”

“Indubitably,” Mac concurred. “In letting our passion for sleuthing get the best of us, we have been insensitive louts.” Speak for yourself Mac; I wasn’t in this for fun and games.

“Maybe so,” Queensbury said, “but the question remains: Whodunit? We all have a stake in the answer. You heard what Mac said earlier: A witness saw Hugh open his door to somebody wearing a deerstalker. Doesn’t that make it look like one of us?”

In the awkward silence that followed, I wanted to point to the cap lying on the floor between his chair and Molly Crocker’s and say, “You should know, Dr. Queensbury.” But, of course, I politely restrained myself.

Then Bob Nakamora pointed out, “We still haven’t solved the mystery of the stolen books. Maybe whoever took those books was also stealing something from Matheson, and Matheson caught him. Couldn’t a clever burglar have noticed a lot of deerstalkers around the hotel and put one on so he’d fit in? They’re not hard to buy.”

Mac thumped the table. “Ingenious, Bob! But not, I fear, the truth. You see” - he knitted up his bushy eyebrows in concentration - “the killer demonstrably was not a burglar. A burglar is one who burgles something, a thief in the night, a cowardly creature of stealth. Not even a novice at that dishonorable craft knocks on his victim’s door.

“Nor,” Mac added, leaning forward, “would a man of law be likely to admit a stranger to his hotel room. The implication is clear: It was a friend or, at minimum, an acquaintance who killed Hugh Matheson.”

That much I’d been sure of all along.

And now I was beginning to get a notion about why Matheson had had to die.

Chapter Twenty-Five - “I Think I’m on to Something”

After breakfast, while others drifted toward the Hearth Room for the first talk of the day, Mac followed me into the corridor

“You have something to report?”

“Not much. Just that I wouldn’t put any money on Reuben Pinkwater for the killer if I were you.” Only after I said it did I realize with bitterness the assumption Mac had made - that I would act the Watson (sorry, amanuensis) he expected me to be. “I don’t even know why you want me talk to people on that damned list of yours,” I added. “You could have interrogated most of them yourself right there at your breakfast table.”

“I had no way of knowing that when I formulated the list,” Mac said. “Of course, I did question my breakfast partners to a certain subtle degree before you arrived. However, I would still benefit from your objectivity as a total outsider and your considerable skills as an interviewer. And there are others-”

“All right, all right.” When Mac refers to himself as subtle, it’s time to shut him up. Besides, he was spreading on the butter awfully thick. “I’ve already talked to Pinkwater and Renata. I’ll keep working my way down the list, unless I can prove the killer’s identity before I get that far.”

Mac paused with his hand halfway into his breast pocket. “You have been holding out on me, old boy. You have a theory.”

“An idea, anyway. I think I’m on to something, but only an expert could tell me for sure. Who knows more about Sherlock Holmes first editions and stuff like that than anybody else here?”

“Woollcott,” Mac said without hesitation.

“Aside from him.”

Mac pulled a cigar from his pocket, for once without some hocus-pocus or even a dramatic flourish. “Lars Jenson. He can readily describe all five Croatian editions of some obscure Spanish pastiche. He is even adept at certifying the handwriting of several important Sherlockian figures. What are you groaning about, Jefferson?”

“The Swedish Chef. It would have to be him. Even if he tells me what I need to know I’ll never be able to understand it.”

“Admittedly, English is not his best language. He and I mostly communicate in German, sometimes Italian.” Show-off.

I asked Mac to go with Jenson and me to the library as an interpreter, but he shook his head and said it was impossible. In a few minutes he had to acknowledge the tragic death of Hugh Matheson and say a few appropriately kind words. He was also scheduled to introduce Dr. Queensbury’s talk on “Dr. John H. Watson: Conductor of Light” and Bob Nakamora’s on “Sherlock Holmes on Radio,” then speak himself on “Humor in the Canon.” He dared not risk Queensbury or Nakamora coming up short and leaving the audience at a loss for a host, as had happened on one embarrassing occasion already. What, Sebastian McCabe couldn’t bi-locate?