“House guest?” If Mac had one of his big cigars in his mouth right then it would have fallen out.

“Woollcott Chalmers,” Lynda said with deliberation, twisting the knife.

“Ah, Jefferson, Lynda-” He looked from one to the other of us with sadness.

“Did somebody take my name in vain?”

All three of us looked around.

Chalmers, his face screwed into a smile, was holding tight to Renata like a metaphor of dependency.

Lynda pulled the Beeton’s Christmas Annual out of the brown bag we’d swiped from the underwear drawer in Chalmers’s room. She thrust it in front of the old man’s face. “Is this what it seems to be?”

Chalmers took it from her and sank down into a chair to page through the annual with painstaking care. “Yes,” he said finally, “it is absolutely authentic. This is wonderful! Where did you get it?”

“From your dresser in the McCabes’ guest suite,” Lynda said.

Mac pulled on his beard and Renata gasped.

“You went into my dresser? This is an outrage!” Chalmers sputtered.

“At least a lapse of etiquette,” I agreed. “But not as impolite as murder.”

Chalmers beseeched Mac. “Perhaps you can tell me what your brother-in-law is ranting about.”

Mac ignited a cigar. Apparently this was no time to obey the NO SMOKING signs, which he usually did in less stressful situations. (Friday night when he used the lit cigar to break the balloon didn’t count because that fit into the category of “just showing off.”)

“I am afraid, Woollcott, that Jefferson believes you killed Hugh,” he said between puffs to stoke up. “If I perceive the scenario correctly, your motives were primarily jealousy and secondarily to retrieve the stolen Sherlockiana which was in Hugh’s possession.”

“But I didn’t have the Beeton’s,” the old man protested. “Somebody must have put it in that drawer. You tell them, Renata.”

She seemed somehow to pull away from her husband, distancing herself from him, without physically moving at all. “I don’t go into your drawers, Woollcott. You wouldn’t like that.”

Chalmers grew older, smaller, in his chair.

“We didn’t think jealousy was the main motive at all,” Lynda said. “It was the blow to his pride when he found out that he was being cuckolded, the realization that Matheson had taken away from him something that he regarded as his.”

Renata stepped away from her husband, a look of horror mixed with fear on her face. At least, that’s how I read it. I could have sworn she believed he’d killed her lover.

Summoning up a reserve of strength, Chalmers tightened his grip on the arms of his chair and peered up at us with a fierce look. “How dare you people pry into my personal affairs? You have no damned right to invade my privacy with your amateur meddling!” He reminded me of the villain in a Sherlock Holmes story I read once, the one with the snake.

“Woollcott,” Mac said with a surprising gentleness, “the matter is scarcely a secret within the Anglo-Indian Club.”

Chalmers slumped back into the chair, as if exhausted. “Renata is a young woman and I am an old man.” His voice was distant and dry, like the sound of old newspapers rustling together. “I couldn’t blame her for having a little fling with Matheson. I knew it was merely physical.”

“I’m not... I’m not... a tramp,” his wife said, gripping the back of Chalmers’s chair. In the weird, surreal circumstances it struck me as an old-fashioned word. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply for a second. “My needs were not just physical. I could never make you understand that, Woollcott. I loved you and I wanted your companionship - I wanted to talk to you about art and music and films. But you were so absorbed in that collection... Hugh at least pretended to be interested in me. I was fool. I knew his reputation, but somehow I convinced myself it was different with me, that we had something real.”

Chalmers stared straight ahead as he talked about his wife as though she weren’t there. “I had no reason to kill Matheson. I knew if I forced Renata to choose between him and me our marriage would be over, so I decided to endure it as long as they were discreet. I was sure that Matheson would soon tire of her and move on to some new conquest, although that hadn’t happened yet.”

“Discreet?” I echoed. “Molly Crocker heard you and Matheson arguing about it in a bar before a meeting of the Anglo-Indian Club!”

“That was an aberration, something that only happened once. He’d just lost an important case that day and had too much to drink. Apparently he felt the need to mortify me by a graphic explication of his relationship with my wife. That’s how I first found out about it.”

“And you couldn’t stand the public humiliation,” I said. “That’s why you killed Matheson.”

“I assure you, Renata knows quite well that I did not.”

She looked away from him.

“That book from your dresser drawer says otherwise,” Lynda told Chalmers. “That’s why you bopped me on the head to keep me from finding it.”

In response to shocked looks all around, we gave the Cliffs Notes version of Lynda’s morning adventure.

“Why would Woollcott render Lynda unconscious to prevent her from finding the Beeton’s, then leave it in the drawer?” Mac objected. “That is, even assuming he had the physical stamina to do so.”

“He was scared away by the sound of me calling for Lynda,” I reasoned. “Things aren’t always so neat in real life.”

“Granted, but you’re saying our killer was so frightened by your arrival that he forgot the object of his quest?” Mac said. “That is hardly likely. And getting past you once you were in the house would have been impossible. There is no exit directly outside from the guest suite. Moreover, from the timetable that you have presented, all of the events at my house must have taken place during my talk on ‘Humor in the Canon.’”

“So?” Lynda said.

“So I personally noted Woollcott’s presence in the audience during my entire talk. I assure you, he could not possibly have been the individual who hit you over the head, my dear Lynda.”

Chapter Thirty-Two - On the Hook

The earth twirled on its axis and revolved around the sun. Eons passed as Woollcott Chalmers stared at Lynda and me, letting Mac’s last words hang in the air like humidity in August. Renata looked confused, as if unsure whether to accept the witness that her husband wasn’t a murderer after all.

Finally, Lynda said, “Maybe we went around the curves a little too fast with this idea.”

“If that’s supposed to be an apology,” Chalmers said, “I’ll have to talk to my lawyer before I accept.”

“This game has gone on too long,” Mac said. “I must tell you that the murderer is-’’

“Mr. Chalmers!”

It wasn’t an accusation this time, just the always-annoying Graham Bentley Post calling to Chalmers from the doorway. Even on a Sunday afternoon the man from the Library of Popular Culture was dressed for business. His three-piece gray suit had the requisite stripes and if the shirt had any more starch in it, it would have been one big Roman collar. His thick, gray mustache was trimmed with precision.

“I have interrupted nothing important, I trust.” Post’s manner as he approached Chalmers was so patently ingratiating that it almost made me ill.

“Nothing important,” Chalmers agreed with a sideways glance at Lynda and me.

Post ignored the byplay and heard what he wanted to hear as he approached the old man. “Good, because what I have to say is important, Mr. Chalmers. It is about the Woollcott Chalmers Collection.”

“Then you should be saying it to these men, not to me.” He waved vaguely in the direction of Mac and me. “They represent St. Benignus College, which for good or ill owns the Collection now.”

“Not irrevocably,” Post said with a triumphant smirk. “It is quite obvious that the collection has been treated shabbily by its new owner. Books have been stolen, a man murdered. The college clearly has not maintained the security of the collection as promised in the agreement under which you made your donation. As a result, I believe that the donation can be voided, freeing you to put the Chalmers Collection in the hands of an institution that is prepared to give it the proper care it deserves.”