“I did,” I grinned back, “but not enough.”
“Why not? You may be making a mistake,” he drawled. “You know my room is just across the hall from his, and I could have left my window, crept across the porch, fired at him, and then run back to my room, on that first night.
“And on the second night—when you were here—you ought to know that I left Knownburg in plenty of time to have come out here, parked my car down the road a bit, fired those two shots, crept around in the shadow of the house, ran back to my car, and then come driving innocently up to the garage. You should know also that my reputation isn’t any too good—that I’m supposed to be a bad egg; and you do know that I don’t like the old man. And for a motive, there is the fact that my wife is Exon’s only heir. What more do you want? I hope,” he raised his eyebrows in burlesqued pain, “that you don’t think I have any moral scruples against a well-placed murder now and then.”
I laughed.
“I don’t.”
“Well, then?”
“If Exon had been killed that first night, and I had come up here, you’d be doing your joking behind bars long before this. And if he’d been killed the second night, even, I might have grabbed you. But I don’t figure you as a man who’d bungle so easy a job—not twice, anyway. You wouldn’t have missed, and then run away, leaving him alive.”
He reached over for my hand and shook it gravely.
“It is comforting to have one’s few virtues appreciated.”
Before Talbert Exon died he sent for me. He wanted to die, he said, with his curiosity appeased; and so we traded information. I told him how I