If Death Ever Slept

“Don’t interrupt. The technical basis of the fact is of course a comparison of the bullets in the police laboratory. How I learned it is not material. So much for the fact; now for my conclusion from it. The bullets are thirty-eights; the gun that was taken from Mr. Jarrell’s desk was a thirty-eight. On Friday I appealed to all of you to help me find Mr. Jarrell’s gun, and told you how, if it was innocent, it could be recovered with no stigma for anyone. Surely, if it was innocent, one of you would have acted on that appeal, but you didn’t, and it was therefore a permissible conjecture that the gun had been used to kill Eber, but only a conjecture. Now it is no longer a conjecture; it has reached the status of a reasonable assumption. For Brigham was killed by a bullet from the gun that killed Eber, and those two men were both closely associated with you people. Eber lived with you for five years, and Brigham was in your familiar circle. Not only that, they were both concerned in the matter which I was hired to investigate one week ago today, the matter which took Mr. Goodwin there-”

“That’ll do! You know what-”

“Don’t interrupt!” It was close to a bellow again. “The matter which took Mr. Goodwin there under another name. I need not unfold that matter; enough that it was both grave and exigent, and that both Eber and Brigham were involved in it. So consider a hypothesis: that those two men were killed by some outsider with his own private motive, and it is merely a chain of coincidences that they were both in your circle, that the gun was the same caliber as Mr. Jarrell’s, that Mr. Jarrell’s gun was taken by one of you the day before Eber was killed, and that in spite of my appeal the gun has not been found. If you can swallow that hypothesis, I can’t. I reject it, and I conclude that one of you is a murderer. That is our starting point.”

“Just a minute.” It was Wyman. His thin nose looked thinner, and the deep creases in his brow looked deeper. “That may be your starting point, but it’s not mine. Your man Goodwin was there. What for? All this racket about a stolen gun-what if he took it? That’s your kind of stunt, and his too, and of course my father was in on it. That’s my starting point.”