If Death Ever Slept

I had swiveled to him. “To begin with,” I said, “as I told you on the phone, I’m not asking you to exert yourself if you’d rather not. I can hang on up there if it takes all summer, and with Orrie here you certainly don’t need me. Only I didn’t want you to have a client shot from under you with no warning from me. By the way, where is Orrie?”

“He stepped out. Who is going to shoot Mr. Jarrell?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know he’s going to be the target. Do you care to hear about it?”

“Go ahead.”

I did so. Giving him only a sketchy outline of my encounters and experiences up to 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, when Jarrell had opened my door and yelled at me to come on, from there I made it more detailed. I reported verbatim my conversation with Jarrell after Horland’s had gone.

Wolfe grunted. “The man’s an ass. Every one of those people would profit by his death. They need a demonstration, or one of them does. He should have corralled them and called in the police to find the gun.”

“Yeah. He’s sure his daughter-in-law took it, or pretends he is. As I said on the phone Monday night, he may have an itch he can’t reach and is not accountable. He could have pulled the rug act himself, answered the phone call from Horland’s there in the library, raced upstairs to get me, and raced down again. He could have taken the gun earlier. I prefer it that way, since in that case there will probably be no bullets flying, but I admit it’s not likely. He is not a nitwit.”

“What has been done?”

“Nothing, actually. After dinner we played bridge, two tables-Trella, Lois, Nora, Jarrell, Wyman, Roger Foote, Corey Brigham, me. Incidentally, when I finally got down to the lounge before dinner Brigham was there with them, and I learned from Steck that he had come early, shortly after six o’clock, so I suppose it could have been him that got the gun, provided he had a key to the library. It was around midnight when we quit, and-”

“You didn’t include the daughter-in-law.”