He produced a photographic print, still damp from the developing process. It was an enlarged photograph of Langner’s suicide note. He had snapped it with a 3A Folding Pocket Kodak camera that his fiancée—a woman in the moving-picture line—had given him. Bell shielded most of the photograph with his hand to spare Miss Langner the deranged raving.

“Is this your father’s handwriting?”

She hesitated, peered closely, then reluctantly nodded. “It looks like his handwriting.”

Bell watched her closely. “You seem unsure.”

“It just looks a little . . . I don’t know! Yes, it is his handwriting.”

“I understand that your father was working under great strain to speed up production. Colleagues who greatly admired him admit he was being driven hard, perhaps beyond endurance.”

“Nonsense!” she snapped back. “My father wasn’t casting church bells. He ran a gun factory. He demanded speed. And if it were too much for him he would have told me. We’ve been thick as thieves since my mother died.”

“But the tragedy of suicide,” Van Dorn interrupted, “is that the victim can see no other escape from the unbearable. It is the loneliest death.”

“He would not have killed himself in that manner.”

“Why not?” asked Isaac Bell.

Dorothy Langner paused before she answered, noting despite her grief that the tall detective was unusually handsome, with an air of elegance tempered by rugged strength. That combination was a quality she looked for in men but found rarely.

“I bought him that piano so he could take up music again. To relax him. He loved me too much to use my gift as the instrument of his death.”

Isaac Bell watched her compelling silvery blue eyes as she pleaded her case. “Father was too happy in his work to kill himself. Twenty years ago he started out replicating British 4-inch guns. Today his gun factory builds the finest 12s in the world. Imagine learning to build naval guns accurate at twenty thousand yards. Ten miles, Mr. Bell!”

Bell cocked his ear for a change of tone that might express doubt. He watched her face for telltale signs of uncertainty in her lyrical description of the dead man’s work.

“The bigger the gun, the more violent the force it has to tame. There is no room for error. You must bore the tube straight as a ray of light. Its diameter can’t vary a thousandth of an inch. Rifling demands the artistry of Michelangelo; shrinking the jacket, the precision of a watchmaker. My father loved his guns—all the great dreadnought men love their work. A steam-propulsion wizard like Alasdair MacDonald loves his turbines. Ronnie Wheeler up in Newport loves his torpedoes. Farley Kent his faster and faster hulls. It is joyous to be devoted, Mr. Bell. Such men do not kill themselves!”

Joseph Van Dorn intervened again. “I can assure you that Isaac Bell’s investigation has been as thorough as—”

“But,” Bell interrupted. “What if Miss Langner is right?”

His boss looked at him, surprised.

Bell said, “With Mr. Van Dorn’s permission, I will look further.”