Paul’s eyes had grown wide. Large. “Carl Hall? Carl Austin Hall?”

“His middle initial is ‘A,’ so it…it could be Austin. Why? Does that sound familiar?”

“Tell me what he looks like.”

I did.

“My God,” Paul said. His tears had stopped. He dug out a handkerchief and dried his face. “So that’s why his voice stirred something. I think I know him. Or, anyway…knew him. Carl Austin Hall was at Kemper with me.”

“What’s Kemper?”

“A military school. ‘West Point of the West,’ they call it. Boonville, hundred miles from here. It’s just high school with gray uniforms and no girls. I hated it. My circle had a good time despite that.”

“Was Carl part of your circle?”

“No. He wanted to be. He was a hanger-on. He would get liquor for us and try to…worm his way in. I frankly thought he was a jerk.”

Paul hadn’t been wrong.

“We weren’t close by any means,” Paul said. “But I did know him. I wonder…my God, did I cause this somehow? Was he taking it out on my family because I snubbed him? Or maybe… did he think I flaunted the family wealth?”

“No, no, he was well-off himself at that time. Paul, this is nothing you could have predicted.”

His face tightened like a terrible fist. “What if my father… what if he blames me for this? What if people think I had something to do with it?”

He began to cry again, but it was a different kind of crying now; he’d gone past sad into despair.

I don’t know how long he was in the doorway, listening, but suddenly the figure in the blue satin dressing gown seemed to fly by and gathered into his arms this man in his mid-thirties like a boy of six and held him close. Paul was sobbing into his father’s chest and that private detective’s mind kicked in again and I suspected this adopted son was in some way of Robert Greenlease’s own blood—perhaps the wrong side of the sheets, if not his own sheets then perhaps a relative’s. But blood was blood, and when it wasn’t being spilled, it was a good thing.

I started to get up.

Greenlease looked at me, his older son still in his arms, standing together like a statue carefully designed not to fall over, and raised a hand as if in benediction, but his tears-slick expression said to wait.

I did so, sitting on the stairs by the carved lion.

Greenlease joined me in perhaps ten minutes and bid me follow him. Soon we were once again in the study where hunters and dogs looked to lush trees for their prey.

“How much did you hear?” I asked.

“Almost all of it,” he said.

Somewhere, somehow, he’d had the presence of mind to make me a rum and Coke and pour himself a good slug of bourbon.

“But,” he said, “I want to hear everything. All of it.”

“Bob…”

“All of it, goddamnit.”