But the case, as Bill called it, was not over. Evans was still missing. Even Hopper admitted that Maud’s farewell letter to Tony could be read two ways, and there was that search of her rooms to worry us all. Then one day, after O’Brien had been in the house for a night or two, Jim Conway telephoned me. “Better come down,” he said. “I want to talk to you. Something’s turned up that I don’t like.”

He was sitting at his desk as usual when I got there, and he had a couple of photographs in his hands. “Afraid it’s bad news, Pat,” he said. “It’s got me anyhow. Ever see one of these?”

He handed me one of the pictures, but it meant nothing to me: a highly magnified cylinder with long vertical scratches on it. I shook my head.

“Picture of a bullet,” he said. “Pictures of two bullets, as you see. The hell of it is, they’ve both been fired from that gun of Tony’s. One’s the test shot, the other’s the one we dug out of Bessie’s car. It doesn’t look so good, does it?”

“Are you saying that Tony shot at her?”

“I’m saying that Tony’s gun fired the bullets. That’s as far as I go.”

It was not, however, as far as the district attorney’s office and the city detectives went. Through a haze I heard Jim putting the case as they saw it: that Tony now had the Wainwright money and the Wainwright business, that he hated Bessie and wanted her out of the way, and that he had probably killed Don Morgan too.

I roused at that. “Killed Don?” I said. “Why would he? What was Don to him?”

“They’ve got something there, Pat.” He leaned back in his chair. “They’ve been looking Don up in Paris. He and Bessie had been pretty intimate there a couple of years ago, according to the police dossier. If Tony knew that—”

“He wouldn’t care, Jim. He didn’t give a tinker’s dam what she did.”

“That’s what you and I think,” he said, and lapsed into gloomy silence. When he spoke again he sounded more hopeful. “There’s one crime they’ll never prove against him, because he didn’t do it. That’s his mother’s death. And I’m banking on just one thing. There was a woman in the playhouse the night Maud Wainwright died. I don’t believe it was Bessie. Then who was it?”

He had a list of names in front of him. They consisted of practically all the women Maud knew, but one by one as we talked he drew a pencil through them. All except Lydia’s. He sat for some time looking at it.

“Funny,” he said. “She’s the one person who would have wanted Don out of the way, outside of Bill Sterling. Ever thought it might be Lydia, Pat?”

“And Maud too, Jim?”

“All right. Have it your own way.” He ran his pencil through Lydia’s name. “I suppose when we’re all through we’ll find that old Mrs. Earle simply went out on a killing spree and Theodore helped her out.”