“Why couldn’t he state his business?”

“It might have been pretty private,” he said grimly. “So private that it killed him.”

The one thing he was certain of was that when Donald Morgan slipped out of his house that night of his death it was to see one of two women, Bessie or Maud. He himself believed it had been Maud.

“But she never went there,” I said. “She was giving a dinner. Remember that.”

“Nevertheless,” he said. “I think he went there to meet her. He drove up in his wife’s car. He had the key to the playhouse and he probably waited inside. Now I want you to think back, Pat. How did she seem that night? Like herself?”

“I think so,” I said slowly. “I had that ankle, you know. She came in to see me before she went downstairs. I liked her dress and she seemed pleased.”

He asked a lot of questions that day. What about Evans? Was he in the old family retainer class? In other words, was he devoted soul and body to the family, especially Maud? I had to smile at that. “I didn’t know him well. If he had any strong emotions he certainly hid them.”

“Not the sort to go around saving the Wainwright honor or what not? Not a loving old soul, in other words. All right, go on.”

I told him all I knew; that Maud’s attitude toward Evans had been casual as well as indulgent, certainly not affectionate. She had been as puzzled as any of us over the attack on him. Outside of sending him things to the hospital, fruit and flowers mostly, she had merely inquired about him. He nodded when I had finished.

“All right. Keep this talk to yourself, will you?” He got up and threw his cigarette into the fire. “Don’t forget the gun, either. Don’t laugh. I’m damned serious.”

I did as he told me. Driving back and forth after that it lay on the seat of the car beside me. I picked Amy up one night and she saw it.

“Listen,” she said. “Put that thing away, will you? I don’t get much chance to sit down, but when I do I don’t want a bullet hole in the part of me I sit on.”

She rather depressed me that night, reminding me that everything went in threes.

“What do you mean, threes?” I said peevishly. “It’s silly.”

“Not a bit of it. Watch your step, my girl. Two deaths mean another. Watch and see. I hear you’ve got a guard up at the Cloisters.”

“We’ve got a deputy Jim sent up. Name’s O’Brien.”

“That little shrimp,” said Amy with disgust. “A lot of help he’ll be. We took out his appendix once. I’ll bet it was the only gut he ever had.”

But she was wrong about O’Brien. He was doing his best the awful night when I shot him in the chest, and he almost died of it.