“There is one missing, sir,” he said. “She doesn’t know when it went. She says she hasn’t seen it for two or three weeks. The room’s full of stuff, you see, sir, and sometimes things get moved about.”

Jim was pretty low that night. He had the story. He was certain he was on the right track, but Bessie’s murder did not fit in anywhere that he could see. He even began to wonder if he had two types of crime on his hands, one and probably two coldly premeditated, and Bessie’s on impulse, out of deep rage and resentment. But he could not conceal the Buddha; not with a fresh-faced young reporter already writing a story about it.

He called Hopper and told him. “No doubt about where it came from,” he said. “I’ve had the butler and one of the maids down here. They identify it.”

“Anything on it?”

“No. Clean as a whistle.”

Hopper conferred with somebody for a moment or two. Then he came back to the telephone. “Better bring Wainwright in,” he said. “The D.A. would like to talk to him. Bring the what-you-call-it too, but don’t tell him.”

It was the same thing all over again; first Bill, then Julian, now Tony. The same strong light, the same smoke-filled air, the same group of men questioning him in relays. Tony was tired. He asked for his lawyer, but they told him that they merely wanted to clear up some points. When at last they set the Buddha before him he hardly looked at it.

“Ever see this before, Mr. Wainwright?”

He glanced at it then. “It looks like one from the house. I wouldn’t know.”

“From what part of the house?”

“I suppose from the Chinese room. It might have been anywhere.”

“It wasn’t in your hand last night, when your wife stepped outside the door to where she was found?”

He stiffened then. “Is that what killed her?”

“We’re asking the questions, Mr. Wainwright.”

If they had hoped he would break they were disappointed. They made him admit that his marriage had been a mistake. He admitted too that he had put a New York firm of private detectives on Bessie’s track. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but she had claimed to know something to his mother’s discredit. He had had to fight fire with fire.

“What was this thing she knew about your mother?”

“What could she know? Anybody who knew my mother would know she had never done a wrong thing in her life.”

They would not hold him, even as a material witness. They knew they could not hold him for any length of time, so they let him go that night. Rather it was morning when he and Jim drove out to Beverly; one of our rare clear winter dawns, with the air light and crisp. Tony slept part of the way, out of sheer exhaustion. He roused when Jim turned in at the Cloisters and slowed the car.