He came alone that day, looking rather smug, and reported that O’Brien was getting better.

“He’ll have a long pull,” he said. “That was a big gun, Pat. But he doesn’t hold it against you. He understands. Just the same, if you’d done it ten minutes earlier—or maybe less than that—you would have wrecked the whole business.”

It did not take long to tell the story. He’d known a lot of it after we had opened that old trunk of Maud’s. He had even suspected it before, when he saw the official notice of her death. He had cut it out and studied it. Jessica Maud Wainwright, widow of the late John C. Wainwright. So her name had been Jessica, and there was the scar on Don Morgan’s chest.

“I got to wondering. He’d had it cut out a long time before, but it might not mean a thing. Quite a few girls’ names begin with a J. Then one day I got Tony talking about his father. He didn’t remember him. Said he’d been killed in the war; went over early with the Canadians and never came back. I wondered if he had been killed. Maud Wainwright had married old J.C. five years later. If he was still alive, that was the mistake she made. She should have waited seven years, but she hadn’t.

“It was only a chance, but look at it yourself. He’d apparently knocked Evans out and taken his keys. He had broken into the Cloisters more than once. And finally he’d been killed at the playhouse there. There had to be some reason. There was, of course. That’s really the story.

“Don Morgan was Maud Wainwright’s first husband. What’s more, it looked as if her second marriage wasn’t legal.

“I didn’t know it, of course. I was still guessing until I found those letters of his to her in the trunk room, but I checked them with some tax receipts we had here on file. The writing was the same, and all at once things began to fall into a sort of pattern.

“Let’s go back a bit. One day in August Maud goes to the city. Old J.C. is dead, but otherwise she’s sitting pretty. She’s got Tony, she has plenty of money, friends, and what have you. She drives along, and there’s Morgan in the street beside the car. He sees her, and she sees him. She collapses in the car, but Morgan gets the license number from the car, goes to the license bureau and learns who she is.

“He must have had a fit, poor devil. If he was the man you saw at the playhouse window in June he was probably only trying to get a glimpse of Audrey. But his wife is now Mrs. J.C. Wainwright, and the scandal sheets are saying that Tony and Audrey are so-and-so about each other. They’re half brother and sister, and they don’t know it.

“Now you knew Morgan. Outside of women he wasn’t a bad sort, but he’s in a hell of a mess. He doesn’t want to upset Maud’s applecart, but he’s got to see her. He tries, but first she’s laid up sick, and later he finds he can’t get her on the telephone and she has a secretary to open her mail.