They were still there an hour later when Tony and Dwight Elliott were admitted. The questioning had gone on endlessly.

“Tell me this, Bill. How long would it take a man to drown if he was knocked out first?”

“Not very long, if he couldn’t put up a fight. Quite a while if he could. And if you had a pulmotor handy and tried to revive him—”

“Well, nobody tried to revive Morgan,” Jim said, and smiled. “See here, Bill, how well did you know Evans, the night watchman at the Cloisters?”

“I’ve seen him about. I didn’t know him at all until he was hurt. I’ve taken care of him since.” Then the import of that question dawned on him. He looked thoughtful. “I see. I knocked out Evans to take his keys. Then I—”

“How did you know Evans’s keys were taken, Bill?”

“Tony Wainwright told me, when Pat Abbott fell down the elevator shaft. We looked the place over that morning.”

But the mention of keys had drawn Jim’s eyes back to the desk. He had picked up Bill’s key ring when Tony and Dwight Elliott appeared, and he still held it in his hands.

“We’re discussing the keys to your playhouse,” he said to Tony. “I suppose you would know one if you saw it?”

“I would. I’m damn sure Bill Sterling never had one, if that’s what you mean.”

But Bill was staring at the keys as if he had never seen them before. “Look here,” he said thickly. “One of those isn’t mine. I only carry four. There are five on that ring.” He jerked them out of Jim’s hands and held them up. “Look,” he said. “Two car keys, office door, house door. What’s the other one?”

It needed only one look at Tony’s face to identify it. It was Evans’s key to the playhouse.

They were all stunned, apparently, after Tony’s nod of identification. Even Dwight Elliott had nothing to say, although later on he was to protest that Jim had gone beyond his authority that day; that there was nothing against Bill then but his hatred of Don, and no reason for questioning him. Until, of course, the key turned up. And that was purely fortuitous. Would any guilty man in his senses produce that key as Bill had done? No. A thousand times no.

Jim Conway must have looked very grave that late Sunday afternoon, with the September sun shining into his tidy office and those three men confronting him. Certainly he was puzzled.

“I didn’t know what the hell to do next,” he said to me later. “I couldn’t see old Bill as a killer, and a nasty one at that. And why would he throw those keys at me, if he were?”

Bill was the first to speak that day. He put the keys quietly down on the desk.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose you’ll have to hold me, Jim. You won’t want to do it, but there you are.”