“Not even a motive, outside of Bill Sterling,” Jim Conway said that day, sitting on the terrace while Roger tried to climb into his lap. “No prints, no cigarettes with lipstick on them, no weapons, no bullets for their ballistics department, no anything. If I wasn’t sitting on their necks with a few odds and ends they’d claim Morgan had a heart attack and got drowned in a puddle.”

Which, as I know now, was certainly not giving the redheaded Hopper his due.

As a matter of fact, he was quietly digging away at the case. One day he saw the young doctor Lydia had called in for Don when Bill Sterling refused to see him. His name was Craven, and he proved a vague sort of witness.

“You considered he was a sick man?”

“Well, he thought so. You can’t see angina, of course,” he added defensively.

He had been giving him small doses of digitalis daily, “just in case.” Otherwise he had recommended rest and a careful diet. “I thought he was under some sort of nervous strain,” he said. “I asked him if he was worrying, and he denied it. ‘Except that I can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘Mrs. Morgan has been kind to me when I needed help, but it can’t go on, of course.’”

“He didn’t strike you as being afraid? You didn’t get the idea he thought his life was in danger?”

“Not at all.”

So there they were. They had only one suspect, and that was Bill. He had motive and opportunity, and only the sworn statement of Julian Stoddard’s undergardener about the two cars kept them from arresting him at once. Even they couldn’t prove that he had hidden the murder car where it was found, and two minutes later have shown up in his own.

Nevertheless, they did their best to build a case against him, tried to break down the gardener, combed Bill’s car, searched his clothes and his house, examined and cross-examined him.

“Did you know Donald Morgan before he came back?”

“No. I was in medical college when they moved here from the East. When he left I was an intern in a New York hospital.”

“But your home was here? Your family lived here?”

“Yes. My father and mother both died while I was in college.”

“You spent your summer holidays here, didn’t you? You’d have seen Morgan then.”

“I worked my way through college. I had no holidays. I never saw any of the Morgans until I came here to practice, and he had gone by that time.”

They shifted then, to the key to the playhouse and the attack on Evans. How well had he known Evans? Did he know that he carried keys to the Cloisters? He merely said that he had not thought about it. He supposed a watchman would do so. As to the key found on his key ring, he had no idea how it got there. But they kept after him, like dogs after a bone. Where was he when Evans was attacked? He showed them the small book he carried, his evening office hours until eight or after, a call or two, and a visit to Lydia until eleven that night.