They were still not satisfied. The two crimes had both taken place at the Cloisters pool, therefore they were connected. But whoever had knocked Evans into the water had not wanted him to drown, whereas in Don’s case they had.

“How many suits of clothes do you own?” Hopper asked him abruptly.

He looked surprised. “Clothes? I don’t know. Enough. Not too many.”

“Who looks after them, Doctor?”

“My housekeeper, Mrs. Watkins.”

“She sends them out to be cleaned and pressed, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Any gone out lately?”

“She would know. I don’t.”

“Haven’t had your watch repaired recently, have you?”

For some reason that annoyed him. “No,” he said shortly. “I suppose you mean I shoved Evans into the pool and then jumped in after him. Well, I’ve been taking pulses with this watch ever since, and if there’s water in it, it must have been built for a diver. As to my clothes, ask Mrs. Watkins.” He smiled rather grimly. “I have no secrets from her. She put diapers on me when I was a baby, and if you think I could smuggle a suit of wet clothes into my house or lose it somewhere in the bushes, you don’t know her.”

But as to the night of Don’s death they had him, more or less. “Certainly I followed the car,” he said impatiently. “Why not? I thought Mrs. Morgan or Audrey was in it. I never got a close look. It was on the way up the hill when I saw it. I had to turn and follow it. By that time it was well ahead, and I lost it at the Beaver Creek Road.”

“What about Morgan’s return? It upset some plans of yours, didn’t it?”

“It did.”

“You resented that, naturally?”

“I did. He had no claim on his former wife. I thought her taking him into the house was a piece of sentimental nonsense.”

They could not shake him. Why should he kill Donald Morgan? Lydia had divorced him. There was no question of a remarriage.

After that they went back to the night of the murder. The autopsy had placed it between four and five hours after Don’s last meal, or not later than midnight. Bill had left the Cloisters at midnight.

“So did a dozen other people,” he said. “What the hell’s that got to do with it? I wasn’t sleepy. I just drove around.”

It was, I think, on Thursday night that in desperation Hopper and Jim Conway tried a reconstruction of the crime. Leaving the Cloisters at midnight—when Bill Sterling had left—they drove out to the main road. Here they parked their car, and walked back to the playhouse, staying out of sight of the house as they figured the murderer would have done. They made it in ten minutes.

Once inside the playhouse they staged a brief quarrel. Jim as the murderer knocked Hopper out, and Hopper lay in the empty pool, with a stopwatch in his hand, and realistically drowned. The problem was to get him out, however. Jim stripped to his shorts and jumped in, but there was no water in the pool to help him. It was some time before a cursing Hopper lay on the tiles and, allowing for the lack of water, they clocked the whole performance at another ten minutes and let it go at that.