They had only an hour, and they had already used a third of it.

But the worst was to come. Not only had Jim to pretend to dry himself and get into his clothes. He had to carry or drag Hopper to the car. But Hopper weighed a hundred and sixty-five, which was Don’s weight, and the playhouse was almost three hundred yards from where they believed Don had left Lydia’s car. Jim sweated and Hopper was limp and disagreeable. “For God’s sake, keep clear of the bushes. You almost put my eye out.”

But the dressing and the hauling had used up another twenty minutes, and taking off Hopper’s overcoat and covering him with it in the rear of the car had taken a couple more. Hopper’s watch showed a total of forty-two minutes before they were ready to start to where the body had been found in the ditch. Jim drove like a lunatic, but it required ten minutes to reach that back road.

He grinned as he dumped Hopper out of the car.

“Eight minutes to go,” he said cheerfully. “And if anybody made it back to that lane below Stoddard’s in eight minutes he had wings.”

It began to look as though the crime had been committed before midnight, which let Bill out. Hopper was surly.

“There’s a catch in it somewhere,” he said. “You cheated on the dressing end, for one thing. Do you suppose the fellow waited to tie his tie?”

Back at Jim’s office that night they checked their lists again. The women at the party, they agreed, were out. Of the men most of them had not, even in the old days, had more than a bowing acquaintance with Don. Dwight Elliott had said, “Never saw the fellow in my life. What’s all this about?” Julian Stoddard had known Don slightly years before. He had not seen him since he came back. Theodore Earle, almost seventy, had merely smiled and said their suspicions were a compliment, and the other two had never even heard of him.

It was two in the morning when Hopper looked up from his list. “What about Tony Wainwright?” he said. “He’s got no alibi for that night. What time did he get home?”

“Don’t be a damned fool,” said Jim. “He was a kid when Morgan left.”

Hopper yawned again. “Morgan had a mighty pretty daughter. He might have objected to her playing around with a married man.”

Chapter Sixteen

IT WAS PRECISELY A WEEK after our murder when Evans disappeared from the Beverly hospital. He had been better, so much so that he had been given his own clothes and a certain amount of freedom. That is, he would wander out now and then and talk to the nurses or to the convalescents; an old man in a shabby suit and carpet slippers, and still with a small scrap of dressing on his head.

His escape—if that was what it was—had been easy. Tony had put him in a private room on the ground floor, and it was not six feet to the path below. Nevertheless, the situation had its unusual points.