“I saw it there last night for the first time.”

“If you didn’t put it there, who did?”

He hesitated. Then he smiled. “I suppose I could say I’d been framed. That’s the usual thing, isn’t it?”

“Do you claim you were framed?”

“I don’t know how it got there,” he said stubbornly. “There are always people in and out of my offices. Almost anybody might have done it.”

They picked up the gun and handed it to him. “Just look it over, Doctor. Your fingerprints are on it.”

“What did you expect? I told you I had picked it up when I saw it there. What are you trying to prove anyhow? If I had taken it from Evans, don’t you suppose I’d have done away with it long ago?”

“We’re saying that you did just that. You buried it. There’s earth in the barrel. Now why did you bury it, if you were innocent? And why did you recover it again?”

He sat very still. Perhaps he had some inkling of the truth then, but he had been tired after a busy day when he was taken, and his exhaustion by that time was acute. He merely made a gesture with his hands and smiled faintly.

“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t answer that. All I can say is that I didn’t bury it.”

It was almost morning by that time. Tony, learning of his arrest, had tried to barge in, but they had kept him out. He had spent most of the night pacing up and down the hall, but when Bill had been put in a cell at police headquarters in the City Hall, he and Jim went to a hotel for such sleep as they could get.

They left a weary crowd behind them. But they were sure they had their case, those men in the district attorney’s office that night. Stewart sat back after they had gone and yawned.

“Tighter than a drum,” he said. “Plenty of motive, a key to the scene of the crime, and the attack on Evans to get that key. Where the hell do you think he’s had that gun buried?”

“How about the cemetery?” said Hopper, grinning. “He’s probably buried a lot of mistakes there.”

They laughed. Their eyes were red with smoke and lack of sleep; all of them were on the point of exhaustion. But they laughed. The law was served, and they had done their job. There were two grand juries in session, and it would be a matter of days only before they obtained an indictment. Stewart got up and buttoned his vest and the waistband of his trousers. He was a portly man.

“All over but the shouting, boys,” he said genially, and went down to his car and home to bed.

I knew nothing of that the next morning, nor of the long interrogation which followed it. It is typical, too, of life in a house like the Cloisters that I did not even know that Tony had not been home that night; that he had gotten a call from Jim after he came in the night before and had gone out again at once.