utes fair compensation, I will. And I'll
probably come up with Fleming's murderer, dead or alive. But until then,
it is simply no epidermis off my scrotum. And I advise you to adopt a
similar attitude."

They changed the subject, then, to the variety of pistols developed and
used by the opposing nations in World War II, and the difficulties ahead
of Cabot in assembling even a fairly representative group of them. Rand
promised to mail Cabot a duplicate copy of his list of the letter-code
symbols used by the Nazis to indicate the factories manufacturing arms
for them, as well as copies of some old wartime Intelligence dope on
enemy small-arms. At a little past one, he left Cabot's home and returned
to the Fleming residence.

There were four cars in the garage. The Packard sedan had not been moved,
but the station-wagon was facing in the opposite direction. The gray
Plymouth was in the space from which Rand had driven earlier in the
evening, and a black Chrysler Imperial had been run in on the left of the
Plymouth. He put his own car in on the right of the station-wagon, made
sure that the Leech & Rigdon was locked in his glove-box, and closed and
locked the garage doors. Then he went up into the house, through the
library, and by the spiral stairway to the gunroom.

The garage had been open, he recalled, at the time of Lane Fleming's
death. The availability of such an easy means of undetected ingress and
egress threw the suspect field wide open. Anybody who knew the habits of
the Fleming household could have slipped up to the gunroom, while Varcek
was in his lab, Dunmore was in the bathroom, and Gladys and Geraldine
were in the parlor. As he crossed the hall to his own room, Rand was
thinking of how narrowly Arnold Rivers had escaped a disastrous lawsuit
and criminal action by the death of Lane Fleming.

CHAPTER 10

When Rand came down to breakfast the next morning, he found Gladys,
Nelda, and a man whom he decided, by elimination, must be Anton Varcek,
already at the table. The latter rose as Rand entered, and bowed jerkily
as Gladys verified the guess with an introduction.

He was about Rand's own age and height; he had a smooth-shaven,
tight-mouthed face, adorned with bushy eyebrows, each of which was almost
as heavy as Rand's mustache. It was a face that seemed tantalizingly
familiar, and Rand puzzled for a moment, then nodded mentally. Of course
he had seen a face like that hundreds of times, in newsree