t say I'm
really very sorry he's dead, Colonel."

"Outside of maybe his wife, and the gunsmith who made his fake Walker
Colts and North & Cheney flintlocks, who is?" he countered. "Oh, yes;
Cecil Gillis. He's about due for induction into the Army of the
Unemployed, unless Mrs. Rivers intends carrying on the business."

Karen's eyes widened. "Cecil Gillis!" she exclaimed softly. "I wonder,
now, if he has an alibi for last night!"

"Think he might need one?" Rand asked. "Of course I only saw him once,
but he didn't strike me as a possible candidate. I can't seem to see
young Gillis doing a messy job like this was, or going to all that manual
labor when he could have used something neat, like a pistol or a dagger."

"Well, Cecil isn't quite the languishing flower he looks," Karen told
him. "He does a lot of swimming, and he's one of the few people around
here who can beat me at tennis. And he has a motive. Maybe two motives."

"Such as?" Rand prompted.

"Maybe you think Cecil is a--you know--one of those boys," she
euphemized. "Well, he isn't. He takes a perfectly normal, and even
slightly wolfish, interest in the female of his species. And while Arnold
Rivers may have been a good provider from a financial standpoint, he
wasn't quite up to his wife's requirements in another important respect.
And Rivers was away a lot, on buying trips and so on, and when he was,
nobody ever saw Cecil leave the Rivers place in the evenings. At least,
that's the story; personally, I wouldn't know. Of course, where there's
smoke, there may be nothing more than somebody with a stogie, but, then,
there may be a regular conflagration."

"That would be a perfectly satisfactory motive, under some
circumstances," Rand admitted. "And the other?"

"Cecil might have been doing funny things with the books, and Rivers
might have caught him."

"That would also be a good enough motive." It would also, Rand thought,
furnish an explanation for the burning of Rivers's record-cards. "I'll
mention it to Mick McKenna; he's hard up for a good usable suspect. And
by the way, the news of this killing will be out before evening, but in
the meantime I wish you wouldn't mention it to anybody, or mention that
I was in here to tell you about it."

"I won't. I'm glad you told me, though.... Do you think there may be a
chance that we can get the collection, now?"

"I wouldn't know why not. Rivers's offer was pretty high; there aren't
many other dealers who w