Stephen Gresham to negotiate it for
them, and he was just on the point of reporting it to be an impossibility
when Fred Dunmore came to him with a proposition. Dunmore said he thought
he could persuade or force Mr. Fleming to consent, and he wanted a
contract guaranteeing him a vice-presidency with Mill-Pack, at forty
thousand a year, if and when the merger was accomplished. The contract
was duly signed about the first of last November."

"Well, good Lord!" Gladys Fleming's eyes widened. "When did you hear
about that?"

"I got that out of Gresham, a couple of days after the blow-up, when it
was too late to be of any use to me," Rand said. "If I'd known it from
the beginning, it might have saved me some work. Not much, though.
Gresham was just as badly scared about the facts coming out as Goode was.
I can't prove collusion between him and Goode, but Gresham was helping
spread the suicide story, too."

"Nice friends Lane had! But didn't anybody think there was something odd
about that accident, immediately after that contract was signed?"

"Of course they did, but try and get them to admit it, even to
themselves. Nobody likes to think that the new vice president of the
company murdered his way into the position. So everybody assumed the
attitudes of the three Japanese monkeys, and made respectable noises
about what a great loss Mr. Fleming was to the business world, and how
lucky Dunmore was that he had that contract."

She looked at him inquiringly for a moment. "Jeff, I want you to tell me
exactly how everything happened," she said. "I think I have a right to
know."

"Yes, you have," he agreed. "I'll tell you the whole thing, what I
actually know, and what I was forced to guess at:

"When this merger idea first took shape, last summer, Dunmore saw how
unalterably opposed to it Mr. Fleming was, and he began wishing him out
of the way. Some time later, he decided to do something about it. I
suppose Anton Varcek gave him the idea, in the first place, with his
jabber about the danger of a firearms accident. Dunmore decided he'd fix
one up for Mr. Fleming. First of all, he'd need a firearm, collector's
type and in good working order. It couldn't be one of the guns in the
collection. He'd have to keep it loaded all the time, waiting for an
opportunity to use it; he couldn't take a weapon out of the collection,
because it would be missed, and he couldn't load one and hang it up
again, because that would be discovered.