“She said she was going to tell him something that was going to jolt him.”

  Nelson turned to Kimberly. “Thought you’d like to hear this,” he said. “In view of Mrs. Bushnell’s story I think I’ll take a look around—unless, of course, you have some objection. If you do, I’ll get a warrant and look anyway.”

  “I see,” Kimberly said sarcastically. “The good old police system. If you can’t solve a crime, start trying to pin it on someone.”

  “Who said anybody was trying to pin anything on you?”

  “You might as well have said it,” Kimberly blazed. “Go right ahead. Look through the place. I’ll just go along with you to make sure you don’t plant anything.”

  “Now, is that nice?” Nelson asked. He got up and walked around the living room, then pointed to a door and asked, “What’s this?”

  “Bedroom,” Kimberly said curtly.

  Nelson went in. The others followed him. Nelson looked around, opened the door of the clothes closet, carefully studied the clothes, looked into the bathroom, and gave particular attention to the bottles in the medicine cabinet.

  Then he went into the kitchen, pointed to another door, and asked, “What’s that?”

  “Darkroom.”

  Nelson pushed in. The others stood in the doorway. Nelson said, “You have your amber light on. You’re all set up for something.”

  “Yes, I was doing a little enlarging.”

  “He was showing me something about photography,” Peggy said.

  “I see,” Nelson said in a tone of voice that indicated his mind was far away. He began opening the various bottles on the shelves and smelling the contents. He said, “I do quite a bit of photography myself. You’ve got a little more expensive equipment here than I can afford. That’s a swell enlarger. You like the condensers better than the cold light?”

  Kimberly made no answer.

  Nelson whistled a tune as he moved around the darkroom, looking over the bottles, studying the labels, smelling the contents.

  Suddenly he paused. “What the hell’s this?” he asked.

  “Potassium bromide. If you’re a photographer, you should know.”

  “The hell it is. That stuff comes in large crystals. This is—smell it.”

  “I don’t think it has any odor,” Kimberly said.

  “Well, this stuff does. Take a smell. And don’t get your nose too close to it. You might wish you hadn’t.”

  Kimberly sniffed the bottle gingerly, then turned puzzled eyes toward the detective. “Why,” he said, “that smells—smells like—”

  “Exactly,” Nelson agreed. “It smells like potassium cyanide. It is potassium cyanide.”

  Abruptly he put the bottle down, put the cork back in place, and said, “I don’t want anyone to touch that bottle. I’m going to process it for fingerprints. I left my fingerprints around the neck of the bottle, but I didn’t leave them on the rest of it. And now, Mr. Donald Kimberly, I’m sorry, but I’m arresting you for the murder of Stella Lynn.”

  In a taxicab headed toward Uncle Benedict’s, Peggy studied the purloined pictures, trying to penetrate the details of the shadows.

  Don Kimberly’s arrest had been a terrific shock. The statement of Mrs. Bushnell had been like a devastating bomb.

  Peggy had a blind faith in Don Kimberly, but she couldn’t combat his arrest except by digging up new and convincing evidence. The morning newspapers would sound the death knell of her new job unless something could be turned up. She hoped her uncle had been able to get some fingerprints from that broken whiskey bottle.

  The beach scene, Peggy concluded, was a picnic, and apparently it had been a twosome—just Stella Lynn and the young man in the bathing suit who appeared in the pictures. He had taken a couple of pictures of Stella. The costume Stella was wearing would not have been permitted on a public beach, so these pictures must have been taken at a private part of the beach. Had they been taken before the others or afterward?

  The series of small cabins, all uniform in appearance, suggested a motel, probably somewhere along the beach.

  The cab slowed to a stop at Uncle Benedict’s. “Wait for me,” she told the driver, and ran up the steps.

  Aunt Martha came to the door. “Heaven’s sake, Peggy, give a body a chance to get there. You rang three times while I was putting my knitting down. What’s the trouble?”

  “Nothing. Where’s Uncle?”

  “Right here. Come on in.”

  Peggy walked over to the wheelchair and kissed Benedict on the forehead.

  “What’s the trouble?” he asked.

  “Nothing in particular, but I wanted to see if you’d found out anything about that broken bottle and—”

  “Dammit, Peggy,” he said irritably, “I’ve taught you to lie better than that.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Everything. Never run your words together when you’re lying. Sounds too much like reciting a formula. Never let a sucker feel he’s hearing a rehearsed line. When you’re lying you want to be thoroughly at ease—never have tension in your voice.

  “Keep your sentences short. Don’t intersperse explanations with lies. That’s where the average liar falls down. He puts himself on the defensive in the middle of what should be the most convincing part of his lie.

  “Now sit down and tell me what’s handed you such a jolt. Tell the truth, if you can. If you can’t, tell the kind of lie that’ll make me proud of you. Now, what’s up?”

  Peggy said, “They arrested Don Kimberly for Stella’s murder.”

  “What evidence?”

  “That’s the tough part. They found a bottle of potassium cyanide among his photographic chemicals, right over the sink in his darkroom.”

  Uncle Benedict threw back his grizzled head and laughed.

  “It’s no laughing matter,” she said.

  “Makes him out so damned stupid, that’s all. There he is with a whole darkroom. Got a sink and running water and everything, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How many more people did they think he was aiming to kill with cyanide?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Suppose he had killed her. He’s scored a bull’s-eye. That was all he wanted. He’d done the job. He’s got no more use for poison. He’d wash the rest of it down the drain.

  “Nope, somebody’s planting evidence. Seems funny the cops didn’t think about that. Perhaps they have. Maybe they’re giving this person lots of rope for self-hanging purposes.”

  Listening to him, she realized the logic of what he said and suddenly felt much better. She spread the pictures out in front of him.

  Uncle Benedict’s eyes lit up. “Good-looking babe,” he said, studying the pictures of Stella in the bathing suit. “Darn good-looking.”

  Aunt Martha, fixing a pot of hot tea for Peggy, snorted. “You’d think he was a Don Juan to listen to him.”

  “Casanova, Casanova,” Uncle Benedict corrected her irritably. “All right, what about these pictures, Peggy?”

  “What can you tell me about them?”

  He picked up the pictures and studied them. Then he said, “This is the motel where they stayed Saturday.”

  “Who stayed there?”

  “This girl in a bathing suit and the fellow who’s with her.”

  “Uncle Benedict, you shouldn’t say things like that without knowing. You don’t know they stayed there, and you can’t know it was Saturday.”

  “I don’t, eh?” He grinned. “It sticks out plain as the nose on your face. This picture with the beach in the background was taken Sunday morning. Same car here as in the other picture. Put two and two together.”

  “You’re jumping at conclusions and not being very fair to Stella.”

  “Not as bad as what the coroner did, broadcasting a girl’s secrets that way. Ought to be ashamed of himself. Two months pregnant, and he puts it in the paper!”

  “He had to do that,” she said. “It’s part of the evidence. It shows the motivation for murder.”

  “Uh-huh,” Uncle Benedict said.

  “What makes you think it was Saturday noon in one picture and Sunday morning in the other?” she asked.

  “Use your eyes,” he told her. “Here’s a motel. See all those garages with cars in them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s the sun?”

  “What do you mean, where’s the sun?”

  “Look at your shadows,” he said. “Here, hand me that ruler.”

  She handed it to him. His arthritis-crippled hands moved the ruler over the photograph so that one end was against a patch of shadow, the other end against the top of an ornamental light pole. “All right, there’s the angle of your sun, good and high.”

  “All right, so what?”

  “Look at the automobiles in the garages. Most motel patrons are transients. They’re hitting the road. They want to come in at night, have a bath, sleep, get up early, be on their way.

  “Now, look at this one. Automobiles in almost every garage, and from the angle of the sun it’s either three in the afternoon or nine in the morning. Look carefully, and you can see it’s morning because here’s a cabin with a key in a half-open door. The key has a big metal tag hanging from it so tenants won’t cart it off, and it’s caught the sunlight and reflected it right into the camera. That car got away early. If it had been afternoon the key would have been in the office instead of the door.

  “Only one car is gone. Most of the people using the motel aren’t traveling, and that means it’s Sunday. The guests are weekenders, people who came Saturday to spend a weekend. Spend it where? Not in a motel, unless that motel’s at a beach.

  “Now look at this other picture. Warm, sunny day. Hardly any surf. See that wharf out there? Lots of fishermen on it. Those are people who came early and—”

  “I don’t see any wharf.”

  “Take a good look,” he said.

  “That’s just a black spot out there—no, wait a minute—”

  “Black spot nothing,” he said. “It’s the end of a pier. See it sticking out there? Take a magnifying glass. You’ll see people all bunched up, fishing at the far end of the—”

  “Of course,” she said. “I hadn’t noticed it before.”

  “Now, look at the people. Here’s where a road runs down to the beach. Jammed with cars parked all along it. But people haven’t spread out on the north end of the beach yet. On a Sunday the whole thing would be crowded. The way it is now, just about the number of people are on the beach who would have come in those parked cars. They haven’t had to park their cars way uptown and walk down to the beach.

  “See the shadow of the automobile? Sun’s pretty much overhead. It’s just about noon. Wouldn’t get that big a play on a beach this time of year except Saturday. Sunday noon it’d be even bigger. All right, what more do you want to know?”

  She said, “I’d like to know who owns that automobile.”

  “Why don’t you find out?”

  “How can I?”

  He said, “How many beaches are there around here that have piers sticking out that far? How many motels in that city—”

  “What city?”

  He tapped the ornamental lighting fixture. “See the peculiar design on that lighting fixture? I could tell you a lot about those fixtures. Pal of mine took over the sale of ornamental lighting fixures to a city. There’s a great opportunity! That’s real graft. Perfectly legitimate. I guess that’s why I never cared much for it, but I can tell you—”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I know where it is myself now. Why in the world didn’t I notice the significance of that ornamental streetlight before?”

  “Preoccupied,” he said. “That’s ’cause you’re in love.”

  “I am not!”

  “Bet you are! Wrapped up in that Beau Brummel guy they took to prison.”

  “I am not, but—I would like to impress him once with Peggy Castle, the girl, and not just Peggy Castle, the logical thinker.”

  “How are you going to do it?”

  “I’m going to prove he didn’t commit the murder.”

  Uncle Benedict chuckled. “Listen to her, Martha. She wants him to notice her as a cute trick and not as an efficient thinking machine, so she goes out and uses her brain! Don’t use your brain when you’re trying to impress a man, Peggy. Don’t let him think you have any brain. Have curves. Be helpless and—”

  “You leave Peggy alone,” Aunt Martha said. “She’s doing it her way.”

  Uncle Benedict shook his head. “Men can’t see glamour and brains together, Martha. Either one or the other.”

  Aunt Martha put down the teapot. “What did you marry me for?”

  His eyes were reminiscent. “Glamour, curves,” he said. “Boy, when you walked out on the stage with tights on, you—”

  “So,” she blazed indignantly, “now you’re trying to tell me I haven’t any brains!”

  Uncle Benedict shook his head. “Arguing with a woman,” he said, “is like trying to order the weather to suit the farmers. Where are you goin’ in such a rush, Peggy?”

  Peggy was dashing for the door. “I’m not going, I’m gone.”

  Peggy felt a surge of triumph when within less than an hour from the time she reached the beach city she had located the motel. The proprietress was reluctant to discuss registrations.

  “We’re running a decent, clean, respectable place,” she said. “Of course, we don’t ask people to show us marriage licenses every time they come in, but they don’t do that even in the Waldorf-Astoria. We just try to look ’em over and—”

  Peggy patiently interrupted to explain that hers was a private matter, that if necessary she could get official authority, but that she didn’t want to and she didn’t think the woman wanted her to.

  That secured instant results. Peggy examined the weekend registrations.

  The car was 5N20861, registered to Peter Bushnell. Mr. and Mrs. Bushnell had spent the weekend in a cabin.

  Peggy could have cried with disappointment. All her hopes were dashed. If she could have proved that Stella had had a boyfriend with whom she had spent the weekend, then Stella’s date with Don Kimberly would have looked like a mere business date. But now that had been swept away. Stella had spent the weekend with the Bushnells.

  Fighting back tears, Peggy started back to her apartment. Then a thought struck her with the force of a blow. She felt certain Mrs. Bushnell had said that Pete was “still” married to her. Did that mean …?

  Peggy frantically consulted the address she had taken from the registration book at the motel. It was a ten-to-one shot, but she was taking it. Peter Bushnell was going to have an unexpected visitor.

  She drove rapidly to the address, an old-fashioned, unpretentious, comfortable-looking apartment house.

  A card in the mailbox told her Peter Bushnell’s apartment was on the second floor. Peggy didn’t even stop for the elevator, but raced up the stairs to the apartment. A slender ribbon of illumination showed from the underside of the door.

  Her heart hammering with excitement, she rang the bell.

  Peggy heard a chair being pushed back, and then the door opened and Peggy found herself looking at the face of the man in the photograph. Now it was a haggard face, drawn with suffering.

  “You’re Peter Bushnell,” she said. “I’m Peggy Castle. I want to talk with you.”

  She stepped past him into the apartment, turned, smiled reassuringly, and waited for him to close the door.

  “Won’t you—won’t you sit down?” he said. “It’s rather late, but—”

  “I wanted to talk with you about Stella,” she said.

  His face showed consternation. “I—I have nothing to say.”

  “Oh, yes, you have. I know some of the facts. In justice to yourself and in justice to Stella’s memory you’ll have to give me the rest of them.”

  “What facts?”

  “For instance, the weekend at the Seaswept Motel. You registered under your own name. Why did you do that, Pete?”

  “Why not? The car’s registered in my name. Why shouldn’t I have used it?”

  “Because you registered Stella as your wife.”

  “Well—so what?”

  “Suppose Frances found out about it?”

  “How would she find out?”

  “I found out about it.”

  “How?”

  Peggy merely smiled. She said, “Tell me about Stella, Pete.”

  “Who are you, anyway?”

  “I’m an investigator.”

  “With the police?”

  “No. I represent the company Stella worked for. You don’t want Stella’s name dragged through the mud, and we don’t want it dragged through the mud. You were in love with her, weren’t you, Pete?”

  He nodded. His face showed anguish.

  “Now, then, let’s get down to brass tacks,” Peggy said. “You married Frances. Stella was going with Bill Everett. You went on weekend parties together, didn’t you?”

  He said, “That was before I was married to Frances. Then Fran and I got married and—well, I found out it was a mistake before we’d been married three months.”

  “Why was it a mistake, Pete?”

  “Because I had been in love with Stella all the time and hadn’t realized it. You have no idea what it was like to be out with Stella. She was such good company. She never sulked, never got mad, never complained. She took everything just the way it came, and she always had such a good time that you had a good time too. She enjoyed life. She got a kick out of everything.

  “Fran was just the opposite. Fran had to have things just so. When she was with a foursome she hid behind Stella’s good nature so you didn’t see her real character. After we were married and it was just the two of us—well, it showed up then.”

  “What happened?”

  “I wanted a divorce, and Fran wouldn’t give me one. She knew by that time I was in love with Stella and did everything she could to block us. She swore that if she couldn’t have me, Stella couldn’t.”

  “So you and Frances separated, and you and Stella started living together?”

  “Well, in a way. Not quite like that.”

  “Why didn’t you live together all the time, Pete? Why those surreptitious weekends?”