McGee was the Vineyard's business manager. Pug Banta had killed him, I said, because McGee was trying to get rid of him. I showed them the Legion button I'd found in the temple basement.
“I figured Oke Johnson was killed,” I said, “by someone who didn't like him nosing around the temple.”
And when I found from Jeliff, the butcher, that he was sending old meat to the Vineyard, I said, I had a pretty good idea Solomon was still alive. “What else would they want decayed meat for but to make a stink?” And if Solomon was alive he'd want to keep it a secret, even if he had to kill Johnson.
“Then old Solomon was still behind everything?” the chief asked.
“Sure.”
“How the hell did he get his food?”
“I suppose a couple of Elders fed him. They probably didn't know whether he was really dead or alive.”
“He was sure crazy,” the chief said. While Grayson told the chief how he'd happened to hire me and Oke Johnson and then went on to some of the things I'd told him at the Arkady, I ate steak and drought about what I'd done. Usually Justice was supposed to be a tall dame in a white robe, but in Paulton, I decided, if the citizens ever stuck a statue of Justice on the courthouse steps, it would have to be a fat, red-faced guy with a scar on his belly.
That was a laugh, but a funny thing: I'd always played on the Justice team. Even now. Nobody could deny that Banta, the Princess and even McGee had it coming. I felt sorry for Caryle Waterman, but it was his own fault. And I had saved Penelope Grayson. I tried to think how I might have got her out in some other way, but I couldn't. It was a case, as the saying goes, of fighting fire with fire.
Grayson turned to me from the chief and asked: “Would Penelope actually have been the Bride if that poor woman hadn't...?”
I said: “Yeah.”
Chief Piper scowled at me. “That brings up the one thing I don't understand.”
I drank the rest of my whisky. “What?”
“Why'd the Princess take Miss Grayson's place?”
They both stared at me. “Oh,” I said; “she just... just wanted to help out.”
“Didn't she know Solomon ... uh ... and killed the Bride?”
“Neither of us knew that,” I said earnestly. “Otherwise she'd never done it.” I took a bite of steak. “I'd never have let her. The Princess... well, I went for her in a big way.”
Grayson said: “You don't seem exactly stricken with grief.”
“Well,” I said, “being a detective toughens a fellow up, Mr. Grayson.”
