blackmailer once more the result will probably be bad all around. If you don’t know a favor when you see it handed to you I suppose you’d think a sock on the jaw was a compliment.'
He said, 'Sis, you’d better go in the house.'
'She can go in a minute,' I said. 'If the agreement is to go overboard she ought to see it sink. If you don’t like it, why did you let her come to Wolfe’s office alone to make it? He would have been glad to see you. He said to your sister, we shall proceed with the inquiry in any event. That’s our business, not such a rotten one either, a few people think who have dealt with us. I say the same to you: agreement or no agreement, we’re going to find out who murdered Peter Oliver Barstow. If you ask me, I think your sister made a swell bargain. If you don’t think so there must be some reason, and that’s one of the things we’ll find out on the way.
'Larry,' Miss Barstow said. Her voice was full of things. She repeated it. 'Larry.' She was telling him and asking him and reminding him all at the same time.
'Come on,' I said. 'You’re all worked up and looking at me all through lunch didn’t help you any, but if something goes wrong with your airplane you don’t just kick and scream, do you? You pull your coat off and help fix it.'
He sat looking not at me but his sister, with his lower lip stuck up and pushed out so that he looked half like a baby about ready to cry and half like a man set to tell the world to go to hell.
'All right, Sis,' he said finally. He showed no signs of apologizing to me, but I thought that could wait for a rainy day.
When I began feeding him questions he snapped out of it. He answered prompt and straight and, as far as I could see, without any figuring or hesitation anywhere. Even about the golf bag, where his sister had flopped around like a fish on a bank, it was all clear and ready with him. The bag had been brought down from the university on the truck; there had been no luggage with them in the car except one suitcase, his mother’s. When the truck had arrived at the house about three o’clock in the afternoon its load had been removed and distributed at once; presumably the golf bag had been taken straight to his father’s room though he had no knowledge of that. At Sunday breakfast he and his father had arranged to play golf that afternoon.
'Who suggested it? You or your father?'
He couldn’t remember. When his father had come downstairs after lunch he had had the bag under his arm. They had driven to the Green Meadow Club in the sedan, parked, and his father had gone straight to the first tee, carrying his bag, while Larry had gone around by the hut for caddies. Larry wasn’t particular about his caddy, but there had been one the preceding summer that his father had taken a fancy to, and by chance that boy was there and Larry had taken him with another. On his way to the first tee Larry had fallen in with the Kimballs, also ready to tee off, and since he hadn’t seen Manuel for some months and was eager to discuss plans for the summer he had asked them to make it a foursome, feeling sure his father wouldn’t mind. When they had reached the tee his father had been off to one side, practicing with a mashie. Peter Oliver Barstow had been cordial with the Kimballs and had greeted his caddy with delight and sent him off to chase balls.
They had waited for two or three other matches to get started and had then teed off. Manuel Kimball had driven first, then Larry, then Barstow, and last the elder Kimball. Larry couldn’t remember seeing his father take the driver from the bag or from his caddy- while they were waiting he had been busy talking with Manuel, and during the moments immediately preceding his father’s drive Larry had been driving himself. But he remembered well his father’s actual swing at the ball, on account of an unusual circumstance. At the end of the swing there had been a peculiar jerk of the club, and as the ball sailed away with a bad slice Barstow had made an exclamation, with a startled look on his face, and begun rubbing his belly. Larry had never seen his father so suddenly and completely abandon his accustomed dignity in public. They had asked him what was wrong, and he had said something about a wasp or a hornet and started to open his shirt. Larry had been impressed by his father’s agitation and had looked inside his shirt at the skin. There had been a tiny puncture, almost invisible, and his father had regained his composure and insisted that it would be nothing. The elder Kimball had made his drive and they had proceeded down the fairway.
The rest had been detailed in the newspapers many times. Thirty minutes later, on the fairway of the fourth hole, Barstow had suddenly collapsed on the ground, kicking and clutching the grass. He had been still alive when his caddy seized his arm, but by the time the others reached him he was dead. A crowd had collected, among them Dr. Nathaniel Bradford, an old Barstow family friend. Manuel Kimball had gone for the sedan and driven it along the edge of the fairway to the scene. The body had been lifted into the back of the sedan, Dr. Bradford had sat on the seat holding the head of his old friend on his lap, and Larry had taken the wheel.
Larry could remember nothing of the golf bag. Absolutely nothing. He knew the caddy’s story, that the bag had been placed in front leaning against the seat, but he could not remember seeing it there while driving or at any other time. He said that he had driven the six miles slowly and carefully, and that later, after getting home, he had found blood all along his lower lip where he had bit it. He was a better liar than his sister. If it had not been for her give-away I might have been fooled by his tale as he told it. I went after him from every angle I could think of, but he didn’t leak once.
I passed that up and asked him about the Kimballs. His story was the same as his sister’s. There had been no contact to speak of between the families; the only connection had been himself and Manuel, and the basis of that was Manuel’s convenience as owner and pilot of an airplane; Larry had intended to get one for himself as soon as he secured a license.
Then I asked the question that had started the fireworks with Mrs. Barstow before lunch. I asked both Larry and his sister, but not only was there no fireworks, there was nothing at all. They declared that they knew of no one who had a serious grievance against their father, or hatred or enmity for him, and that it was unthinkable that there ever should have been such a person. In his remarkable career-he had achieved the presidency of Holland University at forty-eight, ten years before-he had many times faced opposition, but he had always known the trick of melting it instead of crushing it. His private life had been confined to his own home.
His son, I gathered, had had deep respect for him and a certain affection; his daughter had loved him. They agreed that no one could have hated him; and as his daughter told me that, knowing what I had heard from her mother’s lips oniy three hours previously, her eyes challenged me and appealed to me at once.
Next Dr. Bradford. I turned to Miss Barstow oti that instead of her brother. The v~ av the thing seemed to shaping up excellently some hesitation at1 covering, but there certainly was no sign of it. She told me, simply, that Bradford had been a schoolmate at college with her father, that they had always been close friends, and that Bradford, who was a widower, had been almost like one of the family, especially during the summer since he was then also a neighbor. He had been the family physician, and it was on him they had chiefly relied to remove Mrs. Barstow’s difficulty, though he had called in specialists to assist.
