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as a blackmailer. My license as a detective may be revoked. My partner has become so frightened she’s dissolved the partnership and instructed the bank to honor no more checks on the partnership account signed by me.

“That’s what comes of my trying to give your boy something worthwhile instead of merely taking his money and calling it a day.

“Now, does that answer your question?”

John Carver Billings nodded his head in slow acquiescence. “Thank you, Mr. Lam, that answers my question.”

I said, “You folks have wasted three or four days of time and probably several thousand dollars in cash. You’ve tried to extricate yourselves by methods that have backfired and left you in hot water. Now suppose we talk turkey?”

“What do you know about Bishop?” Billings asked.

“Not very much. I know most of what I know from reading the papers.”

“There was nothing in the papers about us.”

“Not in the papers,” I said, “but you went to a lot of trouble to establish an alibi for last Tuesday night. The police know it. I know it. The question is, why? At first I thought the answer was a hit-and-run. Now I think it has to be more serious than that.

“There weren’t any murders committed Tuesday night that the police knew about, so I started looking around to see if there might not have been one committed the police didn’t know about.”

“And you found?”

“I found George Bishop.”

“You mean you’ve found him, you’ve found—”

“No,” I interrupted. “Don’t get me wrong. I unearthed the Bishop case. I went to see Mrs. Bishop about it.”

“What did she say?”

“I questioned her as to whether there was a young lover in the picture, and whether she had deliberately planned her husband’s murder. I felt that might have been where your son entered the picture. He couldn’t afford scandal and he wanted the woman.”

“What did she say?” the elder Billings asked.

“Just about what you’d expect.”

“Perhaps what I’d expect and what you’d expect are two different things.”

“Make it this way, then. Just about the answer that I expected.”

“That doesn’t mean a great deal to me,” he said.

“And it didn’t to me.”

He paused to look me over pretty carefully, then said, “So now you’re going to be cagey, eh?”

I said, “Try putting yourself in my position.”

He thought that over.

“Let me question your son about Mrs. Bishop and see what he says.”

“You’re away off on the wrong track, Lam,” he said.

At the moment, silence was my best weapon, so I sat silent.

Billings cleared his throat. “What I’m going to tell you, Lam, must be held in the strictest confidence.”

I merely took a drag at the cigarette.

“This entire situation has become exceedingly embarrassing to me, personally,” John Carver Billings said.

“That,” I told him, “is a masterpiece of understatement. Exactly what happened Tuesday night?”

“I have no firsthand knowledge of that. I got the information from my son.”

“What information?”

“We have a yacht,” he said, “a rather pretentious, sixtyfive- foot cabin cruiser. We call it the Billingboy and it is moored at one of the exclusive yacht clubs here in the bay.”

“Go on.”

“Tuesday, my son persuaded Sylvia Tucker, a young woman who has been a passing fancy — an attractive manicurist — to ring up the place where she works and say she had a headache and couldn’t come to work. Then she went out in the boat with my son.

“They were together all day Tuesday until about four o’clock in the afternoon when they returned from their outing, and my son took her to her apartment.

“Then my boy had a few drinks and left her there. He knew that I didn’t approve either of Sylvia or of the idea of trips of this sort, and I think he rather dreaded meeting me.

“So he stopped in several places for drinks with which to nerve himself; then argued himself into believing that he could cover things up so I need never know he had used the yacht.

“With that in mind he went down to the yacht planning on changing his clothes and fixing things so it would seem he had spent the biggest part of the day working on the boat.

“Now, in order to definitely understand what followed, Mr. Lam, it’s going to be necessary to explain something of the nature of the yacht club.”

“Go ahead and explain it.”

“The club is so situated that we could very easily be plagued with sightseers and, of course, we don’t want to have the general public climbing around over boats. They do not understand, or do not appreciate, the care that should be given a boat. Nails in the heels of shoes, for instance, would work irreparable injury upon the highly varnished decks of an expensive yacht.”

I said, “You’re trying to tell me that the yacht club is carefully closed off so that the public is excluded?”

“Exactly.”

“What else?”

“There is a high fence running on the land side, a fence topped with barbed wire, and so arranged that it would be virtually impossible for anyone to climb over the fence. The top three strands of barbed wire are on posts at an angle to the meshed wire so that they make an overhang. No one could climb the fence and get in over the top.”

I nodded. “Go ahead.”

“There is but one gate. There is always a watchman on duty to check the persons who come in and the persons who go out. That is intended both as a safeguard and so the caretaker will know who is actually present at the club at any particular time in case telephone calls should be received.”

“In other words, whenever you go into the yacht club the attendant marks down the fact that you are there?”

“The time of arrival and the time of departure in a book which is kept for that purpose, just as one registers in an office building after hours.”

“Isn’t that rather embarrassing at times?”

“Perhaps with a club that had more of a rowdy membership it might be, but this is a very conservative club. Members who are inclined to throw wild parties on their yachts find it expedient to join some other club which has more lax standards.”

“All right, go ahead. What happened?”

“Now, to get back to this Tuesday evening. My son went down to the yacht, planning to arrange things so I would think he had been working on it all day, and therefore when he found that the watchman at the gate was engrossed for the moment in a telephone conversation, with his back turned, it seemed like a providential opportunity, so my son slipped on through the gate. There is an electric connection so an electric buzzer sounds whenever one starts down the ramp to the mooring-float. For some reason this was not working at the moment. My son went down to the yacht. No one saw him. No one knows he was there. No one can ever prove he was there. You must at all times remember that, Mr. Lam.”

“All right, then what?”

“When my son boarded the yacht, unlocked the door, and entered the main cabin he found — well, he found himself in a very grave predicament.”