“Well, if it isn’t Mary Roberts Rinehart, herself!” laughed Jupiter. “Are you sure there wasn’t another one saying, ‘The person who killed Singer was . . . ’?”
“Shut up, you mug. Why would she tear it up in small pieces if it wasn’t important?”
“I’m ashamed of you. You’ve known Miss Slade for a long time and you don’t realize she has a dual personality. She is obsessed with a sense of the dramatic.”
“Oh, excuse me,” she said elaborately. “Of course I’d forgotten that the only way to solve crimes these days is by psychology. I’ll throw it away immediately and watch the movements of her hands. Oh, Lord, here she comes now. Good-bye.”
Jupiter hung up and smiled. The spirit of amateur detection was really getting a firm grip in the community.
“I may be getting senile,” he told himself, “but I fail to see how a ten-day-old newspaper clipping can have anything to do with our troubles.”
He fell back on the sofa and lit a cigarette, waiting for the Sergeant.
CHAPTER XII
HE didn’t have to wait long. Rankin materialized in the fire door, looking worn.
“Cheer up, Inspector,” smiled Jupiter, “it’s just the after-lunch letdown — it gets us all. No luck with the advocate?”
“Not much. I was hoping he would give me something to go on. I was disappointed. Come on in here — I want someone to talk to.”
Jupiter rolled off the couch. “Your unfailing instinct has led you to the right person. I wonder how many times my friends have come to me and said, ‘Jones, old man, there’s something I’ve got to tell you; no one else would understand.’”
In Singer’s room Rankin sat down at the desk in the chair in which Singer had died.
Jupiter stared at him. “Oh, I know what we’re going to do — we’re going to reenact the crime. Please, teacher, can I be the murderer?”
Rankin looked at him gloomily. “Aren’t you ever serious?”
“Certainly I am, but you look like one of the darker moments in Crime and Punishment. I’d hoped my lively banter would help you recapture that devil-may-care spirit I knew of old. Have you forgotten so soon, Inspector, those mad, carefree student days in Paris when we wandered bareheaded through the streets with a song on our lips and a girl on our arm?”
Rankin smiled. “Please shut up; I’m trying to think.”
He had a sheet of paper before him and was making some notes. Jupiter looked over his shoulder.
“Aha!” grinned Jupiter. “I thought it was about time for that. You know, I’ve yet to read a detective story where there wasn’t a time-table or a list of alibis tucked in somewhere. Where do we begin?”
“If you must know, we begin with you,” growled Rankin.
“Me?” asked Jupiter incredulously.
“Yes, you. You were the first person I checked.”
Jupiter feigned pain. “Honestly, Inspector, I don’t think that’s quite cricket. Two-faced, I call it. Worming your way into my confidence with a disarming smile, while all the time you were drawing the noose tighter and tighter around my neck. Well, I give myself up. I’m going to plead the Unwritten Law.”
“Shut up. The next person is Fitzgerald.” Jupiter was not through. The idea of the Sergeant actually checking his alibi was too good to be true.
He went on, “You underestimate me, Inspector. I’m not quite so prosaic as that. If I had killed Singer I would have left the body naked and mangled on some lonely, wind-swept moor with a note pinned to his chest reading, ‘The Phantom has struck. This is the first. Let others beware!’ ” Rankin disregarded him. “Fitzgerald left here at about six-five and stopped in at the Square for a glass of beer. I talked with the bartender and he remembers him, but he can’t remember how long he stayed. He says he thinks he had two beers. Fitzgerald got back to the hotel at ten minutes of seven, I know that. Now, say he got to the Square at six-ten and left the joint at six-thirty — time enough for two drinks — then it took him twenty minutes to get from there to the Continental. How does that sound?”
“It sounds like a good argument for the W. C. T. U.,” said Jupiter. “Fairchild leaves here and has cocktails, Fitzgerald has two beers, and, as you must know by this time, I was doing a little drinking myself at about that time.”
“What I mean is the time element. Fitzgerald said he left the bar at six-forty, but that seems a long time for two beers. How long do you think it would take to walk from the Square to the Continental?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Yes. Well, I guess that that lets Fitzgerald out, although he could have come back here and then taken a taxi to the hotel.”
“Hell, everyone that left here couldn’t have come back. We’ve had one already. Have you got any motive for Fitzgerald to come back?”
“None at all, but I have to leave the possibility open. Of course if Singer was dead at twenty minutes of seven, as I think he must have been, it wouldn’t leave
