Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

“Boniface says he and his wife, that blackheaded looker, went to their own cottage right after you and Mrs. Quintin left for town. He says the whisky they’d drunk had left them drawn tight and wide awake, and they couldn’t sleep. He says they lay in bed and smoked and talked until it was almost time for him to get up and meet Grimes for the fishing they’d planned. He says his wife went to sleep maybe half an hour before the time, but he didn’t sleep at all. I’m not the coroner, Johnny, but I’ll bet my best spinner, after looking at the body, that Grimes died more than half an hour before he was found.”

“I see. You mean the Bonifaces alibi each other. And Mrs. Quintin and I do the same.”

“They could be lying, of course.”

“The Bonifaces?”

“Yes.”

“So could Laura Quintin and I.”

“Not likely, Johnny. If it was her husband instead of you, I might consider it.”

“The way it looks to me, you’ve got Jerome Quintin left.”

“That’s the way it looks. He says he fell on the bed in the cottage Dan Grimes had taken, the one the party was in, and he didn’t wake up until his wife came in this morning. Just his own word.”

“It doesn’t make sense that Jerome Quintin killed Grimes.”

“No? Why not?”

“Grimes had ambitious plans for Quintin. He intended to put him in the capitol.”

“Governor?”

“Eventually.”

“Who told you?”

“Quintin himself. His wife corroborated it.”

“It didn’t have to be true, just because he said it.”

“It didn’t have to be, but I think it was.”

“Maybe something developed that we don’t know about. Maybe Grimes changed his plans. Maybe he told Quintin he was going to dump him.”

“I doubt it, but maybe so. If so, how would it have helped matters to kill Grimes? Quintin would still have been in the dump.”

“Not if he had an agreement with Boniface.”

“I see what you mean. Quintin kills Grimes. Boniface becomes the power. Boniface assumes the support of Quintin.”

“Something like that. You think it sounds reasonable?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think you would. Neither do I, as a matter of fact. The thing’s too clumsy. If it had been planned that way, Quintin would have to have been left in the clear.”

“That’s right. A man who’s been a murder suspect is no candidate for office.”

“You got any other ideas?”

I looked across the lake into the cool, deep pocket of a cove. “No,” I said.

He sighed and slapped a fat thigh. Turning fully around, he stared up the slope toward the cottages.

“I’m afraid to move, Johnny. That’s the truth.”

“You better call in the state cops.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

“There’s a phone in my cottage.”

“Thanks. I’ll use it. I’ve got to get the coroner out here, too.”

He lumbered off the dock and up the slope. I sat on the bench and listened to him go. He breathed so heavily on the ascent that I could hear him almost the entire way to the top. And then, in a kind of flash of insight, I remembered what it was that had hung last night for a moment on the edge of consciousness, and it was nothing I had seen, and nothing I had heard, but something, instead, that I hadn’t heard and should have.

The bad that had come in the Chrysler would get no worse. It was now as bad as it could get.

The sun rose higher in the east, and shadows shortened under shoreline trees. I sat in the sun on the dock and waited for the murderer to come, and after a while she did. It seemed like a long, long while, but it wasn’t. It was, from the time Sam Austin went up the slope, no more than five minutes. She sat down beside me on the bench with a soft sigh.

“You should despise us,” she said. “We’re corrupt people.”

“Maybe I should,” I said, “but I don’t. Especially not you.”

“You should despise me most of all.”

“No. I confess that I admire you very much.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re beautiful. Because you were a fine companion for a little while. Because you’re the coldest, cleverest woman in an emergency that I’ve ever known. I admire you, and I’m afraid of you.”

She didn’t look at me. As I remember it, she never looked at me once while she sat there. All I remember is the stark, high-fashion beauty of her cold profile as she stared steadily across the glittering water.

“Why do you say that?”