Free But He Was Already Dead When I Got There by Barbara Paul

the front entrance clear. At each end of the terrace was a metal gate—locked from the outside only. “Darling, see if you can lift the latch on that gate. My arms are full.”
    Dorrie managed to get the heavy gate open and held it while Simon passed through. But when she tried to prop it open—to make it appear as if the burglar had left in a rush—it swung to behind her and fastened with a noisy click.
    â€œOh well,” said Simon. “The police will figure that’s what happened to the burglar, too.”
    The latch on the library door clicked and the door itself slowly began to inch open. Godfrey Daniel was instantly alert.
    Malcolm Conner peered into the room, and grimaced at what he saw. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Malcolm stood quite still for a few moments, gazing in confusion at the glorious disarray around him. He took in the gaping file cabinet drawers, the papers scattered everywhere, the sofa cushions on the floor, the desk drawers pulled out and turned upside down.
    Finally he focused his attention on Uncle Vincent. He crossed over to the desk and pulled Nicole’s scarf out of his jacket pocket. Carefully he untied the knots; and using the scarf to handle each piece, he placed half the broken alabaster Hermes on the desk and the other half on the floor.
    Malcolm stepped back to examine the effect. Satisfied, he stuffed the scarf back in his pocket and left, absent-mindedly switching off the lights as he went.
    Bored, Godfrey went back to sleep.
    The lights clicked on. Godfrey yawned and resettled himself, waiting patiently to see what this one was going to do.
    Lionel Knox leaned against the closed library door, gazing in horror at the scene before him. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. Slipping off one glove, he quickly crossed to the desk and felt for a pulse in Uncle Vincent’s left wrist. Finding none, he stood in a brown study for a while, barely aware of the cat rubbing against his leg.
    Lionel put his glove back on. He hunkered down and picked up a piece of paper from the floor and glanced at it. He dropped it, picked up another. Godfrey leaped to the back of the sofa, catching Lionel’s eye. “What happened here, Godfrey?” he asked. The cat blinked at him.
    Methodically Lionel started working his way through every piece of paper in the room. He’d look at each one only long enough to see what it was and then go on to the next. The job took him nearly half an hour, and when he finished he still didn’t have what he was looking for.
    Lionel sat on the floor thinking, his forearms resting on his knees. Godfrey trotted up between the man’s knees and raised his head to be petted; Lionel obliged. “I think I know what happened,” he told the cat.
    With a new sense of purpose, Lionel got up and went around behind the desk. Gritting his teeth, he took hold of Uncle Vincent’s shoulders and pulled him back so that the dead man was sitting more or less upright in the wheelchair. Lionel grasped the chair’s handgrips and wheeled Uncle Vincent out to the middle of the room. There he unceremoniously dumped the corpse on the floor. “Sorry, Uncle Vincent,” Lionel muttered. “It’s necessary.” He fetched the automatic from the desk and shoved it under Uncle Vincent’s body.
    He went back to the desk again and picked up the blood-stained blotter—and caught sight of the manila folder that had been underneath. Bernstein, Paul , the tab read in Uncle Vincent’s spidery handwriting—the private investigator’s report. Lionel read through the typewritten report and glanced again at the revealing photographs that accompanied it. He took both the folder and the blotter to the fireplace where he put a match to them; soon both pieces of evidence were going up in flames. Lionel stepped backward away from the fire—and trod on Godfrey Daniel’s tail.
    The cat let out a scream