Free Rex Stout by The Hand in the Glove

want to see it. If we could move things around we could try it. Maybe the bench could have been a lot closer and he could have kicked it back as he dropped, but it looks heavy and I don’t see how he could kick it that far. If he stood it on end and climbed up and jumped from there and kicked it over, it might have rolled that far, but it would have made more dents in the grass, and from as high as that I should think he would break that limb, he must weigh over a hundred and sixty.” He moved the light. “Look at it, not much bigger than your wrist. What the hell, jumping from six feet up? Damn it, they ought to be getting here. Sherwood only had twenty miles to do, and if Doc Flanner waited to finish his supper somebody ought to set fire to his pants.”
    The man chewing grass shook his head. “All I say is, try to fasten a wire around a man’s neck like that. Unless you knock him cold first. There’s no bruises on him, and there’s no signs of any scrap. Crowder’s
Manual of Crime Detection
, which I’ve read and so have you, says you can’t accept any hypothesis if there’s a fact that don’t agree with it. Like that case up in Buffalo, where there was two bullet holes in the wall in the same side of the room and the guy said he had been shot at before he shot back, and the woman said the same thing and she didn’t seem to be lying, but they was able to prove by the science of ballistics that if both shots—Hey, who’s that?”
    Dol, seeing and hearing that she would be interrupting nothing of much moment, had become impatient and stepped out of her shelter. She stopped at the border of the nook, facing them, and then blinked indignantly as the flashlight swiftly circled and spotted her right in the eyes. She put up her hand and demanded:
    “Move that thing.”
    The light darted away, and the man with the flat nose, who held it, inquired, “Well? Didn’t I ask you to go to the house? What do you want?”
    Dol had thought that the thing to do would be to start with a smile, but she didn’t feel like smiling. Nor any smile in her voice: “I want to tell you some things. I had no ideayou would just sit here and wait for doctors and photographers. My name is Bonner. I’m a detective.”
    There was a snort from the one smoking a cigarette. The one with the flat nose sounded politely amazed:
    “You’re what? A detective? What kind?”
    “I run a private agency in New York. A licensed detective agency.”
    “You say—you run it? That’s a—well—all right. You say your name’s Bonner? Then you found this man. They want you up at the house. It was you that told the butler it was murder. How did you know that?”
    Dol moved nearer. “That’s one of the things I have to tell you. Is it you I should tell? Are you going to do anything?”
    “We’ll all do what we can. The first thing is to decide whether this man killed himself. Out here in the country it takes a little while to get organized. Go ahead and tell me.”
    “Very well. First, the wire. Along that walk, about fifty feet back there, is a toolhouse, and on the wall is a reel of wire like that wire, and on a shelf are some pliers and some shears you could cut it with. That’s where the wire came from.”
    “Good.” The trooper sounded sarcastic. “We might have found that when we got moving. That don’t explain your calling it murder.”
    “The pliers or shears might have fingerprints.”
    “Thanks. Go ahead.”
    Dol made her back straighter. “This is something you couldn’t have found out. I don’t know whether it has anything to do with the murder or not. When I first came here about a quarter to seven, and found this here, I looked around without touching anything, and there was a crumpled piece of paper on the grass by the end of the bench. I came back here a little after seven, and pretty soon Ranth came, and then Leonard Chisholm. While I was talking with Chisholm I saw Ranth pick up the paper and put it in his pocket. I