Free Rex Stout by The Hand in the Glove Page A

told him to put it back and he denied he had picked it up. I asked Chisholm to get it, and first he demanded it and then he took it out of Ranth’s pocket and gave it to me. Ranth said it had been in his possession all the time and that I couldn’t prove it had been on the grass and he had picked it up. Which is silly.” Dol opened herbag and took the paper out. “Here it is if you want to look at it.”
    The trooper took it and straightened it out and put the flashlight on it. Jake moved to look over his shoulder. They took their time over it. The trooper looked up to peer at Dol in the dim light:
    “Who is Cleo Audrey Storrs?”
    “Mrs. Storrs. Mr. Storrs’ wife. Widow.”
    The trooper grunted, undid a button of his jacket, and folded the paper and stowed it away inside. “What makes you think this had nothing to do with the murder?”
    “I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t know whether it had or not.”
    “Oh. Was that what you said? Then it wasn’t this paper that made you think it was murder. Was it?”
    “No. I—” Dol hesitated. She resumed: “You know, I really am telling you things. The way you act, your tone of voice—it sounds as if you were dragging them out of me. You aren’t, you know.”
    “Yeah. That’s all right, go ahead. You’ve been going to tell me why you told the butler it was murder.”
    “I am prepared to. I told him it was murder because I was perfectly certain that Storrs was not a man to kill himself under any conceivable circumstances, and absolutely not in any circumstance which I had reason to suppose existed. I knew him fairly well.”
    “Was that all?”
    “That was all.”
    “Not hardly enough,” the trooper said drily. “After all, it’s a serious matter to go saying a man’s been murdered. And you a detective. There might be circumstances you didn’t know about.”
    Dol nodded. “I realized that. Later, when I came back here after telling Belden to phone the police. I saw that I had jumped to a conclusion when I had no right to, so I looked around more. That was when I found the reel of wire in the toolhouse. Then I came here and looked, and found real proof.”
    “Proof of murder?”
    “Yes.”
    “Here?” He sounded skeptical.
    Dol affirmed, “Yes. Part of it was what I heard you talking about—about jumping off the bench and kicking it back and so on. I thought you couldn’t tell for sure about that without trying it. But something else seemed quite certain. May I have the flash?”
    He handed it to her, and she aimed it at the trunk of the tree some four yards away, and slowly moved the beam up and down. She said, “You see that spiral—the way the wire winds around. Did you look at that?”
    “Yeah, I saw it.”
    “Well, it seemed to me that was no way to fasten a wire. Not even for a man who never did it before. I thought I was a fair subject for experiment, because I have never fastened a wire to a tree in my life, so I imagined myself doing it. Here I am with a wire I am going to hang myself with. I drop one end over the limb and leave it dangling at the right height, and take the other end to the trunk to fasten it. It is much longer than I need. What do I do? I might bend it around that crotch and maybe pass it around a few times, and then twist it around itself so it couldn’t slip; or I might secure it to that limb a little lower—that one—; or I might wind it around the trunk itself and end with a twist, but if I did so I would certainly wind it straight around, and anybody in the world would.”
    The trooper muttered, “Somebody didn’t.”
    Dol nodded impatiently. “But not a man who was going to hang himself with it. Not a man who had the wire free and could take his time and fasten it as he pleased. Look at it! Imagine that you are there by the trunk with the wire in your hands, and it passes through the crotch and up over the limb and down again, and there at the end it is looped around the neck of a man you are trying to