“Just one,” Nora said. “But this is just a theory, isn’t it?”
“Call it any name you like. It’s good enough for me.”
“But I thought everybody was supposed to be considered innocent until they were proved guilty and if there was any reasonable doubt, they–”
“That’s for juries, not detectives. You find the guy you think did the murder and you slam him in the can and let everybody know you think he’s guilty and put his picture all over newspapers, and the District Attorney builds up the best theory he can on what information you’ve got and meanwhile you pick up additional details here and there, and people who recognize his picture in the paper–as well as people who’d think he was innocent if you hadn’t arrested him–come in and tell you things about him and presently you’ve got him sitting on the electric chair.” (Two days later a woman in Brooklyn identified Macaulay as a George Foley who for the past three months had been renting an apartment from her.)
“But that seems so loose.”
“When murders are committed by mathematics,” I said, “you can solve them by mathematics. Most of them aren’t and this one wasn’t. I don’t want to go against your idea of what’s right and wrong, but when I say he probably dissected the body so he could carry it into town in bags I’m only saying what seems most probable. That would be on the 6th of October or later, because it wasn’t until then that he laid off the two mechanics Wynant had working in the shop–Prentice and McNaughton– and shut it up. So he buried Wynant under the floor, buried him with a fat man’s clothes and a lame man’s stick and a belt marked D. W. Q., all arranged so they wouldn’t get too much of the lime–or whatever he used to eat off the dead man’s features and flesh–on them, and he re-cemented the floor over the grave. Between police routine and publicity we’ve got more than a fair chance of finding out where he bought or otherwise got the clothes and stick and the cement.” (We traced the cement to him later–he had bought it from a coal and wood dealer uptown–but had no luck with the other things.)
“I hope so,” she said, not too hopefully.
“So now that’s taken care of. By renewing the lease on the shop and keeping it vacant–supposedly waiting for Wynant to return–he can make sure–reasonably sure–that nobody will discover the grave, and if it is accidentally discovered, then fat Mr. D. W. Q.–by that time Wynant’s bones would be pretty bare and you can’t tell whether a man was thin or fat by his skeleton–was murdered by Wynant, which explains why Wynant has made himself scarce. That taken care of, Macaulay forges the power of attorney and, with Julia’s help, settles down to the business of gradually transferring the late Clyde’s money to themselves. Now I’m going theoretical again. Julia doesn’t like murder, and she’s frightened, and he’s not too sure she won’t weaken on him. That’s why he makes her break with Morelli–giving Wynant’s jealousy as an excuse. He’s afraid she might confide to Morelli in a weak moment and, as the time draws near for her still closer friend, Face Peppler, to get out of prison, he gets more and more worried. He’s been safe there as long as Face stayed in, because she’s not likely to put anything dangerous in a letter that has to pass through the warden’s hands, but now . . . Well, he starts to plan, and then all hell breaks loose. Mimi and her children arrive and start hunting for Wynant and I come to town and am in touch with them and he thinks I’m helping them. He decides to play safe on Julia by putting her out of the way. Like it so far?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“It gets worse as it goes along,” I assured her. “On his way here for lunch that day he stops and phones his office, pretending he’s Wynant, and making that appointment at the Plaza, the idea being to establish Wynant’s presence in town. When he leaves here he goes to the Plaza and asks people if they’ve seen Wynant, to make that plausible, and for the same reason phones his office to ask if any further word has come from Wynant, and phones Julia. She tells him she’s expecting Mimi and she tells him Mimi thought she was lying when she said she didn’t know where Wynant was, and Julia probably sounds pretty frightened. So he decides he’s got to beat Mimi to the interview and he does. He beats it over there and kills her. He’s a terrible shot. I saw him shoot during the war. It’s likely he missed her with the first shot, the one that hit the telephone, and didn’t succeed in killing her right away with the other four, but he probably thought she was dead, and, anyhow, he had to get out before Mimi arrived, so he dropped the piece of Wynant’s chain that he had brought along as a clincher–and his having saved that for three months makes it look as if he’d intended killing her from the beginning–and scoots over to the engineer Hermann’s office, where he takes advantage of the breaks and fixes himself up with an alibi. The two things he doesn’t expect–couldn’t very well have foreseen–are that Nunheim, hanging around trying to get at the girl, had seen him leave her apartment–may even have heard the shots–and that Mimi, with blackmail in her heart, was going to conceal the chain for use in shaking down her exhusband. That’s why he had to go down to Philadelphia and send me that wire and the letter to himself and one to Aunt Alice later–if Mimi thinks Wynant’s throwing suspicion on her she’ll get mad enough to give the police the evidence she’s got against him. Her desire to hurt Jorgensen nearly gummed that up, though. Macaulay, by the way, knew Jorgensen was Kelterman. Right after he killed Wynant he had detectives look Mimi and her family up in Europe–their interest in the estate made them potentially dangerous–and the detectives found out who Jorgensen was. We found the reports in Macaulay’s files. He pretended he was getting the information for Wynant, of course. Then he started worrying about me, about my not thinking Wynant guilty and–“