I might as well have told him; he told me that he knew I got it from Jerry. He held the police theory with this variation; I had been having some sort of communication with Jerry through which I had stumbled upon the idea that something was going to happen to Winton Scofield. I had got the notion that it was going to happen through his wife, and so, in my stupid way, I’d driven up to the house deliberately to smash into her car and scare her out of whatever plan she had in her mind. Fred was emotionally worked up, of course, he believed that I meant well by what I tried to do; he didn’t doubt I meant well now. He didn’t blame me for having supposed when I found something was planned against his father that Shirley was in it. “That’s what I thought,” he told me, “when Rowan ’phoned me this morning and got me out of bed to tell me, ‘Mr. Fred, your father’s shot.’ “The family--Kenyon and I--always figured, naturally, that money was what Shirley was after. That’s why we fixed his affairs so she could never get much, even if father had wanted to give it to her. He didn’t have it to give; we had him on an allowance. The only big sum she could get in a lump was his life insurance, which he made over to her. He carried it from the old days, nearly half a million.” Here was some of the stuff I’d come for. All morning my mind had been reaching for a motive, you see,--why old Win Scofield had found a place on Keeban’s board and why his number had come to the top just now. Fred talked on and made it perfectly plain to me. While he talked, I put myself in Keeban’s place for a while and tried to take things from his point of view. I went back a bit to do this--back a few months to the time when old Win, divorced once more and rejuvenated, had arrived again at the cabarets and resumed beau-ing about with the girls. I thought that when Shirley--or Christina--had met him, she talked him over with Keeban and they’d marked him down between them for easy meat. She married him to get away with the big money old Win was supposed to have but hadn’t; for Fred and Kenyon had seen to that, as I’ve mentioned. Win took her to Paris and brought her back to live with him on an allowance. Maybe from the first she had had her eyes on the old man’s insurance; but I didn’t think so. I thought, “She got into this marriage with an idea of an easy get-away with a pile; and when Ken and Fred fooled her, she decided to fool them; she saw Keeban again and they decided to get that insurance money. But they had a big difficulty with that; they had to do more than merely ‘croak’ old Win; they had to do it so Shirley would not possibly be connected and so the insurance money would be paid over to her and she could get away with it.” There, surely, was a job for them when the family and friends thought what they did of Shirley.