"Oh, certainly," Rand assured him. "Now, all they have on you is that there was ill-feeling between you and Rivers about that fake North & Cheney, and that you were in Rivers's shop yesterday evening?" Rand's new client grimaced. "I wish that were all!" he said. "The worst part of it is the way Rivers was killed. See, back in Kaiser Willie's war, before I was assigned a company of my own, I was regimental bayonet-instruction officer. And after we got to France, I always carried a rifle and bayonet at the front; hell, I must have killed close to a dozen Krauts just the way Rivers was killed. And during Schicklgruber's war, I volunteered as bayonet instructor for the local Home Guard." "My God!" Rand made a wry face. "There must be close to a hundred people around here who'd know that, and all of them are probably convinced that you killed Rivers, and are expressing that opinion at the top of their voices to all comers. You don't want a detective, you want a magician!" He took another drag at the cigar, and blew smoke through a circular gun-rack beside him. "What sort of a character is this Farnsworth, anyhow?" he asked. "Before the war, I had all the D.A.'s in the state typed and estimated, but since I got back--" Gresham slandered the county prosecutor's legitimacy. "God-damn headline-hunting little egotist! He's running for re-election this year, too." "One way, that could be bad. On the other hand, it might be easy to throw a scare into him.... Stephen, when you were at Rivers's, were you smoking a cigar?" Gresham shook his head. "No. I threw my cigar away when I got out of the car, and I didn't light another one till I got home. If you remember, I was lighting it when I came in here." "Yes; so you were. Well, I don't suppose, in view of the state of relations between you and Rivers, that you had a drink with him, either?" "I wouldn't drink that guy's liquor if I were dying of snakebite, and he wouldn't offer me a drink if he knew I was," Gresham declared. "Well, did you notice, back near the fireplace, a low table with a fifth of Haig & Haig Pinchbottle, and a couple of glasses, and a siphon, and so on, on it?" "I saw the table. There was an ashtray on it, and a book--I think it was Gluckman's _United States Martial Pistols and Revolvers_--but no bottle, or siphon, or glasses." "All right, then; it was the killer." Rand explained about the drinks, and the cigar-ashes. He went on to tell about the destruction of Rivers's record-cards. "I don't get that." Gresham was puzzled. "Unless it was young Gillis, after all. He could have been knocking down on Rivers, and Rivers caught him at it."