Any Shape or Form by Elizabeth Daly Page B

one hand, her cigarette drooping from the fingers of the other. Her long, slim legs were extended, her feet crossed. Officer Ames dragged his eyes from the shimmering convolutions of her hair and applied himself to his notes.
    â€œNow I understand,” said Griggs, “that this afternoon noon you caught up with Mr. David Malcolm outside that rose garden—while he was hanging up a couple of dead crows—and had a word with him.”
    â€œOh; yes. I did. But I didn’t catch up with him, exactly, you know!” She made the correction with gentle tolerance. “I just happened to pass him; I was on my way to the greenhouse.”
    â€œWould you tell me what he said to you?”
    â€œWhat he said to me? Why on earth do you—but of course you must have some reason for asking that. Let me see. There had been some talk about our going down for a walk to the swimming pool, but I had realized that it would be rough and perhaps wet, and”—she looked at her delicate shoes—“I decided not to go. I told him I wasn’t going after all, and I think he just said all right.”
    â€œAnd he went off alone?”
    â€œWell, I didn’t see him go, because I walked straight across the road and over to the greenhouse.”
    â€œYou stayed inside there for fifteen minutes or more, probably twenty,” said Griggs.
    â€œDid I?” She took a sip of highball. “To tell you the truth, Lieutenant,” she smiled at him, “I was a little tired of the party. I had had quite enough of poor Mrs. Malcolm. She embarrassed me.”
    â€œEmbarrassed you?”
    â€œHer clothes were so insane. She wore a wreath, you know, poor old soul, and a sort of dressing gown, and bare feet in beach sandals. To be perfectly frank, it made me sick to look at her.”
    Griggs picked up a sheet of paper and put it down again. “You were just killing time in that greenhouse?”
    â€œUntil I could decently suggest going home.”
    â€œYou heard that third shot—the one that killed Mrs. Malcolm?”
    â€œYes, I did; faintly.”
    â€œWho did you think fired it?”
    â€œI didn’t think. I knew the rifle was there where David Malcolm left it, and I didn’t know that Henry Gamadge and Mrs. Malcolm had left the place. I thought—or rather I should have thought if I’d thought anything—that Henry had fired it.” She added: “Of course people will say that the Malcolms had a motive.”
    â€œPeople?”
    â€œPeople that don’t know them.”
    â€œThey had a motive, Mrs. Drummond.”
    â€œBut they didn’t know they’d have an opportunity. They didn’t know Mrs. Malcolm was going up to the rockery, and they didn’t know they could shoot her from that one place in the rose garden.” She added brightly: “I don’t know what you can do in a case like this.”
    Griggs looked at her.
    â€œI mean you can’t arrest both the Malcolms, can you, just because one of them might have done it?”
    Griggs said after a pause: “This is a preliminary examination. The evidence hasn’t more than begun to come in yet. And you mustn’t assume that we’re only thinking of the Malcolms, Mrs. Drummond.”
    â€œBut who on earth else...” She stared at him. Then she said: “I meant that you simply have to have something definite, before you arrest people. Don’t you?”
    â€œDefinite? Motive’s definite; Mrs. Drummond.”
    â€œBut don’t juries want more, when they’re—oh, it’s too ridiculous! The Malcolms! If you only knew them! That is, nobody can know Cora; but at least they’d know she wouldn’t commit a murder. David is the simplest, kindest—why, he’s a perfect child. And he was ever so much farther away from the place than Cora was—he picked those asters by the pool. That’s twice as far as the tool