Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 01 by Double for Death Page A

connection between my father’s death and my previous brief contact with Miss Grant. So it’s none of your business. Q.E.D. I knew I’d find a use for my geometry some day.”
    Derwin dropped his damp handkerchief to the desk. “I think you should tell me about it anyway,” he insisted. “If it is completely irrelevant and innocuous—”
    “I didn’t say it was innocuous, I said it had no connection with murder. It wasn’t innocuous. I made an ass of myself and earned her venomous hatred.”
    “Ah! hatred—”
    “No no, no like that.” Jeffrey waved it off again. “I mean the kind of hate that’s just the opposite on the other side. All you have to do is turn it over, like flipping a pancake, but it’s one hard trick.”
    “You said venomous.”
    “Cross it out.”
    Derwin screwed up his lips. “Let me ask you this, Mr. Thorpe. Do you—no, I’ll put it this way. Is your attitude towards Miss Grant such that you would not want her to suffer the legal penalty for killing your father if she were guilty?”
    Jeffrey stared a second, then snorted contemptuously. “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” he stated.
    The district attorney pulled open a drawer of his desk, got out a large rectangle of pasteboard, glanced at it and handed it across. “Did you ever see that before?”
    Jeffrey looked at it and Miranda stretched from her chair to look with him. It was a portrait photograph of Nancy Grant, her lips parted a little and her eyes laughing. At the lower right was an inscription in a round bold hand generous with space and ink: “I’ll never forget!” Beneath it was the signature, “Nancy Grant.”
    “Is that for sale?” Jeffrey demanded.
    “No. Did you ever see it before?”
    “No.”
    “Did you, Mrs. Pemberton?”
    “No. Where did it come from?”
    “It was found in a drawer in a cabinet in your father’s dressing-room in the New York residence.”
    Miranda’s eyes widened. Jeffrey’s mouth fell open. He closed it, looked at the photograph again, glared at Derwin and stated, “That’s a goddam lie.”
    “No, it isn’t, Mr. Thorpe.” Derwin met his glare. “Neither is this.” He opened the drawer again. “Here are two gloves. As you see, they are of yellow cotton, good quality, well-made, the kind that women wear in the summer. One of them was found on the grass back of a shrub twenty feet from the window through which Andrew Grant says he saw your father smoking a cigar and listening to the radio Sunday night. The other was found on the running board of the car which Nancy Grant parked near the gate when she drove her uncle there. We have found—”
    Miranda exclaimed, “But these are both for the right hand!”
    “That’s correct, Mrs. Pemberton. We have found no proof that they belong to Nancy Grant. They were bought, as the label shows, at Hartlespoon’s and they have sold several hundred dozen pairs of them this season. I do not pretend that the fact that she works at Hartlespoon’s has any important significance. But she was at the bungalow Sunday night and so far there is no reason to suspect that any other woman was anywhere near there. According to her story, she was never on that side of the bungalow where the window is; she went straight in at the terrace entrance upon her arrival. One of the gloves was found on the running board of the car she was driving. So while there is no proof, there is a strong presumption that the gloves are her property and that she dropped one of them outside that window where it was found; in which case, she is lying about her movements. She also says that prior to Sunday evening she had never met, or even seen, your father. Again, the photograph furnishes a strong presumption, if not proof, that she is lying.”
    “Good heavens,” Miranda muttered.
    Jeffrey stood up.
    “Where are you going, Mr. Thorpe?”
    “I’m going to find Miss Grant.”
    “Take in the slack, Jeff dear,” Miranda advised. “She won’t speak to