Fer-De-Lance

She nodded. "Yes, we all did. I think I told you- didn’t I?-That one day last summer Larry and Manuel Kimball played a match of tennis and my father and I acted as umpire and linesman. They had a bet on it, and Larry paid Mr. Kimball with a ten dollar bill and Mr. Kimball wanted us to write our names on it as a souvenir. We were sitting-on the side terrace-"

"And Manuel Kimball took the bill?"

"Of course. He won it."

"And this is it?"

"Certainly, there are our signatures. Mr. Goodwin, I suppose it’s just vulgar curiosity, but where did you ever get it?"

I took the bill and replaced it carefully in the envelope-not Carlo Maffei’s envelope, a patent one with a clip on it so the signatures wouldn’t rub any more than they had already-and put it in my pocket.

"I’m sorry, Miss Barstow. Since it’s just vulgar curiosity you can wait. Not long, I hope. And may I say without offense, you’re looking swell. I was thinking when you came in, I’d like to pinch your cheeks."

"What!" She stared, then she laughed. "That’s a compliment?"

"It sure is. If you know how many cheeks there are I wouldn’t bother to pinch. Good day, Miss Barstow."

We shook hands while she still laughed.

Headed south again through the drizzle, I considered that the ten-dollar bill clinched it. The other three items in Carlo Maffei’s envelope were good evidence, but this was something that no one but Manual Kimball could have had, and it had got to Carlo Maffei. How, I wondered. Well: Manuel Kimball had kept it in his wallet as a souvenir. His payments of money, one or more, to Maffei for making the driver, had been made not in a well-lighted room but in places dark enough to defeat the idle curiosity of observers; and in the darkness the souvenir had been included in a payment. Probably Manuel had later discovered his carelessness and demanded the souvenir back, and Maffei had claimed it had been spent unnoticed. That might have aroused Manuel’s early suspicions of Maffei, and certainly it accounted for Maffei’s recognition of the significance of the death, and its manner, of Peter Oliver Barstow; for that name, and two other Barstow names, had been signed on the ten-dollar bill he was preserving.

Yes, Manuel Kimball would live long enough to be sorry he had won that tennis match.