"Just this. When I talked to Hughes that first night I came down here with you, while we all supposed the death a suicide, he couldn't keep his resentment against your father, his hatred of him, from boiling over every time he was mentioned."
"Get on," said Worth wearily. "Father hired a jail-bird that came cheap. Probably put it to himself that he was giving the man a chance to go straight."
I glanced up. This was just about what I remembered Thomas Gilbert to have said in the entry that told of the hiring of Eddie. Worth nodded grimly at my startled face.
"Eddie's gone straight since then," he filled in. "That is, he's kept out of jail, which is going straight for Eddie. He'd certainly hate the man who held him as he's been held for five years. Not motive enough for murder though."
"There's more. The 1920 diary you gave me last night tells when and why the extra bolts were put on the study doors. Your father had been missing liquor and cigars and believed Hughes was taking them."
"Pilfering!" with an expression of distaste. "That doesn't—"
"Hold on!" I stopped him. "On February twelfth your father left money, marked coin and paper money, as if by accident, on the top of the liquor cabinet; not exposed, but dropped in under the edge of the big ash tray so it might look as though it were forgotten—in a sense, lost there."
"How much?" came the quick question.
"Fifty one dollars." He looked around at me.
"Just one dollar above the limit of petty larceny; a hundred cents added to put it in the felony class that meant state's prison. So he could have sent Eddie to the pen,—eh? I guess you've got a motive there, Boyne."