“Your psychology was perfect,” Shayne went on swiftly. “And your timing of the whole affair was also perfect. She ran out of the hotel looking for her father. She was overwrought, and when she saw the body of an old man superficially resembling her father, dressed exactly as she had just seen him, with his face smashed and bloody, she naturally leaped to the conclusion that he was the same man she’d just seen out the window.”
Carson laughed hollowly. “You should be writing mystery stories instead of trying to solve them. You saw me there yourself a few minutes after he died.”
“Philip Steele just duplicated the stunt in exactly six minutes,” Shayne reminded him. “A dentist and his wife saw a bearded man in miner’s clothing run away from the body. That was you, in your disguise.
“And you had timed it so Nora had only a few minutes with the body before you rushed her off to the opera house. She was weeping and torn with grief, in no condition to make a close examination of the corpse. Then, of course, she had to die, too — to prevent her from later discovering Pete wasn’t actually her father — and to make sure that the legacy went directly to you.”
Carson laughed again. “Of all the goddam fairy tales,” he marveled.
“It’s the way it has to be,” Shayne argued. “I showed Raton that recent picture of Screwloose and he couldn’t identify the man as Dalcor either. Just as Nora couldn’t. Why, then, did she suddenly do so through the window last night?”
“How do I know?” snarled Carson. “Just the right light — a familiar expression on his face—”
Shayne shook his head. “You made a half a dozen other mistakes. After you killed Nora, you knew there was no further need to keep on with Mrs. Mattson to get the money, so you told her off. And those clippings you supplied Bryant to hide under the hearth were from Nora’s scrapbook — with the exception of the one of Pete himself which he had torn out of the paper. The others were neatly clipped with scissors to show the date and source — as every actor clips his notices.”
“All that adds up to exactly nothing,” Carson cried scornfully. “You admit Nora was dead before the play ended. I can easily prove I couldn’t have been absent from the theater for as much as five minutes. And it takes longer than that to get to the end of the flume where her body could be thrown in the creek.”
“Yes,” Shayne agreed. “I timed it this afternoon. It takes fifteen minutes to reach the nearest end of the flume. And that gives you a swell alibi, Carson. Except for the trap-door into the flume from the old cellar under the opera house. Until I saw that opening into the flume this afternoon, I confess I didn’t see how you’d managed it. You didn’t have to leave the building to kill her. You got her into the cellar during the first act, killed her and dropped her body through the trap-door into the rushing water that carried her into the creek below town.”