"What? No, not in the least. Didn't you notice?"
"Notice what?"
"Losch was an angry man, yes, indeed."
"Angry," snapped Mandleco. "Good reason!"
"No," Beardsley mused. "The wrong reason. Murder—at least the type we're concerned with—is a form of release, you know. A killer may commit his deed in anger, but once the thing is accomplished he never retains that anger long." Beardsley gazed contemplatively at the screen. "You know, I admire that man. I really do. He had the convictions at least, if not the courage."
Mandleco pounced on that. "Then you think Losch is innocent?"
"I didn't say that!" Beardsley paused in a strange hesitation; his eyes had gone remote beneath the very thick glasses, and his words came slow and isolated. "But he's part of the record. Yes, it should be quite a record. In fact, I have a feeling—you know?—that this case is going to stand as a monument in the annals of crime...."
Mandleco stared at him, searched for the meaning there and then gave it up. Why had he ever committed himself to this situation anyway? Did this little man really know as much as he pretended, or was he merely fumbling around in the dregs of a forgotten past? To be sure, Beardsley was a pathetic enough figure; but the man had once been great in his field, and there was something about him even now....
There was the sudden way Beardsley had of losing his abstracted look, the eyes beneath those ridiculous lenses coming to a sharp bright focus with tiny livening flecks in the gray of the iris; and the way the change lifted his features from mediocrity to the alertness of a terrier. It was absurd, it was farcical ... and it was all very disturbing.
"You told me," Mandleco said testily, "that the killer was someone Carmack trusted enough to have in his home. Then you bludgeon Losch with the idea it was a person Carmack had reason to fear! It would seem to me, Beardsley—"