"No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works."
"You call that working?" I demanded. "Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?"
"Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories."
My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld.
I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it.
"What was this a test for?" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. "What are you planning to do now?"
"This was no test, Venetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat."
"Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you, Carmen! Why, that's murder."
"Not," Carmen said, "without no corpus delecti."
"The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim," I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training.