I didn't admit it to him, but he was right. Calvin's "accident" seemed too convenient to the purposes of his practical little brother, Leo. What's more, the lab and medical men on the force were just as mystified today as they were when we brought Calvin in with the needle-thin hole in his skull. Old Doc Thorsen had admitted to me that he could name no implement—not even a surgical instrument—that could have inflicted such a narrow gauge hole. It had to be caused by a fragment, but there was no fragment in the brain!
"Leo," I said, "I know you consider this case closed, but I want you to do me a favor. I want to go over your brother's lab once more."
"But you've—" He stopped, shrugged and nodded his head. "Okay. I'm interested in finding out what hurt Cal, as much as you are. I'll tell you, I'm busy the rest of this week, but I'll meet you at the old house next Monday evening at eight. You see, I closed up the place and moved downtown."
I agreed, with the feeling that he was deliberately making me wait just to annoy me. Leo Baxter was an important man now, a man graciously willing to cooperate with the police—at his own convenience. I stood up. "Your brother has been calling your name. I suppose they told you that?"
"They phoned. Doctor said it was just mutterings."
"You haven't even been to see him?"
"What's the use? He wouldn't recognize me."
Well, it wasn't any of my business, really, but it's funny how you get to hate a man for his attitude. I don't know what I expected to find by going over that lab-workshop again, but whatever it was, I hoped it would incriminate Leo. On the face of it he was guilty of nothing more than a premature marketing of a new device, but the way he was cashing in on Calvin's genius certainly did the dying man no honor.
Cash in was right! The toys sold like bubble-gum. The papers, radio, and TV picked up the sensational gimmick and gave it a billion bucks worth of free advertising. And the profitable part of it was that the i-Gun was so simple to mass-produce that Leo's fifteen contracting manufacturers were almost able to keep up with the astronomical demand.
Before that week was up, the Wall Street Journal estimated there were already more i-Guns in the hands of the juvenile public than all the yo-yos ever produced. They retailed at eighty-five cents, made of plastic with a hole in the back where you could change the pen-light battery. They sold, all right. They sold in drugstores and toy stores and dime stores and department stores. Toddler's, tykes and teen-agers went for them. And adults. Maybe 30 million of them were in the hands of the public before I saw Leo Baxter next.