All right, suppose a jury would accept such an impalpable theory as a motive, then what? No murder weapon. No witnesses. Not even a genuine murder yet, because Calvin was still alive.
Yes, old Doc Thorsen had kept the mathematician alive somehow. The elder Baxter lay on his back across two, white iron beds pushed together in the City Hospital, and Thorsen came in to report to me.
"The clot seems to be absorbing better than I expected, but it's doubtful that we could operate to remove the paralyzing pressure. The puncture is deep into the brain tissue, and he's too nearly gone to survive such an ordeal."
"Any chance that he might recover consciousness?"
"Pretty remote," Thorsen told me. "We'll keep a special nurse with him as you ordered, just in case he does."
I left Calvin Baxter pale and motionless as some great statue supine amid the tangle of plasma, glucose and saline hoses, under his transparent oxygen tent. The wound that had laid him low was no more than a dot of dried blood on his massive forehead.
Until his death, his file would remain under unsolved crimes. In my own mind I was no longer sure of anything, except that if there was a nickel in Calvin Baxter's discovery, his mercenary brother would wring it out.
And he did. Even before Calvin died.
Some seven weeks later Leo marketed the "MYSTERY i-GUN" as a combined, toy, trick and puzzle, and it set the whole damned world on its ear!
I located Leo Baxter in his new suite of offices on the 34th floor of the State Building. He peeled back his lips in a sneery grin. "I thought you'd be showing up."