“I know,” Gregor said. “I felt the same way after I first saw the drawings in the original case, when I first had access to the cross-sections taken from Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body. I went on feeling that way even after I handled the actual murder weapon. I was doing then what you are doing now. I was trying to think of some weapon that resembled the dagger.”
“But you said there was a weapon that resembled the dagger,” James protested. “You just did.”
“No, I didn’t.” Gregor shook his head. “A murder weapon is not necessarily a weapon per se. People are killed with knives and guns and hand grenades, but they are also killed with bookends and bowling balls and pinking shears. Some nonweapons are obvious candidates for murder weapons, like straight-edged razors and fireplace pokers. Others are not.”
“So this is a weapon that’s not a weapon.” Fred Scherrer was following the proceedings shrewdly. “Surely the police know enough to look for something like that. Even assuming it had been cleaned up, whatever it was, why didn’t they find it?”
“They didn’t find it because it wasn’t there,” Gregor explained. “It was back where it belonged, back where it always was when its owner didn’t have to carry it around. I don’t know if the police ever saw it. If they did, I don’t know how they would have connected it. It would have been different if they had found it in the house.”
“If it wasn’t in the house, where was it?” James sounded exasperated. “And are you honestly telling me that the murderer kept it? Just washed it off and kept it? And all these years? Whatever for?”
“The murderer had to keep the weapon,” Gregor explained, “because it was not easy to replace, it was needed for other things, and it would have been missed. Whether it was kept around for years, I have no idea. Paul Hazzard and Candida DeWitt may have been killed with a replacement. It doesn’t matter. The difficulties, the impossibilities, of disposing of this weapon do lead me to one conclusion though. I think Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard was killed in cold blood. I also think her murder was planned—but I don’t think it was planned for very long. I think the murderer thought it through for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, standing in this room.”
Alyssa stirred on the love seat. “That can’t have been the way Daddy died,” she said, “not if you’re solving his murder with earrings in people’s guest rooms. That could only have been the way Daddy died if that woman did it in a fit of pique then and there.”
“If that woman, as you put it, had murdered your father in a fit of pique then and there, that ornamental dagger wouldn’t have been at the scene covered in your father’s blood.”
“What a wonderful way to put it,” Alyssa said sourly.
“It had to be accounted for,” Gregor told her. “And there was only one way to account for it. It was being used to cover up for the real weapon, to throw suspicion in other directions.”
“Why didn’t your murderer just use that ornamental dagger on Daddy?” Alyssa demanded. “Wouldn’t that have made more sense?”
“Maybe it would have,” Gregor said, “but it wouldn’t have been so sure. The murderer had no idea if that ornamented dagger could actually kill anybody.”
Fred Scherrer snorted. “To hear Paul tell it, that idiotic thing had slaughtered tribesmen without number in its native wherever. He was always very big on how deadly that dagger was.”
“What I want to know is where the real weapon actually is,” James said. “How do we get to it and what does it look like?”
“Oh, that,” Gregor said. “My guess is that the weapon is here.”
“Why?” Fred Scherrer asked.
Bob Cheswicki broke in. “Because we already went to where it usually is this morning and it wasn’t there.”
“Give me a second here.”
Gregor leaned forward and got a hand on Caroline Hazzard’s tote bag. He had it lifted up off the floor before she had a chance to stop him. He held it close to his chest and looked through it. Then he said, “Here it is” and looked up at the assembled company.
“She needed it for work, you see,” he said. “She couldn’t just throw it away because it was such an unusually large size; she had to have it made to order. She had to have all her equipment made to order. It was expensive and it was obvious. She couldn’t just have it disappear.”
He pulled the oversize compass out of the tote bag and dropped the tote bag itself onto the floor. He held the compass up for everybody to see. The big pencil clamped into one point of the V looked dull. The sharp metal tip of the anchor point looked anything but. The metal of the compass had been oiled and shined. It glinted in the light pouring in through the window from the street.