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Empire but a really exceptional lot of early German States as well, and there were also—well, before I get carried away, are you interested in stamps at all?”
    “Only when I’ve a letter to mail.”
    “Oh. Well, this was a fine collection, let me say that much and leave it at that. The seller had to have all cash and the transaction had to go unrecorded. Taxes, you understand.”
    “Indeed I do. The system of taxation makes criminals of us all.”
    “I don’t really think of it as criminal,” Beale said.
    “Few people do. But go on, sir.”
    “What more is there to say? I had to raise fifty thousand dollars on the quiet to close the deal on this fine lot of stamps. By dealing with Speldron, I was able to borrow the money without filling out a lot of forms or giving him anything but my word. I was quite confident I would triple my money by the time I broke up the collection and sold it in job lots to a variety of dealers and collectors. I’ll probably take in a total of fifty thousand out of the U.S. issues alone, and I know a buyer who will salivate when he gets a look at the German States issues.”
    “So it didn’t bother you to pay Speldron his thousand a week.”
    “Not a bit. I figured to have half the stamps sold within a couple of months, and the first thing I’d do would be to repay the fifty thousand dollars principal and close out the loan. I’d have paid eight or ten thousand dollars in interest, say, but what’s that compared to a profit of fifty or a hundred thousand dollars? Speldron was doing me a favor and I appreciated it. Oh, he was doing himself a favor too, two percent interest per week didn’t put him in the hardship category, but it was just good business for both of us, no question about it.”
    “You’d dealt with him before?”
    “Maybe a dozen times over the years. I’ve borrowed sums ranging between ten and seventy thousand dollars. I never heard the interest payments called vigorish before, but I always paid them promptly. And no one ever threatened to break my legs. We did business together, Speldron and I. And it always worked out very well for both of us.”
    “The prosecution argued that by killing Speldron you erased your debt to him. That’s certainly a motive a jury can understand, Mr. Beale. In a world where men are commonly killed for the price of a bottle of whiskey, fifty thousand dollars does seem enough to kill a man over.”
    “But I’d be crazy to kill for that sum. I’m not a pauper. If I was having trouble paying Speldron all I had to do was sell the stamps.”
    “And if you had trouble selling them?”
    “Then I could have liquidated other merchandise from my stock. I could have mortgaged my home. Why, I could have raised enough on the house to pay off Speldron three times over. That car they found the gun in, that’s an Antonelli Scorpion. The car alone is worth more than I owed Speldron.”
    “Indeed,” Martin Ehrengraf said. “But this Walker Murchison. How does he come into the picture?”
    “He killed Speldron.”
    “How do we know this, Mr. Beale?”
    Grantham Beale got to his feet. He’d been sitting on his iron cot, leaving the cell’s one chair for the lawyer. Now he stood up, stretched, and walked to the rear of the cell. For a moment he stood regarding some graffito on the cell wall. Then he turned and looked at Ehrengraf.
    “Speldron and Murchison were partners,” he said. “I dealt only with Speldron because Murchison steered clear of unsecured loans. And Murchison had an insurance business in which Speldron did not participate. Their joint ventures included real estate, investments, and other activities where large sums of money moved around quickly with few records kept of exactly what took place.”
    “Shady operations,” Ehrengraf said.
    “For the most part. Not always illegal, not entirely illegal, but, yes, I like your word. Shady.”
    “So they were partners, and it is not unheard of for one to kill one’s partner.