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mostly U.S. and British 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