He was going to do the talking this time.

“What was it tipped you in the first place?” I asked. “There’s nothing suspicious about a guy being found dead in a bad car smash-up.”

He shrugged. “Be corny, and call it a sixth sense. I don’t know what it is, but you get it after a while if you keep going to these things long enough. You pull a hundred packages out of the file and they’re all just about alike, but one of ‘em will start you ringing like a burglar alarm. The first thing was the way his head was pushed in—”

“Well,” I interrupted, “he did roll a car at sixty-five miles an hour. He figured to get bruised a little—”

“Sure,” he said. “But when reliable witnesses got there he was still under the wheel. He had four broken ribs to prove it. His skull had been crushed by some terrific blow, and the wound was a little to the rear and slightly to the right of the top of his head. So what did he hit it on? The dash? That was in his lap. Granted the top of the car was caved in until it was practically sitting on his haircut, but what he was hit with wasn’t flat—”

“Freaks happen all the time in bad wrecks. Nobody’s ever explained just how you can get knocked out of a pair of shoes that are laced up tight, but it’s been done.”

He nodded. “That’s right. But there were too many freaks in this one. For one thing, he wasn’t drunk. At least, not nearly as drunk as everybody thought. So the only other alternative theory is that he deliberately tried to kill you. And if the people he really meant to kill were still out there at the lake—” He stopped and gave me a cold grin. “That’s where you saw her, of course. Anyway, if they were still out there, which way would they have to go to get back to town?”

“Right past where we crashed,” I said.

He spread his hands. “You see?”

“What makes you so sure he wasn’t drunk?”

“I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t think he was that drunk. Nobody ever established it. No laboratory tests were made. Look at it this way. He was a prominent citizen; he was dead; there was a smell of alcohol about his body, and a pint bottle, about one-third full, in the glove compartment of the car—which didn’t break, incidentally, because the highway maps and papers in it cushioned the shock of the crash. But still the real reason he was assumed to be blotto, drunk was the fact that only a blotto drunk would have cut in like that. You see? They just reversed cause and effect, and didn’t even bother to look for any other explanation.”

“Why didn’t they make the lab tests?” I asked.

“To prove what? Liability for the accident? It was his, from start to finish. They told you that as soon as you came around. The skid marks and the positions of the cars proved that, and what you told them only confirmed it.