Flynn's In by Gregory McDonald Page A

football game. But I just had to get away.”
    “Why doesn’t everyone at table state right here and now where he was last night at eleven o’clock?” said Clifford.
    “There speaks the man with the perfect alibi,” said Flynn.
    “There speaks a man who reads mystery novels,” said Ashley.
    “Actually, not,” said Clifford. “Wrong in both cases.”
    “You don’t read mysteries?” said Ashley. “You never read
Don Quixote?”
    “I went to my room about nine thirty. I was asleep by quarter to ten.”
    Clifford was the youngest at the table. Flynn guessed he was in his early twenties. His dark blue sweat shirt complemented his wide, dark eyes and neatly clipped black hair. The skin over his prominent cheekbones was tight and clear and slightly touched by sun even in October. His neck was muscular and suggested an athletic body. Of everyone at the table, he had appeared to be listening most intently to Flynn.
    “So was I, so was I,” said Buckingham. “In my room early, asleep. I didn’t even hear the shot.”
    “You were passed out,” said Lauderdale.
    “Yes,” said Buckingham. “I’d had a lot to drink. Long before ten o’clock.”
    “Long before six o’clock,” said Lauderdale.
    “We don’t watch that sort of thing around here,” said Rutledge. “We surely don’t comment on it.”
    In his fifties, Buckingham had the large, wide-open facethat almost seems to be a guarantee of success in business or politics. Such a face, rightly or wrongly, gives the impression of a bigness and frankness on the part of the man himself. Flynn had the sense of having seen photographs of Buckingham. At least Buckingham’s hair was thinner than agreed with some previous knowledge of Buckingham’s face. He had the build of someone who had played college football a generation before. And if he’d had too much to drink the night before, Flynn thought, studying him, he was not showing much sign of it at lunch the next day.
    “What time did we finish playing gin?” Ashley leaned against the table and asked Arlington.
    “About ten fifteen, ten thirty. Then I went into the television room to look at my local news off the Betamax.”
    Arlington, too, looked vaguely familiar. The curious thing about him was that his body was short and flabby; his face not at all fat or sagged. His eyebrows rose unnaturally at their outer ends, giving him a peculiarly supercilious expression. Flynn suspected that close examination would reveal scars of cosmetic surgery along his hairline, above and below his ears, under his jaw. Arlington looked in his early fifties but Flynn guessed he was in his mid-sixties.
    “And I went for a walk,” said Ashley. “I walked around the lake.”
    “That takes just an hour,” Rutledge told Flynn.
    “In the dark?” asked Flynn.
    “There’s a path.”
    “When I came back the shooting had taken place. Perhaps I heard it. I’m not sure. Apt to get sort of abstracted, when I walk.”
    Ashley was no more overweight than a normally healthy man is, in his mid-forties. His complexion was ruddy enough, but partly the source of his ruddiness was broken veins, and his eyes were liverish. Of all the men there, Ashley seemed to have given himself the closest shave, the most careful combing job.
    “You were counting the days,” Lauderdale said, “until you have to declare yourself a bankrupt.”
    Ashley glanced at Lauderdale. As he reached for his roll, Ashley’s hand shook.
    “When Icameback,” Ashley said, “I found everyone in the storage room. Poor Huttenbach lying there, bits of him on the wall.”
    “Ashley’s not going bankrupt,” Buckingham said loudly. “When did The Rod and Gun Club ever let one of its members go bankrupt?”
    Lauderdale said: “When it serves our purposes.”
    In his early fifties, Lauderdale’s extreme thinness could not diminish his bones, his man’s shoulders beneath his blouse, the big knuckles of his hands. Clearly, Judge Lauderdale would look far more