"But, right away, Dunmore decided to kill Rivers. He called
him on the phone as soon as he left the table--here I'm speaking by the
book; I walked in on him, in the gunroom, as he was completing the call,
though I didn't know it at the time--and arranged to see him that
evening. Probably to devise ways and means of dealing with the Jeff Rand
menace, for an ostensible reason.
"So that night, Dunmore killed Rivers, with a bayonet. And here we have
some more Aristotelian confusion of orders of abstraction. The bayonet
is defined, verbally, as a 'soldier's weapon,' so Farnsworth and Mick
McKenna and the rest of them bemused themselves with suspects like
Stephen Gresham and Pierre Jarrett, and ignored Dunmore, who'd never had
an hour's military training in his life. I'd like to check up on what
picture-shows Dunmore had been seeing in the week or so before the
killing. I'll bet anything he'd been to one of these South-Pacific
banzai-operas. And speaking of confusing orders of abstraction, Mick
McKenna and his merry men pulled a classic in that line. They saw
Dunmore's automobile, verbally defined as a 'gray Plymouth coupe' in
Rivers's drive at the estimated time of the murder. Pierre Jarrett has
a car of that sort, so they included the inferential idea of Pierre
Jarrett's ownership of the car so described.
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