“Women are funny that way. Always surprisin’ you. No sense of values. The most peaceful of ’em will shoot a man in cold blood without warnin’—”
He suddenly sat up, and his little blue eyes glistened like china. “By gad!” He fairly blurted the ejaculation. “Muriel had dinner alone with Benson the night he was shot—the very night. Saw ’em together myself at the Marseilles.”
“You don’t say, really!” muttered Vance incuriously. “But I suppose we all must eat.… By the bye, how well did you yourself know Benson?”
The colonel looked startled, but Vance’s innocuous expression seemed to reassure him.
“I? My dear fellow! I’ve known Alvin Benson fifteen years. At least fifteen—maybe longer. Showed him the sights in this old town before the lid was put on. A live town it was then. Wide open. Anything you wanted. Gad—what times we had! Those were the days of the old Haymarket. Never thought of toddlin’ home till breakfast—”
Vance again interrupted his irrelevancies.
“How intimate are your relations with Major Benson?”
“The major?… That’s another matter. He and I belong to different schools. Dissimilar tastes. We never hit it off. Rarely see each other.”
He seemed to think that some explanation was necessary, for before Vance could speak again, he nodded, “The major, you know, was never one of the boys, as we say. Disapproved of gaiety. Didn’t mix with our little set. Considered me and Alvin too frivolous. Serious-minded chap.”
Vance ate in silence for a while, then asked in an offhand way, “Did you do much speculating through Benson and Benson?”
For the first time the colonel appeared hesitant about answering. He ostentatiously wiped his mouth with his napkin.
“Oh—dabbled a bit,” he at length admitted airily. “Not very lucky, though.… We all flirted now and then with the Goddess of Chance in Benson’s office.”
Throughout the lunch Vance kept plying him with questions along these lines; but at the end of an hour he seemed to be no nearer anything definite than when he began. Colonel Ostrander was voluble, but his fluency was vague and disorganized. He talked mainly in parentheses and insisted on elaborating his answers with rambling opinions, until it was almost impossible to extract what little information his words contained.
Vance, however, did not appear discouraged. He dwelt on Captain Leacock’s character and seemed particularly interested in his personal relationship with Benson. Pfyfe’s gambling proclivities also occupied his attention, and he let the colonel ramble on tiresomely about the man’s gambling house on Long Island and his hunting experiences in South Africa. He asked numerous questions about Benson’s other friends but paid scant attention to the answers.
The whole interview impressed me as pointless, and I could not help wondering what Vance hoped to learn. Markham, I was convinced, was equally at sea. He pretended polite interest and nodded appreciatively during the colonel’s incredibly drawn-out periods; but his eyes wandered occasionally, and several times I saw him give Vance a look of reproachful inquiry. There was no doubt, however, that Colonel Ostrander knew his people.
When we were back in the district attorney’s office, having taken leave of our garrulous guest at the subway entrance, Vance threw himself into one of the easy chairs with an air of satisfaction.
“Most entertainin’, what? As an elim’nator of suspects the colonel has his good points.”
“Eliminator!” retorted Markham. “It’s a good thing he’s not connected with the police; he’d have half the community jailed for shooting Benson.”
“He is a bit bloodthirsty,” Vance admitted. “He’s determined to get somebody jailed for the crime.”
“According to that old warrior, Benson’s coterie was a camorra of gunmen—not forgetting the women. I couldn’t help getting the impression, as he talked, that Benson was miraculously lucky not to have been riddled with bullets long ago.”
“It’s obvious,” commented Vance, “that you overlooked the illuminatin’ flashes in the colonel’s thunder.”
“Were there any?” Markham asked. “At any rate, I can’t say that they exactly blinded me by their brilliance.”
“And you received no solace from his words?”
“Only those in which he bade me a fond farewell. The parting didn’t exactly break my heart.… What the old boy said about Leacock, however, might be called a confirmatory opinion. It verified—if verification had been necessary—the case against the captain.”
Vance smiled cynically. “Oh, to be sure. And what he said about Miss St. Clair would have verified the case against her, too—last Saturday. Also, what he said about Pfyfe would have verified the case against that Beau Sabreur, if you had happened to suspect him—eh, what?”
Vance had scarcely finished speaking when Swacker came in to say that Emery from the homicide bureau had been sent over by Heath and wished, if possible, to see the district attorney.
When the man entered, I recognized him at once as the detective who had found the cigarette butts in Benson’s grate.
With a quick glance at Vance and me, he went directly to Markham. “We’ve found the gray Cadillac, sir; and Sergeant Heath thought you might want to know about it right away. It’s in a small, one-man garage on Seventy-fourth Street near Amsterdam Avenue, and has been there three days. One of the men from the Sixty-eighth Street station located it and phoned in to headquarters; and I hopped uptown at once. It’s the right car—fishing tackle and all, except for the rods; so I guess the ones found in Central Park belonged to the car after all; fell out probably.… It seems a fellow drove the car into the garage about noon last Friday, and gave the garage-man twenty dollars to keep his mouth shut. The man’s a wop and says he don’t read the papers. Anyway, he came across pronto when I put the screws on.”
The detective drew out a small notebook.
“I looked up the car’s number.… It’s listed in the name of Leander Pfyfe, 24 Elm Boulevard, Port Washington, Long Island.”
Markham received this piece of unexpected information with a perplexed frown. He dismissed Emery almost curtly and sat tapping thoughtfully on his desk.
Vance watched him with an amused smile.
“It’s really not a madhouse, y’ know,” he observed comfortingly. “I say, don’t the colonel’s words bring you any cheer, now that you know Leander was hovering about the neighborhood at the time Benson was translated into the Beyond?”
“Damn your old colonel!” snapped Markham. “What interests me at present is fitting this new development into the situation.”
“It fits beautifully,” Vance told him. “It rounds out the mosaic, so to speak.… Are you actu’lly disconcerted by learning that Pfyfe was the owner of the mysterious car?”
“Not having your gift of clairvoyance, I am, I confess, disturbed by the fact.”
Markham lit a cigar—an indication of worry. “You, of course,” he added, with sarcasm, “knew before Emery came here that it was Pfyfe’s car.”
“I didn’t know,” Vance corrected him; “but I had a strong suspicion. Pfyfe overdid his distress when he told us of his breakdown in the Catskills. And Heath’s question about his itiner’ry annoyed him frightfully. His hauteur was too melodramatic.”
“Your ex post facto wisdom is most useful!”
Markham smoked awhile in silence.
“I think I’ll find out about this matter.”
He rang for Swacker. “Call up the Ansonia,” he ordered angrily; “locate Leander Pfyfe,