“No; I don’t want to. It looks very much as if you were in your room during the hour between six and seven.”
“It does have that appearance,” said Pollard, “but I make no claims.”
“He telephoned twice,” vouchsafed the girl at the switchboard.
“He did!” Prescott wheeled on her.
“Once not very long after he came in – maybe fifteen or twenty minutes after.”
“To whom?”
“To a Cleaning Establishment. I remember, because I couldn’t get them – the shop was closed. And then, he telephoned again for a taxi, when he was ready to go out.”
“At what time?”
“About half-past seven – or maybe a little earlier.”
“Earlier,” said the doorman, who had drawn near again. “Not more’n twenty past. I put him in the taxi myself. And it wasn’t as late as half past.”
“Where did he drive to?”
“I don’t know. He ’most always gives the driver a slip of paper with the numbers on it – ’specially if he’s going to more than one address. He did this tonight.”
“Where’s that taxi man?” asked Prescott, feeling his last prop being pulled from under him.
“He’s outside now,” said the doorman. “He’s waiting for a man upstairs.”
“Call him in.”
The taxi driver looked at Pollard, nodded respectfully, and replied to Prescott’s queries by saying that Mr Pollard did give him a memorandum of the places he wanted to go to, and that they were, first, the Hotel Astor, where he went in for a moment, and came back with some theater tickets which he was putting in his pocket.
“How do you know he had theater tickets?”
“Well, he had a little pink envelope, and he often does get tickets there. Next, he stopped at Bard’s, the Florist’s, and brought out a small square box with him, and next I took him up to a house on Park Avenue, and he stayed there, and I came back.”
“All right, Mr Pollard, my duty is done.” The detective looked a respectful apology. “But I had to find out all this. And remember you did make a surprising statement.”
“Surprising to you, perhaps. But my friends, who know my eccentricities, weren’t surprised at it.”
“No? Well, if it’s your habit to threaten to kill people you don’t like – ”
“I’d rather you didn’t call it a threat. To my mind, a threat is spoken to the intended victim.”
“I don’t know,” Prescott gazed thoughtfully at the speaker. “Can’t you threaten – ”
“But I didn’t threaten. I merely said I should kill Gleason some day. It’s too late, now, to make good my promise, and you’ve satisfied yourself – or, haven’t you? – that I didn’t do it?”
“Yes, I’m satisfied. You couldn’t be here at home and in a taxicab doing errands, between six-fifteen and seven-forty-five, and have any chance to get away long enough to get yourself down to Washington Square and do up that murder business, too.”
“It does look that way,” Pollard agreed. “You’ve checked me up pretty thoroughly. Now do you want me any further? For, though I’m as good-natured and patient as the average man, I have something else to do with my time when you’re through with me.”
“Of course, of course. But, I say, Mr Pollard, can you give me a hint which way to look?”
“Sorry, but I can’t.”
The two had drawn aside from the hotel desk, and were by themselves in an alcove of the lobby. Prescott, eagerly trying to learn something further from his vindicated suspect – Pollard, calm and polite, but quite evidently wishing to get away about his business.
“You don’t suspect anybody?”
“No; you see I knew Mr Gleason but slightly. I didn’t like him, but I assure you I didn’t kill him. And I don’t know who did.”
CHAPTER V – Mrs Mansfield’s Story
“Distrust the obvious, Prescott,” said Belknap, didactically. “It is the astute detective’s weak point that he cannot see beyond the apparent – the evident – the obvious.”
“Oh, yes,” Prescott sniffed; “distrust the obvious is as hackneyed a phrase as Cherchez la femme! and about as useful in our every day work. You make a noise like a Detective Story.”
“And they’re the Big Noise, nowadays,” Belknap returned, unruffled.
“All the same,” and Prescott spoke doggedly, “when a guy says he’s going to kill somebody, and that somebody is found croaked a few hours later, seems to me – ”
“Seems to me, your guy is the last person in the world to suspect. It’s the obvious – ”
“Yes, an obvious that I sorta hate to distrust!”
“Nonsense! And you’ve disposed of Pollard anyway, haven’t you.”
“Yes, I have. Half a dozen people were in touch with him all through the time of the murder. He’s out of it.”
Prescott looked as disheartened as he felt.
“And you’ve wasted good time tracking him down, when you might have been investigating the evidence while it was fresh! I’m disappointed in you, Prescott; you oughtn’t to have fallen for a steer like that.”
Belknap was the Assistant District Attorney, and the Gleason case seemed to him important and absorbing. In his office the morning after the murder, he was getting all the information Prescott could give him, and he was really disgusted with the detective for having followed up the wild goose chase of Manning Pollard’s impulsive speech about the Western millionaire.
Belknap was an earnest, honest investigator, not so much brilliant by deduction as clear-sighted, hard-headed and practical.
He distrusted the obvious, not so much because of the hackneyed aphorism as because his own experience had proved to him that nine times out of ten, or oftener, the obvious was wrong. It must be looked into, of course, but not to the exclusion of other evidence or the neglect of other lines of investigation. And now, he felt, the trail had cooled somewhat, and valuable clews might be lost because of Prescott’s conviction of Pollard’s guilt.
Belknap was of a higher mentality than Pollard, and he also was a man of more education and refinement. He was especially interested on this case, for the Lindsays were an exclusive family and kept themselves out of the limelight of publicity.
But there were rumors that the lovely daughter was a harum-scarum, that the son of the house was addicted to bright lights and high stakes, and that the still young stepmother was quite as fond of social life as her two charges.
But never were their names seen on the society columns or in the gossip papers and now, Belknap reflected, they could be approached by reporters.
Indeed, he saw himself admitted to that hitherto inaccessible home, and in imagination he was already preening himself for the occasion.
But Belknap was methodical, and he was preparing to go at once to the Gleason apartment, to begin his line of investigation.
“How does Mrs Lindsay act?” he allowed himself to ask as he and Prescott started for Washington Square.
“Oh, I don’t know,” returned Prescott; “about like you’d expect a sister to act. She was fond of her brother, I take it, but – well, I didn’t see much of her; still, I’ve a vague impression that she’s revengeful – anxious to find and punish the murderer – that struck me more than her grief.”
“You can’t tell. She may be sorrowing deeply,