connected with Skeel and Doctor Lindquist and Cleaver; and our interview with Mannix didn’t precisely allay suspicions in his direction, either. But when we come right down to it, what’s the situation! We’ve got some fingerprints of Skeel, which might have been made late Monday afternoon. Doctor Lindquist goes berserk when we ask him where he was Monday night, and then offers us a weak alibi. He admits a fatherly interest in the girl, whereas he’s really in love with her—a perfectly natural bit of mendacity. Cleaver lent his car to his brother and lied about it, so that I’d think he was in Boonton Monday at midnight. And Mannix gives us a number of shifty answers to our questions concerning his relations with the girl.… Not an embarrassment of riches.”
“I wouldn’t say your information was exactly negligent,” observed Vance, taking a chair beside the sergeant. “It may all prove devilish valuable if only it could be put together properly. The difficulty, it appears to me, is that certain parts of the puzzle are missing. Find ’em, and I’ll warrant everything will fit beautifully—like a mosaic.”
“Easy enough to say ‘find ’em,’” grumbled Markham. “The trouble is to know where to look.”
Heath relighted his dead cigar and made an impatient gesture.
“You can’t get away from Skeel. He’s the boy that did it, and, if it wasn’t for Abe Rubin, I’d sweat the truth outa him. And by the way, Mr. Vance, he had his own private key to the Odell apartment, all right.” He glanced at Markham hesitantly. “I don’t want to look as if I was criticising, sir, but I got a feeling we’re wasting time chasing after these gentlemen friends of Odell—Cleaver and Mannix and this here doctor.”
“You may be right.” Markham seemed inclined to agree with him. “However, I’d like to know why Lindquist acted the way he did.”
“Well, that might help some,” Heath compromised. “If the doc was so far gone on Odell as to threaten to shoot her, and if he went off his head when you asked him to alibi himself, maybe he could tell us something. Why not throw a little scare into him? His record ain’t any too good, anyway.”
“An excellent idea,” chimed in Vance.
Markham looked up sharply. Then he consulted his appointment book. “I’m fairly free this afternoon, so suppose you bring him down here, Sergeant. Get a subpoena if you have to—only see that he comes. And make it as soon after lunch as you can.” He tapped on the desk irritably. “If I don’t do anything else, I’m going to eliminate some of this human flotsam that’s cluttering up the case. And Lindquist is as good as any to start with. I’ll either develop these various suspicious circumstances into something workable or I’ll root them up. Then we’ll see where we stand.”
Heath shook hands pessimistically and went out.
“Poor hapless man!” sighed Vance, looking after him. “He giveth way to all the pangs and fury of despair.”
“And so would you,” snapped Markham, “if the newspapers were butchering you for a political holiday. By the way, weren’t you to be a harbinger of glad tidings this noon, or something of the sort?”
“I believe I did hold out some such hope.” Vance sat looking meditatively out of the window for several minutes. “Markham, this fellow Mannix lures me like a magnet. He irks and whirrets me. He infests my slumbers. He’s the raven on my bust of Pallas. He plagues me like a banshee.”
“Does this jeremiad come under the head of tidings?”
“I sha’n’t rest peacefully,” pursued Vance, “until I know where Louey the furrier was between eleven o’clock and midnight Monday. He was somewhere he shouldn’t have been. And you, Markham, must find out. Please make Mannix the second offensive in your assault upon the flotsam. He’ll parley, with the right amount of pressure. Be brutal, old dear; let him think you suspect him of the throttling. Ask him about the fur model—what’s her name?—Frisbee—” He stopped short and knit his brows. “My eye—oh, my eye! I wonder.… Yes, yes, Markham; you must question him about the fur model. Ask him when he saw her last, and try to look wise and mysterious when you’re doing it.”
“See here, Vance”—Markham was exasperated—“you’ve been harping on Mannix for three days. What’s keeping your nose to that scent?”
“Intuition—sheer intuition. My psychic temperament, don’t y’ know.”
“I’d believe that if I hadn’t known you for fifteen years.” Markham inspected him shrewdly, then shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll have Mannix on the tapis when I’m through with Lindquist.”
CHAPTER 19
THE DOCTOR EXPLAINS
(Friday, September 14; 2 P.M.)
We lunched in the district attorney’s private sanctum; and at two o’clock Doctor Lindquist was announced. Heath accompanied him, and, from the expression on the sergeant’s face, it was plain he did not at all like his companion.
The doctor, at Markham’s request, seated himself facing the district attorney’s desk.
“What is the meaning of this new outrage?” he demanded coldly. “Is it your prerogative to force a citizen to leave his private affairs in order to be bullied?”
“It’s my duty to bring murderers to justice,” replied Markham, with equal coldness. “And if any citizen considers that giving aid to the authorities is an outrage, that’s his prerogative. If you have anything to fear by answering my questions, Doctor, you are entitled to have your attorney present. Would you care to phone him to come here now and give you legal protection?”
Doctor Lindquist hesitated. “I need no legal protection, sir. Will you be good enough to tell me at once why I was brought here?”
“Certainly; to explain a few points which have been discovered regarding your relationship with Miss Odell, and to elucidate—if you care to—your reasons for deceiving me, at our last conference, in regard to that relationship.”
“You have, I infer, been prying unwarrantably into my private affairs. I had heard that such practices were once common in Russia.…”
“If the prying was unwarranted, you can, Doctor Lindquist, easily convince me on that point; and whatever we may have learned concerning you will be instantly forgotten. It is true, is it not, that your interest in Miss Odell went somewhat beyond mere paternal affection?”
“Are not even a man’s sacred sentiments respected by the police of this country?” There was insolent scorn in the doctor’s tone.
“Under some conditions, yes; under others, no.” Markham controlled his fury admirably. “You need not answer me, of course; but, if you choose to be frank, you may possibly save yourself the humiliation of being questioned publicly by the people’s attorney in a court of law.”
Doctor Lindquist winced and considered the matter at some length. “And if I admit that my affection for Miss Odell was other than paternal—what then?”
Markham accepted the question as an affirmation.
“You were intensely jealous of her, were you not, Doctor?”
“Jealousy,” Doctor Lindquist remarked, with an air of ironic professionalism, “is not an unusual accompaniment to an infatuation. Authorities
