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Lee was engaged to dine this night with the Curt Wintergrenns. He had been looking forward to the occasion because Carol Wintergrenn had snapped up a French refugee chef who was a master of his profession. This was his first performance and he would certainly be on his mettle. Lee loved masterly cooking. However, when he reflected that the table talk would inevitably concentrate on the Gartrey case, his heart sank. He called up Mrs. Wintergrenn to beg off.

She wouldn’t hear of it. “Lee!” she screamed. “At the eleventh hour! The dinner of the season! I am depending on you to hold it together; to give the affair a cachet! How could I replace you now? My party will be ruined. I don’t believe you’ve got a headache. Tell me the real reason you want to stay away.”

Answered Lee: “You’re entitled to the truth, my darling. I am so fed up with this nasty Gartrey affair that it nauseates me. I know, people being what they are, nothing else will be talked about tonight, and I can’t face it.”

“Is that all?” she said in a voice of relief. “Well, I haven’t been giving dinners for ten years for nothing. You sit beside me and I shall keep the conversation in my own hands. I promise you you shan’t be annoyed.”

So Lee agreed to be there.

Unfortunately for Carol Wintergrenn’s promise, there were two men at her table whose names had been connected with the Gartrey case, George Coler and Rulon Innes, and she found herself helpless. She would no sooner get the talk steered away from the all-absorbing topic than somebody would ask Coler or Innes a question. The whole table would wait in silence for the answer, and off they would go again. However, Lee did not mind it as much as he had expected; the limelight was beating on the two men in the know, and little Lee was allowed to savor the marvelous salmi de caneton in peace.

Coler, who was Gartrey’s principal lieutenant in business, was a handsome bachelor in the middle forties with a reputation for wit and savoir-faire that caused him to be much in demand for dinners. Lee had never cared for him, simply because he had himself under such perfect control. Lee himself was not accustomed to wearing his heart on his sleeve, and he freely granted the necessity of keeping a guard on yourself in the great world, but such people did not interest him; for him in woman or man it was the native wood-note wild that charmed.

A woman asked: “Mr. Coler, honestly, how is dear Agnes bearing up under the strain?” The affected solicitude did not conceal the purr of satisfaction in her voice. Older and plainer women naturally were delighted to see Agnes Gartrey catching it.

“Magnificently!” said Coler smoothly. “Like all your sex, when faced by something really big, she has risen out of herself.”

“Is she in love with Al Yohe?”

“Honestly,” said Coler, spreading out his hands, “I don’t know. I am the watchdog of her business affairs, not her heart.”

“Of course she is!” cried another woman. “Look how she stands up for him!”

“That proves nothing. She has to stand up for him in order to clear her own skirts.”

“Strange as it may seem, I think she was attached to her hard-boiled old husband,” said Coler. “At least, they got along pretty well together, considering.”

“Impossible!” exclaimed all the women together. “A man thirty years older!”

“If she is in love with Yohe,” Coler went on, “so much the worse for her. Even in the unlikely event of his clearing himself, they could never come together now.”

Young Rulon Innes, feeling that he had been left out of the conversation long enough, now delivered his opinion authoritatively: “None of you are being fair to Agnes. Nobody understands her. She has the heart of a child!”

Hearing this, the women kept their lips decorous, but their eyes were frankly derisive. Lee, glancing around the table, enjoyed the comedy. Innes was a handsome young man in a somewhat luscious style. He was so filled with the consciousness of his beauty that he appeared to be about to choke on it. Lee wondered how a woman could fall for him, yet many had; perhaps it was because he, after Al Yohe, was the fashion.

“Is she in love with Al Yohe?” persisted the first woman.

“Nothing to it,” said Innes languidly, regarding his finger nails. “Al’s methods with women were those of a truck driver. No finesse.” He paused to point the contrast between Al and himself. Some of the women bit their lips. “Agnes would never fall for that sort of thing,” he went on. “She is too fastidious.... Does it not occur to any of you that she may be telling the simple truth?”

Carol Wintergrenn was provoked. “The truth is never simple,” she said, “and nobody nowadays ever tells it.... For heaven’s sake, let us talk about something else.”

They paid no attention to her. Everybody at the table had a contribution to make to the Gartrey case and sat bouncing in impatience to get a word in. There was Miss Delphine Harley, the actress, perennially lovely and smiling. She said:

“I must take exception to truck driver. Poor Al’s manners were free but never coarse. He despised the sultry innuendo that passes for love-making in the night clubs. Al never ‘made love.’ He captivated women by making them laugh. His apparent sexlessness was a challenge to us. His naturalness, his honesty were as refreshing as a breeze off the sea.”

This produced a little babel of assent and dissent around the table. Miss Harley popped a forkful of the salmi into her mouth and murmured: “Delicious!” Rulon Innes laughed a thought too loudly and was heard to say:

“Al Yohe sexless! That’s good!”

“Women will know what I mean,” said Delphine quietly. “Don’t think that I am belittling sex,” she went on with her delightful, wicked smile. “Sex is grand! But I must say we women get a little tired of seeing it paraded like a drum major.”

There were murmurs of assent from other women.

“Perhaps,” said Delphine, delicately balancing her fork, “perhaps Al Yohe’s pretense of sexlessness was the finest kind of finesse.”

Lee went through the motions of clapping his hands. He loved wit in a woman. Delphine Harley was doing something that Fanny and Judy had not been able to accomplish, forcing him a little to reconsider his ideas about the legendary Al.

There was a Senator at the table, who protested throatily: “But, my dear Miss Harley, a murderer!”

“Oh, that’s something else again,” said Delphine with a shrug.

“Surely you can’t have any doubt as to his guilt?”

“I have no opinion at all,” said Delphine sweetly. “I leave that to my betters.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I think,” put in the woman who had started the discussion. “It has not been suggested in the newspapers, but I believe that Agnes Gartrey herself is keeping him under cover.”

This was received around the table with the silence of astonishment.

“I don’t believe he ever left the apartment!” she added triumphantly.

This opened up fascinating possibilities to her hearers.

“Oh, I assure you you are wrong,” said George Coler earnestly. “Mrs. Gartrey has discussed the case with me in all its implications. I can state positively that if she knew where he was, she would be the first to produce him.”

After the ladies had left the table and the gentlemen were occupied with their cigars and liqueurs, a footman approached Lee Mappin.

“If you please, Mr. Mappin, you’re wanted on the telephone, sir.”

Lee left the table in some surprise. He could think of no reason why anyone should call him there. The servant led him to a telephone booth at the back of the hall. It was a woman’s voice that came over the wire, a voice unknown to Lee.

“Mr. Mappin, please forgive me for disturbing you.”

“Who is it?” asked Lee mildly.

“Agnes Gartrey.”

Lee felt like a big round O of astonishment. He had never met Mrs. Gartrey, but the quality of the voice, its agitation, assured him that this was certainly she.

“Yes, Mrs. Gartrey?”

The voice became imploring. “Would you come to see me tonight?”

“But I’m dining out, Mrs. Gartrey.”

“I know. It doesn’t matter how late you are.”

“But what can I do for you?”

“Just give me a little advice. Everything I do or say seems to be the wrong thing!”

Curiosity is a powerful motive force. “Very well, Mrs. Gartrey, I will be there as soon as I can get away.”

“Oh, thank you so much! Please don’t say anything about your visit to me.”

“I shall not do so.”

When he returned to the dining room Curt Wintergrenn said: “No bad news, I hope, Lee.”

“No, indeed, Curt. A bit of routine business, that’s all.”

“You looked a little disturbed.”

Lee laid a hand on his epigastrium. “I partook a little too generously of the caneton.”

“Have a brandy?”

When they returned to the drawing room Mrs. Wintergrenn was sitting alone at the coffee table and Lee went to her. “Carol, I have had a phone call, I shall have to slip away, my dear.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “Don’t you like my party? ... Honestly, Lee, I’m distressed because I couldn’t steer the talk better.”

“You needn’t apologize for that,” he said. “I’m positively becoming interested in the case.”

“Do me a little favor before you go,” begged Carol.

“Anything within my power, my dear.”

“While you men were at the table we got to talking about crime. Somebody said that criminals had a snap nowadays because of modern inventions. For instance, a call made from a dial phone cannot be traced. I said that might be, but that you were able to read off a phone number just from hearing it dialed. They all scouted at the idea. Please, Lee, give them a demonstration.”

“I hate to do parlor tricks,” said Lee.

“I know, but just to bear me out, please. Afterwards you can slip out quietly, and I’ll make your excuses.”

Lee submitted and the whole party adjourned to the hall to make the test. One went into the booth while Lee, provided with pencil and pad, turned his back on it. As the numbers were dialed, Lee made marks on his pad. Out of five tries he read off four correctly, and great was the wonder of the beholders.

“There is no magic in it,” said Lee; “simply a question of training your ear. Some people pull the dial around quickly, some slowly; you pay no attention to that sound. But the dial always comes clicking back at the same measured rate of speed; that is what you listen for. I can do it without pencil and paper, but there is a danger of forgetting a number before the call is completed. So I make these marks of different lengths corresponding to the passage of the dial, and then I have a record.”

“Marvelous!” they cried.

Soon afterwards he made an inconspicuous getaway.

The Gartrey apartment occupied the entire eighth floor of one of the finest buildings on the avenue. A manservant admitted Lee to a stately foyer. An immense music room opened off on his left and in front of him a salon as big as a museum. Today the very rich have more space in their city apartments than they once had in a whole house. Mrs. Gartrey presently came swimming to meet him in something pink that set off her cunningly dressed chestnut hair. She looked like a girl and was, perhaps, thirty years old. She was beautiful but not so beautiful in the flesh as in her photographs. It was because hers was a beauty of feature rather than expression. The touch of gentleness that makes a woman wholly adorable was lacking. It was clear that she had suffered dreadfully during the past few days, but it had not softened her.

“How good of you!” she murmured.

“I was glad to come if you think I can be of the least use,” said Lee.

She led him to a settee by the fireplace. She was alone in the vast room. Lee reflected that rich people were apt to be lonelier than the poor. They sat down.

“Will you have a drink, Mr. Mappin?”

“Thanks, no. I have just come from a too-hospitable house.”

A bitter expression crossed her face. “I expect I was well discussed around the table.”

He wasn’t going to lie to her. “You were,” he said candidly.

“What did they say?”

“Oh, come, Mrs. Gartrey, you didn’t ask me here to repeat silly gossip. I assure you you did not lack defenders at the table.”

She put a handkerchief to her lips. “It’s so hard to know where to begin my story!” she murmured.

“Tell me why you chose to send for me instead of somebody else.”

“That’s easy,” she said. “One reads your books; one reads in the newspaper how extraordinarily clever you are in bringing the truth to light in baffling cases. I want you to find out the truth of this case.”

Lee waited for more. It was obvious that the woman was suffering intensely, but did she really want the truth? He doubted it.

“You understand,” she went on, “I am asking you to accept me for a client. I expect to pay for your services.”

Lee waved his hand. That didn’t commit him to anything.

Her voice scaled up. “The newspapers are like a pack of dogs, like a pack of dogs yapping at Mr. Yohe’s heels!” she cried. “He is innocent of any wrongdoing. He was out of the house before my husband came home. I want you to prove that to the world.”

“How can I without his co-operation?” said Lee.

She put a hand over her eyes. “Oh, I know! I know! It was suicidal for him to run away and to stay away. I wish to God I could reach him. I could soon persuade him to come back.”

Lee said, to see what kind of reaction he would get: “It has been suggested that you do know where he is.”

“That’s a lie,” she said scornfully. “Would I be suffering this horrible uncertainty? Would I stay here if I knew? This place has become a nightmare to me. Every time I cross the foyer I can see my husband lying there.”

“Why do you stay here?”

“Because I think that Al ... Mr. Yohe may try to get in touch with me here. By telephone. Even the telephone is risky, but he might take a chance. I am listening for it day and night!”

Lee thought: Okay, she does not know where he is. He said: “Until he does come back, Mrs. Gartrey, I don’t see what I can do.”

“Oh, you must, you must help me!” she cried, clasping her hands. “Ask me whatever you like and I’ll gladly pay it!”

“Believe me, it’s not a question of a fee,” he said mildly. “I have sufficient for my modest wants. I have no family.”

“All you have to do is to come out in his favor,” she pleaded. “Then, wherever he is, he would see that he had a friend and a powerful one; that would bring him back.”

Lee said firmly: “I can’t come out in his favor until I see some reason to doubt his guilt.”

“He’s innocent!” she wailed. “Who should know that better than I?”

“If Alastair Yohe didn’t shoot your husband, who did?” asked Lee bluntly.

“Oh, I don’t want to accuse anybody else! I have no proof!”

“If you have even a suspicion it will be safe with me.”

“Have you thought of the butler, Robert Hawkins?” she asked in a muffled voice.

“Hm, that’s a new lead,” said Lee.

“He was in a position to do it,” she went on eagerly, “and it would explain why he tried to put it off on Al.”

“What motive could Hawkins have had?”

“Personal motive? None! He was only a servant. But my husband had enemies. Men of great wealth. It would have been easy for one of them to get at Hawkins and to pay him, to pay him a great sum, perhaps, to do away with my husband.”

“That’s a possibility,” said Lee. “I will investigate it.”

“I understand that Hawkins has disappeared,” she said.

“Only from the newspaper reporters. He has given the police his present address.”

“Oh, he’s a smooth customer,” she said bitterly. “Don’t be deceived by his snowy hair and his seeming honesty!”

“I am not easily deceived,” said Lee mildly.

“He washes his hair with bluing to make it whiter,” she said acidly. “My maid told me. It wouldn’t do any good for you to talk to him. He would only lie.”

“Naturally. I shall endeavor to find out if he has come into any money lately.”

Mrs. Gartrey arose. “You must let me give you a check, Mr. Mappin. You shall name the amount yourself!”

Lee held up his hand. “Thank you, no! I have not yet taken the case.”

Mrs. Gartrey’s eyes never left his face. As they proceeded toward the door, she saw him looking at the masses of expensive flowers that filled the room, and murmured: “People will send flowers. And usually the people one doesn’t much care for. It is so inconsiderate. Every box that comes administers a fresh stab!”

“Why don’t you send them to a hospital?” he asked dryly.

“The senders usually call to extend their condolences. They would be offended if they didn’t see their flowers.”

Lee passed a huge bouquet of American Beauty roses with stems three feet long. Under the edge of the vase which contained them was caught the edge of a card—presumably the sender’s. On it was written: “Deepest sympathy—Rulon.”

“Mrs. Gartrey,” said Lee, “why don’t you address Mr. Yohe through the newspapers? Wherever he is, we may be sure that he reads them.”

“How can I?” she murmured distressfully. “In the first shock of this awful happening I was so confused, so distracted, that I made the mistake of telling the police that he was just a casual acquaintance. You know better than that. I can’t hide anything from you. But I trust you. You see, if the truth about what I feel came out now, it would only react against him.”

There was something very flattering, very affecting in the sight of the famous beauty casting herself on his mercy like this. And she knows it! thought Lee. “I see,” he said.

“But Mr. Mappin, I swear to you there has been no wrongdoing!” she protested.

“I accept it,” said Lee. He took a pinch of snuff. “I may say, though, that it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me if there had been.”

She laid her hand lightly for a moment on his arm. “Ah, you are so kind and understanding!”

“Still,” he said, “why can’t you put an ad among the public notices that none but he would understand. Haven’t you some private way of addressing him that he would recognize?”

She shook her head with an appearance of great sadness. “No! It hadn’t gone as far as that, you understand.”