Kennedy said nothing as Riley walked away, but I fancied that underneath he concurred largely with the operative.
We were about to leave the veranda when Burke rejoined us, his face indicating that some new problem had come up.
“I wonder what Shelby Maddox can be up to,” he began, as though appealing for aid. “I was using the telephone, and while I waited for my number I got to talking with the little girl at the switchboard. She tells me that in the last day or two, while Shelby has been out here, he has been talking a great deal over the wire with New York and has placed some large orders through different brokers for Maddox Munitions stock.”
It was an important piece of news. I recalled Hastings’s wonder at Shelby’s trips in to the city and our own discovery that he had been visiting a broker, coupled with the presence of Paquita down-town in the same building.
“Maddox Munitions isn’t so low that it’s a good buy,” considered Burke, “unless there’s some scheme to manipulate it up. It had a little slump when Marshall Maddox died, but recovered. What its future will be without him no one can say. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t decline—but it hasn’t done so.”
“Perhaps that’s the game,” I suggested. “Maybe Shelby is holding the market up. Some one must be supporting it. Why, if it weren’t for some support, I’ll wager the stock would have broken worse than it did, and it wouldn’t have recovered.”
Kennedy nodded, not so much in approval of the explanation as at the line of thought that the idea suggested.
“Do you suppose,” speculated Burke, “that there can be some manipulation of Maddox Munitions going on under cover? What can be Shelby’s purpose in all this? Perhaps we’re mistaken in that young man, and he’s a great deal deeper than any of us give him credit for being. Would it be impossible that he might be planning to get the control from the others?”
It was an explanation that could not be easily put aside. Only death had wrested the control from the elder brother. Who was there to take his place? Had Shelby undergone a transformation almost overnight? Or—more horrible thought—had the whole affair been preconceived from the conference on the yacht and the murder to the manipulation of the market?
What with both Riley and Burke theorizing on the case, I could see that Kennedy was growing a bit impatient. Though he formed many of them, theories never appealed to Kennedy as long as one little fact might knock out the prettiest deduction.