He could see discretion drop like a curtain across her watching face.
“Connie Binhart!” she temporized. Blake, as his heavy side glance slewed about to her, prided himself on the fact that he could see through her pretenses. At any other time he would have thrown open the flood-gates of that ever-inundating anger of his and swept away all such obliquities.
“I guess,” he went on with slow patience, “we know him best round here as Charles Blanchard.”
“Blanchard?” she echoed.
“Yes, Blanchard, the Blanchard we’ve been looking for, for seven months now, the Blanchard who chloroformed Ezra Newcomb and carried off a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.”
“Newcomb?” again meditated the woman.
“The Blanchard who shot down the bank detective in Newcomb’s room when the rest of the bank was listening to a German band playing in the side street, a band hired for the occasion.”
“When was that?” demanded the woman.
“That was last October,” he answered with a sing-song weariness suggestive of impatience at such supererogative explanations.
“I was at Monte Carlo all last autumn,” was the woman’s quick retort.