“This is the word,” said Louis, and his low voice was intense and incisive, “if you or anybody else undertakes to drag Ivy Hayes’ name into this muddle, you’ll have to reckon with me!”
“Oh, come, now,” Prescott smiled, “in the first place, I won’t have my case called a muddle—next, if Miss Hayes or anybody else is connected with it in any way, she’s in it already, without having to be dragged in—as you call it. Go on, Mr Barry, what did you learn from or about Miss Hayes?”
“I learned that she was in Mr Gleason’s apartment the afternoon of the murder——”
“She wasn’t!” Louis exclaimed, “She wasn’t!”
“Oh, hush, Louis,” Barry said, contemptuously, “she told me herself she was.”
“Go on,” said Prescott.
“She left Mr Gleason alive and well, when she departed.”
“At what time?”
“She doesn’t remember exactly—it’s the hardest thing in the world to make people assert a time. But I gathered it was not far from six o’clock when she left Gleason’s rooms.”
“That’s getting pretty close to the time of the murder,” Prescott said thoughtfully.