“No; a clever criminal doesn’t have a confederate. No; Pollard killed Gleason himself. By the way, Zizi, I found Pollard’s fingerprints on the Barry letter.”
“But Dean Monroe did that.”
“Dean Monroe asked Barry to sign it, but—he told me himself—Pollard gave him the paper and asked him to get Barry’s signature. This, Monroe did, and gave the paper back to Pollard. Later, Pollard told Monroe the plan had been given up. I dug that all out, without speaking to Barry about it. I don’t want Pollard to imagine we suspect him. Now, my child, what was his motive?”
“A pretty strong one. It seems that Manning Pollard is an illegitimate child. He was born in Coggs’ Hollow, of unmarried parents. Later, his father and mother married, so he was legally legitimized. But of course, a stigma remains. Now, Mr Pollard is several years younger than Robert Gleason, so the assumption is that Robert Gleason, who lived all his boyhood in Coggs’ Hollow, knew this secret of Pollard’s birth, and had threatened to expose him, unless he desisted from trying to win Phyllis away from Gleason.”
Pennington Wise thought a few moments.
“That’s it,” he said, at last; “that’s it, Zizi. You’re a wonderful child for sure! How did you get it?”
“I went straight to the town clerk, and he not only showed me his books, but he told me the story. He knows nothing of the Gleason murder, and I didn’t tell him. Up in that little dot of a village they don’t know the news of New York.”
“But they must know of Gleason’s death. He was a foremost citizen, wasn’t he?”
“Of Seattle, yes. But when he left Coggs’ Hollow he was a young man of twenty-five or so, and I suppose they’ve forgotten all about him. Anyway, the town clerk didn’t remember him very clearly, but he remembered all about the Pollard family. Of course, it was a celebrated case up there.
“The fact of the couple’s marriage, five or six years after Manning Pollard’s birth, was a sensational affair, and though nobody could blame Mr Pollard, the fact remains that he was really an illegitimate child.”