The daughter was apathetic. “Poor father,” she said, “I wonder where he is. But I’m so worried about Mr. Adler, I can think of nothing else.”
There was cause, indeed, for the wife’s anxiety, for Adler was in the late stages of galloping consumption. And the harassed woman, none too well fixed with this world’s goods, was alone, caring for him. Groot’s humanity was touched and he forbore to trouble her further.
“Stryker’s decamped, that’s all,” Groot said; “and flight is confession. It’s clear enough. He wanted this insurance of his for his daughter, the agent told me the policy is payable to her, and he had to take it out before his age limit was reached. He knew of the legacy coming to him, and in order to get his insurance, he hastened the realization of his fortune.”
It did look that way, for Avice and Mrs. Black agreed that Stryker was devoted to his daughter, and they knew of her husband’s desperate illness. Knew too, that she would be left penniless, and was herself delicate and unfit for hard work. Stryker could support her while he lived, but to leave her an income from his life insurance was his great desire. Judge Hoyt, too, said that he knew of this from conversations he had himself had with Stryker. But he had supposed the butler had saved up funds for his insurance premium. He now learned that the support and care of the sick man had made this impossible.
So Stryker was strongly suspected of the crime, and every effort was made to find the missing man.
Meantime Alvin Duane came. Though alleged to be a clever detective, he admitted he found little to work upon.
“It is too late,” he said, “to look for clues on the scene of the crime. Had I been called in earlier, I might have found something, but after nearly a fortnight of damp, rainy weather, one can expect nothing in the way of footprints or other traces, though, of course, I shall look carefully.”
Duane was a middle-aged, grizzled man, and though earnest and serious, was not a brilliant member of his profession. He had, he said himself, no use for the hair-trigger deductions of imaginative brains which, oftener than not, were false. Give him good, material clues, and attested evidence, and he would hunt down a criminal as quickly as anybody, but not from a shred of cloth or a missing cuff-link.
Eleanor Black, with her dislike of detectives of all sorts, was openly rude to Duane. He was in and out of the house at all hours; he was continually wanting to intrude in the individual rooms, look over Mr. Trowbridge’s papers, quiz the servants, or hold long confabs with Avice or Kane Landon or herself, until she declared she was sick of the very sight of him.
“I don’t care,” Avice would say; “if he can find the murderer, he can go about it any way he chooses. He isn’t as sure that Stryker’s guilty as Mr. Groot is. Mr. Duane says if Stryker did it, it was because somebody else hired him or forced him to do it.”