“I can’t say. I’ve only just begun on this case, and I wish I’d been called sooner. It’s a great thing to get in at the beginning——”
“Yes, when the clues are fresh. Well, if I can help you in any way, call on me. Landon is my friend, but if he’s innocent, investigation won’t hurt him, and if he’s implicated, he ought to be shown up.”
Alvin Duane went away, full of new theories. If Kane Landon did kill his uncle, here were several bits of corroborative evidence. If Mrs. Black was an old friend of his, and they had pretended otherwise, that was a suspicious circumstance in itself. And if they were both entirely innocent and unconnected in any way with the murder, why did they meet secretly in the library instead of openly at the Trowbridge home? These things must be explained, and satisfactorily, too.
Also, what was in the package that she went there to give him? Lindsay had said it was about the size of a brick, but flatter. Was it, could it have been a handkerchief of Stryker’s? Duane’s brain was leaping wildly now. Supposing these two conspirators were responsible for the murder. Supposing Kane had been the subject of his uncle’s dying words, and had himself committed the deed, might it not be that the adventuress (as he already called Mrs. Black) had brought him a handkerchief of the butler’s in deliberate scheming to fasten the crime on Stryker! That Landon had left it there purposely, and that Stryker discovering this, had fled, in fear of being unable to prove his innocence.
All theory, to be sure, but well-founded theory backed by the recorded facts, which Duane had studied till he knew them by heart.
Then the telephone caller who said “Uncle” was really the nephew, and the “stephanotis” and Caribbean Sea were jokes between the two, or as was more likely, figments of the stenographer’s fertile brain.
On an impulse, Duane went to see Miss Wilkinson, the stenographer, and verify his ideas.
“You’re sure it was a man’s voice?” he asked her.
“Sure,” she replied, always ready to reiterate this, though she had been quizzed about it a dozen times.
“Do you think it could have been Mr. Landon?”