Even when he had comfortably settled himself Mr. Hagan's initial comment was irrelevant.
"Your place is decidedly changed, Mr. Tollman. Improved I should call it."
"Thank you. Please state your business."
"On one of the cross streets in the forties in New York City there's a hotel called the Van Styne with a reputation none too savory and downtown there's a sort of mission organization in which a minister, name of Sam Haymond, takes an interest. He's a live-wire reform worker."
"Indeed?" Eben Tollman's monosyllabic rejoinder conveyed the impression of an interest unawakened, but Mr. Hagan was not so soon discouraged.
"Doesn't interest you yet? Maybe it will later. Recently a girl by the name of Minnie Ray fell out of a window at the hotel I'm speaking of—the Van Styne. It killed her."
"Yes?"
"I thought likely you'd read the item in the papers. The coroner's verdict was accident."
"Yes?" These brief, interrogatory replies might have proved dampening to some narrators. Not so with Mr. Hagan. He nodded his head, then he asserted briefly. "But as a matter of fact the Ray woman committed suicide."
"You disagree, it appears, with the coroner."