The detective rose to his feet. He was in no pleasant mood. Though the telephone wires had been flashing their news every few minutes, it seemed, indeed, as though the car which they had chased had vanished into space.
“What do you want to say to me?” he asked gruffly.
“I want, if I can,” Peter Ruff said earnestly, “to do you a service.”
Dory’s eyes glittered.
“I think,” he said, “that I can do without your services.”
“Don’t be foolish,” Peter Ruff said. “You are harboring a grievance against me which is purely an imaginary one. Now listen to the facts. You employ your wife—which after all, Dory, I think, was not quite the straight thing—to try and track down a young man named Spencer Fitzgerald, who was formerly, in a small way, a client of mine. I find your wife an agreeable companion—we become friends. Then I discover her object, and know that I am being fooled. The end of that little episode you remember. But tell me why should you bear me ill-will for defending my friend and myself?”
The detective came slowly up to Peter Ruff. He took hold of the lapel of the other’s coat with his left hand, and his right hand was clenched. But Peter Ruff did not falter.
“Listen to me,” said Dory. “I will tell you what grudge I bear against you. It was your entertainment of my wife which gave her the taste for luxury and for gadding about. Mind, I don’t blame you for that altogether, but there the fact remains. She left me. She went on the stage.”
“Stop!” Peter Ruff said. “You must still hold me blameless. She wrote to me. I went out with her once. The only advice I gave her was to return to you. So far as I am concerned, I have treated her with the respect that I would have shown my own sister.”
“You lie!” Dory cried, fiercely. “A month ago, I saw her come to your fiat. I watched for hours. She did not leave it—she did not leave it all that night!”