“Do you think anyone could have gotten out of that room in the excitement after you found the body?” asked Lanagan.
“No, sir,” said Murray, with aged preciseness. “I locked the door on the outside when I went for an officer, and it could not have been opened, because in my hurry I left my master’s key turned in the lock when I went for a policeman.”
So much for Lanagan’s very plausible theory of the “get-away.” He came up from it as suave as ever and asked:
“Could anyone have been in that room before Monteagle came in, do you suppose?”
“No, sir,” said Murray, with the didacticism of the aged again. “No, sir. There was nobody in that room. I know because the elevator boy, Denny, heard the telephone bell ringing for eight or ten times, and finally let himself in and answered it, but the party hung up. Mr. Monteagle was very free and easy with us men, which accounts for Denny taking the liberty. There was nobody in that room when Denny was in there, and that was well after eight o’clock, after I came on duty. It all gets me, sir, how that knife sticker got into that room or how he got out after he got there. I don’t like to think Ole Stromberg had a hand in it, but it looks a leetle black for Ole, according to the papers. I know my skirts are clear.”
We went on up to the room. The Public Administrator, with Monteagle’s lawyer and his stenographer, was there. The lawyer was inclined to get forward, but the Administrator was a good programer for a newspaper man and smoothed matters over. Lanagan was studying the stenographer: intelligent of feature, stylishly but plainly dressed, and bearing about her eyes and mouth very plain indications of the nervous tension under which she must have laboured during the last three days. She was one of that type of well-poised secretary-stenographers found in most large offices.
Lanagan made an opportunity of asking her:
“Did Mr. Monteagle have any enemies that you know of? Persons who have threatened him personally, by letter or over the ’phone?”
“None that I know of,” she replied quietly.
“Do you think,” asked Lanagan quickly, eying the girl narrowly with those singularly penetrating eyes of his, “do you think it could have been possible that a person might have been concealed in that closet when you locked the office door for the night?”