“Judge,” said Lanagan, smoothly, “you lie. Don’t try to peddle any of that stuff on me. You see him about three times a week right here in this room, and you regulate your court calendar by what he tells you. I had very particular reasons for wondering whether you were here to-night. I see you are. So-long, Billy. Enjoy that wine, Judge. But you better order another Martini.”
Before either could make reply he backed away from the door and left the café.
“Pretty fair start,” he muttered to himself, grimly. “A judge with Bannerman’s appreciation of newspapers will have a lively understanding of the mess I caught him in. If there is anything wrong here, there will be a get-together of some sort quick.”
His thoughts swung back to the case in hand.
“The man who was big enough to take that woman away from the night life and make her his wife, was not the man who was killing their child,” he repeated to himself, with stubborn reiteration. And yet there could not be found hitherto the slightest sherd of motive on the part of anyone else to account for the killing.
And yet, so far as Lanagan’s investigations had gone on the case, Peters’ record was found to be ordinary enough, and neither in his life nor that of his family was there anything irregular to be discovered that would create the barest suspicion of any person seeking to strike at him through the child. There could be found not the slightest sherd of motive on the part of anyone else to account for the killing.
The life of the wife began with the meeting with Peters. What her heritage was or her history before that time, proved a problem absolutely insoluble to Lanagan and the police: although the police, for their part, did little save work to fasten the crime on the husband, even the brilliant Leslie, greatest chief of his time, taking that line.
The records of the night life are unwritten, save where the requiescat is inscribed when a callous deputy coroner blots the entry at the morgue. Who she was before she came into the brooding shadow of the night lights was a secret that, if any of the wastrels there knew, they guarded. It is more than likely that they did not know. It is a great, wide way, the entrance there. She had come by that way one of a multitude; into the shadows and out. Whether she went out for happiness or ill, whether to a free life or a sombre death, few there cared to ask, even if they recalled her at all.
Ceaselessly Lanagan had searched that district. He could trace her back to the time when Peters met her and no further. That incident had made some trifling stir merely because the “guy who got ‘copped’ on Gracie” had taken her away and really married her; or so they had heard.
Otherwise she had come into that Tenderloin district as many of her transitory sisters, with a suit case; but whether from far or near no one could say.