I steered the talk around so I could ask after a while, “Your father goes down to business now?”
“You bet not! We see to that.”
“Then what does he do?”
“When he manages to break away from Shirley? Well, in spite of his youth, he keeps up with some of his old friends; he likes his rubbers of bridge, you know; so every other evening or so you’ll find the young chap down at the club at his old place among the unrejuvenated.”
“To-night, for instance?”
“Friday; let’s see,” Fred considered. “Yes; he’ll be there to-night; why?”
Of course I didn’t tell him and I was more careful with my next remarks which finally drew out the information that, on the nights when he played bridge, Shirley, his wife—Christina, that was—herself drove down with the chauffeur to bring him home.
That made one thing clear to me, which was that the ride which Winton Scofield must not take in his car to-night was the ride he would take with his wife. I wanted to tell it all to Fred; but Jerry had warned me not to.
I was feeling quite comfortable over Jerry that day; I figured he must be all right or he’d never have ’phoned me that warning. When I returned to my office, I merely went through the motions of business while I was waiting, really, for Jerry to call me again; but he did not. So I set to working up a simple, obvious sort of scheme that any one, in my place, might resort to. Likely enough, I thought, Jerry would be satisfied with such a scheme; he would expect about that much of me.
I’d found out from Fred that his father’s bridge game broke up after eleven; so at ten that night, to make my plan sure, I took my roadster up through Lincoln Park and then up Sheridan Road to the big, new home of Win Scofield.