“Mr. George Dallas!”
A jaunty figure in blue serge, with a smart foulard tie and curly blond hair just beginning to thin, moved briskly forward. Mr. Dallas was obviously a good fellow; there was a hearty timbre to his rather light voice, his lips parted constantly in an earnestly engaging smile over even white teeth, and his brown eyes were the friendliest ever seen out of a dog’s head. If he had not had thirty thousand dollars a year, he would have been an Elk, a Rotarian, and the best salesman on the force.
He cast an earnestly propitiatory smile at Sue Ives, who smiled back, faintly and gravely, and an even more earnestly propitiatory one at the prosecutor, who returned it somewhat perfunctorily.
“Mr. Dallas, you were giving a poker party on the night of the nineteenth of June, were you not?”
“I was indeed.”
Mr. Dallas’s tone implied eloquently that it had been a highly successful party, lacking only the prosecutor’s presence to make it quite flawless.
“You were present when Mr. Farwell telephoned Mr. Burgoyne?”
“Oh, yes.”
“The telephone was in the room in which you were playing?”
“Yes, sir.”