“The signatures of Bill Hogarty.”
“What else?” she asked.
“There was a letter written by Leeds to John Milicant, dated thirty days ago, stating that he had never heard of Mr. B. C. Hogar, and that if Mr. Hogar presumed to give him a reference, it was an indication that Hogar would stand investigation. There was an old yellowed newspaper clipping from a Dawson paper telling about the finding of a body in the Tanana district. The body showed evidence of violence. The clipping doesn’t state specifically what was found. It goes on to say that the body had been tentatively identified as that of an Alden Leeds who had been in partnership with a Bill Hogarty and was reputed to have struck it rich, that Hogarty had left the Klondike district in the fall of 1907 after coming upstream from the Tanana district. He had been traced as far as Seattle where he had married a girl who had been employed in the ‘M and N Dance Hall’ at Dawson. At this late date — the article was dated 1912 — the police had been unable to find any further trace of either party.”
Della Street frowned. “What does that add up to, Chief?”
“I don’t know,” Mason said. “There were a lot of other things, photographs, location notices, things which had evidently been collected with the greatest care.”
“And who’s B. C. Hogar?” she asked.
Mason smiled and said, “He might be Bill Hogarty under another name.”
“Then the first initial would be ‘W,’” she said. “Bill is a nickname for William.”
Mason nodded. “And, on the other hand,” he went on, “it might be that someone who suspected rather strongly that Alden Leeds was in reality Bill Hogarty, wanted him to sign the name, ‘Bill Hogarty,’ for the purpose of checking handwriting, but naturally he was afraid to let the cat out of the bag, so he wrote a letter asking information about a B. C. Hogar, and Leeds, without suspecting what was in the wind, answered the letter in such a way that he wrote the name not only once but twice.”
The telephone rang. Mason looked at his wrist watch and said, “I’ll bet Stive has a golf engagement this afternoon and broke his neck to get an opinion in just before twelve.”