"Gee!" I said, soft to myself.
"You can quell those rising hopes," he replied. "He wasn't the man you heard."
"How do you know?"
"Because hearing that he was a friend of Miss Hesketh's, I spent part of yesterday at Azalea and found that Mr. Cokesbury can prove as good an alibi as any of them."
"Did you see him?"
"No, he wasn't there and if he had been I wouldn't have bothered with him. I saw someone much better—Miner, the man who owns the Azalea Garage, where Cokesbury puts up his car. It appears that the trip before last Cokesbury broke his axle and had to have his car towed down to the garage and left there to be mended. When he came down Saturday he expected it to be done and when it wasn't, got in a rage and raised the devil of a row. He had to go out to his place in one of Miner's cars which left him there and went back for him Monday morning."
"Then he had no auto on Sunday."
"Miss Morganthau will take the head of the class," then he said, low, as if to someone beside him: "She's our prize pupil but we don't say it before her face for fear of making her proud," then back to me as solemn as a priest in the pulpit, "That is the situation reduced to its lowest terms—he had no car."
"Well that ends him," I said.
"So it seems to me. In fact Cokesbury gets the gate. I won't hide from you now that I went to Azalea because I'd heard a rumor of that talk on the phone and thought I'd do a little private sleuthing on my own. Didn't know but what I was destined to be the Baby Grand Burns."