"Your case might hold water," said Jasper, "if it wasn't as full of holes as a sieve. Why, you can make out as good a one for almost anybody."
"Who, for example?" Jones asked.
"Well—take Reddy."
"Jack Reddy?" I said that, sitting up suddenly and staring at them with a piece of jelly roll halfway to my mouth.
"He's as good as another," said Jasper, and then he added sort of dreamy: "I believe I could work up quite a convincing case against Reddy, allowing for a hole here and there. But our illustrious friend here admits holes at this stage."
"Fire away," said Babbitts. "Give it to us, holes and all."
"Well—off the bat here it is. You may remember that no one saw him coming back from Maple Lane that night. There is no one, therefore, to deny that he may have had Miss Hesketh in the car with him. Instead of going back to Firehill, as he says he did, he followed his original plan of taking her by the turnpike."
"Right at the start I challenge that," said Babbitts. "She appeared at the Wayside Arbor at nine-thirty. The date in Maple Lane was for seven. Supposing she kept it and was on time—which is a stretch of the imagination—he would have had to travel one hundred and eighteen miles in two hours and a half."
"He could have done it."
"On a black, dark night? nearly forty-eight miles an hour?"