We walked round into Bryant Park and sat down on a bench. We were so excited we didn't notice anything—that I'd grabbed Babbitt's hand and kept hold of it, that it was freezing cold, that we'd got on a bench with a drunk all huddled up on the other end. We were as certain as if he'd confessed it that Cokesbury was the Unknown Voice and that he'd killed Sylvia Hesketh. We just brushed his alibi aside as if he'd never made one and planned how I was to hear him before he got away to Europe. We laid plots there in the dark, sitting close together to keep warm, with the drunk all lopped over and muttering to himself on the seat beside us.
When Babbitts left me at the Ferry we'd fixed it that he was to call me up the next day and tell me what he'd done in town and I was to tell him what I'd accomplished at my end of the line.
The next morning I tried Cokesbury's office with the same results. At one Babbitts called me and said he'd tried twice to get him as a test and been told that Mr. Cokesbury wasn't down to-day and his whereabouts were unknown. By inquiries at the steamship offices he'd found that Our Suspect—that's what we called him on the wire—had taken passage on the Caronia for the following Saturday. That was four days off—four days to hear the man who wouldn't answer the phone.
That afternoon I had an idea, called up Anne Hennessey and asked her to meet me at the Gilt Edge for supper. She came and afterward in my room at Galway's I told her—I had to, but she's true-blue and I knew it—and she agreed to help. She was to come to the Exchange the next morning, call up Cokesbury and say she was Mrs. Fowler, who wanted to bid him good-bye before he left. While she spoke—imitating Mrs. Fowler—I was to listen. We did it—though she'd have lost her job if she'd been found out—and I heard the clerk tell her that Mr. Cokesbury wasn't in his office, that he didn't know where she could find him, and that it was very little use trying to get him on the phone as he was so much occupied prior to his departure.
When Anne came out of the booth I was crying. I guess I never before in my life had my nerves as strung up as they were then.
It wasn't long after that that I had a call from Babbitts. He'd been able to do nothing. When he heard of my last attempt he said:
"He's not answering any calls at all now. His own mother couldn't get him. It's no use trying that line any more. We've got to think up some other way."
That was Wednesday—I had only three days. Three days and I hadn't an idea how to do it. Three days and Jack Reddy was waiting indictment in Bloomington jail. We couldn't stop Cokesbury going or get anybody else to stop him unless we could light on something more definite than a hello girl's suspicions.
[XII]
Thursday afternoon I was sitting in the Exchange, feeling as if the bottom had fallen out of the world. I hadn't given up yet—I'm not the giving-up kind—but I couldn't think of anything else to do. I'd tossed on my bed all night thinking, I'd dressed thinking, I'd tried to eat thinking, I'd put in the plugs and made the connections thinking—and nothing would come.