“So he uses the phone!” Drew repeated like an indictment. “Well! Well! Well!”
Harrigan stepped in through the door. Drew turned away from the window and stared at the assistant-manager. “What did you find?” he snapped.
“I found enough, Chief! Frick says that Morphy is the whole thing up there. They call him the ‘Assistant-Warden,’ in jest. The Welfare League won’t have anything to do with him. They got him down for a squealing ‘rat.’”
“You can’t fool the Gray Brotherhood,” said Drew. “Their rooms are too close together. What about this telephoning? Who was it to?”
“A telephone booth in the Subway Station at Times Square!”
“Good God!”
“Frick says it was! He tried to listen but Morphy came out and looked around twice.”
The detective rose from his chair and grasped Harrigan’s narrow shoulders with fingers of steel.
“Get out there!” he ordered through line-drawn lips. “Get out there and phone from the soundproof booth. Ask my friend—the vice-president of the telephone company—to find out for us whether Morphy or anybody else in the prison telephoned at four minutes past twelve this morning. Get that?”
“That was when Stockbridge was shot, wasn’t it, Chief?”