After a few minutes Hilton nodded as if some point had been settled, and with the grace of the professional dancer, crossed the great room and went out. Clifford’s first impulse was to follow him, but he thought better of it and kept his place. He had his recompense, for a little later the dainty Nina Cordova entered with an escort. Soon, as if by the ordinary drifting of after-midnight merry-makers, she, too, was conversing with Peter Loveman.
Again Clifford would have been glad to trade his cash and credit that he might hear. He knew that this girlish-looking creature had been privately fitted into more than one of Loveman’s adroit plans of this pleasure world; and he remembered, too, that less than a year before there had been the beginning of an affair between Jack and Nina—that she, with fame glittering before her excited vision, had dropped Jack for what she always spoke of as “her art”; and he guessed that now, having been pushed by managerial enterprise beyond her meager merits as a singer in musical comedy, and having toppled ingloriously from her lofty dreams, she might have quite other plans.
If there was a plot, could Nina be in it? And if she was in it, what was her part? And if Hilton was in it, what was that gentleman’s rôle?
Nina and Loveman went off together toward three o’clock. Clifford, alive with suspicion, followed in a taxi—only to see Nina set down at her hotel, and see Loveman drive straight to his apartment house and enter. Clifford watched the windows of the lawyer’s studio apartment, wondering if any person had been waiting within to consult with Loveman; but promptly at four o’clock—Loveman’s regular hour for going to bed—the studio windows darkened.
Clifford had learned nothing that was definite. But he had the sense, the result of long experience, that he was on the trail of the parties chiefly concerned, and that he was close upon something big—though that something was provokingly intangible and elusive.
There was but one way to handle so obscure a situation: that was by an intensive study of every possibility, and the next day Clifford began upon this slow, cautious programme. Loveman’s telephone wires had already been tapped by the Police Department. Clifford now took the vacant apartment above Loveman’s and secretly installed a dictagraph in the big studio which served Loveman as a library. Always there were ears at these wires; and with the help of four of Commissioner Thorne’s best plain-clothes men, Clifford tried to keep every movement of the suspects covered. Also he enlisted the aid of Uncle George, in whose ears the secret doings of Broadway were somehow mysteriously published. Loveman came and went about his business and pleasures, apparently as usual; Hilton was not seen again; Nina Cordova was seen only two other times; and once, for a few minutes in the Claridge restaurant, Clifford saw another woman with Loveman—one Nan Burdette, who had had a meteoric career in New York’s pleasure life, and about whom Clifford had heard a thing or two not at all to that young woman’s credit. And though she never knew it, Clifford personally kept a watch over Mary Regan. Some way, he felt sure, Mary was involved in this.
Also as part of this plan of studying all possibly related circumstances, Clifford scrutinized every available item of the pasts of Hilton and Nan Burdette and Nina Cordova.
But for all his own effort and the efforts of those helping him, Clifford still had little more than suspicion to explain the disappearance of Jack Morton. Jack could not have vanished more clearly had gravitation become suddenly invalidated and had he been shot off into space in the night.
Clifford kept doggedly at his method. It was all slow work, painstaking work, and tedious, tiring, undramatic work—as all good police work is and necessarily must be, except for now and then a turn of luck, a moment of inspiration. But after the fifth day following Jack’s disappearance a change was noticeable: from the various sources of information which Clifford had set to work, little details began to be accumulated—bits of action that had been seen, fragments of talk overheard by the patient listeners on the wires. His accumulation of tiny facts increased rapidly; and fitting the fragments together he began to perceive the outlines of a plan, though as yet he had no proof—a plan which, if he was conjecturing truly, was a typical case of how clever powers may operate through and behind the brilliant activities of Big Pleasure—of how such powers may subtly twist persons to their own ends, the person never guessing what has really happened.
On the seventh day there came to him another fragment which made him see his conjecture as an even stronger possibility, which made him feel that this hidden plan was drawing toward its climax—and which caused him hastily to send off the following note to Mary:—