The voice had a strange dwindling whine as though it came from some cavernous depth in the man’s immense body.
The witness looked about with a vague smile. “Well, Colonel,” he said, “I have had some experience.”
“You have had a great deal of experience. You were Chief of Police, then you set up a detective agency. You have had a lot of experience in criminal investigation. And you have usually been right.”
This was generous treatment when the reverse was indicated.
The detective was not conspicuous for the confidence of the community in a profession too often subject to cloud. His employment in the bank affairs had followed from his intimate association with Halloway, an association, as all knew, resulting from the handling of a questionable matter in the banker’s private life.
The bank did not require a retained detective.
Was this man’s sinecure gratitude in the banker, or a sort of blackmail? Here was material with which a reflection on the witness could have been assembled. But the attorney chose rather to admit the man’s superior mental acumen in criminal affairs.
The witness moved in his chair. “Well, Colonel,” he said, “I try to be right.”
“And you have nearly always been right,” continued the attorney. “In the Deal case you maintained that the decedent had not been killed by a bullet fired from a cellar grating at a hundred yards along the street east of the man’s window, and it was afterward shown that the trajectory of a bullet fired from that point would have crashed into an electric light midway of the distance. And in the Littlewood case, you said the evidences of a struggle were manufactured, because the slant of wood fibers in the broken window sash showed that the pressure had been exerted from within the room and not from without.”
The voice ascended into a lighter drawl with a facetious note in it.