“Not more than a couple of minutes,” said Barclay. “Do you really think it figures in your affair?”
“As a matter of fact, Don, I think there is hardly any doubt of it,” Chick said seriously. “In a way, however, it serves only to increase the mystery.”
“I don’t quite see your point.”
“My point is this,” Chick explained. “Why did the person, or persons, responsible for this curious affair go to the trouble to bring the victim, if she was a victim, and place her on a seat in the hospital grounds? She could have been left in many places with much less danger of detection. In the court itself or a dark doorway. It surely is a singular mystery.”
Barclay puckered his brows thoughtfully, but he could suggest no theory for the circumstances. Moreover, he could not give the detective any additional information.
Declining an invitation to remain to dinner, Chick remained only to warn the artist to say nothing about the affair, and he then bade him farewell and departed. He did not retrace his steps. Instead, he sauntered through the court mentioned, which was only wide enough for a single vehicle, and he presently found himself in Belmont Street, a quiet residential avenue, with a traffic-filled thoroughfare to be seen in the distance.
“By Jove, it looks very much as if I am hitting the right trail,” Chick said to himself, now shaping a course toward the business section. “If the girl left the Alhambra when the show ended, it then must have been about eleven o’clock, and if she lost consciousness while walking homeward through Main Street, it’s a safe gamble that she did not go far in her abnormal condition. She may have been picked up by the cab, therefore, and brought this way and through the court just as Barclay was gazing from his window. It would have taken only a couple of minutes to place the girl on the seat and move on, as he stated, which would show plainly that one or more men had a hand in the job. But what was the object? That’s the question. By Jove, I’ll head for the Alhambra and see what I can learn.”
He arrived at the moving-picture house ten minutes later. He found the manager, Mr. Hewitt, in the ticket office with one of his sellers. Addressing him through the lattice window, at the same time tendering the yellow coupon, he inquired:
“Do you know, or have you any way of learning, who occupied this seat in your theater last evening?”
Hewitt gazed at him a bit sharply through his glasses; then shook his head and tossed the coupon aside, saying indifferently: