"It gets you just here"—Leverage talked slowly, heavily, tapping his spatulate fingers on the table to emphasize his points—"we know this bird was going to elope with some skirt. All right! Now I ask this—why go all around the block, looking for some one he might have been mixed up with, when the woman a man is most likely to elope with is the girl he's engaged to marry?"
Silence—several seconds of it. Carroll spoke:
"Miss Gresham, you mean?"
"Sure, David—sure! I'm not sayin' she was the woman, mind you. I'm not sayin' anything except that if I'm right in thinkin' that maybe her folks weren't as crazy about this guy Warren as they seemed—if I'm right in that, maybe they was plannin' to take matters in their own hands and elope."
"It's possible."
"Sure, it's possible, and—"
"But, chief," interrupted the reporter who had done most of the talking, "why should Miss Gresham kill Warren?"
"I didn't say she did, did I?"
"If she was the woman in the taxi—"
"If! Sure—if! All I mentioned that for was to show you we might as well start thinking close to home before we go to beatin' through the bushes to follow a cold trail."