The night-officer, the substance of whose testimony had been told to me in the Inspector's office as I have related, then testified. He gave his account of the happenings of the night just as I had heard them and in answer to a few direct questions stated positively that it was not later than a quarter after one o'clock when White left the house that night wearing the cap and ulster, that he had seen him wear them more than once and knew them. That it was about a half-hour later when he had seen a man looking in White's window and some little time later, probably still before two o'clock, when the same man came out of the vestibule and hurried away, turning up Sixth Avenue. That he wore a light coat and brown derby hat and that he thought he could recognize him if he saw him again.
The witness impressed me as honest and painstaking in his work but not as especially clever. The effect of his evidence upon the jury and all present was plain. They had hung on his every word with breathless attention. To them it evidently seemed, as to the police, that they had fixed upon the criminal.
At my request the Inspector asked the officer if the man he had seen leaving the vestibule had White's ulster with him, and he answered positively that he had not.
My intention, of course, was to call to the notice of the jurors its unaccounted-for disappearance. I was not, however, encouraged to hope I had been successful, for from the indifferent expression with which the answer was received by most of them at least, they apparently thought it gratuitous and I realized that it would require a lucid argument to awaken them to its importance.
As the officer left the stand, I wondered whom the next witness would be, and if I was ever to hear anything further of the ulster or if its disappearance was to remain unexplained, to be ignored! I remembered, however, Detective Miles's promise, "We will find it if it is not destroyed," and felt sure he would keep his word, and this expectation was promptly confirmed.
"Call Mrs. Bunce!" and one of the ladies I had previously observed came forward. She was past middle age and plain but respectable looking.
"Where do you live?" she was asked. She gave her residence—a house on Nineteenth Street, west of Sixth Avenue, on the north side and only a block west of White's house.
She kept a lodging-house, she said.
An officer, by order of Dalton, now unwrapped a large package and produced the ulster. Miles smiled at me and I nodded my approval. The witness was asked if she knew anything about it. She identified it immediately and explained that she had found it lying over a chair in her front hall when she came down early the morning of White's death. She did not know how it came there; it was not there when she retired about eleven o'clock. No inmate of the house owned such an article that she knew of. In fact no one lived in the house but herself and one other lady—and she looked toward her companion,—and a servant girl. The Inspector asked her nothing further, and Miss Stanton was then called.
When Mrs. Bunce left the stand, a slight, graceful woman came quickly forward and took her place and as she lifted her veil to take the oath, a very pretty face was disclosed. She was young, not much more than twenty, I should say, and had the dark hair and the blue eyes of the Irish type. The gray hat she wore with the big tilted brim had a jaunty look, while it cast a softening shadow over her face, and a close-fitting tailor gown of gray home-spun fitted well her trim figure. Altogether she was a very attractive-looking woman. When she spoke her voice was low and not unrefined, but there was a slight metallic tone to it and a lack of sensitive modulation that was a bit disappointing. Her eyes, too, when she looked at you, though undeniably handsome, were too direct and persistent in their glance to be altogether pleasing; there was also a little hard look about the mouth that should not have been there in a woman. I had never seen her before, but I knew of her quite well as the somewhat questionable friend of White's of whom we had been talking on the night of his death, and I took perhaps a greater interest in her on that account than I might otherwise have done. I noticed, too, that Davis, Littell, and Van Bult were also observing her closely, the latter with his monocle critically adjusted. So far as I was aware, however, none of them knew her except by reputation.