“It was all done quick as a flash, Dan!” whispered the disgraced detective. “He was seemingly docile, and asked me for a drink of water as you went out. I turned to get it. He had seen me put back my pistol.
“With his handcuffed hands he swiftly plucked it out, then one touch of the trigger, and there he lies.”
“It is the will of God,” said Daly, gravely. “There’ll be no newspaper scandal and public exposure now. He has gone before the higher court. Wait here. Let no one enter. We must call it a drink suicide.”
Daly leaped away like a leopard on the chase to be the first to seal Mrs. Willoughby’s lips forever as to this happening, and to hand over the document which had cost the dead scoundrel his life. With grave faces, the detectives watched the stiffening form upon the floor. The “rising star” had set forever!
Only the silent, weeping, widowed woman at the Hotel Savoy knew the whirlwind of baffled hate which had filled Vreeland’s wretched breast as he staggered away from his wife’s rooms that morning.
Their quarrel had been the unveiling of an unpunished crime—a tangle of sin and shame.
For smarting under the loss of a “financial backer” who could not refuse him money advances, Vreeland had faced his wife with the direct query, so long withheld, as to her separate property.
“You must now aid me with your cash, money, property or whatever else you have. Garston’s death leaves me without a friend.”
Standing among the scattered pyramids of fashion’s evening uniforms, Katharine Vreeland turned her bright, defiant eyes upon the half-insane speculator. How she despised him in her guilty heart!
“I have neither money nor friends. All I had to hope for died with James Garston. You were not man enough to demand an accounting of the living.