“I guess I’m getting soft, too.” She nodded her head, still looking Vance squarely in the eyes. “I risked my happy home to tell you what I did, because somehow I believed you. . . . Say, you weren’t stringing me, by any chance?”
Vance put his hand on his heart, and became serious.
“My dear Miss La Fosse, when I leave here it will be as though I had never entered. Dismiss me and Mr. Van Dine here from your mind.”
Something in his manner banished her misgivings, and she bade us a kittenish farewell.
CHAPTER XVII.
Checking an Alibi
(Thursday, September 13; afternoon)
“My sleuthing goes better,” exulted Vance, when we were again in the street. “Fair Alys was a veritable mine of information—eh, what? Only, you should have controlled yourself better when she mentioned her beloved’s name—really, you should, Van old thing. I saw you jump and heard you heave. Such emotion is most unbecoming in a lawyer.”
From a booth in a drug-store near the hotel he telephoned Markham: “I am taking you to lunch. I have numerous confidences I would pour into your ear.” A debate ensued, but in the end Vance emerged triumphant; and a moment later a taxicab was driving us down-town.
“Alys is clever—there are brains in that fluffy head,” he ruminated. “She’s much smarter than Heath; she knew at once that Skeel wasn’t guilty. Her characterization of the immaculate Tony was inelegant but how accurate—oh, how accurate! And you noticed, of course, how she trusted me. Touchin’, wasn’t it? . . . It’s a knotty problem, Van. Something’s amiss somewhere.”
He was silent, smoking, for several blocks.