We had turned into West Broadway beneath the Elevated tracks before any of us spoke. Then Markham voiced a doubt which was plainly an articulation of his troubled ruminations.
“I’m wondering if, after all, this fellow Skeel can have any important information to give us. His phone call was very strange. Yet he spoke confidently enough regarding his knowledge. No dramatics, no request for immunity—just a plain, assured statement that he knew who murdered the Odell girl, and had decided to come clean.”
“It’s certain he himself didn’t strangle the lady,” pronounced Vance. “My theory, as you know, is that he was hiding in the clothes-press when the shady business was being enacted; and all along I’ve clung lovingly to the idea that he was au secret to the entire proceedings. The keyhole of that closet door is on a direct line with the end of the davenport where the lady was strangled; and if a rival was operating at the time of his concealment, it’s not unreasonable to assume that he peered forth—eh, what? I questioned him on this point, you remember; and he didn’t like it a bit.”
“But, in that case——”
“Oh, I know. There are all kinds of erudite objections to my wild dream.—Why didn’t he give the alarm? Why didn’t he tell us about it before? Why this? and why that? . . . I make no claim to omniscience, y’ know; I don’t even pretend to have a logical explanation for the various traits d’union of my vagary. My theory is only sketched in, as it were. But I’m convinced, nevertheless, that the modish Tony knows who killed his bona roba and looted her apartment.”
“But of the three persons who possibly could have got into the Odell apartment that night—namely, Mannix, Cleaver, and Lindquist—Skeel evidently knows only one—Mannix.”
“Yes—to be sure. And Mannix, it would seem, is the only one of the trio who knows Skeel. . . . An interestin’ point.”
Heath met us at the Franklin Street entrance to the Criminal Courts Building. He, too, was anxious and subdued, and he shook hands with us in a detached manner devoid of his usual heartiness.
“I’ve got Snitkin running the elevator,” he said, after the briefest of salutations. “Burke’s in the hall up-stairs, and Emery is with him, waiting to be let into Swacker’s office.”
We entered the deserted and almost silent building and rode up to the fourth floor. Markham unlocked his office door and we passed in.