"A good deal more. A basista, without being a member of the gang, is the invaluable unsuspected spy in the camp of the victims, who loots profitable news and sends it in. He or she is sometimes the brilliant amateur director, the educated person with an outlook, the Adviser Plenipotentiary. A dramatic-minded young lady with extravagant tastes and some kind of righteous grudge against society might hardly realize at first what she was doing—and oh, how she has struggled to be rid of it, since! Naturally, she's become worth double to them. And she's recently furnished them with such a hold that, so far from getting clear, I fancy she was pushed to furnish them with another victim; that if it hadn't been for the moving-picture another person would soon have received an Arm of Justice letter, and that person Cuyler Ten Euyck. What do you think of my thread?"
"Pretty thin, isn't it?"
"Wait, encouraging youth! You'll be grateful some day! Come, I'll show you my hand! Ever since the inquest it has been perfectly clear to the unprejudiced mind that Christina Hope was in that room when Ingham was shot. It was perfectly evident that she was shielding somebody. We say, now, that she was shielding Denny. When we began to suspect Denny we had to run down his friend, Christina Hope, who left behind her a scarf bordered with the color in which, through his craze for her, Ingham's apartment was decorated—a color which up to the time of the murder she wore so constantly that it was like a part of her personal effect, and which she has never worn since."
The color was all about them—blue-gray. What could that have to do with the shimmer of a dummy pistol, scratched upon whose golden surface Herrick once more confronted the initial "C"? But he did not put this question to the District-Attorney. And it was Kane who continued. "Shall I treat you to a bit of ancient history; shall I reconstruct for you the movements of Miss Hope on the night of the fourth of August?"
"As you please."
"She testified to have dined at home. So she did; but with so poor an appetite that the maids said to each other that she had really dined early somewhere else. She testified to being ill and out of sorts; so she was. But she was incited by this being out of sorts to something very different from the languor to which she testified. Far from having bade Ingham farewell forever she called him up at the Van Dam on an average of every half hour, as well as at his club, and at two restaurants which he frequented. Failing to find him, at eleven o'clock she did, indeed, go to the post-box and mail a letter; but at twenty minutes past eleven she was waiting in a taxi outside the theater where Denny was rehearsing and sent in a message, without any concealment of her name, that she wished to speak to him. He sent out word that he was engaged. An hour later she was there again, and not believing the back doorman who told her that he had left, she stopped Wheeler, who had been inside, and besought him to get Denny to speak to her. He replied that Denny was gone, whereupon she called out to her chauffeur, with every adjuration to hurry, the name of the Van Dam apartment house—where, say at a quarter after one, you, Herrick, saw her shadow on the blind. According to Joe Patrick she was the first on the spot.—Was she the last there, too?"
Herrick paused in a long stride; with his bones slowly freezing in him he turned and faced the District-Attorney.
"If Denny loved her and went there on her account did he shoot down Ingham before her eyes? Or did she run out, as she suggested at the inquest, and Denny shoot Ingham as he turned to follow her? There's your chance, Herrick, prove that! Mr. Bird tells us when our prisoner came in. But, before all and everything, when did he come out?"
He had a way for which Herrick could have slain him, of driving points home with a smile.
"But suppose, now, she did most of the loving on her own account. Ingham, to a certainty, had found out her connection with the Arm of Justice, when it tried to blackmail him through her. From the row you heard between them he's likely to have been threatening her with exposure. Suppose Denny's story is straight and when he found her there with Ingham he just turned and walked off. Was Ingham a man to refrain from threatening to send his revelations, first of all, to a man who had treated him so cavalierly? Is she a girl to stop short of the desperate in preventing him? Isn't she one to avenge herself in advance? It may not have been wholly in revenge. Ingham was himself a wild revengeful fellow who sometimes had too much to drink. He may have provoked her even to bodily fear. If he guessed such a thing do you think Denny would not keep silence? I see it strikes you."