The Luminous Face

“All right.” Belknap was already absorbed in the loose papers scattered on the desk. “Several notes from ladies.”

“Yes, I noticed them. Old Gleason had a few friends in the chorus, I judge. But, unless they have any bearing on the case, there’s no call to exploit ’em, eh?”

“No, of course not. Nor any reason to mention them to the Lindsays.”

“They’ll know all there is to know. You can’t fool ’em. Miss Phyllis is as wide-awake as they come, and the Mrs is nobody’s fool. The boy, I don’t think much of. Say, aren’t you going up there? Don’t you want to see them?”

“Later, yes. But me for the other tenants here, first. Here’s where Gleason lay, was it? Near the telephone table – look here, if the first shot did for him, how could he telephone to the doctor that he was wounded?”

“Oh, I don’t know! I don’t believe that dope about the doctors knowing which shot came first. And, as you say, it couldn’t have been the fatal one first, or how could he have phoned? Anyway he could only have called the doctor if it was a suicide. You don’t think, do you, that the murderer would stand by and let him call up!”

“Scarcely. That’s why I haven’t given up the idea that it was a suicide.”

“Never mind, Oscar, you will. Why, that man was too happy to kill himself. His friends all say so. No, he was shot, all right, but the two shots make a mystery that I can’t get yet.”

Belknap frowned deeply, and thought for a few moments.

“Great mistake,” he said at last, “to reason from insufficient data.”

“Another of your ‘familiar quotations,’” chaffed Prescott.

“Another good rule,” retorted the attorney, and went out in the hall.

Prescott followed and together they went to the Mansfields’ apartment.

“We’ve been thinking it over,” Mrs Mansfield said, after she had admitted her callers and taken them to her living room, “and my husband and I feel we ought to tell all we know.”

“You certainly ought to,” Belknap assured her.

“Well,” the blonde head nodded mysteriously, “that man, Gleason, he was a gay old bird.”

“Just what do you mean, Mrs Mansfield? Speak plainly,” adjured Belknap.

“Oh, well,” she shrugged her shoulders pettishly, for she was the sort of woman who loved innuendo better than statement. “I don’t know the girls, of course, I’m not in that class of society, but he did have gay looking girls coming to his apartment now and then.”

“Every day?” Belknap looked at her sharply.

“Oh, my land, no, not every day. Just now and then?”

“Every other day?”

“No,” pettishly.

“Maybe once a week?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe, you saw one, once – ”

Mrs Mansfield laughed out.

“That’s it, Mr Belknap,” she said. “How you do pin me down. Well, all I can swear to is one time I did see a fly little piece of baggage go in at his door.”

“Day or night?”

“Daytime.” Mrs Mansfield spoke aggrievedly, as if all the zest had been taken out of her news.

“Humph! And she might have been his lawyer’s stenographer, with an important paper.”

“She might not!” Mrs Mansfield declined to lose her last shred of excitement. “Stenographers are flippy enough, Lord knows! But this little snipjack, now, she was a real little vamp!”

“You don’t know her?”

“My land! I guess I don’t! I’m a respectable married woman – ”

“And probably she is a respectable unmarried woman – ”

“Coming to see a man in his apartment?”

“Well, until we know the circumstances we can’t judge her. I say, Prescott, get that photograph, will you. You know, the – ”

“I know,” and Prescott went back across the hall. He returned with the picture of the girl Kelly had called Ivy Hayes.

“This the lady?”

“That’s the one,” said Mrs Mansfield, drawing away from it, “but she’s no lady.”

“Oh, come, now, you don’t know her. She’s a little moving picture actress. She may have had business with Mr Gleason.”

“She may have!” and the disdainful lady sniffed. “But it’s none of my business, and I don’t care to discuss her.”

“You say you saw her go in there, yesterday?”

“Good land, no! I didn’t say yesterday! I said, one day.”

“All right, I’m glad you told us about it. It might mean something and it might not.”

“Of course, it means something!” Mrs Mansfield didn’t want her news scorned as naught. “An actress calling on a man like that – of course it means something!”

“If it does we’ll find it out,” Belknap said. “You don’t think this little thing shot Gleason, do you?”

“I don’t know why she couldn’t. Little women have done such deeds.”

“So they have. Now, you’ve nothing more to tell us?”

But though Mrs Mansfield said quite a bit more, she had really nothing more to tell them that they wanted to hear, and they got away, though with some difficulty, for the lady was of a garrulous type.

To the floor above Belknap went, Prescott returning to the Gleason rooms to look about.