“Meet Mr. Smith”
Right or wrong, that’s what we did. We stowed all those lovely clues away in a drawer, locked the drawer, and forgot them. Then we set out to find Creda Dexter’s masculine acquaintances and sift them for the murderer.
But it wasn’t as simple as it sounded.
All our digging into her past failed to bring to light one man who could be considered a suitor. She and her brother had been in San Francisco three years. We traced them back the length of that period, from apartment to apartment. We questioned everyone we could find who even knew her by sight. And nobody could tell us of a single man who had shown an interest in her besides Gantvoort. Nobody, apparently, had ever seen her with any man except Gantvoort or her brother.
All of which, while not getting us ahead, at least convinced us that we were on the right trail. There must have been, we argued, at least one man in her life in those three years besides Gantvoort. She wasn’t—unless we were very much mistaken—the sort of woman who would discourage masculine attention; and she was certainly endowed by nature to attract it. And if there was another man, then the very fact that he had been kept so thoroughly under cover strengthened the probability of him having been mixed up in Gantvoort’s death.
We were unsuccessful in learning where the Dexters had lived before they came to San Francisco, but we weren’t so very interested in their earlier life. Of course it was possible that some old-time lover had come upon the scene again recently; but in that case it should have been easier to find the recent connection than the old one.