disappeared. I know exactly where he has gone, but I have reason to believe that something might happen to him. … Yes, I am the Mrs. Hollander who was formerly Mrs. Herbert Endicott. … Yes, that dreadful affair. … Oh, you will? Thank you so much.”
Inspector Valcour smiled a curiously satisfied little smile all to himself as he sat in a department limousine, chauffeured by a department driver, and sped smoothly north along Lafayette Street on the way to Mrs. Hollander’s address on Park Avenue.
And he thought of many things.
He thought of Marge Myles and of Herbert Endicott, who were dead; and of Madame Velasquez who, too, had died.
He thought of Mrs. Siddons, returned to her native New England hills, sinking her body and her being into their granite harshnesses and drawing amazing sustenance from them, as a flower will that grows in the imperceptible fissure of some solid rock.
He thought of Roberts whom he had never seen again and of whom he had never again heard, after the violation of the Sullivan Law had been charged against her, and her sentence suspended. She had gone back to England, probably, to lapse into a proper background for her neurotic broodings.
And that partner of Hollander’s—the Southernistic Mr. Smith. He had faded entirely, never to return; nor was the fact of any consequence at all. He had been at best a side issue too unimportant for further bother.
But most of all he thought of Mrs. Endicott, who was now Mrs. Hollander.
The annals of history and the annals of crime were fringed with women just like her: beautiful, astonishing women, who revolved with their