Helen Albury was, I read, Robert Albury’s sister, and she was, in spite of his confession, thoroughly convinced that her brother was not guilty of murder, but the victim of a plot. She had retained Charles Proctor Dawn to defend him. (I could guess that the late Charles Proctor had hunted her up, and not she him.) The brother refused to have Dawn or any other lawyer, but the girl (properly encouraged by Dawn, no doubt) had not given up the fight.

Finding a vacant flat across the street from Dinah Brand’s house, Helen Albury had rented it, and had installed herself therein with a pair of field glasses and one idea⁠—to prove that Dinah and her associates were guilty of Donald Willsson’s murder.

I, it seems, was one of the “associates.” The Herald called me “a man supposed to be a private detective from San Francisco, who has been in the city for several days, apparently on intimate terms with Max (‘Whisper’) Thaler, Daniel Rolff, Oliver (‘Reno’) Starkey, and Dinah Brand.” We were the plotters who had framed Robert Albury.