He was calm, efficient, self-contained now as he got Central Station upon the wire and began talking.

“Hello, lieutenant?  Yes.  This is John Cavendish of the Waldron apartments speaking.  My cousin, Frederick Cavendish, has been found dead in his room and his safe rifled.  Nothing has been disturbed.  Yes, at the Waldron, Fifty-Seventh Street.  Please hurry.”

Perhaps half an hour later the police came—­two bull-necked plain-clothes men and a flannel-mouthed “cop.”

With them came three reporters, one of them a woman.  She was a young woman, plainly dressed and, though she could not be called beautiful, there was a certain patrician prettiness in her small, oval, womanly face with its grey kind eyes, its aquiline nose, its firm lips and determined jaw, a certain charm in the manner in which her chestnut hair escaped occasionally from under her trim hat.  Young, aggressive, keen of mind and tireless, Stella Donovan was one of the few good woman reporters of the city and the only one the Star kept upon its pinched pay-roil.  They did so because she could cover a man-size job and get a feminine touch into her story after she did it.  And, though her customary assignments were “sob” stories, divorces, society events and the tracking down of succulent bits of general scandal, she nevertheless enjoyed being upon the scene of the murder even though she was not assigned to it.  This casual duty was for Willis, the Star’s “police” man, who had dragged her along with him for momentary company over her protest that she must get a “yarn” concerning juvenile prisoners for the Sunday edition.

“Now, we’ll put ’em on the rack.”  Willis smiled as he left her side and joined the detectives.

A flood of questions from the officers, interspersed frequently with a number from Willis, and occasionally one from the youthful Chronicle man, came down upon Valois and John Cavendish, while Miss Donovan, silent and watchful, stood back, frequently letting her eyes admire the tasteful prints upon the walls and the rich hangings in the room of death.

Valois repeated his experience, which was corroborated in part by the testimony of John Cavendish’s valet whom he had met and talked with in the hall.  The valet also testified that his employer, John Cavendish, had come home not later than twelve o’clock and immediately retired.  Then John Cavendish established the fact that ten minutes before arriving home he had dropped Celeste La Rue at her apartment.  There was no flaw in any of the stories to which the inquisitors could attach suspicion.  One thing alone seemed to irritate Willis.

“Are you sure,” he said to Cavendish, “that the dead man is your cousin?  The face and chest are pretty badly burned you know, and I thought perhaps——­”

A laugh from the detectives silenced him while Cavendish ended any fleeting doubts with a contemptuous gaze.