orced--who is a sort of ringleader, though she
rarely goes personally to her brokers' office. She's one of those
uptown plungers, and the story is that she has a whole string of
scalps of alleged Sunday-school superintendents at her belt. She
can make Bruce do pretty nearly anything, they say. He's the latest
conquest. I got the story on pretty good authority, but until I
verified the names, dates and places, of course I wouldn't dare print
a line of it. The story goes that her husband is a hanger-on of the
System, and that she's been working in their interest, too. That was
why he was so complacent over the whole affair. They put her up to
capturing Bruce, and after she had acquired an influence over him they
worked it so that she made him make love to Mrs. Parker. It's a long
story, but that isn't all of it. The point was, you see, that by
this devious route they hoped to worm out of Mrs. Parker some inside
information about Parker's rubber schemes, which he hadn't divulged
even to his partners in business. It was a deep and carefully planned
plot, and some of the conspirators were pretty deeply in the mire,
I guess. I wish I'd had all the facts about who this red-haired
Machiavelli was--what a piece of muckraking it would have made! Oh,
here comes the rest of the news story over the wire. By Jove, it is
said on good authority that Bruce will be taken in as one of the board
of directors. What do you think of that?"

So that was how the wind lay--Bruce making love to Mrs. Parker and she
presumably betraying her husband's secrets. I thought I saw it all:
the note from somebody exposing the scheme, Parker's incredulity,
Bruce sitting by him and catching sight of the note, his hurrying out
into the ladies' department, and then the shot. But who fired it?
After all, I had only picked up another clue.

Kennedy was not at the apartment at dinner, and an inquiry at the
laboratory was fruitless also. So I sat down to fidget for a while.
Pretty soon the buzzer on the door sounded, and I opened it to find a
messenger-boy with a large brown paper parcel.

"Is Mr. Bruce here?" he asked.

"Why, no, he doesn't--" then I checked myself and added: "He will be
here presently. You can leave the bundle."

"Well, this is the parcel he telephoned for. His valet told me to
tell him that they had a hard time to find it but he guesses it's all
right. The charges are forty cents. Sign here."

I signed the book, feeling like a thief, and