"He did. Then things got bad at the Borough Bank. Fleming had had to divide with Schwartz and the Lord only knows who all, but it was Fleming who had to put in the money to avert a crash--the word crash being synonymous with scandal in this case. He scrapes together a paltry hundred thousand, which Wardrop gets at the capital, and brings on. Wardrop is robbed, or says he is: the bank collapses and Clarkson, driven to the wall, kills himself, just after Fleming is murdered. What does that sound like?"
"Like Clarkson!" I exclaimed. "And Clarkson knew Fleming was hiding at the White Cat!"
"Now, then, take the other theory," he said, pushing aside his cup. "Wardrop goes in to Fleming with a story that he has been robbed: Fleming gets crazy and attacks him. All that is in the morning--Friday. Now, then--Wardrop goes back there that night. Within twenty minutes after he enters the club he rushes out, and when Hunter follows him, he says he is looking for a doctor, to get cocaine for a gentleman up-stairs. He is white and trembling. They go back together, and find you there, and Fleming dead. Wardrop tells two stories: first he says Fleming committed suicide just before he left. Then he changes it and says he was dead when he arrived there. He produces the weapon with which Fleming is supposed to have killed himself, and which, by the way, Miss Fleming identified yesterday as her father's. But there are two discrepancies. Wardrop practically admitted that he had taken that revolver from Fleming, not that night, but the morning before, during the quarrel."
"The bullet. Nobody ever fired a thirty-two bullet out of a thirty-eight caliber revolver--unless he was trying to shoot a double-compound curve. Now, then, who does it look like?"
"Like Wardrop," I confessed. "By Jove, they didn't both do it."
"And he didn't do it himself for two good reasons: he had no revolver that night, and there were no powder marks."
"And the eleven twenty-two, and Miss Maitland's disappearance?"
He looked at me with his quizzical smile.
"I'll have to have another steak, if I'm to settle that," he said. "I can only solve one murder on one steak. But disappearances are my specialty; perhaps, if I have a piece of pie and some cheese--"