“You’d better get after the Yellow Taxicab Company right away,” Markham suggested. “Find out, if you can, who the man was who left here at half past eleven last night, and where he went.”

“Do you imagine for one moment,” asked Vance, “that if this man knew anything about the murder, he would have stopped in the hall and asked the operator to call a taxi for him?”

“Oh, I don’t look for much in that direction.” Markham’s tone was almost listless. “But the girl may have said something to him that’ll give us a lead.”

Vance shook his head facetiously. “O welcome pure-ey’d Faith, white-handed Hope, thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!”

Markham was in no mood for chaffing. He turned to Heath, and spoke with forced cheeriness.

“Call me up later this afternoon. I may get some new evidence out of the outfit we’ve just interviewed. … And,” he added, “be sure to put a man on guard here. I want this apartment kept just as it is until we see a little more light.”

“I’ll attend to that,” Heath assured him.

Markham and Vance and I went out and entered the car. A few minutes later we were winding rapidly across town through Central Park.

“Recall our recent conversazione[40] about footprints in the snow?” asked Vance, as we emerged into Fifth Avenue and headed south.

Markham nodded abstractedly.

“As I remember,” mused Vance, “in the hypothetical case you presented there were not only footprints but a dozen or more witnesses—including a youthful prodigy—who saw a figure of some kind cross the hibernal landscape. … Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie![41] Here you are in a most beastly pother because of the disheartenin’ fact that there are neither footprints in the snow nor witnesses who saw a fleeing figure. In short, you are bereft of both direct and circumstantial evidence. … Sad, sad.”

He wagged his head dolefully.

“Y’ know, Markham, it appears to me that the testimony in this case constitutes conclusive legal proof that no one could have been with the deceased at the hour of her passing, and that, ergo[42], she is presumably alive. The strangled body of the lady is, I take it, simply an irrelevant circumstance from the standpoint of legal procedure. I know that you learned lawyers won’t admit a murder without a body; but how, in sweet Heaven’s name, do you get around a corpus delicti

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