It was not. Inked in carefully on the label was a series of numbers, and I knew them at once.

They were the license numbers of Maud’s limousine.

I did not tell Lydia. Fortunately she was not looking at me. She was gazing helplessly around the room.

“I’ve just remembered, Pat,” she said. “Where are the keys? He had a lot of them, on a long steel chain. Do you suppose he took them with him?”

I felt suddenly cold.

“Did you tell the police that?” I asked.

“No. Is it important?”

“It might be,” I said carefully. “It looks as though they might have been Evans’s keys, Lydia. They were taken the night he was hurt.”

“Evans? The watchman at the Cloisters? Do you know what you are saying, Pat?”

“I’m afraid I do.”

Chapter Fifteen

IT HAD BECOME A habit with me to lie awake, and I had a lot to think over before I tried to sleep that night. Without any proof to speak of I was certain that Don Morgan had been in the neighborhood long before his official arrival. Perhaps even as early as June, and that I had seen him—possibly watching Audrey—through the windows of the playhouse. The rest was not so clear, however. His attack on Evans, the keys, and his two attempts to get into the Cloisters. And that final rendezvous of his with someone at the playhouse, and its ending.

It had been a rendezvous. I was certain Lydia was right. Someone had telephoned him that day and made the appointment. Then again there was the matter of Maud’s license number. Why had he kept it? Was Bessie mixed up in this, after all, and had he seen her in Maud’s car? Then I remembered something that seemed to eliminate Bessie. The evening papers had stated that a clerk in the motor vehicle license bureau, seeing Don’s picture in the paper on Monday, had recognized him as a man who, some weeks before, had inquired as to the ownership of a certain car.

“It damned near knocked me down,” the man had said. “I had the lights too. I’ll get that bastard’s license if it’s the last thing I do.”

The clerk had turned it over to someone else and did not remember the number. But he said the man looked as though he had had a narrow escape. He was pale and his hands shook as he lit a cigarette.

It was possible, of course. It might even account for Maud’s collapse. If Gus had almost struck someone with the heavy car she would never tell on him. But the next morning when I spoke to Gus he flatly denied anything of the sort.

“You can ask Mrs. Wainwright, if you don’t believe me,” he said stiffly. “I never touched anybody that day, or came near it.”

That was on Thursday. Don had been murdered on Saturday night, and the case was apparently at a standstill. Hopper and the other detectives from the city were pretty well disgruntled. They had what looked like a well-planned murder, but outside of where it took place there was nothing.