“You watched that cab all the time?” “Sure--sure. All the time.” “Now listen to me carefully,” Smith urged. “Did you see another man approach your man in the cab?” “No. No one came to cab. No one.” “There must have been some one,” Smith exclaimed impatiently. “The man didn’t kill himself.” “No one! No one came to cab,” insisted the driver. “I watched. I see. I wonder why he send me away because he just sit there fifteen minutes.” Smith swore softly in his perplexity. “But someone must have shot him,” he insisted. “He must have come here to keep a date. He must have been expecting someone. Why did he dismiss you?” “No one came here,” the driver repeated. “I watch.” “We’ll see if you did,” snapped Smith. “You take us to the chair you occupied in the café. Come on!” The driver dutifully led us to the bodega and to the seat he had occupied. We got a clear view of both the cab and the street through the broad windows. Further, not only the driver but the swarthy jowelled proprietor and some of his habitual patrons were ready to swear that no one had approached the cab. They had been idly observing it, they said. They remembered it well. And no one had heard a shot of any kind. The further we plunged into the circumstances of the third murder associated with the Gilded Cage, the more uncanny it seemed. I know that for my part, although it was broad daylight, a bright sun, a profusion of tropical flowers everywhere about us, I shivered as if I were listening to a ghost story upon a moonless night in some creaky old house. Smith peered up at the Gilded Cage, as if trying to discover something in its marble walls. “I’ve never had a case before,” Smith turned to Breese, “that tossed me around the way this one does. I know it all fits together. But I can’t tell you how.” He paused, observing Breese keenly. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t be stumped. I’d hold on to you.” “To me?” “Yes--if I hold on to you I can puzzle it out.” “But I was with you all the time.” “Yes,” said Smith, “but you may have an accomplice. Your driver, for example. Let me show you, Mr. Breese, how guilty you look. Spence is a blackmailer, and you receive a letter from him. Now why does he write you a letter?” “I don’t know,” said Breese. “Over the ’phone he said he had information on my wife’s death. To my face he said practically nothing, just told me to wait.” “That’s your story,” said Smith, “but who’d believe it? He wrote me a letter, too. That’s natural enough. If his victim didn’t come through with money he’d see the police got the information. Now who was his victim? You were the only one, aside from myself, who came to his place. Obviously, he must have had something on you. That’s a reasonable conclusion. Particularly in view of the circumstantial evidence against you in the other two cases. Then, your driver says he told him you sent him off in the cab. Where does he go? To your house. And in front of your house he is killed.”