"What has he got to do with the telephone? What right has an inmate of a prison got to phone? Unless--unless the warden thought the case was justified--like in sickness or important business." "Maybe the warden allowed him, Chief. I didn't ask Frick!" "Get out there and ask him! Quick!" Drew waited with every muscle taut. He drummed the table with impatient fingers. He thumbed the sheath of papers he had collected on the Stockbridge case. He wheeled in his chair and stared out through the frosted window with unseeing eyes. The vision came to him of a pompous old man in prison gray, strutting about the front office with silk socks and a Havana cigar. Drew had no sympathy with a certain kind of convict. The misguided safeblower or house prowler might be excused for a great many things. The pickpocket was a professional, who took his chances as they ran. The gentleman bank-wrecker, with his overextended tale of woe and his bid for the world's sympathies, was the one the detective detested with all his soul. Such men, he believed, were beyond the pale. They knew better. Morphy, for instance, had not only gotten away with much of widow's and orphan's money, but he had wrecked a score of homes and dragged down many with him at the final assizes. "So he uses the phone!" Drew repeated like an indictment. "Well! Well! Well!" Harrigan stepped in through the door. Drew turned away from the window and stared at the assistant-manager. "What did you find?" he snapped. "I found enough, Chief! Frick says that Morphy is the whole thing up there. They call him the 'Assistant-Warden,' in jest. The Welfare League won't have anything to do with him. They got him down for a squealing 'rat.'" "You can't fool the Gray Brotherhood," said Drew. "Their rooms are too close together. What about this telephoning? Who was it to?" "A telephone booth in the Subway Station at Times Square!" "Good God!" "Frick says it was! He tried to listen but Morphy came out and looked around twice." The detective rose from his chair and grasped Harrigan's narrow shoulders with fingers of steel. "Get out there!" he ordered through line-drawn lips. "Get out there and phone from the soundproof booth. Ask my friend--the vice-president of the telephone company--to find out for us whether Morphy or anybody else in the prison telephoned at four minutes past twelve this morning. Get that?" "That was when Stockbridge was shot, wasn't it, Chief?" "It was!" exclaimed Triggy Drew. CHAPTER TEN "A WOMAN CALLS" The business of a modern detective agency is managed in much the same manner as a corporation or a large firm of corporation lawyers. Its tentacles, or operatives, are spread over the globe. Its news and assignments come in via wire. Its telephone and telegraph bills amount to thousands of dollars every year. In no other way can satisfactory results be secured.