“Well!” he burst out as they entered.  “My secretary tells me you’ve come about this temperamental Carmen of mine.  Tell me where she is.  Quick!”

Graham smiled at Bobby.  The manager ran his fingers across his bald and shining forehead.

“It’s no laughing matter.”

“Then she has definitely disappeared?” Graham said.

“Disappeared!  Why did I come down at this ungodly hour except on the chance of getting some word?  She didn’t even telephone last night.  I had to show myself in front of the curtain and give them a spiel about a sudden indisposition.  And believe me, gentlemen, audiences ain’t what they used to be.  Did these ginks sit back and take the show for what it was worth?  Not by a darn sight.  Flocked to the box office and howled for their money back.  If she doesn’t appear to-night I might as well close the house.  I’ll be ruined.”

“Unless,” Graham suggested, “you get your press agent to make capital out of her absence.  The papers would publish her picture and thousands of people would look her up for you.”

The manager ceased his perplexed massage of his forehead.  He shook hands genially.

“I’d thought of that with some frills.  ’Has beautiful dancer met foul play?  Millions in jewels on her person when last seen.’  Old stuff, but they rise to it.”

“That will help,” Graham said to Bobby when they were in the car again.  “The reporters will find Maria quicker than any detective I can put my hand on.  My man evidently fell down because she had gone before I got him on the case.”  At his office they learned that was the fact.  The private detective had been able to get no slightest clue as to Maria’s whereabouts.  Moreover, Bobby’s description of the stranger who had entered the cafe with her merely suggested a type familiar to the Tenderloin.  For purposes of identification it was worthless.  Always followed by the car from Smithtown, they went to the hotel where Paredes had lived, to a number of his haunts.  Bobby talked with men who knew him, but he learned nothing.  Paredes’s friends had had no word since the man’s departure for the Cedars the day before.  So they turned their backs on the city, elated by the significance of Maria’s absence, yet worried by the search and the watchful car which never lost sight of them.  When they were in the country Graham sighed his relief.  “You haven’t been stopped.  Therefore, nothing was found at your apartment, but if that wasn’t planted why should Maria have sent an incriminating note there?” “Unless,” Bobby answered, “she told the truth.  Unless she was sincere when she mailed it.  Unless she learned something important between the time she wrote it and her disappearance from her home.”

“Frankly, Bobby,” Graham said, “the note and the circumstances under which it came to you are as damaging as the footprints and the handkerchief, but it doesn’t tell us how any human being could have entered that room to commit the murders and disturb the bodies.  At least we’ve got one physical fact, and I’m going to work on that.”