Annihilation

Transcriber’s Note Italic text displayed as: _italic_

Annihilation

Annihilation

By Isabel Ostrander

[Illustration: Decoration]

NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 1924

Copyright, 1924, by ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & CO.

_Printed in the United States of America_

Published, 1924

Contents

Chapter Page

I In The Rain 1

II Number Four 16

III The Nose Of Dennis Riordan 28

IV The Inspector Brings News 40

V Ching Lee’S Errand 55

VI Deadlock 70

VII Gertie 84

VIII Gates Of Mystery 99

IX In Thin Air 112

X The Man In The Shadows 123

XI The Closed House 134

XII The Breath Of Death 145

XIII “The Horror Deepens!” 161

XIV The Blue Balloon 174

XV Midnight Marauders 188

XVI A Question Answered 202

XVII Forewarned 216

XVIII Checkmate! 229

XIX Dennis Supplies A Simile 244

XX Max 256

XXI The Black Pyre 270

XXII Annihilation 280

XXIII The Advice Of Ex-Roundsman Mccarty 299

Annihilation

Chapter I

In The Rain

A seven-fifty derby, new only that afternoon and destined already to be reblocked! Ex-roundsman Timothy McCarty, whose complete transition to civilian attire was still so recent as to be a source of satisfaction to himself and of despair to his tailor and haberdasher, shrugged his broad shoulders and trudged sturdily along in the teeming downpour. A walk he had come out for, to clear his head of all that psycho-junk he’d been reading, and a walk he would have, but he could think of a place the devil could take this rain to, where it would be better appreciated!

Rain dripped down upon a sodden wisp of tobacco which hung dejectedly from beneath his mustache, and muddy streams spurted up almost to his knees with every step. It was a mean district, a neighborhood of broken, narrow sidewalks, dilapidated tenements and squalid wooden shacks, which became more squalid as McCarty neared the river, although here great warehouses loomed against the lesser darkness of the night sky. It was barely nine o’clock but there was scarcely a light in the streets, except where irregularly spaced street lamps emitted a blurred glimmer which emphasized rather than dispelled the murky gloom, yet McCarty strode on with the unconcern of one treading a once-familiar precinct.

He was not the only pedestrian abroad in the late September storm. Under the glow of a lamp he presently descried a dark figure proceeding also in the direction of the waterfront, and insensibly he quickened his own steps. Some peculiarity in the latter’s gait had aroused that suspicion, more than mere curiosity, that had served him so well in the old days on the Force.

The man was lurching along at an unsteady pace, now breaking into a shambling trot for a few steps, now pulling up short, only to dive forward once more, reeling through the driving sheets of rain. McCarty followed closely. He had almost overtaken the man when a tall, bluecoated figure stepped suddenly from the shelter of a doorway and barred his progress.

“None of that, my lad! For what are you following that feller there—? Glory be, it’s Mac!”

“True for you, Terry!” McCarty responded, as their hands met in a mighty grip. “A fine, conscientious bull you are, I’ll say that for you, pinching the old has-been that got you on the Force, just because he’s taking a bit of a stroll on a grand night like this!”

Officer Terrence Keenan grinned sheepishly in the darkness.

“It’s a grand night, all right; for ducks!” he amended. “You’re no has-been, Mac, from what the boys tell me of the different cases you’ve taken a hand in on the quiet since you resigned from the Department, but you needn’t give me the laugh for looking you over just now! You know this neighborhood as well as me, and when I see a guy trailing a prosperous looking drunk towards the riverfront and the wharves it’s up to me—”

“‘Drunk,’ is it?” McCarty demanded in fine scorn. Then he checked himself and added with a sweeping gesture toward the greenish glow from twin lights across the street: “I was minded to take a stroll through my own old beat and drop in at the house over there for a word or two with you and the Lieutenant at the desk, when I saw the guy ahead—but where is he? He couldn’t have got in one of the warehouses at this time of the evening and there’s nothing else between here and the corner—?”

“Aw, let him go!” Officer Keenan interrupted good-naturedly. “Honest, Mac, I ain’t got the heart to run them in these days, when the stuff is so hard to get, and all—!”

But McCarty was not listening. Forgotten alike were the bedraggled derby and the affluent private life of which it had so lately been sign and symbol; he was back on his old beat with something doing, and he grabbed his brother officer by the arm.

“What’s that there beyond the lamp-post, half in and half out of the gutter? It’s him, Terry, he’s down!—Come on!”

Terry needed no second bidding now. Together they ran, splashing through puddles and over the loose, tilting fragments of pavement to where the man lay. He had pitched forward, his face hanging over the curb’s edge, down into the swirling gutter. The back of his head showed a bald spot gleaming in the misty rays from the lamp.

“There’s some heft to him!” Terry grunted. “Now I’ll have to run him in for safe-keeping. What’s that he’s jabbering, Mac?”

Between them they had turned the prostrate man, who was breathing stertorously and muttering to himself in broken gasps. The young policeman’s flashlight revealed a heavy, smooth-shaven face, distorted and pasty gray beneath the rivulets of muddy water that coursed down it, with small, close-set eyes darting about in a wild, distended gaze.

McCarty bent lower in an effort to distinguish the hoarse accents. His companion commented disgustedly:

“He’s worse than I thought he was! Look at the rolling eyes of him! It’ll be Bellevue, I’m thinking—”

“Hush!” McCarty commanded, as he lifted the man’s head higher on his knee. His breathing had become a series of heaving gasps now. Suddenly, with a rumbling snort, they ceased altogether, the flabby jaw sagging as the lids drooped.

“Not Bellevue, Terry; the morgue, more likely.” McCarty spoke solemnly. “He’s gone.”

“Croaked!” Terry started up. “It sure looks like it! I’ll run across to the house and tip off the lieut. and put in the ambulance call. You’ll wait here?”

Without pausing for a reply he turned and splashed heavily across the street to the station house. McCarty looked down at the figure still propped against his knee. In the feeble light of the street lamp it appeared to be muffled to the neck in a loose, dark ulster of some thin material. The body was portly though not actually stout; the upturned face, washed clean of the mud from the gutter, was a grayish blur, its hideous distortion of feature relaxed, leaving it a mere flaccid mass. Some involuntary movement of the supporting knee caused the head to slump forward on the dead man’s breast and once more that small, round bald spot gleamed whitely from the scant, dark hair surrounding it.

“Mike Taggart—he’s lieutenant now, as you may know,—says it’ll be all right to bring the body over there without waiting out on such a night for the ambulance.” Terry had waded back through the reeking mire. “He’d be glad of a word with you, too, Mac, so will you give me a hand with the old boy here? It’s only a step.”

With a slight shrug and a smile that was lost upon his companion McCarty assumed his share of their limp burden. Together they bore it across the street to the station house. He blinked in the sudden glare of light, as the sodden figure was deposited on the floor, and then turned to greet the homely, spruce young giant who had come forward from behind the desk.

“So it’s Lieutenant Taggart now, that was a rookie when I left the Force!” he exclaimed with a laugh. “I’d thought to drop in on you one of these days but not as part of the escort for our friend here!”

He motioned over his shoulder toward the body and the lieutenant shook hands with obvious respect before advancing to examine it.

“Glad to see you, McCarty, though you do come in strange company!” He smiled and then turned to Officer Keenan who had knelt and was running his hands over the inanimate form in a practiced manner. “Humph! Looks like a pretty prosperous sort of a bird to be hanging around the waterfront on a night like this, don’t he? What do you find on him, Terry? I don’t believe I ever saw that face in this precinct before.”

As the policeman turned over to his superior the contents of the dead man’s pockets, McCarty stood gazing thoughtfully down upon him. He was apparently in the late forties and in life the beefy, extremely close-shaven face might have been florid; the nose was short but highly arched and the lids which had opened now revealed the small, pale eyes set in a dull stare. His raincoat, of excellent texture, had been opened to admit of Terry’s search, and disclosed a dark brown sack suit and tie of the same grade of conservative excellence as the outer garment, but the low brown shoes that covered the large, rather flat feet were as incongruously inferior as they were blatantly new. The man’s hands were outstretched limply, palms upward, with the thick though well-kept fingers curling slightly, and McCarty’s keen eyes narrowed a little as they rested on them. Then he turned.

“Lieutenant, I think I saw his hat go sailing off down the gutter as we carried him across. Shall I get it while you and my friend Terry, here, go over his effects?”

“Wish you would, McCarty.” The lieutenant glanced up absently from the desk where he and Keenan were sorting out a collection of small articles. “You must take a flash at these when you come back.”

McCarty nodded and departed upon his self-elected errand, appropriating the flashlight which the policeman had laid on a chair. He proceeded to the opposite side of the street and measuring off with his eye the distance from the lamp-post to where the fallen man’s head had rested over the curb, he followed the racing gutter for several yards down past the further warehouse to where the turbid flow was separated by a pile of refuse. There, impaled on a barrel stave, he found the sodden, shapeless brown mass that had once been a soft felt hat, and retrieving it, he carefully examined the inner side of the crown with the aid of the flashlight. The gilt lettering denoting the maker on the sweatband was so soaked as to be illegible but two initials showed plainly in the tiny, gleaming ray:—‘B. P.’

With his trophy McCarty returned to the station house to find Keenan and his superior with their heads together over a key-ring.

“There’s the hat, or what’s left of it.” He deposited the drenched article beside the body on the floor as he spoke. “Terry, here, was watching the guy pass him and he says he was hooched up for fair, so likely there’ll be nothing further come of this after his folks haul him away from the morgue, but if I’m wanted to swear that ’twas bootleg lightning and not the regular kind hit him, Inspector Druet or any of the old crowd at headquarters will know where to find me. I’ll be getting on home, for I’m soaked to the skin—”

“Take a look at these first, McCarty,” the lieutenant invited. “Hooch or no hooch, I’m going to find out what this bird was doing in my precinct! If that jewelry’s phoney it don’t go with the rest of his outfit and if it’s real, what was he doing down this way with it on? Don’t make any crack about his relying on us to protect him, for you walked your beat here yourself in the old days and the district hasn’t changed much! What do you make of it?”

McCarty turned over the articles presented for his inspection with a carelessly critical air.

“Handkerchief, kid gloves, Wareham gold-filled watch, pigskin cigar case with two broken cigars in it, sixty—seventy dollars and eighty cents in change,” McCarty enumerated rapidly. “Nothing here marked and no letters nor papers, eh? That scarf pin and those cuff buttons, fakes or not, are what they call cat’s-eyes, I’m thinking. Is that all except the key-ring?”

“It is, but if this bird purposely intended to leave everything off that would give him away to whoever he was going to meet, he slipped up! Look at here!” Lieutenant Taggart spoke with an air of triumph as he separated the keys of all shapes and sizes on the ring to disclose a small, thin, much-worn disk of some dull metal, one side of which bore the single numeral ‘4,’ and the reverse three letters in old English script:—‘N. Q. M.’

McCarty’s stubby mustache moved slightly as his lips tightened, but he shook his head.

“What is it?” he asked. “I’d say it looked like one of those identification tags in case he lost his keys, but if ‘N. Q. M.’ are his initials, what is the ‘4’?”

The young lieutenant regarded him almost pityingly.

“It was not meant for an identification tag exactly, McCarty; at least, not for any stranger that might happen to pick up these keys, but it’ll tell me more than just who this bird is and where he lived before I’m through!”

“I hope so, lad!” But McCarty still shook his head. “Happen, though, when the body is claimed you’ll find he was Neil Quinn Malone, walking delegate for Stevedores’ Union Number Four, and down here late for a date because of meeting up with some bootlegger’s first cousins!”

“There’s the ambulance!” Terry spoke suddenly as a bell clanged up the street. His honest face had reddened and his tone was a mixture of forbearance and chagrin.

“Well, I’ll take the air, boys,—and the rain!” McCarty sternly repressed the twinkle in his eyes. “I’m chilled to the marrow of me, which does no good to the touch of rheumatism I’ve had lately, and I need no young sawbones in a white coat to tell me that guy is dead, even though there’s never a mark on him! Good luck to the two of you!”

He made his way out into the storm, bending his head before the pelting downpour and chuckling as he turned the coat collar up about his throat. The good lads back there would think that a few years of soft living had done for old Mac, and he was through!

Yet he was not chuckling when he turned into a dingy little lunchroom a few blocks away and in the look which he bent upon his coffee cup there was more of uneasy indecision than its steaming but doubtful contents warranted. He _was_ through, though not in the way Terry and Taggart might be thinking. Never again would he intrude on a case that belonged to the department he had quitted! The methods had changed too much since his day when a plainclothes bull went out and got his man or was hauled up on the carpet to explain why not; it was bad enough when Headquarters began to be cluttered up with all that scientific crime detecting junk from the foreign police centers, but now they were opening up a school to teach this black art called “criminal psycho-analysis” to a bunch of fine lads in the detective bureau who needed nothing but the quick minds and strong arms that the Lord had given them already! It was his own secret and shamefaced perusal of such books on this subject as he had been able to gather, that had driven him forth with a case of mental blind staggers earlier that very evening. Well, let them psycho-analyze that man who carried the queer tag on his key-ring! And yet—!

It was a rare case! McCarty’s eyes glistened and his nostrils fairly quivered with the old eagerness as he considered its possibilities. His coffee finished, he took the nearest subway that led to the rooms over the antique shop where he maintained a solitary bachelor establishment.

He had expected to find it empty as usual but to his surprise he noted that a low light glowed from behind the shades of his two front windows and on opening the entrance door with his latchkey he was greeted by a particularly malodorous stench of tobacco wafted down the narrow stairway. There wasn’t another pipe in the world that smelt quite like that one, and as he bounded upward he called:

“Denny! If I hadn’t thought you were on duty at the engine house—!”

No reply came to him, however. He rounded the stairs’ head and then paused in amazement on the threshold of his shabby, comfortable living-room. Dennis Riordan, engine driver from the nearest fire house and his particular crony since they had landed from the Old Country, was totally oblivious to his presence. He sprawled in the low Morris chair with a book in his hands, and his long legs writhed while his lantern-jawed face was contorted in the agony of mental concentration.

“Denny! Snap out of it!” his unheeded host commanded. “What in the name of all that’s—!”

Denny “snapped.” He dropped the book and sat up with a jerk, his eyes blinking.

“So you’re back,” he remarked dazedly. “’Tis small wonder I’ve seen little of you these days since you’ve taken to literature! Newspapers have been your limit up till now but here I use the latchkey you gave me, thinking to get in out of the rain whilst I’m waiting for you, and I find these books. Man, they’re fair wonderful!—But what do they mean?”

“I don’t know yet and I misdoubt the guys who wrote them do!” McCarty’s tone was almost savage as he deposited his dripping hat tenderly on the corner of the mantel and peeled off the sodden topcoat. “Which one had you there?”

“‘The Diagnostics of Penology.’” Denny picked up the volume once more and read the title laboriously. “I thought a ‘diagnostic’ was an unbeliever and you’d taken to religion in your declining years, but ’tis all about the different kinds of criminals. I never knew there was but one—a crook!”

“No more did I.” McCarty lighted a cigar reflectively. “There must be something in it, though, for that’s the stuff the commissioner is going to get through the heads of the boys at headquarters in this new school of his.”

“Is it, now!” Dennis’ tone held a touch of awe. “Do you mean that all they’ll have to do when a crime’s committed will be to sit down and figure out whether the lad who pulled it off was a lunatic, maybe, or ’twas born in him, or a matter of habit or the only time he’d try it, or else that he’d been brought up to it? And what would the crook be doing meanwhile? He’d still have to be caught.”

“It would all help, even though we don’t get the hang of it, or the commissioner would not be trying it on the boys,” declared McCarty loyally. “Some of them that have not yet been promoted to headquarters would not be hurt by anything that would teach them to use their heads now and then, I’m thinking!”

There was that in his voice which made his companion straighten in his chair, the mild gray eyes sparkling with eager interest.

“Who’s been blundering now?” he demanded. “I ought to have known you would not be trailing around in the storm till near ten o’clock for the sake of your health! What is it, Mac? For the love of God, are you on another case?”

“I am not!” responded McCarty with dignity. “I’m a real estate owner, as well you know, with no connection with the police department any more, and if an exhausted man in mortal terror or agony drops dead in his tracks and they ship him to the morgue as an acute alcoholic it’s nothing to me!”

Dennis emptied the contents of his pipe into the tray and rose.

“Where do we start from?” he asked excitedly. “Thanks be, I’ve the next twenty-four hours off duty! Do we have a talk with his folks first or what?”

“First and last, we mind our own business this time!” McCarty waved toward the chair. “Sit down again and light up, Denny, and I’ll give you the dope on it, though there’s little enough according to Terry Keenan and Mike Taggart—”

“Terry Keenan and Mike—!” Dennis obeyed tensely. “That’ll be down in the old precinct, then, along the waterfront! Who was the guy and what was he running from when he dropped?”

McCarty gave an account of the evening’s occurrence, concisely yet omitting no significant detail. When he had finished, his visitor sat silent for a moment, turning the story over in his none too quick mind. Then he remarked:

“I don’t get it at all, Mac. A prosperous, middle-aged, respectable looking fellow by what you say, with never a scrap of paper on him to show who he was, only that bit of a metal tag! He must have been running from somebody! Did you look behind you?”

“I did not, and neither did he.” McCarty paused. “Mind you that, Denny! I didn’t say he was trying to get away from anybody. The way he was running and stopping and then reeling along once more showed that if he was not half-crazed with pain, ’twas only will power kept him going as far as he got. When Terry and I turned him over, the gray look of his face came from more than his slowing heart. It was horror that stared out of his eyes! He was conscious, too, though the end came in less than a minute, and muttering with his last breath.”

“Do you think he might have been going some place down among the wharves at that hour, and running till his heart burst to get there on time?” Dennis’ pipe had gone out in his excitement and he laid it on the tray with a tremulous hand. “Was it blackmail? Did he think whoever was waiting would kill him if he didn’t show up? Mac, what manner of man was he? Fine quality clothes and cheap shoes, elegant jewelry and a gold-filled watch that could be bought on the installment plan! The cigar case was real pigskin, you tell me, but—what kind of cigars was in it?”

“Denny, you’ve rung the bell again, even though you don’t know it!” McCarty gazed for a moment in affectionate but unflattering surprise at his old friend. “The cigars were Coronas, and there’s no better nor more costly made! For all the clothes were of grand quality, they didn’t fit him; they’d been carefully altered but they’d been made in the beginning for a taller and thinner man—and they’d had good wear. Only the cheap shoes were new, and though the links and pin were as rich-looking as any swell would sport they were fakes, even if I wouldn’t give Taggart the satisfaction of telling him so! He’d too close a shave, remember, and his hands showed no signs of hard work; don’t you make anything at all out of it?”

“He could wear the clothes, though not the shoes, of another man—smoke his cigars, copy his jewelry, keep his own hands soft—? No, there’s no sense to it, whatever!” Dennis shook his head slowly. “You’ve something up your sleeve, but what makes you figure so much on the close shave of him? Why was that number ‘four’ on the other side of the tag with his initials on the key-ring? Did you look to see if the same letters was in his hat?”

“It had dropped down into the gutter when he fell.” McCarty had refrained for the time being from mentioning his errand after the missing headgear. “Did I say that ‘N. Q. M.’ were the dead man’s initials? I fitted a made-up name to them in joke when Taggart was so sure about it, but it might be an address as well. You’ve known this town as long and as well as me, Denny; did you ever hear of the New Queen’s Mall?”

“That I do,” said Denny. “You mean that one block running through from the Park to the next avenue, with gates shutting it in at both ends, as though the families living in the houses on the two sides of the street was too good to mix with the rest of the world? It’s right in the heart of the millionaires’ part of town, with the swellest society all around, and ’twas named after some grand place in London, wasn’t it?”

McCarty nodded.

“The Queen’s Mall. The Burminsters came from there and they owned most of the property on both sides of this block here. The great corner mansion on the north side nearest the Park is where they live, and they moved heaven and earth to close in the street with gates, the families in the other houses liking the idea fine. The newspapers put up a holler about the street being a public thoroughfare and the whole business being contrary to democracy, but that little bunch of millionaires had their way. That was long before ever you and me came to this country, Denny, but the inspector told me about it, and it’s brought up even now when there’s occasion for it at some election time or other—”

“Number Four, New Queen’s Mall!” Dennis interrupted witheringly as he emptied and pocketed his cold pipe and rose with a glance at the clock. “’Tis twenty minutes to eleven, and you sit there giving me a history of New York! What are we waiting for?”

Chapter II

Number Four

At the corner the two self-appointed investigators found a taxi and Dennis, for once taking the lead, insisted upon engaging it. McCarty had protested loudly against this excursion, but the recounting of the strange event at the waterfront had aroused all the sternly-repressed longing to be back in the game once more, and although he was bitterly resentful of the new order of things at headquarters since his day the fascination of the mystery itself had gripped him with irresistible force. Not for worlds would he have admitted it to his companion, however, and as they rattled eastward through the Park he grumbled:

“You must have taken leave of your senses entirely, Denny, and I’m no better, letting you drag me out again on a night like this to gawk through barred gates at a row of rich men’s houses! I’ve one satisfaction, though; ’twas you and not me, as you’ll kindly remember, that hired this robber taxi!”

Dennis grinned to himself in the darkness.

“You’re welcome to the ride, Mac!” Then his tone lowered seriously. “I’ve been thinking this thing over, and I must have been wrong on that blackmail notion; that the fellow was on the way to pay any, I mean, if he had only a matter of seventy dollars on him. I’m surprised at you, though, and even at Terry and Mike Taggart, that not one of the three of you thought to go back across and get the hat; it could not have sailed far, in spite of the hill there and the gutters running over. ’Tis not like you—”

“Damn the hat!” McCarty interrupted irascibly. “’Tis the man himself I’m thinking of; now if the cold, muddy rain-water in the gutter had anything to do with it—?”

He mumbled and lapsed into silence and after a discreet interval his companion observed in an aggrieved tone:

“Through more than muddy rain-water have I followed you on many a case you’ve dragged me into, but if the grand education you’ve been getting lately from those books has made you talk in riddles, you can keep the answers to yourself for all of me! By the same token, if that fellow was not running away from anybody or hurrying to meet them but was just chasing along like that through the storm, staggering and stopping and leaping forward again, he must have been out of his head entirely, and the asylum would have got him if the morgue hadn’t!”

“True for you, Denny; that’s what was in my mind just now,” McCarty replied with a contrite return to his habitual geniality. “Not about his being a lunatic, maybe, but delirious from sickness or suffering. When he fell, with his head hanging over the gutter and the cold water rushing over his face I was thinking it brought back his consciousness for that minute there at the end. You could see by the look in his eyes and the way he fought for breath that there was something he was trying his best to tell, something that filled him with more horror than the fear of death itself!”

“’Tis a lot to see in a man’s eye,” Dennis remarked in unusual skepticism. “Maybe he’d no notion of dying; he seems to have been a pretty healthy looking fellow, from what you tell me. If those books are getting you to read meanings in people’s faces that are not there you’d best be sticking to the newspapers!”

“’Tis small meaning anybody could read in yours, my lad!” the indignant student retorted. “Here we are and the gates are shut, just as I told you. What’s the next move? You started this, Denny, and it’s up to you!”

But it proved to be up to neither of them, for, as McCarty descended from the taxi before the great gates of wrought iron which spanned the side street, a tall figure emerged from the shadows and a well-known voice exclaimed in accents of satisfaction not untinged with amusement:

“There you are, Mac! I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Inspector!” McCarty gasped, gaping at his former superior. “How in the world did you know—?”

Inspector Druet laughed.

“How did I know you’d be on the scent with the trail fresh and the wind your way? Good evening, Riordan; it’s like old times to find you following Mac’s lead again.”

“’Tis Denny that’s leading this night,” averred McCarty, with a chuckle, as Dennis turned to pay the taxi driver. “In spite of the rain and all, he was possessed to come and have a look around here when I told him about the drunk that fell dead across the street from the station-house down by the waterfront!”

“The ‘drunk,’ eh?” Inspector Druet tapped a leather case which he carried. “I have the man’s hat here which you found in the gutter, and I needn’t ask if you saw the initials inside, though you said nothing to the boys at the house. When I found out you’d been on the scene, and got a line from them on the way you’d collected all the dope on the case and then quietly faded away with a pathetic reference to rheumatism, I knew you would be on the job. Then your phone didn’t answer a little while ago and I was morally certain you had read that identification tag correctly and were on your way here, so I waited. It looks as though this was going to be bigger than it appeared at first.”

They had drawn under the comparative shelter of an overhanging cornice, and Dennis, who had turned to gaze reproachfully at McCarty when the hat was mentioned, asked with lively interest:

“Do you mean, Inspector, that the fellow didn’t just drop dead by accident? What was the initials? Who was he?”

“The initials are ‘B. P.’” The inspector spoke with added impressiveness. “I have a list of all the householders on this block; there are only a few, for you can see by the street-lamps that each place is several times the size of an ordinary city lot. The owner of Number Seven is Benjamin Parsons, and if this is his hat—?”

“But the tag on the key-ring said Number Four,” Dennis observed doubtfully as the inspector paused. “Somebody named ‘B. P.’ might live there too, sir.”

“Number Four is occupied by a bachelor alone, a Mr. Henry Orbit.” The inspector shook his head. “I don’t know how the keys of his house came to be in Parsons’ pocket, but that’s a detail. Here’s the private watchman now; come on.”

He moved out toward the gateway in the middle of the street but McCarty laid a detaining hand on his arm.

“Just one minute, Inspector. Well I know I’ve nothing to do with this case, if there is a case in it at all, but ’tis easier to change hats than houses, and if you stop by first at Number Four, and—and let me do the talking to whoever opens the door—?”

He hesitated and Inspector Druet flashed him a keen glance.

“What is it, Mac?” he demanded quickly. “Have you seen more than I have in this?”

“I’ve seen the corpse, sir,” McCarty returned evasively.

Along the enclosed street the solitary figure of the private watchman was advancing with quickened step. When he reached the gate the inspector spoke to him in a low but authoritative tone. The watchman uttered a startled exclamation and a brief colloquy ensued during which McCarty and Dennis gazed up the wide vista of the street beyond the high iron bars. In the glow of the lanterns which lighted the Mall the smooth pavement glistened like a sheet of glass under the dancing raindrops and the houses on either side, built of gleaming marble or the darker brownstone of an older period, looked like miniature palaces, with their vaguely outlined turrets and towers and overhanging balconies. Straight ahead loomed another gate, behind it the inky mass of foliage of the great park across the Avenue, untouched as yet by the season’s first frost.

“’Tis like a picture-book scene, even in the night!” Dennis remarked, and then he shook his head. “But it’s too restricted, entirely. For all its grandeur, the folks living in there will be having no more chance of keeping their private affairs one from the other than if ’twas a row of workman’s cottages out in the factory suburbs! ’Tis small mystery could last for long inside these gates!”

“I’d rather be outside them and free, than cooped up in there for all the millions these families have,” acquiesced McCarty. “The watchman’s opening up, though, and the inspector is beckoning. Will he be letting me have my way, I wonder?”

The great gates swung inward and the three passed in, the inspector leading and turning to the south sidewalk which was bordered by the houses bearing even numbers.

“Of course I know the servants belonging to every household on the block,” the gray-haired watchman was saying in a slightly lofty tone. “Mr. Orbit has none with the initials you mention, Inspector, and no house guests at present or I should have been notified. It’s my business, and the day man’s, to know everybody who comes and goes through the gates.”

“You see, Mac?” Dennis nudged his companion. “’Tis worse than a jail!”

But McCarty paid no heed. He was eyeing the house fronts as they passed with a gaze of critical absorption, giving quick glances at the occasional lighted windows of those across the way, but the latter were all discreetly curtained, and the first two houses on the south side were utterly dark. The third—Number Six—was a rococo affair of some pinkish stone, bristling with tiny pointed turrets and unexpected balconies. Here a brilliant light shone from the upper floors, but the next house—Number Four—although small in contrast to the mansions across the street, gave an impression of size in its stately lines of snowy marble, broken only by the windows with dark, graceful vines trailing from the boxes on each sill.

It appeared to be attached to the farther house by a conservatory of some sort, but there was no time to explore further, for the watchman had halted and Inspector Druet mounted the steps and rang the bell. McCarty followed with Dennis at his heels. As they paused, waiting, the soft but deeply resonant tones of an organ came to their ears from behind the windows to their right, from which emanated a subdued glow of light.

From the far end of the street behind them a faint gong sounded and with an exclamation of annoyance the watchman hurried off to open the gate on the park side for the entrance of a motor car. He had scarcely passed beyond earshot when the inspector whispered to McCarty:

“What’s the idea, Mac? Did you hear what the watchman said? ‘B. P.’ didn’t belong here, in spite of the tag on the key-ring.”

“No more he did, sir,” McCarty agreed, but there was no disappointment in his tone. “I just want a word with the one that opens the door.”

There was no sound of footsteps from within but as McCarty finished speaking the door opened. Silhouetted against the soft light was the figure of a man, before whom, for the moment, even McCarty’s ready tongue was silenced. Dennis choked. They were confronted by a man who, though taller than the average of his race, was unmistakably Mongolian and clad in the flowing robes of his native land. He bowed slightly but in a dignified fashion, and then, as the visitors still remained silent, he asked:

“What is it you desire, please?”

His voice was high and singsong but it bore no trace of an accent.

“We don’t want to disturb Mr. Orbit, if there’s been a mistake made, but a man who says he’s a servant here has met with a bit of an accident,” McCarty explained. “He’s kind of stout with a round, red face and a little bald spot on his head. Forty-five or nearer fifty years old, he might be. Can you tell us his name?”

He had edged closer to the side of the wide entrance door, so that, in continuing to face him, the Chinaman had been compelled to turn until the low light played across his countenance but it remained gravely inscrutable as he listened. And although there was a perceptible pause, when he did reply, the words followed each other without hesitation.

“It is Hughes, the valet. You desire to talk with Mr. Orbit? He is engaged but I will see if he can receive you. This way, sirs.”

He closed the door after them and led the way into the house. As he walked the long queue which depended from his head almost to his knees swayed with each step.

“A Chink!” Dennis whispered. “What is he, the laundress here?”

Once again his remark went unheeded for McCarty was staring about him. He had seen many wealthy homes in the past, but never had he entered an apartment of such unostentatious magnificence as this hall of Mr. Henry Orbit’s house. He could not know that he walked among almost priceless treasures, that the dim panels on the walls were Catalan tapestries of the fifteenth century, that the frescoed ceiling had known the brush of Raphael himself, and that upon the great carved chair, secretly removed from the Duomo long ago, had once rested the exhausted but dauntless frame of Savonarola. The ex-roundsman could only feel with some sixth sense, that he was in the presence of beauty and he trod as lightly as his clumping boots would permit on the ancient, deep-piled rug beneath his feet.

The Chinese butler conducted them to a spacious room at the left of the hall, bowed them to chairs and withdrew, closing the door behind him. From the room opposite the swelling notes of the organ rose, filling their ears with a thunder of harmony which made the impressionable Dennis catch his breath and instinctively bow his head.

“Come out of it, Denny! We’re not in church!” McCarty admonished, and then turned to the inspector. “You see, sir, that fellow who died down there by the wharves was wearing his own cheap shoes but the expensive hand-me-down clothes of another man not his own build, and who would that have been but his employer? He’d shaved too often and very close like a man who was constantly in service, a butler or a valet, and if he borrowed, without leave, cigars too good for the likes of his taste he might have borrowed a hat, without leave as well. It struck me the keys was his own, though, along with the little metal tag and that’s why I thought maybe we’d save time by stopping here first.”

“You were right, again!” Inspector Druet exclaimed heartily. “I was in such a hurry that I took too much for granted. We’ll see what Mr. Orbit can tell us about this man of his.”

But Mr. Orbit did not immediately appear, and as the last notes of the organ throbbed into silence, Dennis found his voice.

“Valet or no, what was any one from a grand house like this doing down in that tough precinct by the waterfront, and in all the storm? Answer me that! What did he die of, did the ambulance doctor know?”

The inspector shook his head.

“It wasn’t up to him to say; he just pronounced the man dead and now it’s the medical examiner’s job, but we’ll know in the morning, after the autopsy.... What have you found over there, Mac, anything interesting?”

The room into which the Chinese had ushered them was a library, modern and luxurious yet monastic in tone, with tall-backed, cathedral chairs, refectory tables and benches and dried rushes covering the inlaid marble floor. A single huge log smoldered upon the hearth and books lined the wall space from floor to ceiling between the narrow, stained-glass windows. The light came from torches held in sconces and braziers suspended from massive chains.

McCarty had strolled over to a low row of open shelves where he stood with his back to his two companions. He seemed not to have heard the inspector’s query.

“It’s literature he’s took up now,” Dennis explained gloomily, “all along of that new school the commissioner’s opening at headquarters. This psycho-whatzis has gone to the head of him, and I misdoubt Mac’ll ever be the same man again!”

McCarty’s expression denoted symptoms of apoplexy at this slanderous betrayal, but before he turned he surreptitiously slipped into his inner breast pocket a pamphlet bound in pale blue paper which had fallen almost into his hands when he removed a larger, leather-covered volume. He replaced the latter and turned with dignity to approach the hearth once more.

“You’ll need to lose no sleep over me, Denny, and there’s more than me would not be hurting themselves by improving their minds!” he announced cuttingly. “The inspector’s here on a case of—of sudden death, not to listen to your opinion of my private affairs!”

There was an amused but affectionate softening of the inspector’s keen eyes as they glanced at his erstwhile subordinate. He opened his lips to speak when a pleasantly modulated voice from the doorway behind them fell upon their ears.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” it said. “I am Mr. Orbit.”

The three visitors turned to find a tall, slenderly erect man in dinner clothes regarding them with gravely inquiring eyes. He must have been well over fifty, but the lines in his strikingly distinguished face were those of strength, not age, his dark hair was only lightly powdered with gray at the temples and he bore himself with the air of a man at the apex of his prime.

As he advanced into the room the inspector stepped forward to meet him.

“Sorry to have disturbed you, Mr. Orbit, but we will only detain you for a few minutes. I am Inspector Druet from Police Headquarters and these are two of my assistants. We want a little information about a certain man who carries a tag with this house address on his key-ring.”

Henry Orbit nodded slowly and the concern deepened upon his face as he waved them back to their chairs and seated himself in a highbacked one facing them.

“I know of no one who carries such a tag except my valet, Hughes. Is he in any trouble? Ching Lee tells me that, from your description, the man about whom you are inquiring is undoubtedly Hughes.”

“You don’t seem surprised,” the inspector observed bluntly. “Has this valet of yours been in trouble before?”

A shadow of regret more than annoyance crossed the face of their host and he shook his head.

“He has gotten into more than one scrape, although nothing, to my knowledge, of course, that would engage the attention of the police. I am afraid he is rather a scoundrel, but he has been with me for twenty-two years and I cannot believe him utterly reprehensible. Has he suggested to you that I would help him now?”

“The man I’m asking about is beyond any one’s help,” responded the official. “He is dead.”

“Dead!” the other repeated in a low, shocked tone, after a moment’s pause. “It seems incredible! Only a few hours ago I gave him permission to go out! What happened? Did some accident occur?”

“That’s what we want to find out,” Inspector Druet announced grimly. “There are several suspicious circumstances connected with his death. Do you know of any enemies he may have had?”

Orbit frowned slightly and his glance traveled in startled amazement to the faces of McCarty and Dennis and back again to his interrogator.

“‘Enemies?’” he repeated. “Surely there was no violence? I know nothing of Hughes’ personal affairs but I should not have fancied he had an active enemy in the world!”

Chapter III

The Nose Of Dennis Riordan

There was a second pause and then the inspector asked: “Did he give you any excuse for wanting an evening out to-night?”

“No, none. It was not unusual and I thought nothing of it.” Orbit’s hands clenched slightly. “I cannot believe that poor Hughes is really gone! Perhaps Ching Lee made a mistake, perhaps some one else had come into possession of Hughes’ key-ring. Will you describe him to me, please, and tell me the suspicious circumstances you mentioned?”

“You describe the fellow, Mac; you examined him and his clothes more closely than I did.” There was a double significance in the inspector’s tone and he added: “Special Deputy McCarty happened to be there when this man died.”

Orbit nodded and fixed his eyes expectantly on McCarty as the latter briefly complied with the inspector’s request, without, however, mentioning the letters in the hat. When he had finished, Orbit exclaimed:

“It is he, beyond a doubt! The raincoat and brown sack suit were my own, given to him when I tired of them myself, and he must have copied my cat’s-eye pin and links, although I never saw them. How did he die?”

“Well, sir, he was hurrying along in the rain and all of a sudden he dropped.” McCarty chose his words carefully. “When me and a friend of mine got to him he was breathing his last and the end came as I lifted his head to my knee.... How did he happen to be wearing a hat with the letters ‘B. P.’ in it, Mr. Orbit? Who is B. P.?”

Orbit frowned again thoughtfully.

“I cannot at the moment recall any one with those initials but naturally I have no knowledge of his friends or associates,” he replied at last. “Surely that is immaterial, however. What was suspicious about the poor fellow’s death? He was an irreproachable servant but when his time was his own his habits were irregular and I should not have been surprised to learn that his heart had failed or he had suffered a stroke.”

“Had he been drinking the last time you saw him; this evening, I think you said?” McCarty asked.

“Certainly not! I have never seen him under the influence of alcohol or he would not have remained an hour in my service. He was fully aware of this, and although I am convinced that he occasionally drank to excess he was careful never to let me see him in such a condition. Had he been drinking when you went to his assistance?”

McCarty ignored the question.

“You don’t ask where that was, I notice. Have you any notion where he could have been going to-night?”

“Not the slightest,” Orbit shrugged. “I have told you that I am quite ignorant of his private affairs and have had no interest in them.”

“Still, he’d been your personal servant for a matter of twenty-odd years,” McCarty insisted. “Wouldn’t you want to know what he was up to if you learned he’d left your house to go down along the waterfront, in one of the toughest districts in the city?”

Orbit stared in genuine amazement.

“‘The waterfront?’” he repeated. “I cannot imagine what he could have been doing in such a district as you describe! Even in his dissipations Hughes was never attracted by anything sordid, to my knowledge, but aped even the vices of men of a higher station than he.”

“I was coming to that,” McCarty remarked. “You spoke awhile back of trouble he’d got into more than once; what sort of trouble?”

“Gambling debts and indiscreet affairs with women; upper servants like himself or the wives of upper servants. When monetary settlements were in order he came to me for an advance on his salary and that is how I learned of his difficulties.” Orbit paused and then added reflectively: “He has been in none of late, however; at least, none which required assistance from me.”

“About what hour to-night was the last time you saw him alive?”

“At a little before seven, when he laid out these clothes for me.” Orbit motioned to his attire. “Some guests were dining with me—three gentlemen, all near neighbors—and I was preoccupied but Hughes’ appearance and manner must have been quite as usual or I would have noted a change. My guests are still here.”

He paused significantly and McCarty replied directly to the hint.

“We’re sorry to keep you from them but we’ve got to know what your man was doing down in that neighborhood. You don’t know his own friends maybe, but you might know which of the servants employed by your neighbors he’s been most friendly with, and if you don’t maybe your neighbors themselves would know.”

“Really, is it as important as that?” There was still no trace of annoyance in Orbit’s voice or manner but merely a dignified protest. “You can understand that any notoriety in connection with the death of my unfortunate valet would be highly distasteful to me, and to have my friends subjected to it would be doubly so. My guests this evening are Mr. Gardner Sloane and his son, Mr. Brinsley Sloane, Second, who live across the street at Number Five, and Mr. Eustace Goddard, from Number Two, the corner house next door to me here. I have no idea whether or not Hughes was even acquainted with any of the servants in either the Sloane or Goddard households, but I will inquire.”

He rose and left the room, and the inspector turned to McCarty.

“Is all this necessary, Mac? I know I said this looked big but that was when I thought the man dead down there near the river was the millionaire Parsons. If it’s just a dissipated valet we can let it slide, at least unless the autopsy discloses foul play of some sort.”

“When you asked me if I’d seen more in this than you, inspector, I told you I’d seen the corpse,” McCarty reminded him quietly. “Now you’re asking me if it’s necessary to find out even before the autopsy who this fellow Hughes was friendly with and I’ll say it won’t do any harm, because I saw him before he was a corpse! Heart disease he may have died of, or apoplexy, but it may be a good thing for us to know what brought it on him so sudden to-night, even if he was just a valet!”

There was no mistaking the earnestness in his tones and the inspector started to speak, but once more he was forestalled by the opening of the door, and Orbit ushered in three men. The first was slightly younger than his host, stout and bald except for a fringe of sandy hair. His mouth beneath the small, reddish mustache had a humorous quirk at the corners which appeared to be habitual, his blue eyes twinkled and he regarded the police official and his two deputies with a frank and not unfriendly curiosity.

The second man was approximately the same age but his smooth-shaven face was strikingly handsome and his youthfully cut dinner coat was worn with a jauntiness which proclaimed the middle-aged gallant.

The last of Mr. Orbit’s guests to enter was a tall, thin man of about thirty, whose inordinately serious expression was enhanced by the shell-rimmed glasses which bestrode the bridge of his nose. His chin was cleft, like that of the man who had immediately preceded him and there was an unmistakable family resemblance between them. Even before the introduction McCarty placed him as Brinsley Sloane, Second, the older man as his father, Gardner Sloane, and the first to enter, therefore, as the next-door neighbor, Eustace Goddard.

It was Goddard who spoke first.

“Too bad about poor Hughes, inspector. Very hard on Mr. Orbit, I must say. I’ve seen Hughes about the house here for years, of course, but I don’t think I’ve exchanged half a dozen words with him in my life and I’m quite sure none of the servants in my household know anything more about him than I do.”

“Why, Mr. Goddard?” asked the inspector.

“Well, for one thing, they’re all elderly and staid—been with my family for years. Mr. Orbit happened to mention the fact just now that Hughes was given to dissipation occasionally. He wouldn’t have found anything in common with our staff, but you are welcome to question them to-morrow as much as you please.”

“Thank you.” The inspector turned to the elder of the two remaining guests. “Mr. Sloane, have you happened to notice any acquaintanceship between Mr. Orbit’s valet and your servants?”

There was a slight touch of sarcasm in his voice and the flush which mounted to Goddard’s scant red hair showed that the shot had gone home. Gardner Sloane responded with a hearty assumption of cordiality:

“Can’t say that I have, inspector. We are a household of men, for my son and I are alone with my father, who is very old and an invalid. His male nurse, a Swede who speaks little English, and John Platt the butler who is nearly seventy, are the only servants in our employ with whom there is any likelihood that Hughes might have come in contact. However, I have observed him on several occasions in the company of a butler in service in another house on this block and although I find it very distasteful to direct even the most casual of official inquiries to an establishment presided over by an unprotected lady—”

“Father!” the young man interrupted in precise, shocked tones. “I am astonished—!”

“You usually are, Brin,” interrupted the elder in his turn. “It is my duty to tell these officers what I have seen. The only servant here in the Mall I have ever noticed in Hughes’ company is Snape, Mrs. Bellamy’s butler; if any of them knows anything about the fellow’s private affairs, it should be he.”

“Which is Mrs. Bellamy’s house?” the inspector inquired.

“Number Six, next door to this on the east,” the younger Sloane replied hastily. “I am sure, however, that my father must be mistaken, and if you annoy Mrs. Bellamy at such an hour as this merely for below-stairs gossip, you will distress her greatly. Indeed, why should any of us be interrogated? The man Hughes dropped dead in the street, I understand; it means nothing to any one except Mr. Orbit, who has lost an efficient servant!”

Again the inspector sent a hurried glance at McCarty, who ignored the indignant young man and turned to the master of the house.

“Mr. Orbit, have you any notion what relations Hughes had?”

“None, in this country. He was the son of a blacksmith in Cornwall who went to London when a lad and took service as a bootboy. From this he rose to the position of valet and when he came to me he was, as Mr. Sloane has observed, a most efficient one.”

“Then,” McCarty spoke musingly, as though to himself, “there’ll be no one to notify about the funeral arrangements.”

“I shall assume all responsibility, of course,” Orbit announced. “I will arrange with an undertaking establishment to send for the body at once. It has been removed to the morgue?”

McCarty nodded.

“To-morrow’ll do, sir; there’ll have to be some formalities, permits and such. The inspector will let you know.”

McCarty and his companions had remained standing since the re-entrance of Orbit with his guests and now he signaled with lifted eyebrows to his former superior and nodded almost imperceptibly toward the door. Inspector Druet nodded in response and turned to the four men collectively.

“We won’t trouble you any further, and if we can obtain the information we want elsewhere it will not be necessary to question the servants of any one living here in the Mall. Goodnight.”

The Chinese butler was waiting to show them out but McCarty lingered for a moment after the others had preceded him.

“You’re the butler here?”

The other bowed in silent affirmation and McCarty went on:

“How many other servants are employed here and what are their names?”

“André the chef, Jean the houseman and little Fu Moy the coffee boy. That is all except Hughes.” The reply came without a pause in the falsetto singsong monotone.

“Hughes is dead,” McCarty said abruptly.

Again the Chinese bowed and when he raised his head his expression had not changed an iota.

After vainly waiting for some remark in response, McCarty asked:

“You were all in to-night? Did any one leave this house since afternoon except Hughes?”

“No one.”

There was a suggestion of finality in the oddly chanting tones now and the discomfited questioner shrugged and rejoined the inspector and Dennis who were waiting on the sidewalk before the many-turreted house next door. All the lights had been extinguished except one on the top floor which gleamed down upon them like a single wakeful eye.

“What were you getting out of that Chink?” Dennis demanded as they started toward the eastern gate where the watchman waited.

“Not a living thing that I wanted except a list of the other servants of the household and word that none of them but Hughes had left the doors this night,” McCarty responded disgustedly. “What he got out of me was my goat! I sprung it on him quick that Hughes had croaked and he never turned a hair nor uttered a word but just waited politely for me to go along about my business!”

“It is conceivable that Orbit told him when he went to bring his guests,” the inspector observed dryly.

“Did he strike you as being the sort that would stop then to talk to one of the servants? He didn’t me,” McCarty averred. “He may tell this Ching Lee, as he called him, after his three neighbors go, but it’ll be only so that he can break the news to the others before the morning papers come out. Twenty-two years this Hughes has been with him and Orbit knew no more about his affairs than the day he hired him! ’Tis unnatural that never once in all that time did they talk together as man to man and yet I don’t think Orbit lied, at that. Look at the way he treated us! He was polite and friendly enough and never once could you have laid your finger on a word or a look from him that was haughty or arrogant like the most of them act over here when the police get snooping around, and yet didn’t you kind of feel as though you were talking to a Royal Duke at the least? It’s the grand manner of him, that he don’t even know he’s got.”

“A fine gentleman, Mr. Orbit,” Dennis agreed. “We’ve found out nothing, though, about what Hughes was doing down in Mike Taggart’s precinct nor why he ran like that till he dropped, and likely we’ll not find it here between these two gates.”

“There’s something more than that on your mind, Mac!” the inspector declared shrewdly. “You’d never have insisted on questioning Orbit’s friends if you hadn’t some idea of what caused Hughes’ seizure, and that it led back here! What did you see before he died that you’re keeping to yourself?”

“Tell you to-morrow, inspector, if you’ll drop in when you’ve nothing better to do, or ’phone Denny and me the word to come downtown to you,” replied McCarty hurriedly in a lowered tone for they had almost reached the gate and the watchman was advancing to meet them. “Denny’s off duty and I’m taking him home with me the night, though I misdoubt he’ll keep me up till dawn with his wild theories as to what desperate crime took Hughes down to the waterfront! Thanks be, the rain has stopped and he’ll not be wanting to ride home in state!”

But it was McCarty himself who hailed a prowling taxi when they had taken leave of the inspector and discreetly rounded a corner, and he had no time on the homeward way to glance at the meter, being engaged in mollifying his outraged companion.

“Will you never learn, you simpleton, when I’m talking about you for the benefit of somebody else?” he demanded in exasperation, when Dennis with bitter resentment had spurned his hospitality. “’Twas to put off the inspector I dropped that hint about being wishful for my sleep or he would have trailed along with us to find out what I’d got up my sleeve, and well you know ’tis nothing but the expression on a dying man’s face and the way he tried to speak but couldn’t! He’ll have the laugh on the both of us to-morrow if the medical examiner says ’twas ‘natural causes,’ and he’ll forget all about this night’s doings, but I won’t; I’m going to find out why Hughes ran the breath from his body and what it was he tried so hard to say.”

“Some day,” Dennis began darkly, but with a tell-tale softening in his tones, “some day you’ll broadcast through me once too often and this radio station will shut down on you! The inspector was right, though; I can see that now. Whatever made Hughes throw that fit, you think it happened back in that society fire line or you’d not have listened to the fat, bald little man, nor yet the old he-gossip and his son. I misdoubt but some night we’ll be putting a scaling ladder against that iron fence and chloroforming the watchman, so you can put that butler next door through the third degree!”

Back in McCarty’s rooms once more Dennis dried his rain-soaked boots comfortably before the little coal fire in the grate and watched with a quizzical light in his eyes while his host stowed his newly acquired library carefully away in a closet and then proceeded to clear out the accumulated litter of several days’ bachelor housekeeping, but he said no word until the task was accomplished. Then he observed:

“When you’re working on a case, Mac, you use your head, and the eyes and ears of you, but to-night another of your senses was asleep at the switch. Not that it had anything to do with Hughes, of course, but no more did anything else we learned except his name! You overlooked one little bet.”

“Oh, I did, did I!” McCarty retorted, stung but wary. “And what sense of mine was it that was not working?”

“Smell.” The reply was succinct. “Unless you’re holding out on me, your nose was not on the job.”

McCarty stared.

“What was there to smell?” he demanded. “Since when is your nose keener than mine?”

“’Tis keen for one thing it’s been trained to for many a year, and that’s fire. Mac, there’s been a fire in Orbit’s house, and not more than a few hours before we got there!”

“A fire, is it!” McCarty snorted. “There’d likely been one in the kitchen, since dinner was cooked there, and you saw the log burning on the hearth in the library—!”

“Stoves and hearths don’t burn wool and silk and carpets and varnished wood, my lad!” Dennis laid his pipe on the mantel and rose. “It could only have been a small bit of a fire, for the smoke of it had cleared away entirely, but the smell hadn’t; there was enough of that hanging in the air for me to get the whiff, anyway, even though nobody else could. I’ve not the gift to explain it right, but there’s a different smell to everything that’s inflammable, if you’ve the nose for it, and it was house furnishings had been burned this night!”

Chapter IV

The Inspector Brings News

The twain slept late the next morning, and they had only just returned from the little restaurant around the corner, where McCarty habitually took his meals, when the bell jangled on its loose wire from below.

“Don’t disturb yourself, Mac,” Dennis admonished with a grin, as his host threw down his newspaper. “I’ll let the inspector in.”

“And why are you so sure—!”

“’Twas not in my honor you cleaned house last night, but because you knew the inspector would be here, and you did it then for you were sure he’d come so early there’d be no time this morning.” Dennis emitted one of his rare chuckles as he pressed the button which released the lock on the entrance door. “Since I’ve been associating so much with detectives, active and retired, I’m getting to work their way, myself!”

“It’s too clever you’re growing, by half!” McCarty grumbled, but there was a twinkle in his eye as he strode past the other and opening the door, leaned over the banisters. In a passable imitation of the inspector’s own amusedly satisfied tones of the night before he called down: “There you are, sir! We’ve been waiting for you.”

“The devil you have!” Inspector Druet laughed as he bounded up the stairs with a lightness which belied his gray hair. “Getting back at me for last night, eh? If you hadn’t held out on me we’d have been on the job still in the New Queen’s Mall!—’Morning, Riordan! I suppose you’re crowing over me, too!”

“There’ll not be a peep out of me, let alone a crow, till I know what’s doing, inspector, for Mac’s told me nothing except the look he saw on Hughes’ face,” Dennis replied, as he drew forward the shabby easy-chair and placed an ash-tray within reach. His homely, long face was set in lines of deep seriousness once more and the inspector’s, too, had sobered.

McCarty closed the door and taking a box of cigars from the mantel he held it out to the visitor.

“The autopsy’ll be over, I’m thinking.” He spoke carelessly enough but his breath labored with suppressed excitement. “What kind of poison was it, inspector?”

The inspector nodded slowly.

“I _thought_ you had guessed! It was physostigmine, the medical examiner called it; powdered Calabar bean. It’s colorless, has no taste, and a single grain would be fatal in three hours or a little longer, but Hughes had taken a trifle more than a grain.”

“Holy saints!” gasped Dennis. “So ’twas murder, after all!”

An expression of honest gratification had stolen over McCarty’s face but he shook his head.

“Many kinds of beans I have heard of, including the Mexican ones that jump like a frog, but never the sort that bring death,” he said. “If one grain of it would kill in three or four hours, a little more would kill in two or maybe three, I suppose. It was around nine o’clock when Hughes fell there across from the station-house, so he must have taken that powdered bean before he left the Orbit house or right after, though we’ve not yet fixed the time he did leave. I wonder what would be the symptoms of that poison?”

“I asked the medical examiner,” the inspector responded. “Pain in the abdomen, nausea, then spasmodic respiration, numbness, and a complete paralysis of respiration, which of course would mean death. It doesn’t explain his staggering along so that Terry thought he was drunk—”

He paused and McCarty lighted his own cigar and drew contemplatively upon it before he spoke.

“Maybe it would. The pain had passed and the nausea, but it had left him weak and the paralysis was creeping over the lungs of him so that he was fighting like mad for breath, reeling and stopping and lurching forward again. He was choking and gasping when Terry and me first turned him over and he died with a heave and a snort as if a ton weight had landed on the chest of him. It was agony that I saw in his face and the horror of knowing he’d been poisoned; he knew who did it, too, or I miss my guess, for ’twas that he was trying to tell when the end came!”

“What else did you see?” The inspector’s tone held an unwonted note of asperity. “I want to know everything that happened, Mac, from the first minute you laid eyes on the fellow! If you had told me last night before the watchman opened the gates we might have saved precious time!”

“I’d nothing to tell but the look on Hughes’ face and him trying so hard to speak, and that I thought maybe he’d been running like that because he was delirious from pain and not in liquor. There was no mark on him when we carried him into the station-house, at least none that showed, and it come to me it must be poison. But with nothing more to go on than just my own private suspicions, I didn’t want to air them unless the autopsy proved there was grounds for them. I’ll be reminding you, inspector, that I’ve resigned from the Force long since and the new methods—”

“New methods be damned!” exploded the inspector. “You’ve said that about every case we’ve worked out together since you did resign, but you’ve come back long enough each time to find out the truth when no one else could. I told Orbit last night that you were a special deputy of mine, and by the Lord you are from now on, till we’ve found out who killed Hughes.”

“Yes, sir,” McCarty said meekly, avoiding Dennis’ eye, but the latter had an immediate difficulty of his own on his mind.

“If Hughes took that poison, or ’twas give to him, either before or just after he left the house, ’twill be on that block between those two locked gates that Mac will be looking first for clues, and they’re guarded night and day; you heard what that watchman said,” he remarked wistfully. “You’ll be getting a pass for Mac, likely, but unless a fire starts inside big enough for a general alarm there’ll be no chance of me following him, inspector, and ’twill be the first case ever he tackled since he left the Force that I didn’t get in on with him from start to finish, every minute I was off duty.”

“Don’t worry, Riordan,” Inspector Druet smiled. “I’ve never been able to figure out which of you two has the luck, but your teamwork can’t be beaten and I’ll see that you get a pass along with Mac. I’ve had a diagram of the New Queen’s Mall prepared and brought this copy with me for you two so you may know without loss of time who owns each house and which ones are occupied.”

He produced a folded paper on which the street had been roughly mapped out, with spaces, in which names and numbers had been written, blocked off from it on either side. The two bent their heads over it eagerly.

“You see there, Denny?” McCarty pointed with his forefinger. “Looking from the Avenue, the opposite gate to that we went into last night, the corner house, Number Two, on the south side belongs to the Goddards. That’ll be the stout, bald fellow with the little red mustache and the twinkle in his eye, you mind him? Next to it, but separated by that bulge that looks like a conservatory, is Number Four, Orbit’s house; then comes Mrs. Bellamy’s, Number Six, where that butler Snape works and after that, Eight and Ten, but they’re marked ‘closed.’”

“The Falkinghams, Number Eight, have lived abroad for more than twenty years and the sole heiress to Number Ten is Georgianna Davenant, a little girl of twelve away at school,” the inspector interposed. “That finishes the Mall on the south side, but starting at the western end again, a great house taking up the entire space opposite both Goddard’s and Orbit’s and bearing two numbers, ‘one’ and ‘three’ is occupied by the Burminster family, who originally owned most of the block and were the moving spirits in having it enclosed with gates. Number Five is the Sloanes’; you met two of the three generations last night—”

“That’ll be the handsome, middle-aged flirt and the son who cut him out with Mrs. Bellamy,” McCarty observed.

“How in the world—?” Dennis’ lantern jaw hung relaxed and the inspector glanced up quickly.

“’Twas as plain as the nose on your face!” McCarty exclaimed impatiently. “Let’s go on: Number Seven, next to the Sloanes’, is the Parsons’. That’s where this Benjamin Parsons lives, who you thought owned the hat Hughes was wearing, isn’t it, sir?”

“Yes. That hat is still a factor in the case, don’t forget that!” The inspector bent again over the diagram and indicated the final space. “This house, the end of the Mall on the north, belongs to the Quentin family, and two branches of it are fighting over the property; it’s been unoccupied and in litigation for some years. I’m going to call at Mrs. Bellamy’s now and interview her butler; want to come along?”

Dennis rose precipitately and stretched a long arm to the mantel for his hat, but McCarty said with quick decision:

“We’ll go through the gates with you, sir, so that you can square us with the day watchman, but I think we’d best prowl around for awhile and not interfere with you. We might drop in at the Orbit house later to see if any of the other servants can talk a bit more than Ching Lee.”

“If you do, be sure not to mention the autopsy, nor the fact that it is even suspected Hughes’ death wasn’t a natural one,” warned the inspector as they passed out to the stairs. “I’ll probably meet you there later.”

They entered the Mall by way of the western gate this time and the private watchman on duty now proved to be younger and less obviously impressed by the dignity of his office than the one encountered the night before. He had evidently been apprised of their possible coming and readily assented to the inspector’s demand that his two deputies be admitted in future without question. When the official himself had proceeded to the Bellamy house McCarty turned with an affable smile to the watchman and tendered a cigar.

“Have a smoke?”

“Thanks, but I’ll have to keep it till later.” He was a tall, muscular young giant with a good-natured, not too intelligent countenance and he grinned in an embarrassed fashion at the overture. Then the grin faded and he added in low tones: “They haven’t brought Alfred Hughes’ body back yet; I’ve been watching for it all morning.”

“It isn’t going to be brought here; didn’t you know?” McCarty’s own tones were invitingly confidential. “Mr. Orbit told Denny and me last night that he was arranging to have it taken to some undertaking establishment and buried from there. Didn’t he, Denny?”

Not yet sure of his ground, Dennis contributed merely a nod of affirmation to the conversation and after a disgusted look at him McCarty asked:

“What’s your name?”

“Bill—I mean ‘William’ Jennings.” The watchman replied promptly.

“Well, Bill, you’ve got a pretty soft job here, haven’t you? If you’re going to patrol your beat to the other gate Denny and me will stroll along with you. That’s all you have to do, isn’t it, except to give the eye to the pretty nurse-girls of all the kids on the block?”

Bill Jennings reddened sheepishly.

“The better the neighborhood the less kids there are in it, did you ever notice that?” he countered. “In all six of the families living on this block there are only three children: the Goddards’ boy, Horace, who is fourteen; Daphne Burminster, two years younger—she belongs in that great corner house over there but they haven’t come back yet from the country—and little Maudie Bellamy. Horace is kind of sickly and has a private teacher—they call him a ‘tutor’—and Miss Daphne has a maid and a governess, both of them old and sour. The Bellamy baby has the only nurse on the block and she’s foreign—French, I guess.”

“Some of those French girls are beauties.” McCarty spoke with the air of a connoisseur and Dennis coughed. The former added hastily: “Is this one a looker?”

“Pretty as a picture and as nice as she’s pretty!” There was immense respect as well as admiration in Bill’s voice. “I guess she ain’t been over long, for she’s awful young and shy but she knows how to take care of herself, as Alfred Hughes found out.”

He checked himself suddenly but McCarty chuckled with careless amusement.

“He was a great hand with the women, they tell me!” he commented.

“Not her kind! Lucette—even her name’s pretty, ain’t it?—Lucette is polite to everybody but Alfred Hughes didn’t understand that and thought he’d made a hit, I guess. One night real late about a month ago—Dave Hollis, the night watchman told me about it—Lucette ran out to the drugstore for some medicine for little Maudie, who’d been took sick awful sudden, and when she came back Alfred Hughes met her right in front of her own house. He must have tried to put his arm around her or something for she gave a little cry and Dave, who’d waited to fasten the gate again after letting her in, came hurrying up just as Alfred Hughes said something in a low kind of a voice and she slapped his face! Then she ran into the house sobbing to herself and Dave says he gave Alfred Hughes hell—the big stiff!” Bill checked himself again and added in renewed embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I guess nobody on the block had much use for him, except Mrs. Bellamy’s butler, Snape; the two of them have been thick as thieves for years.”

“Is that so?” McCarty turned deliberately to his self-effacing colleague. “Didn’t somebody say as much to you, Denny?”

“That Hughes and this Snape were friendly? Sure!” Emboldened by having found his voice Dennis added guilelessly: “’Twas that Chink butler at Orbit’s told me, I’m thinking. Nice, sociable fellow, if he does wear a pigtail; didn’t you find him so, Mac?”

“I found he’d more brains than most of the galoots who come over here and land in the fire department!” McCarty retorted with withering emphasis, then turned to the watchman again. “What sort of a guy is this Snape—the same kind as Hughes?”

“Underneath, maybe, but you’d never think it to look at him. He’s younger by ten years at least than Hughes, slim and dark and minds his own business. If it wasn’t for the gates you’d never know when he went in or out.”

McCarty darted a quick, sidelong glance at his informant.

“Keeps funny hours, does he?”

“Late ones.” Bill grinned again. “I guess Mrs. Bellamy doesn’t know it, but being the only man in her house he has it all his own way. He ain’t any too anxious to have his doings known, though, for Dave says he’s tried more than once to slip in with the milk! I ain’t spoke ten words to him and I’ve held down this job over a year. Here comes Horace Goddard now!”

The trio had strolled past the closed houses which flanked that of Mrs. Bellamy and were nearing the eastern gate. As Bill hurried forward, McCarty glanced through the high iron bars of the fence and saw a slender, undersized boy, with very red hair and a pale, delicate face, who approached with a droop of his narrow shoulders and a dragging step. At sight of Bill Jennings opening the gate, however, he quickened his pace, a smile lifting the corners of the sensitive mouth.

“Hello, Bill!” His voice was still a clear, almost childish treble.

“Hello, there, buddy! What’s the good word?” the watchman returned cheerily.

“It isn’t very good, not for me!” The boy’s face clouded once more. “Mr. Blaisdell is going away on a sketching tour for October. I—I wish I could go with him! He’d take me but Dad won’t hear of it!”

The two listeners who had remained a little apart, saw now that he carried a small leather portfolio and a sketch book.

“An artist, the lad is!” Dennis exclaimed beneath his breath. “It’s out playing baseball he should be, and getting into a good healthy fight now and then. Look at the hollow chest and spindly legs of him!”

“Poor little cuss!” McCarty murmured as Horace Goddard with a parting word to the watchman passed them with a mere glance of well-bred inquiry. “Say, Bill, what’s that family doing to the kid? Making him learn to paint?”

The watchman had strolled up to them once more and at the question his grin broadened.

“_Make_ him? They can’t keep him away from it! We’re great buddies, him and me, and he’s a lonesome kind of a little feller and talks to me every chance he gets. You heard what he said? This Blaisdell guy is one of the greatest painters in the country and he met the kid at Mr. Orbit’s house one day and took a fancy to him. He let Horace come to his studio and watch him work, it seems, and Horace began trying to copy him and now he’s giving him regular lessons. Going to stroll back? I take the other side of the street.”

“No, we’ll be looking in to see what arrangements Mr. Orbit has made for the funeral.” McCarty touched Dennis’ sleeve. “So long.”

“See you later.” Bill nodded and turned to cross to the opposite sidewalk and his erstwhile companions started back the way they had come.

“A lot you got out of him!” Dennis remarked.

“I got what I was looking for, dope on some of the families and their servants,” replied McCarty. “I didn’t want to crowd him too much at the first go, and besides, we’ve no more time to spend on him just now.”

“Going to tackle that Chink again?” asked the other innocently.

“I’m going to tackle every last mother’s son of them!” McCarty set his lips firmly and his step quickened. “I want a talk with Orbit, too, before the inspector breaks the news.”

In response to their ring at the bell the door was presently opened by a fat little Chinese boy, whose round, yellow face was wreathed in smiles. On seeing them he bowed straight forward from the waist with both short arms spread wide and ushered them into a huge, dim room at the left, where their footsteps rang on a bare, mosaic floor of exquisite design and inlay. McCarty observed that the whole opposite wall was of glass, curving out in a swelling arc, like a gigantic bow window. It was filled with a mass of strange, vivid flowering plants, the like of which neither of the visitors had ever seen before, and a delicate, elusive fragrance hung upon the super-heated atmosphere.

On their right, at the back, the pipes of an enormous organ reared their slender tubes. Stone settles and benches were scattered about, backed by towering masses of palms and cacti, but the echoing, high-ceilinged room held no other furnishing.

They seated themselves on the nearest marble bench and McCarty, who was commencing to perspire freely, pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

“’Tis for all the world like that grand undertaker’s where the lodge gave Corcoran his funeral!” Dennis had spoken in his normal tones but they swiftly sank to a hoarse whisper as they reverberated. “God save us, did you hear that? It’s worse than a tunnel!”

“Wisht! The little heathen is still hanging around.” McCarty admonished. “Come here, son.”

The little boy who had lingered in the doorway smiled again and sidled forward silently in his soft embroidered slippers.

“My name Fu Moy,” he announced.

“Oh, you’re the coffee boy?” McCarty remembered his conversation with the butler.

“Can do!” Fu Moy bobbed his head delightedly at the recognition.

“And is Ching Lee your father?” McCarty disregarded the dissimilarity in family names.

“Ching Lee on-clee.” He labored over the difficult word with evident anxiety to make himself understood.

“Uncle, is he?” His questioner paused. “You know Hughes?”

The round face clouded.

“Me catchum Mlistler Hughes. Me no like. Mlistler Hughes gone away. Me glad.”

“That,” observed Dennis judiciously, “was straight from the shoulder. I couldn’t have put it better myself if I’d known the spalpeen!”

Fu Moy hung his head shyly but McCarty pulled a shining new quarter from his pocket and held it out.

“You catchum some of those nuts with the raisins inside for yourself—lichee.—But tell me first why you no like Hughes.”

The small, yellow, claw-like hand closed avidly over the coin.

“When Honorable Gleat Lord come, Mlistler Hughes say Fu Moy velly nice boy. When Honorable Lord no come, Mlistler Hughes kickee, stlikee, hurtee head, allee time say Fu Moy go hellee.” The little slippered foot shot out suggestively and he rubbed his ear in realistic fashion.

“The dirty hound, for abusing and cursing a little shaver, heathen or no!” Dennis exclaimed. “Who’s the honorable lord, youngster? Mr. Orbit?”

Again Fu Moy nodded and a look of adoration shone on the childish face.

“Can do!” His tone was fervid. “Honorable Lord Orblit velley gleat man, allee same Lord High Plince!”

“So that’s that! We know how he stands with the kid, all right,” McCarty interposed as Dennis started to speak again. But Fu Moy had evidently struck a congenial topic.

“Ching Lee catchum Mlistler Hughes make do.” He pulled up the sleeve of his embroidered silk jacket disclosing the fresh, livid marks of five thick fingers on his plump arm. “Ching Lee gettee knifee, can do!”

Fu Moy drew his hand across his throat and Dennis shuddered.

“For the love of the saints!”

“When was this?” McCarty was careful to keep his tone indifferent.

“Yes—yes—!”

“Yesterday?”

Fu Moy’s bullet head bobbed.

“Honorable Lord come takee knifee away from Ching Lee, say no can do, p’leecee man would come. He say Mlistler Hughes hurtee Fu Moy he go! Mlistler Hughes gone. Honorable Lord one piecee gleat man.” He looked down at the coin and then up with a sudden thought. “Lichee nuts no can do! Slipples can do! Slipples ’long Honorable Lord!”

He had gestured toward his feet and Dennis turned puzzled eyes on his companion.

“Does the youngster mean that he wants to buy a pair of slippers for Orbit?” Fu Moy’s expression was sufficient answer, and Dennis suggested: “Sure, he must have plenty of slippers, lad?”

Fu Moy’s head shook decisively.

“Allee blurn. Bang-bang flier Honorable Lord’s loom. Littlee flier, gleat big bang-bang! Slipples ’longside chair, all same blurn.”

“I’ve got him!” McCarty spoke aside in a hurried undertone; to the little boy whose dark, bright, slant eyes were fixed upon him as though for approval, he added: “Sure, son! Get your honorable lord a pair of slippers, and if you can find any for a quarter let me know where. Now you run and tell him that two of the men who were here last night would like to speak to him. Think you can make him know what you mean?”

“Honorable lord—speakee—Mac and me—here?” Dennis interpreted unexpectedly.

The child nodded gravely.

“Can do. Honorable Lord talkee my talk.” With another bow he turned and trotted from the room, and Dennis murmured:

“Could you beat that? Orbit speaks Chinee! That kid was talking about the fire last night, but what did he mean by ‘bang-bang’? Did somebody fire a shot, do you suppose?”

“They did not!” McCarty replied impatiently. “Something exploded in Orbit’s room and set fire to a chair and the slippers under it, but that’s neither here nor there. He’s a bright kid, little Fu Moy, with a gift of the gab that I’m wishful his uncle had! Only yesterday this Ching Lee tried to murder Hughes for mistreating the child, but Orbit stopped him; Fu Moy’s just been told that Hughes has gone away, Denny, and he thinks Orbit discharged him and worships the boss accordingly. I wonder if maybe Ching Lee tried again? I wonder if he ever heard of the Calabar bean?”

Chapter V

Ching Lee’S Errand

“Good morning, gentlemen.” Henry Orbit appeared in the doorway and came forward. “Has your inspector news for me about the removal of Hughes’ body? I have made all the arrangements.”

There was a weary note in his voice and the pallor of fatigue had spread over his strongly marked features, but it only added to the distinction of his appearance and his eyes seemed if anything more brilliantly alight than on the previous evening. A plum-colored house-robe swathed the tall, erect figure, but he was immaculately groomed and it was only when he had almost reached the visitors that they saw he carried under one arm a tiny, wistful-eyed monkey.

Dennis gave a start but McCarty replied quietly:

“The inspector gave us no message about the body, sir, but no doubt you’ll hear from him any time now. We’d like to fix the exact time Hughes left the house. The last you saw of him was a little before seven, I think you said. Was that before or after the fire in your room?”

“Some little time before. I have Vite, here, to thank for that.” A faint smile curved Orbit’s mobile lips and he stroked the little creature in his arm with a reassuring gesture as it whimpered at the mention of its name. “An alcohol cigar-lighter was left burning on my desk and in his haste to follow me downstairs Vite knocked it over, setting fire to an upholstered chair, but Fu Moy, the coffee boy who admitted you just now, discovered it before any further damage was done and summoned Ching Lee. Fu Moy was as pleasantly excited about it as any small American boy would have been, but he should not have annoyed you with his chatter. I suppose it was he who told you?”

“No, sir. I knew it last night,” Dennis remarked. “I smelled it.”

“To be sure! I could not myself detect it downstairs but when I retired the odor drove me to one of the guest rooms and although I am an experienced traveler I do not sleep well in unaccustomed surroundings; that is why you find me still _en déshabillé_ at this hour.” He glanced down at the house-robe and then added with a touch of sadness in his voice. “To be truthful, I could not get poor Hughes out of my thoughts. After all, twenty-two years is a long time.”

“It is that, Mr. Orbit. When he laid out your clothes and asked for the evening off, did he leave you at once?”

“Yes. I told him to go and have his dinner; the servants always dine early when I am entertaining, for their meals are prepared separately. That is how the cigar lighter happened to be left burning. I can’t tell you what time he went out but perhaps André or Jean would know, or Ching Lee. André is the cook; shall I have him sent to you here?”

“If it’s all the same to you we’ll go to the kitchen and talk to him.” McCarty glanced at the mass of exotic blooms, vividly ablaze where the sun poured in upon them through the glass wall. “You’ve some wonderful flowers, Mr. Orbit.”

“The orchids are rather rare; some of them have never been known to thrive above the equator before and the cacti and palms usually do not grow north of Central America. I’m quite proud of them. But come. I will show you the way to the pantries and kitchen.”

McCarty gasped thankfully in the comparatively chill atmosphere of the hall after the almost overpowering heat of the conservatory and the two followed along a narrowed hall toward the rear. Half-open double doors at the left past the library revealed a great formal dining-room and back of the conservatory, on the other side of the wall against which the organ had been installed, there appeared to be a combined picture gallery and card room, for the walls were lined with paintings whose massive frames all but touched and green-clothed tables of various sizes stood about on the brightly waxed surface of the marquetry floor.

“Ring the bell in the pantry for Fu Moy and he will bring you to me if there are any questions you would like to ask after you have seen André or Jean.” Orbit had paused before a door at the end of the hall. “Ching Lee is out at present but I shall be glad to give you any assistance in my power. Since the inspector attached so much importance to it I find that I am curious myself to know what errand could have taken Hughes to the quarter of town in which he died.—Beyond the butler’s pantry you will find the kitchen pantries, the refrigerating room and then the kitchen.”

“All right, then,” McCarty responded. “The chances are that we won’t bother you again before we go.”

He pushed open the door as Orbit turned, and Dennis followed him into the spacious white-tiled room shining with glass and porcelain. A door further along in the same wall as that by which they had entered evidently opened into the dining-room but McCarty led the way to another facing them and they passed down a short corridor and into a spacious kitchen.

A fat man immaculate in starched white apron and cap, with a round, ruddy face and bristling black mustache turned on them belligerently from a long pastry table.

“What is this, that you come to my kitchen? _Sacré Nom!_ If M’sieur Obeet know this—!”

“Don’t let that worry you, André! Mr. Orbit just showed us the way through the pantry,” McCarty interrupted. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about Hughes.”

“_Mon Dieu! Les gendarmes!_” André raised his floury hands in dismay.

“What’s that you’re calling us?” demanded Dennis advancing truculently and the fat chef retreated behind the table in haste.

“‘Gendarmes’ it is French for Messieurs of the Police!” he stammered, his conciliatory tone comically at variance with the fierce expression lent to him by the bristling mustache. “I know nothing of Hughes, nothing! He goes out last night upon his own affairs and in the morning Ching Lee comes to me and tells me that he is dead, he falls in the street with a—a seekness of the heart. Is it not so? _Alors_, why do the police interest themselves?”

“Ching Lee told you that, did he?” McCarty seated himself and Dennis took a chair by the door. “Did you ever hear Hughes complain of a weak heart?”

“But no! It—it was something else, then, which have killed Hughes?” André asked quickly, then checked himself with a shrug. “What is it that you would have me tell you?”

“How long have you worked for Mr. Orbit?”

“It will be seex years next month. I am chef for a friend of M’sieu in Paris and when he is kill’ in the war M’sieu send for me. When the war it is finish’ M’sieu permits that my cousin Jean who was a _poilu_ come also to be houseman. Jean and me, we do not concern ourselves with the affairs of Hughes, we know of him nothing!”

“Who comes here to see him, besides Snape, the butler from next door?” McCarty asked.

“No one.” André wiped his hands and came slowly around the table. “It is not often that we see Snape, for he arrive’ in the evening late, and when the dinner is finish’ Jean and me, we have our own affairs together.”

“What time did you and the rest have dinner last night?” McCarty dropped the futile line of questioning. “It was before you served Mr. Orbit and his company, wasn’t it?”

“But yes. At seex hours and a half.” The reply came promptly, in obvious relief.

“Did Hughes eat with you?”

“Of a certainty!” André looked his surprise. “Fu Moy arrange’ the tables in our dining-room there—one for himself and Ching Lee, who prefers that they eat alone together, and the other for us three, but Hughes he is late, he attend upon M’sieu. Ching Lee and Fu Moy have almost finish’ and Jean and me, we think we will wait no longer when at last Hughes he comes.”

“Did he tell you he was going out?”

“Not until after dinner. Ching Lee have gone to make complete the table for M’sieu and his guests and Fu Moy to robe himself in the little jaquette of embroidered satin that later he may serve coffee and liqueurs. Then Hughes says that he will go for a walk. Jean warns him that it will make rain—how you say? A storm, it is coming, but Hughes does not care, it is for his health that he walks. Jean and me, we think that is droll for there is nothing the matter with the health of Hughes, only that he drinks too much and often he is out very late.” Again André checked himself and then went on hurriedly. “It is the last month, perhaps two, that he is not look so well, but he is not seek, nevaire. He goes, and—”

“What time was this?” McCarty interrupted.

“At a little past seven hours, perhaps half, but me, I am engage’ with the dinner of M’sieu, and Jean he cleans our dishes; we pay not much attention. Hughes says ‘good night’ and goes out the side door here into the allee which leads to the tradesmen’s entrance. That is the end of Hughes.”

With a gesture of dismissal he turned to the range and tested the heat regulator of the oven, but McCarty remained seated.

“The fire broke out in Mr. Orbit’s room after Hughes left, then?”

“Yes. You have heard of that?” André turned again with uplifted brows. “It was nothing, we do not even know of it until it is all over. Little Fu Moy, he see the smoke and the single tongue of flame and he cry for Ching Lee who puts it out. M’sieu, he is downstairs awaiting his guests and it is said that the _singe_—the monkey—Vite have upset the cigar lighter, but me, I think it is Fu Moy who makes play with the matches! He is a bad child, that little Fu Moy!”

“You say that Hughes has not looked so well lately,” McCarty ignored the subject of the coffee boy’s delinquencies. “Did he seem worried, like, or as if anything was on his mind that might have hurt his health, weakened his heart, maybe?”

André shrugged once more.

“He is if anything in the greater spirits and Jean and me, we think that he have win at the cards. He looks—how do you say?—dissipate’, and tired because he creeps in with the dawn.”

“Does Mr. Orbit know of this?” McCarty feigned surprise. “It’s a wonder he’d have kept him.”

“If he suspects he says nothing, because no matter how late Hughes arrive at home he is always up promptly in the morning and he drinks only when M’sieu shall not know. He is the perfect valet and M’sieu asks no more.”

“Well, we won’t either, just now.” Dennis had taken no part in the inquiry but now as McCarty spoke he signaled him an agonized glance and the latter nodded.

“André, when did that fire break out?” Dennis drew a deep breath.

“Last night? It must have been but a moment or two after the departure of Hughes for it is still less than eight hours when it is finish, before the three gentlemen arrive.”

“Before you knew of it, then,—say, a few minutes after Hughes left; did you hear anything?” Dennis pursued carefully. “A kind of a bang! it would be, like a firecracker going off, if you know what that is.”

“The red fire toys of Fu Moy which explode when he lights them? I know!” André responded grimly. Then a reflective look came over his round countenance. “It appears that I did hear a single, quick noise, like the violent closing of a door somewhere above which make the house to tremble! Me, I am occupied with the _chateaubriand_, that it cook not too fast, and I think not of it again. But what—”

“Nothing. That’s all I wanted to know.” Dennis turned to his companion. “Let’s be moving, Mac.”

He started along the corridor but McCarty stopped him at the foot of a narrow, winding staircase.

“We’ll go up here, Denny, for a minute. I want a look around.”

“No more than I do, myself!” Dennis returned promptly. “It’s beginning to come to me that Hughes was not over popular around here. I wonder what this Jean thought of him?”

What Jean thought was speedily ascertained for they came upon him in the upper hall, energetically waxing the floor; a slim, dark, youngish man with a deep scar across his smooth-shaven face and a nervous, jerky manner as though every muscle and nerve were strung on wires.

“It was unfortunate that Hughes should have died so suddenly but what would you? A man so gross, who ate like a great pig and drank like a sot and took no care of himself,” Jean replied to his own observation with a shrug and applied his energies anew to his task.

“Where were you last evening, Jean, while Fu Moy was setting the tables in the servants’ dining-room?” McCarty asked, as though in an afterthought.

“In the kitchen assisting André. It is not my work but André is occupied with the dinner of Monsieur Orbit. I arrange first the trays for Fu Moy and he take them to the table and then call his uncle, Ching Lee. André and me, we await Hughes—”

“So Ching Lee and Fu Moy ate alone in the dining-room for awhile before Hughes came down, and you and him and André went in to have your own dinners?”

“Yes, m’sieu.” Jean had risen from his knees and now he regarded his questioner expectantly but for a moment McCarty seemed lost in thought. Then he roused himself.

“What did you have?”

“A soup of vegetables, ragout of lamb, a salad and cheese and coffee,” Jean responded. “There was rice also for Ching Lee and Fu Moy, and pastry from Monsieur Orbit’s _déjeuner_, which I placed for Hughes but he desired it not.”

“Did he eat as much as usual?” McCarty asked quickly.

“Like a glutton at first but he is finished very soon, he is satisfied and the remainder of his dinner goes almost untouched. Then he goes out for a walk, so he tells to André and me, in spite of the storm which is coming.” Jean’s face twisted in a grimace of knowing incredulity. “It takes him not five minutes to change and then he is gone.”

“Did you help André dish up the dinner for Mr. Orbit and his friends?”

“I assist him, but it is soon over, for when the guests are only gentlemen the menu is very simple though always of the best. At half past eight dinner is served and in an hour it is finished and we are making all clean in the kitchen. Some French papers have arrived for us in the mail but yesterday and we take them to André’s room to read; at eleven we go to bed.”

The man spoke glibly enough, but why without being asked had he volunteered a detailed account of how he had spent the evening? Did he consider it necessary to establish an alibi, and if so, what reason had he? There was a frank, open look to him, McCarty thought, and anyway there would be no sense in disputing with him now; even if he was lying André would back up that statement of his.

“Do all of you sleep on the same floor?”

Jean nodded.

“At the top of the house. Shall I show you—?”

“No, I’ll be taking a look around later, maybe. What else is on this floor besides Mr. Orbit’s room?”

“Monsieur’s suite,” Jean corrected. “He has a private sitting-room also, in addition to the bedroom and dressing-room. The rest of this floor and all of the one above are arranged in suites for guests.”

“Does Mr. Orbit have much company staying here in the house?” McCarty’s gaze had wandered to the many doors on either side of the broad corridor.

“Not many. Only one or two at a time have I seen since I came, and all gentlemen. Never are ladies guests of the house although often they dine here or arrive for the affairs of society which Monsieur gives.—But I must arrange the table now for _déjeuner_, because Ching Lee is out.”

He gathered up his brushes and started for the back stairs but McCarty stopped him.

“Where did Ching Lee go? Did Orbit send him on an errand?”

“I do not think so.” Jean hesitated. “When Monsieur sends him—which is but seldom, for nearly always I go,—he tucks up his queue and arrays himself in American attire, but to-day, as when he goes about his own affairs, he wore the ordinary dress of his country; not the magnificent embroidered robes of silk but the plain, dark dress one sees upon _les Chinois_ everywhere. It is now two hours since he has gone.”

He turned once more to the stairs and this time McCarty made no effort to detain him. He waited until the houseman’s footsteps had died away in the hall below and a door had closed. Then he turned to where Dennis had been standing just behind him.

“Get that, Denny? I’m thinking—!” He paused, for he was talking to the empty air. Dennis had disappeared.

With a shrug McCarty mounted to the next floor but no one was visible and each of the several doors which he opened gave upon bedrooms furnished in different periods of the Italian and French monarchical régimes. He only knew that they seemed very handsome, if the rugs and draperies did look a bit faded and draggled to his eyes and the gilt tarnished, but about all there hung the aloof, cheerless air of apartments seldom tenanted.

The floor above was evidently cut up into many smaller rooms, for there were more doors closer together. Several of them were locked and the first which opened readily was that of a large room at the back, furnished merely with two chests of drawers and two matting covered cots heaped with cushions. Matting was laid upon the floor, a niche in the wall was hung with rich silk upon which a gorgeous dragon was emblazoned and lanterns were suspended from the ceiling. McCarty sniffed the faintly aromatic odor as of sandalwood which greeted him and knew that this must be the room Ching Lee shared with Fu Moy.

Closing the door he retraced his steps and tried another just at the head of the stairs. It opened into a room slightly smaller than the first but comfortably furnished in old oak with a bright rug on the floor and simple curtains at the two broad windows. Military brushes and other masculine toilet accessories were scattered on the dresser and a rack which hung beside it glowed with the rich, subdued colors of a score or more neckties and scarves. Across the foot of the bed lay a lounging robe of heavily quilted brocade but somewhat worn and frayed.

Was this where one of the Frenchmen slept or—? McCarty strode to the closet and flung the door wide. Suits of plain black alternated with others of conservative shades and material but far more expensive; a glance showed that they were much too large for the slender houseman, yet not sufficiently capacious to accommodate the chef’s rotund girth.

If this, then, were Hughes’ room could he have left any clue behind him which would point to his unknown enemy? A hasty examination of the closet revealed an empty whiskey bottle among the boots on the floor, but the pockets of the various garments contained merely small bills and newspaper clippings of racing results.

In the top drawer of the dresser McCarty came upon a stack of letters in different handwriting but all unmistakably feminine and sentimental in tone, couched in more or less illiterate terms. He took possession of them for reading at his leisure. The lower drawers contained only clothing and there were no other receptacles in the room which might have held papers but his experienced eye noted a slight unevenness in the surface of the rug near the head of the bed and turning it back he found a bank-book and a check-book fastened together with a rubber band.

These he pocketed also and then descended to the first bedroom floor where Dennis had deserted him, to discover that individual hovering uncertainly about the stairs’ head.

“Where the devil did you take yourself off to?” he demanded. “If the inspector let you in on this with me ’twas not to gum up my game, Denny Riordan! Moreover, whenever you go off on your own hook—!”

“Let be, Mac! The inspector’s here, talking to Orbit now in his private sitting-room, they all but caught me snooping around in there!” Dennis interrupted. “He’s sprung it on him that Hughes was poisoned!”

“Come on downstairs and tell me what you heard.” McCarty led the way without further waste of words and Dennis followed him to the entrance hall below where they stationed themselves in the embrasure of a window beside the door.

“Whilst you were asking Jean about the layout of the rooms upstairs I thought I’d have a look at the ones Orbit keeps for himself,” Dennis explained in a slightly defiant tone. “He sleeps in a bed with a roof to it, all hung with curtains like a hearse. The chair that was burned is gone but there’s a scorched place in the rug and the smell is hanging on the air yet. I took just a peep in the bathroom, which is fitted up like a gymnasium and almost as big, and then I went on into the sitting-room. ’Tis grand, Mac, with books and pictures and flowers everywhere, to say nothing of the window boxes just ablaze with flowers for all it’s near frost. There’s a piano, too, with big sheets of paper covered with hen-tracks on the rack as if somebody’d been writing music by hand, and I was just looking at it when I heard the inspector’s voice and him and Orbit coming along the hall. I ducked back into the bedroom and then I stopped for I caught the last word the inspector was saying; it was ‘murder!’”

It was an unprecedentedly long speech for the taciturn Dennis and as he paused for breath McCarty rubbed his chin reflectively.

“How did Orbit take it?”

“For a full minute you could have cut the stillness with a knife and then he says low and shocked, like: ‘My God, how frightful! You’re sure there’s no possibility of a mistake about it, inspector? But your man who witnessed it said nothing last night about foul play! I understand that poor Hughes simply dropped in the street when no one was near.’ Then the inspector up and told him it was poison, giving it that long name ‘physos’-something, and Orbit says could it be possible, that he’d heard of it, of course, being a bit of a bot—botanist, but ’twas rare, and how could anybody have got hold of it to give to Hughes, and why?” Dennis paused again and then added conscientiously: “Maybe them wasn’t just the words, Mac, but he was struck all of a heap. I was afraid they’d be coming in and catching me so I beat it out to the head of the stairs where you found me.—Wisht! They’re coming down now!”

“I’ll be waiting for a word with the inspector,” McCarty announced hurriedly. “I’ve a job for you, Denny if you’ll not be shooting your mouth off!”

A door above had opened but it was evident that Orbit and his companion had paused, for no sound of footsteps ensued and Dennis asked eagerly:

“What is it, Mac? Well you know I’m not given to talk—!”

“Then listen! Run down to the old waterfront precinct and see is Mike Taggart or Terry around; tell them I stopped by the fire house this morning on the way out to my Homevale estates and mentioned the fellow that dropped dead down there last night, and you thought from my description maybe you knew him. You’re disgusted that I took so little interest and it’s your opinion I’m not the man I was—”

“And who says so?” demanded Dennis with loyal indignation.

“You do, you blockhead!” McCarty retorted. “Let them knock me and get all the dope you can about last night, and then bring up old times when I walked my beat there and you used to come around for a word with me and the rest of the boys. Say the neighborhood looks about the same to you but you kind of recall seeing more Chinks hanging out in the doorways, and wasn’t there a laundry or a chop suey joint on the block?”

“’Tis you should know there wasn’t!” Dennis’ tone was bewildered but a light suddenly dawned in his gray eyes and he added in a sepulchral whisper: “Mac! You don’t mean—! You’re thinking—!”

“I’m wishful to know if there was a strange Chinaman in that street this morning; one that was curious, maybe, about what happened last night. If there was, his queue might have been tucked up or swinging free, but I’ve a hunch he’d look like Ching Lee!”

Chapter VI

Deadlock

Dennis had scarcely departed on his errand when the inspector and Orbit came down the stairs together and the latter remarked to McCarty:

“You didn’t tell me Hughes had been poisoned!”

“No, sir,” McCarty agreed. “’Twas not for me to say: I told you I’d no message for you about the body but you’d hear from the inspector. There’s no chance he could have took that Calabar bean powder—I disremember its other name,—by mistake, is there? Would it be lying around the house here for any purpose?”

“Hardly!” Orbit smiled. “I have read of its use as a cure for lockjaw and an antidote for some other poison—strychnine, I believe,—but one would not find it in an ordinary, normal household!—You’ll let me know, inspector, if I can do anything to further your investigation?”

The inspector promised, somewhat superfluously, and as they descended the steps he observed to his companion:

“It’s a damn funny case, Mac! The Bellamy woman’s butler is a smooth proposition, but as far as I could make out he came clean; he’s been playing the races with Hughes in a poolroom down on Thirtieth and gambling in a joint over on the East Side, and Hughes was stuck on some new Jane named ‘Gertie.’ Snape thinks she’s a married woman, though he never saw her nor heard her last name, and she doesn’t belong on this block. He wasn’t with Hughes last night and didn’t even know he’d gone out.”

“Did you see anybody else in that house?” asked McCarty.

“Only a mighty pretty nursemaid going out with a baby. Did you have any luck at Orbit’s?”

“Not much,” McCarty responded guardedly. “I’ll tell you later if you’ll drop around to my rooms. I want to have another talk with the stout, bald little guy next door here, Goddard.”

“All right. I think we’re wasting our time, though, here in the Mall. If we can trace Hughes’ movements from the minute he passed out of that gate there until he fell dying in front of you, we’ll nail the fellow who slipped him that Calabar bean; there won’t be much to this case, Mac.”

McCarty watched the inspector cross the street to the stately old entrance to Number Seven and then proceeded to the corner house and rang the bell. An elderly butler, with the pallor of a long lifetime of indoor service admitted him, shaking his head dubiously. It was some little time before Eustace Goddard appeared.

“’Pon my soul, you fellows are persistent!” His blue eyes twinkled with lively curiosity as he spoke. “Never knew of such a fuss being made over the death of a servant before! I suppose you’ve come to question mine?”

“After a bit,” McCarty smiled grimly. “Servant or no, we’re bound to make a fuss, as you call it, when it’s a case of murder.”

“What? You don’t say so!” Goddard ran his hand over the fringe of sandy hair adorning his bald pate. “Devil of a thing for Orbit, the notoriety and all! Can’t see why he kept the fellow; I never did like his looks!—But who killed him?”

“That’s what we’re asking!” McCarty retorted. “First of all we’ve got to fix the time he left the house. Did you see him when you went there to dinner last night?”

“No. It was about quarter past eight and just beginning to rain when I went next door. Ching Lee admitted me and I found Orbit in the library; the Sloanes came a few minutes later and we four went in to dinner and then played a rubber or two of bridge. I’ve never seen Orbit in better form; he’s a splendid player but last night his game was extraordinary and we had a rattling good time until you fellows showed up!”

“You weren’t playing cards when we got there,” McCarty suggested.

“No, we’d finished and gone into the conservatory. Orbit was at the organ; you must have heard him.” Goddard spoke in short, jerky sentences as though out of breath and a deeper flush had mounted in his ruddy cheeks. “Don’t pretend to know much about music myself but Orbit can make those pipes talk and I never heard him play as he did last night! His own composition, too; he’s a genius!”

“You’ve known him long?”

“God bless me, yes! He was my idol when I was a little boy and he a big one, home from school for the holidays. Then came the university and after that he traveled for some years, returning only at his father’s sudden death. He brought Hughes back with him then.” Goddard checked himself as though recalled all at once to a consciousness of his visitor’s identity. “About last night, though, I saw none of the servants except Ching Lee and Fu Moy.”

“Have those two been with Orbit a long while?”

“Ching Lee has; little Fu Moy only appeared a year or so ago. But Orbit himself can tell you—”

“You visit in there a lot, don’t you?” McCarty interrupted.

“Naturally, when Mr. Orbit is in residence.” A shade of stiffness had manifested itself in the genial, garrulous tones. “He frequently closed the house and went away for long trips, although not of late years!”

“Then you must have seen a good deal of Hughes,” persisted the interrogator.

Goddard shook his head decisively and his small, reddish mustache seemed to fairly bristle.

“As I told you last night I have hardly addressed the fellow half a dozen times in my life. He was self-effacing, like any other well-trained servant; you’d scarcely know he was there. Then, too, I never had much occasion to see him, for though such old friends Orbit and I have not been on an intimate footing; Mrs. Goddard and I dine there or I run over for an evening of bridge now and then, that’s about the extent of our intercourse.”

“Oh, Dad!” The clear, treble voice which McCarty had already heard sounded from the hall and the red-haired, delicate-looking boy appeared in the doorway. “Dad, that old Hughes is dead! Now he’ll never be horrid to Max any more when he follows me over to Mr. Orbit’s!”

“Run away, Horace!” Goddard ordered peremptorily. “Dad’s busy—!”

“So Hughes was horrid to Max, was he?” McCarty interrupted with the broad, ingratiating smile which always won juvenile confidence. “And who is Max, my lad?”

“My police dog. Hughes was afraid of him, and that’s why he tried to kick him out. It’s lucky Mr. Orbit didn’t see him; he never lets anything be hurt—”

The boy was replying courteously, in simple friendliness, when his father interrupted:

“Horace, it’s time you got ready for lunch. Look at your hands!”

“That’s paint, Dad; it won’t come off, but I’ll try again.” He nodded, his wistful, sensitive face breaking into a smile and then went off down the hall while Goddard remarked:

“That boy of mine is crazy to be an artist and he runs next door now and then to see Orbit’s paintings. Never took much stock in that sort of thing myself. Sorry I can’t give you any further information about that valet, but I don’t see why you should come to me, anyway!”

“Well, you’ve got the finest house on the block, except the closed-up one just over the way, and I supposed you’d know the folks that live in the others,” McCarty explained. “Does any of them do anything but clip coupons?”

“We all know each other, of course.” There was a softened note of genial patronage in his tone. “I don’t know what it can have to do with your investigation but we’re none of us what you would probably call the ‘idle rich.’ I manage several estates for relatives besides my own, Burminster over there works harder than any of his clerks, looking after his enormous holdings, Gardner Sloane—whom you met last night—is a prominent banker, Benjamin Parsons a philanthropist and Mrs. Bellamy’s late husband was a broker. Orbit doesn’t go in for finance, his money is all soundly invested, and I don’t believe he touches half his income, but his contributions to art and science and literature have been almost incalculable.”

“Have they, so!” interjected McCarty, considerably impressed. “And are the Burminsters and the Parsons friends of Orbit, too?”

“The Burminsters, yes, but when I said we all knew each other here in the Mall I spoke generally. The Parsons are comparative strangers to all of us, although they have been here for two generations—no, three—Benjamin Parsons’ young niece makes the third. No one here between these gates knows them.”

“What’s wrong with them?” McCarty demanded, adding with a very sober countenance: “Wasn’t there time in the two generations to get acquainted?”

Goddard shrugged.

“Not in their estimation, evidently. From the beginning they held themselves aloof and made it plain that they wanted no social intercourse with the rest of us here; they live in a world of their own and for years none of us has tried to invade it. Orbit’s newer than they—his father bought that house next door within my memory,—but he’s a different sort.”

“Yet you’re not intimate with him, you tell me. Who are his close friends, informal-like? You’d know that, being his neighbor.”

“I know nothing at all about Orbit’s friends, and I fail to see what they’d have to do with his valet’s murder!” Goddard flared out. “I’ve been pretty patient with you, but this is a confounded impertinence! Why don’t you look up the associates of the fellow himself and not annoy us with such an affair? He was killed miles away from here in some vile slum, as I understand it; it’s insufferable that Orbit’s neighbors should be dragged into your investigation!”

“Well, I’ll be annoying you no longer just now,” McCarty responded equably as he rose. “I’ll just have a word with your help to put in my report, though, before I go.”

Neither the butler nor the cook had any information of value to offer, however, and the maids employed upstairs gave equally valueless testimony. All had known Hughes by sight for years and had spoken to him occasionally in casual greeting but it was plain that they had not approved of him and were not particularly interested in his death.

“And them living next door to him for twenty years and more! ’Tis not in nature!” Dennis exclaimed, an hour later, when he and McCarty met by prearrangement at a modest East Side lunchroom and the latter disgustedly voiced his opinion of the apathetic Goddard staff. “There’s no woman too old to be curious about a neighbor’s sudden death, if it’s only for the gossip of it! You didn’t let on ’twas poison got him?”

“I did not! I told Goddard himself it was murder but he thinks somebody killed Hughes down there in what he calls a ‘vile slum.’” McCarty paused to give their order to the slatternly waitress and then leaning his elbows on the table he asked eagerly: “What did you find out in the old precinct? Did you see Mike Taggart or Terry?”

“The both of them!” It was Dennis’ turn to evince disgust. “Conceited young pups they are, the day! Terry’s clean forgot he put Hughes down as an ordinary alcoholic case and Mike that he misread the tag on the key-ring, but they were having the laugh on you for seeing a man die of poison under your nose and not getting wise! They didn’t laugh much, though, after I began asking about the old chop suey joints and Chink laundries!”

“So you spilled it, after all!” McCarty accused indignantly. “I might have known you would!”

“I spilled nothing but what I was told,” retorted Dennis, with an underlying hint of dogged satisfaction in his tone. “’Twas not my fault they guessed, dumb as they are! They took it all in till I sprung that and even then Terry began telling me there was a laundry around the corner and a chop suey joint back on the next block but Mike broke in and asked me what the hell I was getting at; what did I know about the Chink that had been hanging around there not an hour before, and what in blazes you were up to now? Man, dear, ’twould have done your heart good to see the faces on them! I said you were foreclosing a mortgage out at Homevale, and ’twas themselves had spoke of the guy being poisoned, not me, and what Chink were they talking about? There was no fooling them then, though, they were wise, but Terry told me about the tall Chinaman with a face like a graven image who used good plain English even if he did sing it, and I knew it was Ching Lee, all right!”

“What about him?” McCarty demanded: “If he went to the station-house asking about Hughes when ’twas not even in the morning papers that the body’d been identified ’tis a wonder they didn’t run him in on general principles!”

“Ching Lee is not that foolish!” Dennis lowered the knife, upon the end of which he had balanced a section of ham. “He told them he’d heard two other Chinks in that chop suey joint where he had his breakfast talking about one of their own countrymen who had fallen down dead in front of the station-house last night, and though the proprietor of the restaurant had said it was a white man, American, who had died, he had come there to make sure, being anxious about his brother.—Seems brother was to have met him the night before but didn’t show up, or some such stall, and that he had a weak heart. Anyway, them two bright lads fell for it, told him the guy that croaked was white and I misdoubt but they let drop a hint that it was more than heart disease killed him. ’Twas only when I come around with my questions they began to see that maybe they’d pulled a bloomer.—Where the devil and all is our coffee?”

The coffee appeared and when they had finished it McCarty asked:

“What did you do then? You’ve not been all this long while kidding the boys at the house!”

“I have not,” Dennis admitted with some complacency. “I left them looking like they’d got a comic valentine, and having time yet on my hands before I was to meet you I took a roundabout way to that chop suey joint, got a table hid behind the proprietor’s desk and ordered some heathenish mess. The proprietor’s a jolly, fat old Chink and I was trying to think up some way of bringing Ching Lee into our talk when who should come strolling in but Terry in plain clothes! He was off duty, of course, but he could not leave the matter be. The minute the old Chink lamped him he drew down his eyelids like the hood of an owl and pretended he couldn’t understand English, but I was watching his face and I got wise that he knew Ching Lee all right! I could have laughed, thinking how he’d been jabbering to me but he fooled Terry and the lunkhead went away at last without even catching sight of me behind the desk!—Give me that check and let’s beat it.”

They left the lunchroom and started westward again, McCarty seemingly lost in his own thoughts, until Dennis observed with a touch of impatience:

“I don’t get the meaning of it at all! We know Ching Lee was ready to knife Hughes only yesterday and if he did slip that Calabar bean into his food the while him and Fu Moy was alone in their dining-room and then heard later from us that it had worked all right, you’d think he would just sit tight and wait for what was coming next instead of trailing down to the station-house to make himself conspicuous! Wasn’t he the one that identified the body to us as being Hughes’, and wouldn’t he figger Terry and Mike would have been told of who the dead guy was, even if it hadn’t come out in the morning papers? If he wanted to know whether the autopsy’d showed poison or not he’d only have had to wait for the next edition! Yet, when you had that hunch ’twas there he’d gone this morning you must have doped out that he had some good reason for it; what put the notion in your head to send me down there, Mac?”

But McCarty made strange answer.

“If he’d been in a hurry to get there he’d have took the subway over here.” They were crossing Lexington Avenue, proceeding toward the Park. “Even if he’d walked it all the way he would have got down to the waterfront before nine, providing he took the most direct route, unless he stopped somewhere. He was in a hurry when he left the house but that might have been because of the storm coming; he was in no hurry to get where we found him, for all he was trying to run when he fell. Now what—?”

His voice trailed away into silence and his companion shrugged in exasperation.

“’Tis like talking to the empty air to ask you a civil question these days, what with your new learning, but if you’re asking me one, and it’s about Hughes last night, I’ll remind you of what you said coming over in the taxi; that maybe he wasn’t bound for anywhere in particular but just wandering along, crazed by delirium and suffering. According to what the inspector told us concerning the action of that Calabar bean, he must have been in fierce pain before paralysis set in the lungs of him. It might have been then he stopped somewhere, though he could have been staggering and lurching around the streets for hours between the New Queen’s Mall and the waterfront.”

McCarty shook his head.

“If you’ll call to mind, too, Denny, the inspector said the effect of the poison wouldn’t be felt for maybe a couple of hours, the amount he’d took of it. It come on him sudden, and that when he was near the old precinct, and it worked quick to the end. I’m not making little of the inspector’s power of persuasion but I wish we’d had the first shot at that Snape!—Look here, how much have you got on you?”

“Nine dollars and sixty-two cents.” Dennis replied with the promptitude of certainty but he eyed the questioner askance.

“I’ll get fifty for you before night. Thanks be, that sporting butler of Mrs. Bellamy’s has never laid eyes on either of us, and you’ve the luck of Old Nick with the cards! Come evening, you’ll be—”

“Come six o’clock this night I’ll be on duty for twenty-four solid hours, if you’ll remember!” Dennis interrupted, regretfully but firmly. “If you were fixing for me to sit in a little game with Snape after scraping acquaintance with him, to find out maybe what the inspector overlooked I’d like nothing better, and I misdoubt but that if you take it on instead you’ll be losing the clothes off your back! Could you not let it go till to-morrow night?”

The note of solicitude in his tone was lost upon McCarty in whose bosom the aspersion cast upon his poker ability rankled.

“If I’m losing the last stitch on me ’twill not be through playing close to my chest, like some!” he asserted darkly. “I was going back through the gate to have another talk with the Sloanes, if so be I’d find them in this time of day, but they’ll keep, and I’ve a check-book and some letters in my pocket that may give us as good a line on Hughes as Snape himself could; besides, the inspector’ll be dropping in for the good word. Come on till we hop a bus up to the cross-town.”

Arriving before the entrance which led to McCarty’s rooms they were astonished to see the door of the antique shop beside it open and the inspector himself emerge.

“Where have you two been?” he asked sharply. “I haven’t time to go upstairs but unlock the door, Mac, and we’ll step inside. Your friend Ballard of the ‘Bulletin’ has been hanging around; how in hell did he know you were in on this Hughes case?”

McCarty considerately forebore to glance at Dennis’ chagrined countenance as he swung the door wide, but it was obvious to his own mind that the ubiquitous reporter must have been in touch with Mike or Terry at the station-house since his loyal but bungling assistant’s visit of the morning.

“I don’t know, sir,” he replied innocently. “I’ve not laid eyes on Jimmie this long while.—But what’s up? I left you heading for Parsons’ house; did you get any dope from the old man about the hat, maybe?”

“How did you know he was old?” Inspector Druet countered.

“Goddard was after telling me he was a philanthropist and youth don’t turn to charity, as a rule,” observed McCarty. “Moreover he’s got a grown niece, and they’ve small use for any of their neighbors in spite of the millions around them.”

“So I gathered,” remarked the inspector dryly. “Parsons is a fine-looking old man with a face like a saint and a voice like a preacher, but he’s stern and unbending as a ramrod! He could not recognize the hat and he knew no one in the New Queen’s Mall; his sister took no interest in society, his niece had her own friends beyond the gates and he himself was engrossed in affairs which required all his time and attention. I figured the old gentleman would thaw when I said every one knew of the great good he’d done with his model tenements and playgrounds, and free hospital and shelters, but he shut me up as though I’d made a break and told me he was only a steward. He undoubtedly had seen the man, Hughes, if he’d been employed for twenty years or more in a house across the way, but he didn’t recognize him and he’d never heard his name. Death by violence was a very dreadful thing and he only regretted his inability to aid the cause of justice.”

“Was it the bunk, do you think, inspector?” Dennis asked. “Him talking like a book and all?”

The inspector shook his head.

“He’s an old-fashioned gentleman, Riordan, the kind you don’t often see nowadays, and his charities speak for themselves for all that he doesn’t celebrate them with a brass band. But it brought me no nearer to getting a line on Hughes, nor did the talk I had with his servants; they’re not allowed to associate with any others on the block and had never talked to Hughes though they knew him by sight. There was one queer thing about that interview, though; I could swear that I’d seen one or two of them before but I couldn’t place them.”

“So you drew a blank in the Parsons house?” McCarty commented. “So did I at the Goddard’s and as Denny says, ’tis not natural. The neighbors’ help may not have liked Hughes, or be scared now of mixing up in this mess, but they’re bound to have known him in all these years, whether they admit it or not.”

“Then you have no sign of a clue?” The inspector’s face lengthened. “If we don’t clean this case up in record time the papers will let out a roar that we’re lying down on the job because Hughes wasn’t a person of prominence, and with election so near the commissioner’ll be up on his toes to show results. It’s of more importance now for us to find out who killed that valet than if he were a king!”

Chapter VII

Gertie

When the inspector had left them McCarty and Dennis mounted to the apartment above and together looked over the bank-book and check-book appropriated from beneath the rug in Hughes’ room.

The first showed a regular deposit of one hundred and fifty dollars on the first of every month with varying sums between, ranging from twenty to just under a hundred, but balanced it invariably revealed only a comparatively small amount on hand.

“If the one hundred and fifty means his wages, he got mighty high ones,” Dennis remarked. “Still, Orbit looks like the kind who’d pay anything if he was suited and he said Hughes was a perfect valet, if you remember. The money deposited during the month might be his winnings at the races or cards and he was a lucky son-of-a-gun, but he seems to have lived up to nearly every cent.”

“Or lost it back again,” suggested McCarty. “Let’s have a look at the check-book.”

The stubs in the latter were not illuminating, for the dead man had evidently evolved a method of his own for noting those to whom he assigned checks and only hieroglyphics designated them. Laying aside this disappointing record McCarty turned to the little pile of letters which he had taken from the drawer of Hughes’ dresser and passed a handful to his companion.

“Here, Denny, sort these,” he directed. “You can tell by the writing if not by the names signed to them. If they’re love letters from women the more fools they, and ’tis no time to be squeamish!”

For a brief space there was silence, except for the rustle of paper and an occasional shocked exclamation from the scandalized Dennis, but at last he glanced up with a look of wonderment and exclaimed:

“Don’t it beat hell how much alike they are, all of them?”

“Who are?” McCarty asked absently.

“Women!” Dennis waved a huge paw in a vaguely comprehensive gesture. “American or foreign,—and you can tell the last by the strange words they put in when they can’t think of the English of them,—they all begin writing to him as if they was doing him a favor, the scoundrel! After a bit they start bossing him, and nagging and fault-finding, then they throw a bluff at ‘good-by forever,’ and the last of it’s always the same; begging him to come back! ’Tis well for us, Mac, that we’ve steered clear of them, for the both of us would have been wax in their hands!”

“Speak for yourself!” McCarty retorted. “No living woman could make a mark of me, though I’m giving none a chance! ’Tis funny they’d fall for a beefy, middle-aged guy like that, though, with the little mean eyes of him and the bald spot and all!”

“There’s no telling what they’ll take to!” asserted Dennis darkly. “There’s only one sensible female in the lot here; this one signing herself ‘Truda.’ She tells him kind but firm to stop writing to her or it’ll bring trouble to the two of them and it’s all damn’ foolishness, anyway.”

“She said that?” demanded McCarty.

“Not in those words, maybe; I’ve put it shorter and better than she does,” Dennis admitted modestly. “It looks as if she goes out sick-nursing or something, but she’s a married woman, all right.”

“‘Married?’” McCarty dropped the letter he had just taken up. “‘Truda’ might stand for ‘Gertrude,’ and ‘Gertie’ is short for the same name. I wonder now could she be ‘Gertie’?”

“And who in the world is Gertie?” Dennis stared. “Have you been holding out on me, Mac?”

“I have not. Snape told the inspector this morning that Hughes was crazy over some married woman named Gertie, but that’s all he knew about her. Read the letters, Denny.”

“There’s only two of them.” Dennis spread out the thin, double sheet of folded note-paper. “Listen, then: this is the first, for ’tis dated August twenty-second.—‘Dear friend Alfred. I was surprised and very pleased with the so pretty flowers you send to me, but please, you should not do it any more. I no longer am a girl, that I could accept such things and also he would be so angry to know. He is still there but you have not seen him for some days because the old gentleman of whom he takes care has been much worser. To me he has not come, even, but soon he will and my lady always talks to him when she is well enough, she takes interest for him to learn English more quicker. I got fear she speaks to him of the pretty flowers, for I tell her they come from him, and so it makes troubles for you and me, the both. Because of that, though I thank you for the so kind thought, I ask that you send no more. Your very true friend, Truda.’”

“Humph! Truda ain’t so strong on the English herself, is she?” McCarty remarked. “Sounds like a Dutch girl to me, or one of those squareheads. I wonder where her husband could be working that Hughes expected to see him? Anyway, it’s him and not her does the sick-nursing, Denny.”

“The both of them do!” Dennis declared. “Wait’ll you hear the second letter.—‘Dear friend. I could not meet you as you wish for my lady is not so well and I do not leave her bed, but also I would not. It is much silliness that you write me and you should not do it again once. You are making yourself amused with me and I got anger you should keep sending the letters I do not want and that could harm us both yet. He is not stupid and mild like you think. Nothing he says but much he thinks, and then it comes out and terrible is it. So you will not write again, nor try that I should see you. Your friend, Truda.’”

“She’s Dutch, all right, and level-headed. Hughes must have had the fine opinion of himself as a lady-killer, to be chasing after a respectable married woman that wanted nothing to do with the likes of him!” McCarty snorted. “I’ll bet Snape knows who she is and the husband, too, only he’s scared to speak now.”

“Mac, do you mind what Orbit told us about that Calabar bean being used as a medicine? Besides a doctor, who’d know more about medicines and poisons and such than a trained nurse?” Dennis’ leathery countenance was flushed with sudden excitement. “Hughes thought Truda’s husband was a dull-witted lout, with no more spirit than a sick cat, but _she_ says he’s terrible when he gets going, and she’d ought to know! What if he got on to them letters and being a foreigner with little or no English—!”

“Denny!” McCarty gazed wide-eyed at his confrère. “By the powers, I wonder if you’ve hit it! If Snape’s held anything back he’ll come across with it now! Are you sure there are no more ‘Truda’ letters except the two?”

“Not here, but you’ve not gone through all yours yet.” Dennis reminded him.

McCarty fell upon the few that remained and running hastily over them seized on one with an exclamation of satisfaction. It died upon his lips as he ran his eye down the page and then glanced up at Dennis’ tense face.

“Listen you to this!” he said impressively. “’Tis short but tells more than the other two put together.—‘Friend Alfred Hughes. To you I have tried to be kind but it is not good. Now I say that if you should write again I shall tell it to my husband that you are made to stop. He knows already you bother me, but comes any more letters and he will the street go over to make of you sausage meat. It is enough. Truda L.’—And ’tis dated just four days ago! Do you get it, Denny?”

“Only that the husband works near, but we learned that much before—”

“‘Near?’” McCarty interrupted. “He’s across the street! Didn’t Sloane say his old father was an invalid with a male nurse that was a Swede and spoke little English? Come on! It’s back we’ll be going to the New Queen’s Mall!”

Dennis was overwhelmed with the importance of their discovery and ventured only one question when they stood again at the entrance gate.

“How’ll we start in on him?”

“On who?”

“The Swede at Sloane’s. We’ll have to find out first if his last name begins with ‘L.’”

“I’m not going near him, not till I’ve found and talked to this Truda. It’s Snape I’m after and I’ll be leaving you outside the gate, Denny, for maybe you’ll be scraping acquaintance with him to-morrow, after all.”

Bill Jennings admitted him and stopped for a word with Dennis, while McCarty went quickly to the Bellamy house and rang the bell. The door was opened promptly by a tall, slenderly erect man of thirty-five or a trifle more, with the strongly marked features and intelligent, self-contained expression of an actor. The slight puffiness about the slate-gray eyes and fine lines at the corners of his mouth were the only evidences of the possible dissipation of which the watchman Jennings had spoken. He waited with an aloof but courteous air of inquiry to learn the visitor’s errand.

“You’re the butler here? Snape is your name?”

“Yes, sir,” the man replied with no hint of surprise in his tone but his eyes narrowed and a certain touch of deference vanished from his manner.

“I’m a special deputy, headquarters.” McCarty showed the old badge which he had resurrected just before leaving his rooms with Dennis. “Inspector Druet thought you forgot one or two things this morning that you might have had time to remember by now. Where can we talk private?”

Snape hesitated for a minute and then stepped aside for McCarty to enter.

“Come this way.” He closed the door, and, turning, started down the hall toward the rear, with McCarty at his heels. The butler led his unwelcome guest through a door opening into the domestic quarters of the establishment and to a plainly but comfortably appointed dining-room where he motioned to a chair at the table and seated himself in another opposite.

“What can I do for you?” His tone was brisk but not truculent, and McCarty, too, came to the point without preamble.

“You can tell me the address where Truda’s working now, taking care of the sick woman.”

“‘Truda?’” Snape frowned, as though perplexed, and McCarty assumed an air of impatience.

“Oh, you know her! ‘Gertie,’ Hughes may have called her to you, but Truda is the name she signs to her letters and she mentions you in them.”

“Me?” Snape smiled incredulously. “There’s a mistake somewhere. I don’t know any one by either name.”

“You spoke of her first to the inspector this morning.”

“I said Hughes had mentioned a girl named Gertie that he was taken with, in a manner of speaking, but I didn’t know anything more about her except just the name, though from what he said I had a notion that she was a married party.” Snape coughed discreetly. “I told the inspector Hughes and I had a bit of diversion together now and then, but nothing to do with women. He was always running after one or another of them and I never paid much attention to what he told me about them, but in the case of this ‘Gertie’ he did say there was somebody in the way, and I supposed he meant a husband.”

“You know well there was a husband and you’d not need the strength of a child to throw a stone right now and hit him!” McCarty retorted. “She’s respectable, with no use for Hughes and his nonsense, and it was to save her trouble, since he’s dead and out of it, that I came to you for her address instead of going across the street and giving her away to the man she’s married to. Of course, if you can’t recall Hughes mentioning it to you I’ve no choice.”

He made as if to rise and Snape wet his thin lips nervously.

“I have my place to consider.” There was a slight whine in his tone. “How do I know that the ‘Truda’ you speak of is the same—!”

“Come across if you’re going to!” McCarty interrupted with the harsh, commanding bark of the old days. “You know damn’ well that if I go over to the Sloanes’ and tell her husband ’twas you first wised us up that Hughes and his wife—”

“I never said Otto Lindholm’s wife was the woman Hughes was taken with!” A sullen note had replaced the whine. “I said it was somebody named ‘Gertie’ and there could be a million Gerties! The one he knew might be companion to an invalid up on the Drive; a Mrs. Cochrane, who has a private house in the neighborhood of Eightieth Street, somewhere, but it’s not for me to say. Hughes talked about so many—”

He paused with a shrug and McCarty asked quickly:

“When was the last time you saw Otto Lindholm?”

“The night before last—Thursday,—about eleven o’clock. We met at the east gate coming in.”

“What did he have to say to you?”

“Nothing much. He’s too thick-headed to learn English and he don’t say two words to anybody.” Snape spoke with lazy contempt, but there was an undercurrent of antagonism which McCarty recognized.

“He had a few words with you, though, didn’t he? What are you and him on bad terms about?”

“I don’t even know him, except to nod to when we meet!” Snape disclaimed. “He’s a surly customer and never had any use for Hughes even before—”

He checked himself but it was too late.

“Before Thursday night, eh? So Hughes was with you when you met outside the gate?” McCarty pounced on him like a flash. “What passed between the three of you? I want every word.”

“Oh, well, Lindholm just said ‘hello’ to me and then he stepped up to Hughes and growled something about letting his wife alone or he’d fix him. That’s all I know, I can’t repeat his lingo. Hughes blustered it out and Lindholm went on in ahead of us muttering to himself, when Dave Hollis opened the gate. I didn’t want to say anything about it, because of getting the woman into trouble, but what’s all this got to do with Hughes’ death?” The gray eyes lighted shrewdly. “You fellows think there was something wrong or you wouldn’t be raising all this row over it. Nobody had it in for him bad enough to do him any hurt, and the papers said nothing about his having been beat up! You don’t think he was murdered, do you?”

The amused insolence in the man’s voice was only slightly veiled. McCarty concluded that if he were putting it on he was indeed a smooth proposition, as the inspector had said.

“Nobody beat him up.” He ignored the final question. “Do you know any of the other help over at the Sloanes’?”

“Only John Platt, the butler, but he’s old and hardly leaves the house.” Snape had risen with alacrity, but as he showed McCarty to the front door he added anxiously: “I never even saw the Lindholm woman but once, and I don’t know what you want her for, but I hope you won’t say that I tipped you off about her! I don’t want to get in any mix-up with that Swede husband of hers and it would be as much as my place is worth, if I was thought to have made trouble in the Mall here!”

On the sidewalk before the house McCarty found an exceedingly pretty young girl in the picturesque dress of the typical French bonne, guiding the steps of a tiny, toddling baby. The child was dimpling and gurgling with mischief. Snatching suddenly at her nurse’s handbag she tossed it as far out on the sidewalk as she could. McCarty retrieved and returned it with a bow.

“_Merci, monsieur_,” the girl said gravely, but her dark eyes too danced with laughter. “She is a very naughty, bad baby that I have here, is it not so?”

The last observation was evidently intended for her charge, but McCarty replied gallantly:

“’Twas a pleasure, miss! Sure, at that age they’re all full of the—of life. It’s Mrs. Bellamy’s little girl, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Monsieur.” Her eyes were serious now and there was a note of reserve in her soft voice. “Come, _ma petite_. We shall go in now.”

Dennis was waiting patiently and evinced considerable interest in the brief tête-à-tête he had just witnessed, but McCarty was not in a mood to be treated with levity.

“She’s a pretty girl and a polite one, but well you know I’ve no eye for them!” he disclaimed. “I’ll be taking you now to call on another, though, that’ll maybe give us some real dope.”

“It’s Truda!” exulted Dennis. “You’ve made him come across with her address! Did you get anything else out of him, Mac?”

“Only that there was bad blood between her husband, that nurses at the Sloanes’, and Hughes.” McCarty repeated the tale of the encounter and his companion’s face expressed satisfaction.

“’Twill be him, all right!” he predicted sagely. “Them silent, slow-thinking fellows are the worst! Where’d he get hold of that Calabar bean stuff and how’d he slip it to Hughes?”

“And why didn’t I go and pinch him right off the bat instead of taking this little trip?” McCarty supplemented sarcastically, as they boarded an uptown car. “There’s more than him and that wall-eyed Chink that had it in for Hughes, but we’ll see what his wife has to say.”

A telephone book, in a drugstore on Eightieth Street, vouchsafed them the house number of the only Cochranes on Riverside Drive. They found the place to be a small, solidly built residence of gray stone with potted evergreens flanking the turn of the steps to the entrance door.

A trim little maid with a coquettishly frilled apron admitted them to a foyer, arranged informally as a library or den, with seats built in at either side of the empty hearth and books ranged along the opposite wall behind a long table. There she left them and presently slow, soft footsteps sounded on the stairs and another woman appeared.

She was thirty or thereabout, with thick braids of coarse, pale-gold hair wound around a small, shapely head, and a face whose perfect features would have rendered it beautiful had it been lighted with intelligence; but the great blue eyes were dull and bovine, and, although the rich color came and went in her cheeks, there was no hint of expression beyond vaguely bewildered inquiry as she bowed.

“I am Mrs. Lindholm. The maid say that you wish to see me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Dennis was gaping in flagrant admiration at the vision, but McCarty stepped forward. “We’ve come to return something that belongs to you.”

He handed her the first two letters which she had written to the dead man and watched her face as she recognized them. A shadow of dismay darkened her eyes and a little frown gathered above them.

“Oh, for why did he keep them?” Her tone was distressed but without agitation. “Such a nuisance as he was, poor man! Where did you get these?”

“Amongst his things.” McCarty drew a step nearer. “You know he is dead then?”

“Alfred Hughes? Yes, this morning in the papers I see it. So sudden it was! You are his friends, maybe?” She folded the letters and slipped them into the belt of her starched, white nurse’s uniform. “Sit down, please. I cannot long stay away from my patient.”

“We’re taking charge of Alfred Hughes’ belongings and arranging with Mr. Orbit for the funeral.” McCarty explained speciously, as they complied. “You and him were good friends, weren’t you?”

Truda Lindholm shook her blonde head slowly.

“No. I meet him by accident when I go to see my husband, who works across the street from Mr. Orbit’s, and then he waits for me two—three times. If you have read these letters you must know he gets a foolishness in his mind to make a flirtation with me, but it did not please me. He is gone now, poor soul, and so we do not talk about that, no?”

“But you did talk about it, didn’t you, Mrs. Lindholm?” asked McCarty. “You told you