“Yes, wearing a mask composed of several layers of gauze impregnated with glycerinated solution of sodium hypophosphate. That is one of many substances used. All that was necessary was to wet the mask with water and adjust it. It would have served a double purpose—to protect the wearer’s life as well as his identity.”
Amazed at Kennedy’s powers of reconstruction from evidence that looked so slender, I merely waited for him to proceed.
“Then whoever it was probably rifled his clothes and so obtained the keys to the building and the office. From the brief-case they must have extracted the copies of the telautomaton plans. After that it was a simple matter to throw the body overboard in the hope that the affair might possibly be covered up as an accident or suicide. In the course of the night the wind cleared the room of the gas. They did not reckon, however, on what science can discover—or if they did, cared little. After that, I suppose, some one went to New York, perhaps in a high-powered car.”
“Mito couldn’t have gone to New York—and got back again,” I exclaimed, impulsively, recalling that Mito had been seen ashore that night without apparent reason.
“Mito may or may not have played his part,” was all that Kennedy would comment.
He left me wildly speculating. Was Mito a cog in the wheel, of which Paquita and the gang suspected by Burke were other cogs? Was Shelby Maddox also a cog, willingly or unwillingly? Could he have got away from the yacht and got back again? A host of unanswered questions raced through my mind. But Kennedy had said all that he was prepared to say now.
“We had better be going,” he remarked, calmly, “if we are to keep that appointment with Hastings and Burke.”
He was evidently much more interested in what Burke might turn up than in his own investigation, which was quite natural, for what he had told me was already an old story to him, and his restless mind craved to be speeding toward the solution of the mystery.
Half an hour later Kennedy and I entered the office of Hastings. I looked about curiously. There were, as in many lawyers’ offices, two private offices for the members of the firm, while outside was a large room for the clerks, the stenographers, and the telephone girl.
As we were welcomed by Hastings in his own office I wondered what the walls might have heard. Marshall Maddox and his lawyer must have had many conferences there during the time that Maddox was planning his great coup in the munitions company.