As he pointed the spots out, one of them near where he was, the other near the outer edge of the desk, Kennedy's eye fell on the desk calendar.
"I removed the pages I told you about," supplied Leslie, noticing the direction of Craig's glance. "It's a loose-leaf affair, as you see. Here they are."
Leslie drew from his pocket the leaves for the various days, and we looked at them again, with their notations—one reading, "Prepare papers in proposed case of Lathrop vs. Lathrop." Others read, "Vina at four," and other dates, with hours attached. There were several of them, more than would seem to have been necessary were the relation merely that of lawyer and client for so brief a time. There were none for the day of the murder however.
Kennedy continued the search, now rummaging the papers, now directing either Leslie or myself to bring him objects.
He had asked me for a letter-file, and I was turning from a cabinet to hand it to him when my foot kicked some small, soft object lying along the edge of the rug. The thing, whatever it was, flew over and hit the baseboard.
Mechanically I reached down and picked the object up, holding it in the palm of my hand.
It seemed to be a rough-coated, grayish-brown bean, of irregular, kidney shape, about an inch long and half an inch thick, with two margins, one short and concave, the other long and convex. The surfaces were rounded slightly, but flattened. The coat of the bean was glossy.
Kennedy, with quick eye, had noted that I had picked up something and was over at my side in a moment.
"What's that?" he asked quickly, taking the thing from my hand as I turned to him.
He looked at it critically for a moment. Then he pressed the hard outer coat until it parted slightly, disclosing inside two creamy white cotyledons. He studied them for some time, then pressed the bean back into shape again as it had been before.