“I’m looking for a man called Connie Binhart,” he finally confessed, as he continued to study that ruinous figure in front of him. It startled him to see what idleness and alcohol and the heat of the tropics could do to a man once as astute as Dusty McGlade.
“Then why didn’t you say so?” complained McGlade, as though impatient of obliquities that had been altogether too apparent. He had once been afraid of this man called Blake, he remembered. But time had changed things, as time has the habit of doing. And most of all, time had changed Blake himself, had left the old-time Headquarters man oddly heavy of movement and strangely slow of thought.
“Well, I’m saying it now!” Blake’s guttural voice was reminding him.
“Then why didn’t you say it an hour ago?” contested McGlade, with his alcoholic peevish obstinacy.
“Well, let’s have it now,” placated the patient-eyed Blake. He waited, with a show of indifference. He even overlooked Dusty’s curt laugh of contempt.
“I can tell you all right, all right—but it won’t do you much good!”
“Why not?” And still Blake was bland and patient.
“Because,” retorted McGlade, fixing the other man with a lean finger that was both unclean and unsteady, “you can’t get at him!”
“You tell me where he is,” said Blake, striking a match. “I’ll attend to the rest of it!”
McGlade slowly and deliberately drank the last of his swizzle. Then he put down his empty glass and stared pensively and pregnantly into it.