For, whatever they said, I felt sure that a statement that I had seen Alma go to Pleasure Dome that fatal night at about one-thirty and had probably heard her return about two-thirty, would be something like a match to a trail of gunpowder.
“Now,” Keeley went on, “I must do some real Sherlocking. First, as to Harper Ames. I’m inclined to scratch his name from my list of suspects because of his frankly expressed desire that I should take the case for him. Either he has the knowledge of his own absolute innocence, or else he is the very most clever devil I have ever chanced to run across.”
“He’s innocent all right,” Lora said. “He couldn’t act out all that. He really wants you to take the case, Kee, and that proves his innocence.”
“But does it?” Moore argued. “May it not be that he is the guilty man and he is bold enough to think that by taking such a course he can steer suspicion away from himself?”
“Seems to me,” I put in, “that for a real Sherlock you are doing a lot of theorizing and surmising. Why not get down to shreds of wool, missing cuff-links and dropped handkerchiefs?”
“Keeley isn’t a fictional detective,” Lora exclaimed. “He doesn’t work on conventional lines——”
“There are two kinds of fictional detectives, my dear girl,” Keeley told her. “The detective of fiction, and the story-book sleuth who declares that he is not the detective of fiction. The original detective of fiction was the hound-on-the-scent sort. The man who could put two and two together. The wizard who could tell the height, weight, and colouring of the unknown criminal from a flick of cigar ash. Then, as this superman palled a bit on the reader, came then his successor, the man who scorned all these tricks of the trade and announced himself as not the detective of fiction.”
“And which sort are you?” asked Lora, brightly, with a hint of veiled chaffing.
“I’m a mixture of both,” Kee stated calmly. “But I do think one should consider the bent and inclination of a suspect as well as the material clues he leaves about.”
“For instance?” I asked.