“All right. Riordan, close the windows, will you, and fix the catches?” The inspector turned and fumbled with the key in the lock as Dennis started for the windows and Orbit, after a last horror-stricken glance at the dead girl, preceded the others from the room.
McCarty eyed his superior’s back for a moment then stooped quickly and drew out from under the bench the object he had carefully kicked there a minute or two before; it was a slender stick with a wad of shrivelled, limp blue rubber dependent from one end. Snapping the stick he thrust it back beneath the bench again and placed the fragment with the clinging, clammily resilient pouch in his pocket. Then he, too, glanced once more at Lucette’s dead face as though ratifying some agreement between them and turned to follow his superior.
CHAPTER XIV
THE BLUE BALLOON
Orbit told of the afternoon’s tragic experience again in detail for the inspector’s benefit and McCarty and Dennis listened carefully, but it differed in no way from his first description. At its conclusion the medical examiner’s assistant was announced. The inspector descended with Orbit but McCarty and his colleague discreetly effaced themselves.
“We’re leaving just when it’s getting good!” Dennis sighed with morbid relish as they went down the steps and out into the lengthening shadows of late afternoon. “I’d like to have had a good look by ourselves around that conservatory! That doctor may be all right for the fashionable, expensive ailments of the crowd around this neighborhood, but I’ve been fighting fires too long not to know what asphyxiation means and ’twas not that killed the poor young thing in that great vault of a room with the windows open wide behind her!—How the devil do you suppose she did come to die, Mac?”
“I’m past guessing!” McCarty confessed. “’Tis the worst case since ever I went on the Force, and we’re up against the cleverest murdering wretch that’s been loosed on the world! You’ll mind I told you once that brains and not brawn was back of it all? Brains it is, with the genius of them twisted and gone wrong, and a knowledge of poisons and such that means the learning of a lifetime! We’ll slip around to the back of the house and wait till the medical lad from headquarters has gone. I’m thinking there’s more besides us would like a minute or two in that conservatory!”
“Why?” Dennis looked startled. “Is something hid there, do you mean? How could it be, with the servants around all the time and Orbit right there in the room? ’Tis the first murder ever I heard of that could be pulled off with a man playing the organ not twenty feet away and a little child running about in the midst of it and neither of them the wiser! There’s the baby now!”
They had reached the rear court and in the tradesmen’s entrance of the Bellamy house next door a buxom housemaid appeared with little Maude in her arms. She stood eyeing them in undisguised curiosity and interest and McCarty lifted his hat, approaching her with a bland smile.
“Maudie’s after having a new nurse, I see!” he began ingratiatingly. “’Tis a pity Lucette took sick back there in Mr. Orbit’s—”
“How is she?” the woman interrupted. “What happened to her? I know who you are; you’re from the police trying to find out who killed the valet from in there.”