“He’d no time, but I’m thinking he’ll be on his way here as soon as he can pacify the two latest victims of outrage there in the Mall. Moreover, if you’re going to stop for Brian to shave you after breakfast, it will be a miracle that you’re not late for duty!”
Dennis disappeared promptly into the bathroom and McCarty gathered up the documents and the page torn from the encyclopædia purloined from the Parsons house, and stowed them carefully away before making his own hasty toilet. They ate a sketchy breakfast together at the accustomed restaurant and then separated, McCarty returning to his rooms with a sheaf of newspapers to await the coming of his superior.
From the front page of the first paper the pictured face of Horace Goddard stared out at him, big-eyed and wistfully alert, and the caption beneath announced that Mr. Eustace Goddard offered twenty-five thousand dollars’ reward for information which would lead to the recovery of his son. A second article, brief but placed in significant juxtaposition to it, declared that no further progress had been made in the investigation into the death of the valet, Alfred Hughes, who had succumbed to the effects of the little-known poison physostigmine soon after leaving the residence of his employer Mr. Henry Orbit in the New Queen’s Mall six days before, but the authorities expected to make an important arrest in connection with it in the immediate future.
Inspector Druet’s impatient ring brought McCarty quickly to his feet and as the former sprang up the stairs he flung open the living-room door.
“Mac, what the devil have you been doing?”
“Me, inspector?” McCarty’s face was a study, but he had misunderstood.
“Yes! Why weren’t you on the job? They’ve raised hell in the Mall last night while I was chasing up some false clues about the Goddard case and I haven’t laid eyes on you since the medical examiner’s assistant arrived at Orbit’s yesterday!”
“I’ve been getting a bit of sleep, this morning,” McCarty replied evasively. “Did you see Parsons? You told me he’d been robbed,—did he say what was stole from him?”
“No. That’s the queer part of it. When he phoned to headquarters he was anxious to talk but as soon as I got to his house he began to hedge. A whole pane had been removed from one of the rear windows, and the telephone and Kip alarm system wires were cut, but he couldn’t show me that anything in his study had been disturbed, and although he insisted that some documents had been stolen from his filing case he would tell me nothing about them except that some were notes for a book he was writing and the rest of a highly personal nature.”
“If ’twas nothing of money value I’d not be bothering about it,” McCarty suggested hurriedly. “He got off light, considering what’s happened at other houses on that block.—Look at Orbit! Wasn’t he drugged besides, to say nothing of the murder committed there?”