“‘I whirled around then and saw her playing about several feet away but Lucette was lying back dead, the remnants of the balloon at her feet! I rushed then to open the windows that the deadly vapors might not hang upon the air to betray me and after the room was quite clear of them I raised the alarm.
“‘McCarty and his associate were passing and in supreme confidence I had them called in, glorifying in their mystification. But the balloon disappeared! After the doctor and the medical examiner’s assistant had gone, after the body had been removed and the baby sent home the balloon was missing and somehow I feel, I know that McCarty has it! That he suspects!
“‘Sir Philip has come but he is writing an important letter and I have taken the time to jot this down. I am going out. I have McCarty’s address. I must know!
“‘Later. McCarty did have the balloon. He and his associate went out leaving the entrance door unlatched and one of the keys I took with me fitted the door of his apartment. I found the remnant of the balloon and brought it home, but that is of comparatively little importance now. With the knowledge that he actually suspects, this strange, new sensation came to me. Before, mine was the supreme power, I killed at will, but now I must kill to save myself! From being master I am become slave—but slave of what?—I shall have use once more for that key!’”
“Sure, he did!” McCarty nodded. “I told you about the revolver waiting for me on a pulley the next night, but I’d like to know how ever he got hold of a police positive!”
“He tells that on the next page,” the inspector remarked. “Here it is: ‘I have just laid a trap for him in his rooms and he will blunder into it, but it has cost me the service revolver I picked up in one of my solitary walks down on the East Side, when a young policeman had been killed by gangsters and the body just removed. There is a retributive justice about my work to-night, for last night McCarty and his associate broke in here. I pretended to chloroform myself, hoping to hear from their conversation why they had come and how strong were their suspicions against me, but the man McCarty opened my windows and hurried his associate away. Can he have realized my ruse?
“‘I am afraid, I know it now, but not of McCarty personally. Individual to individual he is infinitely my inferior and yet there is about him a suggestion of strength which takes from me my sense of power. Is it because of what he represents? I am above the law and beyond its reach, but is it because he stands for the law, for the cumulative will of society, that my own will seems almost puny?’”
“Grand words!” McCarty grunted. “He was getting cold feet, that’s what! He’d let his craze for murder run away with him, after all, and then lost his nerve when he found he wasn’t putting it over!”
“I don’t know about that, Mac!” Dennis shook his head. “Any guy that can plan such a finish for himself as he did don’t lack nerve, even if he was such a cold-blooded, black-hearted devil! I’m thinking he guessed right; it was the fear of the law, of every man’s hand being against him, that made him put his back to the wall!”
“There’s just one more entry,” the inspector observed. “That one was dated Thursday and this one is Friday, the twenty-fourth.”