“Tell you to-morrow, inspector, if you’ll drop in when you’ve nothing better to do, or ’phone Denny and me the word to come downtown to you,” replied McCarty hurriedly in a lowered tone for they had almost reached the gate and the watchman was advancing to meet them. “Denny’s off duty and I’m taking him home with me the night, though I misdoubt he’ll keep me up till dawn with his wild theories as to what desperate crime took Hughes down to the waterfront! Thanks be, the rain has stopped and he’ll not be wanting to ride home in state!”
But it was McCarty himself who hailed a prowling taxi when they had taken leave of the inspector and discreetly rounded a corner, and he had no time on the homeward way to glance at the meter, being engaged in mollifying his outraged companion.
“Will you never learn, you simpleton, when I’m talking about you for the benefit of somebody else?” he demanded in exasperation, when Dennis with bitter resentment had spurned his hospitality. “’Twas to put off the inspector I dropped that hint about being wishful for my sleep or he would have trailed along with us to find out what I’d got up my sleeve, and well you know ’tis nothing but the expression on a dying man’s face and the way he tried to speak but couldn’t! He’ll have the laugh on the both of us to-morrow if the medical examiner says ’twas ‘natural causes,’ and he’ll forget all about this night’s doings, but I won’t; I’m going to find out why Hughes ran the breath from his body and what it was he tried so hard to say.”
“Some day,” Dennis began darkly, but with a tell-tale softening in his tones, “some day you’ll broadcast through me once too often and this radio station will shut down on you! The inspector was right, though; I can see that now. Whatever made Hughes throw that fit, you think it happened back in that society fire line or you’d not have listened to the fat, bald little man, nor yet the old he-gossip and his son. I misdoubt but some night we’ll be putting a scaling ladder against that iron fence and chloroforming the watchman, so you can put that butler next door through the third degree!”
Back in McCarty’s rooms once more Dennis dried his rain-soaked boots comfortably before the little coal fire in the grate and watched with a quizzical light in his eyes while his host stowed his newly acquired library carefully away in a closet and then proceeded to clear out the accumulated litter of several days’ bachelor housekeeping, but he said no word until the task was accomplished. Then he observed:
“When you’re working on a case, Mac, you use your head, and the eyes and ears of you, but to-night another of your senses was asleep at the switch. Not that it had anything to do with Hughes, of course, but no more did anything else we learned except his name! You overlooked one little bet.”
“Oh, I did, did I!” McCarty retorted, stung but wary. “And what sense of mine was it that was not working?”
“Smell.” The reply was succinct. “Unless you’re holding out on me, your nose was not on the job.”
McCarty stared.
“What was there to smell?” he demanded. “Since when is your nose keener than mine?”