“Well, I’ll be annoying you no longer just now,” McCarty responded equably as he rose. “I’ll just have a word with your help to put in my report, though, before I go.”
Neither the butler nor the cook had any information of value to offer, however, and the maids employed upstairs gave equally valueless testimony. All had known Hughes by sight for years and had spoken to him occasionally in casual greeting but it was plain that they had not approved of him and were not particularly interested in his death.
“And them living next door to him for twenty years and more! ’Tis not in nature!” Dennis exclaimed, an hour later, when he and McCarty met by prearrangement at a modest East Side lunchroom and the latter disgustedly voiced his opinion of the apathetic Goddard staff. “There’s no woman too old to be curious about a neighbor’s sudden death, if it’s only for the gossip of it! You didn’t let on ’twas poison got him?”
“I did not! I told Goddard himself it was murder but he thinks somebody killed Hughes down there in what he calls a ‘vile slum.’” McCarty paused to give their order to the slatternly waitress and then leaning his elbows on the table he asked eagerly: “What did you find out in the old precinct? Did you see Mike Taggart or Terry?”
“The both of them!” It was Dennis’ turn to evince disgust. “Conceited young pups they are, the day! Terry’s clean forgot he put Hughes down as an ordinary alcoholic case and Mike that he misread the tag on the key-ring, but they were having the laugh on you for seeing a man die of poison under your nose and not getting wise! They didn’t laugh much, though, after I began asking about the old chop suey joints and Chink laundries!”
“So you spilled it, after all!” McCarty accused indignantly. “I might have known you would!”
“I spilled nothing but what I was told,” retorted Dennis, with an underlying hint of dogged satisfaction in his tone. “’Twas not my fault they guessed, dumb as they are! They took it all in till I sprung that and even then Terry began telling me there was a laundry around the corner and a chop suey joint back on the next block but Mike broke in and asked me what the hell I was getting at; what did I know about the Chink that had been hanging around there not an hour before, and what in blazes you were up to now? Man, dear, ’twould have done your heart good to see the faces on them! I said you were foreclosing a mortgage out at Homevale, and ’twas themselves had spoke of the guy being poisoned, not me, and what Chink were they talking about? There was no fooling them then, though, they were wise, but Terry told me about the tall Chinaman with a face like a graven image who used good plain English even if he did sing it, and I knew it was Ching Lee, all right!”
“What about him?” McCarty demanded: “If he went to the station-house asking about Hughes when ’twas not even in the morning papers that the body’d been identified ’tis a wonder they didn’t run him in on general principles!”
“Ching Lee is not that foolish!” Dennis lowered the knife, upon the end of which he had balanced a section of ham. “He told them he’d heard two other Chinks in that chop suey joint where he had his breakfast talking about one of their own countrymen who had fallen down dead in front of the station-house last night, and though the proprietor of the restaurant had said it was a white man, American, who had died, he had come there to make sure, being anxious about his brother.—Seems brother was to have met him the night before but didn’t show up, or some such stall, and that he had a weak heart. Anyway, them two bright lads fell for it, told him the guy that croaked was white and I misdoubt but they let drop a hint that it was more than heart disease killed him. ’Twas only when I come around with my questions they began to see that maybe they’d pulled a bloomer.—Where the devil and all is our coffee?”
The coffee appeared and when they had finished it McCarty asked: