“What did you do then? You’ve not been all this long while kidding the boys at the house!”
“I have not,” Dennis admitted with some complacency. “I left them looking like they’d got a comic valentine, and having time yet on my hands before I was to meet you I took a roundabout way to that chop suey joint, got a table hid behind the proprietor’s desk and ordered some heathenish mess. The proprietor’s a jolly, fat old Chink and I was trying to think up some way of bringing Ching Lee into our talk when who should come strolling in but Terry in plain clothes! He was off duty, of course, but he could not leave the matter be. The minute the old Chink lamped him he drew down his eyelids like the hood of an owl and pretended he couldn’t understand English, but I was watching his face and I got wise that he knew Ching Lee all right! I could have laughed, thinking how he’d been jabbering to me but he fooled Terry and the lunkhead went away at last without even catching sight of me behind the desk!—Give me that check and let’s beat it.”
They left the lunchroom and started westward again, McCarty seemingly lost in his own thoughts, until Dennis observed with a touch of impatience:
“I don’t get the meaning of it at all! We know Ching Lee was ready to knife Hughes only yesterday and if he did slip that Calabar bean into his food the while him and Fu Moy was alone in their dining-room and then heard later from us that it had worked all right, you’d think he would just sit tight and wait for what was coming next instead of trailing down to the station-house to make himself conspicuous! Wasn’t he the one that identified the body to us as being Hughes’, and wouldn’t he figger Terry and Mike would have been told of who the dead guy was, even if it hadn’t come out in the morning papers? If he wanted to know whether the autopsy’d showed poison or not he’d only have had to wait for the next edition! Yet, when you had that hunch ’twas there he’d gone this morning you must have doped out that he had some good reason for it; what put the notion in your head to send me down there, Mac?”
But McCarty made strange answer.
“If he’d been in a hurry to get there he’d have took the subway over here.” They were crossing Lexington Avenue, proceeding toward the Park. “Even if he’d walked it all the way he would have got down to the waterfront before nine, providing he took the most direct route, unless he stopped somewhere. He was in a hurry when he left the house but that might have been because of the storm coming; he was in no hurry to get where we found him, for all he was trying to run when he fell. Now what—?”
His voice trailed away into silence and his companion shrugged in exasperation.
“’Tis like talking to the empty air to ask you a civil question these days, what with your new learning, but if you’re asking me one, and it’s about Hughes last night, I’ll remind you of what you said coming over in the taxi; that maybe he wasn’t bound for anywhere in particular but just wandering along, crazed by delirium and suffering. According to what the inspector told us concerning the action of that Calabar bean, he must have been in fierce pain before paralysis set in the lungs of him. It might have been then he stopped somewhere, though he could have been staggering and lurching around the streets for hours between the New Queen’s Mall and the waterfront.”
McCarty shook his head.
“If you’ll call to mind, too, Denny, the inspector said the effect of the poison wouldn’t be felt for maybe a couple of hours, the amount he’d took of it. It come on him sudden, and that when he was near the old precinct, and it worked quick to the end. I’m not making little of the inspector’s power of persuasion but I wish we’d had the first shot at that Snape!—Look here, how much have you got on you?”