“What is it?” he asked. “I’d say it looked like one of those identification tags in case he lost his keys, but if ‘N. Q. M.’ are his initials, what is the ‘4’?”
The young lieutenant regarded him almost pityingly.
“It was not meant for an identification tag exactly, McCarty; at least, not for any stranger that might happen to pick up these keys, but it’ll tell me more than just who this bird is and where he lived before I’m through!”
“I hope so, lad!” But McCarty still shook his head. “Happen, though, when the body is claimed you’ll find he was Neil Quinn Malone, walking delegate for Stevedores’ Union Number Four, and down here late for a date because of meeting up with some bootlegger’s first cousins!”
“There’s the ambulance!” Terry spoke suddenly as a bell clanged up the street. His honest face had reddened and his tone was a mixture of forbearance and chagrin.
“Well, I’ll take the air, boys,—and the rain!” McCarty sternly repressed the twinkle in his eyes. “I’m chilled to the marrow of me, which does no good to the touch of rheumatism I’ve had lately, and I need no young sawbones in a white coat to tell me that guy is dead, even though there’s never a mark on him! Good luck to the two of you!”
He made his way out into the storm, bending his head before the pelting downpour and chuckling as he turned the coat collar up about his throat. The good lads back there would think that a few years of soft living had done for old Mac, and he was through!
Yet he was not chuckling when he turned into a dingy little lunchroom a few blocks away and in the look which he bent upon his coffee cup there was more of uneasy indecision than its steaming but doubtful contents warranted. He was through, though not in the way Terry and Taggart might be thinking. Never again would he intrude on a case that belonged to the department he had quitted! The methods had changed too much since his day when a plainclothes bull went out and got his man or was hauled up on the carpet to explain why not; it was bad enough when Headquarters began to be cluttered up with all that scientific crime detecting junk from the foreign police centers, but now they were opening up a school to teach this black art called “criminal psycho-analysis” to a bunch of fine lads in the detective bureau who needed nothing but the quick minds and strong arms that the Lord had given them already! It was his own secret and shamefaced perusal of such books on this subject as he had been able to gather, that had driven him forth with a case of mental blind staggers earlier that very evening. Well, let them psycho-analyze that man who carried the queer tag on his key-ring! And yet—!
It was a rare case! McCarty’s eyes glistened and his nostrils fairly quivered with the old eagerness as he considered its possibilities. His coffee finished, he took the nearest subway that led to the rooms over the antique shop where he maintained a solitary bachelor establishment.
He had expected to find it empty as usual but to his surprise he noted that a low light glowed from behind the shades of his two front windows and on opening the entrance door with his latchkey he was greeted by a particularly malodorous stench of tobacco wafted down the narrow stairway. There wasn’t another pipe in the world that smelt quite like that one, and as he bounded upward he called: