On the west side of the park they separated, Dennis to take up his duty and McCarty to return to the Cochrane house. As the former had predicted, Truda Lindholm had departed hurriedly half an hour before, after a telephone conversation during which she had learned of serious illness in her own family. The same trim maid who opened the door at their first visit was McCarty’s informant and she couldn’t say from whom the message had come, but she added that Mrs. Lindholm seemed more distressed at leaving her patient than anxious over her own trouble. She had been there nearly a month, since just after Mrs. Cochrane’s little boy died, and had come well recommended from the West End registry for nurses; they had all liked her.
At the registry office McCarty obtained an address in the Bronx, only to learn from the Swedish couple living there that Mr. and Mrs. Lindholm had boarded with them up to a month before, but had left, giving the Sloane house as a forwarding address.
He ate a solitary dinner and then returned to his rooms, to meditate disgustedly over the negative result of the day’s efforts. Hughes’ murder challenged his every instinct and habit of mind. If Ching Lee knew nothing of it, what impulse had taken him that morning to the scene of the crime’s consummation? Were Lindholm and his wife both stupid enough to have taken alarm at the first hint of investigation, if they were innocent, and so deserted their responsible positions? Had Snape really told all he knew?
McCarty chewed savagely on his unlighted cigar, as he paced back and forth. How would the bright lads in the new scientific school of criminal psychology down at headquarters get after the mystery? With a concrete example before him, would those books he had vainly pored over give him a hint now? Dubiously he resurrected his newly-acquired collection from the depths of his closet and then paused at sight of the pale blue covered pamphlet protruding from the pocket of the coat hanging above. It was the book he had appropriated from Orbit’s library the night before, because it seemed to have something about psychology in it that a fellow could get through his head. Now he sat himself down doggedly to study it, with his own library scattered about him.
It was dawn before he went to bed at last, with the unaltered conviction that this new school was not for him and that if he were to succeed at all it must be by the wits God gave him, which, he had once told Dennis, were his only science.
Yet Sunday passed and Monday; Hughes was laid to rest in the grave provided for him by his late employer, and still there was no inkling of his murderer’s identity. Ching Lee blandly declared he had been to Chinatown on the morning after the tragedy and offered to produce numerous relations to prove it. No slightest trace could be found of the Lindholms; and Snape kept sedulously to the Bellamy house, affording Dennis no opportunity to foster an acquaintance. The newspapers were already criticizing the police department, Inspector Druet smarted under the recriminations from higher up, and Dennis lugubriously predicted defeat.
“The truth of it will never come out, Mac, with them Lindholms disappearing and all,” he remarked on Tuesday afternoon, as they walked slowly down the Mall toward Orbit’s house. “Maybe if we could get a line on Hughes’ actions from the time he left here and the way he took down to where he died—?”
“I’ve taken a dozen different routes trying to get trace of somebody who might have noticed him when he first took sick to see did he give a hint to them of what he was wanting to say when the end came, but ’tis no matter of use,” McCarty interrupted gloomily. “You said the first night we set foot in here that ’twould be small mystery could last for long between these two gates and yet it’s within a space where you could swing a cat that the answer lies; that’s what gets my goat! I want to have another talk with Orbit. He’s late getting in his coal, ain’t he?”
The roar of coal sliding down a chute from a huge truck beside the door almost drowned his comment, but Dennis nodded.
“Look at them two guys working like blazes shoving it down the hole quicker, and Jean waiting with the hose to clean the sidewalk after.” He pointed. “Orbit must be going to give some sort of a shindy, for isn’t that a red carpet and an awning piled up alongside the door? You’ll be out of luck if you’re wanting to interview him again this afternoon.”