“Not for a minute, old man. Don’t dream of deserting me and the ship. In fact I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, get on without you. I’m not as cold-blooded as you; and I don’t in the least relish being left alone by night, in a fog, with the rats either dead or deserted. No, I guess I could bear up as far as that’s concerned. But I do look to you to provide the missing link to what seems to me a pretty bad tangle. Which reminds me I have an important question to put to you. Run along, Prentice, will you, like a good fellow? The powers that be want to confer.”
Julian, having just congratulated himself on the fact that they seemed to have completely forgotten him, was sadly disappointed. He left them with their heads together.
XIX
Yes, Belknap and Berry at last had their heads together in peace and quiet—if being cheek by jowl with a tongue in each could be said to be having their heads together. Greek was meeting Greek, and, with reservations (decidedly with reservations!), they put their cards on the table.
It was a kind of peace and quiet in which the two men conversed. Nothing, thought Berry, had ever seemed to him more hollow-still than Thorngate that Saturday evening: fog outside, and illness, depression, and possibly guilt inside. Like the central vacuum of a cyclone it seemed to augur as much trouble ahead as behind. He wished for a moment that he and Belknap had let Sergeant Stebbins carry out his obstinate desire, which had been to run the whole lot down to the Blue Acres lockup for the night. It had really been because he relished the thought of catching somebody red-handed that he had joined in Belknap’s quiet but determined resistance to the idea. Belknap’s claim was that the scandal in society was bad enough as it was without herding several prominent and supposedly honorable ladies and gentlemen into prison as if they were one and all guilty of murder. It was hardly likely they were all guilty, and the danger of injured innocence was not fair to risk.
But Stebbins would undoubtedly have had his way about the arrested Crawford, whom he had proved backwards and forwards to his own satisfaction guilty of Whittaker’s murder, if Crawford had not chosen an opportune moment to collapse and be put to bed. Even the hardened Belknap had shown a gleam of sympathy for the prostrated Crawford and asked if someone hadn’t a sleeping drug. It was Nadia Mdevani who produced the little red bottle from her vanity bag, poured a few half-inch capsules into her cupped hand, and re-poured them into Belknap’s, who transferred them to Sydney Crawford’s.
“I couldn’t survive without these,” she had said. “They’re harmless enough—allanol or luminol, or one of those things.”
So every living soul that had been dining at Thorngate the night before, always with the exception of Dorn, was still there. It was this fact of his absence that brought Dorn uppermost in the Belknap-Berry discussion.
“No report on Milton Dorn?” Berry asked.
“None of any exact value to us. But one of your men has unearthed a hidden room at the back of his Eighty-fifth Street office, and in it several human specimens in varying degrees of dissection. None of these can hope to endure, but none have been dealt the finishing stroke of the knife. The press is hot on that scent, as you can well imagine. And of course nothing will satisfy it but that Dorn is guilty of our three murders and a few besides. I wish I felt as sure of the three as of the few besides.”