Berry shivered.
“You say that’s all of no value to us? I should think as a mark of character it might shed light on the situation. However, it’s useless to jump to conclusions. Our whole case against Dorn is summed up in his disappearance, added to your possible glimpse of him.”
“Perfectly true. My answer referred merely to the fact that he himself has not been traced, much less located.”
“I see.” Berry stroked his chin and glanced up at Belknap with one eye shut. “You’re not in too good a humor, old man. Stuck for an answer? Don’t tell me!”
“I guess I am, Berry. I’m mired.” Belknap smiled slowly, but failed to quite meet Berry’s open eye. “The trouble being I haven’t a flare about this business. And unless my instincts are at work I flounder. I’m not good with a magnifying glass, I must admit.” And Belknap made a thrust of his head at the glass on the table.
Berry laughed.
“Neither am I, really,” he said. “I bow to convention. I know you don’t. But neither are my instincts particularly violent. A little luck, some thinking, and an enormous amount of hard work have got the poor boy where he is today. Don’t disparage him. A glass like this is a pretty little tool of the trade. Boys like Prentice like to see a detective without one as little as they like to see a naturalist without a butterfly net. I’m a detective, you see; you’re a genius. That’s the difference—and oh, the difference to me! Gee, that rhymes, Belknap—internally.”
It was true that on the face of it Belknap’s reputation exceeded Berry’s because of the ‘hunches’ that made him spectacular. Yet Berry, for just the reason that he lacked them, perhaps averaged a greater percentage of successes than the older man. Whereas Belknap’s failures, according to the fortune of heroes, passed unrecorded or were forgotten overnight, Berry’s went down in history.
Berry had recently written finis at the end of a slow, grueling, painstaking case, begun five years before—having of course had his hand in numberless affairs, successful and unsuccessful, in the meantime. The Star Diamond robbery round-up, seen in a bird’s eye view from beginning to end, was a masterpiece of intricate workmanship and cunning design, with Berry the spider. But it had been too much to expect a fickle public attention to remain riveted to a five-year hunt that led around the world and back again. And what newspaper would take the time to review it at sufficient length to bring out its pattern in bas-relief.
Belknap, on the other hand, seldom was interested in crimes at their birth. They had to pull themselves together, assume character, even become aged and ripened in the detective cellars, before he woke up to them. Then suddenly with the warp and the woof before him he saw the flaw, the weak thread, and unraveled the whole in a breath. Belknap had a certain contempt for Berry’s methods, though a sincere respect for his achievements.