“You could not have found more dissimilar medicine to go in this pill box, although the two kinds of pills are identical in color and size,” he said. “Aconitine depresses the heart action while the other stimulates it.”
The physician's statement fell on deaf ears. Raising his head after contemplating the pills, Kent had looked across the room and his glance had fallen on a wing chair, standing just inside the doorway of the living room, and thrown partly in shadow by the portieres. The wing of the chair appeared to move. Kent rubbed his eyes and looking again, caught the same slight movement.
Bounding toward the chair Kent saw that the brown shape which he had mistaken for part of the tufted upholstery was the sleek brown hair of a man's well-shaped head. He halted abruptly on meeting the gaze of a pair of mocking eyes.
“Rochester?” he gasped unbelievingly. “Rochester!”
His partner laughed softly as Stone approached. “I have been an interested listener,” he said. “Let me complete the good doctor's argument. Nitro-glycerine would have benefitted Jimmie Turnbull and his feeble heart; whereas the missing aconitine pills killed him.”
Stone regarded him with severity. “How did you get in this apartment?” he demanded, declining the challenge Rochester had offered in addressing his opinion of Turnbull's death directly to him.
Rochester dangled his bunch of keys in the physician's face and smiled at his excited partner. “If you two hadn't been so absorbed in your conversation you would have heard me walk in,” he remarked.
“Where have you been?” demanded Kent, partly recovering from his astonishment which had deprived him of speech.
“I decided to take a vacation at a moment's notice.” Rochester spoke with the same slow drawl which was characteristic of him. “You should be accustomed to my eccentricities by this time, Harry.”
“We are,” announced Detective Ferguson from the hallway, where he and Nelson had been silent witnesses of the scene. “And we'll give you a chance to explain them in the police court.”