“Then he——”
“Probably someone either paid him well, or else, as I think is more likely, he really had left the powder there. Some one knew it.”
“Why should I be bothered?”
Grover’s theory was that through his reputation as the Ear Detective, or else because of some film or other data, the suspected miscreant feared him as he had feared Astrovox.
The conversation ended and Roger, finding his old friend, the taxi driver, on his night station, used his car.
At home he made certain that the devices, moved from Doctor Ryder’s residence, which no longer seemed threatened, because the absence of the Eye of Om had been explained to the Tibetans, all worked. He shifted the recording needle a dozen turns of the threaded arm that made it follow a spiral path. The call of “fire” and the crackling noises occupied only the start of the disk. He set the recorder to fall in place further over toward the center.
Switching on the electrically charged locks, he kept his desk lamp burning while he retired.
Just as he was about to turn it out, the light died.
Thinking that the bulb had been used up, he tried another light, just as a precaution, recalled to mind by the doctor’s experience.
That light was unresponsive.