“But why did the man take the white rats?” Potts was beaming, in the faint glow from the bulbs in the shadow box; tickled that his word had been so good; not dreaming that Grover was inwardly amused.
“With the same motive that makes a magician do meaningless movements with his left hand while he really palms cards in his other hand,” Dr. Ryder explained, “to make you look away from the real motive.”
“And he brought the kangaroo and the ape to confusicate us,” Potts was being clever, he felt.
“I’d say the ape came so he could be used to climb down a rope, and go and open the cellar trap that had no beam-alarm,” Roger spoke up. “I looked up notices in the theatre columns and there is an act that has a boxing kangaroo, and the critic called it ‘she.’ In the act, she ‘brings down the house’ when a fire is supposed to trap the trained rats on the roof of a little house, and ‘she’ makes everybody laugh by taking the rats and putting them in the pouch they have to carry their young in.”
“Oh, yes, that coagulates,” Potts agreed.
Although all the others realized that the word meant to clot or curdle, and wanted to smile when it was used to mean “connects up,” Potts, had they known it, was precisely correct—for they were to find that many deductions certainly coagulated, in a broad way of speaking, the real truth, instead of solving the mystery.
If clotting and curdling means to thicken and make lumpy, then as Potts said, Roger’s explanation did exactly that to their deductive cleverness.
Roger, as the slow minutes dragged along, picked up with his headset whispers of the policemen outside a window, exchanging ideas about their tedious watch; and even the slip and rattle of shifting coal in the cellar bin.
No invading menagerie, though, brought news to his intent ears.
A tiny, but sharp click broke a long silence. The oil-burner relays of heating plants in adjoining buildings made such “static” on his home radio, he knew, but the heat would not be used in the hour after midnight.