The Chief of the United States Secret Service was tapping with nervous irritation on the desk before him.
“Yes, yes!” he agreed, and again he looked oddly at his operative. “Perhaps there is something to that; you work along that line, Del: you can have a free hand. Take a few days off, a little vacation if you wish. Yes—and ask Sprague to step in from the other office; he has the personnel list.”
Robert Delamater felt the other’s eyes follow him as he left the room. “And that about lets me out,” he told himself; “he thinks I’ve gone cuckoo, now.”
He stopped in a corridor; his fingers, fumbling in a vest pocket, had touched the little metal spheres. Again his mind flashed back to the chain of events he had linked together. He turned toward an inner office.
“I would like to see Doctor Brooks,” he said. And when the physician appeared: “About that man who was murdered at the hotel, Doctor—”
“Who died,” the doctor corrected; “we found no evidence of murder.”
“Who was murdered,” the operative insisted. “Have you his clothing where I can examine it?”
“Sure,” agreed the physician. He led Delamater to another room and brought out a box of the dead man’s effects.
“But if it’s murder you expect to prove you’ll find no help in this.”