“But why accuse me?” asked Deweese, smiling. “I have no bats in my menagerie—nothing, in fact, but a flea-bitten bulldog.”
Peret’s face became sober.
“You stand accused not by me,” he said solemnly, “but by Berjet, the first of your victims.”
“What’s that?” asked Deweese sharply. For the first time, he seemed alarmed. He sat up suddenly in his chair, and as suddenly relaxed, but the hunted look that crept into his eyes continued to show how sharply the blow had struck home.
“You start, eh? Good! My reasoning is sound. Yes, my friend; Berjet is your accuser. Just before he died, he uttered two words. The first word was ‘assassins;’ and the other was a word that I at first believed to be ‘dix,’ the French word for ‘ten,’ which is pronounced dees. I thought Berjet meant he had been attacked by ten assassins, incredible as it seemed. That is what got me all balled up, as the saying goes.
“But after I heard your name, and let it roll around in my mind for awhile, I realized my mistake. The dying man did not say Dix. He pronounced your name, or rather, your present alias, ‘Deweese.’
“When realization of this burst upon me, I was so gratified that I decided to lay a little trap for you. I became very excited, you may recall, shouted that I knew what the Whispering Thing was, that the mystery was solved! I wanted you to show your hand, my friend. But I was not looking for you to act through a confederate, and as a result I very obligingly walked into the little trap which you, in turn, laid for me.
“Who was it that put the chauve-souris in my room, eh? Was it Sing Tong Fat? It could not have been you, for you have been under surveillance every minute of the time since you left the murdered scientist’s house last night. I think you gave Sing Tong Fat instructions to destroy me over the telephone, for the police report you as having called your house from Greenleigh’s drug store after your departure from Berjet’s. Ah, that devil of a Chinaman! I was watching him through the kitchen window for a little while this morning polishing silver, and he was singing to himself! Pardieu! he has an easy conscience for a would-be murderer, monsieur!”
“You have a very fertile imagination,” remarked Deweese, when Peret paused to blow the ashes from his cigarette. “But your fairy tale amuses me, so pray continue. In view of the fact that I was near the scene of the crime when Berjet was murdered, it is not difficult to perceive how you might confuse my name with the scientist’s last utterance. But how you ever came to identify me with Dalfonzo is past my comprehension.”
“That is very easily explained,” was Peret’s affable reply. “After leaving the scene of the crime last night, I had your house placed under surveillance of the operative I have already mentioned. While he was waiting for me to join him, so we could search the house, he saw Sing Tong Fat through one of the windows and recognized him as your familiar.