So every living soul that had been dining at Thorngate the night before, always with the exception of Dorn, was still there. It was this fact of his absence that brought Dorn uppermost in the Belknap-Berry discussion.

“No report on Milton Dorn?” Berry asked.

“None of any exact value to us. But one of your men has unearthed a hidden room at the back of his Eighty-fifth Street office, and in it several human specimens in varying degrees of dissection. None of these can hope to endure, but none have been dealt the finishing stroke of the knife. The press is hot on that scent, as you can well imagine. And of course nothing will satisfy it but that Dorn is guilty of our three murders and a few besides. I wish I felt as sure of the three as of the few besides.”

Berry shivered.

“You say that’s all of no value to us? I should think as a mark of character it might shed light on the situation. However, it’s useless to jump to conclusions. Our whole case against Dorn is summed up in his disappearance, added to your possible glimpse of him.”

“Perfectly true. My answer referred merely to the fact that he himself has not been traced, much less located.”

“I see.” Berry stroked his chin and glanced up at Belknap with one eye shut. “You’re not in too good a humor, old man. Stuck for an answer? Don’t tell me!”

“I guess I am, Berry. I’m mired.” Belknap smiled slowly, but failed to quite meet Berry’s open eye. “The trouble being I haven’t a flare about this business. And unless my instincts are at work I flounder. I’m not good with a magnifying glass, I must admit.” And Belknap made a thrust of his head at the glass on the table.

Berry laughed.

“Neither am I, really,” he said. “I bow to convention. I know you don’t. But neither are my instincts particularly violent. A little luck, some thinking, and an enormous amount of hard work have got the poor boy where he is today. Don’t disparage him. A glass like this is a pretty little tool of the trade. Boys like Prentice like to see a detective without one as little as they like to see a naturalist without a butterfly net. I’m a detective, you see; you’re a genius. That’s the difference—and oh, the difference to me! Gee, that rhymes, Belknap—internally.”

It was true that on the face of it Belknap’s reputation exceeded Berry’s because of the ‘hunches’ that made him spectacular. Yet Berry, for just the reason that he lacked them, perhaps averaged a greater percentage of successes than the older man. Whereas Belknap’s failures, according to the fortune of heroes, passed unrecorded or were forgotten overnight, Berry’s went down in history.

Berry had recently written finis at the end of a slow, grueling, painstaking case, begun five years before—having of course had his hand in numberless affairs, successful and unsuccessful, in the meantime. The Star Diamond robbery round-up, seen in a bird’s eye view from beginning to end, was a masterpiece of intricate workmanship and cunning design, with Berry the spider. But it had been too much to expect a fickle public attention to remain riveted to a five-year hunt that led around the world and back again. And what newspaper would take the time to review it at sufficient length to bring out its pattern in bas-relief.

Belknap, on the other hand, seldom was interested in crimes at their birth. They had to pull themselves together, assume character, even become aged and ripened in the detective cellars, before he woke up to them. Then suddenly with the warp and the woof before him he saw the flaw, the weak thread, and unraveled the whole in a breath. Belknap had a certain contempt for Berry’s methods, though a sincere respect for his achievements.

“I’m not so sure about the luck in your case, Berry,” he said generously. “I’m afraid there’s always been far too much of it with me. I’m not a hard worker. And as for thinking, it happens in wedges of intuition driven in between sleeping and waking. I have damn little to do with it. That’s why I’m up a tree now. I haven’t had a good sleep since the returns on these murders of ours began to come in.”

“You don’t look it. And unless I miss my guess we’ve got a bad night ahead of us. So let’s run over our lists to date and not leave the household too long on its wild lone. Who are there to be considered? Mr. and Mrs. Crawford; Prentice and his girl-friend; Miss Mdevani; and this missing Dorn. And that leaves out of account the quite possible possibility that Blake killed Miss Video, or vice versa, or that Whittaker killed both. Violet Mowbray’s name may be a stepping-stone and it may prove just another stumbling-block. What really interested me in Miss Video’s remark was the ‘revelation for revelation’ bit. Did she mean that because Whittaker was exposing her lover Crawford she was going to pay him off? For what she could have meant was that if you are exposing me I’ll get even with a story about you and Violet Mowbray. In which case it would bear out a little suspicion of mine about that Diary you people seem so anxious to forget. Perhaps the Diary had ’em all in it—not merely Crawford. Whittaker may have been letting fifty-nine cats out of the bag instead of one. He was an old scoundrel, Whittaker, by accounts. If that was so, with most of those here having interrelated parts, what more likely than the only way for any one of them to come clean was to wipe out every other one, and the Diary with ’em.”

Belknap carefully regarded a thumb-nail, pausing before he spoke.

“Astute reasoning, Berry. You’re uncannily warm, you’ll be pleased to know. I haven’t had a good opportunity to explain to you the method in this madness, if there is any. Such as it is, it’s Whittaker’s. The poor devil, though I swear I can’t be as sympathetic as I should be, was dying of cancer, and witness his bright idea of a way to shorten the sentence. He called me in at the last minute to watch it done—too late to more than expostulate and then resign myself to what I thought was going to be rather a gruesome lark, and has proved far too much of a good thing. I assure you I didn’t anticipate a shambles! I’ve kept this item for your ear alone because—well, you know the police. Can’t you picture that damned sergeant hot and bothered on the trail of a lot of stale crimes when the time is too short for the new? What do you say about it?”

Berry walked across and threw up a window. “Bad night,” he said, and spit. He knocked the ashes from his pipe on the stone outer sill, closed the window deliberately, and came a few steps back, refilling his pipe as he came, and keeping his eyes on that.

“You’ve let me do quite a bit of feeling around in the dark, haven’t you, boy? Oh, I don’t exactly blame you. After all, it was your case, not mine. There’s a catch-as-catch-can element between us I guess we can’t avoid. And aside from that I agree with you that it would be rather low-down to allow your friend the Judge to blight the careers of his criminal friends because of certain age-old professional secrets between them. For I take it that’s what you’re trying to tell me.”

“I am, exactly. But now that you are enlightened what good is it to you? It’s been of little help to me to know that the Miss Laceys and Mr. Prentices have their pasts. Can you see either one of them with any of last night’s blood on their hands?”

“Not particularly. But we’ve both had our tragic experiences with gentle creatures who have spread the veil of innocence over a positive welter of sin. No, given your tale of what Whittaker had set out to do, and has done to a T, the matter boils itself down to a neat psychological one. We’re unable to budge with the circumstantial evidence; unless the fact that all the circumstantial points directly at your foreign lady, Miss Mdevani. But I, for one, feel it’s planted on her. I gather it strikes you the same way? However, we can’t afford to eliminate her. As far as everyone is concerned we only have their sworn word as to how they spent last night: Miss Lacey in Mr. Prentice’s room, for the most part; Mr. Prentice in the Judge’s, except when he wasn’t; the Judge in Miss Video’s, you think; Mrs. Crawford in her own; Miss Mdevani very much out and about—and yet not seen until her visit to you; Mr. Crawford further out and about but not seen because of the assignation with his wops. The few instances in which we can check their stories we find them quite uncommonly truthful. You saw Miss Lacey when she says she came to the library for a drink. Mrs. Crawford saw Mr. Prentice as he came from the Judge’s room, when she was on her way down to find her husband and found Blake instead. No one saw Blake. You kept moving and saw damn little—unless you did see Dorn. I wasn’t in the picture until after two of the important episodes, and too far afield to get much out of the third. You were actually present at the third, and a lot of good it did you. Which reminds me. I just want to check that shooting with you again. It bothers me. One shot, you say, from the direction of the library wall, in other words from the holes therein. Prentice does insist on two.”

“There was one shot,” Belknap said with controlled quietness. “I should think it would be unnecessary for me to repeat myself. But there have been cases of simultaneous, or all but simultaneous, shots that might deceive one, more particularly the person nearest the scene of action. Do you suggest it might have been something of that sort? Miss Mdevani in the wall, and Crawford or his hired man in the pantry, shall we say?”

“My idea in a nutshell. You see this is what I found to make me such a nuisance on the subject.”

Berry produced the bullet of a 22 calibre Colt automatic from his vest pocket—a bullet apparently identical to the one found in the table that morning.

“May I inquire?” Belknap asked gravely, taking the pellet on the palm of his hand and crossing it from one to the other.

“In my meticulous, persnickety way,” Berry said with his little twisted smile, “I made a cleaner sweep of the dining-room tonight than you and I and the Sergeant did this morning when working in unison.” Berry had been known to strip a freshly papered wall in his thoroughness! “And this article is the net result. Found in the sideboard—you noticed that Chippendale thing between the windows—inside, deep in the back board, with the doors closed and no hole in the doors. Meaning the doors were standing open when the shot was fired, which, incidentally, means nothing.”

“Exactly; nothing at all. And of course it may have been in hiding there for years, the relic of some earlier shooting picnic at the Whittaker mansion! But I congratulate you on the find, for it is a find. We must get it to the ballistician, who has Exhibit A, and let him determine which, if either, came from our captured weapon. We know only one shot could have come from it.”

“Certainly. I’ll take charge of it. You get in touch with Miss Mowbray. I’ll continue with Miss Video’s room while I’m about it, and you go mix with the gang. The more I hear about them the less I like them unchaperoned. See you later.”

On either side the door each drew a long breath that being translated meant “I guess I gave him my facts fair enough. Conclusions? No.”