The Devil's Cook

24

Bartholdi knew that he would not sleep. Instead of going home, he went to headquarters and sat alone in his office in a darkness that was compromised by a finger of light prying through a crack in his door from the hall outside.

His brain was as jumpy as if it had been injected with a cerebral aphrodisiac. It had happened before, and he always preferred on such occasions to sit in the dark. He indulged himself at these times in a harmless fantasy. His thoughts, he would imagine, were irrepressible imps that wriggled out at his head and scampered around with an abandon that was often embarrassing. Consequently, in order to secure a decent privacy for their performance, it was only proper to release them after dark, and when he was alone.

Now his liberated imps were uneasy and angry. He was convinced that a murderer was at that moment having a grim laugh at his expense. He was certain, indeed, of a number of things. He was certain that his quarry knew the police knew Terry Miles was dead; he knew, in spite of this, why they had been put through the antics of this dreary night.

His imps figured it out this way:

The kidnapper allegedly knew that Jay Miles had gone to the police. If so, why didn’t he also know that the body of Terry Miles had been found? Having Jay under such close observation, apparently following him from home to headquarters, would he have abandoned the tail just in time to remain in ignorance of their subsequent visit to the old Skully place? Is was conceivable, granting an egomaniac with delusions of grandeur and immunity, but it was not probable. No, it was not.

In the second place, the kidnapper himself was merely a theory. Evidence of his existence was hearsay. Bartholdi had only Jay Miles’s word that a kidnapper had made himself known. There had been no witnesses to the telephone contact.

It had been necessary to take the whole thing on blind faith, and Bartholdi did not count himself among the faithful blind. Yet he believed in a kidnapping of a sort.

He knew who the murderer was. He would have bet his pension and his sacred soul that he knew. But he could not, knowing, prove what he knew. He needed confirmation on a critical point.

From among his antic imps he culled the three that had directed his mind to its present state. Sternly, like a drill sergeant, he brought them to attention in rank and inspected them:

One newspaper too many.

A girl who slept too soundly.

Most important of all, a ragout with too many onions.