me over. You didn't happen to lift any prints, did you, sir?'
'Fingerprints?' asked the coroner. 'Certainly not. The courts will never admit fingerprint evidence.'
'Well, it was too late by the time I got there. The whole place was already cleaned out. All the girl's things were gone.'
Hugel was incensed. He called it tampering with evidence. 'But you must have learned something about the Riverford girl,' he added.
'She was new,' said Littlemore. 'She only lived there a month or two.'
'They opened in June, Littlemore. Everyone has lived there only a month or two.'
'Oh. Well she was a real quiet type. Kept to herself.'
'Is that all? Was anyone seen with her yesterday?' asked the coroner.
'She came in around eight o'clock. Nobody with her. No guests later. Went to her apartment and never came out, as far as anybody knows.'
'Did she have any regular visitors?'
'Nope. Nobody remembers anybody ever visiting her.'
'Why was she living alone in New York City — at her age and in so large an apartment?'
'That's what I wanted to know,' said Littlemore. 'But they clammed up on me pretty good at the Balmoral, every one of them. I was serious about the harbor though, Mr Hugel. I found some clay on the floor of Miss Riverford's bedroom. Pretty fresh too. I think it came from the harbor.'
'Clay? What color clay?' asked Hugel.
'Red. Cakey, kind of.'
'That wasn't clay, Littlemore,' said the coroner, rolling his eyes, 'that was my chalk.'
The detective frowned. 'I wondered why there was a whole circle of it.'
'To keep people away from the body, you nitwit!'
'I'm just joking, Mr Hugel. It wasn't your chalk. I saw your chalk. The clay was by the fireplace. A couple of small traces. Needed my magnifying glass before I saw it. I took it home to compare with my samples; I got a whole collection. It's a lot like the red clay all over the piers at the harbor.'
Hugel took this in. He was considering whether to be impressed. 'Is the clay in the harbor unique? Could it come from somewhere else — the Central Park, for example?'
'Not the park,' said the detective. 'This is river clay, Mr Hugel. No rivers in the park.'
'What about the Hudson Valley?'
'Could be.'
'Or Fort Tryon, uptown, where Billings has just turned over so much earth?'
'You think there's clay up there?'
'I congratulate you, Littlemore, on your outstanding detective work.'
'Thanks, Mr Hugel.'
'Would you be interested in a description of the murderer, by any chance?'
'I sure would.'
'He is middle-aged, wealthy, and right-handed. His hair: graying, but formerly dark brown. His height: six foot to six-foot-one. And I believe he was acquainted with his victim — well acquainted.'
Littlemore looked amazed. 'How — ?'
'Here are three hairs I collected from the girl's person.' The coroner pointed to a small double-paned rectangle of glass on his desk, next to a microscope: sandwiched between the panes of glass were three hairs. 'They are dark but striated with gray, indicating a man of middle age. On the girl's neck were threads of white silk — most probably a man's tie, evidently used to strangle her. The silk was of the highest quality. Thus our man has money. Of his dexterity, there can be no doubt; the wounds all proceed from right to left.'
'His dexterity?'
'His right-handedness, Detective.'
'But how do you know he knew her?'
'I do not know. I suspect. Answer me this: in what posture was Miss Riverford when she was whipped?'
'I never saw her,' the detective complained. 'I don't even know cause of death.'
'Ligature strangulation, confirmed by the fracture of the hyoid bone, as I saw when I opened her chest. A lovely break, if I may say, like a perfectly split wishbone. Indeed, a lovely female chest altogether: the ribs perfectly formed, the lungs and heart, once removed, the very picture of healthy asphyxiated tissue. It was a pleasure to hold them in one's hands. But to the point: Miss Riverford was standing when she was whipped. This we know from the simple fact that the blood dripped straight down from her lacerations. Her hands were undoubtedly tied above her head by a heavy- gauge rope of some kind, almost certainly attached to the fixture in the ceiling. I saw rope threads on that fixture. Did you? No? Well, go back and look for them. Question: why would a man who has a good sturdy rope strangle his victim with a delicate silk? Inference, Mr Littlemore: he did not want to put something so coarse around the girl's neck. And why was that? Hypothesis, Mr Littlemore: because he had feelings for her. Now, as to the man's height, we are back to certainties. Miss Riverford was five-foot-five. Judging from her wounds, the whipping was administered by someone seven to eight inches above her. Thus the murderer's height was between six foot and six-foot-one.'
'Unless he was standing on something,' said Littlemore.
'What?'
'On a stool or something.'
'On a stool?' repeated the coroner.
'It's possible,' said Littlemore.
'A man does not stand on a stool while whipping a girl, Detective.'
'Why not?'
'Because it's ridiculous. He would fall off.'
'Not if he had something to hold on to,' said the detective. 'A lamp, maybe, or a hat rack.'
'A hat rack?' said Hugel. 'Why would he do that, Detective?'
'To make us think he was taller.'
'How many homicide cases have you investigated?' asked the coroner.
'This is my first,' said Littlemore, with undisguised excitement, 'as a detective.'
Hugel nodded. 'You spoke with the maid at least, I suppose?'
'The maid?'
'Yes, the maid. Miss Riverford's maid. Did you ask her if she noticed anything unusual?'
'I don't think I — '
'I don't want you to think,' snapped the coroner. 'I want you to detect. Go back to the Balmoral and talk to that maid again. She was the first one in the room. Ask her to describe to you exactly what she saw when she went in. Get the details, do you hear me?'
On the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-third Street, in a room no woman had ever entered, not even to dust or beat the curtains, a butler poured from a sparkling decanter into three etched-crystal goblets. The bowls of these goblets were intricately carved and so deep they could hold an entire bottle of claret. The butler poured a quarter inch of red wine into each.
These glasses he offered to the Triumvirate.
The three men sat in deep leather armchairs arranged around a central fireplace. The room was a library containing more than thirty-seven hundred volumes, most of which were in Greek, Latin, or German. On one side of the unlit fireplace stood a bust of Aristotle atop a jade- green marble pedestal. On the other was a bust of an ancient Hindu. Over the mantel was an entablature: it displayed a large snake curled into a sine wave, against a background of flames. The word charaka was engraved in capital letters underneath.
Smoke from the men's pipes caressed the ceiling high above them. The man in the center of the three made a barely perceptible motion with his right hand, on which he wore a large and unusual silver ring. He was in his late fifties, elegant, gaunt in the face, and wiry in build, with dark eyes, black eyebrows below his silver hair, and the hands of a pianist.
In response to his sign, the butler put a spark to the hearth, causing a thick set of papers therein to catch and burn. The fireplace glowed and crackled with dancing orange flames. 'Be sure to preserve the ashes,' said the master to his servant.
