“Do you want to look around downstairs?” The Captain asked Stan.
“There’s not much use looking around any place—after you fellows get through with it.” Stan grinned. “I just want to get an idea of the layout on the second floor.” He turned to Toby, who was waiting expectantly in the archway. “Do you mind?”
“What difference does it make, if I do? Come on up. You won’t disturb anybody. The bathrooms are up there and you can take a look under the tubs. Maybe there’s another body.”
The stairs to the second floor were to the right of the front door. They went up straight, half-way, then turned abruptly about-face on a small landing. The upper half was completely walled in, invisible from the lower halt, so that anyone descending could not be seen from the ground floor until they had made the turn on the landing.
Toby, leading the way, stopped on the landing and stepped to one side. Juan Andres, the steward, was coming down, carrying a metal wastebasket, partly filled.
“Just a minute.” LeRoy barred the way. “What’s in that basket? I said nothing was to be touched in here until I gave permission.”
Juan’s dark handsome face remained passive, but he darted a quick frightened look at Toby, and asked a question in Spanish. The proprietor spoke for him.
“I told him to empty the ashtrays, and throw away the old scores. Your men have been over everything.”
Stan glanced in the basket. “Let it go, Vince. There’s nothing there I want to mess with.”
The Captain shrugged, resignedly. He had known Stan Rice for years; watched him work as Investigator for the State’s Attorney; seen him plow doggedly through the tiresome details of private cases. He had never learned what Stan was going to do, nor exactly what Stan wanted to see. Sometimes the lanky, yellow-haired six-footer was frantic because some trivial thing had been thrown away. When the Captain took pains to preserve everything, the chances were Stan wanted to see none of it.
Stan’s method had irritated the Captain more than once. Vincent LeRoy had reached his position in charge of the Homicide Squad by hard work, unfailing integrity, and a flair for observing every detail of every case. He was a brainy officer in a well organized police department which had to cope with more than its share of organized crime. Inconsistency made him uncomfortable, and Miles Standish Rice, at work, was capricious as a ballet dancer with corns.
Stan felt immediately that LeRoy was disgruntled about allowing the contents of the wastebasket to pass unchallenged.
“I told you, Vince, I just wanted to look around to get a clear picture of the set-up here,” he explained, soothingly, as they continued up the stairs. “If your department has been over things, I’m certainly not going to waste my time going over them again. Fawcett’s the best fingerprint man I know—and Earle Ralphs can take pictures of a dead man’s insides. When I reach the stage of having to carry a camera, a tin of dusting powder, and a lens—I’ll start advertising: ‘M. S. Rice, Private De-tec-ka-tive.’”
The stair-well opened into an “L” shaped hall on the second floor. To the right of the stairs, at the bottom of the “L,” were two large closets. The one nearer to the stairs had been converted into a cloak room by fitting it with a divided door, which formed a counter when the bottom half was closed. The other closet was used for storage of cleaning equipment and odds and ends. At the end of the hall a door led into the well equipped kitchen, where Juan prepared tasty Cuban dishes for occasional parties who wished to dine at the club.
Stan passed by the closets, and lingered only long enough in the kitchen to glance in the big electric ice box. It was well stocked, and served to remind him that Doris Buchanan was busy with a prime roast of beef on the banks of Indian Creek. It was, indeed, a serious affair when Miles Standish Rice missed a meal. A Sunday dinner would have been close to cataclysmic. He was seized with a sudden burst of energy which LeRoy falsely attributed to excitement instead of hunger.
The bridge room occupied him less than five minutes. He went in the door opposite the cloak closet, glanced without interest at the four tables, and stepped onto the porch. From where he stood he could see part of Pomona Road through the trees. The porch was entirely screened. It continued on around in back of the house, encompassing the bridge room on two sides. Heavy matting of woven grass covered the floor.
The furnishings were simple—a settee-swing, two wicker chairs, a wicker table supporting a lamp. Stan stepped around the corner. There was another settee-swing there, its back slightly above the sill of a window to the bridge room. There was another window, by the door to the porch, but the other settee-swing faced it. Toby had sat there the night before watching Edward Fowler.
In the card room the Captain was questioning Toby about the seating arrangements the night before. Stan sculled vigorously at the grass matting with the toe of his black and white sports shoe. He bent over and studied the result. Some of the stiff fibre strands were loose. He pulled out a few, vainly searched the pockets of his white coat for an envelope, and finally dropped them into his left hand coat pocket.
As Stan came back into the card room, LeRoy pointed to the table at the right of the porch door. “That’s where Fowler sat last night, Stan. His back was to the rest of the room most of the time.”
Stan hardly heard him. There were three doors to the card room; one across the hall from the cloak closet, by which they had entered; a
