The two branches would then compare notes, and if a satisfactory amount of evidence had been obtained by the technical department to establish a case against one or several of the suspects, arrests would be made or the suspects brought in for questioning. According to the temperament and station of the suspects, one of the various forms that go to make up the properly dreaded third degree would be employed and a confession obtained. The work of the Central Office would then be finished, and the case up to the prosecutor.
Lieutenant Valcour was glad that in the present instance the homicide chief had felt it useless to set in motion the machinery of the second branch until more definite developments should occur. The case interested him. Mrs. Endicott interested him—her astonishing beauty, her mind, her contradictions—Roberts—Marge Myles—three women who offered an assurance of satisfying an almost blatant curiosity he possessed for discovering the source springs of human behaviour. This talk about reviving Endicott and Endicott himself making a statement—well, perhaps. But until it was accomplished he preferred to think of Endicott as a corpse, the case a definite homicide, and of possible suspects right in the house.
Lieutenant Valcour concentrated his attention upon the cupboard. There were shelves along the back of it, the lowest one being at the height of a man’s head. Numerous suits of clothes were hanging from beneath this lowest shelf. He stood on the chair and played his flashlight along the top of it. There was nothing there but an accumulation of dust. He felt a distinct and highly satisfactory thrill when he noted that streaks showed where the dust had very recently been rubbed away, as if somebody had deliberately wiped both his hands in it. It linked with the dirty cake of soap. Andrews had said nothing about the streaks. It was pretty obvious that the Central Office men had overlooked them—had casually observed that the shelves were empty and had let the matter go at that.
Lieutenant Valcour began to feel quite pleasant and informed himself gravely that a deduction was in order. For a happy moment he considered the possibility of that curious and sinister Oriental influence that crops up so perennially in the very finest of murder cases—of Cassidy’s murder cases: that elusive figure swathed in gray, whitely turbanned above coffee-coloured skin, who has a penchant toward religious fanaticism the esoteric rites of which involve dust. This breath-shocking villain would ultimately be trapped by the bright detective through the wretch’s occult passion for this dust. Had one, Lieutenant Valcour wanted to know, such an enigma to deal with here? No, he informed himself sternly, one knew damned well one had not. But in the place of such a handy and beautiful deduction—what?
He stared at the dust and began to see pictures in it: a crouching person tormented by hate or fear, or both, who knows that Endicott is going to open the cupboard door. What, in the name of the lighter humorists, to do? The person dreads recognition. Is there no disguise? No, curse it—but yes—the dust! The person’s hands are smeared, and by means of the hands, the face …
“Ain’t there nothing I can do for you, Lieutenant?”
Lieutenant Valcour sighed and got down from the chair.
“Yes, Cassidy,” he said. “You can take this chair and put it over by the hall door. Then you can sit down.”
“Very well, Lieutenant,” said Cassidy bitterly. “But when you’re in that cupboard there ain’t nobody in the room with me but that live corpse.”
“Then sit where you can’t see it.”
“Cripes, Lieutenant, I don’t have to see it. I get the chills just thinking about it.”
“You’ll get the gate, Cassidy, if you don’t snap out of it.”
“All right, sir, but if you come out and find me keeled over, don’t blame me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Cassidy.”
Lieutenant Valcour reentered the cupboard. He examined the corner in which Endicott had been slumped. The suits on the hangers had fallen back a little into shape. He carefully went through their various pockets. They were empty, and from the rumpled condition of their linings he knew that they had been hastily gone through before. Perhaps the Central Office men had done so, but he doubted it. They would concern themselves pretty exclusively with the effects taken from the clothes Endicott had been wearing at the time of the attack.
It interested him to note that the suits against which Endicott’s body had been slumped showed evidence of having been searched with the rest. It confirmed his theory that that was what the attacker had been doing when caught in the cupboard by Endicott’s sudden appearance in the bedroom, and it also strengthened his theory of the ingenious use of dust from the shelf top as a disguise.
Shoes lined a low shelf along the bottom of one side, and hat boxes occupied a corresponding shelf on the other. Lieutenant Valcour dismissed the possibility that the particular hat he was searching for—the one that Endicott was wearing or intended to get at the moment of the attack—would be in a box. Perhaps it was in the cupboard Mrs. Endicott spoke about downstairs in the entrance hall. The point kept nagging at him irritatingly, and he considered it important enough to go down and find out.
Cassidy barely restrained himself from clutching Lieutenant Valcour’s arm by the hall door.
“Honest to God, you ain’t going to leave me in here alone, Lieutenant?”
“Honest to God, Cassidy, I am.”
Lieutenant Valcour went out. Cassidy took one bleak look at his charge, the living corpse, carefully crossed the fingers of both his hands, and sat down.
“I just knew,” he muttered truculently, “that this case was going to be one of them printed damn things.”
