“Hansen,” Lieutenant Valcour said, “I want you to search the backyard for a revolver that may have been thrown there from the balcony. If you can’t find it, search the two adjoining backyards, and the three in the rear as well. Don’t wake up the people in the other houses, just get a stepladder and cross the party walls.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Report to me as soon as you’ve finished, or find anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lieutenant Valcour closed the door again. The revolver would clinch the case: Mrs. Endicott the principal, and Hollander the accomplice. What a sweet bunch of muck it would be, too. There were all sorts of sob angles: Hollander and Endicott as Damon and Pythias, brothers in arms during the war who were transformed through the vicious caprice of a siren into Cain and Abel. Or would Mrs. Endicott spatter the tabloids as a woman wronged who had by a reversal of the usual position of the sexes taken her just revenge beneath the legendary cloak of the unwritten law? If her lawyers were smart, she would. And they would be smart, too. She’d probably have the most impressive battery of legal guns that were procurable in the state lined up on her side.
It wasn’t the gun only that Lieutenant Valcour wanted. There was something else. Endicott’s hat: that was it. How did the person who had been caught in the cupboard fit in with Endicott’s hat? The answer came to him with the sudden clearness that will enlighten a problem that the subconscious mind has been working on for some time. The hat was the final touch to the person’s disguise. And the fact would presuppose a woman. A man’s hat would add immeasurably to any disguise adopted by a woman.
But which woman?
And why had his hat been in the cupboard?
And still there was no answer to the baffling question as to what had been the object of the search through Endicott’s pockets and his papers. There was, of course, a perfectly plain and logically possible solution: the object or paper, whatever it was, had been found and had been carried off by the thief along with Endicott’s hat and the top button from his overcoat. And if such were the case, just what that object or paper was might never be known.
For the fourth time since he had been sitting at the desk Lieutenant Valcour sniffed the air. There was a faint trace of scent—a curiously reminiscent odour—all but intangible, but which he was quite certain he had encountered in some different locality at some time during the night. It was only apparent when he sat at the desk, and the deduction was reached without too much mental labour that it must, hence, emanate from something connected with the desk. Perhaps that aperture from which he had pulled the drawer—
The telephone rang sharply. He drew the instrument to him across the top of the desk, and took the receiver from the hook.
The call came, he was informed, from Central Office.
XXV
5:01 a.m.—Lunatic Vistas
The report from Central Office which Lieutenant Valcour received over the telephone contained one definitely useful piece of information: the person who had used the comb and brushes belonging to Endicott had been a blonde and was either a man or a woman with bobbed hair.
And Mrs. Endicott, Lieutenant Valcour reflected as he hung up the receiver, had blonde shingled hair. And so, except for the shingling, did Hollander.
Roberts, on the other hand, had not.
And where, he wanted to know, was his inspiring confidence in the innocence of Mrs. Endicott now? Precisely where it had been before. His mind began to gibber. What was that curious scent, that trace of an aroma? What about Hollander’s roommate: the young Southerner who preyed upon wealthy women in night clubs? Had Endicott evidence that Hollander was mixed up in similar jobs, and had Hollander come to steal it, or silence Endicott? Rats! And what were Marge Myles’s address and telephone number doing in Mrs. Endicott’s personal directory? And why had Mrs. Endicott been such a stupid liar as to say she had seen no one on the balcony at the time when the shots were fired, when the only apparent place from which the shot that had killed Endicott could have been fired was the balcony? … A knock-knock.
“Come in,” he said.
Cassidy opened the door.
“There’s an old dame downstairs, Lieutenant, who insisted on coming in. She wants to see you.”
“Did she say who she was, Cassidy?”
“She did. And you can believe it or not, sir, but her name is Molasses.”
Lieutenant Valcour made a desperate clutch at his scattering reason.
“By all means, Cassidy,” he said, “show Mrs. Molasses right up.”
Madame Velasquez, in the penetrating light of early morning, was beyond words. The intervening hours since Lieutenant Valcour had left her, wigless and talking to herself in her stepdaughter’s apartment, had unquestionably been ones of worry. As she came into the room Lieutenant Valcour motioned to Cassidy to wait outside and close the corridor door.
Over her black sequinned dress she had thrown an evening cape of blue satin edged with marabou, and on her wig rested a picture hat trimmed with plumes. Her eyes ignored the details of Endicott’s room, of Endicott’s body stretched beneath the sheet; ignored everything but Lieutenant Valcour, the man whom she had come to see.
“Marge is dead,” she said.
Her voice still retained the curious qualities that made it suggest a scream.
Lieutenant Valcour wearily closed his eyes. One other murder would truly prove to be the straw with himself in the role of the already overladen camel.
“Sit down, Madame Velasquez,” he said, “and tell
