“Mrs. Endicott will explain things to you,” he said. “Stay with her, please.”
There lingered, as he went into the bathroom, a picture of the two women, separated by the distance of the room, standing quite still and staring at each other: Mrs. Endicott, young, exquisitely lovely looking—the other, older, quite implacable. The connection was absurd, but the effect remained of two antagonists in a strange encounter who are standing in their separate corners of a ring. He closed the bathroom door and slipped the catch. He turned on all the lights.
There was a single window. He parted muslin curtains and looked at a glazed lemon-coloured shade, especially along its hemmed bottom. There were some smudges at its centre that interested him. He believed that they had been made by a dirty thumb. He raised the shade and the lower sash of the window.
The night was clear and cold and windless. A shallow stone balcony ran the width of the rear of the house. It was for ornamentation rather than use, as to get onto it one had to straddle the window sill. Lieutenant Valcour did so, and stood looking down upon the dimly defined outlines of what, in spring, would bloom into a formal garden. He satisfied himself that there seemed no access to the balcony from the ground unless one used a ladder or were endowed with those special and fortunately rare qualities which transform an otherwise normal person into a human fly.
The house was five windows wide; the two on the right of the bathroom belonged to Mrs. Endicott’s room, and the two on its left to her husband’s. He flashed on his electric torch and examined all five sills. None showed a trace of recent passage, and there was no very good reason, he realized, why any of them should. They were clean, windswept, and smooth.
How pleasant it would be, he reflected, to come across the perfect imprint of a shoe, or a rubber, or—what was it that was so popular at the moment?—of course: the footprint of a gorilla. The case would then be what was technically known as an open-and-shut one. He’d simply take the train for California and arrest Lon Chaney, and—But enough.
And the floor itself on the balcony was smugly lacking in clues. He relinquished the keen sharp air, the star-heavy night, and returned to the bathroom by way of its window, which he closed, and again drew down its lemon-coloured shade.
A cake of soap in a container set in the wall above a basin attracted his attention. It was so incredibly dirty. Someone with exceptionally dirty hands had used it and either hadn’t bothered to rinse it off or else hadn’t had the time to. The dirt had dried on it.
He couldn’t vision such a condition of uncleanliness in connection with the hands of either Mr. or Mrs. Endicott, unless there had been some obscure reason. He preferred to think for the moment that the hands had belonged, and presumably still did, to the murderer. That, of course, eliminated the gorilla. What a pity it was, he reflected, that he was so constantly obsessed with infernal absurdities. Even though he tried to keep them under triple lock and key when working with his associates on the force, they had a distressing habit at times of cropping out into the open where they could be seen. Nor were they of a humour especially in vogue among his contemporaries; there rarely was an and-the-drummer-said-to-Mabel or an-Irishman-and-a-Jew among them. Rarely? He shuddered. Never. As a result there were occasions when he rested under the cloud of being considered mildly lunatic. It was bad business. He had told himself so firmly again and again. Success and humour formed bedfellows as agreeable as an absentminded dog would be en négligé in the boudoir of a surprised cat.
With a beautiful access of gravity he lifted the lid of an enamelled wicker hamper and peered in at the soiled linen it contained. There were many towels. Towels were, he reflected, one of the few genuine hallmarks of the rich. The Endicotts, hence, must be very, very rich, as it was obvious that they shed—or was it shedded?—towels as profusely as the petals fall from a white flowering tree.
There was a badly soiled and crumpled towel on the very top of the pile. He picked it up and looked at it. It was very dirty and still faintly damp. He folded it, set it on the floor beneath the basin, and placed the cake of soap upon it. They were, he smiled faintly, Exhibits B and C. The distinction of being classified as Exhibit A was already reserved by the threatening note on the desk. As for the smudges on the lemon-coloured shade, they would have to be definitely determined as finger prints before they could have their niche in the alphabet. The prosecuting attorney would be pleased. He was a man whose flair for alphabeted exhibits amounted to a passion. Lieutenant Valcour hoped that he could find a crushed rose. The prosecuting attorney was at his best with crushed roses. For example, take that knifing case in the Ghetto. Three petals were all the prosecuting attorney had had there, but they had bloomed, via the jury, into tears. Into tears, Lieutenant Valcour amended, and tripe.
A pair of silver-backed brushes showed no finger marks upon their shining surfaces, nor were there any on the silver rim that backed a comb. One could infer, Lieutenant Valcour decided, and did, that someone later than Mr. Endicott had used them, as Mr. Endicott would never have wiped them off to remove his prints, and had he not done so there certainly would have been some signs of usage. What a careful murderer it was, he thought, to polish the evidence so very clean. And what a grip the subject of finger prints maintained upon the criminal mind, and upon
