The bathroom could tell him nothing more. He reconstructed its segment of the drama before leaving it: the murderer had entered, gone at once to the window and pulled down its shade. There had been a washing of hands and a brushing and combing of hair. The murderer had wiped the silver clear of finger prints and had left. The whys and wherefors must come later. The shell would remain unchanged until the moment came to pour it full of motive and give it reason and life.
He went into Endicott’s room and opened the cupboard door. The beam from his electric torch, added to the ceiling light, brought out sharply the waxy pallor of the face’s skin. Its good-looking, homely ruggedness was marred by a slight cast of petulance, as inappropriate as a pink bow on a lion. Cruelty showed, too, a little—and something inscrutable that baffled analysis. Endicott weighed, Lieutenant Valcour decided, close upon two hundred pounds and no fat, either; a strong, powerfully muscled man, and about thirty-five years old. He played the light upon Endicott’s right hand and exposed the wrist a little by drawing up the sleeve. The wrist and hand were normally clean, as he had expected.
He gently inserted his fingers into such of Endicott’s pockets as he could reach without disturbing the body. From the rumpled state of their linings and their complete emptiness it was apparent that they had been hastily turned inside out and replaced.
Lieutenant Valcour began to sniff at a motive. Not robbery, exactly, in the ordinary sense, as an expensive platinum wrist watch and a set of black pearl shirt studs were untouched, but robbery in the extraordinary sense—one that had been indulged in for a certain definite purpose. He strongly began to suspect that there would be the ubiquitous “fatal papers.” It might also develop that Endicott was the secretive owner of some fabulous jewel of a sort usually referred to as a Heart of Buddha, or perhaps some important slice of the Russian crown jewels—the number of which now almost equalled, he reflected, the thousands upon thousands of ancestors who came over to our shores on the Mayflower.
The top button was missing from Endicott’s overcoat. It would have been torn away when the murderer had lifted his victim from the floor in order to drag him into the cupboard. Otherwise there wasn’t anything that hinted at a struggle. There wasn’t any blood, or any wound, or sign of contusion visible on the head, and no trace of blood around such parts of the cupboard that Lieutenant Valcour could see.
He suddenly wondered where Endicott’s hat was. It wasn’t on Endicott’s head, nor in the cupboard, nor in the bedroom, which struck him as strange. He was a strong believer in the paraphrase that where the coat is, there the hat lies, too. One could look for it more carefully later. Just at present, of greater importance was Exhibit A.
Lieutenant Valcour went to the desk, picked up the note and studied it. The pencil used had been a thick leaded one, almost a crayon. And there, right before his nose in a shallow tray that held an assortment of office things, was a pencil with a very thick lead that was almost a crayon. He copied the note with it on the back of an envelope he took from his pocket. He compared the result with the printing on the note. They were alike.
One begins, he informed himself gently, to wonder.
III
9:45 p.m.—Guards Are Stationed at the Doors
There are knocks, Lieutenant Valcour believed, and knocks. He ranged them from gentle careless rappings, through sly sinister taps, to imperative demands and, finally, thumps. He classified the ones at the moment being bestowed upon the hall door as official whacks. He was right. He put the scrap of paper and the crayon pencil in his pocket and turned to greet five men from the station house who flooded into the room on the heels of his “Come in.”
They were intelligent-looking young men, well built, alert, and their uniforms were immaculate—five competent blue jays outlined sharply against gray walls. Lieutenant Valcour knew each one of them both by reputation and by name.
He nodded to the starchiest and youngest looking of them. “Cassidy,” he said, “stay in here. O’Brian, stay by the front door, and keep Hansen with you to carry messages. There’s a servants’ entrance at the front, McGinnis. It’s yours. And you, Stump, watch the door from the back of the house into the garden. If anyone wants to leave the house send him to me first. You can let anyone in, with the exception of reporters, and find out their business. Now in regard to the reporters just be your natural genial selves and say that apart from the plain statement that Mr. Herbert Endicott, the owner of this house, is dead and that—” Lieutenant Valcour choked slightly—“foul play is suspected, you can tell them nothing. The police, as usual, are actively on the job, have the case well in hand, and there is every reason to believe that in view of our customary efficiency the guilty parties will soon be brilliantly apprehended etcetera and so forth Amen. Excuse-it-please.”
“Cuckoo,” confided O’Brian to Hansen as, with Stump and McGinnis, they filed out.
“Cuckoo as a fox,” agreed Hansen, who had worked under Lieutenant Valcour on a case
