“Well,” Lieutenant Valcour said, as he joined Dr. Worth in Endicott’s room, “what do you think now?”

Dr. Worth was finished with bewilderments. In spite of the camel’s-hair robe swathing him, he had recaptured to an impressive extent his air of dignity.

“Lieutenant,” he said, “I think that my services are no longer required in this house. With your permission, I shall dismiss the two nurses and go home.”

“Why, certainly, Doctor, if you wish. The prosecuting attorney will probably require your testimony to secure an indictment and will want you later on at the trial, but I’m sure he will bother you just as little as possible. We realize how annoying any court work is to a doctor.”

“I shall be glad to testify whenever required.”

“Will you also let me know where to keep in touch with the two nurses? Their testimony will be needed, too.”

Dr. Worth stated the name and address of the Nurses’ Home at which Miss Vickers and Miss Murrow could always be reached, and Lieutenant Valcour wrote them down in his notebook.

“Would it bother you very much, Lieutenant, to let Mrs. Endicott know that I have gone, when you see her?”

“Not at all, Doctor.”

“I doubt whether she will require my services again.” He paused for a moment at the doorway. “That woman, sir, is of iron.”

“I shouldn’t wonder, Doctor. At any rate, she is pretty thoroughly encased in metal. I’ll send Cassidy along with you to pass you and the nurses by O’Brian down at the door. No one can leave the house, you see, without permission.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Doctor, and thanks for all your assistance. Cassidy, come back after you’ve seen the doctor out, and stay in the corridor. I’ll call when I need you.”

“Yes, sir.”

The door closed, and Lieutenant Valcour was alone. With a persistence that was becoming annoying, the same curious feeling of lurking danger crept out at him from the room’s stillnesses. His nerves were usually as steady as the quality reputed to be enjoyed by a rock, and the strange little jumpings they were going in for were getting that fabulous animal known as his goat.

He went over to the chair before the flat-topped desk and sat down. There was that drawer filled with disordered papers to be gone through. He removed the drawer and emptied it of its contents by the simple expedient of turning it upside down onto the top of the desk.

There were, mixed up among bills and receipts, a surprising number of letters from women. He read each one of them carefully and felt a little sorrier, at the conclusion of each, for the future of the race⁠—not so much because of any danger to its morals as to its mentality.

He made a little group of each batch of notes from the same woman. One pile topped the list with the number of ten. These were signed “Bebe” and were addressed with deplorable monotony to “My cave man.” Endicott must have been rather an ass, he decided, as well as a pretty low sort of an animal. It was all very well for Roberts to rave on about soldiers, and simple hearts, and war, and things. That’s just what it amounted to: raving. What if Endicott and, presumably, her brother had had simple hearts. So had guinea pigs.

Lieutenant Valcour wondered whether everyone else connected with the case was quite sane and he just a little mad. Roberts⁠—Mrs. Endicott⁠—the housekeeper⁠—Hollander⁠—Madame Velasquez. They all seemed a little touched, and that was a sign of madness when one considered everyone else but one’s self insane. But no one was ever truly normal under disagreeable and terrifying circumstances; at least, he had never found anyone who was so.

The letters were meaningless as possible clues to a motive; just a sticky conglomeration of lust, greed, dullness, and execrable taste. He shoved them aside.

He watched the strengthening light of day as it came through the window across the desk before him. Such sky as he saw was of rubbed emerald, and the backs of the houses across the intervening gardens were mauve and dark gray, with lines of lemon yellow running thinly along their roofs.

He thought of Bohême⁠—dawn always made him think of Bohême⁠—and hummed a bar or two of it softly. Then he thought of Mrs. Endicott, and his thoughts were pastelled in the colours of the dawn: a woman of halftones and overlapping lacquer shades.

It became quite clear in his mind that she never would have killed her husband. Or Hollander. That, in fact, she never would have killed anybody at all. The belief became fixed, even in face of the sizeable amount of evidence against her.

He reviewed her case, in digest, as the prosecuting attorney might present it to a jury: from the very start there was that contrary fact of her having telephoned for the police. Why? On the slender ground of a pencilled note that might or might not have been a threat, and an instinctive premonition that her husband was in danger. The prosecution would thereupon interpolate a smart crack or two on the general subject of premonitions, fortune tellings, and the Ace of Spades. They would point out that people who committed crimes which were bound to be shortly discovered occasionally got in touch with the police in order to use the gesture as a premise of their innocence.

There were her definite admissions of intent to kill her husband⁠—her having left her bedroom immediately upon his having knocked and said goodbye⁠—and her recent most damaging actions in regard to the narcotic and having been on the balcony.

Motive?

The prosecuting attorney could offer a thousand. The most prominent ones would include a jealous rage at her husband’s easily proved peccadillos with other women and her own rather significant attitude toward Hollander. Yes, it would be only too possible for the prosecuting attorney to get a conviction against Mrs. Endicott, and to rope Hollander in as an accomplice. He’d want the weapon, though, to make the case complete. Lieutenant Valcour had forgotten about the weapon. He stood up, went to the door, and opened it. Hansen was standing outside, having taken his post there until Cassidy should come back from letting out Dr. Worth and the nurses.

“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.