Mrs. Endicott thought for a moment of simply dialling the operator and saying, “I want a policeman.” It was what the printed notices in the telephone directory urged one to do in case of an emergency....

Lieutenant Valcour felt that the utter stillness of the room would overwhelm him. He⁠—Mrs. Endicott⁠—everything seemed to be taking its cue from death. He reached past Mrs. Endicott and touched the bo...

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 a...

Lieutenant Valcour wondered concerning Mrs. Endicott as he walked slowly across the corridor and knocked on the door of her room. A curious, curious woman, with youth and beauty that almost passed bel...

Lieutenant Valcour’s eyes narrowed slightly. He had a habit of dividing suicides into two classes⁠—those who talked about killing themselves, and those who did so. He knew that the two rarely overlapp...

Lieutenant Valcour stared for a puzzled instant at the white face. “What do you mean, Cassidy?” he said. “Honest to God, Lieutenant, I mean just what I say.” “But that’s impossible.” Cassidy went even...

The corridor was deserted. Lieutenant Valcour walked along it to the top of the stair well and looked down into the entrance hall. He could see the broad athletic back of Officer O’Brian on guard at t...

The tangents and the bypaths were beginning to increase. Lieutenant Valcour tabulated them as he went thoughtfully down the stairs and along the corridor toward Endicott’s room: Mrs. Endicott herself,...

Roberts went indifferently to the chair that Jane had been using and sat down. Lieutenant Valcour drew another up beside her. He began with the usual distant skirmishing before launching the main body...

Lieutenant Valcour went to the head of the stairs. “O’Brian!” he called down. O’Brian looked up at him from below. “Yes, Lieutenant?” “Send Hansen up here, please.” “Yes, sir.” A painting on the wall ...

Lieutenant Valcour refreshed his memory from the leather reference book and then dialled the number. “Mr. Thomas Hollander?” he said, when a man’s voice answered him. It was a smooth, soft voice, and ...

The taxi ran north along Fifth Avenue for a few blocks and then bore left into the leafless, frosty stretches of Central Park. It was deserted of pedestrians. Occasional yellow lights showed the vacan...

Nurse Murrow didn’t slumber, exactly; it was much too slender a lapse from consciousness for that. But it was not until the second gentle rapping that she stood up. Someone was rapping on the hall doo...

It was just after two o’clock when Lieutenant Valcour stepped to the pavement and paid his fare to the driver. The cab snorted away and left silence hanging heavy on the street. The bachelor apartment...

Miss Murrow began to feel fidgety. Even after the many, many years she had spent in nursing she had never accustomed herself to spending a night quite comfortably in a chair. She had always had her at...

O’Brian stirred a bit restlessly in his chair by the hall door and yawned; then he looked at his watch. It was almost a quarter past two. He began to enumerate the various things he would give for a g...

The pounding on the door became hysterical, and Cassidy, who for two cents would have become hysterical himself, went over and unlocked it. He found Dr. Worth, backed by scandalously excited servants ...

Dr. Worth, too, was staring at the black, impenetrable rectangle left by the opened window. It was a passageway for air, but infinitely more so was it a passageway leading to obscure recesses of the n...

“Doctor,” Lieutenant Valcour said, “our immediate concern is to find out who fired that shot. The principal reason is quite academic: we want to catch and arrest the person who did it. A secondary rea...

“You wanted to see me, Lieutenant?” She had been under a strain, and a rather terrible one. There wasn’t any doubt about that. It was emotion, after all, that brought age, not years, thought Lieutenan...

Lieutenant Valcour felt a distinct shock, and his eyes became predatorily alert. If this astonishing thing was true and Mrs. Endicott had not taken the narcotic prepared for her by Dr. Worth, then the...

Lieutenant Valcour picked the slipper up and sighed. It was a distressingly leading and decisive clue, but it did not lead in a direction he cared to follow, nor did it decide things as he thought the...

“You needn’t say anything you don’t care to, Mrs. Endicott.” “I’m glad you didn’t use the stereotyped formula, Lieutenant. It would have disappointed me if you had. Get me a cigarette, please; there a...

“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 r...

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 Endi...

Mrs. Siddons had not gone to bed at all. She remained the same amazing pencil done in flat planes of black that had left him standing with his ear pressed against the panels of her bedroom door. Lieut...

Lieutenant Valcour stepped across the corridor and rapped on the door of Mrs. Endicott’s room. There was no response. He rapped again, and still there was no response. He turned the knob and the door ...

Lieutenant Valcour was out of the door in no time and racing along the corridor up the stairs to the floor above. Somewhere⁠—somewhere was the entrance to the stairs leading farther up to the attic. A...

Mrs. Endicott stared sharply at Lieutenant Valcour. She was suddenly tensely alert. “I think,” she said, “that you have gone mad.” “Do you still maintain the pretence that when you were on the sill of...

Lieutenant Valcour was once more in his shoes. Even in their laceless condition they restored his confidence in the relative fitness of things. Mrs. Endicott preceded him down two flights of stairs an...

Mrs. Hollander thought for a moment of simply dialling the operator and saying, “I want a policeman.” It was what the printed notices in the telephone directory urged one to do in case of an emergency...