It was only when she approached the door of Number 658, and saw once more the brown trunk at the end of the hall, that Clo remembered the odd side-issue of her adventure. She hesitated between the need for haste and the wish to solve the mystery that troubled her. But it would take only a minute to run to the trunk, to sit on it again, and see what happened! Meanwhile, any one who went in, or came out from, Number 658, must do so under her eyes.
Curiosity conquered. Clo tip-toed to the trunk, sat heavily down on the rounded top, as she had done before, and nothing happened. There was no sign of movement within; and Clo wondered if, after all, the thing that had jumped under the lid had been created by her own jumping nerves. Suddenly the impulse came upon her to try and open it. She seized the corner of the rounded lid, but it remained immovable. She picked at the metal hasp which covered the cheap lock. It did not yield, but her fingers—or she fancied it—touched moisture. The girl shrank back and looked at her hand. Thumb and forefinger were smeared with blood.
The girl felt sick, and might have fainted comfortably. "Pooh!" she scolded herself. "You've cut your finger. Serve you right for not minding your own business. Go to it now, and no nonsense, if you please!"
Goading herself to courage she marched to the door of 658 and knocked. No answer came, and the girl's heart sank. It seemed too bad to be true that Peterson should have escaped during the few minutes spent in putting Angel into a taxi. Besides, she had scarcely gone beyond eye-shot of the hotel entrance.
"Perhaps he's asleep," thought Clo. She turned the handle, and to her surprise the door yielded. She had expected to find it locked. As before, the room was unlit save by golden reflections from the street below. The girl opened the door wide, and deliberately looked in. Strange; there sat the man in his easy chair in front of the window, with his mean profile outlined against the light, just as he had sat when Beverley had answered the summons to "Come in!" One would say, to look at him, that he had not moved an inch.
Clo's theory had gone wrong. She had urged her conviction upon Angel that he was the thief; that, if he were the thief, he would "make his get-away" in haste. Yet here he sat, in the dark, asleep.
She stepped across the threshold, felt along the wall for an electric switch, found it, and flooded the room with light. Still the figure in the chair did not stir.
Clo glanced round the squalid room. Peterson had begun to pack. A suitcase lay open on the narrow bed. The wrinkled gray-white counterpane was half covered with scattered clothing.
"If he's fast enough asleep, I can go through everything," she thought, "including his pockets!"
The girl walked in, and closed the door resolutely but softly, her eyes always upon the figure in the chair. She mustn't begin to search the place without making sure that Peterson was not playing "possum." It would be awful, when her back was turned, to have him pounce upon her like a monkey. She tip-toed across the room, and stopped in front of the easy-chair, within a yard of the stretched-out feet, where she could take a good look at the sleeper. His head was bent down over his breast, and the girl had to stoop a little to peer into the face. But a glance sent her reeling back against a chest of drawers. The top of the man's head had been crushed in by some blunt instrument. His forehead and the side of his face turned toward the window were covered with blood. His shirt and coat were soaked with it, in a long red stripe, and a dark pool had formed in a vague heart-shape on the patterned carpet.