“It’s exactly the same,” Zizi murmured, “for I brought Mr. Brice’s with me: here it is.”
Calmly the girl took from her little hand-bag a piece torn from my desk-blotter. It held the drawing done by Rivers while he was waiting for his telephone call and it was the precise duplicate of the figure drawn on the blotter of Amos Gately’s mahogany desk.
“The same pencil—or, rather, the same hand drew those two,” Wise said, positively, and I could not contradict this.
Snow crystals are said by scientists to show hundreds of different shapes, and almost any illustrated dictionary or text-book of natural science shows several specimens. This one we were looking at was of simple but beautiful design and I felt sure Rivers had copied it from some picture as one can rarely keep a real snowflake long enough to copy its form.
Anyway it was stretching the law of coincidence a little too far to believe that two men would idly draw the same form on a desk-blotter while telephoning.
Of course, this sketch on Amos Gately’s desk need not have been made while the artist’s other hand held the telephone receiver, but its juxtaposition to the instrument indicated that it was.
“Of course, Mr. Rivers drew this,” Zizi declared, her little head bobbing as she turned her black eyes from one of us to the other.
She wore a small turban made entirely of red feathers,—soft breast feathers of some tropical bird, I suppose. The hat set jauntily on her sleek black hair, and the motions of her head were so quick and birdlike, that she gave me a fleeting remembrance of the human birds I saw in the play of Chantecler.
“Of course he did,” assented Wise, very gravely; “and now we must go on. Granting, for the moment, that Case Rivers,—as we call him,—drew this little sketch, he must have been in this office the day of Amos Gately’s murder. For I’ve been told that the blotter on this desk was changed every day, and any marks or blots now on it were therefore made on that day. If he did it, then,—or, rather, when he did it, he was telephoning to somebody——”
“Well,” put in Zizi, “perhaps he was just sitting here, talking to Mr. Gately. Maybe, he might draw those things when he just sits idly as well as when he telephones.”