“Miss Harlan, who cleaned this room?”
She had reached the door, but turned to answer him.
“Why, Jimmy—the man who works around the grounds. He swept every morning before we came to work.”
“Did he clean the room the day of the murder?”
“Yes, he was here when I came; had just finished.” She paused, waiting for another question, but instead Bartley said “Good night,” and she went outside. When she had gone, he turned to the chief and myself.
“I picked this up on the floor,” he said, holding some object in his hand. We came closer to see what it was. As we looked we saw a small bone hairpin, which we gazed at without speaking. As he placed it in his pocket, he said:
“It may not mean a single thing. The secretary has her hair bobbed, so, of course, she does not use hairpins. But if the man cleaned up the place the morning of the murder he must have overlooked this.”
No one made any reply, and the chief stood looking rather moodily at the desk. Then he asked:
“What do you think about that letter?”
Instead of replying, Bartley walked over to the typewriting stand. The typewriter was covered, but he took the cover off. Finding a piece of blank paper, he placed it in the machine and struck several of the keys, then wrote a sentence. He turned to ask that the chief let him see the letter, and then evidently copied something from it. Pulling from the machine the sheet upon which he had written, he compared the two for a moment. Then he said.