So, after a few unsatisfactory sallies into the realm of Things To Be Remembered, he gave up and leaned back to enjoy the ride through the streets of Brooklyn. He filed away the incident under unfinished business and completely relaxed. He gave no thought to his coming encounter with Gamaliel Foley, of which name there was only one in all New York's directories, for he had no referent. Foley, so far as he was concerned, might as well be Adam, or Zoroaster — he had met neither.
When the cab driver stopped at the address the Saint had given, Simon got out and walked back two blocks to the address he wanted. This was an apartment house of fairly respectable mien, a blocky building rising angularly into some hundred feet of midnight air. Its face was pocked with windows lighted at intervals, and its whole demeanor was one of middle-class stolidity.
He searched the name plates beside the door, found Foley on the eighth floor. The Saint sighed again. This was his night for climbing stairs. He rang a bell at random on the eleventh floor, and when the door buzzed, slipped inside. He went up the carpeted stairway, ticking off what the residents had had for dinner as he went. First floor, lamb, fish, and something that might have been beef stew; second floor, cabbage; third floor, ham flavored with odors of second floor's cabbage; and so on.
He noted a strip of light at the bottom of Foley's door. He wouldn't be getting the man out of bed, then. Just what he would say, Simon had no idea. He always left such considerations to the inspiration of the moment. He put knuckles to the door.
There was no sound of a man getting out of a chair to grump to the door in answer to a late summons. There was no sound at all. The Saint knocked again. Still no sound. He tried the door. It opened on to a living room modestly furnished with medium-priced overstuffed pieces.
"Hullo," Simon called softly. "Foley?"
He stepped inside, closed the door. No one was in the living room. On the far side was a door leading into a kitchen, the other no doubt led into the bedroom. He turned the kitchen light on, looked about, switched off the light and knocked on the bedroom door. He opened it, flicked the light switch.
There was someone here, all right — or had been. What was here now was not a person, it was a corpse. It sprawled on the rug, face down, and blood had seeped from the back to the dark green carpet. It was — had been — a man.
Without disturbing the body any more than necessary, Simon gathered certain data. He had been young, somewhere in his thirties; he was a white-collar worker, neat, clean; he bore identification cards which named him Gamaliel Bradford Foley, member of the Seamen's Union.
The body bore no information which would link this man with Dr. Ernst Zellermann. Nor did the apartment, for that matter. The Saint searched it expertly, so that it seemed as if nothing had been disturbed, yet every possible hiding place had been thoroughly explored. Foley, it seemed, was about to become engaged to a Miss Martha Lane, Simon gathered from a letter which he shamelessly read. The comely face which smiled from a picture on Foley's dresser was probably her likeness.