“Not much. Hocksley’s a big, powerful man who walks with a decided limp. He’s very eccentric, and apparently interested primarily in being left absolutely alone.”
“That makes two of them,” Mason said.
“What?”
“Tenants in the same building who didn’t want to have anything to do with neighbors.”
“I gather it was a different situation with Hocksley, from what it was with Karr. Karr is a neurotic old crab. Hocksley was engaged in doing something he wanted kept an absolute secret. Hocksley worked at night, and slept during the daytime. The people who sold him the safe, the agent who rented him the house, the company that sold him his automobile all remember him more or less vaguely. But by putting the descriptions together, we have a pretty good picture of the man, about forty-eight or fifty with very broad shoulders and flaming red hair. His limp was quite noticeable — not the sort of limp you’d get from a stiffness in a leg, but the kind where one leg is shorter than the other.”
Mason asked, “Any connection between Hocksley or his housekeeper and anyone over in the Gentrie house?”
“No. The connection there is between Opal Sunley and Arthur Gentrie, Jr. That’s also something.”
“What?”
“Arthur Gentrie, the boy’s father, had been painting that night down in the cellar. I believe you’re the one who first noticed that someone who evidently didn’t know about that fresh paint had been groping for the garage door and had smeared paint on his fingertips. After you pointed this out to Tragg, he had the police look the automobiles over pretty carefully to see if they couldn’t find some trace of paint on the handles of the doors or on the steering wheels. They couldn’t find a thing, but over in Hocksley’s flat they found two fingerprints outlined in paint of exactly the same color as that used on the garage door.”
“Where were those paint fingerprints?” Mason asked.