“I feel so sure of it that I sent a policeman, Jim Kennedy, to arrest him.”
“As convincing as that, is it?”
“That’s what, Nick, and there’s no telling what a man might do who has done a job of this kind. I thought I’d better get him without delay.”
Nick glanced around the room, noting a few drops of blood on the thick Wilton carpet, a scattered trail leading through a broad, curtained doorway into an adjoining room. One curtain of the portière was partly torn from its pins and was hanging awry from its walnut rod.
“Step in there and have a look,” said Phelan. “Nothing can be done for the woman, so I’ve not called a physician. She was dead and gone long ago.”
Nick drew aside the portière and entered the adjoining room. It evidently had been used for a living room, or a[Pg 6] library. In the middle of it stood a table covered with newspapers, books, and magazines.
A desk between two windows overlooking the side street, the roller shades of which still were drawn down, had been broken open and some of its contents were scattered over the floor.
Against the wall of an adjoining bedroom, accessible from a passageway leading to a dining room and kitchen, stood a sofa, on which were several handsome silk pillows. Two of them were bespattered with blood.
On the floor near one end of the sofa lay the lifeless form of the woman. She was clad in a handsome evening dress. Her bare neck and shoulders were covered with blood. Her luxuriant auburn hair was in disorder, matted with blood that had flowed from several gashes in the scalp. The skull had been beaten in with a heavy bludgeon of some kind.
She was lying on her left side, with her head nearly touching the baseboard of the wall, from which her right hand appeared to have fallen after a desperate effort to reach it, or to continue doing so.