The people who lived at No. — 120th Street were a most respectable family, and a large one. They deprecated the publicity which the number of their house in the story of the murdered girl had thrust upon them. Inquiry into the character of this family satisfied me on one point, that the monk had given that address simply because it was a distant one, whether he had written it at random or had known the people residing at the number.
I went to all the transatlantic steamers which were in port and got their passenger-lists of the voyage over. In one that had arrived three days before I found a name which I will call in this story Count Hermann Stolzberger of Vienna. He was the only German count who had come over in any of them.
I made a tour of the swell hotels in the city and examined their registers. In one on Fifth Avenue I found the entry, "Hermann Stolzberger and servant." He had arrived three days before.
I engaged a room at the hotel. I wished to be in the neighborhood. I had first inquired if Count Stolzberger had left town, and the clerk had told me no. Where was he to go? The clerk had heard him say to a friend that he expected to be in New York ten days or so. Was he in now? No. He had gone out with friends and would not be back for dinner.
That evening I lounged around the office, sitting in the long corridor into which the door from the street opened. I waited until twelve. No Count! I prolonged my guard for an hour more, and he had not appeared. I wished above all to get a look at Count Hermann Stolzberger. He might, it was true, have gone in at the ladies' entrance, or he might remain out all night. On the other hand, he possibly had delayed with friends and would yet return. I waited.
My patience was rewarded. At half-past one a cab rolled up to the door, and a young man in a large overcoat, somewhat foreign in its mode, sprang out and walked with a quick, nervous tread into the corridor. He walked rapidly by, but my eye had taken him in from the moment he opened the door. My memory of faces is excellent. I recognized the blond fairness of the Count at once, though there was not much color in his cheeks, and his face looked worn and thin. Count Hermann Stolzberger was the young German who had entered the French Ball and turned pale at the sight of the Columbine!
I have said that this case almost seemed to unroll itself for me; but there were two or three connections to be made to constitute proof, and not leave me with a distinct suspicion only.
I visited the morgue daily in hope of some clue, but none came. No one identified the body, and after the allotted length of time it went to the dissecting-table. There were hundreds of visitors to see it, and a great deal of sympathy was expressed; but that was all. Nobody claimed it or seemed to have known the poor girl.
A costumer had claimed the Franciscan's robe. I fancy he did this more through curiosity to find if it were the one he had let than on account of the value of it, for it must have been very cheap. I got the address of this man and called on him. I asked him if he remembered the man who had hired it. He said he did. It was a smooth-faced, dark-complexioned man of about forty. He remembered, because he had made some joke with him about his being clean shaven enough for a monk.
The man had given no address, and he did not know who he was. This was a slight hitch in the proceedings. I was convinced that the murderer in the garb of the Franciscan friar was not the man who had engaged it of the costumer, but the German. He was of much the same size and build as the original monk, and so he had assumed the loose brown habit without exciting my attention. But the fact of the German's turning so pale and calling the monk out from the dance had made me feel that he was the one who had strangled the gay Columbine in the carriage that night.