were killed almost as soon as they got in the room. Those whisky glasses you found were dry and clean. Whoever turned the trick must have been waiting for them. I wonder about this fellow Ingraham.”
“I’m wondering, too,” I said. “Figuring it out from the positions I found them in when I opened the closet door, Ingraham sizes up as the key to the whole thing. Develyn was back against the wall, with Ansley in front of him, both facing the door. Ingraham was facing them, with his back to the door. The clothespress was just large enough for them to be packed in it—too small for any of them to slip down while the door was closed.
“Then there was no blood in the room except what had come from the clothespress. Ingraham, with that gaping slit in his back, couldn’t have been stabbed until he was inside the closet, or he’d have bled elsewhere. He was standing close to the other men when he was knifed, and whoever knifed him closed the door quickly afterward.
“Now, why should he have been standing in such a position? Do you dope it out that he and another killed the two friends, and that while he was stowing their bodies in the closet his accomplice finished him off?”
“Maybe,” Dean said.
And that “maybe” was still as far as we had gone three days later.
We had sent and received bales of telegrams, having relatives and acquaintances of the dead men interviewed; and we had found nothing that seemed to have any bearing upon their deaths. Nor had we found the slightest connecting link between Ingraham and the other two. We had traced those other two back step by step almost to their cradles. We had accounted for every minute of their time since Ingraham had arrived in San Francisco—thoroughly enough to convince us that neither of them had met Ingraham.