The Montgomery Hotel’s regular detective had taken his last week’s rake-off from the hotel bootlegger in merchandise instead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and had been fired. I happened to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently.
The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it—until the third and last day.
Then things changed.
I came down into the lobby that afternoon to find Stacey, the assistant manager on duty at the time, hunting for me.
“One of the maids just phoned that there’s something wrong up in 906,” he said.
We went up to that room together. The door was open. In the center of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothespress. From under it, extending perhaps a foot across the floor toward us, was a snake-shaped ribbon of blood.
I stepped past the maid and tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it. Slowly, rigidly, a man pitched out into my arms—pitched out backward—and there was a six-inch slit down the back of his coat, and the coat was wet and sticky.
That wasn’t altogether a surprise: the blood on the floor had prepared me for something of the sort. But when another followed him—facing