me, this one, with a dark, distorted face—I dropped the one I had caught and jumped back.
And as I jumped a third man came tumbling out after the others.
From behind me came a scream and a thud as the maid fainted. I wasn’t feeling any too steady myself. I’m no sensitive plant, and I’ve looked at a lot of unlovely sights in my time, but for weeks afterward I could see those three dead men coming out of that clothespress to pile up at my feet: coming out slowly—almost deliberately—in a ghastly game of “follow your leader.”
Seeing them, you couldn’t doubt that they were really dead. Every detail of their falling, every detail of the heap in which they now lay, had a horrible certainty of lifelessness in it.
I turned to Stacey, who, deathly white himself, was keeping on his feet only by clinging to the foot of the brass bed.
“Get the woman out! Get doctors—police!”
I pulled the three dead bodies apart, laying them out in a grim row, faces up. Then I made a hasty examination of the room.
A soft hat, which fitted one of the dead men, lay in the center of the unruffled bed. The room key was in the door, on the inside. There was no blood in the room except what had leaked out of the clothespress, and the room showed no signs of having been the scene of a struggle.
The door to the bathroom was open. In the bottom of the bath tub was a shattered gin bottle, which, from the strength of the odor and the dampness of the tub, had been nearly full when broken. In one corner of the bathroom I found a small whisky glass, and another under the tub. Both were dry, clean, and odorless.