The inside of the clothespress door was stained with blood from the height of my shoulder to the floor, and two hats lay in the puddle of blood on the closet floor. Each of the hats fitted one of the dead men.
That was all. Three dead men, a broken gin bottle, blood.
Stacey returned presently with a doctor, and while the doctor was examining the dead men, the police detectives arrived.
The doctor’s work was soon done.
“This man,” he said, pointing to one of them, “was struck on the back of the head with a small blunt instrument, and then strangled. This one,” pointing to another, “was simply strangled. And the third was stabbed in the back with a blade perhaps five inches long. They have been dead for about two hours—since noon or a little after.”
The assistant manager identified two of the bodies. The man who had been stabbed—the first to fall out of the clothespress—had arrived at the hotel three days before, registering as Tudor Ingraham of Washington, DC , and had occupied room 915, three doors away.
The last man to fall out—the one who had been simply choked—was the occupant of this room. His name was Vincent Develyn. He was an insurance broker and had made the hotel his home since his wife’s death, some four years before.
The third man had been seen in Develyn’s company frequently, and one of the clerks remembered that they had come into the hotel together at about five minutes after twelve this day. Cards and letters in his pockets told us that he was Homer Ansley, a member of the law firm of Lankershim and Ansley, whose offices were in the Miles Building—next door to Develyn’s office, in fact.
Develyn’s pockets held between $150 and $200; Ansley’s wallet contained more than $100; Ingraham’s pockets yielded nearly $300, and