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Page 12
"The coroner and the police officers."
"Oh! You say the body was lying right here?"
"Yes--the head there, and the feet there. I suppose you are going to
try to clear Miss Langmore, aren't you?" went on Mrs. Morse curiously.
"I am--if she is innocent."
"You'll have a task doing it. Everybody around here thinks her guilty."
To this Adam Adams did not reply. He was down on his hands and knees,
close to where the head of the murdered woman had rested. He placed
his nose to the carpet and drew in a long breath. His olfactory nerves
were sensitive, and detected a certain pungent, stinging odor, of a
sort not easily forgotten.
"You must be pretty short-sighted," was the woman's comment. The sight
of the man on his hands and knees amused her.
"Well, I might have a better pair of eyes, I admit."
From his examination of the carpet, the detective turned to the window.
Outside was the roof to the side piazza of the mansion. On the tin
roof were some dried-up spots of mud. He looked them over carefully,
and came to the conclusion that they were footprints, but how old was a
question.
"When did it rain last around here?" he asked.
"We haven't had a real storm for ten days or two weeks. We have had
several showers, though."
He took a glance into Mrs. Langmore's dressing room. Everything was in
perfect order, even to the powder-box and the cologne bottles on the
dresser.
"That is all I wish to see up here," he said, and passed below, where
he encountered the policeman in charge. Like the woman, this officer
had taken him to be a lawyer, and he readily consented to let the
detective inspect the library.
"Mr. Langmore was found in that chair," said he. "He looked as if he
had suffered great pain before he died. I think he was strangled,
although he didn't show the marks of it."
The library was a richly-furnished apartment. Along two walls were
rows of costly volumes, many relating to modern inventions. On the
walls hung some rare steel engravings, including one of Fulton and his
first steamboat. There was a large library table, with a student's
lamp, a mahogany roller-top desk, half a dozen comfortable chairs, and
a small, but well-built safe, which, as said before, was closed and
locked.
"The coroner locked and sealed the desk, and put all the loose papers
in it," said the policeman.
There were two windows to the library, and one was close to the side
porch, the roof of which the detective had examined from above. A
person dropping from above could easily have entered the library by the
window, thus saving himself the trouble of walking through the halls
and down the stairs. Adam Adams looked outside, and saw on the ground
a number of footprints, some running to a gravel path but a few feet
away.
"Where are the bodies?" he asked, as he continued his examination of
the room.
"At Camboin's morgue. The doctors have been looking for poison, but
they can't find any."
The detective got down in front of the safe and examined it critically.
Had it been opened after the murder and then closed again? That was an
important question, but he was unable to answer it.
More by instinct than anything else, he got down and peered under the
safe. A crumpled-up bit of paper caught his eye, and he picked it up
and slipped it into his pocket without the policeman being the wiser.
"Has anybody else been here?" he asked. "I mean any outsiders."
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