Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 02 by Bad for Business Page B

the torch because the lights were on. In the anteroom he stood motionless for ten seconds, heard nothing whatever, and proceeded, with no effort to conceal his own noise. The doors were all standing open.
    Two spaces inside Arthur Tingley’s office, just beyond the edge of the burlap screen at his right, he stopped again. Taking Amy’s story as she told it, it must have been just there that she had been struck. Considering the screen, that was all right. He circled the screen and directed his eyes downward.
    A tightening of the muscles around his mouth and a breath intake through his nostrils somewhat quicker and deeper than common were his only visible reactions to what he saw. Though a glance was enough to make it more than probable that Amy had not, in her stunned daze, left her uncle to bleed slowly to death, he stepped around the area of the congealed liquid on the floor to bend over for a brief but conclusive examination. That done, he straightened up for a survey. For three minutes he stood, moving only his head and eyes, filing away a hundred details in the cabinet in his skull. The outstanding items were:
A bloody towel on the floor by the wash basin, sixteen inches from the wall.
Another bloody towel on the rim of the basin, to the right.
A long thin knife with a black composition handle on the floor between the body and the screen. In the factory that morning he had seen girls with similar knives, sharp as razors, slicing meat loaves.
Also on the floor, between the two front legs of the wash basin, a metal object nearly as big as his fist, in the form of a truncated cone, with a figure 2 in high relief on its side. That too, or its fellow, he had seen in the factory: a two-pound weight of an old-fashioned scale in the sauce room.
Farther away, out beyond the edge of the screen, a snakeskin bag—a woman’s handbag.
    When he moved, it was to kneel for a close inspection of the knife, without touching it; and the same for the metal weight. It was unnecessary to repeat the performance for the handbag: from his height he could see the chromium monogram, AD, at a corner of it. It, too, he left untouched; in fact, he touched nothing, as he toured the room, but he saw that someone else had touched a great many things, during what had apparently been a thorough search. Two drawers of the rolltop desk were standing open. Objects which, when he was there in the morning, had been neatly and compactly stacked on rows of shelves, were now disarranged and anything but neat. A pile of the trade journal,
The National Grocer
, had tumbled to chaos on the floor. The door of the enormous old safe was standing wide open. Arthur Tingley’s hat was still on the little shelf above and to the left of the desk, but his coat, instead of being on the hanger which dangled from a hook beneath the shelf, as it should have been, was in a heap on the floor.
    Fox noted these and many other evidences of a search, stood scowling in the middle of the room andmuttered, “It’s too damn bad I can’t make a job of it,” and departed.
    It was still raining. Five minutes later, at 11:21 by his watch, he was in a phone booth in a drugstore at 28th and Broadway, speaking in the transmitter:
    “All right, if the inspector isn’t there I’ll tell you about it. May I have your name, please? Sergeant Tepper? Thanks. You’d better write this down. Name: Arthur Tingley. Place: His office on the second floor of his place of business at Twenty-sixth Street and Tenth Avenue. He’s there dead, murdered, throat cut. Let me finish, please. My name is Fox, Tecumseh Fox. That’s right. Tell Inspector Damon I’ll see him tomorrow—hold on and get this, will you?—I’ll see him tomorrow and tell him where Amy Duncan is. Amy Duncan!”
    He cut off loud remonstrances by hanging up, went out to his car and drove to the Hotel Vandermeer and asked the doorman, who greeted him as an old acquaintance, to have the car garaged. Inside the clerk greeted him