Free Postmark Murder by Mignon G. Eberhart Page B

the floor, near the table. There was a chest of drawers. His suitcase stood on the floor near the bed. The overcoat he had worn was across the bed. His jacket was on a chair.” She remembered the gray shirt he wore and the red splotches on the back of it. She stopped.
    “Any other details about the room?”
    She could still see the brightly lighted little room in all its bareness and its tragedy. “No— Oh, yes, I think there were two glasses on the table.”
    She knew, of course, that Lieutenant Peabody had already examined the room and had seen everything that she had seen. He said, however, in a very quiet, almost a casual voice, “Did the glasses look clean?”
    She hesitated. “Yes. Yes, I think so. I don’t remember seeing anything in them.”
    The Lieutenant said, “What exactly did you do?”
    “I told you—”
    “Tell me again.”
    “I—felt for his pulse and tried to see with the mirror if he was still breathing. Then I glanced around the room but I really was thinking only of Jonny and that it was murder. It was—horrible. I only wanted to get away—”
    “So you knew at once that it was murder?”
    “How could it be anything else? The wounds were in his back.”
    “The Lieutenant said, “It seems to me that your mind was working very clearly if you reasoned at once that it was murder.”
    Matt said, “It was perfectly clear, Lieutenant. He couldn’t have killed himself like that. It was a physical impossibility. Anybody would have known at once that it was murder.”
    “No doubt,” Peabody said. “But it must have been a great shock to you, Miss March. People do not ordinarily encounter a murder. At least people who are not in my profession. You must have been interested in the papers which he claimed to have, his passport and his papers of identification. Didn’t you look for them?”
    “No! I never thought of it. All I could think of was Jonny and —and that he was murdered.”
    “You are sure you didn’t—say, open the suitcase, search his coat pockets—”
    “No!” Laura cried. “I didn’t!”
    “What are you getting at, Lieutenant?” Matt said suddenly. “Didn’t you find any papers of identification?”
    “Not a thing,” the Lieutenant said. “No passport. No letter from the orphanage. We found no letters at all, in fact. No cards of identity. He had a bill folder with about a hundred dollars in it, American money. There was nothing else. No initials on his clothing, nothing whatever to identify him except of course”—his dreamy gaze shifted to Laura—“his visit to you and his claim to be Stanislowski.”

NINE
    “BUT THAT SUGGESTS— ” MATT began, but the Lieutenant interrupted. “That suggests that his murderer took such papers. It also suggests, however, that he had no such papers.” He took a small envelope from his pocket. “Another question, Miss March. Did he speak to you when you went to his room at Koska Street?”
    “He was dead—”
    “He didn’t die immediately after he was stabbed. You knew that. Didn’t you?”
    There was a tone in his voice which bewildered Laura. “I thought he must have been alive when the woman, Maria Brown, phoned to me. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known my name. She wouldn’t have asked me to bring the doctor to help him. But he was dead when I saw him.”
    “You have described the room exactly as you saw it? There’s no detail you have omitted?”
    Laura thought back to that brightly lighted little room which was like a clear photographic image in her mind. “No,” she said slowly, “nothing.”
    “As a matter of fact,” the Lieutenant said, “there were bloodstains on the armchair across the room—”
    “I didn’t see that. I—”
    “And there were a few smears of blood along the floor. It looks as if he was stabbed when he was sitting in the chair. Then he was either helped by somebody else or dragged himself along the floor toward the writing table. In any event he lived certainly for a few