For one of Hitchin's strange temperament and habits of thought, his own apartment could not have been situated more happily, if an affair of this kind were to involve Anthony Fry. Room for room, the home of the prosperous crime-student was directly below that of Anthony; they used the same dumbwaiter, and they were served by the same service elevator, so that if Hitchin had so elected he could even have inspected the meals that went to Anthony's table. Still more, they were in the old wing of the Lasande, where the rooms are larger, but where the floors--laid long before the days of sound-proof concrete filling--permit the unduly inquisitive to hear much of what goes on above and below. According to his own reasoning, Hitchin had struck upon the investigation of his whole lifetime. Surely as he wore spectacles, murder had been done in the flat of the impeccable Anthony Fry. What the motive could possibly be, Hobart Hitchin could only guess, as he had already guessed; but it was a fact that he had been suspicious ever since Anthony's appearance last night with the slim boy of the heavy storm coat and the down-pulled cap. These, failing to harmonize with anything that went in and out of the Lasande ordinarily, had twanged every responsive string in Hitchin's consciousness, and not by any manner of means had the strings ceased twanging after his unusual interview with Anthony. Hence, having returned to his own flat, he waited tense and expectant. With straining ears he heard the coming of Beatrice Boller and the subsequent excitement, and to him her peculiar cries signified another friend of David Prentiss's who had come suddenly upon the grisly thing that had once been the young boy. And now those processes of deductive reasoning which are used so successfully in fiction and so infrequently in real life, informed Hobart Hitchin that the crime's next step was almost at hand. Accustomed to murder or otherwise, an intelligent man like Anthony Fry would risk no more of these disturbances; whatever his original plans, he would seek very shortly to get the body out of the Lasande--hardly in grips, Hitchin fancied, probably not in a packing case, rather in that reliable actor in so many sensational murders, a trunk. Here, on the floor above him, some one moved and bumped what was unquestionably a hollow, empty trunk! As the veteran fireman responds to the gong, so did the brain of Hobart Hitchin respond to that bump! Fifteen seconds and he had visualized the whole of the next step; the trunk to the freight elevator, thence to the street, thence to the waiting motor express wagon, thence-- Again, after a time, came the bump, indicating that the trunk was in the living-room now--and then, absolutely true to the hypothesis, Anthony's door opened and the bumps went to the hall, while the freight elevator came up the shaft!