“Captain Cook sent me over to say that it looks now like that Hemingway case was not a suicide after all. There are no powder burns on the face. The revolver must have been put in her hand after she was shot.” Cook was night captain of detectives. Leslie jumped to his feet and swung Lanagan to his. “Here! This will put you on your mettle. I didn’t like the looks of that case from the start. I am going out and take hold of it personally. Come along. Maybe you can turn up something that the _Enquirer_ will be glad to hear from you on. Come along, Brady.” They jumped into the police machine and were whirled out to a fashionable home on Pacific Avenue. It was 9:30 o’clock. Less than an hour before a report had been received of the suicide of the daughter of the house, a débutante whose coming-out party had been an event of the spring before and whose engagement to a broker, Oliver Macondray, had just been announced. Wilson, accounted one of Leslie’s shrewdest upper office men, was already in the room when Leslie, Lanagan, and Brady arrived. There were there also a shoal of newspaper men and photographers, and the smell of flash powders was heavy on the air. On the first report from police headquarters I had been sent out by Sampson and had already been in the house for half an hour. But I was glad to surrender the story promptly to Lanagan when he entered, although he did not then say that he intended going to work. It was Wilson, as I recall it, who had raised a doubt of the suicide theory by pointing out the absence of powder burns, although the bullet wound was in the right temple and the revolver clasped tightly in the right hand. A girl with her frail wrist must have pressed the revolver close before firing. It was clear the revolver had been placed in her hand after the shooting. It was an English bulldog of old pattern, one of those “family” pistols found in most homes. [Illustration: “Then Lanagan took his leisurely turn, drawing up an easy chair.”] “If you can’t be first on the ground, be last,” was an axiom of the newspaper business that Lanagan often tried to impress upon me. He proceeded to act upon his theory now by rolling and lighting a cigarette to give all in the room ample time to finish their investigation. Finally the room was cleared of all save, Leslie, Lanagan, Brady, Wilson, and myself. The room had one set of French windows giving out upon a wide porch and a heavily matted lawn. It would be next to impossible to say whether a person had escaped over the lawn by way of the veranda. The bedroom door was open when a maid, attracted by the shot, had overcome her terror and run to the room.