Six shared the secret, the Whitneys, father and son, the Babbittses, husband and wife, Jack Reddy and O’Mally. In twenty-four hours Mrs. Meagher and Dannie were spirited off to a farm up-state and the old man had a séance with Meagher, the drayman, that shut his mouth tighter than a gag. The six of us were organized into a sort of band to work on the case. It seemed to me we were like moles, tunneling along underground, not a soul on the surface knowing we were there, and if they’d found it out, not able to make a guess what we were after. O’Mally and I were the only two that were put right on the scene of the crime. I was to stay on the Black Eagle switchboard to pick up all I could from Troop, the boy who operated the one elevator which was running that night—to find out about the people he had taken up or down from the seventeenth floor between five and six-thirty. O’Mally was commissioned to examine the Azalea Woods Estates offices, and get next to Mrs. Hansen, cleaner of the top floors, and see if she had seen anything on the evening of January fifteenth. What we ferreted out I’ll put down as clearly and quickly as I can. It may not be interesting, but to understand a case that _was_ interesting, it’s necessary to know it. O’Mally got busy right off—quicker than I, but he knew better how to do it. The Azalea Woods Estates was vacated and _that_ was easy. His search only gave up one thing, two dark spots on the floor of the private office close by the window. With a chisel he shaved off the wood on which they were and it was sent to a chemist who analyzed the spots as blood. What he heard from Mrs. Hansen was even more important, and he did it well, worming it out of her in easy talk about the suicide. I’ll boil it down to simple facts, not as I heard him tell it in Mr. Whitney’s den, with bits about Mrs. Hansen that you couldn’t help but laugh at. On the night of January the fifteenth she was at work on the seventeenth floor at half-past five. Behind the elevators, round on the side corridor where the service stairs go down, is a sink closet where the cleaners kept their brooms and dusters. Having finished with a rear office she went into this closet to empty and refill her pails, at a little before six. While in there she could hear nothing because of the running water, but when she turned it off she heard steps coming down the stairs on the Broadway side. She had moved out into the hall when the steps stopped, and rounding the corner by the elevators she saw Mr. Harland standing at the door of the Azalea Woods Estates offices.