The Doorbell Rang (The Rex Stout Library)

For the street door at 63 Arbor Street I still had the key Mrs Althaus had given me, so I was clean until I stood at Sarah Dacos's door and got out the collection of keys. When I had knocked twice, and pushed the button twice and heard the ring, with no response, I tried a key. The fourth one did it, smooth and easy. I put the gloves on, turned the knob, opened the door, crossed the sill, and shut the door, and I had broken and entered according to the statutes of the State of New York.

The layout was the same as upstairs, but the furniture was quite different. Rugs here and there instead of carpet, smaller couch smothered with pillows, no desk or typewriter, fewer chairs, about one-fourth as many books, five little pictures on the walls which the bold lover must have considered old hat. The drapes were drawn, and I turned the lights on, put my coat and hat on the couch, and went and opened a closet door.

There were two facts: the cleaning woman might come any minute, and I had no idea what I might find, if anything. The point was simply that there might be something that would help, no matter what was going to happen Thursday night, to square it with Cramer for that carton of milk. A fast once-over was called for, and I spent only ten minutes on the living room and its two closets and then went to the bedroom.

I came mighty close to passing it by. The bedroom closet was crammed-clothes on hangers, shoe racks, luggage, cartons and hatboxes on two high shelves. The bag and two suitcases were packed with summer clothes, and I skipped the hatboxes; I would have given a finif of my money to know if the cleaning woman came Wednesdays. But ten minutes later, going through a drawerful of photographs one by one, I realized that it was dumb to skip the hatboxes and then waste time with a bunch of photographs which could tell me nothing I didn't already know, so I took a chair to the closet, mounted it, and got the boxes down. There were three. The first one contained three so-called hats and two bikinis. The second one held one big floppy hat. I lifted it out, and there on the bottom was a revolver. I gawked at it for five seconds, then took it out and inspected it. It was an S & W.38 and held one cartridge that had been fired and five that hadn't.