He swung the register around toward him so he could read it. Amos J. Dillberry, City, was inscribed on it. Meaning this was the salesman’s headquarters when he was not on the road, probably. Striker shifted it back again.

He saw the salesman in the hotel dining-room at mealtime that evening. He came in freshly showered and laundered, and had a wisecrack for his waiter. That was the salesman in him. The heat certainly hadn’t affected his appetite any, the way he stoked.

“If anything happens,” thought Striker with gloomy foreboding, “that dick Courlander should show up later and try to tell me this guy was depressed or affected by the heat! He should just try!”

In the early part of the evening the salesman hung around the lobby a while, trying to drum up conversation with this and that sweltering fellow-guest. Striker was in there too, watching him covertly. For once he was not a hotel dick sizing somebody up hostilely, he was a hotel dick sizing somebody up protectively. Not finding anyone particularly receptive, Dillberry went out into the street about ten, in quest of a soul-mate.

Striker stood up as soon as he’d gone, and took the opportunity of going up to 913 and inspecting it thoroughly. He went over every square inch of it; got down on his hands and knees and explored all along the baseboards of the walls; examined the electric outlets; held matches to such slight fissures as there were between the tiles in the bathroom; rolled back one half of the carpet at a time and inspected the floorboards thoroughly; even got up on a chair and fiddled with the ceiling light fixture, to see if there was anything tricky about it. He couldn’t find a thing wrong. He tested the windows exhaustively, working them back and forth until the hinges threatened to come off. There wasn’t anything defective or balky about them, and on a scorching night like this the inmate was bound to leave them wide open and let it go at that, not fiddle around with them in any way during the middle of the night. There wasn’t enough breeze, even this high up, to swing a cobweb.

He locked the room behind him, went downstairs again with a helpless dissatisfied feeling of having done everything that was humanly possible—and yet not having done anything at all, really. What was there he could do?

Dillberry reappeared a few minutes before twelve, with a package cradled in his arm that was unmistakably for refreshment purposes up in his room, and a conspiratorial expression on his face that told Striker’s experienced eyes what was coming next. The salesman obviously wasn’t the solitary drinker type.

Striker saw her drift in about ten minutes later, with the air of a lady on her way to do a little constructive drinking. He couldn’t place her on the guest list, and she skipped the desk entirely—so he bracketed her with Dillberry. He did exactly nothing about it—turned his head away as though he hadn’t noticed her.