The city dick took his departure from the hotel, with the magnanimous assurance: “It’s the depresh. They’re poppin’ off like popcorn all over the country this week. I ain’t been able to cash my pay check since Monday.”

Perry returned to his own quarters, with the typical managerial admonition, to Maxon and Striker, “Soft pedal, now, you two. Don’t let this get around the house.” He yawned with a sound like air brakes, going up in the elevator. You could still hear it echoing down the shaft after his feet had gone up out of sight.

“Just the same,” Striker said finally, unasked, to the night clerk, “I don’t care what that know-it-all says, Hopper didn’t have suicide on his mind when he checked in here at 7:30. He saw a show that was full of laughs, and even came home whistling one of the tunes from it. We both heard him. He unpacked all his shirts and things into the bureau drawers. He intended staying. He went to bed first; I felt the covers, they were warm. Then he popped up all of a sudden and took this standing broadjump.”

“Maybe he had a bad dream,” Maxon suggested facetiously. His was a hard boiled racket. He yawned, muscularly magnetized by his boss’s recent gape, and opened a big ledger. “Some of ’em put on a fake front until the last minute—whistle, go to a show, too proud to take the world into their confidence, and then—bang—they’ve crumpled. How do you or I know what was on his mind?”

And on that note it ended. As Maxon said, there was no accounting for human nature. Striker caught the sleepiness from the other two, widened his jaws terrifyingly, brought them together again with a click. And yet somehow, to him, this suicide hadn’t run true to form.

He went back up to his own room again with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, that wasn’t strong enough to do anything about, and yet that he couldn’t altogether throw off. Like the feeling you get when you’re working out a crossword puzzle and one of the words fills up the space satisfactorily, but doesn’t seem to have the required meaning called for in the solution.

The St. Anselm went back to sleep again, the small part of it that had been awake. The case was closed.

People came and went from 913 and the incident faded into the limbo of half-forgotten things. Then in the early Fall of ’34 the room came to specific attention again.