On the foyer floor, beyond the swing of the front door, was a lump of white pottery, a hollow broken piece of something, about the size of a softball. It was smeared with blood and gray slime. Loughran, just behind Leland, said, “Mrs. McFee doesn’t think she kicked that or banged it with the door. The door was ajar when she came up. She’s pretty sure she kept her hands off of everything. She goes to the movies a lot. The body is in the bedroom on the right side of that hall.”

The living room had expensive, handsome furnishings, which were now in disarray. The contents of an ash tray were scattered across the top of the coffee table; there was some more broken china, lighter and thinner than the chunk in the foyer. From across the room the pieces appeared to be clean. Opposite the sofa and the coffee table was a liquor cabinet, doors open. On top was a phonograph. A record was on the turntable and there were other records, unjacketed, on top of the cabinet. A couple of highball glasses were beside the records and a cigarette butt floated in the liquid of one of them. If there had been any ice in the glasses, it was melted.

“Danny,” Leland said, “take a series of overlapping views of this room. Move in on the obvious things. Get a couple of shots of that thing in the hall, then fish it up onto a newspaper and put it in a place where it won’t be kicked.”

“I’ll tape off the room, too,” Curran said.

“Just the foyer,” Leland said. “The rest has to be dusted. Give Dave a hand with that when you have the pictures. Dave, is there a piece of chalk?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“Give it to Danny and let him do the marking as he goes around. Let’s have a look in the bedroom.”

There were other doors off the hall, all closed. Leland said, “Dave, check out those knobs so we can have a look at the rest of the place. Robbie, do you have anything else to tell us?”

“Just that the landlady said that Leikman lived alone, he was a designer of some kind, and was in his early twenties—you may not be able to tell. She heard voices up here from about six o’clock on, but Leikman was a quiet tenant generally and she left him alone. It was quiet awhile and then there was more noise, more or less continuous from eleven o’clock, and then at one o’clock she heard the door bang hard, but not so that it caught—as if the bolt had been thrown first. She didn’t hear anyone on the stairs, she was very clear about that, because she was alerted by the strange sound of the door. She waited for someone to come down. Then she got an ‘eerie feeling,’ she called it, and decided to come up. The door was ajar.”