MILKMAN’S DISCOVERY

God! He hadn’t meant to kill Anita! And if she hadn’t insisted so on marriage, and threatened him… He raised the window quietly.

* * * *

The Professor lifted his eyes from the twisted, broken, pajama-clad body lying a foot from the apartment building, looked quizzically at milkman Horace Bone, who had discovered the tragedy at 5:30 that morning.

“From where did you phone the police?” he asked.

“From the janitor’s apartment.”

“Then you continued your milk deliveries throughout the building?”

“Yes. The janitor stayed by the body. Wasn’t that all right?”

Fordney gazed up to the fourth floor balcony off of Anita Brownley’s apartment, lowered his eyes to the third floor window of Cyril Morse’s apartment, turned to the other man.

“Did you visit your fiancée last night?”

“No, no, I didn’t,” Morse replied.

“Yet you say you were home all evening. Isn’t that a bit…”

“I didn’t visit her, but Anita came down to my apartment for awhile. She left at 11 o’clock. No, I heard nothing during the night.”

“Was the body disturbed in any way?” Fordney asked Bone.

“No, sir.”

* * * *

The Professor climbed through Anita’s open window to the four-foot balcony off the two rear windows of her one-room apartment, scraped a fingernail along the low iron railing, looked up at the next balcony two floors above and murmured, “Quite.”

He stepped back into the room. The word GOODBYE, cut from a magazine, was pasted on the dressing table mirror. He knew, of course, that Anita had not gone to her death from her apartment—and that spelled murder.

What clue told Fordney Anita had not jumped or fallen from her own apartment? Turn page for solution.