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a naked body, male, 165 pounds, five feet ten inches, brown hair and eyes, age about forty, has ways of speaking even after the tongue is stilled. Department experts, without direction from Mullins, were trying to make it speak.
    The Medical Examiner’s office was taking it apart with knives, and reserving portions for analysis, and sewing it up again. Fingerprint men had long since photographed and enlarged the prints of the dead fingers, and found that there were none in the department files to match them. Copies of the enlargements had been started by air mail to Washington and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and there more experts compared them with yet more files, and found nothing. To the Federal Bureau, too, went precise physical descriptions, backed by measurements, and those, reduced to punch marks in a key card, sent thousands of other cards whirling through a machine, and expelled a few of them—including cards which gave names and last addresses and other significant details of three men long since dead, two serving life sentences and another at that moment awaiting trial for bank robbery. This was not as helpful as it might have been.
    And the body’s teeth were examined. They turned out, to everyone’s annoyance, to be remarkably healthy teeth, showing only a few small fillings and no really intricate dental construction. It was a setback; nevertheless, dental charts were prepared on what data there was, and sent circulating among dentists, on the off chance. The Bureau of Missing Persons came into it, checking the description of the body against those of men who had wandered, unreported, from their homes, and one or two promising leads were turned up. Detectives hurried with photographs to consult worried men and women who might prove to be relatives of what had been found in the bathtub of 95 Greenwich Place, and men and women looked at the photographs fearfully and sighed over them with relief. For that came to nothing, too.
    While this went on, and Mullins waited, Lieutenant Weigand went to see Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley, in charge of the Homicide Squad, and of Lieutenant Weigand—in final charge, too, of the body which had turned up in the bathtub. Inspector O’Malley had once been rather like Mullins, only several times as bright. Like Mullins, he preferred blastings, and regarded amateur murder with distrust. Murders like the present, which were not only amateur but bizarre, irritated Inspector O’Malley. Thus, although not an unamiable man, as Deputy Chief Inspectors go, he growled at Weigand when the lieutenant entered, and wanted to know, profanely, where he had been. Weigand said he had stopped for a bite of dinner; he tried to make it sound as if he had scooped a sandwich off a counter and chewed as he ran after clues. The inspector looked at him coldly, and Weigand was gratified that he had avoided the fourth cocktail, but felt slightly uneasy about the third.
    â€œWell,” said Inspector O’Malley, “what’s going on there? It sounds screwy to me.”
    Weigand told him what he knew—about the Norths finding the body, about the battered skull and the nudity, about the Western Union boy who probably was not a Western Union boy, and about the cat. He told about the cat with misgivings, because, among other prejudices, Inspector O’Malley did not like cats. He did not even like to have cats mentioned. He frowned disgustedly.
    â€œA cat!” he said. “For God’s sake!”
    Lieutenant Weigand was sorry, and said so. Nevertheless, there it was. A cat had got into it and, when you looked at it carefully, to good purpose. It fixed the time, if you could believe it.
    â€œA cat!” said Inspector O’Malley, with distilled disgust.
    The inspector glared at Weigand, blaming him for the cat. Weigand waited suitably and went on.
    â€œWell,” said the inspector, when Weigand had told him all he could think of