Death at the Excelsior | Page 3

a dozen years from a single room to
an impressive suite bright with polished wood, clicking typewriters,
and other evidences of success. Where once Mr. Snyder had sat and
waited for clients and attended to them himself, he now sat in his
private office and directed eight assistants.
He had just accepted a case--a case that might be nothing at all or
something exceedingly big. It was on the latter possibility that he had
gambled. The fee offered was, judged by his present standards of
prosperity, small. But the bizarre facts, coupled with something in the
personality of the client, had won him over. He briskly touched the bell
and requested that Mr. Oakes should be sent in to him.
Elliot Oakes was a young man who both amused and interested Mr.
Snyder, for though he had only recently joined the staff, he made no
secret of his intention of revolutionizing the methods of the agency. Mr.
Snyder himself, in common with most of his assistants, relied for
results on hard work and plenty of common sense. He had never been a
detective of the showy type. Results had justified his methods, but he
was perfectly aware that young Mr. Oakes looked on him as a dull old
man who had been miraculously favored by luck.
Mr. Snyder had selected Oakes for the case in hand principally because
it was one where inexperience could do no harm, and where the
brilliant guesswork which Oakes preferred to call his inductive
reasoning might achieve an unexpected success.
Another motive actuated Mr. Snyder in his choice. He had a strong
suspicion that the conduct of this case was going to have the beneficial
result of lowering Oakes' self-esteem. If failure achieved this end, Mr.
Snyder felt that failure, though it would not help the Agency, would not
be an unmixed ill.

The door opened and Oakes entered tensely. He did everything tensely,
partly from a natural nervous energy, and partly as a pose. He was a
lean young man, with dark eyes and a thin-lipped mouth, and he looked
quite as much like a typical detective as Mr. Snyder looked like a
comfortable and prosperous stock broker.
"Sit down, Oakes," said Mr. Snyder. "I've got a job for you."
Oakes sank into a chair like a crouching leopard, and placed the tips of
his fingers together. He nodded curtly. It was part of his pose to be
keen and silent.
"I want you to go to this address"--Mr. Snyder handed him an
envelope--"and look around. The address on that envelope is of a
sailors' boarding-house down in Southampton. You know the sort of
place--retired sea captains and so on live there. All most respectable. In
all its history nothing more sensational has ever happened than a case
of suspected cheating at halfpenny nap. Well, a man had died there."
"Murdered?" Oakes asked.
"I don't know. That's for you to find out. The coroner left it open.
'Death by Misadventure' was the verdict, and I don't blame him. I don't
see how it could have been murder. The door was locked on the inside,
so nobody could have got in."
"The window?"
"The window was open, granted. But the room is on the second floor.
Anyway, you may dismiss the window. I remember the old lady saying
there was a bar across it, and that nobody could have squeezed
through."
Oakes' eyes glistened. He was interested. "What was the cause of
death?" he asked.
Mr. Snyder coughed. "Snake bite," he said.
Oakes' careful calm deserted him. He uttered a cry of astonishment.
"Why, that's incredible!"
"It's the literal truth. The medical examination proved that the fellow
had been killed by snake poison--cobra, to be exact, which is found
principally in India."
"Cobra!"
"Just so. In a Southampton boarding-house, in a room with a locked
door, this man was stung by a cobra. To add a little mystification to the
limpid simplicity of the affair, when the door was opened there was no

sign of any cobra. It couldn't have got out through the door, because the
door was locked. It couldn't have got out of the window, because the
window was too high up, and snakes can't jump. And it couldn't have
gotten up the chimney, because there was no chimney. So there you
have it."
He looked at Oakes with a certain quiet satisfaction. It had come to his
ears that Oakes had been heard to complain of the infantile nature and
unworthiness of the last two cases to which he had been assigned. He
had even said that he hoped some day to be given a problem which
should be beyond the reasoning powers of a child of six. It seemed to
Mr. Snyder that Oakes was about to get his wish.
"I should