Death Has a Small Voice by Frances Lockridge

the short flight of immaculate white stairs. They rang it again.
    â€œI’ll tell you, Loot,” Mullins said. “The back would be better, sort of.”
    â€œRight,” Bill said. Absently, he fingered the knob of the door. It turned in his fingers. “The front’ll do,” Bill Weigand said. He opened the door, slowly, quietly. The three of them went into the little house.
    The hall was almost too small for three men. Entering it, they faced a narrow flight of stairs, leading to the second floor. At their right was an opening, the width of double doors. Through it—and they went through it, Mullins’s flashlight beam showing the way—was the living room. It was about ten feet in width. It ran the depth of the little house. It was almost a hall, in dimensions; it was a most glorified hall. Weigand pressed a tumbler switch near the door and light came on in a small, ornate, yet oddly beautiful, chandelier midway of the room. Light reflected from cut crystals. The light fell on heavy, deep red curtains looped at the windows at either end, down one side, of the long, narrow room. It fell on Victorian chairs and sofas; on the marble mantel of a small fireplace at the far end of the room, on a mirror above the mantel and an intricate, small white clock on the mantel shelf. The light fell on white woodwork; on wall paper intricately patterned in gold. The room was perfect in its re-creation of another day—a more opulent day.
    Mullins whistled, softly.
    The room was empty. They could see that immediately the lights were on. They went through it, nevertheless. At the rear of the room, on the left, a sliding door hid a small kitchen, which was by no means Victorian. It, too, was empty. They went back through the room and up the stairs. At the top of the stairs they found a bathroom, a very narrow hall and two bedrooms.
    The bedroom at the rear was, evidently, Hilda Godwin’s. It was small, but not too small for a canopied bed; not too small for a vanity made of mirrors, but wearing skirts. There were crystal sconces on either side of the dressing table. It was a little like the inside of a jewel box, but the single window at the rear was fitted with an air-conditioning unit. The other bedroom, which intercommunicated but could also be reached from the narrow hall, was more matter of fact. It did not, as the rear bedroom did, have the atmosphere of frequent occupancy.
    Both rooms were empty. In each, the beds were neatly made. The closet off the front bedroom held some summer dresses; the larger closet of the rear bedroom was filled with clothes—pretty clothes, very modern clothes.
    Nowhere, on the second floor or on the floor below, was there anything to indicate that violence, or even precipitate action, had occurred in the little house. They went back down again. And, again, Jerry North felt that they had hurried, had run, to nothingness.
    They went over the living room more carefully the second time. The desk at which, they could assume, Hilda Godwin worked, was Victorian in external design, modern in convenience. A typewriter emerged from it, smoothly, when the proper knob was pulled.
    â€œMissed that, Eaton did,” Mullins commented. “Maybe he was in a hurry.”
    But there was no sign Eaton had been there at all. If he had, in searching for objects at once of value and portable, disturbed the room’s other-day elegance, evidence of his marauding had been smoothed away. It was Mullins who found, pushed into a corner, partly under bookshelves, a small, wheeled table. It was Jerry who, before the others, recognized it.
    â€œThat’s where she kept the Voice-Scriber,” he said. His voice was dull.
    Looking at it closely, with the beam of Mullins’s torch lighting it obliquely, they could see the outline, faint in just perceptible dust, of the device Eaton had stolen. They confirmed what they already knew. They stood for a moment and looked at the little