The Case of the Velvet Claws by Erle Stanley Gardner

ordinarily keep a brighter light burning over the stairs until the family has retired?"
    "Sometimes," she said, "but George has his upstairs apartment all to himself. He doesn't bother the rest of us, and we don't bother him."
    "All right," said Mason. "Let's go on up. Turn on the light."
    She clicked a switch, and the stairway was flooded with light.
    Mason led the way up the stairs and into the reception room of the suite where he had first seen George Belter.
    The door through which Belter had entered on that occasion was now closed. Mason turned the knob, opened the door and stepped into the study.
    It was a huge room, done in much the same style as the sitting room. The chairs were huge and heavily upholstered. The desk was twice the size of an ordinary large desk. There was a door open which led into a bedroom, and, within a few feet of that door, was the door which led into the bath. There was also a door from the bedroom to the bathroom.
    The body of George Belter lay on the floor, just inside the doorway from the bathroom to the study. It was wrapped in a flannel dressing gown, which had fallen open along the front and showed that underneath the gown the body was entirely nude.
    Eva Belter gave a little scream and clung closely to Mason. Mason shook her off, strode to the body, and knelt down.
    The man was quite dead. There had been but one bullet, and that had penetrated directly through the heart. Death had apparently been instantaneous.
    Mason felt the inside of the bathrobe and noticed that it was damp. He pulled the bathrobe together over the corpse, stepped over the outstretched arm, and into the bathroom.
    Like the other rooms of the suite, the bathroom was built on a massive scale, for a huge man. The bathtub, set down below the level of the floor, was some three or four feet deep and almost eight feet long. A huge washbowl occupied the center of the bathroom. There were towels folded on the racks. Mason looked at them, then turned to Eva Belter.
    "Listen," he said, "he was taking a bath, and something caused him to get up and get out. Notice that he flung on his bathrobe, and didn't dry himself with a towel. He was still wet when he put the bathrobe around him, and the towels are all folded, and haven't been used."
    She nodded slow acquiescence. "Do you suppose we had better moisten a bath towel and crumple it as though he had dried himself?" she asked.
    "Why?"
    "Oh, I don't know," she said. "I just wondered."
    "Listen," he told her, "we get to faking evidence here, and we're going to get into serious difficulty. Now listen, and get this straight! Apparently, no one besides yourself knows what happened, or when. The police will get sore if they aren't notified right away. They'll also want to know how you happened to telephone to a lawyer before you telephoned to them. It makes it look like a suspicious circumstance as far as you're concerned. D'you understand?"
    She nodded again, her eyes wide and dark.
    "All right," he said, "now get this, and get it straight, and keep your head all the way through. Here's what happened. You're going to tell exactly the truth, just as you told it to me, with one exception. And that is about your coming back upstairs after the man had left the house. That's the thing that I don't like about your story, and that's the thing that the police won't like about it. If you had presence of mind enough to go up the stairs and look around, then you would have had presence of mind enough to call the police. The fact that you wanted to call an attorney before you called the police, is going to make the police think that you had a consciousness of guilt."
    "But," she said, "we can explain to them that I had consulted you on this other matter, and that it was all so mixed up together that I wanted to talk with you before I talked with the police, couldn't we?"
    He laughed at her.
    "What a sweet mess that would be. Then the police would want to know all about what that other matter was.