“Naturally, neither Black Mark nor anyone else there believed it, but they trooped out to the yard with lamps and there was Mrs. Cotton, her body nude and her nightgown lying beside her. Pedersen and I, with Abie the tracker, got out there at ten minutes to one. The body hadn’t been moved and was then covered with the nightgown. All about the body the ground had been tramped on by the boots of thirty-odd people.

“That Mrs. Cotton had been strangled was obvious. The doctor arrived a few minutes after we did. The woman was so man-handled that her neck was broken. We checked up on the man who found her body. The time he left the bar and the time he rushed in to tell what he had stumbled over, as well as other facts we gained from those thirty-odd people, let him out.”

“Is the time known when she went to bed?” asked Bony.

“Yes. It was nine-twenty. The drunk found her in the yard at approximately eleven-thirty. Her injuries, according to the doctor…”

“The medical report later. What was the condition of Mrs. Cotton’s bedroom?”

“Quite in order. She had gone to bed. A bottle of aspirin and a tumbler partially filled with water lay undisturbed on the bedside table. There was no evidence of a struggle in the bedroom.”

“The weather that night?”

“Calm and dark. There was a slight haze masking the stars.”

“Warm?”

“Not so warm that a woman would wander around in the yard in her nightgown only.”

“Her moral reputation?”

“Excellent.”

“The examination of the twenty men in the bar produced nothing of interest?”

“Nothing. And nothing was obtained from the staff and the guests who were not in the bar at the time.”

“The nightgown… was it damaged in any way?”

“Yes,” replied Sawtell. “It was ripped at the back from top to bottom. That was done deliberately, because the neck seam was extremely hard to rip apart. I tried it.”