“We’ll look at his room, if you please,” said the investigator.

Complainingly, the woman led the way up the infirm staircase.  At the fourth floor she pushed open a door and showed them into a long loft-like room with high ceiling and mansard windows.  There came a squawking and fluttering from somewhere above as they entered.

“Them’s the cockatoos,” said the landlady.  “They miss Mr. Spatola very much.  When I go to feed them with the stale bread and seed he has here for them, would you believe it, they’ll hardly eat a thing.”

The room was without a floor covering.  Upon some rough shelves, nailed to the wall, were heaps of music.  A violin case also lay there.  There were a few chairs, a cot-bed, and a neat pile of books upon a table.  Ashton-Kirk ran over these quickly; they were mostly upon musical subjects, and in Italian.  But some were Spanish, English, German and French.

“He was the greatest hand for talking and reading languages,” said Mrs. Marx, wonderingly.  “I don’t think there was any kind of a nationality that he couldn’t converse with.  Mr. Sagon that lives on the floor below says that his French was elegant, and Mr. Hertz, my parlor lodger, used to just love to talk German with him.  He said his German was so high.”

Ashton-Kirk opened the violin case and looked at the instrument within.

“Spatola always carried his violin in this when he went out, I suppose?” he said, inquiringly.

“Oh, yes; that one he did.  But the one on the wall there,” pointing to a second instrument hanging from a peg, “he never took much care of that.  It’s the one he played on the street, you see.”

Her visitors followed the gesture with interest.

“That was just to clinch a point I made with Fuller this morning,” said the investigator to Pendleton, in explanation.  Then to Mrs. Marx he continued:  “Mr. Spatola had visitors from time to time, had he not?”

But the woman shook her head.

“Sometimes he had a pupil who came in the evening.  But they never came more than once or twice; he generally called them thick-heads after a little, and told them they’d better go back to the grocery or butcher’s shop where they belonged.”

“Are you quite sure that no one else ever called upon him?”

The woman nodded positively.

“I’m certain sure of it,” she said.  “I remember saying more than once to my gentlemen on the different floors, that Mr. Spatola must be awfully lonely sometimes.  Mr. Crawford would often come up here and smoke with him and play a game or two of Pedro.  Mr. Hertz tried it a couple of times; but him and Mr. Spatola couldn’t hit it very well.”

“How many lodgers have you?”