ontering the front door, going directly to the rest rooms, and not returning. This confirmed what the chief of police had told him. He made several attempts to encounter some of the customers in the entrance to the rest rooms, but each time the room was empty by the time ho got thero.

The Cove officially closed on March 13. For a week after the closing date, Mayor Wren parked his car across the street and covertly watched tradesmen and moving van personnel remove equipment from the premises. Occasionally he left his car and posed as a curious passerby. From the movers he elicited the following information : There had been a bar upstairs, it contained "a lot of crazy paintings", and the movers were having great difficulty in bringing the larger and heavier equipment do wn in the dumb-waiter which was in the broom closet. It appeared, moreover, that the bar it self would have to be sawed into four or five smaller pieces before it could be removed via the dumb-waiter.

The police checked

That's funny, thought Mayor Wren that broom closet time and again, and they never mentioned anything about a dumb-waiter. Wren returned to his car and waited until the last piece had been loaded into the van.

After the moving van had driven out of sight, Wren fished through his pockets for a pass key and unlocked the front door. The mixture of curiosity and anxiety in him was causing his head to throb. He could hardly restrain himself from sprinting to the broom closet in the rest room vestibule.

When Wren opened the closet door, the dumb-waiter lay in the bottom of the shaft almost as though some cne had just lowered it ospecially for him. As he approached the top of the shaft, he noticed a trap door, which he opened effortlessly.

A single light bulb was burning in the space which had formerly housed The Attic. Wren noticed the faded spots on the walls where the paintings had hung. The place was entirely bare except for a huge wall-to-wall mirror.

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