Two murders had been committed there in times gone by. There had been an interval of more than a few years between the two killings, and the one was in no way connected with the other except as to locale—for which reason, those who remembered and were superstitiously minded always claimed that some day sooner or later that same locale would inevitably be the scene of a third murder.
Its location—on a side street just off Washington Square—afforded a certain seclusion and, for New York, a comparatively quiet retreat. Colin Hewitt was not superstitious; nor, indeed, was the previous tenant from whom, as it were, he had inherited the place—a fellow writer who, some two years ago, had left New York to make his home in the south of France.
