Summary
A cryptic billet-doux lures Eileen Meredith to the townhouse of her affianced, dilettante antiquarian Robert Grell; she dispatches her sister Helen instead. Within the lamplit library, Helen confronts a corpse wearing Grell’s patrician face, the hilt of a Florentine stiletto protruding like an exclamation. The authentic Grell bursts in, misreads the tableau, believes his beloved Eileen blood-slicked, and—guided by some gallant death-drive—absconds to shoulder the blame. Enter Heldon Foye, criminologist and cartographer of guilt, whose magnifying glass warps under the heat of his secret love for Helen. Fingerprints bloom on the blade like dark orchids; hers. Duty and desire wrestle across Foye’s hawkish visage while Grell scours gaslit alleys for the true architect of this carnivalesque nightmare. The revelation arrives in the form of a woman whose gloved hand had redirected destiny: the cadaver is Harry Goldenberg, Grell’s profligate half-brother, a blackmailing gargoyle bleeding out after a tussle over extortionate letters. With the murderess unmasked yet unpunishable, the surviving players reassemble: Grell claims Eileen’s hand, Helen absolves Foye’s suspicion, and the dagger, wiped clean, hangs in the library like a silent rebuke to every certainty.
Synopsis
Eileen Meredith receives word from an "unknown friend" to call at the house of her fiancé, Robert Grell, where she will discover something of great importance. Unable to go, Eileen sends her sister Helen in her place. Helen enters the library where she finds a dead body resembling Grell. The real Grell then enters and, seeing Helen holding the dagger, mistakes her for Eileen and flees, hoping to cast suspicion on himself. Criminologist Heldon Foye takes the case. Foyle is in love with Helen, and when he finds her prints on the dagger, finds himself in a struggle between love and duty. Meanwhile, Grell locates the real murderer, a woman who clears up the mystery by explaining that the murdered man was Harry Goldenberg, her husband and Grell's dissolute brother who had come to blackmail him. In a struggle, she had stabbed Goldenberg, but because she had worn gloves, no fingerprints were visible on the dagger. The mystery thus resolved, Grell marries Eileen while Helen forgives Foyle for misjudging her.
