Paseo Place apartment building

The Paseo Place apartment building is more than the address at the center of the investigation: its enclosed courtyard, routes between street and alley, and swimming pool make it a setting where concealment and discovery depend on the details of ordinary space. The boys arrive at 402 Paseo Place at half past five, and over the following days the building becomes the only link they can identify among a series of unsettling incidents in the surrounding area.

Setting and Layout

The building first appears at twilight in late December, after Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews pass Paseo Place Park, St Jude’s Church, and the rectory. It looks private from the street. Garages occupy the street level, with two storeys of apartments above them; every window has its curtains carefully closed. This outwardly closed face gives the boys little to read about the residents or the life inside, even as their arrival places them within a neighborhood where the church and park are only steps away.

The numbered address is precise: Jupiter identifies it as 402 Paseo Place and notes that it is exactly half past five. That punctual arrival gives the building an immediate practical role as a destination for an investigation, rather than simply a backdrop. A flight of broad flagstone steps leads from beside the garages toward a gate and into the building’s interior. The boys encounter a man in a camel-coloured jacket coming down those steps, a brief passage that establishes how people can move between the street and the private side of the property without lingering in the open.

Routes Through the Property

The building’s less visible connections become clear when the boys leave by its back entrance. From the interior stairs they cross the courtyard and pass through a small passageway beside a laundry and a storeroom, then climb a few steps to an alley. There they see dustbins, garages, and the backs of buildings facing the next street. The route makes the apartment house part of a larger, connected block: its back passage opens onto an alley, and the building behind it, 329 Lucan Court, is directly behind Fenton Prentice’s apartment house.

That arrangement matters to the investigation because movement around the property is not confined to its formal front entrance. The boys can pass from the courtyard to the alley and approach the neighboring residence from behind the apartment building. They use that route to visit Charles Niedland after the burglary, then return with Fenton Prentice through the alley and courtyard. The same spaces serve as ordinary passageways and as links among separate locations under investigation; the building’s layout helps explain how nearby events can be geographically connected without yet proving who is responsible for them.

Courtyard and Investigation

The courtyard provides a shared outdoor space between the apartments and the pool. When the boys return with Prentice, Mrs Bortz is there picking a dead leaf off a plant. Prentice ignores her and takes the boys upstairs to his apartment, where Jupiter explains a plan to coat the ceramic drawer knobs with investigative ointment. The building’s residents and visitors therefore occupy overlapping spaces: the courtyard brings them into view of one another, while the private apartments above it offer places where the investigation can turn to less public methods.

The boys later take chairs beside the swimming pool and wait, acting on Jupiter’s belief that the person entering Prentice’s apartment lives in the building and saw them leave. The pool is not merely a feature admired in passing. Pete calls it impressive, and Bob notes its randomly arranged blue and gold tiles and reports that the water is heated. Those details, initially part of the courtyard’s ordinary appearance, become crucial to understanding how the stolen sculpture could have been hidden there without attracting notice.

A Cluster of Incidents

After several days of escalating events, Jupiter tells Prentice that they have known him scarcely three days, during which Mrs Bortz has entered his apartment and Jupiter has twice observed another intruder, the shadow. Prentice has also lost an irreplaceable work of art and received a ransom demand; meanwhile, a neighbor has been poisoned. Bob adds the assault on the church caretaker and Jupiter’s confinement in the church. Jupiter’s assessment is cautious but pointed: the incidents seem too coincidental, yet their only established connection is location, since they have happened in or near the building.

The building consequently concentrates uncertainty rather than resolving it at once. Alex Hassell calls the place jinxed after incidents involving Gwen Chalmers, Mrs Bortz, and John Murphy. Prentice instead traces the disruption to the burglary: things had been peaceful until the burglar ran through the courtyard three nights earlier. Jupiter draws a more practical inference from that starting point, concluding that the Carpathian Hound—and probably the person who stole it—is present. The courtyard’s position within the neighborhood turns a passing escape route into a clue about where the stolen object and its thief might remain.

The Pool and the Hidden Hound

The decisive discovery gives the courtyard pool its fullest significance. Jupiter dives and surfaces holding an object attached to a dangling string, then offers it to Fenton Prentice. It is the Carpathian Hound, a crystal sculpture about six inches tall: a heavily muscled dog with a square head, gold-rimmed eyes, gold flecks at its jowls, and a human skull between its feet. A length of gilt cord is tied around its middle.

Jupiter explains that the burglar did not need to enter the pool. The sculpture had been lowered to the bottom on its cord and released; against the pool’s random blue-and-gold tile pattern, the gold cord was difficult to see. The building’s most conspicuous shared amenity had thus also served as an effective hiding place. What first looked like a quiet, secluded apartment house becomes the point where the investigation’s spatial clues converge: the back route connects it to neighboring buildings, the courtyard gathers the residents and investigators, and the pool conceals the object that explains the burglary.