“When I woke up it was morning and I was in bed. I thought: Thank God, it’s all been a horrible dream. I dressed, woke Beryl up, and went down to make breakfast. Mr. Woolfolk wasn’t anywhere in the house and when I looked outside for him I saw those footprints that led to the Music Box. That’s where he was. He wouldn’t have stayed out here all night, unless—I knew what had happened, but I was too terrified to go and look. And then Verl came …”
Banner frowned. “When did Woolfolk die?”
Verl answered: “The police say about four o’clock in the morning—four hours after it’d stopped snowing.”
“And the weapon used?”
“The old horse pistol that was kept in the stable.”
“Have they found it?”
“They searched the house from top to bottom first, before they did find it. The murderer had laid a stick across the chimney stack and the gun was hanging halfway down on the inside tied to a string.”
Banner heard a thin voice pipe up behind his chair. “You should see the dog now. I painted him blue.”
Banner swiveled his big head. The child was staring at him with blank green eyes as if they were painted on a wooden face. Two rat-tails of carroty hair hung down over her scrawny shoulders. The pale-skinned arms had freckles sprinkled on them and her bloodless lips were chapped.
Ora had reached the limit of her endurance. She lifted her voice shrilly. “Beryl! I told you to stay in bed!”
“I won’t. I tore up the bed. You’ll have to make it over.” She stared steadily at Banner. “I don’t like you. You’re fat and filthy and you can’t play the piano.”
Banner said sweetly to Ora: “Does Snookums know about Daddy?”
“Yes, we told her,” said Ora.
“She doesn’t seem very grieved,” said Verl.
“Let her stay up if she wants to.” Banner plowed his hand into one of the roomy kangaroo pockets of his coat and took out a paper-wrapped candy bar. He held it up. “Butterscotch,” he said. “It melts in your mouth. I would’ve given it to you, tadpole, if you’d wiggled off to bed. But since you’d rather stay up—” He gave a titanic shrug.
She watched sullenly while he returned the butterscotch to his pocket. Then she sat on a footstool and appeared to be reconsidering the situation.
Verl’s mind was tinkering with something. He said: “Ora, has the radio aerial been fixed yet?”
“No,” said Ora listlessly.
“What happened to it?” said Banner.
Beryl squirmed on the footstool. “I broke it yesterday,” she confessed.
“You broke it!” said Banner.
Beryl shrugged her thin shoulders. “Sure. I was up on the roof, breaking off shingles, when I thought I’d climb the aerial. Is it any business of yours?”
Banner scowled. “Yep. I investigate that under the head of monkey business.”
Ora was sitting looking wide-eyed at Verl. “How did you know the aerial was broken? I never told—”
“Yes, you did. You told me about it when you saw me yesterday in town.”
“I never saw you yesterday!” she said strongly.
“Why, Ora, you most certainly did. You dropped into The Griffon editorial office and asked me if I wanted to go with you to the all-Tschaikovsky afternoon concert at the school hall. And we went. And you liked the Nutcracker Suite.”
“Verl! Stop ragging me! I was right here all afternoon. I stayed in and cleaned the house.”
“See here, Ora. You spent at least two full hours with me.”
“That’s a lie!”
Verl checked an angry retort. “Ora,” he said tightly, “I can prove it. Several other people saw you too, my father among them. Why should we all lie about it?”
She was near frantic tears. “But, Verl, I never left the house. I remember what I did all afternoon. I never went out!”
“Someone was masquerading as you, I suppose?” Verl shook his head. “No, it was you. We’ve grown up together. Nobody could pull off a deception like that.”
Beryl perked up accusingly. “You walk in your sleep.”
“People don’t act that wide-awake in their sleep,” argued Verl. “I tell you, Ora, you were awake and you were with me.”
“I won’t listen to any more.” Ora stood up. “Beryl, for the last time, are you going to lie down?”
Beryl looked questioningly at Banner’s pocket. “I might go if—”
Banner chuckled. “Hunky-dory.” He put the butterscotch in her hand. “Off to blanket class.”
Beryl, pacified, left with Ora.
Banner said sternly: “What snicklefritz needs is to get the tar whaled outta her.”
Verl flung out his arms and snapped: “Why should she deny being with me? I know I’m not lying.”
“Mebbe she ain’t either,” said Banner cryptically. “Does anybody like Beryl?”
“Her father did. God knows why. She’s a heller. She spies on people and tells nothing but lies. Breaking the aerial was just another one of those things. She takes showers with all her clothes on. She rings the dinner bell before time. She lets all the horses out of the stable. She floods the garden. She puts heavy books in her pillow-slip when she wants a pillow fight. She says Ora is loony.”
Verl broke off suddenly.
Banner glanced sideways at a slight sound and saw a strange woman standing in the doorway. It was Caroline Spires. Caroline was totally different from her dowdy sister. The figure was thickening (fat with sin, as Banner liked to put it), but it was dressed in the latest of fashions. She had strawy blonde hair, fresh from a cold perm-wave and a little too much pancake makeup on. Banner had a feeling that in spite of her placid exterior she could be a vixen when aroused.
“Hello, Caroline,” said Verl, with some surprise. “I want you to meet Senator Banner.”
Caroline teetered in on very high heels and used the properly sorrowful smile for the occasion as she shook his hand. “How do you do?” she enunciated.
“Meetcha,” said Banner.
“Seeing you standing there, Caroline,” went on Verl, “gave me a turn. Ora said that last night you weren’t able to lift a finger. You’ve made a very rapid recovery.”
A crease of annoyance came and went between her penciled brows. “Oh, no matter how I felt, I couldn’t stay away at a time like this.” She took a package wrapped in holiday tissue from her handbag. “I know that Caspar would have wanted me to bring this.” She let her lower lip tremble. “Who knows? In another few weeks I might have been Mrs. Woolfolk.”
Banner thought: Nice acting, baby.
He said: “You felt that Beryl needed you for a mother.”
“I should say not,” said Caroline forcefully. “She’s ungovernable. I wouldn’t feel safe living in the same house with that brat. I wanted her sent away to a school. I told him so. I wouldn’t marry him under any other condition.”
“Woolfolk visited you at your sick-bed last night. He left near ten. Didja get up any time after that?”
She smiled archly. “I hardly dared. My nurse looked in every half hour to see if I was asleep. Surely you don’t think I did it. I’m not one that’s likely to kill a goose with golden eggs.” She twisted the wrapped gift over in her manicured hands. “Excuse me. I want to put this under the tree.” Before she turned away she added: “What a horrible Christmas!”
They listened to her heels tap away in the hall.
Verl said: “If she’d had her way with Woolfolk, she’d be mistress of Falconridge now. Lately she’s been afraid that Woolfolk might get too interested in Ora. There’s a rivalry between those two sisters, but it doesn’t show on the surface. I don’t think she was sick for one minute. This sudden recovery proves it. She did it to keep Woolfolk at her bedside morning and night. Finally he would have married her out of sheer sympathy.”
Banner studied him with his shrewd baby-blue eyes. “Are you in love with Ora? Or vice versa?”
Verl looked genuinely surprised, then he grinned. �
�That’s funny. I never thought of that before.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Senator. We’ve known each other all our lives. We’re good friends. But I doubt that Ora will ever marry anyone. She’s a born and bred spinster. Since she was a tot, Caroline put the fear of men in her.” He paused. “There’s that interesting sidelight on Woolfolk that I was telling you about. Come into the library. I’ll show you.”
Banner followed him in.
Three of the room’s four walls were banked with heavy books.
Verl waved his hand at them. “Abnormal psychology—every last one of them.” He handled a volume. “Most of these subjects are old familiars with me. I majored in psych at Holy Cross.”
Banner ran his eye over the titles: Paranoia. Mania. Melancholy. Hallucination. Hypochondria. Sadism. Masochism. Lycanthropy.
There was a volume lying closed on a square table. Banner leafed through it and stopped at a chapter headed Schizophrenia. There was a marginal note in a fine masculine hand: There’s no doubt she has a split personality.
Banner snapped the book shut. To whom had Woolfolk referred? Ora? Beryl? Caroline? Or someone else?
Banner trotted across the library and laid the book on a victrola top. “What kinda gun did the police find hanging down the chimney?”
“I told you. The old horse pistol. A single loader.”
“When the police searched the house, they didn’t find another gun?”
“Another one? No. Why should they? It was the horse pistol that killed Woolfolk.”
Without answering, Banner galumphed across the carpet and out of the library. He went into the dining room. Verl followed.
The Christmas fir was there. The gifts underneath its tinseled boughs were undisturbed. Beryl, the little brat, had hung some of her soiled underwear on the tree. Caroline was nowhere in sight.
Banner plumped down on his well-padded knees and sorted out all the packages meant for Woolfolk. He ripped open the smaller ones like a ghoulish vandal. It wasn’t until he reached the fifth package. When he tore it open a small black automatic fell out and clattered on the parquet floor.
“The devil!” cried Verl. “How’d that get there?”
Banner’s head shot around, his eyes probing. “You’ve seen it before?”
“Yes. It’s Woolfolk’s.”
“Tell Ora and Caroline to come to the library.”
“But, Senator, what’s the gun doing there?”
“That’s where Ora hid it and that’s the one place the police neglected to look.”
“Ora!”
“Find her and Caroline! Skeedaddle!”
Verl ran upstairs.
Banner stuck a pencil into the pistol-barrel and picked it up. He pranced into the library and looked thoughtfully at the victrola. Then he opened the records cabinet and hunted. Finally he held up a record to the dull light from the window. He chuckled. The label said: Selections from La Somnambula. Pianist, Caspar Woolfolk.
He heard the other three coming.
“Ora,” he said to her in his bullfrog voice as she came faltering in, “your story didn’t fuse. If you’d walked out to the li’l house on the lawn in your sleep, you’d’ve left tracks in the snow. And when you told me how you killed Woolfolk you used the word shots.”
“I did,” she said frantically. “I kept shooting over and over. I don’t know how many times.”
“Woolfolk was shot only once. He was killed with a single loader. You can’t fire the horse pistol more than once without jamming in another round.”
Ora stared. “You mean I didn’t shoot—”
Banner held up the black automatic. “This’s the gun you shot at him with.”
“Then I killed him after all,” she cried in bewildered despair.
Banner chuckled. “With blanks!”
“Blanks!” exploded Verl. “What kind of games were they playing last night?”
“Mighty deep ones,” said Banner seriously. “Woolfolk was hipped on psychology. What started him off we’ll go into later. Woolfolk tried an ignoble experiment on Ora. Would she—hypnotized—be compelled to commit murder!”
“Hypnotism!” Verl snapped his fingers with elation.
“Sure,” said Banner. “Woolfolk babbled about the magic mirror, Carl Saxtus’s zinc button, and Father Hell’s magnet. It’s all hypnotism!”
“I was hypnotized?” said Ora dully. “Oh no. No. Mr. Woolfolk never hypnotized me. He couldn’t do that against my will. Nobody can.”
“You walk in your sleep, duck,” said Banner. “Somnambulism’s the nearest thing to a hypnotic trance. Woolfolk would meet you and gently suggest—”
“He saw me—he saw me in my night clothes!” She was mortified. This was worse than being accused of murder.
Banner grinned and continued: “Bug doctors call it post-hypnotic suggestion. You tell a person to do something the next day and to forget they’ve done it.”
“That’s why she didn’t remember being with me in town yesterday afternoon,” said Verl.
“Yass. At his suggestion, Ora, you put notations in your diary. He was experimenting with you, as I said. He was conditioning your mind for a pseudo murder. He wanted to see how far a gentle-natured woman, like yourself, would go. And he’d selected himself as the victim. Finally Woolfolk was ready for the experiment. He told you to come where you could hear him playing.”
“I remember that,” she said.
Caroline Spires, in the background, was drinking it all in greedily, not making a sound.
Banner said: “Last night, Ora, you woke up about 3:30, under post-hypnotic compulsion. The little black automatic, loaded with blanks, had been laid on your night table by your bed by Woolfolk himself. You couldn’t help but see it when you woke. You took the gun in your hand and started downstairs. You could hear Woolfolk’s arrangement of La Somnambula. But the music wasn’t coming from outside the house. It came from right here in the library. Woolfolk had considered the cold and the snow and your scanty nightdress. So he duplicated the Music Box here in the library. All he needed was piano music and a piano. He built up this square table with books and threw the large Spanish shawl over all of it. You thought it was the piano, cuz the shawl always covered the piano. The music you heard was from one of Woolfolk’s own recordings being played on the victrola.” He jabbed a dynamic forefinger at it. “He turned it off when he heard you coming. He rose up, then goaded you till you fired the harmless automatic at him. That’s how you murdered Woolfolk.”
She sobbed with relief.
“But somebody did kill Woolfolk in the Music Box!” cried Verl.
“I’m coming to that. After Ora fled back to her room, he put the record and books away—probably with mixed emotions over what’d just occurred—and threw the Spanish shawl over his arm. He went to the door. It was nearly four o’clock. It’d stopped snowing some time before. Carrying the shawl, he walked across the snow to the Music Box, leaving the only tracks.”
The others were breathlessly silent.
“The murderer was waiting in the little house—had been waiting there for hours …”
“Ah,” said Verl. It was as soft as a prayer.
Caroline cleared her throat raspingly. “How did the murderer know that Caspar was going out there at all?”
“Cuz,” said Banner, “the murderer overheard Woolfolk telling Ora to come where he would be playing. And where else would that be but the Music Box where the piano is?” There was a light dawning in Verl’s eyes, but Banner went on evenly: “Woolfolk came in and arranged the shawl and sheet music on the piano, putting everything back in its proper place, y’see. The murderer was hiding behind the grandfather’s clock, the horse pistol cocked, the fingers that held it stiff from waiting. As Woolfolk sat down on the bench to run his fingers over the keys, the murderer stepped out into view and fired. Woolfolk, a bullet in his skull, fell forward onto the piano.”
“My God,” breathed Ora, her hand fluttering at her white throat.
; Verl was excited. “But now you’ve got the murderer trapped out there!”
“For the moment. To walk back across the snow would leave distinctive, incriminating footprints. There had to be another way.” Banner looked into Verl’s luminous eyes. “You told me the answer at the orphanage, in your first recital of your discovery of the crime. There’s only one way out.”
“I?” said Verl incredulously. “I know?”
Banner nodded grimly. “You said that when you came into the little house the day was so gloomy that you had to switch on the light. Later I also called attention to the tipped-over table lamp. That means electricity!”
“No, I can’t—” puzzled Verl.
“And electricity means wires!”
“Oh,” said Verl, like a deflated balloon.
“The insulated wire runs at a long slant up from under the eaves to the cross-armed pole thirty feet away. You can reach the wire from one of the windows. It ain’t slippy. It hasn’t been cold enough for ice. More poles carry the wire across the snow to the trampled road, where all footprints’re lost.” Banner shrugged. “That’s all there is to know.”
Caroline whispered: “Then the murderer is someone who would have no trouble climbing. Like a little monkey.”
“Yass,” said Banner gloomily. “Someone who can climb things like radio aerials. That should’ve given you an idea. A tomboy—”
Ora had her hands up to her mouth in shocked horror.
Someone screamed in the hall and dashed in furiously to spit and tear at Banner.
“He was going to send me away!” Beryl screeched at him. “I heard him tell Caroline! He wanted to marry her and send me away! And he liked Ora even better than me!”
Ora sat horrified listening to a child’s confession of murder.
Later a psychiatrist said to Banner: “So Woolfolk took up psychology to study his own child’s case. His layman’s diagnosis was correct. She is schizophrenic.”
Another psychiatrist interrupted: “I think, in this particular case, that dementia praecox is the more precise term.”
Banner waggled his big speckled hand at both of them and grunted: “Gentlemen, she was just plain nuts.”
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Page 44
