The Case of the Solid Key

by Anthony Boucher

  Norman puffed at his pipe a little harder than was necessary. “Possible,” he said. “Maybe even plausible, if we postpone the question of the door. But where’s your proof?”

  Fergus grinned ruefully. “I know. Proof. Proof.” He resumed his pacing, peering into every corner of the littered room. “Masks … Tin daggers … One leopardskin, badly moth-eaten … Any place else an outrageous assortment like this would be crawling with informative clews. But in a theatrical workshop …” He came back to the table which had been charred by the heat of the explosion. “And these bottles would be what he was mixing when it happened. There’s something else that worries me. Why was he so anxious to get good effects in that prologue? Usually he didn’t give a damn about staging. ‘This is a flesh mart,’ I heard him say once, ‘not a Theater Arts laboratory.’ And yet he slaved over these effects …”

  “I haven’t read Jordan’s play. Why did he need fire in the prologue?”

  “It’s a witches’ Sabbath scene. Depiction of the medieval concept of evil at large in the world. Then the play itself takes up the theme allegorically: no more demons in our skeptic world, but all hell looses just the same. Still Black versus White. And these fire effects were for the climax of the Sabbath. The scene sounded effective the way Andrews outlined it to me, but that’s not the sort of stuff Carruthers ever touched. And now …” He paused, his hand on one of the bottles of powder. Gently he lifted the bottle by the rim of its neck and carried it into a better light.

  “Look here,” he murmured gloatingly.

  Norman looked at the brown-red clot. “So?”

  Fergus whistled the tuneless memory of a jig. “So it was murder.” His chest expanded so under the yellow polo shirt that Norman was afraid for a moment that he would drum on it.

  “All right,” said Norman. “I’m as dumb as any Watson should be. How does that prove murder to you?”

  Fergus set down the bottle. “Hist! There. For years I’ve been wanting a good opportunity to say hist! and here it is.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “There’s somebody outside that door.”

  Lightly Fergus tiptoed to the door, but before he could open it it swung wide. There in the doorway stood Hilary Vane. The sun gleamed brightly on the revolver in his hand.

  “Outside,” said Hilary tersely. There was nothing of lavender about his voice now.

  Fergus looked at the revolver, smiled, and shrugged. “Come on, Norm.”

  Norman watched the taut face of the young actor with some apprehension, and decided it was best to follow. As they stepped out of the workshop, Fergus bent over and was busy for an instant at the lock. As he rose, he allowed a brief glimpse of a key in his hand.

  “Fennworth gave us the key when he went home,” he lied easily. “He couldn’t go in there again himself, and he wanted us to see if we could find Carruthers’ pocket notebook. Jackson didn’t see it, and it has some addresses Fennworth needs for business now.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Hilary frankly. “And I don’t believe anyone but the police has the right to be in a room where a man has just died.” He did not lower the revolver.

  Fergus looked away casually. “And how did you know a man had just died? You hadn’t been here when Mark Andrews left, and since then there’s been nobody here to tell you.”

  “I saw Betsy this morning. She lives near me and came over with the news. No, O’Breen, I can be accounted for easily enough. It’s you two that have some explaining to do.”

  “Can you be accounted for, now? So easily as all that? Can you explain why a man of your ability is wasting his time here? Can you explain why a man of your experience pretends to take Carruthers’ direction for gospel? Can you—?”

  “You don’t distract me, O’Breen. You’re going to tell me why you were snooping around in that workshop, and what—”

  “This is no place for melodrama,” Norman interposed. “There’s somebody coming.”

  “Oh no. I don’t fool so easy as that. I—”

  “You don’t want to scare the gentleman, do you?” Fergus asked. “Here. Give to Papa.” Calmly he grasped the revolver by the barrel, lifted it from Hilary’s hands, and dropped it in his pocket. “There, there,” he murmured, as Hilary began to splutter impotently, “Santa Claus’ll bring you another. And there is somebody coming.

  The somebody was a sleek and trim individual of rather Continental appearance, resulting partly from the cut of his clothes and the wax of his mustache, but even more from the glint in his eye and the twist to his lip—something like Joseph Schildkraut, Norman thought, or better yet … There was another resemblance that he could not quite place.

  This exotic gentleman’s semimilitary strides brought him sharply up to the group. There he paused, gave a swing or two to his short cane, and demanded, “Is this the Carruthers Little Theater?” The words were curt, clear, and clipped; the accent was predominantly Oxford, with Teutonic traces.

  “It was,” said Fergus.

  The visitor appeared not to notice the distinction in tense. “I believe you have an actress here named Plunk? Sarah Plunk, if I am correctly informed?”

  “She’s not here now.”

  “But she performs under the aegis of this theater, does she not? I wish to know when I might see her. Not personally, you understand, but professionally. I have heard such glowing accounts—But of course,” he interrupted himself as he saw their blank faces, “you do not know who I am.”

  “No,” said Fergus, without any notable enthusiasm.

  “Allow me. I am Erich Moser, formerly director of the Wiener Neueste Kunstbühne. Now that I am perforce far from my native land, I am eagerly in search of new talent.” He smiled, a brilliant and half-sinister smile with a great deal of upper-case Charm and very little lower-case.

  “The Wiener Neueste Kunstbühne,” Hilary repeated. “I don’t—”

  “You will please tell me,” the stranger went on commandingly, “when I may see Miss Plunk?”

  “Right now,” said Fergus, “she’s at Metropolis Pictures. Said something about a possible job there.”

  Herr Moser was perturbed. “At Metropolis? But surely that is not possible … When might I find her here again?”

  “God knows. Our director was killed in an accident last night.”

  The Viennese seemed to draw himself more tightly together. The light cane whipped at the air. “Mr. Carruthers? Killed?”

  “You stay and explain things to Herr Moser, Hilary. You seem to know plenty. And we’ve got things to do.”

  Quickly he led Norman off to the yellow roadster. Hilary and Erich Moser were left staring at each other.

  “Why did you shunt him off so?” Norman asked as they drove off. “He might do Sarah a lot of good.”

  “Know anything about him?” Fergus replied indirectly. “Hilary sounded as though he’d never heard of that outfit, and he knows the Continental theater pretty well.”

  “I know that face. I’ve seen it somewhere—probably in Theater Arts Monthly or such. But I can’t remember the name.”

  “Hm,” said Fergus. He dropped one hand from the wheel to the bulge in his pocket and seemed reassured by the touch. “How’d you like Hilary’s Big Bad Man act?”

  “Not very much. I doubt if I could ever develop a taste for having guns pointed at me.”

  “I never have,” Fergus admitted. “I might have been worried this time, if I hadn’t recognized the revolver. It’s a prop gun from backstage. Fires only blank cartridges.”

  Norman snorted. “And you let me grow a fine crop of goose flesh all for that! Then why the big disarming scene? What harm did it do if he did keep the gun?”

  “I want to show that gun to Andy,” said Fergus. “I’ve an idea he could tell us something interesting.”

  Chapter 9

  The first stop of the yellow roadster was at a drugstore, where Norman lost himself in the wonders of Supersuper Comics under the proprietor’s suspicious eye while
Fergus busied himself in the phone booth.

  When the young Irishman emerged, his step was even jauntier than usual. “The first move,” he announced as they got into the car, “may be labeled an unqualified success. I talked with Rafetti—the Southwestern National pays for a phone connection in his hospital room so’s they can keep in touch with him—and he thinks my taking over is a swell idea. He’s calling the head office now, and we’re to drop in there in a half-hour and see what breaks.”

  “And where next?”

  “I think a further small chat with that rising young officer, A. Jackson, is indicated at this point.”

  “He spoke of himself as A. Jackson,” Norman reflected. “Why this initial business? Why not just Andrew? I don’t call myself N. Harker.”

  “Because it isn’t Andrew. The boys all call him Andy, which is inevitable with that initial and the name Jackson, but on the official records he’s just plain A. Jackson.”

  “Which stands for?”

  “God only knows. It’s the one foul secret in his otherwise blameless life. Five’ll get you ten that if I ever learn what A. stands for I can blackmail any information I may ever want out of him. But in the meantime—”

  The barren waiting room at headquarters provided nothing so absorbing as Supersuper Comics. Norman read the reward posters through and was just starting on the announcements of civil-service examinations when Fergus finally came out of the inner office. He was whistling his tuneless jig again, and his pocket was no longer loaded with steel.

  “Well?” Norman asked.

  “A. Jackson is exceedingly interested in powder bottles with dried clots on them. So much so that he’s sending a man out to add this one to his collection. He also thinks that a key from a strange die should be traceable and that blank-cartridge prop guns are worth turning over to the fingerprint department.”

  “That’s nice. But would you mind a footnote or two? First, why should Hilary’s prints be so extra? Anybody around the theater might have been anyplace in that workroom at any time. If you should find his there, it wouldn’t prove a thing.”

  “Granted. But there was nothing amateurish about his descent on us, aside from his choice of weapon. And that must have been sheer necessity plus a slight contempt for my intelligence. He handled that pistol like a man that’s used to death between his fingers. None of your amateur’s ticklish hesitancy. So I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to see if the department had ever run on to those prints before.”

  “Do you think that effete young esthete is a gunman? Nonsense!”

  “You are,” Fergus muttered as he started the car, “the most ungoddamnedencouraging Watson a man was ever cursed with. Do you ever think of opening up your rosy lips and gasping, ‘Marvelous, O’Breen!’? Hell no; you just sit there with a Ned Sparks dead pan and grunt, ‘Nonsense!’ Such a Watson I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

  “You asked for it. But go on and tell me about the clotted bottle.”

  “All right. Look: according to the accident theory, Carruthers mixes his powders, they explode, he falls backward, cracks his skull open, and expires. Fine. But that way he never touches those bottles after the bleeding starts. Now one of the bottles sports a clot of dried but fairly fresh blood. According to what may ring down the annals of crime as the O’Breen Hypothesis, somebody with the striking and unusual cognomen of X smashed Rupert’s skull for him and then mixed the powders to produce the ‘accident.’ That way X handles the bottles after the skull-splitting, and might reasonably be supposed to have a spot of blood around him somewheres.” Fergus paused. “Well, is it still nonsense?”

  “No. I won’t go that far. But I’m still not saying, ‘Marvelous, O’Breen!’ Mightn’t Carruthers have cut himself earlier in his work?”

  “Sure. And he might have had a nosebleed, like the statue in Castle of Otranto. Anything goes. But this is an indication, and indicative enough to make Andy pay a little attention. For the moment, that’s enough.”

  The office of the Southwest National Insurance Company was beyond doubt the dullest of Norman’s waiting stations. Here there was nothing to read but trade journals, composed half of unintelligible statistics and half of all too intelligible messages of inspiration on how to win friends and influence premiums.

  The morning’s beer began to have its effect. Not poppy nor mandragora can have the ministering power of much beer early in the day. Norman’s head sank forward, jerked back, sank, jerked, sank, and stayed sunk.

  Maureen O’Breen was offering him fifty thousand dollars if he would maintain absolute secrecy as to the identity of Herr Erich Moser, who had stolen a pair of false teeth and was using them to evade identification by a Gestapo inspector named A. Schildkraut, when Hilary Vane burst in waving a bottle which dripped blood at every pore. Lewis Jordan protested firmly that blood was an enemy to man, but Carol, who was quite naked and well worth it, took the bottle and bathed her breasts in its contents. She then tried to drink it, but spat it out when she discovered that it was only sherry after all. Fran Owen took the bottle off to a corner to kill it, but it had now changed back to blood. Mark Andrews warned them that there was no rehearsal because Fennworth had locked the auditorium from the inside, so they all fell to dancing to the jig which Fergus was whistling …

  “Now this,” said Fergus, breaking off his halfmusic, “is in the best Watsonian tradition. Symboliclike. Not only mentally asleep, but physically too.”

  Norman blinked helplessly at the insurance office. “I had the damnedest dream,” he muttered.

  “Did it solve the case?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I’m afraid the creative activity of the subconscious is overrated. But come on—or how are you at somnambulism?”

  “I’m awake enough now. What happened in there?”

  “I saw our Mr. Ivers. He’s mildly doubtful—it’s an unheard-of procedure and, my dear young man, you should realize that there is no precedent for such an action, but in view of the peculiar circumstances … Anyway, I finally talked him out of five dollars a day expenses on a ten-day minimum, which is chicken feed; but if I can establish facts which void the policy, I get a bonus which nobody could mistake for hay.”

  “And what’s next?”

  “In view of my newly acquired professional position,” said Fergus jauntily, “I think an interview is indicated with the surviving policy holder. And by the way—it was double indemnity.”

  Fergus was relatively quiet as the yellow roadster drove through Griffith Park and on into the comfortably expensive residential district beyond. “You know,” he said at last, “I’m a little afraid of Lewis Jordan.”

  “Afraid of him? I’m afraid for him, if you like—afraid for anybody so pure in heart tangled up in the messy web of the Carruthers Little Theater.”

  “Yes. I wonder how much Rupert was nicking him for? The saints know he wasn’t producing The Soul Has Two Garments for any altruistic reasons. He must have known it was bad, and I can’t see Carruthers becoming such a convert to quiet idealism that he had to spread its message to the world. But I repeat, I’m afraid of Jordan. I think it’s something the way primitive people feel about idiots: their values aren’t ours, their minds don’t work the same way, so they must be something … well, nonhuman. Supernatural, if you will. You see, Lewis Jordan is just about the only good person I’ve ever known. I mean good with a positive and sainted goodness, not just the absence of the more extreme evils which is as far as most of us ever get.”

  “And yet you’re coming out here to quiz him about a murder.”

  They had left the expensive homes now and were on the dusty mountain road which might have been a hundred miles from civilization. “People say,” Fergus observed, “that routine is dull and stifling. But here’s a point for the opposition: follow routine long enough, and the damnedest things’ll happen to you, like grilling a saint as a murder suspect.”

  The perfect little house was again bright in the sun. Nansen was once mor
e snoozing on the doorstep. But Norman had no hopes of another afternoon of ideal serenity. Through the open window he could see Lewis Jordan approaching the door. The old man’s bronzed face was frowning and preoccupied, but it lit up—one might have thought with relief—when he saw who his visitors were.

  “Mr. O’Breen! And Mr. Harker! Please come in. I had hardly hoped for the pleasure of your company so soon again.”

  The room was somehow subtly altered, Norman thought as he seated himself in a solidly comfortable wooden chair, fashioned by Jordan’s own hands. The picture before his eyes did not quite jibe with that in his memory.

  “Tea, gentlemen?” Jordan was asking. “A trifle early, perhaps, but— Or a glass of sherry? I am afraid my establishment does not run to anything stronger.”

  “No thanks,” said Fergus. He seemed unusually ill at ease. “We can’t stay long.”

  “Then at least sit down for a moment and be comfortable.”

  “I’ll just pace a bit, if you don’t mind. Look, sir. That was damned decent of you to straighten out Betsy’s trouble like that.”

  Jordan smiled. “Why should I not? I have some money left from my days of prominence. My life here costs almost nothing. And even though, as I was fumblingly expounding to Mr. Harker the other day, I am trying now to work through words rather than deeds, a small deed never comes amiss.”

  “Have you …” Fergus paused and took much longer than necessary to find and light a cigarette. “Have you been to the theater today?”

  Lewis Jordan bent over the vivid pepper plant on the window sill and seemed greatly concerned as to whether it needed watering. “No. No, I haven’t.”