Gavigan sat down, took a pipe from his pocket, and began to fill it. He relaxed for the first time since he’d arrived at dawn. “I’ve a blanked good notion to book you for resisting an officer in the performance of his duties.”
“But, Great Scott! Don’t you want to know who killed Linda and Floyd? I notice you didn’t arrest any of them for murder, except Lamb; and those weren’t the right murders, or were they?”
“No. But I can’t go wrong. One of them did it. There won’t be any more pitched battles around here, like tonight. I can take time out now to sit down and think.”
“Ross,” Merlini said, “he doesn’t even ask to hear my solution. He doesn’t think that I—”
“I doubt it,” Gavigan said; “but I’ll listen. Only, I warn you, if you’ve cooked up something with mirrors and trap doors and disguised identities and—and if you bring on any more—bah—acrobats, I’ll—All right. Who set the fire? Who killed Linda, Floyd, and Watrous?”
Merlini’s half dollar appeared at his finger tips and then was gone again. “Lamb killed Watrous, but he didn’t put the poison in Rappourt’s capsule, and he didn’t type that diving chart. That doesn’t sound like the Boss does it?”
“No. It’s not quite his style, I’ll admit that.”
“Besides, you remember that it was Lamb who told us he saw Rappourt pass the capsule to Linda. The murderer would certainly never have offered that piece of information. And if he had seen it happen, he’d have tried to prevent it. Lamb is definitely out.”
“Well, get on with it. Rappourt, Arnold, Brooke. Which one of them did it?”
Merlini simply said, “No. I can eliminate them all.”
I should have expected that from him, but I hadn’t. Suddenly, the tension in that room stretched and vibrated like a taut steel wire.
Together, Inspector Gavigan, Burt, and myself turned and stared at the only other people left in the room.
Sigrid Verrill looked at Merlini with wide eyes, one hand at her throat. Dr. William Gail got slowly to his feet.
Chapter Twenty-One:
HOCUS-POCUS
DR. GAIL SAID NOTHING, but I could see that a lot of fast thinking was going on behind those shrewd gray eyes.
Sigrid cried, “Merlini! You can’t—”
Gavigan said, “You two were lying about being in the library together! One of you went out and fired at Rappourt. Dr. Gail, I—”
And Merlini said quickly, “I warn you, Inspector, if you make any further arrests without knowing, as I don’t think you do, exactly how that fire was set, why it was set, and who knew enough to have a reason for setting it, you’ll be shooting in the dark. Unless—”
“So. You don’t think it was Gail.” The Inspector’s blue eyes were disillusioned and coldly suspicious.
“Unless,” Merlini insisted, “you can explain the phantom bullet that magically penetrates steel and concrete, you may very well make a mistake—and even if you shouldn’t, you won’t have a case, unless you can explain the phantom bullet that—”
“Stop imitating a cracked phonograph record,” Gavigan snarled. “Do you have a case?”
“I do. Will you sit down and relax?”
Gavigan roared, “No!”
Merlini spoke to Gail and the girl. “If this over-zealous police officer arrests either of you before I’m quite finished with what I have to say—and if he snaps his handcuffs on the wrong person, I’ll contribute the services of my lawyer free of charge to aid in a thundering big suit for false arrest. I will have attention!”
The Inspector scowled mightily, sat down, and took a shiny blue-steel automatic from his pocket. He didn’t point it at anyone, but it was obvious that when the time came only the smallest twist of the wrist was going to be necessary.
“I arrested those others,” he grumbled, “so there’d be no more attempts at murder, and now you spring this! You want to sit there and show off. Well, talk, dammit! But if anyone in this room makes one single funny motion, something sudden and unpleasant is going to happen!”
Merlini, seated in the center of the large davenport, leaned back, his long legs outstretched. He appeared as calm and unwary as a well-fed sleeping cat. Yet he was about to raise the curtain on some subtle feat of mental hocus-pocus, some “now you see it—now you don’t” display of cerebral sleight-of-hand.
“Before anything unpleasant does happen,” he suggested quietly, “drinks all around might lessen the tension in this room. I’ll have straight Italian vermouth, Burt. I’m going to need it before this is over. Miss Verrill?”
The Doctor had an arm around her shoulder. She pressed his hand once, then moved to a chair, and sat down. “I’ll—Scotch please and—and not too much soda.”
“Doctor?”
“Nothing, thanks. I want to hear this solution. I don’t think I’m going to like it.”
“Inspector?”
“Merlini, for the last time, if you don’t—”
“All right. Stop nagging at me. I never saw a less receptive audience. However—suppose we begin at the beginning.” He looked lazily at the ceiling. “The difficulty in this case has arisen largely because our criminal committed—er—his or her—there’s that pronoun difficulty again. Inspector, may I, for the sake of brevity, use the masculine without your initiating any of those unpleasant actions?”
Gavigan grunted faintly, eyed Burt, who was busy at the liquor cabinet, and said, “I’ll have Scotch, straight.”
“Our criminal then,” Merlini continued, “committed his murders while surrounded, nearly swamped, in fact, by criminals and potential criminals, and against a background of smooth, expert; dirty work. These people, in order to avoid their own detection, found it necessary to cover up after him. It’s a device to remember. Though it does have its dangers.”
He nodded his thanks as Burt passed him his drink, held it in his hand, looked at it speculatively a moment, and went on.
“The situation was this: Floyd and Arnold both hated Linda with understandable fervor because, as Arnold said, she was hell on wheels to live with and because she had a tight hold on what they considered their rightful share of the Skelton fortune. And Linda, with a disproportionate number of left-handed kinks under her hat, rubbed that fact in. She even went so far as to wave a will in their faces which, except for the trifling technical bequest of one dollar each, made no mention of either of them. She taunted them with the fact that she had willed the Skelton millions to—Miss Sigrid Verrill.”
Sigrid’s glass dropped from her fingers, and the liquid splashed out across the carpet. Dr. Gail was motionless.
“Mix her another, Burt,” Merlini said and, without pause, went quickly on. “Arnold, as you know, with yet another, even stronger motive, planned eventually to kill her. While Floyd, unable to suffer lack of funds, planned to get some of his own back. He had invested what little patrimony he had in treasure hunts that never panned out. He decided that Linda should play angel for the next, with himself on the receiving end. I can imagine he thought about that for a long time before he stumbled on a practical method of selling her such a bill of goods. But he found it—Madame Eva Rappourt.
“He met her when they were both taken to the cleaners by the Caribbean Salvage Corporation, a concern that could stand—or perhaps might not stand investigation. You should look into it, Inspector. If it was a phony, I’m beginning to suspect that Ira Brooke might just possibly have had a finger in the pie.
“Floyd realized that, if there was one sure-fire method of swindling Linda, it was by the spirit-message route. He didn’t know whether Rappourt could be ‘had,’ but he worked on the almost-axiomatic assumption that, crossing a medium’s palm with a good-sized cut of $8,000,000 will buy just about any spirit phenomena one could desire. He didn’t tell her he was after the salvage money, you notice. He told her his Hussar story—and she fell for it, as she’d fallen for the Caribbean Salvage Corporation. Anyone can be fooled at the other man’s game. Lamb, the ex-head of a millio
n-dollar criminal combine, was hooked on a confidence game—and is that going to burn him up when he realizes it! I knew a world-famous magician—you’d recognize the name at once—who earned a respectable fortune fooling people and promptly sank it all in a nearly nonexistent gold mine. ‘Old Smoke’ Morrisey, perhaps the most important figure in the history of American gambling, made himself $1,500,000 in 20 years of skinning-house and casino operation, and then lost most of it in Wall Street. Even the slicker can be a sucker. Rappourt had fooled a lot of learned investigating committees in dark rooms, but—”
Irritably Gavigan cut-in.
“Do you have to document your argument so damn thoroughly?”
Merlini, twisting his glass in his fingers and gazing into the liquid as into a crystal ball, continued imperturbably, “Rappourt fell for his story though she did bounce a bit. She’d just dropped $75,000 and she figured that this time she might as well hold out an ace or two. That bright and shining $8,000,000 might be there in the river as Floyd asserted, but she was going to see that the salvage money was not expended in any vain attempt to get it. Floyd was double-crossing her and, quite independently, she laid plans to double-cross him! She brought in Glass Eye George to play the part of Ira Brooke, submarine expert and inventor, suggest a lot of fancy reasons why at least $200,000 would be needed to salvage the treasure, and help her produce spirit phenomena. But Floyd didn’t know that. Floyd thought he was a bona-fide expert and congratulated himself because his Hussar changed-location theory got by so nicely. Of course, he didn’t object if the salvage ante was raised; that was okay with him, since that’s what he was really after. Floyd, the amateur swindler, placed his con-game in the hands of a couple of experts—though not the sort he thought!”
Gavigan said, “It sounds good, but how have you managed to read Floyd’s mind after death? You been getting spirit messages, too?”
“Yes, I have. I’ll produce a few shortly, genuine ones, that will corroborate everything I’ve said. But I’ll have you know that I deduced those facts, too, believe it or not. It wasn’t too difficult. Counterfeit coins and stolen relics obviously indicated a swindle and made it only too apparent that Floyd himself never really believed his Hussar theory. If he really thought he had located the genuine article, he’d never have jeopardized a possible $8,000,000 haul by introducing faked evidence. That could only mean he was after the salvage money itself. Also, if he knew that Ira was a phony expert he’d certainly never have even considered making a dangerous 110-foot dive with that gentleman as his topside assistant. Thus, since he thought Ira the real thing, it meant that he must be planning to blow with the salvage money, double-crossing Rappourt and Ira; and, conversely, his unawareness of Ira’s faked status meant that Rappourt and Brooke must be crossing him up.
“But didn’t we decide,” Gavigan objected, “that the murderer would never have thought of his fake-diving-chart murder method unless he knew Ira was not what he pretended to be? If Rappourt and Brooke kept that fact even from Floyd, who the hell else—? Was Watrous in on the con-game too?”
“No. The Colonel was no swindler. We did decide the murderer must have known Ira was a fake; the murderer did know; and once you tumble to how he knew you’ve solved the case. Think about it.”
Without having tasted it, Merlini leaned forward and placed his drink on the floor between his feet. He took a cigarette from his pocket. Burt, standing quietly beside my chair, tossed him a paper of matches. When the cigarette was glowing, Merlini went on.
“Then Mr. Charles Lamb appeared on the scene, and the plot thickened. He came out here with his two guns, looking for an island to settle on because he had a persecution complex that sprang, not like Linda’s neurosis, from an imaginary fear, but from a very real one. Lamb was a thorn in my deductions throughout. I realized that his aversion for the police, indicated by his cutting the phone, scuttling the boats, and blackjacking the Colonel, meant that he had something to hide. But until you got the goods on him I didn’t know that he was scared pink that some day Mike the Weasel or Gatling Gun Joe, or whatever their names are, would catch up with him. He wanted to have a good open view of all the approaches. A nice quiet retreat with a moat around it. I rather think, if Dr. Gail will permit me to enter the diagnostic field for a moment, that that was also the reason for those little pink pills of his. He had, for business purposes, acted the part of a stony-faced, ruthless killer and his emotions, securely bottled up for so long, simply played merry hell with his digestive system.…Do you realize that this case might well be titled The Great Pirate Murder Mystery? It began with the notorious Captain Skelton, and it ends with the just-as-notorious Captain Lamb, First Mate Rappourt, and Second Mate Brooke—pirates all, modern versions. The conspirators didn’t know about Lamb’s reputation. I thought they looked unnaturally pale around the gills tonight when you told them, Inspector. They thought he was a hard-headed business man, a retired broker. And they weren’t too sure, at first, that their spirit hocus-pocus would go down. But he wasn’t a broker and he was a not-particularly-cultivated Corsican, and superstitious. The séance phenomena impressed him—with what he had on his conscience, I’m surprised it didn’t scare the living daylights out of him! Anyway, Floyd, Rappourt, and Brooke decided that he was just another lamb ready for the shearing—sorry—that crept up on me.
“But, at the last when it was too late, when they got down to the subject of cold cash, his business sense flashed a red light. He wanted to send down a disinterested diver—not Floyd, as was immediately suggested—for a preliminary survey. He wanted some really tangible evidence. Linda, seeing his hesitation, held out, too.
“Something had to be done at once. They did it. They stalled him off until they could plant some evidence. They stole the Hussar relics and placed an order for the counterfeit guineas. They were so close to $200,000 that their mouths watered; and, if Ira’s pretty-looking blueprints and his model suction salvage apparatus weren’t enough in the way of confidence-game props, they’d supply what was.
“And now—because of a certain motive which will be discussed shortly—the murderer went into action.
“He knew that Ira was a fake expert, and he knew that Floyd was going to dive and salt the site of the wreck. He typed the diving chart. The method wasn’t sure fire, of course. Either Floyd or Ira might possibly suspect the chart—but he took that chance rather than resort to any first-hand and possibly bloody murder method; He couldn’t bring himself to that. Even if the chart was noticed, Floyd could only suspect Brooke or Rappourt—which would be all right, too. One of his motives was to smash the con-game. If the conspirators quarreled—that was fine. He might not even have to murder.
“While, if it did work—as it did—Brooke would find himself in a spot. That would be another monkey wrench in the swindle machinery—Brooke, fearing exposure, because of Floyd’s death while diving, could be expected to take it on the lam. But, as it happens, Brooke doesn’t scare easily. He is a professional and knows his job. He promptly put his customary con-man’s ingenuity to work. Floyd had gone in to New York, before diving, to get the relics from Ira’s room and to make it appear he wasn’t on the island. He went in again, afterward, in order to shuck the heavy underwear necessary for diving at that depth and to return legitimately via the water taxi. But when he failed to come back, Ira began to worry and sneaked in to check up. He found Floyd dead in the hotel room. That wouldn’t do at all. He had to think fast. He moved the body, took some very clever and direct steps to prevent any immediate identification, and then, later, some others to prevent any suspicion that Floyd, though missing, wasn’t in perfectly good health. He wrote the letter, and posted it by what we might call the boomerang method.”
Merlini crushed his cigarette in an ash tray. Sigrid and Gail were listening intently. Gavigan watched them, but he paid attention. I got up and added ice to my drink. Burt, following me, poured himself another brandy.
“Do you remember what that letter said?” Merlini asked. �
� ‘Kick in before I get back, or else.’ Brooke and Rappourt were, in the face of imminent disaster, making a last stand, trying to push the con-game to its pay-off before the dead Floyd could appear to embarrass them. They were playing for time until Lamb had completed his independent diving survey and been convinced by the relics Floyd had planted. The guineas would have been there, too, except that Lamb, having rushed matters, had made Floyd’s dive necessary before the counterfeiter had delivered them.
“Brooke and Rappourt, you might note, are at this point eliminated as suspects in Linda’s murder—they’d hardly kill one of the geese that were about to lay the golden eggs. They’re innocent on another count, also. Had they intended to murder Linda later, they’d have taken more care with the letter-mailing details. They never expected an official investigation or they’d have not used the typewriter they did, or left the faintest smudge of a fingerprint on the notepaper, or planted it on a train that took such a roundabout route to Chicago. They could hardly have expected to cover up Floyd’s death successfully. They’d have known that a missing person—”
“Skip it,” Gavigan said. “I’m damned if I’ll listen to all the hair-splitting logic that proves innocence in Linda’s death when Rappourt was the intended victim.”
“As you say, Inspector. And we’ll skip the logic that proves Rappourt and Brooke were innocent in plotting Rappourt’s death. It should be obvious—” Merlini’s eyes twinkled impishly—“though there are one or two other things I should have thought were obvious, too. Perhaps I had better—”
“Go ahead, gloat! But if you don’t get to the point soon, I’m going to arrest you as an accessory after the fact. Why are you so damned sure there’s only one murderer? Why couldn’t there be two—one for Floyd and one for Rappourt?” Gavigan eyed Sigrid and Gail almost hungrily.
“No,” Merlini protested. “Not two. I won’t have it. That would give us one potential murderer and three actual ones out of only seven suspects. The percentage is absurd. Not only that, but the essential similarity of means—two finicky long-range murder methods: the poison and the typewriter—is indicative of one and the same person.
Footprints on the Ceiling Page 24
