by Mike Ashley
“Who would have such access to it?”
“I suppose that you are still accusing me? I hated him. But not so that I would cut my own throat. He was a bastard but he was the goose who laid the golden egg. There was no point in being rid of him.”
“Just so,” muttered Fane, thoughtfully. His eye caught sight of a note pad in the case and he flicked through its pages while Frank Tilley sat looking on in discomfort. Fane found a list of initials with the head, “immediate dismissal” and that day’s date.
“A list of half-a-dozen people that he was about to sack?” Fane observed.
“I told you that he was going to enjoy a public purge of his executives and mentioned some names to me.”
“The list contains only initials and starts with O.T.E.” He glanced at Tilley with a raised eyebrow. “Oscar Elgee?”
“Hardly,” Tilley replied with a patronising smile. “It means Otis T. Elliott, the general manager of our US database subsidiary.”
“I see. Let’s see if we can identify the others.”
He ran through the other initials to which Tilley added names. The next four were also executives of Gray’s companies. The last initials were written as “Ft”.
“F.T. is underscored three times with the words ‘no pay off!’ written against it. Who’s “F.T.?”
“You know that F.T. are my initials,” Tilley observed quietly. His features were white and suddenly very grave. “I swear that he never said anything to me about sacking me when we discussed those he had on his list. He never mentioned it.”
“Well, was there anyone else in the company that the initials F.T. could apply to?”
Tilley frowned, trying to recall but finally shook his head and gave a resigned shrug.
“No. It could only be me. The bastard! He never told me what he was planning. Some nice little public humiliation, I suppose.”
Hector Ross emerged from the curtained section and motioned Fane to join him.
“I think I can tell you how it was done,” he announced with satisfaction.
Fane grinned at his friend.
“So can I. Tell me if I am wrong. Gray went into the toilet to use his inhaler to relieve an attack of asthma. He placed the inhaler in his mouth, depressed it in the normal way and . . .”
He ended with a shrug.
Ross looked shocked.
“How did you . . .?” He glanced over Fane’s shoulder to where Frank Tilley was still sitting, twitching nervously. “Did he confess that he set it up?”
Fane shook his head.
“No. But was I right?”
“It is a good hypothesis but needs a laboratory to confirm it. I found tiny particles of aluminium in the mouth, and some plastic. Something certainly exploded with force, sending a tiny steel projectile into the back roof of the mouth with such force that it entered the brain and death was instantaneous, as you initially surmised. Whatever had triggered the projectile disintegrated with the force. Hence there were only small fragments embedded in his mouth and cheeks. There were some when I searched carefully, around the cubicle. Diabolical.”
“This was arranged by someone who knew that friend Gray had a weakness and banked on it. Gray didn’t like to take his inhaler in public and would find a quiet corner. The plan worked out very well and nearly presented an impossible crime, an almost insolvable crime. Initially it appeared that the victim had been shot in the mouth in a locked toilet.”
Hector Ross smiled indulgently at his colleague.
“You imply that you already have the solution?”
“Oh yes. Remember the song that we used to sing at school?
“Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”
Hector Ross nodded.
“It’s many a day since I last sang that, laddie. Something by Longfellow, wasn’t it?”
Fane grinned.
“It was, indeed. Based on some lines from the Book of Genesis – ‘terra es, terram ibis – dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return’. Get Captain Evans here, please.” He made the request to the Chief Steward, Jeff Ryder, who had been waiting attendance on Ross. When he had departed, Fane glanced back to his friend. “There is something to be said for Latin scholarship.”
“I don’t follow, laddie.”
“Our murderer was too fond of the Latin in-jokes he shared with his boss.”
“You mean his secretary?” He glanced at Frank Tilley.
“Tilley claims that he couldn’t even translated memento mori.”
“Remember death?”
Fane regarded his friend in disapproval.
“It actually means ‘remember to die’ and a memento mori is usually applied to a human skull or some other objection which reminds us of our mortality.”
Captain Evans arrived and looked from Fane to Ross in expectation.
“Well, what news?”
“To save any unpleasant scene on the aircraft, captain, I suggest you radio ahead and have the police waiting to arrest one of your passengers on a charge of murder. No need to make any move until we land. The man can’t go far.”
“Which man?” demanded Evans, his grim faced.
“He is listed as Oscar Elgee in the tourist class.”
“How could he . . .?”
“Simple. Elgee was not only Gray’s manservant but I think you’ll find, from the broad hints Mister Tilley gave me, that he was also his lover. Elgee seems to confirm it by a death note with a Latin phrase in which he emphasized the word homo, meaning man, but, we also know it was often used as a slang term in my generation for ‘homosexual’.”
“How would you know that Elgee was capable of understanding puns in Latin?” asked Ross.
“The moment he saw Gray’s body, young Elgee muttered the very words. Terra es, terram ibis – dust you are, to dust you will return.”
“A quarrel between lovers?” asked Ross. “Love to hatred turned – and all that, as Billy Shakespeare succinctly put it?”
Fane nodded.
“Gray was giving Elgee the push, both as lover and employee, and so Elgee decided to end his lover’s career in mid-flight, so to speak. There is a note in his attache case that Elgee was to be sacked immediately without compensation.”
Tilley, who had been sitting quietly, shook his head vehemently.
“No there isn’t,” he interrupted. “We went through the list. I told you that the initials O.T.E. referred to Otis Elliott. I had faxed that dismissal through before we boarded the plane.”
Fane smiled softly.
“You have forgotten F.T.”
“But that’s my . . .”
“You didn’t share your boss’s passion for Latin tags, did you? It was the F.T. that confused me. I should have trusted that a person with Gray’s reputation would not have written F followed by a lower case t if he meant two initials F.T. I missed the point. It was not your initials at all, Mister Tilley. It was Ft meant as an abbreviation. Specifically, fac, fiomfacere: to do; and totum: all things. Factotum. And who was Gray’s factotum?”
There was a silence.
“I think we will find that this murder was planned for a week or two at least. Once I began to realize what the mechanism was which killed Gray, all I had to do was look for the person capable of devising that mechanism as well as having motive and opportunity. Hold out your hands, Mister Tilley.”
Reluctantly the secretary did so.
“You can’t seriously see those hands constructing a delicate mechanism, can you?” Fane said. “No, Elgee, the model maker and handyman, doctored one of Gray’s inhalers so that when it was depressed it would explode with an impact into the mouth, shooting a needle into the brain. Simple but effective. He knew that Gray did not like to be seen using the inhaler in public. The rest was left to chance and it was a good chance. It almost turned out to be the ultimate impossible crime. It might have worked had not ou
r victim and his murderer been too fond of their Latin in-jokes.”
THE PULP CONNECTION
Bill Pronzini
Bill Pronzini (b.1943) is a prolific writer of mystery stories, westerns and science fiction, and also a fine anthologist, selecting material from his enviable collection of pulp and digest magazines. Indeed the old pulps are crucial to solving the following story. In the mystery fiction field, Pronzini is probably best known for his stories and novels featuring the Nameless Detective, which began with The Snatch (1971) and include two story collections: Casefile (1983) and Spadework (1996). Quite a few of the stories are impossible crimes.
The address Eberhardt had given me on the phone was a corner lot in St Francis Wood, halfway up the western slope of Mt Davidson. The house there looked like a baronial Spanish villa – a massive two-story stucco affair with black iron trimming, flanked on two sides by evergreens and eucalyptus. It sat on a notch in the slope forty feet above street level, and it commanded an impressive view of Lake Merced and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Even by St Francis Wood standards – the area is one of San Francisco’s moneyed residential sections – it was some place, probably worth half a million dollars or more.
At four o’clock on an overcast weekday afternoon this kind of neighbourhood is usually quiet and semi-deserted; today it was teeming with people and traffic. Cars were parked bumper to bumper on both fronting streets, among them half a dozen police cruisers and unmarked sedans and a television camera truck. Thirty or forty citizens were grouped along the sidewalks, gawking, and I saw four uniformed cops standing watch in front of the gate and on the stairs that led up to the house.
I didn’t know what to make of all this as I drove past and tried to find a place to park. Eberhardt had not said much on the phone, just that he wanted to see me immediately on a police matter at this address. The way it looked, a crime of no small consequence had taken place here today – but why summon me to the scene? I had no idea who lived in the house; I had no rich clients or any clients at all except for an appliance outfit that had hired me to do a skip-trace on one of its deadbeat customers.
Frowning, I wedged my car between two others a block away and walked back down to the corner. The uniformed cop on the gate gave me a sharp look as I came up to him, but when I told him my name his manner changed and he said, “Oh, right, Lieutenant Eberhardt’s expecting you. Go on up.”
So I climbed the stairs under a stone arch and past a terraced rock garden to the porch. Another patrolman stationed there took my name and then led me through an archway and inside.
The interior of the house was dark, and quiet except for the muted sound of voices coming from somewhere in the rear. The foyer and the living room and the hallway we went down were each ordinary enough, furnished in a baroque Spanish style, but the large room the cop ushered me into was anything but ordinary for a place like this. It contained an overstuffed leather chair, a reading lamp, an antique trestle desk-and-chair and no other furniture except for floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered every available inch of wall space; there were even library-type stacks along one side. And all the shelves were jammed with paperbacks, some new and some which seemed to date back to the 1940s. As far as I could tell, every one of them was genre – mysteries, Westerns and science fiction.
Standing in the middle of the room were two men – Eberhardt and an inspector I recognized named Jordan. Eberhardt was puffing away on one of his battered black briars; the air in the room was blue with smoke. Eighteen months ago, when I owned a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, the smoke would have started me coughing but also made me hungry for a weed. But I’d gone to a doctor about the cough around that time, and he had found what he was afraid might be a malignant lesion on one lung. I’d had a bad scare for a while; if the lesion had turned out to be malignant, which it hadn’t, I would probably be dead or dying by now. There’s nothing like a cancer scare and facing your own imminent mortality to make you give up cigarettes for good. I hadn’t had one in all those eighteen months, and I would never have one again.
Both Eberhardt and Jordan turned when I came in. Eb said something to the inspector, who nodded and started out. He gave me a nod on his way past that conveyed uncertainty about whether or not I ought to be there. Which made two of us.
Eberhardt was wearing a rumpled blue suit and his usual sour look; but the look seemed tempered a little today with something that might have been embarrassment. And that was odd, too, because I had never known him to be embarrassed by anything while he was on the job.
“You took your time getting here, hotshot,” he said.
“Come on, Eb, it’s only been half an hour since you called. You can’t drive out here from downtown in much less than that.” I glanced around at the bookshelves again. “What’s all this?”
“The Paperback Room,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“You heard me. The Paperback Room. There’s also a Hardcover Room, a Radio and Television Room, a Movie Room, a Pulp Room, a Comic Art Room and two or three others I can’t remember.”
I just looked at him.
“This place belongs to Thomas Murray,” he said. “Name mean anything to you?”
“Not offhand.”
“Media’s done features on him in the past – the King of the Popular Culture Collectors.”
The name clicked then in my memory; I had read an article on Murray in one of the Sunday supplements about a year ago. He was a retired manufacturer of electronic components, worth a couple of million dollars, who spent all his time accumulating popular culture – genre books and magazines, prints of television and theatrical films, old radio shows on tape, comic books and strips, original artwork, Sherlockiana and other such items. He was reputed to be one of the foremost experts in the country on these subjects, and regularly provided material and copies of material to other collectors, students and historians for nominal fees.
I said, “Okay, I know who he is. But I—”
“Was,” Eberhardt said.
“What?”
“Who he was. He’s dead – murdered.”
“So that’s it.”
“Yeah, that’s it.” His mouth turned down at the corners in a sardonic scowl. “He was found here by his niece shortly before one o’clock. In a locked room.”
“Locked room?”
“Something the matter with your hearing today?” Eberhardt said irritably. “Yes, a damned locked room. We had to break down the door because it was locked from the inside, and we found Murray lying in his own blood on the carpet. Stabbed under the breastbone with a razor-sharp piece of thin steel, like a splinter.” He paused, watching me. I kept my expression stoic and attentive. “We also found what looks like a kind of dying message, if you want to call it that.”
“What sort of message?”
“You’ll see for yourself pretty soon.”
“Me? Look, Eb, just why did you get me out here?”
“Because I want your help, damn it. And if you say anything cute about this being a big switch, the cops calling in a private eye for help on a murder case, I won’t like it much.”
So that was the reason he seemed a little embarrassed. I said, “I wasn’t going to make any wisecracks; you know me better than that. If I can help you I’ll do it gladly – but I don’t know how.”
“You collect pulp magazines yourself, don’t you?”
“Sure. But what does that have to do with—”
“The homicide took place in the Pulp Room,” he said. “And the dying message involves pulp magazines. Okay?”
I was surprised, and twice as curious now, but I said only, “Okay.” Eberhardt is not a man you can prod.
He said, “Before we go in there, you’d better know a little of the background. Murray lived here alone except for the niece, Paula Thurman, and a housekeeper named Edith Keeler. His wife died a few years ago, and they didn’t have any children. Two other people have keys to the house – a cousin, Walter Cox, and Murray’s
brother David. We managed to round up all four of those people, and we’ve got them in a room at the rear of the house.
“None of them claims to know anything about the murder. The housekeeper was out all day; this is the day she does her shopping. The niece is a would-be artist, and she was taking a class at San Francisco State. The cousin was having a long lunch with a girl friend downtown, and the brother was at Tanforan with another horseplayer. In other words, three of them have got alibis for the probable time of Murray’s death, but none of the alibis is what you could call unshakable.
“And all of them, with the possible exception of the housekeeper, have strong motives. Murray was worth around three million, and he wasn’t exactly generous with his money where his relatives are concerned; he doled out allowances to each of them, but he spent most of his ready cash on his popular-culture collection. They’re all in his will – they freely admit that – and each of them stands to inherit a potful now that he’s dead.
“They also freely admit, all of them, that they could use the inheritance. Paula Thurman is a nice-looking blonde, around twenty-five, and she wants to go to Europe and pursue an art career. David Murray is about the same age as his brother, late fifties; if the broken veins in his nose are any indication he’s a boozer as well as a horseplayer – a literal loser and going downhill fast. Walter Cox is a mousy little guy who wears glasses about six inches thick; he fancies himself an investments expert but doesn’t have the cash to make himself rich – he says – in the stock market. Edith Keeler is around sixty, not too bright, and stands to inherit a token five thousand dollars in Murray’s will; that’s why she’s what your pulp detectives call ‘the least likely suspect.’”
He paused again. “Lot of details there, but I figured you’d better know as much as possible. You with me so far?”
I nodded.
“Okay. Now, Murray was one of these regimented types – did everything the same way day after day. Or at least he did when he wasn’t off on buying trips or attending popular-culture conventions. He spent two hours every day in each of his Rooms, starting with the Paperback Room at eight am. His time in the Pulp Room was from noon until two pm. While he was in each of these Rooms he would read or watch films or listen to tapes, and he would also answer correspondence pertaining to whatever that Room contained – pulps, paperbacks, TV and radio shows, and so on. Did all his own secretarial work – and kept all his correspondence segregated by Rooms.”
