“Very good, Bart,” Robin Adlair drawled. “A very sound point—and an excellent red herring.”
“Red herring!” Murtry pushed up out of his chair, black eyes blazing. “What in blazes are you getting at?”
“Whatever you want to make of it,” the blond chap grinned, but his implication was clear. A clever killer well might try to avert suspicion from himself by disputing a theory that seemed to exculpate him from suspicion. “I’m curious about one thing, though. What makes you so sure the shot came from the stage?”
The other’s lips pulled back from his teeth in what he might have meant for a smile but was more like a snarl. “That’s obvious to anyone but a moron, or someone who’d like to have us think it was fired from somewhere else. Coming from anywhere in the auditorium it could not have struck the back of the seat.” The smoldering antagonism founded in their rivalry for Sherry was no longer covert but had flared into an open feud.
“It seems to me, Mr. Robin Adlair,” Murtry purred, “that you’ve more reason to draw herrings across the trail than I.”
I could read Pardeen’s mind as he glanced from one to the other. “Keep up the squabble, boys,” he was thinking, “and maybe one of you will drop the clue I’m looking for.”
“I seem to recall,” Murtry continued, “that when the lights went on you were standing there on the New York stage.”
“Right.” The blonde giant grinned. “I figured on getting to the New York Bijou in time to check the set, but the crowd outside held me up and I got inside the entrance, which is on the right of the house, just as the lights were dimming. I thought I could still make it but was caught on the right of the stage by the curtain going up, couldn’t cross without exposing myself.”
“You were delayed, all right,” Murtry snapped back at him. “You reached the wings just as the actors were about to fire their blanks and you had to get off your own shot so fast that you didn’t notice Mr. Loring wasn’t where he was supposed to be.”
He’d slipped the noose around Adlair’s neck as neatly as I could have.
“No, Robin,” Sherry moaned. “No. You couldn’t!”
“Yes, kitten, I could.” The fellow seemed oddly unperturbed. “Our Bart has built up a swell case against me. Hasn’t he, Inspector?” He transferred his lazy grin to Pardeen. “Almost as good a case as you had when you were about to arrest me. And it suffers from the same defect.”
“I’m afraid it does,” the law officer agreed. “You see, Mr. Murtry, the weapon whose rifling the murder bullet matches was found some ten minutes after the shot was fired and while Mr. Adlair still was in the custody of the New York police, on the stage of the Chicago theater.”
That really was a crusher. Eyes met widening eyes in puzzlement, breaths sighed in an almost eerie hush which was broken by Adlair’s chuckle. “Maybe you can figure that one out. Bart.”
“Maybe I can.” Murtry wasn’t beaten yet. “In fact, I know that answer. What you did was to cache your gun in Chicago, within the area the receiver there would scan. When the Multidram was switched on, it was reproduced at the same spot on all the stage. You picked up its material image in New York, loaded it with a real cartridge which in turn was recreated in the other nine theaters and fired it.”
“Doctor Parker turned off the current and presto!—no gun on you, nothing to connect you with the gun in Chicago. Except—”
It was he who grinned now, triumphantly.
“Except, Inspector Pardeen, that the flashback of powder gases from the real cartridge will have left their mark on the skin of his right hand.”
“Good boy!” The inspector jumped up. “That does it. We’ll apply the wax test, right here and now.” He strode to the door, jerked it open. “Jenkins,” he called. “Ashkinazy. I’ve got a little job for you.”
There was a muttered conference at the door, a wait, then two uniformed men came in carrying a tray with some simple apparatus on it. As, still smiling but a little uneasily, Robin Adlair submitted to their ministrations the man from the UN spoke for the first time.
“You know, Inspector Pardeen, there’s something about this that still bothers me.”
“What’s that?”
“Why the Multidram field was enlarged to include Mr. Loring’s seat. There doesn’t seem to have been any reason for that.”
Pardeen looked at Murtry but I answered for him. “Does there have to be a reason, Mr. Hanscom? I imagine it was a slight, if unfortunate misadjustment of the control apparatus in Chicago. After all, Mr. Parker was undoubtedly a little excited over the first public test of his new invention and—well, he isn’t as young as he used to be.”
“Meaning that I’m superannuated, Billiken?” Mal Parker demanded, bristling. “Why don’t you pension me off, if that’s the case?”
“Perhaps I will, Mal,” I couldn’t resist responding. “Remind me to consider it after your protégé has been properly taken care of.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Loring,” Hanscom intervened. “I don’t want to seem persistent but I can’t help wondering if the misadjustment need necessarily have been made at the central controls in Chicago.”
“Now look here, Hanscom,” I flared. “What right have you—”
“Just a minute, Billiken,” Mal Parker interrupted me. “Since that concerns me directly, I’d like to clear it up. The answer to your question, Mr. Hanscom, is that all ten Multidram transceivers were electronically interlocked so as to avoid the possibility of overlapping or other faulty registry. A change in the adjustment of any one would affect them all. Look. I’ll draw you a diagram that will make it clear. May I have a paper and pencil, Inspector?”
Pardeen started to fish in his pocket, turned to the slender, sharp-featured officer who approached him.
“Well, Ashkinazy, what have you got?”
Mask-faced, the chap held out a crinkling film of wax.
“Look for yourself, sir.” It showed the roughness of Adlair’s skin, and nothing else. “That guy didn’t shoot off any gun in the last twenty-four hours, not with either hand.”
There was a small, hawking sound in Bart Murtry’s throat, from Sherry Parker a glad cry as she flew to the blond giant.
“I knew it, Robin. I knew you didn’t do it.”
“So did I, honey,” he grinned as he caught her and held her. “But someone did. I wonder if it wasn’t the one who tried to fasten it on me.” His broad face was abruptly grim. “I suggest, Inspector, that you submit Bart Murtry to this same test.”
“Why Murtry?” Maxwell Hanscom asked. “We have absolute proof that he was in London at the time of the murders.” He seemed suddenly to have taken over command of the proceedings and the frightening thing was that Pardeen let him. “Why not Billingsley Loring?”
“That’s absurd!” I flared. “Are you intimating that I tried to murder myself, Mr. Hanscom?”
He turned those penetrating cold gray eyes on me;
“No, Mr. Loring. I’m simply recalling that like Mr. Adlair, you were on the stage of the New York theater in position to fire the real bullet in the imaged gun. In position also, as Mr. Adlair was not, to have made the slight change in the transceiver’s setting that resulted in the death of the nine men to whom you’d sent tickets to seat A-one. The same nine men who brought against you the charges I’ve been investigating of fraudulent operation of corporations whose stock they bought from you, and without whose evidence the charges must be dropped.”
Inspector Pardeen was coming toward me and his uniformed aides were closing in on me from either side but I saw only Neva’s shocked eyes, Neva’s color-drained, cameo features.
“No,” Neva’s daughter whispered. “No, Uncle Billiken. You couldn’t have.”
But I had. It was the only way I could have saved the great commercial empire I’d slaved for years to build. What were the lives of nine money-grubbers against that?
k
The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack Page 48
