The box containing the remains was prominent in the center aisle, on a wheeled bier draped in purple and black. Gazing at it, I did regret my touch of bad temper.
After the ceremony, a dozen cars would follow the hearse out to the graveyard in Queens, but Kit's detective ardor, I'm happy to say, didn't extend that far. Nor did Staples'; seeing him move away from the line of mourners shuffling out to the cars, I went over to him and said, "Anything new?"
"Not with me. How about you?"
"Well, you got Kit mad."
He seemed amused. "I did?"
"She's decided to find the killer herself, and show you up."
"Fine. But if Edgarson says he saw her last Tuesday night, it'll be all over."
Edgarson? Was I supposed to know that name? Playing it safe, I repeated it with a question mark, and Staples explained he was the detective, etc. "Oh," I said. "Is that all set up?"
"Not yet. He's supposed to call me next time he checks in with his office."
Don't hold your breath. I said, "Let me know when you switch to a new theory, okay? Kit's about to drive me crazy."
Grinning, he said, "Why don't you come up with something? If you can't show that somebody else is guilty, at least prove to my satisfaction that your girl is innocent."
"I'll work on it," I promised.
"Come along with me," he suggested. "If we spend one concentrated day on this case maybe we can crack it."
"Sorry. I've already promised Kit I'd play Mr. and Mrs. North." I gestured to where she was standing in a corner of the chapel, arms folded as she glowered in our direction.
"Later on, then, Around two?"
At two, Patricia would be dropping by for more Gaslight "I don't think so, Fred. I'll be with Kit most of the day."
"Well, I wish you luck."
"I believe I'm going to need it." I left Staples and rejoined Kit, who wanted to know everything that had been said. "Let's go back to the States first," I suggested, "and have a cup of coffee."
Which we did, in a Second Avenue health food restaurant full of heroin addicts. Kit went through her expanded list of suspects and I managed to contract it again slightly by removing three of the women who I knew happened to be a part of the alibis of various former male suspects. Another of the female suspects I eliminated by simply laughing the idea to scorn, but that still left two women and five men on the list. Six men, since she insisted on adding Jay English, the famous homosexual. Seven men; Jay's boy friend Dave Poumon was swept ashore on the next tide.
"Nine suspects," I said. "What are you going to do with all those people?"
"Throw a party," she said. "We'll get them all drinking and relaxed, and ask some penetrating questions."
"God help us," I said. "And when will this overdone scene take place?"
"Today's Monday. Why not Friday? Everybody spends their weekends in town this time of year."
"Friday's a long way off," I pointed out. "I thought you were feeling a certain urgency about all this."
"Oh, we have lots to do before the party." She had this all thoroughly planned, I could see that much. "We'll want to know which penetrating questions to ask," she explained.
"Ah, of course."
She ruminated over her list. "I'll make some phone calls this afternoon. I can ask Betty about Claire." She made a note, then another, saying, "And Lucy Fishman used to go with Jack Henderson, so 111 find out about him from her." She frowned at her list, made another note, made a question mark, underlined something, and switched her frown to me. "You can start with Staples," she said. "I can?"
"There was something about an anonymous letter. See if you can get a look at it."
"I’ll try," I promised.
She tapped her list with the pencil point. "There's a possibility he already checked out Jay English and Dave. Could you find out?"
"Clever questioning might turn the trick," I said.
"Also Claire and Ellen. See if he has anything on them."
"Will do."
"Could you get to him this afternoon?"
An unexpected mobile of deceit suspended itself delicately in my brain. "I think maybe I could," I said.
"Then come down to my place for dinner and we'll compare notes."
"Lovely idea."
"Around seven?"
"Perfect," I said
Between two and three, when Staples thought I was with Kit and Kit thought I was with Staples, I was with Patricia, enjoying Gaslight. At twenty past three, alone and refreshed and energetic from the shower, I popped a Valium and phoned Staples at his office, but he wasn't there. I left a message and worked on the Cassavetes article until four-thirty, when Staples called. "I thought you were with Miss Markowitz."
"We laid our plans," I said, "but then she went off to do some girl-talk type sleuthing of her own."
"Would you like to do some boy-type sleuthing? We've got another one."
"New York must be on the verge of depopulation."
"This one's imported. From Visaria."
"From what?"
"Visaria." He spelled it, which didn't help.
"Is that a country?"
"I don't know if they've got a country," he said, "but they've got a mission at the UN, and the head of it just got himself killed. You feel ready for a locked room mystery?"
* * *
Staples had sent a car for me again, which delivered me to a small remodeled brick town house on 46th Street between First and Second Avenues. This entire neighborhood was full of United Nations missions and foreign embassies, each nation putting on as much show as it could afford. At East Side prices, the smaller countries couldn't afford much, and this narrow four-story architectural nonentity was about par for a modest mission like that from Visaria.
If I'd hoped for some insight into the style and culture of Visaria from the interior of the mission I was doomed to disappointment. The building, probably in advanced disrepair when Visaria bought it, had apparently been purchased as a Handyman's Special and furnished out of Sears, Roebuck. The floors, which felt spongy and unreliable underfoot, had all been covered with cheap solid-color wall-to-wall carpeting. Dropped ceilings, those fiberboard rectangles in a white metal grid, screened off the no-doubt-hideous original ceilings with clean new hideousness, and the original walls were covered with pale-tone panelings in simulated wood grain. Light was provided by fluorescent panels in the dropped ceilings. It was like being in a real estate office in a shopping center, with furnishing to match; imitation-wood formica desks, imitation-leather vinyl sofas, and real metal square wastebaskets.
The building was narrow, and not very deep, so there was minimal floor-space. One entered from the street into a vestibule with a staircase leading up; the staircase too was covered with cheap carpeting. A sign hanging over the stairs was neatly hand-printed AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Another sign, waist-height, standing on its own chrome leg in front of the stairs, said INFORMATION, with an arrow pointing to the right.
An interior wall had apparently been removed here, so that the vestibule and the former living room had become one oddly-shaped receptionist's office. It was appropriately furnished, including paintings that might have been views of the forests and lakes of Visaria but that looked to me like the forests and lakes of northern Michigan. A small rack of tourist literature near the entrance had an indefinably scraggy and hopeless air about it, as though even the Visarians could think of no sensible reason for anyone to visit their country.
Several people were now in this room. Two of them were Staples and Bray, several others appeared also to have some sort of official connection with today's event, and the last two were a weepy-eyed heavyset girl sitting at the receptionist's desk and a truculent-looking bruiser hulking on one of the vinyl sofas. He reminded me for some reason of this morning's funeral, probably because he seemed ethnic in much the same way. If Laura's husband had grown up big enough to play professional football he might have looked a lot like this fellow.
Staples, seeing me
arrive, came over and said, quietly, "I won't introduce you. We'll just take a little walk through and I'll describe the situation."
"Right."
"You see the girl sitting at the desk?"
"The receptionist?"
"Right. She came back from lunch at one o'clock this afternoon. So did the guard."
"The blocking back on the sofa?"
"That's the one. Visaria has its own political problems, just like everybody else. His job is to sit out here and make sure there aren't any incidents."
"No wonder he doesn't look happy."
"The point is," Staples said, "both of those characters were in this room from one o'clock until after the body was found. Neither of them left for a second, not to go to the John, not for anything. They both swear to it."
"Could they be in cahoots with one another?"
"Look at them," Staples suggested.
I looked at them. Judging from appearances—generally a good way to judge, by the way—between them they might just be able to figure out how to open a box of corn flakes. "Okay," I said.
"Now let's go to the scene of the crime."
Staples led the way. We had to walk through the little cluster of people near the inner door, and it turned out that at least two of them were Visarian. Or anyway foreign, since they were speaking together in some language that seemed to consist principally of the letter "k," spoken with varying degrees of emphasis. One of these two intercepted Staples on his way by, saying, "You are making progress?"
"We are making progress," Staples told him. They smiled at one another, and Staples moved on, me following. I too smiled at the Visarian, and he smiled back.
Staples paused at the door. "As you see, it had to be broken in."
"Locked from the inside, eh?" • "Locked and bolted. The door fit snugly. There's no way to throw that bolt except from this side."
I studied the door, the wrenched wood, the hardware. I said, "And I assume the only fingerprints on the bolt belonged to the dead man."
"Of course."
"This is a pretty elaborate setup," I said. "What's it all about?"
"There'd been threats on this fellow's life," Staples said. "Some political thing at home. So he spent his working hours in this room with the door locked on the inside. If anyone wanted to see him, the receptionist would buzz, tell him who was waiting, and he'd come over and unlock the door."
"All right." I looked hesitantly into this inner room. "The body still here?"
"No, it was taken away. He'd been strangled with wire, sitting there at his desk."
My adam's apple gave a little twinge. "Charming," I said, and roved around the room a bit.
It was almost identical with the room outside; same ceiling, same paneled walls, same spongy carpeted floor. A little money had been spent on the desk, but the other furnishings were still bottom-of-the-line from some office furniture discount house. There was, however, a paper shredder in one corner, to show that this was a serious diplomatic operation.
A pair of tall windows at the back had a clear close view of a brick wall. Heavy iron bars masked both windows on the outside. I said, "I assume those bars have been checked."
"Just as solid as they look," Staples assured me.
A door behind the desk led to a small bathroom done in the same minimal style as everything else. This would be the corner of the house directly behind the staircase. The one window in the bathroom was also guarded by iron bars, and was in any event too small to crawl through. I noticed two dirt smudges on the vinyl tile floor, but nothing else in here of interest.
When I returned to the office, Bray had come in looking glum and harassed. "I hope you feel brilliant," he told me.
"Not yet," I admitted.
Staples said to Bray, "Give the man time."
"All he wants," Bray said. To me he said, "By the way, in that Templeton case, the woman that went off the terrace, it looks as though you and Fred were right."
"Oh, really?"
Bray shrugged. "We never came up with anything," he said. "I resisted the idea, but I guess it really was suicide after all."
So George had gotten away with it. Good for him. I said, "They can t all be murders, can they?"
"I suppose not," Bray said.
Staples said, "But this one definitely is. Let me tell you the situation, Carey. The chief of mission, Ivor Kaklov, lived here in the building, up on the top floor. The receptionist and the guard also live here. They spent an ordinary morning, Kaklov in this office and the other two outside, and at twelve Kaklov came out and they went upstairs for lunch."
I said, "Locking the office behind them?"
"No," Staples said. "It was only kept locked when Kaklov was in it."
"How about the front door?"
Bray said, "That was locked, but it doesn't matter. It's the kind you can open by slipping a credit card down between the door and the jamb."
I said, "So the killer came into the building while everybody was at lunch, and hid in here. In the bathroom, in fact."
Staples said, "Ah, good man. You saw those smudges on the bathroom floor."
"Of course," I said. "We have sloppy weather outside.
Even if the killer took a cab he wouldn't get out right at this address, so he did some walking and he tracked dirty snow in with him. It melted while he waited for Kaklov to finish lunch."
Bray said, "That part we can work out for ourselves. We know how the killer got in, and what he did after he got here. The question is, how in hell did he get out again r
I nodded. "That's the question, all right. I wonder what the answer is."
Nobody told me. So I turned away again, wandering around the room, looking at this and that. There was a certain atmosphere of disarrangement in the area of the desk, which was only to be expected, but otherwise the place retained its neat anonymity.
Well, not quite. The paper shredder was out about three feet from the wall, standing alone and awkward into the room like a volunteer robot. It didn't look as though it belonged there, so I went over to check, and from the indentations in the carpet I could see that the machine usually stood against the wall. It had been moved out here, by some person for some reason.
It was a heavy machine, about waist height, but it moved readily enough on its casters. There was nothing underneath it. There was no shredded paper in the white plastic bag in the bottom half. A dirt smudge on the beige metal top suggested nothing in particular. When I pushed the On button the machine gnashed its many teeth but nothing came out.
Staples and Bray had been watching me, and now Staples came over to say, "Something?"
"I'm not sure." I frowned at him, frowned at the room, at all its lumber yard banality.
"You're onto something." Staples was staring at me as though I were an egg and he'd just heard cracking sounds.
I said, "Kaklov and the receptionist and the guard all went upstairs at twelve. They all came down together at one?"
"Right."
"Kaklov came in here, and the other two stayed outside. That was at one o'clock. When was the body found?"
"Three-thirty. A phone call from outside came through for Kaklov, the receptionist buzzed, there wasn't any answer, she knocked on the door, she and the guard talked it over, and finally the guard broke the door in."
"Between one and three-thirty, did Kaklov have any visitors?"
"No."
"Any other phone calls?"
"No."
Bray had also come over, and now he said, "The preliminary medical report says he'd been dead at least a couple of hours when he was examined. Meaning probably before two."
I said, "Or as close to one o'clock as the assassin could make it."
"Looks that way."
I frowned at the room. The answer was in here somewhere. I felt I could almost reach out and touch it. I said, "The assassin came in during lunch and hid in the bathroom. Kaklov came in at one o'clock, locked the door, and the assassin killed him. The guard broke the door
down at three-thirty, and Kaklov was in here alone." Looking back at Bray, I said, "What about after they found the body? Any time when there wasn't anyone around?"
But Bray shook his head. "There's a special police detachment a block from here," he said. "For the UN. There were officers on the scene within five minutes, and both the receptionist and the guard swear they stayed right in that office the whole time."
"I was afraid that was the answer." I leaned against the paneled wall, folding my arms and looking around this damn bland enigmatic room. I said, "I find myself thinking of the Sherlock Holmes dictum: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth/ So what are the impossibilities here?"
Bray said, "The whole thing is impossible. This isn't the kind of case I like."
"No, let's think about it." I looked over at the desk again, where the killing had taken place. "The assassin getting in was possible. The assassin committing the crime was possible."
"The assassin getting out again," Bray said. "That's impossible."
"So we eliminate that." Smiling as though I knew what I was doing, I said, "In approved Sherlock Holmes style, we eliminate the impossible. The assassin did not get out. So where does that leave us?"
"Up a tree," suggested Staples.
"Up a—" Then it hit me. "Of course!"
They both stared at me. Half-whispering, Staples said, "You've got it?"
"Of course I've got it. If the assassin didn't get out of this room, Fred, then he's still here."
Bray said, "If you mean suicide, Kaklov did it himself, it won't work. A man can't strangle himself, not that way."
"No, there was a killer," I agreed. "But the point is, he's still in this room. That's what the dirt on the paper shredder is all about."
"Dirt on the paper shredder?" Staples went over to frown at it. "Yeah, you're right. So what?"
Westlake, Donald E - SSC 02 Page 12
