The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries
Page 43
“You mean me, Thomas Mann,” he said fiercely.
The cop shook his head and took off his cap, pulled out a letter. “Nope, this letter is addressed to Mrs. Thomas Mann. I saw a guy drop it and called, but he didn’t hear me. See, it’s registered. I figured it might be important. Mrs. Thomas Mann …”
Tom stared down at the letter. It was the same, the one he had stolen. There couldn’t be any doubt of it at all. He remembered the way the stamps were on it and there was even the mark of his foot on the envelope.
“Thank you, officer,” he said slowly. “That’s just about the most important letter in the world, I guess.”
“Oh,” Anna whispered. “From father. It’s from father.”
The cop looked a little puzzled. “Sure … Well, Merry Christmas to you both.”
“Oh, such a Merry Christmas,” Anna whispered, and threw both arms around the policeman’s neck.…
The door was closed again and Anna was in Tom’s arms. “It couldn’t happen,” he said slowly, “but it has. I stole your father’s letter to you, and it was the gift money I spent. Darling, we’ll stop being such stiff-necked fools. You’ll go home until I can take care of you properly.”
There was real, ringing happiness in Anna’s laughter. “Oh, it won’t be necessary,” she said.
“Father says that if we’re such young idiots that we’ll starve together rather than separate, we’d better come on home! He’s got a job lined up for you, and—Tom, you won’t refuse?”
Tom said, quietly, “Mrs. Mann, I only look like a damned fool! If you’ll get on your bonnet and shawl, Mrs. Mann, we’ll go out and do a little telephoning … and take your dad up on that before he forgets it! Just incidentally, of course, we might tell him Merry Christmas.…”
The smiles on people’s faces weren’t silly at all. Even the streetlights seemed to have smiling haloes around them. But perhaps that was because there was something in Anna’s eyes that made them blur a little now and then.…
SERENADE TO A KILLER
Joseph Commings
JOSEPH COMMINGS WAS ONE OF THE MASTERS of the locked room mystery—that demanding form in which crimes appear to be impossible—and the present story is no exception. Commings’s writing career began when he made up stories to entertain his fellow soldiers during World War II. With some rewriting after the war, he found a ready market for them in the pulps. Although the pulps were dying in the late 1940s, new digest-sized magazines came to life and Commings sold stories to Mystery Digest, The Saint Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. Although he wrote several full-length mystery novels, none ever was published, in spite of the encouragement of his friend John Dickson Carr. “Serenade to a Killer” was first published in the July 1957 issue of Mystery Digest.
Serenade to a Killer
JOSEPH COMMINGS
MURDER AND CHRISTMAS ARE usually poles apart. But this Yuletide Senator Brooks U. Banner had the crazy killing at Falconridge dumped into his over-sized elastic stocking.
At the Cobleskill Orphanage, he stood among the re-painted toys like a clean-shaven Kris Kringle. He was telling the kids how he’d begun his career as a parentless tyke—just as they—with a loaf of Bohemian rye under one arm and six bits in his patched jeans. He followed that revelation with a fruity true crime story about a lonely hearts blonde who killed six mail-order husbands and how he’d helped the police to catch her. The two old maids who ran the orphanage paused to listen and were scandalized, but the kids loved him. He was six feet three inches tall and weighed 280 pounds, and he looked so quaint in his greasy black string tie, dusty frock-coat, baggy grey britches, and the huge storm rubbers with the red ridged soles.
Presenting the toys, he made little comic speeches and ruffled up the kids’ hair. While this was going on a young man came in and stood in the bare, draughty dining-hall with its shrivelled brown holly wreaths. He was sallow-skinned and slight, with a faint moustache and large lustrous eyes.
He waited impatiently until Banner was done, then he approached.
“Senator, my name is Verl Griffon. I’m a reporter for my father who owns the local paper, The Griffon.”
Banner beamed. “And you wanna interview me!” He stabbed a fresh corona cigar in his mouth. “Yass, yass! Wal, my lad, if you’d come in a li’l earlier, you’d’ve heard me telling the young-timers that—”
“No, this isn’t merely an interview, Senator.” Verl’s luminous eyes zigzagged nervously. “Where can I see you privately?”
Frowning, Banner led the way into a gloomy office that had a cold radiator and a two-dimensional red-cardboard Christmas bell on the window. They looked dubiously at the rickety ladder-backed chairs and remained standing.
Verl chewed his knuckles. “Senator, I’ve read a lot about the way you handle things. Things like murders. And I was at the trial of Jack Horner in New York.”
Banner grunted from his top pants-button. “Izzat so? Then you saw how I made that poisoner holler uncle.”
“Indeed I did. Now I need your help. You’ve heard of Caspar Woolfolk, the famous pianist, haven’t you?”
Banner grinned. “Lad, when it comes to music, I lissen to a jook-box every Saturday night.”
Verl plunged on regardless. “Early this morning Woolfolk was murdered!”
“No!”
“And a woman I know very well says she killed him—but the facts are all against it!” His eyes, peering into the middle distance, were stunned with bewilderment.
Banner shifted ponderously. “Tell it to me from A to Izzard. Pin the donkey on the tail.”
Verl talked rapidly, gravely. “Woolfolk owned Falconridge, a manor outside town. On the grounds is a little octagonal house he called the Music Box. He kept his piano and music library there. This morning I found him in there dead. He was killed and no one knows how the murderer could have done it … You see, I went to the manor after breakfast to wish everybody a happy holiday. Ora met me at the door. She had the jitters.”
“Who’s Ora?”
“Ora Spires. That’s the woman I referred to. She’s governess to little Beryl, Woolfolk’s ten-year-old daughter. Woolfolk was a widower. Ora, as I said, greeted me with a look of panic. All she could tell me was that something terrible must have happened to Woolfolk inside the Music Box. She hadn’t dared go look for herself … It snowed during the night. There’s over an inch of it on the ground. The snow on the lawns hadn’t been disturbed, save where Woolfolk had walked out in it toward the Music Box. I could see by the single line of clear-cut footprints that Woolfolk hadn’t come back. I walked alongside his tracks. The door opened to my touch. This morning was so gloomy that I switched on the light. Woolfolk was at the grand piano, sitting on the bench, the upper part of his body lying across the music. He was stone cold dead—shot through the centre of the forehead.”
Cold as the room was, Banner could see a sheen of sweat on Verl’s puckered forehead.
“Remembering that I’d seen only Woolfolk’s tracks,” continued Verl, “the first thought that struck me was: If he’s been murdered, the murderer is still here! I searched the place. There was no one else there. Even the weapon that’d killed Woolfolk was missing—proving beyond a doubt that it wasn’t suicide. How can a thing like that be.
It stopped snowing around midnight. Woolfolk walked out there after that time. Then somebody killed him. And whoever it was got away without leaving a trace anywhere in the snow!”
“How far from the main house is the Music Box?”
“A good hundred yards.”
“A sharpshooter might’ve plugged Woolfolk through an open window while standing a hundred yards or more away.”
“No,” said Verl. “The doors and windows were closed. Woolfolk was shot at close range. The murderer stood on the other side of the piano.”
Ruminating, Banner finally said: “Wal, sir. You can take your pick of three possible answers.”
“Three!” said Verl with a bounce of surprise.
Verl looked annoyed—and disappointed. “That’s out of the question. No one was there, I tell you.”
Banner, undismayed, stuck up his forefinger. “Two. Both the murderer and Woolfolk went out there before it’d stopped snowing. Both their tracks were covered up by the falling snow. After killing Woolfolk, the murderer put on Woolfolk’s shoes and walked backwards toward the main house.”
Verl shook his head sourly. “Woolfolk was wearing his own shoes when I found him. The police, who came later, went over all that. There’s absolutely no trickery about the footprints. They were made by a man walking forward. Made by Woolfolk. That’s certain!”
Banner lifted his middle finger. He stared at it thoughtfully and with hesitation. “Three. Again, the murderer got out there before Woolfolk did—”
He paused so long that Verl said: “And how did he get back?”
“He knows a way of crossing a hundred yards of snow without leaving a mark on it!”
Verl’s mouth dropped open. He snapped it shut again. “Ora Spires,” he said, jittery, “has part of an answer. She thinks she killed Woolfolk. She keeps saying that.” He paused. “But she doesn’t know how she got out there and back.”
Quizzically Banner raised his black furry eyebrows. “Right now,” he said, reaching for the doorknob, “I’m so fulla curiosity that Ora has more lure for me than a sarong gal.”
Verl took a step toward the held-open door and then he said: “Something else, Senator. She walks in her sleep.”
The great Spanish shawl that covered the whole top of the grand piano in the Music Box was clotted with blood. Woolfolk’s body had been removed. Banner walked behind the piano bench. On the piano-rack was the sheet music for Bellini’s La Somnambula.
“Was this electric lamp tipped over when you found him?” asked Banner.
Verl nodded.
Ten paces beyond the piano stood a grandfather’s clock. The wall shelves were stuffed with music albums.
Verl said: “Doesn’t that music on the piano strike you as being particularly significant, Senator? La Somnambula. The Sleep Walker!”
“Uh-huh.” Banner bobbed his grizzled mop of hair.
Verl rattled on as if he couldn’t restrain himself. “Woolfolk was a funny one. Peculiar. His talk wasn’t all music. He was full of weird theories about the power of suggestion, mind over matter, that sort of thing. He sometimes mentioned a lot of grotesque characters and objects, like: Abbé Faria, Carl Saxtus’s zinc button, Baron du Potet’s magic mirror, and Father Hell’s magnet. He thought all that esoteric knowledge would help him to rule women. But I don’t think it helped very much. Women,” he added regretfully, “know intuitively how to get the best of men.”
Banner didn’t answer. He lumbered to both windows. He opened each. Thirty feet to the east of the small house stood a pole with insulated cross-arms. Nowhere was the snow on the ground disturbed. There was no snow on either of the window-sills. The over-hanging eaves had sheltered them. He looked up at the eaves.
Verl said in a tired voice: “The snow on the roof hasn’t been disturbed either.”
Banner closed the windows and they both trudged across the white lawn to the manor house.
Ora Spires was a thirty-one-year-old spinster. She wore horn-rimmed eyeglasses and her hair was drawn back from a worried brow and knotted into a tight black bun. Her slack dress left you guessing about her figure. Her mouth had a pinched-in look as if she were trying to cork up all her feelings with her lips. Yet with some attention to her features she wouldn’t have been half bad-looking. Banner wondered if she deliberately made herself unattractive or if she didn’t know any better.
“The police have gone,” she said in a cracked whisper to Verl. “They’ve taken him to Hostetler’s.” She looked at Verl as if he had just come in to have her try on the glass slipper.
Verl said to Banner: “Ora means Woolfolk’s body. Hostetler is the town undertaker … Ora, you haven’t told the police what you told—”
“Oh no,” she said.
Banner got impatient. “I’m Senator Banner. Verl thinks I can help you.”
“Oh, yes,” she said quickly. “I voted for you once.”
“Mighty fine. Tickled to meetcha.” He pumped her limp hand. “Come sit down. We’ll iron this out.”
When they sat down in the parlor she said fretfully: “This morning I thought I’d dreamed I’d killed Mr. Woolfolk, but the whole nightmare has turned out to be real.”
Banner was deep in the waffle-back armchair. “Tell me everything.”
Her eyes were cloudy behind the glasses. She would tell him everything. Banner was the kind of man you told your troubles to. “I’ve lived in Cobleskill all my life. My parents are dead and my sister Caroline helped bring me up. She’s four years older than I am. About three years ago I came to work for Mr. Woolfolk taking care of his little daughter. Have you told him much about Beryl, Verl?”
Verl shuffled his feet on the bird-of-paradise pattern rug. “Only just mentioned her.”
Ora smiled sadly. “Beryl’s ten now, she’s very hard to manage.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” groaned Verl.
“But I stuck it out, Senator. Mr. Woolfolk was always going away on concert tours, leaving me alone with Beryl.” She was thatching her long, white, sensitive fingers nervously. “I keep a diary. It’s locked up secretly in my bureau drawer and I wear the key around my neck. One night, about two weeks ago, I took it out of the drawer to make my day’s entry. I was stunned to see that the last words I had written were: I hate Mr. Woolfolk!” She stiffened. “I never remember writing those words!”
“Clever forgery?” suggested Banner.
She shook her head. “How could it be? It was positively my handwriting. Besides, how could the forger have gotten to where I hide my diary? The lock on the bureau drawer wasn’t forced … All that night I lay sleepless thinking about it. I realized there were a lot of things I didn’t like about Mr. Woolfolk, things that could make me hate him. Things that had never entered my conscious mind before.”
“What were they?” said Banner when she paused to draw a shuddery breath.
“Why, little habits I detested. The way he dressed—one shoe always used to squeak when he walked. The way he put extra spoonfuls of sugar on his morning cereal. The way he coughed irritatingly after he’d smoked a cigarette too many. The—the thin whistle of the breath in his nose whenever he breathed too near me. And the way he would drop little hints to me about what a devil he was with the ladies, trying to get it across to me that—Yes, all that night an inner voice kept saying to me: I hate Mr. Woolfolk!
“During this last week he got on my nerves more than I can say. Yesterday was Christmas Eve. After supper he left for town to visit my sister Caroline. She’s been deathly sick lately. I tried to amuse Beryl, but she was extra unruly and I finally had to pack her off to bed as punishment. Mr. Woolfolk returned about ten o’clock. There was snow on his coat. He said, ‘It’s snowing out.’ And I thought that was perfectly hateful. I knew it was snowing. I could see it on him. It was a perfectly exasperating remark and I hated his false teeth when he grinned at me. He hung his coat up and came over to me. He reached out and felt my hand. It was the first time he’d ever touched me like that. Inwardly I squirmed. I tried to draw my hand back without offending him. He said suggestively, ‘I’m going out to the Music Box afterwards. Come out where you hear me playing.’
“I answered with as much sarcasm as I dared. ‘Christmas carols?’ He was still grinning. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not exactly Christmas carols.’ I didn’t answer him. I walked away from him.” She paused to straighten her eyeglasses primly on her narrow nose. “Oh, I knew wha
t he meant. But he didn’t press me about it. I worked on the Christmas tree and spread presents around it until I noticed the clock striking in the hall. It was twelve midnight. I felt he was down here in the parlor and went up the stairs. On the first landing I stopped for a moment and looked out the window. The snow had stopped falling. The moon was out. Everything was beautiful and white. I hurried up the rest of the stairs to my bedroom. I locked the door. I felt too tired to open my diary last night, but something kept drawing me to it. At last I decided: A few words. When I opened it and saw what was in it, it fell out of my hands. The last words written in it were: Tonight I’m going to kill Mr. Woolfolk.”
She swallowed painfully. “I thought I must have gone insane. Why should I have written such a terrible thing? It couldn’t have been me. Yet it was in my own handwriting. I flung the book back into the drawer and crawled into bed, trembling, sick at my thoughts. It was as if some evil thing had come into the house and taken possession of me during the past two weeks. I knew I walked in my sleep. Beryl told me that she’d seen me. Once I found some silverware in my room where I’d hidden it while I was asleep. I was afraid I’d do something horrible when I had no conscious control of myself. I didn’t want to go to sleep, ever. I lay awake, fighting it, for as long a time as I could. I kept listening. The house was still. But I couldn’t keep awake. I couldn’t. I did fall asleep—and I dreamed …”
Her face was the color of ashes. “Somewhere in a dim corner of my mind I remembered Mr. Woolfolk saying, ‘Come where you hear me playing.’ My actions were all of a dreamlike floating quality. In the distance I could hear Mr. Woolfolk playing a part of La Somnambula score. I don’t know how I got there, but I was eventually facing him across the Spanish shawl on the piano. The music had stopped. He was rising to his feet, grinning. I hated him more than I ever did. There was a gun in my hand. I don’t know how it got there. He kept repeating, ‘Shoot me! Go ahead! Shoot me! If you hate me so much, why don’t you shoot?’ I heard the shots stabbing into my brain. Then it all faded out again.