Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia

by Gruber, Frank

  The headlights of his little coupe picked out a car on the road ahead. It was a touring car with side curtains, a large machine but not too comfortable for such sodden weather. Its headlights were silhouetting a framework ahead of it. It wasn’t until Quade had come up within fifty feet that he could make out that the framework was a bridge.

  Quade braked his car to a stop a few yards behind the touring car and then he saw something else; water was rushing over the flooring of the bridge.

  He rolled down the window at his left elbow, stuck his head out into the downpour and yelled, “Bridge go out?”

  A man wearing a glistening raincoat sloshed up to Quade’s car. “Naw,” he said. “She ain’t out yet, but she’s creaking and won’t stand much more.”

  “You going to cross?” Quade asked.

  The man shrugged. “We gotta make it across, but we’re scared to take a chance. The current’s pretty swift. We’d be carried right away.”

  Another man in a dripping slicker came up. “Mister, your car’s a lot lighter than ours,” he said. “You might make it.” Quade pursed his lips. “Well, the road’s too narrow to turn around and go back so I guess I’ll have to chance it.”

  The man who had come up first, said, “Mind if we ride across with you? We got to get over there.”

  “Hop in,” Quade invited. “Three hundred and fifty pounds more won’t make enough difference.”

  He opened the door on the far side of him and the two men trudged around. They squeezed into the front seat, the closest man’s slicker wetting Quade clear through to the skin.

  He gunned the motor and the wheels swished on the soaked gravel. For a moment Quade thought his car was already stuck, but then the little motor jerked the car out of the rut and it went back. Quade stopped it fifty yards from the bridge.

  “Hang on,” he said, grimly. “I’m going to take it full speed.”

  “In high?” asked the man beside him.

  “No, the water’s too deep for that and if I should kill the motor I doubt whether I could start it again. I’ll take it in low, but I’m not stopping for anything.”

  “I thought I heard the bridge creak,” said the second man. “Think we ought to try it?”

  Quade thought that he saw the bridge skeleton move. The car was insured and could be replaced. His life wasn’t insured and couldn’t be replaced. He asked:

  “How important is it for you to get across?”

  The man beside Quade sighed. “Very important. I’m Dave Starkey, the sheriff of this county. And this is Lou Higginbotham, my deputy. A murder has been committed over on that island. That’s why we want to get over.”

  “Then,” said Quade, “Hold tight … and pray!”

  He shifted into low, kept his foot on the clutch and raced the motor. Then suddenly he let out the clutch. The car leaped forward and Quade pushed the gas throttle to the floorboards. He gripped the steering wheel firmly and missed the lawmen’s car by inches. The coupe hit the water covering the bridge floor and splashed it mightily.

  Quade felt the wheels grip the bridge planking. Water splashed up through the floor-boards, soaked his trousers to his knees, but he kept his foot down on the throttle.

  Half-way across! The bridge creaked ominously and for a giddy moment Quade thought it was going out. He heard the sheriff beside him gasp.

  Three-quarters across and the bridge swayed so that Quade had to fight the wheel. Higginbotham, the deputy, whimpered.

  And then, miraculously, the coupe leaped clear of the water and climbed the steep, graveled road on the other side. Quade continued to the crest of the ridge before he lifted his foot from the throttle. He stopped the car then, and a tremor ran through him. He knew that there was a fine film of perspiration on his forehead.

  “We made it,” the sheriff said and there was a catch in his voice.

  “Do you think your own car can make it?” Quade asked.

  The sheriff shook his head. “No, not a chance in the world. That bridge is going out of its own accord inside of a half hour.”

  “Then perhaps you’d better not walk back after it. I’ll drive you to where you’re going.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Thanks. It’s the Olcott place. ’Bout a quarter mile ahead, then a driveway to the left.”

  There was a stone arch over the driveway leading into the Olcott place. That told Quade that he was entering the grounds of a rich man’s estate.

  The house, two hundred yards from the highway, was built on a hilltop. It was ablaze with lights and had, Quade estimated, at least twenty rooms. A smaller house nearby was evidently the servants’ quarters.

  Quade braked the coupe to a stop before the big house. The raincoated officers climbed out.

  “Thanks a lot, mister,” the sheriff said. “If you ever get arrested in Spurling I’ll see that you get treated better than usual.”

  Quade said, “That’s very generous of you. But how the devil am I going to get away from here? You said this was an island?”

  “Yeah, I’d forgot.” The sheriff frowned. “There’s another bridge a quarter-mile beyond, but I’ve a notion that it’s gone out already. It was lower than the one we crossed.”

  “Fine,” said Quade. “I was just looking for an excuse not to drive any more tonight. And I’ve always wanted to spend a day or two on a swell estate like this.”

  “You forget why we’re here,” said the sheriff. “A murder—”

  “Dead ones don’t scare me,” Quade replied. “Only live ones. I don’t imagine Mr. Murderer hung around here to wait for the cops. Let’s go inside.”

  Someone inside the big house must have heard the car stop for before the three men reached the front door it was thrown wide open. A butler in livery peered out. He asked:

  “Are you the police?”

  “We are,” said the sheriff. “And we had one sweet time getting here.”

  Quade and the officers entered the house and began taking off their dripping coats. The butler took them.

  A white-haired man came out of the living room on the right.

  “Sheriff Starkey!” he exclaimed. “I’m glad you made it. I—well, you know why we sent for you.”

  “Yes, Mr. Olcott. You said your brother was killed.”

  The man called Olcott shook his head. “It—it was frightful. Allison went to call him for dinner and there—there he was.”

  “Lead the way, Mr. Olcott,” the sheriff said.

  The white-haired man grimaced and turned to a staircase. The sheriff, the deputy and Quade followed.

  A wide corridor split the second floor. On the side where the staircase was, five doors opened onto the corridor; on the unbroken side, six doors. All the doors except the last one to the left of the stairs were open. Ferdinand Olcott led the way to the closed door.

  The sheriff pushed open the door. The light was on in the bedroom.

  “Ah,” said the sheriff. The deputy cleared his throat hoarsely.

  The dead man was about fifty; in life he had been an athletic, heavy-set man. His hair was iron-gray and his face tanned as if he had lived in the open.

  There was much blood on the bed. Quade felt his insides tighten and wished that he had stayed in the city, back there fifty miles or so.

  The sheriff drew a breath and approached the bed. He examined the body, then said, “It’s just a little hole. He must have bled to death.”

  “No,” said Quade. “He died almost instantly. The blade went through the spinal cord at the back of his neck. If he hadn’t died instantly, he would have screamed.”

  The sheriff looked sharply at Quade. “Maybe he did scream; what makes you think he didn’t?”

  “Mr. Olcott said the butler came to call him for dinner. If he’d screamed, someone in the house would have heard him.”

  “Mmm.” The sheriff looked
suspiciously at Oliver Quade. “What about the knife hitting his spinal cord? How’d you figure that? Are you a doctor?”

  “No, not at all. I’m Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia.”

  Sheriff Starkey’s eyes widened. “The Human what?”

  “Human Encyclopedia.”

  “I don’t get you. Why should you be a Human Encyclopedia?”

  “Well, because I sell encyclopedias.”

  “You’re a book agent? I’ll be damned.”

  Mr. Olcott, standing just inside the door, said anxiously: “He—he was killed? It’s not suicide?”

  The sheriff looked at the paper-knife lying on the floor, near the foot of the bed, then at the edge of the sheet where the killer had wiped off the blade.

  “It couldn’t have been suicide,” he said. “The blade was obviously wiped off and a man killing himself wouldn’t do that.”

  “He was your brother?” Quade asked, turning to Olcott.

  Olcott nodded. “Yes, but I hadn’t seen him in six years until he came to visit here last week.”

  The sheriff looked disapprovingly at Quade. Then he said to the old man, “Then you don’t know very much about your brother?”

  “As much as anyone, I guess. He wrote me often. He owns a tremendously large cattle ranch down in the Argentine.”

  Quade saw the sheriff’s eyes light up and knew the question of inheritance had popped into his mind. But the sheriff didn’t ask it. Instead he examined his finger nails.

  “I’d like to use your phone now, Mr. Olcott,” he said.

  “Of course. Downstairs.”

  “Yes. I’m through here, for the time being.”

  The upper corridor was strangely devoid of servants. The dead man in the end bedroom had frightened them downstairs, Quade reasoned.

  He and the lawmen and Ferdinand Olcott descended to the entrance hall. There the sheriff picked up a phone from a stand. He jiggled the hook, then replaced the receiver on it.

  “It’s dead. I’ve been expecting that.” He looked at his deputy. Higginbotham was a big man, standing over six feet, and weighing close to two hundred pounds. He was a young fellow, not over twenty-five. His forehead wrinkled as soon as the sheriff looked at him.

  “Lou,” the sheriff said. “You’d better go and see if either of the bridges are still in. With the telephone wire down …” He left the sentence unfinished.

  The deputy coughed awkwardly. “You mean I should walk?”

  The sheriff looked at Quade, then at Olcott. He said, “Isn’t your chauffeur here, Mr. Olcott?”

  “Yes, of course, he’s in the kitchen with the rest of the servants. I’ll have him get out one of the small cars and drive your man.”

  Allison, the butler, came out of a door. “Allison,” said Mr. Olcott, “tell Charles to take this deputy where he wants to go. In the smallest car.”

  The butler and the deputy went through a door at the end of the hall. Olcott turned to the sheriff then. “I suppose you will want to talk to the family—and the guests?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Ferdinand Olcott led the way into a living room that ran the width of the house, more than forty feet. There were seven or eight people in it. Quade wondered that none had been curious enough to come out into the hallway when he and the police officers had arrived.

  There was one woman. She was young, beautiful; a rather tall, blonde girl with a boyish figure and classic features. Oliver Quade liked her intelligent expression. She was Martha Olcott, the daughter of the house.

  The men interested Quade most. His sharp eyes studied them carefully. Movie-goers would instantly have picked the swarthy man as the villain of the play. He was of middle height, slightly stout, used pomade on his hair, and had a pointed, waxed mustache. This was Arturo Nogales and he was, Ferdinand Olcott explained, the dead man’s business manager.

  The second man, from the way he kept his eyes on Martha Olcott, was her sweetheart. He was a well-built, dark young man of about twenty-five or twenty-six. He had probably played football at college and played it well, Quade thought. His name was Lynn Crosby.

  The last man came rightly last. He was that sort of man; he was probably five feet six, had sandy hair, wore tortoise-shell rimmed glasses and would have walked around an impudent cat on the sidewalk, rather than dispute the right-of-way. He was Clarence Olcott, Ferdinand Olcott’s son.

  The introductions over, Sheriff Starkey got down to business.

  “As sorry as I am about everything, I’m still the sheriff of this county and it’s my duty to make an investigation. I must determine first of all where everyone was in the house at the time the murder was committed.”

  His bluntness drew a couple of gasps. Ferdinand Olcott protested. “Why, Sheriff, you talk as if you suspect someone in this house killed my brother.”

  The sheriff’s eyes popped wide open. “Isn’t that what you think?”

  “Of course not,” replied Olcott, indignantly. “The thought never occurred to me that it was done by anyone but an intruder, some second-story man who entered the house for nefarious purposes.”

  The sheriff gulped. “In daylight, during the kind of weather we had today? Oh, come now, Mr. Olcott, does it sound reasonable that a sneak thief or burglar would try to come into a house during a rainstorm when he knows that more than a dozen people are in it?”

  Olcott frowned and shook his head. “But it’s preposterous to think that anyone in this house committed the—crime. The servants have all been with us for years and surely you don’t think—”

  “He means just that,” the mousy Clarence surprised everyone by saying. “And I believe he’s justified in that contention. I’ve been giving some thought to the matter and I can see only one logical explanation: Someone in this house killed Uncle Walter.”

  There was some rumbling about that. Quade decided then that he had been silent long enough. He said, “Mr. Olcott’s right. No outsider would have used a paper-knife as a weapon for killing someone in this house. A pocket knife or blackjack would have been a more likely weapon for an outsider. Sheriff, I know you intended to do it, but don’t you think it’s time to find out from whose room the murder weapon came?”

  The sheriff glared at Quade. At that moment the outer door slammed and Higginbotham, the deputy, came into the big living room. “Both bridges are out and the river’s gone up more than six feet.”

  “Six feet!” cried the sheriff. “It couldn’t go up that much in such a little time.”

  “It could if the dam went out up the river,” said Lynn Crosby with his eyes still on Martha.

  Ferdinand Olcott exclaimed in consternation. “Fourteen years ago, before that dam was built, we had a flood here and the water came up almost to the spot where this house is built. I never thought that dam would go out.”

  “You mean, Father,” interposed Martha Olcott, “that there’s actual danger from the flood?”

  Olcott looked frankly worried. “Why, I—I’d hate to think that, but if the dam’s broken, the water’s going to get pretty high. I don’t think it’ll quite reach the house, but, with the bridges out and the telephone wires down, we may be isolated for several days.”

  “There’s enough food in the house for a month,” said Martha Olcott.

  Nogales, the Argentinian, showed white teeth. “Good! Then there is nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing,” said Quade, “except that a man has been murdered in this house, that the murderer is still here, and that we’re on an island, cut off from the rest of the world. There’s going to be a flood out there and people are going to be too busy for a while to think about this little group here. We may be here a week … with a dead man in the house.”

  The sheriff took a deep breath. “Then we may as well get some things straight. I’m the law here and I’m conducting a murder investigati
on. Mr. Human Encyclopedia, you did a good job in getting us over here, but, just to avoid trouble in the future, keep in mind that I’m running things here. Understand?”

  Quade looked sardonically at the sheriff. “It so happens that I’m one of the three people here not under suspicion. I’ve violated no laws and I’m probably the most intelligent person here.”

  Clarence Olcott took up the challenge. “I’m a Harvard man, mister,” he said. “I’ve got an A.B. and M.A. and I’m working for an LL.D. I think my educational qualifications are the equal of anyone here.”

  “I guess I spoke out of turn,” said Quade. “But, Mr. Olcott, can you tell me in what direction Reno, Nevada, is from San Diego, California?”

  Clarence Olcott looked superciliously at Quade. “Any schoolboy could tell you that. Reno is northeast of San Diego.”

  “I’m afraid the schoolboy who’d say that would flunk,” Quade replied. “It so happens that Reno is northwest of San Diego. Look it up on the map.”

  Clarence strode to a bookcase and took out an atlas. After a moment he grunted. “I’ll be damned. You’re right. But that was a trick question. All right, it’s my turn. I’ll ask you something. Hmm. Who invented the principle of the door lock?”

  Clarence Olcott had evidently asked the first question to come to his mind, without realizing the magnitude of it. Quade screwed up his mouth. “That,” he said, “is a very good question. Only about six persons in this country could answer it. I’m one of the six. The ancient Egyptians invented the door lock. The principle of it died with the decline of Egypt, and in medieval days an inferior lock was evolved by Europeans. The first real lock of modern times was invented by Robert Barron in 1774. In 1848 Linus Yale invented the modern tumbler lock, using the principle of the ancient Egyptian lock, patterned after one found in the ruins of Nineveh.”

  Almost everyone in the room was staring at Quade by this time. He chuckled and went on: “With the Yale lock and key, 32,768 combinations are possible…. Do you want to ask me another question, Mr. Olcott?”