Tucker didn’t answer. Instead he asked Phillips, “Was the vase washed when the flowers were changed?”
The butler nodded. “Yes, it was.”
This answer seemed to hit Tucker hard. He stood there for a moment without speaking, staring blankly at the glass in his hand.
Then Flint said, “Well, let’s have it. Whose print—”
Tucker’s answer was barely audible. The bottom had dropped out of his voice completely.
“It’s Smith’s,” he said.
The man who refused to stay dead, the man whose body had been lying on a cold slab at the morgue for nearly three hours, was back again.
Chapter Seventeen:
The Fine Art of Murder
JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I had found a silver lining in the cloud, the damned thing exploded thunder and lightning. I had been ready to guarantee my solution free from all supernatural impurities and had been sure that it would even meet the lieutenant’s specifications in that respect. I had exorcised the ghost completely, and, in the next moment, he was right back again just as lively as ever—and twice as dead!
All my answers, as far as I could see, were still good except that none of them would explain what had just happened. I knew how Smith had vanished both from Mrs. Wolff’s bedroom and from the study. But, even if he were still alive, those methods wouldn’t begin to explain how he could have come unseen into this room and tipped over that vase. They certainly wouldn’t explain it if he were dead. And worse, even if I disregarded the fingerprint, I saw no way anyone else could have managed it. That included the murderer. I couldn’t even see why the murderer would want to do it.
The one thing I did know was that I was not going to let a ghost come creeping back into my solution no matter what sort of fingerprint credentials he offered. He was, somehow, going to have to turn out to be the juggling trick he always had been. The thing to do was refer the matter to the technical expert in hocus-pocus, Merlini. It was in his department.
I turned and saw him making for the door to the hall. I caught him just before he went out.
“Just a minute,” I said. “Is Smith really dead this time, or isn’t he?”
“If he’s only pretending,” Merlini answered, “it’s as realistic a job of acting as I ever saw. We stopped at the morgue on our way back just now and had a look at most of him.”
“Most of him?”
“Yes. The medical examiner had removed a few pieces here and there for analysis.”
“And did you find out if his death was accidental or on purpose?”
“Well, there wasn’t anything wrong with the car that couldn’t have been caused by the smash, and the autopsy hasn’t turned up anything, so far at least, that contradicts an accidental death. The toxicological tests, of course, will take time.”
I saw Sergeant Lovejoy whispering in the lieutenant’s ear and nodding in ray direction. I knew what that meant.
“Time,” I said, “is something I’m not going to have nearly enough of. Are you still betting that there’ll be evidences of poison?”
Merlini hesitated. Flint’s voice came across the room. “Ross Harte. Come here!”
“Quick,” I said. “I’ve got to know.” Merlini shook his head. “I’m afraid that the medical examiner won’t find a single solitary trace.”
“Then you think it was accident after all?”
Flint’s voice came again. “Lovejoy, go get him!” The order was superfluous. The sergeant, apparently fearing that I might vanish again, was already bearing down upon me with decks cleared for action. “What,” Merlini asked, “have you done now?”
“I opened my mouth and put my foot in it.”
“Good,” he said. “Keep it there until I get one or two things attended to.” He turned and ducked quickly out through the door.
“Hey,” I said, “wait! I’m the one who needs rear-guard support.” But he was gone and Lovejoy had me by the arm.
“The lieutenant was speaking to you,” he growled.
“Yes. I heard him, but he didn’t say please.”
Lovejoy didn’t seem to know the word either. “Come on,” he said. “Pick up your feet.”
“Take him in the library, Sergeant,” Flint ordered. “And Ryan, you get Merlini. I want him in there too.” Lovejoy took me in, closed the door firmly, and proceeded to watch me as though I were the crown jewels. In the few minutes’ grace I had before Flint arrived I tried to think of some delaying action. I knew that Lovejoy had reported hearing me say that I knew who the murderer was, but I wasn’t as eager to confide in the lieutenant as I had been before that flower vase had dropped a nice fresh puzzle in my lap. Somehow I was going to have to stall him off, at least until Merlini appeared. I tried throwing a fast one in under his guard before he could open fire.
“Is this,” I asked, as soon as he came in, “where I get fitted for the handcuffs?”
“It might be,” he said flatly. “Are you confessing?”
“No, not yet. I’ve just turned up an alibi.”
“For what?”
“That flower vase out there. I was miles from it when it fell. You were a lot nearer yourself. You can’t hang that on me.”
“Don’t be too sure. Lovejoy says he heard you saying you know who the murderer is. Stop stalling and let’s have it.”
I shook my head. “I’ve changed my mind. I spoke hastily. I don’t know who the murderer is.”
The look Flint gave me was frostbitten. Without turning his head, he said, “Okay, Sergeant, take him in. He’s turned up something, or thinks he has. But if he thinks he’s going to save it for an exclusive press release, he’s got another think coming.”
Lovejoy moved toward me just as Ryan opened the door and stepped in. He had a worried look on his face, and he was alone.
Flint sounded a bit worried too. “Where’s Merlini? If you tell me he’s disappeared—”
Ryan shook his head. “No. He’s out in the kitchen. He says he wants you to come out there. I thought I’d better humor him.”
“You what?”
“Well, you see, he’s lighting cigarettes and throwing them all over the room. I think he’s gone nuts. I think you’d better come—”
Flint swore and started out. Lovejoy asked, “What do I book Harte on?”
“Withholding material evidence. No, wait. Bring him out here first. You may have to take them both in.”
Ryan’s description of what was happening in the kitchen was not exaggerated. Phillips stood just inside the door frowning uneasily as he watched Merlini light a fresh cigarette, take a few quick puffs on it, and then throw it with considerable force against the side of the refrigerator. It bounced off and rolled across the linoleum trailing sparks.
“But why so much, Phillips?” Merlini said as he stopped, picked the cigarette up, looked at it closely, and added it to a neatly aligned row of several others that lay in a dish on the table.
“Mr. Wolff was exceptionally fond of it, sir,” Phillips replied. “He ate it several times a day. Large portions.”
Merlini scratched a match and was applying it to still another cigarette when Flint asked, “What did Wolff eat so much of, and what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Merlini looked around. “Oh hello.” He held the new cigarette out in front of him, opened his fingers, and let it fall to the floor. He picked it up and did it again. Phillips looked as though he were glad to see us. I didn’t blame him.
Then Merlini answered both of Flint’s questions at once. “Dudley Wolff was an ice-cream addict. And I’m gathering experimental data for a learned dissertation on the inflammable characteristics of cigarette tobacco. You’ll be interested.”
“So far I’m not,” Flint objected. “What are you getting at?”
Merlini looked at the butler. “Thank you, Phillips. That will be all.” He waited until Phillips had gone out. Then he said, “My researches tend to indicate that your medical examiner is going to be considerably annoyed when all h
is laborious toxicological tests turn up an answer of zero.” He added the cigarette he held to those in the dish.
Flint was annoyed too. “Then you admit now that the smash was an accident?”
“I didn’t say that. I said that he wasn’t poisoned.”
“But you admitted there wasn’t anything wrong with that car. You even had the heater pulled apart. You didn’t find a damned thing. It has to be one or the other.”
“It is. And we did find something. The cigarette stub on the car floor.”
“All right. So what?” Flint took an envelope from his pocket, lilted the flap, and carefully rolled a cigarette out onto the porcelain table top. It was two thirds the length of a fresh one and there was a black tip of burned carbon at its end.
“Don’t you see anything queer about it?” Merlini asked.
Flint scowled at it. “It’s the brand Leonard uses, and it’s probably the one Dunning was smoking when he was knocked out. It fell to the car floor. But I don’t see—”
Merlini turned to me. “Ross?”
I looked at the cigarettes he had been experimenting with in the dish. There were seven of varying lengths. Smoke still curled upward from six of them. Except for that, they seemed no different from the one Flint had produced.
“I give up,” I said. “The floor’s yours.” Then, half afraid that he might go mysterious on us and hold out whatever it was that he had, I decided to jar it loose. “And stop acting like a quiz program. We’re rushed. The lieutenant’s waiting to hear me blow this case apart.”
“He’s waiting to hear what?”
“The solution. I’ve got it wrapped up, or I will have as soon as you prove Smith was murdered. If you can do that—”
“You know who shot Wolff?”
“Yes.”
“And how Smith vanished without benefit of trap doors?”
“That too.”
Merlini gave me a long penetrating look. “Congratulations,” he said, not sounding at all as if he meant it. “That’s fine. But you don’t know what’s wrong with this cigarette?”
“No. You can contribute that. Give.”
My confidence seemed to upset him a bit. He hesitated a moment, then said, “All right.”
He bent above the cigarette as though about to demonstrate some subtle and sensational point. Flint and I leaned over too. And Merlini crossed us up with one of his Bernard Shaw prefaces.
“Some critics of murder,” he said, “mistakenly suppose that undetectability is the sole criterion of the perfect crime. They give the highest award to the simple bash on the head of the first passer-by in the nearest dark alley. But many an unimaginative criminal moron has accomplished murder of that sort and successfully evaded detection. Far from being the perfect crime, it is a primitive, uncivilized, utterly inartistic procedure. The real connoisseur of murder demands artistry and imagination.”
I straightened up. “Stop cribbing De Quincey and get on with it.”
He ignored me. “The artistic murder would be one in which the murderer is a sane person with a definite motive. Ideally it should never be suspected of being murder at all. Or, failing that, it should utterly confound the most up-to-date efforts of the autopsist and all the prying devices of the laboratory specialist in their attempts to prove that it is anything other than death from natural causes or accident. It should, preferably, be accomplished by a remote-control method having all the stark simplicity of an axiom out of Euclid. And the device used should not only be self-working but self-effacing, equipped, as was the device that caused Smith’s death, with an automatic vanishing attachment that leaves not the slightest vestige of anything remotely resembling a clue.”
“Hey,” Flint cut in, “you said this cigarette—”
“I know. It is a clue. But artistically it shouldn’t count. It’s a purely accidental blemish on a perfectly planned crime. The one other thing a criminal needs, the thing this criminal didn’t have quite enough of, is luck. If Dunning hadn’t happened to be smoking when he was hit, there would have been absolutely nothing to blow the gaff. Aristotle, Einstein, J. Edgar Hoover, and Clarence Darrow working together couldn’t have proved that the traffic smash was not a legitimate accident.”
Flint glared at him and started to interrupt. Merlini hastened quickly to the point. “Cigarettes don’t go out as a pipe does the moment you stop puffing at them. If you’ve ever left one on your wife’s polished dining-room table you will undoubtedly have had the point called to your attention. They go on burning merrily until there’s nothing left but ash and a charred streak on the veneer. Like that one.”
He pointed to the shortest of the burning cigarettes on the dish. Less than a half-inch of it remained. All the rest was ash.
“That’s been burning for eighteen minutes by my watch. But a good two thirds of the one we found in the car is unburned. Its neat, unwrinkled condition clearly indicates that it was not stepped on or snuffed out in the usual manner. What extinguished it?”
“It was lying on the floor of the car,” Flint said. “When the car crashed—”
“No.” Merlini shook his head. “It took that car fifteen minutes to get from here to where it cracked up. If the cigarette had been burning all that time, there’d be little more than a half inch left.”
“Then it went out when Dunning dropped—”
Merlini shook his head again. “I don’t think so. That’s why I’ve been tossing lighted cigarettes around this kitchen like a pyromaniac. They don’t go out quite that easily.” He pointed at the one stub in the dish that was not burning. “That’s the only one I put out in seven tries. It landed, and with more force than Dunning’s would have, directly on its lighted end. The burning portion was completely dislodged. Compare it with the one we found in the car. The burned center core of carbon is still intact. Why didn’t it continue to burn? What put it out somewhere between here and Mount Vernon?”
Flint gave him a quick look. “Does this have anything to do with the car heater you were so interested in?
Merlini nodded.
“But dammit,” Flint objected. “The heater was turned on. It was feeding a stream of air back into the car. That would help keep the cigarette lit. This stub looks more as if it stopped burning because of a lack of oxygen.”
“It did. Add that to Phillips’s statement that Dudley Wolff liked ice cream so much that there’s always a gallon freezer of it on hand.”
I saw it then. “Packed,” I finished, “with dry ice!”
“Yes. Frozen carbon dioxide. Someone with a neatly ingenious turn of mind shoved several sticks of it into the car heater. Too much of the oxygen in the hot-air stream coming back into the closed car was combined with carbon in the molecular proportion of two to one. Carbon dioxide is noncombustible. When the percentage of C02 in the atmosphere is too great a flame can’t get enough oxygen. Cigarettes go out. So do people. Same reason.”
Lieutenant Flint, in the butler’s pantry, was already examining the freezer.
“And,” Merlini continued, “note the irony. Mr. Zareh Bey Smith, the shallow-breathing expert, the man who couldn’t be asphyxiated, met his death after all primarily because of a lack of good fresh air. Dry ice is so called because, in melting at normal temperatures, it skips the liquid stage and passes directly from a solid to gaseous state. There’s no residue. That’s the automatic vanishing attachment I mentioned. And the car heater not only hastened the melting but fed the gas in a steady stream back into the car.”
I asked, “Why did you say the medical examiner wouldn’t find any traces of poison?”
“Because I sneaked a look in his toxicology text while Flint was talking to him. I quote: It is not possible to demonstrate carbon-dioxide poisoning by means of any chemical tests on the dead body. And, in the second place—”
“It won’t do,” Flint said as he returned. “You’d need a concentration of about twelve percent carbon dioxide in the air in that car. That would take a lot more dry ice than that heate
r would ever hold. A bucketful might do it, but not—”
“This murderer didn’t need that much,” Merlini said. “The second reason that the medical examiner will find nothing is that Smith didn’t die from C02 poisoning. He died from injuries received in the smash. The murderer not only used a poison undetectable to any medical examination even in lethal quantities—he didn’t even use enough to kill! He only needed enough to make Smith lose control of the car. The first symptoms of too much carbon dioxide are giddiness and a marked somnolence. You can’t mix those with a speed of seventy plus. When you travel that fast you need to be wide-awake just to stay on the road. Even if Smith noticed that the air seemed stuffy and that he was feeling sleepy, he had other more urgent matters to occupy his attention, namely: the cop that was on his tail.
“Smith blinked, tried to keep his eyes open, failed for an instant or two, and crashed. The CO2 dissipated when the car windows smashed. By the time anyone thinks to look in the heater, which we’d never have done anyway but for the accident of the cigarette, the dry ice has vanished into something as thin as, but more deadly than, air. I hope I never meet another murder device half as ingenious. Even if it fails, even if the victim isn’t in such an all-fired hurry, if he does have time to notice that something is wrong and opens a window, he’d never tumble to just what was wrong. He’d never know there: had been an attempt on his life. The murderer could try again and even use the same method.”
“All right,” Flint admitted doubtfully, “you make it sound good. But suppose I do take it? What have we got? One cigarette that might have gone out too soon and a hell of a lot of high, wide, and fancy guesswork. A defense attorney would have himself a picnic.”
He turned suddenly to me. “Harte, it’s your turn. What do you think you’ve got that tells you who the murderer is?”
“Motive,” I said, “and opportunity. Also a whole flock of answers to hard questions. The person who didn’t dig Smith up, the person who tried to get him with the trap gun, the person who did get him with the dry ice, the person who shot Wolff, and the one and only person who could have spirited that vest-pocket revolver out of the study is the one person we’ve consistently overlooked because—”
No Coffin for the Corpse Page 21
