The gun in his hand lifted and pointed at Merlini.
His voice was cold and hard and confident. “Lovejoy, handcuff him again. And this time get those lockpicks he carries. He’s just told me all I wanted to know!”
Merlini’s eyebrows lifted. This turn of events was apparently not one he had planned. I’ve told you—
“Yeah. Yon certainly have. Thanks for explaining the flower-vase trick. That bothered me. But Miss Wolff didn’t put Smith’s fingerprint on that extra piece. You did! You saw Phillips take that vase into the living-room just before we left to investigate the traffic accident. And then you went into the kitchen for a moment. You’re the one who cracked a piece from another vase, and you added Smith’s print when we saw his body later at the morgue. You put the piece in with the flowers and put the ice under the vase just after we got back.
“I let you pull this bluff of trapping the murderer because I wasn’t sure just what kind of sleight of hand you were leading up to this time. I know now. You’re trying to frame Miss Wolff in a desperate attempt to save your own skin. You’re the guy who knows so much about burial-alive and dry-ice murder methods. You think that if you mix enough truth with your misdirection I’ll believe it. That burial-alive blackmail scheme is just the sort of thing a magician would think up, and a magician is just the sort of person who’d know someone like Zareh Bey. You shot Wolff!”
“I did? Why?”
“You were trying to get backing for your show. That’s why you tried to blackmail Wolff. But things went wrong when your Algerian stooge wouldn’t stay dead. You didn’t come out here last night to investigate a ghost; you came to get rid of him. But Smith tried to get you first. When Harte came into the study in the dark, Smith thought it was you. That’s why he tossed Harte out the window!
“Then, after he left, Kay didn’t come in. You did. You took cover behind the desk when Mrs. Wolff and then Wolff arrived. Wolff had begun to suspect you. You heard him begin to tell his wife that. You shot him. She fainted. Then you went out into the hall, locked the door behind you with your lockpicks, and, when everyone else arrived, pretended you were trying to get in to investigate the shots.”
“You almost convince me, Lieutenant. And the murder gun? How did I get that out? I was still at the door when you arrived, and you had the sergeant search me immediately after.”
“Lovejoy hasn’t had much experience frisking magicians. You palmed it. That’s why you picked the smallest you could find.”
“And I put the dry ice in the car heater too?”
“Sure. You had to get rid of Smith. He knew too much.”
“I see. And then, after committing the perfect crime, I call your attention to the cigarette and prove that what I’d tried so hard to make look like accident was murder. That seems a bit odd.”
Flint shook his head. “I thought you’d give me that. You’re a magician. You couldn’t resist the temptation to let everyone know that the accident was a perfect, undetectable crime—a clever trick. That was why we had to listen to that damned smug lecture of yours in which you said the criminal was a genius. You were tossing bouquets at yourself. You thought it was more misdirection. You figured that if you blew the gaff on the accident, I’d never suspect you could be the murderer. But you laid it on too thick. That’s partly why you gave me the burial-alive story too, that and the fact that you had to dish up something to explain the missing body and all the evidence that indicated that Smith was still alive.
“And what’s more, if you really had phoned Miss Wolff just now, if she and not yourself were the murderer, she’d have been here by now. What made you think that she’d—
Flint stopped as suddenly as if someone had clapped a hand over his mouth. His head jerked around. The knob on the study door was turning.
Merlini’s tense whisper said, “The phone call did work after all! Make sure you get the person who comes—”
The door pushed open. Flint watched but the gun in his hand still covered Merlini. Then his jaw dropped.
Lovejoy was the one who acted. He lunged forward, grabbed the wrist of the person who stood in the doorway, and twisted it savagely.
The blue-steel automatic in Kay’s hand fell to the floor.
Chapter Twenty:
The Last Solution
I TURNED TO MERLINI. “You and your sleight of hand,” I roared. “Now look what you’ve done!” I started toward Kay. “Why did you come to this room just now? Why—”
Flint grabbed my arm. He roared even louder. “You pipe down! I’ll do the questioning. Well, Miss Wolff?”
She nodded at the window which Leonard had left partly open and which no one had thought to close. “My room is the next one over. I heard voices in here, Merlini’s and yours. I thought I heard Merlini accusing me—” She looked at him with round eyes, still not quite believing it.
“I apologize, Kay,” Merlini said quickly. “I’m sorry. Don’t believe everything you hear. Is that gun of yours loaded?”
She shook her head. “No. I took it from the gun room as I came upstairs. When the police arrest the wrong person and then go away leaving us with a murderer—well, I felt safer—”
Lovejoy, who had picked the gun up and examined it, said, “She’s right. It’s empty.”
“And that,” Merlini said, “lets her out, Lieutenant. The murderer wouldn’t arrive bent on killing Smith with an unloaded gun.”
“She wouldn’t have come here to meet Smith anyway,” I put in. “She knew he was dead. I told her.”
Flint turned to Merlini. “You’re not still trying to make me believe that you called anyone on that phone?”
“I am. I did call someone. But not Miss Wolff. The case against her won’t stand a good close look. Ross did not see her go out the window. I was only talking fast, trying to keep you quiet until the person I did phone should arrive. But now, with this door wide open and our voices broadcasting the fact that we’re here, the trap is a washout. And I am, apparently, going to have to do some even faster talking to get out from under the case you’ve built up against me.”
He stopped. His head jerked around toward the door.
The burglar alarm was ringing once again and from outside the house, as it had once before that morning, came the quick starting roar of a car.
“Lieutenant,” Merlini said, “there goes your murderer.”
For a moment Flint hung fire. Then, as the pistol shots cracked out, he roared, “Lovejoy! No one leaves this room. Watch them!” And he was gone.
Merlini looked at Lovejoy. “You’d better get out an alarm, Sergeant. And quickly. Flint is going to have trouble. The police cars are all parked down the drive. By the time he reaches one—”
The sergeant made a startled grab for the phone.
I looked at Merlini. “Your sleight of hand slipped a bit, didn’t it?”
“It wobbled some,” he admitted. “But the trap did work. The murderer heard our voices just now when Kay came in. Having had no news of Smith’s death, having seen the fingerprint on the flower vase indicate that he had returned, and having received my phone call, it looked as though Smith were here and that we had got him—alive, kicking, and ready to talk. It looked as if there was nothing to do but get out fast.”
Kay said, “Merlini, who are you talking about? If someone doesn’t tell me something soon, I’ll—”
Merlini looked at me. “Ross, you tell her.”
“Tell her what? Haggard, Galt, Dunning, Phillips, Scotty—if you can show me how a single one of them could possibly have been in this room when Wolff was shot—”
Sergeant Lovejoy’s voice, angry and baffled, roared at us across the phone. “Dammit, do you know who took it on the lam in that car or don’t you? I don’t know who to tell them to stop!”
“You should,” Merlini answered. “Ross told you some time ago. Mrs. Wolff.”
Lovejoy stared at him uncertainly. “If this is more of your sleight of hand—”
“No, Sergeant. Cross m
y heart and hope to die. That’s the last solution. There are no more.”
“It was the first one too,” I growled. “And you had to pretend it was wrong so you could step into the spotlight and finish things off with a lot of pretty fireworks. It seems to me that just for once you might let someone else—”
“But, Ross,” he objected. “I didn’t say you were wrong. I merely asked you some questions. Luckily you didn’t have the answers, lost confidence, and began to doubt—”
“Luckily?”
“Yes. If I had agreed with you, if we had convinced the lieutenant and he had made an arrest, then he could never have made it stick. He wouldn’t have had enough concrete evidence to put in his eye, or in the district attorney’s. And he would have discovered that even the nicely built castle of deductive reasoning he did have was built on sand.”
“But if she is the only possible person who could have been in this study when Wolff was shot—”
“That’s the trouble. From Flint’s point of view she isn’t. The whole train of reasoning that proves she must have shot Wolff is based directly on your testimony that no one had left by and no gun had been thrown from the window, and on my testimony that no one had left by the door. Accept those statements as fact and the only solution to the problem of the vanishing gun must be just what you said—that she swallowed it. But neither of us had the least bit of corroboration. When the attorney for the defense got through pointing out that I get my living by deception, that you had a motive as big as all outdoors, and that we were both guilty of burglarous entry the jury would begin having reasonable doubts by the dozen.
“The moment our statements are doubted the whole locked-room situation collapses. Mrs. Wolff is not the only possible suspect. There’s a case against you—you shot him and dropped out the window; there’s a case against Kay—she shot him and did the same; there’s a case against me, the best of the lot—I shot him and left by the door. I knew that in order to escape that predicament we’d have to turn up some evidence against Mrs. Wolff that a jury could really get its teeth into. And then, before there was a chance, you turned my hair gray by popping out with the correct answer way too soon.”
“And so you popped your trick questions,” I said unhappily. “Flint is right. Never trust a magician. That question about the flower vase had nothing to do with the case at all. You’re the colored man in that woodpile. You added that bit of embroidery in order to convince Mrs. Wolff that Smith was back again. And then you insisted I had no case until I had explained it. Was that fair?”
“It was necessary. I had to give you something to worry about until I could set and bait my trap. But it wasn’t so unfair. Flint gave you the answer before the pay-off, you know. And, for good measure, I gave you one of the other answers as well. When I threw Kay to the wolves I told you that you had made a mistake in assuming that Smith shoved you out the window. I told you that the murderer did it, thinking that she was getting rid of Smith’s body.
“But I couldn’t very well explain when the trap gun was fired or where Smith went to after leaving the study. I was trying to cook up a case against Kay, and both those answers point directly at Mrs. Wolff.”
“I give up,” I said. “When was the trap gun fired?”
“You give up too easily. You heard it fired. We all did.”
Kay objected. “But, Merlini, the only shots we heard were the ones Anne fired in her bedroom.”
Merlini nodded. “And how many did you hear?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t count them. There were a lot.”
I tried to remember. “We heard two shots, then three, and she opened her door and backed out into the hall still blazing away. She fired twice more. I’ll be damned!”
“Seven shots,” Merlini said. “Yet her gun held six and there were only six bullet holes in the walls of her bedroom. I’m afraid I didn’t realize that until a bit late myself, not until Lovejoy found the trap gun and we knew it had been fired. When I tried to figure out when that could have happened, I began counting shots and bullet holes. Then, a moment later the medical examiner phoned and reported a powder burn on Smith’s face. That tore it. It he was the one who had gone into the study and tripped the trap gun, Mrs. Wolff couldn’t have been shooting at him in the bedroom as she said. She was shooting at nothing and her barrage not only misdirected our attention from the study, as you said, but also covered the sound of the trap gun as well.”
“But,” Kay objected, “I don’t see why Smith went into the study at all. That was a dead end. Why didn’t he go through Anne’s room and out the window?”
“That’s what he intended to do,” I said. “But she sidetracked him into the study where the trap gun was. When he ducked after posing for the picture, she met him at her door, whispered that Leonard was outside and—”
“Wait, Ross,” Merlini said, shaking his head. “Flint didn’t like that whispering. Neither do I. There’s a much simpler method. All she had to do was lock her door. Smith does the only thing he can do—he jumps for the study. As soon as she hears the report of the trap gun she blazes away with her own gun, backs out of her room into the hall, and comes to a stop directly against the study door. She was making sure that the door had closed and locked behind Smith.
“Later, she did what I pretended to Flint that Kay had done. She went to the study to get rid of the body. But, since Dudley was still awake in his room next door, she didn’t dare show a light that might shine out on the water and be seen from his window. Nor was there any moonlight to show her, when she pulled the body up onto the window sill, that she was making a slight mistake in identity. And Ross, do you remember that when you got your head up above water you saw that the study light had been turned on? And remember who I told you had turned it on?”
I nodded glumly. “Yes. I do now. Dudley Wolff. He had the damned bad luck to walk in on a murderer just as she was getting rid of what she thought was her victim’s body. That’s why she shot him.”
“And then,” Merlini went on, “before she could get out and back to her own room, before she could even do what Flint accused me of—get outside the study door, lock it, and begin pounding on it as though she had just arrived—before she could make a move, I was there at the door doing some pounding of my own! Why that didn’t turn her hair white I don’t know. She had dropped straight from frying pan into a roaring red-hot blaze of fire. She stood there in a locked room, her husband’s body at her feet, and a gun in her hand.
“Anyone’s first instinctive reaction, even in as hopeless a situation as that, would be to rid themselves somehow of that gun. She couldn’t put it in Wolff’s hand and give out a suicide story. Even if he hadn’t been shot twice and in the wrong places, his fear of death made his suicide highly unlikely. Throwing it out the window was nearly as bad. That would be the first place the police, not finding it in the room would look. The vest-pocket gun which she had taken from the collection for the reason Ross gave, that it was small enough for a woman to carry unnoticed on her person, was still far too large to carry unnoticed out of any such situation as this. The voices in the hall outside told her that the police had already arrived. The search she would get would be thorough enough to uncover any gun no matter how small.
“But I doubt that Anne Wolff, in the moments during which I tried frantically to pick the lock on that door, even needed to think through and discard those possibilities. Another and much better one would have occurred to her almost at once. One of the standard methods of producing the spirit lights that had been her special mediumistic forte is the use of a vial of oil in which phosphorus has been dissolved. When the solution is uncapped and exposed to air in the dark it glows with a pale-yellow light. Mrs. Wolff concealed this evidence of fraud by using the subtle but common magician’s principle of deception known as the ‘unlikely means.’ She had practiced an ability to accomplish an action which the ordinary investigator would never suspect simply because it is so unlikely that it never occurs to him. She c
oncealed her spirit-light vial in the same way Jeanne Veiller, Mrs. Duncan, and other mediums hid their ectoplasm. The gun was no larger. She removed the unfired cartridges and swallowed it.
“Then, because this created an apparently impossible situation, similar to those given us by the ghost who had already twice vanished inexplicably, the obvious line to follow was to pretend that he had done it again. The police might not swallow any such theory as that, but the gun’s absence and the prevalence of ghost stories they’d get from all sides would at least confuse the investigation and delay her arrest long enough for her to get an opportunity to cut and run for it. So she dropped the key she had taken from her husband’s ring behind the desk where she later said someone or something had been hiding. Then she lay down, kept her fingers crossed, and played possum.”
“And then,” I said, “I’ll bet she really did pass out. When you pulled me out of the water, she was face to face with the paralyzing fact that the man who cannot die was still living up to his reputation!”
Merlini nodded. “It must have been discouraging to say the least. She realized that the trap gun had missed, that she had disposed of the wrong body, that Smith was still alive and well-aware that she had tried a second time to kill him. And to top that off, her attempt to mislead the police by throwing suspicion on a dead man would boomerang disastrously the moment they found him still alive and heard his—”
“Just a minute,” I interrupted. “Still alive, but, as you proved so thoroughly, invisible. Now disprove it.”
“Why? He was invisible. He left the study just as you said. He went across into the bedroom and discovered that his flashlight wouldn’t work. I pointed out that he could not leave by the window, the door to the hall, or the door to the bathroom. But is it my fault that you forgot that there is another door in that room?”
“Another door?”
“Yes. The closet door. It’s not exactly a way out of the room, but it is a place to hide—the only place. When Mrs. Wolff was carried in, searched, and put to bed, there was no particular reason for anyone to go poking around behind the dresses in that closet. The police were naturally concentrating on the study, the missing gun, and your very suspicious presence in the water below the window. It wasn’t until nearly three hours later, when you told us your story and Tucker found fingerprints to back you up, that we found out that the ghost had been in the study. It was a bit late then. In the meantime Doctor Haggard had given Mrs. Wolff the sleeping tablets which she promptly coughed up along with the gun as soon as he had gone out. Then—well, what else would happen once she was alone?”
No Coffin for the Corpse Page 24
