tantaliz

by Isaac Asimov ed.

  Mannix paused in his thoughts to consider the roster of possible suspects. There were perhaps 250 writers in the MWA—four-fifths of all the mystery writers in America. Of these, at least 150 belonged to the New York chapter, with sizeable groups located in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

  At least 80 writers had been present at that September meeting, and most of them, with the exception of a corporal's guard who had traveled from Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington to be present, lived within two hours' drive of Waggoner's cottage. Many lived closer. There were, for instance, Bruno Fischer and Lawrence Treat, both in northern Westchester, no more than an hour away.

  Percival Wilde, Hugh Pentecost, Georges Simenon, the Kelley Rooses, George Harmon Coxe—all lived in Connecticut, within easy driving distance. Others were clustered thickly in the Larchmont-Mamaroneck area—the names of John Dickson Carr, Herbert Brean, Clayton Rawson leaped to his mind. There were more, Mannix knew, if he cared to check. But he could not seriously visualize any of them playing the role of a murderer. All were more than competent enough to create their own plots, and at considerably less risk.

  Nevertheless, someone—his leaping thoughts reined up sharply at an obstacle he had not previously envisioned. The whole case had the touch one usually found in third-rate melodramas—the boarded windows, the message on the sheet in the typewriter, the severed head on a beer stein.

  From whatever angle you approached the case it reeked of the literary touch, as if a writer had at last discarded paper and typewriter and written his work in deeds, not words. But—and this was the obstacle he could not bypass—if a writer had killed Waggoner for his locked-room gimmick, why had he immediately wasted the idea by translating it into actuality?

  Obviously, now, the killer would hardly dare reveal his method of escape by putting it into a book. That would be virtually admitting he was the murderer. Of course he himself hoped to use the idea in a book, but that was different: he had an alibi.

  No, the two conclusions were antagonistic: only a mystery writer could be guilty—but no mystery writer would have used Waggoner's locked-room idea as the actual scene of the crime.

  Mannix's thoughts revolved fruitlessly, and it was only the opening of the outside door that put a period to them. Startled, he turned. Willy Briscoe was just entering.

  "Just come over to make sure I locked up, and seen the light, Mr. Mannix," Willy said apologetically. "Didn't know you was planning to come here tonight."

  "I just wanted to get a preliminary impression," Mannix said, annoyed. "But I guess it's time to go now."

  "Sure hope you figure it out," Willy told him, nodding his head briskly. "Poor Mr. Waggoner, he might have sat here dead for weeks till I come to collect th' rent, if Jody Pine hadn't had that special-delivery letter to give him."

  Mannix stared at him, cigarette frozen in his lips.

  "Willy," he said, his tongue strangely thick with tension, "sit down. I'd like to talk to you."

  "Sure." Willy Briscoe sat down on an antique ladder-back chair that had been Waggoner's pride. "What about?"

  "Willy," Harrison Mannix asked, "you were here at the cottage on September first?"

  "Sure, to collect th' rent, like always on the first."

  "The rent! Of course. And you talked to Mr. Waggoner? In fact, I think you mentioned an idea for a mystery story to him. Right?"

  "You bet I did!" Willy's face flushed, and his lips twisted with the remembered anger. "I been reading his books from th' liberry and I noticed they was always about murders in a room all locked up or nailed shut, or similar. And it come to me I knew a way to get out of a locked-up room he hadn't ever used. So I asked him what th' idea'd be worth to him. He said he'd have to hear it first, so I told him. Right away he said it had been used a dozen times.

  "Well, I'd believed him when he said my idea wasn't any good. Then one day I come to fix th' water pump—he'd called up to complain about it—and he was in th' village. But th' door was unlocked. So I come in and see some writin' on his desk and looked at it and there it was—my idea that he'd stole and was usin' in a book!"

  The farmer paused, breathing hard, and Mannix felt his heart hammering with excitement So Waggoner had lied! Not a chance conversation, but a suggestion given to him by an amateur! Every mystery writer had plots suggested to him by amateurs—absurd, impossible plots; but this one hadn't been impossible!

  "Then what happened, Willy?" His tone was soothing. "Waggoner came home and you quarreled with him. Right?"

  "Yes, blast him!" Willy shouted. "Caught me readin' th' story and lit into me. And I lit into him for stealin' my idea after sayin' it wasn't any good."

  "So you killed him," Mannix said, half to himself.

  "Yep, I killed him!'' Willy said, hands clenching. "He'd said my idea was no good and he lied to me and tried to cheat me, and before I knowed what I was doing I was choking him by the throat And before I could stop, he was dead."

  Willy stopped, as if realizing for the first time what he had said. Mannix nodded reassuringly.

  "I understand, Willy," he said. "I'd have done the same thing. But after you killed him you nailed this cottage shut from the inside. Was that to fool the police?"

  "No." Willy shrugged. "If I'd wanted just to fool them I'd 'a' took Mr. Waggoner's money and messed up th' house—then it'd look like a tramp done it. But he said my idea wasn't any good. And I knew it was. I couldn't write it in a book, like him, but by thunder I could show it was good! And I did! That's why I fixed the cottage up all nailed shut from the inside, like in the idea I give him."

  "And cutting off his head was part of the idea?"

  "Sure," Willy told him. There's always some crazy stuff like that in a mystery story—you know, a crazy statue from Africa or Egypt or somethin'. So I cut off his head to make it interestin', and wrote on his typewriter, 'My Last Mystery.' I wanted to stab him with a jeweled dagger too, only I didn't have one."

  Mannix swelled with triumph. Waggoner had been killed by a mystery writer! An illiterate who could only get "published" by acting out his plot in reality.

  "Willy," he said, "the more I think about it, the more I think you were perfectly justified in killing Waggoner. So I won't say anything about it to anybody. And I have a proposition to make to you. I'll buy your idea. If you'll tell me how you got out of this room I'll pay you five hundred dollars."

  Willy Briscoe brightened.

  "Honest?" he said. "All right, if s a deal. I'll do better'n tell you-I'll show you."

  He rose and came forward with outstretched, work-hardened hands. ...

  Willy Briscoe stood by the fireplace and surveyed the room. The new front door was nailed tightly shut. The windows remained boarded up just as they had been since Waggoner s death.

  Harrison Mannix sat erect in the chair just before the typewriter.

  Harrison Mannix's head rested on the beer stein on top of the bookcase ten feet away, wide-open eyes surveying the headless body.

  The saw which had effected the separation hung above the fireplace.

  In all essential respects the room was exactly as it had been the morning Waggoner's body had been discovered—except, of course, for the change in the cast which now put Harrison Mannix in the leading role.

  Satisfied Willy turned out the light and, approaching the stone fireplace, climbed upward, using the rough stones of the fireplace for toe holds.

  Just a few feet to the left of the chimney was one of the corners of the room. And in that corner there was now an eighteen-inch gap where the roof failed to meet the walls.

  Willy wriggled through the gap and dropped to the ground outside.

  Then he turned his attention to the sturdy truck-jack, which was now exerting its power against a six-by-six timber, thrust under the corner of the overhanging roof. A turn at a time in the darkness, and Willy eased off the pressure. The roof settled down until once again it rested, with every appearance of solidity, on the walls. The timber which had lifted it starte
d to fall and Willy caught it dexterously.

  "Look at a house with a roof on, it looks like a mighty solid piece of building," he muttered aloud. "Easy to forget a roof has to be put on and what can be put on can be took off—or lifted. If'n a real carpenter had builded this house, might not be so easy. But men Jake run out of big nails the day we framed this end of th' roof. Always meant to put in a few, but never got around to it Lucky, way it's turned out"

  He carried the truck-jack to a wheelbarrow, tossed it in, and laid the timber across the barrow. Using a flashlight, he made sure there were no significant marks left in the gravel drive where the jack had stood. Then he trundled the wheelbarrow down the road, back to his barn and to the truck that had been in the process of being repaired for two months now.

  "Expect they'll be a good lot of excitement when the time Mr. Mannix paid me for is up and I go over to open up th' cottage," he reflected. "But won't nobody think of me. They'll be too excited over th' mystery." Then another thought occurred to him.

  "Likely I'll be takin' forty, fifty dollars a week out'n that cottage, showin' it to summer folks the next ten years," he murmured, smacking his thin hps. "That's better'n writin' for a livin' any dayl"

  William March

  Law clerk, subpoena server, marine, and corporate vice president, William March (1893-1954) grew up in small sawmill towns of Alabama and Florida. He began writing in 1928 and had his first novel, Company K, published in 1933—though it was written years earlier. Many of his stories are set in small southern towns and are noted for a skillful handling of eccentric and horrible people. By 1954 he seemed to be reaching the full flowering of his powers. There were works such as The Bad Seed, a powerful novel of a psychopathic little girl, and "The Bird House," which suggested an ingenious solution to a real life crime. But then, tragically, he died of pneumonia before being able to capitalize on his newly found fame.

  THE BIRD HOUSE

  It was near sunset, and they sat in front of the wide, recessed window that overlooked the park, their drinks arranged on tables beside them. Outside, the red-brick building was covered with lush vines of a peculiar brilliance. They thickened the ledges and the ornate, old-fashioned balconies over which they grew, and so outlined the window itself with dense, translucent foliage that the effect of the small park, seen through it, was the effect of green in an easel of brighter green. Marcella Crosby called attention to the window and the park at once. "Look!" she cried out with soft excitement. "It's like a landscape framed in a florist's wreath!"

  She felt warmth in her stomach, a nervous tightening at the base of her neck, and she took a strand of her straight, black hair and brushed it across her Hps, nibbling the ends thoughtfully. This was the beginning of a new poem, and she knew that well. She did not, as yet, know precisely what the poem would be, what emotional direction it would take, but she felt that somehow it would concern an old man who, achieving resurrection in his grave, broke through the earth with his hands and sat up in amazement among the stiff floral tributes that others had placed above him.

  The idea so excited her that she spoke her thoughts aloud: Most of us see death, when we see it at all, through the long, optimistic window of life, she said: but in her poem the convention would be reversed, for her hero would look forward toward life from the grave, through the most terrible and perhaps truest window of all— the foolish, arranged elegance of a funeral wreath.

  The Filipino houseboy came up with a cocktail pitcher. When he had filled the glasses, the guests were silent for a time, staring indolently at the park and the tall buildings beyond. Inside the park, between a flowering syringa and the starched laciness of a ginkgo tree, was a bird house atop a green pole. It was new and elaborate, and it rose upward in setback levels, like the scaled down model of an ancient temple. There were circular holes in each tier, designed so precisely for size that while a bird no larger than a wren could easily enter and find sanctuary, its enemies, because of the very bulk that made them dangerous, were turned back finally, and defeated.

  Dr. Hilde Flugelmann gestured with her cigarette holder and said in her ingratiating, foreign voice, "It was not the window that caught my eye: it was the little white bird house." She smiled and inclined her head, exposing obliquely the pink gums above her small, seed-like teeth. "I think the security of the bird house impressed me because I see terror, terror, terror all day long in the poor, insecure minds of my patients. Why, only a moment ago I was thinking to myself that no matter how vulnerable we are, at least the birds are somewhat safe."

  For a time they all talked at once, contrasting the security of animals with the security humans know, but at length they turned to Walter Nation, as if some law of courtesy permitted the host the flattery of the final opinion; but he merely sighed and said that all the talk about funeral wreaths and bird houses had put him in mind of a laundryman who had been murdered a few years before. It was an affair which had always interested him, he said, for there was in it mystery, pathos, terror, suspense, and even a touch of that baffling, artistic senselessness which is found in all truly memorable crimes.

  He hesitated and glanced expectantly at his guests, but when they said they were not familiar with the case and asked him to tell it to them, he continued: "It happened here in New York, in Harlem to be exact, and the name of the murdered man was Emmanuel Vogel. But let me begin at the beginning, and tell you some of the things the police found out in the course of their investigation: Emmanuel was born in a small Polish village. I've never seen the place, of course, but Tve always thought of it as one of those communities Chekhov describes so well: a village consisting of a general store and a collection of houses, surrounded in winter by the traditional sea of mud."

  He took a cigarette from a box at his elbow, lighted it, and went on with his story. Emmanuel's father, he explained, had been a poor peddler who went about the countryside with a pack strapped to his back; his mother had been the local laundress. She was a frail woman, and when her son could barely walk, he was already helping her at the washtub. She died when he was seven. Afterwards, he had washed, cooked, and scrubbed for his father, just as she had done; he had even carried on her laundry business as best he could; but three years later his father died too, and he was entirely alone in the little town.

  "Oh, I know that place so well," said Dr. Flugelmann. "I have seen it, or its counterpart, many times. At the edge of the village there was an old factory with a rusting iron roof. There was a market place where the farmers came to trade, and about a mile in the distance, set in a grove of handsome trees, was the big house where the local nobility lived." She shook her head, sighed, and continued: "I see Emmanuel so plainly at this instant: I see him delivering a parcel of laundry in a basket almost too big for him to manage, and as he moves down the street, away from his home, he glances back over his shoulder. He has rust-colored hair, a long neck, and a big, jutting nose. I think he cracks his knuckles when he's nervous, and as he waits at the door for the money he's earned, he presses his palms together, or twists one leg anxiously about the other."

  "My clearest picture of him is in his home, immediately after his father's funeral," said Marcella Crosby. "He is wearing a ridiculous little black hat: something hard like a derby, but with a very low crown, with mourning crepe sewed over the original band. His suit is too short and too tight for him. He is walking up and down, trying to control his grief, but suddenly he gives in, rests his face against his mother's old washtub, and cries." She brushed back her hair, closed her eyes for concentration, and continued, "He must have felt terror at that moment, knowing he was alone in a world he feared, and which despised him, and a little later, I think he ran to the doors and windows and locked them all securely."

  Mr. Nation inhaled, sat farther back in his chair, and said he considered the fantasy of the locking of the doors and windows a most interesting one. Perhaps it really had happened that way; perhaps it was the beginning of Emmanuel's preoccupation with locks and bolts and bars which wa
s, some years later on, to baffle the police so greatly. He crushed his cigarette with a slow, scrubbing motion, and went on with his story:

  It seemed that following his father's death, Emmanuel was not only alone, but homeless too, and at once a pathetic, itinerant existence had begun for him, for he became a sort of housewife's helper who rarely spent more than a day or two in any one place: a kind of rustic menial who moved from villager to villager, from farmer to farmer, doing the domestic work required of him in return for his food, his temporary bed, and perhaps even a few coins on occasion. He cooked, he scrubbed, he mended, he baked for his employers—but washing was the thing he did best, and that was the task he was usually called on to do.

  But Mr. Nation did not want his listeners to think of Emmanuel as being without ambition during those years. If they did think so, they would be misled, for actually the child had had a positive, if somewhat modest goal that never wavered, and that was to come to America and eventually own a laundry of his own. His task was a difficult one, and to achieve his purpose he had led a life of hysterical penury and deprivation; nevertheless, he had his passage money eventually, and a little besides, and when he was twenty years old he landed triumphantly in New York.

  Being a laundryman, he had gone at once to work in a laundry. It was a small establishment, located somewhere on the lower east side, and for the next few years, according to the material the police gathered after his death, he had put in long hours at his washtub, or bending above his ironing board. He had lived entirely to himself, but if the timidity of his temperament had prevented his having friends, it had served equally well to preclude his making enemies. The only relaxation he had had was smoking, and Mr. Nation felt he must make this point sooner or later, since the buying of a pack of cigarettes had figured in his murder.