The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “But what about the murder?” Mrs. Brent wanted to know. “Why should Hager kill his partner in crime?”

  “I fear it was because of my arrival. My detailed questions about Zadig’s teachings caught them both off guard; and Hager, especially, knew that I might uncover their whole phony plot. When I mentioned the parallels between the attacks on Zadig and Kaspar Hauser, as well as those between the doctrines of Zadig and Zoroaster, Hager knew I was getting too close. When he and Zadig went out on the porch together before, I imagine they set up the final act of the Hauser drama, in which Zadig was to be wounded by a devil that had taken possession of him. I suppose this was the final try for the money, and perhaps they’d done the whole performance before.”

  “Only this time it was real,” I said; “this time Hager really killed him.…”

  “Correct. You’ll remember it was Hager who asked how Hauser had been killed—and Hager who got us out of the house, so we could have front row seats for the final act. The actual mechanics of the murder are simple, once you know they were both swindlers. There’s an old trick among confidence men—I believe it’s called a ‘cackle-bladder’—a small membranous bag filled with chicken blood or the like, which the swindler crushes to his body in order to appear wounded, after his confederate has fired a blank pistol at him. Douglas Zadig, walking toward us across the field, simply burst the bladder on his side and did a good job of acting. Hager, who naturally was expecting it all, easily managed to move fastest and reach the ‘body’ first. At this point, to make it look as realistic as possible, Hager was to wound Zadig slightly with a spring-knife hidden up his sleeve.…”

  He paused, and we remembered the scene in the snow; and the horror of what was coming dawned on us all.

  “And then, while Douglas Zadig braced himself so as to remain motionless when the knife cut into him, his partner released the spring knife up his sleeve, and sent the steel blade deep into Zadig’s side, straight for the heart.…”

  Charles Kingsley stirred slightly, and Mrs. Brent was beginning to look sick. But there wasn’t much more, and Simon Ark continued. “Both doctors told us such a wound would have caused almost instantaneous death, and that made me wonder about the wounded man walking as far as he did. Anything’s possible, of course, but it seemed far more likely that Hager had killed him as he bent over the body.”

  “But,” I objected, “why did he have the nerve to try to kill you in the same way? When you pulled the trick with the chicken blood he must have realized you knew.”

  “It wasn’t chicken blood,” Simon Ark corrected with a slight smile. “I was forced to use ordinary ketchup, but I knew Hager would try to kill me, even though he realized I was only waiting to grab the knife from his sleeve. He had no choice, really. Once I was on to his trick, I had only to explain it; and an analysis of the various blood stains on Zadig’s shirt would have proved me correct. His only chance was to be faster with his spring-knife that I was with my hands. Luckily, he wasn’t, or you might have had a second impossible death on your hands.”

  He said it as if he meant it; but somehow I had the feeling that his life had never really been in danger. I had the feeling that it would be awfully difficult to kill Simon Ark.…

  And so we departed from the little town in Maine, and journeyed back toward the slightly warmer wilds of Manhattan. A search of the house had turned up nearly a hundred thousand dollars in contributions from Zadig’s swindled followers, and we began to think that Hager had possibly been thinking of that, too, when he plunged the knife into his partner’s side.

  “One thing, though, Simon,” I said as the train thundered through the New England night. “Just where did Douglas Zadig ever come from? What happened in that London mist ten years ago?”

  “There are things that are never explained,” he answered simply. “But several explanations present themselves. The copy of the novel in French suggests—now that we know the man’s true character—that even at this early age he was trying to fool the public into thinking him French instead of English. I don’t know the real answer, and probably never will; but if a young man had avoided military service during England’s darkest hours, he might well have had to think up a scheme to protect himself in a postwar world full of returning veterans.”

  “Of course!” I agreed. “He was a draft-dodger; that would explain why his fingerprints weren’t on file with the army, or elsewhere!”

  But Simon Ark was gazing out the window, into the night, and he replied in a quiet voice. “There are other possible explanations, of course, but I prefer not to dwell on them. Douglas Zadig is dead, like Kasper Hauser before him, and there are some things better left unexplained, at least in this world.”

  And after that he said no more about it.…

  THE LAUGHING BUTCHER

  CLAIMING THAT HE WROTE mysteries for the money but science fiction for fun, Fredric William Brown (1906–1972) is equally revered in both genres. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and attended the University of Cincinnati at night and then spent a year at Hanover College, Indiana. He was an office worker for a dozen years before becoming a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal for a decade. He was not able to devote his full time to writing fiction until 1949. He had for several years, however, already been a prolific writer of short stories and in the form that he mastered and for which he is much loved today, the difficult-to-write short-short story (generally one to three pages).

  Brown was never financially secure, which forced him to write at a prodigious pace, yet he seemed to be enjoying himself in spite of the work load. Many of his stories and novels are imbued with humor, including a devotion to puns and word play. A “writer’s writer,” he was highly regarded by his colleagues, including Mickey Spillane, who called him his favorite writer of all time; Robert Heinlein, who made him a dedicatee of Stranger in a Strange Land; and Ayn Rand, who in The Romantic Manifesto regarded him as ingenious. After more than three hundred short stories, he wrote his first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), for which he won an Edgar. His best-known work is The Screaming Mimi (1949), which served as the basis for the 1957 Columbia Pictures film of the same title that starred Anita Ekberg, Philip Carey, and Gypsy Rose Lee.

  “The Laughing Butcher” was first published in the Fall 1948 issue of Mystery Book; it was first collected in Mostly Murder (New York, Dutton, 1953).

  FREDRIC BROWN

  YESTERDAY MUST have been a dull day for news, because the Chicago Sun gave three inches to the funeral of a dwarf downstate, in Corbyville.

  “Listen to this, Bill,” Kathy said, and Wally—(that’s my only in-law, Kathy’s brother)—and I looked up from our game of cribbage.

  “Yeah?” I said. Kathy read it to us.

  Then she said, “Bill, wasn’t that—” She let it trail off.

  I looked at her warningly, because of her brother being there with us, and I said, “The dwarf that beat you at a game of chess five years ago? Yeah, that was the one.”

  Wally put down his last card, said, “Thirty-one for two,” and pegged it. I scored my hand and he scored his and the crib, and it put him out and ended the game.

  “Five years ago,” he said. “And yesterday was your anniversary. That’s put it on your honeymoon, if it was exactly five years ago, I mean. She play chess with dwarfs on your honeymoon?”

  “One dwarf,” I told him. “One game. In Corbyville. And she got beaten.”

  “Served her right,” Wally said. “Look, Bill—wasn’t it about that time, five years ago, they lynched a guy in Corbyville? The case they called the ‘The Corbyville Horror’?”

  “A few weeks after that,” I said.

  “The guy was a butcher, and a black magician, or something. Or they thought he was. Killed somebody by magic, or … What was it about, anyway?”

  I was looking at the window, and the window was a black, blank square of night, and I wanted to shiver, but with Wally watching me that way, I couldn’t. I got up and walked over to the window instead
, so I could look down on the lights and traffic of Division Street instead of at the black night above it.

  “It was the butcher they lynched,” I said. I turned around from the window. “We saw him, too.”

  Wally picked up his glass of beer and took a sip of it.

  “Some of it’s coming back to me,” he said. “Corbyville’s that circus town, isn’t it? Town where a lot of ex-circus people live?”

  I nodded.

  “And this Corbyville Horror business. Wasn’t a guy found out in the middle of a field of snow, dead, with two sets of footprints leading up to his body and none leading away from it?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “And one set of footprints was his own and the other set just led to the body and vanished as though the guy had flown?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I remember now. And the town lynched this butcher-magician because he had a down on the guy who was killed, and—”

  “Something like that.”

  “They never did find out what really happened?” Wally asked.

  “No.”

  He took another sip of beer and shook his head.

  “I remember now that it puzzled me. How could a set of tracks go halfway across a field of snow and then stop, and not either come back or go on?”

  “One set’s easy to explain,” I said. “I mean those of the guy they found dead out there in the field.”

  “Sure, him. But what about the one who chased him? He did chase him, didn’t he? I mean, if I remember rightly, his footprints were on top of the dead man’s in the snow.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I saw those footprints myself. Of course by the time I saw them there were a lot of other prints around and they’d taken the body away, but I talked to the men who found the body, and they were sure of their description of those prints, and of the fact that there weren’t any other ones around, within a hundred yards.”

  “Didn’t somebody suggest ropes?”

  “No trees or telephone poles anywhere near. Nope.”

  Kathy went and got us some more beer. I asked Wally if he wanted another game of cribbage. “No,” he said. “The story.”

  I poured his glass full and then mine.

  “What do you want to know, Wally?” I asked.

  “What killed him?”

  “Heart failure,” I said.

  “But—what was chasing him?”

  “Nothing was chasing him,” I said slowly. “Nothing at all. He wasn’t running away from anybody or anything. It was more horrible than that.”

  I went over and sat down in the big armchair. Kathy came over and curled up on my lap like a contented kitten. Over her shoulder I could see that black square of night that was the open window.

  “It was much more horrible than that, Wally,” I repeated slowly. “He wasn’t running away from something. He was running toward something. Something out in the middle of that field.”

  Wally laughed uneasily. “Bill,” he said, “you don’t talk like a Chicago copper. You talk like a fey Irishman. What was out in that field?”

  “Death,” I told him.

  That held him for a minute. Then he asked, “What about the one-way tracks, the ones that led to the body and not away from it?”

  It was warm and pleasant up there on top of the hill, I remember. I stopped the car at the side of the muddy road, put my arm around Kathy and kissed her, with the soundness that a second-day-of-honeymoon kiss deserves. We had been married the morning before, in Chicago, and were driving south. I had arranged a month off and we figured to get to New Orleans and back, driving leisurely, and stopping off wherever we wished. We had spent the first night of our honeymoon in Decatur, a town I’ll never forget.

  I won’t forget Corbyville, either, although not for the same reason. But of course I didn’t know that then. I pointed to the view through the windshield and down the hill into the valley, bright green and muddy brown from the recent rains. And with a little village at the bottom of it—three score or so of houses huddled together like frightened sheep.

  “Ain’t it purty?” I said.

  “Beautiful,” Kathy said. “The valley, I mean. Is that Corbyville? Where are the elephants? Didn’t I read they used elephants for the plowing outside Corbyville?”

  I laughed at her. “One elephant, and it died years ago. I guess there are a lot of the circus people left there, though. Maybe we’ll see some of them when we drive through.”

  “I forget the story, Bill,” Kathy said. “Why is it so many circus people live there? Some circus owner—”

  “Old John Corby,” I said. “He owned about the third biggest circus in the country and made a fortune from it. That was the town he came from—it had some other name then—and he put all his profits into the land there, got to own nearly the whole town and valley.

  “And when he died, his will left houses and stores and farms to people in his circus, on the condition that they live there. A lot of ’em wouldn’t, of course; weren’t ready to settle down, and went with some other circus instead. But a lot of ’em did take what was left them and live there. Out of a population of a thousand or so, over a hundred, I think, are ex-circus people.… Did I ever tell you I love you, Kathy?”

  “I seem to remem … Bill, not here! You—”

  So after a minute I slid the car in gear and started down the slippery, winding road into the valley. We were off the main highway, coming in on a side road that wasn’t used much, and it was pretty bad. The mud was inches deep in the ruts. It wasn’t too bad until we were just a half-mile outside the village, and then suddenly the wheels were sliding and the back end of the car, despite my efforts with the wheel, slewed around and went off the road. I tried to start, and the back wheels spun in mud that was like soup.

  I said appropriate words, suitably modified to fit Kathy’s presence, and got out of the car, then looked around.

  There was a little three-room frame farmhouse only a few dozen paces away, and a stocky, blond man of about thirty was already walking from the house toward the car.

  He grinned at me.

  “Nice roads we got here,” he said. “You in very deep?”

  “Not too bad,” I told him. “If you can give me a hand, maybe two of us—”

  “Wish I could,” he said. “But anything heavy’s against the rules. I’ve got a bum ticker. The doc won’t let me pick up anything heavier than a potato, and I got to do that slow.” He looked up and down the road. “We might get you out with some gunny sacks or boards, but it’d hardly be worth the trouble. Pete Hobbs is about due by here. He’s the mailman.”

  “Drive a truck?”

  The blond man laughed. “Sure, but he won’t need it. Pete used to be a strongman with Corby. He’s getting old, but he can still pick up the back end of your car with one hand. You and the missus want to drop in the house till Pete gets here?”

  Kathy had been listening, and she must have liked the man because she said sure, we’d be glad to.

  So we went in, and it was half an hour before the mailman came along and we got to know the Wilsons fairly well, for half an hour. That was the blond man’s name, Len Wilson. His wife, Dorothy, was a stunner. Almost as pretty as Kathy.

  No, Len Wilson told us, he hadn’t been with any circus. He had been born right here on this small farm, and Dorothy had been born in Corbyville. They had been married four years, and you could see they were still in love. I noticed how considerate they were of each other; how, when he started up to get an ash tray for me, Dorothy spoke almost sharply to him to make him sit down again. The sort of sharpness one might use on a child.

  I remember wondering how, since Len couldn’t exert himself physically, he managed to run a farm, even a small one. Maybe he knew I’d be wondering that. Anyway, he told me the answer.

  “I can work all right,” he told me, “as long as it isn’t heavy, and I keep at a steady, dogged pace. I can lift a thousand pounds—about ten pounds at a time. I can
walk a hundred miles, if I walk slowly and rest once in a while. And I can run a farm, a little one like this, the same way. Not that I get rich doing it.” He grinned a little.

  A honking out front brought us to our feet, and Dorothy Wilson said:

  “That’s Pete. I’ll run ahead and be sure to catch him.”

  The rest of us followed more slowly, Kathy and I matching our pace to Len’s. The ex-strongman got out of his mail truck and he and I easily lifted the car’s back end around to where the wheels would find traction.

  As I got under the wheel, Len waved.

  “Might see you in town, if you’re stopping there,” he said. “I’m riding in with Pete.”

  Anyway, that was how we met Len Wilson. We saw him only once more, in Corbyville, a little later.

  I was going to drive on through, I remember, but Kathy wanted to stop and eat. I parked the car in front of a clean-looking hamburger joint and we went in. That was where we met the dwarf.

  I remember thinking, when we first went in and sat down at the counter, that there was something strange and out of proportion about the five-foot-tall little man who nodded to us from behind the counter and took our orders. But I didn’t realize what it was until he walked back to the grill to put on the hamburgers we ordered. He wasn’t five feet tall at all; he was about three feet. The area back of the counter was built up, about two feet higher than the floor in the rest of the room.

  He saw me lean over the counter and look down, and grinned at me.

  “My chin’d just about come to the level of the counter without that arrangement,” he said.