The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  I fumbled my way out of the locker room and down the passageway outside, guiding myself with one arm along the wall, and past the sergeant’s desk and down the steps, and then I was out in the street.

  I left my car there where it was. What did I want with it? I started to walk, without knowing where I was going. I walked a long time, and a good long distance.

  Then all of a sudden I noticed a lighted drugstore—it was dark by now—across the way. I must have passed others before now, but this was the first one I noticed.

  I crossed over and looked in the open doorway. It had telephone booths; I could see them at the back, to one side. I moved on a few steps, stopped, and felt in my pockets. I found a quill toothpick, and I dug the point of it good and hard down the back of my finger, ripped the skin open. Then I threw it away. I wrapped a handkerchief around the finger, and I turned around and went inside.

  I said to the clerk, “Give me some iodine. My cat just scratched me and I don’t want to take any chances.”

  He said, “Want me to put it on for you?”

  I said, “No, gimme the whole bottle. I’ll take it home; we’re out of it.”

  I paid him for it and moved over to one side and started to thumb through one of the directories in the rack. Just as he went back inside the prescription room, I found my number. I went into the end booth and pulled the slide closed. I took off my hat and hung it over the phone mouthpiece, sort of making myself at home.

  Then I sat down and started to undo the paper he’d just wrapped around the bottle. When I had it off, I pulled the knot of my tie out a little further to give myself lots of room. Then I took the stopper out of the bottle and tilted my head back and braced myself.

  Something that felt like a baseball bat came chopping down on the arm I was bringing up, and nearly broke it in two, and the iodine sprayed all over the side of the booth. Ainslie was standing there in the half-opened slide.

  He said, “Come on outta there!” and gave me a pull by the collar of my coat that did it for me. He didn’t say anything more until we were out on the sidewalk in front of the place. Then he stopped and looked me over from head to foot as if I were some kind of a microbe. He said, “Well, it was worth coming all this way after you, at that!”

  My car was standing there; I must have left the keys in it and he must have tailed me in that. He thumbed it, and I went over and climbed in and sat there limply. He stayed outside.

  I said, “I can’t live with shadows, Ainslie. I’m frightened, too frightened to go on. You don’t know what the nights’ll be like from now on. And the days won’t be much better. I’d rather go now, fast. Show her to me on a slab at the morgue and I won’t whimper. Show her to me all cut up in small pieces and I won’t bat an eyelash. But don’t say she never was.”

  “I guessed what was coming from the minute I saw you jab yourself with that toothpick.” He watched sardonically while I slowly unwound the handkerchief, that had stayed around my finger all this time. The scratch had hardly bled at all. Just a single hairline of red was on the handkerchief.

  We both looked at that.

  Then more of the handkerchief came open. We both looked at the initials in the corner. A.B. We both, most likely, smelled the faint sweetness that still came from it at the same time. Very faint, for it was such a small handkerchief.

  We both looked at each other, and both our minds made the same discovery at the same time. I was the one who spoke it aloud. “It’s hers,” I said grimly; “the wife that didn’t exist.”

  “This is a fine time to come out with it,” he said quietly. “Move over, I’ll drive.” That was his way of saying, “I’m in.”

  I said, “I remember now. I got a cinder in my eye, during the drive in, and she lent me her handkerchief to take it out with; I didn’t have one of my own on me. I guess I forgot to give it back to her. And this—is it.” I looked at him rebukingly. “What a difference a few square inches of linen can make. Without it, I was a madman. With it, I’m a rational being who enlists your co-operation.”

  “No. You didn’t turn it up when it would have done you the most good, back at the station house. You only turned it up several minutes after you were already supposed to have gulped a bottle of iodine. I could tell by your face you’d forgotten about it until then yourself. I think that does make a difference. To me it does, anyway.” He meshed gears.

  “And what’re you going to do about it?”

  “Since we don’t believe in the supernatural, our only possible premise is that there’s been some human agency at work.”

  I noticed the direction he was taking. “Aren’t you going back to the Royal?”

  “There’s no use bothering with the hotel. D’you see what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said bluntly. “That was where she disappeared.”

  “The focus for this wholesale case of astigmatism is elsewhere, outside the hotel. It’s true we could try to break them down, there at the hotel. But what about the justice, what about the Beresford house in Lake City? I think it’ll be simpler to try to find out the reason rather than the mechanics of the disappearance.

  “And the reason lies elsewhere. Because you brought her to the hotel from the justice’s. And to the justice’s from Lake City. The hotel was the last stage. Find out why the justice denies he married you, and we don’t have to find out why the hotel staff denies having seen her. Find out why the Beresford house denies she was a maid there, and we don’t have to find out why the justice denies he married you.

  “Find out, maybe, something else, and we don’t have to find out why the Beresford house denies she was a maid there. The time element keeps moving backward through the whole thing. Now talk to me. How long did you know her? How well? How much did you know about her?”

  “Not long. Not well. Practically nothing. It was one of those story-book things. I met her a week ago last night. She was sitting on a bench in the park, as if she were lonely, didn’t have a friend in the world. I don’t make a habit of accosting girls on park benches, but she looked so dejected it got to me.

  “Well, that’s how we met. I walked her home afterwards to where she said she lived. But when we got there—holy smoke, it was a mansion! I got nervous, said: ‘Gee, this is a pretty swell place for a guy like me to be bringing anyone home to, just a clerk in a store.’

  “She laughed and said, ‘I’m only the maid. Disappointed?’ I said, ‘No, I would have been disappointed if you’d been anybody else, because then you wouldn’t be in my class.’ She seemed relieved after I said that. She said, ‘Gee, I’ve waited so long to find someone who’d like me for myself.’

  “Well, to make a long story short, we made an appointment to meet at that same bench the next night. I waited there for two hours and she never showed up. Luckily I went back there the next night again—and there she was. She explained she hadn’t been able to get out the night before; the people where she worked were having company or something.

  “When I took her home that night I asked her name, which I didn’t know yet, and that seemed to scare her. She got sort of flustered, and I saw her look at her handbag. It had the initials A.B. on it; I’d already noticed that the first night I met her. She said, ‘Alice Brown.’

  “By the third time we met we were already nuts about each other. I asked her whether she’d take a chance and marry me. She said, ‘Is it possible someone wants to marry little Alice Brown, who hasn’t a friend in the world?’ I said yes, and that was all there was to it.

  “Only, when I left her that night, she seemed kind of scared. First I thought she was scared I’d change my mind, back out, but it wasn’t that. She said, ‘Jimmy, let’s hurry up and do it, don’t let’s put it off. Let’s do it while—while we have the chance’; and she hung on to my sleeve tight with both hands.

  “So the next day I asked for a week off, which I had coming to me from last summer anyway, and I waited for her with the car on the corner three blocks away from the house where she
was in service. She came running as if the devil were behind her, but I thought that was because she didn’t want to keep me waiting. She just had that one little overnight bag with her.

  “She jumped in, and her face looked kind of white, and she said, ‘Hurry, Jimmy, hurry!’ And away we went. And until we were outside of Lake City, she kept looking back every once in a while, as if she were afraid someone was coming after us.”

  Ainslie didn’t say much after all that rigmarole I’d given him. Just five words, after we’d driven on for about ten minutes or so. “She was afraid of something.” And then in another ten minutes, “And whatever it was, it’s what’s caught up with her now.”

  We stopped at the filling station where Alice and I had stopped for gas the night before. I looked over the attendants, said: “There’s the one serviced us.” Ainslie called him over, played a pocket light on my face.

  “Do you remember servicing this man last night? This man, and a girl with him?”

  “Nope, not me. Maybe one of the oth—”

  Neither of us could see his hands at the moment; they were out of range below the car door. I said, “He’s got a white scar across the back of his right hand. I saw it last night.”

  Ainslie said, “Hold it up.”

  He did, and there was a white cicatrix across it, where stitches had been taken or something. Ainslie said, “Now whaddye say?”

  It didn’t shake him in the least. “I still say no. Maybe he saw me at one time or another, but I’ve never seen him, to my knowledge, with or without a girl.” He waited a minute, then added: “Why should I deny it, if it was so?”

  “We’ll be back, in a day or in a week or in a month,” Ainslie let him know grimly, “but we’ll be back—to find that out.”

  We drove on. “Those few square inches of linen handkerchief will be wearing pretty thin, if this keeps up,” I muttered dejectedly after a while.

  “Don’t let that worry you,” he said, looking straight ahead. “Once I’m sold, I don’t unsell easily.”

  We crossed U.S. 9 a half-hour later. A little white house came skimming along out of the darkness. “This is where I was married to a ghost,” I said.

  He braked, twisted the grip of the door latch. My hand shot down, stopped his arm.

  “Wait; before you go in, listen to this. It may help out that handkerchief. There’ll be a round mirror in the hall, to the left of the door, with antlers over it for a hatrack. In their parlor, where he read the service, there’ll be an upright piano, with brass candle holders sticking out of the front of it, above the keyboard. It’s got a scarf on it that ends in a lot of little plush balls. And on the music rack, the top selection is a copy of Kiss Me Again. And on the wall there’s a painting of a lot of fruit rolling out of a basket. And this housekeeper, he calls her Dora.”

  “That’s enough,” he said in that toneless voice of his. “I told you I was with you anyway, didn’t I?” He got out and went over and rang the bell. I went with him, of course.

  They must have been asleep; they didn’t answer right away. Then the housekeeper opened the door and looked out at us. Before we could say anything, we heard the justice call down the stairs, “Who is it, Dora?”

  Ainslie asked if we could come in and talk to him, and straightened his necktie in the round mirror to the left of the door, with antlers over it.

  Hulskamp came down in a bathrobe, and Ainslie said: “You married this man to a girl named Alice Brown last night.” It wasn’t a question.

  The justice said, “No. I’ve already been asked that once, over the phone, and I said I hadn’t. I’ve never seen this young man before.” He even put on his glasses to look at me better.

  Ainslie didn’t argue the matter, almost seemed to take him at his word. “I won’t ask you to let me see your records,” he said drily, “because they’ll undoubtedly—bear out your word.”

  He strolled as far as the parlor entrance, glanced in idly. I peered over his shoulder. There was an upright piano with brass candle sconces. A copy of Kiss Me Again was topmost on its rack. A painting of fruit rolling out of a basket daubed the wall.

  “They certainly will!” snapped the justice resentfully.

  The housekeeper put her oar in. “I’m a witness at all the marriages the justice performs, and I’m sure the young man’s mistaken. I don’t ever recall—”

  Ainslie steadied me with one hand clasping my arm, and led me out without another word. We got in the car again. Their door closed, somewhat forcefully.

  I pounded the rim of the wheel helplessly with my fist. I said, “What is it? Some sort of wholesale conspiracy? But why? She’s not important; I’m not important.”

  He threw in the clutch, the little white house ebbed away in the night darkness behind us.

  “It’s some sort of a conspiracy, all right,” he said. “We’ve got to get the reason for it. That’s the quickest, shortest way to clear it up. To take any of the weaker links, the bellboy at the hotel or that filling station attendant, and break them down, would not only take days, but in the end would only get us some anonymous individual who’d either threatened them or paid them to forget having seen your wife, and we wouldn’t be much further than before. If we can get the reason behind it all, the source, we don’t have to bother with any of these small fry. That’s why we’re heading back to Lake City instead of just concentrating on that hotel in Michianopolis.”

  We made Lake City by one a.m. and I showed him the way to New Hampshire Avenue. Number 20 was a massive corner house, and we glided up to it from the back, along the side street; braked across the way from the service entrance I’d always brought her back to. Not a light was showing.

  “Don’t get out yet,” he said. “When you brought her home nights, you brought her to this back door, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me, did you ever actually see her open it and go in, or did you just leave her here by it and walk off without waiting to see where she went?”

  I felt myself get a little frightened again. This was something that hadn’t occurred to me until now. “I didn’t once actually see the door open and her go inside, now that I come to think of it. She seemed to—to want me to walk off without waiting. She didn’t say so, but I could tell. I thought maybe it was because she didn’t want her employers to catch on she was going around with anyone. I’d walk off, down that way—”

  I pointed to the corner behind us, on the next avenue over. “Then when I got there, I’d look back from there each time. As anyone would. Each time I did, she wasn’t there anymore. I thought she’d gone in, but—it’s funny, I never saw her go in.”

  He nodded gloomily. “Just about what I thought. For all you know, she didn’t even belong in that house, never went in there at all. A quick little dash, while your back was turned, would have taken her around the corner of the house and out of sight. And the city would have swallowed her up.”

  “But why?” I said helplessly.

  He didn’t answer that. We hadn’t had a good look at the front of the house yet. As I have said, we had approached from the rear, along the side street. He got out of the car now, and I followed suit. We walked down the few remaining yards to the corner, and turned and looked all up and down the front of it.

  It was an expensive limestone building; it spelt real dough, even looking at it in the dark as we were. There was a light showing from the front, through one of the tall ground-floor windows—but a very dim one, almost like a night light. It didn’t send any shine outside; just peered wanly around the sides of the blind that had been drawn on the inside.

  Something moved close up against the door-facing, stirred a little. If it hadn’t been white limestone, it wouldn’t have even been noticeable at all. We both saw it at once; I caught instinctively at Ainslie’s arm, and a cold knife of dull fear went through me—though why I couldn’t tell.

  “Crepe on the front door,” he whispered. “Somebody’s dead in there. Whether she did go in here or didn’t,
just the same I think we’d better have a look at the inside of this place.”

  I took a step in the direction of the front door. He recalled me with a curt gesture. “And by that I don’t mean march up the front steps, ring the doorbell, and flash my badge.”

  “Then how?”

  Brakes ground somewhere along the side street behind us. We turned our heads and a lacquered sedan-truck had drawn up directly before the service door of 20 New Hampshire Avenue. “Just in time,” Ainslie said. “This is how.”

  We started back toward it. The driver and a helper had gotten down, were unloading batches of camp chairs and stacking them up against the side of the truck, preparatory to taking them in.

  “For the services tomorrow, I suppose,” Ainslie grunted. He said to the driver: “Who is it that died, bud?”

  “Mean to say you ain’t heard? It’s in alla papers.”

  “We’re from out of town.”

  “Alma Beresford, the heiress. Richest gal in twenty-four states. She was an orphum, too. Pretty soft for her guardian; not another soul to get the cash but him.”

  “What was it?” For the first time since I’d known him, you couldn’t have called Ainslie’s voice toneless; it was sort of springy like a rubber band that’s pulled too tight.

  “Heart attack, I think.” The truckman snapped his fingers. “Like that. Shows you that rich or poor, when you gotta go, you gotta go.”

  Ainslie asked only one more question. “Why you bringing these setups at an hour like this? They’re not going to hold the services in the middle of the night, are they?”

  “Nah, but first thing in the morning; so early there wouldn’t be a chance to get ’em over here unless we delivered ’em ahead of time.” He was suddenly staring fascinatedly at the silvery lining of Ainslie’s hand.