The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  And the good lady burst into such a howl of tears that Mrs. Craggs could do nothing else but guide her into the kitchen, ease her down onto a chair at the table, and hastily put a light under the kettle for that universal remedy, a good strong cup of tea.

  “There, there,” she said. “You’ll be all right, dear. He can’t’ve gone. Not gone. You just didn’t see him, that’s all.”

  But she knew at that moment that these were no more than mere words of comfort. Because the plain fact of the matter was that standing in front of the bathroom mirror, you could see plainly and fully right to the back of the sort of sentry box made by the shower curtain at the far end of the bath. She had often noticed this herself when she had cleaned the glass shelf over the wash basin and was making sure that each one of Mrs. Marchpane’s toilet articles was back in its exact place.

  At last she saw with relief that the kettle had boiled. She tumbled hot water into the teapot, poured a quick cup—it wouldn’t be very strong, but at least it would be hot—and put it in front of Mrs. Marchpane.

  But already that lady was beginning to recover.

  “Tea?” she exclaimed. “In the kitchen? What can you be thinking of? I’ll be in the sitting room. In the sitting room, Mrs. Craggs.”

  She rose to her feet, somewhat unsteadily.

  “Oh, no, you won’t,” Mrs. Craggs said, her voice exactly mingling sternness and kindliness. “You’ll sit just there where you are and swaller that cup right down. A nasty shock you’ve ’ad, an’ tea you need.”

  And she even planted her sturdy legs squarely in front of the kitchen door to stop her employer from getting up and opening it.

  Mrs. Marchpane, to Mrs. Craggs’s relief, seemed to lack enough of her customary hammering willpower to resist. She fell back onto the kitchen chair and began to sip the hot liquid.

  “Now,” said Mrs. Craggs, “I’ll just go along to that old bathroom an’ see what all this is about.”

  She marched off, not without urgency, neglecting indeed in this emergency to take care to walk round and not across the hall carpet.

  But, true enough, in the bathroom there was no sign of the Squadron Leader. And when, joined by Mrs. Marchpane, she looked through all the rest of the flat, there was still not the faintest trace of him to be found.

  It had been some time before Mrs. Craggs allowed her employer to go to the length of telephoning the police. But in the end she had had to agree to that portentous step. And that had been the start of a process that had gone on for at least the two weeks during which the mysterious disappearance had made the national press. A series of ever more important police officers had one by one confessed themselves baffled. Fingerprint experts, photographers, Geiger counters, stethoscopes—all had been used, but none had helped.

  At last the mystery entered the history books, and Mrs. Craggs brought herself to utter the words she had wanted to say ever since her first week of employment at the flat in Fitzjames Avenue, “Sorry, madam, but I shan’t be able to oblige after next Friday.”

  Even her friend Mrs. Milhorne, who had pestered her night and morning for new details of the affair—and had had to be content with meagre pickings indeed—at last transferred her riotous imagination to the latest Hollywood scandal.

  Until just a week before Christmas, nearly six months later.

  That was when Mrs. Craggs received a particularly splendid Christmas card. Even if it was one not particularly in the spirit of Yuletide, consisting as it did of a reproduced painting of that hallowed air-war machine of old, the Spitfire.

  Mrs. Milhorne, dropping in for a chat and a cup of tea, took it from the mantelpiece, without asking, and looked inside.

  “From Jack Mayglass—and Jill,” she read aloud. “Who’s he then? I didn’t know you knew any Jack Mayglass.”

  Mrs. Craggs pondered for a moment.

  “Well,” she said at last, “I don’t suppose it matters if I tell you now, in confidence like. I don’t know no Jack May-glass. But I used ter know a John March-pane.”

  “John March—the Great Locked Bathroom Mystery?”

  “Locked bathroom. That bathroom weren’t locked fer very long,” Mrs. Craggs said. “It weren’t locked from the moment that silly cow unbolted it when she thought her poor long-suffering hubby had disappeared.”

  “But he had disappeared. It said so in the papers.”

  “Oh, yes. He disappeared all right. Then. Disappeared from a dog’s life, to start up somewhere new. Walked right out o’ that bathroom ’e did, soon as I ’appened to take his missus into the kitchen an’ shut the door behind me. Stuck on ’is shirt an’ trousers what ’e took out o’ that Ali Baba basket where he’d just put ’em, an’ walked right out o’ the house. An’ jolly good luck to ’im.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Milhorne slowly. “Yes, I can see that. I can see he might of been driven to that, driven by a force greater than what he was. But what I can’t see is, how he wasn’t there when she looked for him in that mirror.”

  “Easy,” said Mrs. Craggs. “Hair.”

  “Hair? What you mean ‘hair’?”

  “He must of been cleaning ’is hair out o’ the plug-’ole,” Mrs. Craggs answered. “Like what she was always on an’ on at him to do. Crouched down ’e must of been ter hoick the stuff out. An’ just then the silly cow would’ve looked back in the mirror again an’ not seen ’im. ’Course she wouldn’t, not with ’im tucked away beneath ’er sight the way ’e was an’ with that curtain there an’ all. But what’s she do? Blows ’er top straight away, goes rushing to the door, yanks open that bolt, comes yelling up ter me an’ clasps me in ’er arms like what we was Rudy Valentino an’ Mary Pickford. An’ then it must of come to ’im. This was his chance. His sudden chance. An’ ’e took it.”

  Mrs. Milhorne looked at the card with the picture of the sunlit Spitfire on it.

  “But you knew,” she said suddenly. “You must of known all along.”

  “Well, not quite all along. But I did ’ear some little noises in the ’all while we was in the kitchen, an’ I knew then I’d better keep that dratted woman in there. An’ it was a good thing I did. Footsteps all across the ’all carpet there was. ’Ad to tread on ’em meself to blot ’em out. Couldn’t ’ave the Great Locked Bathroom Mystery come to an end before it’d really begun, could I?”

  MIKE, ALEC, AND RUFUS

  AS WRITERS TURNED from the orotund style of Henry James and his Victorian predecessors to lean and swift prose, scholars have pointed to the undeniably profound force of Ernest Hemingway, but the argument could be made that the most influential writer of the twentieth century was Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), whose crisp and realistic (one might say Hemingwayesque) dialogue appears to have influenced the great Papa.

  Publishing dates are hard facts, not esoteric theories. Hammett’s first Continental Op story appeared in Black Mask on October 1, 1923. The quintessential hard-boiled private eye appeared frequently in the ensuing years. Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, was published in Paris in a limited edition in 1924, and published in a tiny edition of 1,335 copies in the United States in October 1925, by which time Hammett was already well established and a highly popular regular contributor to the most important pulp magazine of its time.

  In addition to the nameless operative of the Continental Detective Agency, Hammett created Sam Spade, the hero of the most famous American detective novel ever written or filmed, The Maltese Falcon (1930), which had been serialized in Black Mask, as were all of his novels except the last, The Thin Man (1934).

  “Mike, Alec, or Rufus” was published in the January 1925 issue of Black Mask; it was first published in book form under the title “Tom, Dick, or Harry” (as it had been retitled for its publication in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) in Twentieth Century Detective Stories (Cleveland, World, 1948). It was first collected in the Hammett short-story collection The Creeping Siamese (New York, Jonathan Press, 1950).

  DASHIELL HAMMETT

  I DON’T KNOW
whether Frank Toplin was tall or short. All of him I ever got a look at was his round head—naked scalp and wrinkled face, both of them the color and texture of Manila paper—propped up on white pillows in a big four-poster bed. The rest of him was buried under a thick pile of bedding.

  Also in the room that first time were his wife, a roly-poly woman with lines in a plump white face like scratches in ivory; his daughter Phyllis, a smart popular-member-of-the-younger-set type; and the maid who had opened the door for me, a big-boned blond girl in apron and cap.

  I had introduced myself as a representative of the North American Casualty Company’s San Francisco office, which I was in a way. There was no immediate profit in admitting I was a Continental Detective Agency sleuth, just now in the casualty company’s hire, so I held back that part.

  “I want a list of the stuff you lost,” I told Toplin, “but first—”

  “Stuff?” Toplin’s yellow sphere of a skull bobbed off the pillows, and he wailed to the ceiling, “A hundred thousand dollars if a nickel, and he calls it stuff!”

  Mrs. Toplin pushed her husband’s head down on the pillows again with a short-fingered fat hand.

  “Now, Frank, don’t get excited,” she soothed him.

  Phyllis Toplin’s dark eyes twinkled, and she winked at me.

  The man in bed turned his face to me again, smiled a bit shame-facedly, and chuckled.

  “Well, if you people want to call your seventy-five-thousand-dollar-loss stuff, I guess I can stand it for twenty-five thousand.”

  “So it adds up to a hundred thousand?” I asked.

  “Yes. None of them were insured to their full value, and some weren’t insured at all.”

  That was very usual. I don’t remember ever having anybody admit that anything stolen from them was insured to the hilt—always it was half, or at most, three-quarters covered by the policy.

  “Suppose you tell me exactly what happened,” I suggested, and added, to head off another speech that usually comes, “I know you’ve already told the police the whole thing, but I’ll have to have it from you.”

  “Well, we were getting dressed to go to the Bauers’ last night. I brought my wife’s and daughter’s jewelry—the valuable pieces—home with me from the safe-deposit box. I had just got my coat on and had called to them to hurry up when the doorbell rang.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Just about half-past eight. I went out of this room into the sitting-room across the passageway and was putting some cigars in my case when Hilda”—nodding at the blond maid—“came walking into the room, backward. I started to ask her if she had gone crazy, walking around backward, when I saw the robber. He—”

  “Just a moment.” I turned to the maid. “What happened when you answered the bell?”

  “Why, I opened the door, of course, and this man was standing there, and he had a revolver in his hand, and he stuck it against my—my stomach, and pushed me back into the room where Mr. Toplin was, and he shot Mr. Toplin, and—”

  “When I saw him and the revolver in his hand”—Toplin took the story away from his servant—“it gave me a fright, sort of, and I let my cigar case slip out of my hand. Trying to catch it again—no sense in ruining good cigars even if you are being robbed—he must have thought I was trying to get a gun or something. Anyway, he shot me in the leg. My wife and Phyllis came running in when they heard the shot and he pointed the revolver at them, took all their jewels, and had them empty my pockets. Then he made them drag me back into Phyllis’s room, into the closet, and he locked us all in there. And mind you, he didn’t say a word all the time, not a word—just made motions with his gun and his left hand.”

  “How bad did he bang your leg?”

  “Depends on whether you want to believe me or the doctor. He says it’s nothing much. Just a scratch, he says, but it’s my leg that’s shot, not his!”

  “Did he say anything when you opened the door?” I asked the maid.

  “No, sir.”

  “Did any of you hear him say anything while he was here?”

  None of them had.

  “What happened after he locked you in the closet?”

  “Nothing that we knew about,” Toplin said, “until McBirney and a policeman came and let us out.”

  “Who’s McBirney?”

  “The janitor.”

  “How’d he happen along with a policeman?”

  “He heard the shot and came upstairs just as the robber was starting down after leaving here. The robber turned around and ran upstairs, then into an apartment on the seventh floor, and stayed there—keeping the woman who lives there, a Miss Eveleth, quiet with his revolver—until he got a chance to sneak out and get away. He knocked her unconscious before he left, and—and that’s all. McBirney called the police right after he saw the robber, but they got here too late to be any good.”

  “How long were you in the closet?”

  “Ten minutes—maybe fifteen.”

  “What sort of looking man was the robber?”

  “Short and thin and—”

  “How short?”

  “About your height, or maybe shorter.”

  “About five feet five or six, say? What would he weigh?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—maybe a hundred and fifteen or twenty. He was kind of puny.”

  “How old?”

  “Not more than twenty-two or -three.”

  “Oh, Papa,” Phyllis objected, “he was thirty, or near it!”

  “What do you think?” I asked Mrs. Toplin.

  “Twenty-five, I’d say.”

  “And you?” to the maid.

  “I don’t know exactly, sir, but he wasn’t very old.”

  “Light or dark?”

  “He was light,” Toplin said. “He needed a shave and his beard was yellowish.”

  “More of a light brown,” Phyllis amended.

  “Maybe, but it was light.”

  “What color eyes?”

  “I don’t know. He had a cap pulled down over them. They looked dark, but that might have been because they were in the shadow.”

  “How would you describe the part of his face you could see?”

  “Pale, and kind of weak-looking—small chin. But you couldn’t see much of his face; he had his coat collar up and his cap pulled down.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “A blue cap pulled down over his eyes, a blue suit, black shoes, and black gloves—silk ones.”

  “Shabby or neat?”

  “Kind of cheap-looking clothes, awfully wrinkled.”

  “What sort of gun?”

  Phyllis Toplin put in her word ahead of her father.

  “Papa and Hilda keep calling it a revolver, but it was an automatic—a thirty-eight.”

  “Would you folks know him if you saw him again?”

  “Yes,” they agreed.

  I cleared a space on the bedside table and got out a pencil and paper.

  “I want a list of what he got, with as thorough a description of each piece as possible, and the price you paid for it, where you bought it, and when.” I got the list half an hour later.

  “Do you know the number of Miss Eveleth’s apartment?” I asked.

  “702, two floors above.

  “I went up there and rang the bell. The door was opened by a girl of twenty-something, whose nose was hidden under adhesive tape. She had nice clear hazel eyes, dark hair, and athletics written all over her.

  “Miss Eveleth?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m from the insurance company that insured the Toplin jewelry, and I’m looking for information about the robbery.”

  She touched her bandaged nose and smiled ruefully.

  “This is some of my information.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “A penalty of femininity. I forgot to mind my own business. But what you want, I suppose, is what I know about the scoundrel. The doorbell rang a few minutes before nine last night and when I opened the door he
was there. As soon as I got the door opened he jabbed a pistol at me and said, ‘Inside, kid!’

  “I let him in with no hesitancy at all; I was quite instantaneous about it and he kicked the door to behind him.

  “ ‘Where’s the fire escape?’ he asked.

  “The fire escape doesn’t come to any of my windows, and I told him so, but he wouldn’t take my word for it. He drove me ahead of him to each of the windows; but of course he didn’t find his fire escape, and he got peevish about it, as if it were my fault. I didn’t like some of the things he called me, and he was such a little half-portion of a man so I tried to take him in hand. But—well, man is still the dominant animal so far as I’m concerned. In plain American, he busted me in the nose and left me where I fell. I was dazed, though not quite all the way out, and when I got up he had gone. I ran out into the corridor then, and found some policemen on the stairs. I sobbed out my pathetic little tale to them and they told me of the Toplin robbery. Two of them came back here with me and searched the apartment. I hadn’t seen him actually leave, and they thought he might be foxy enough or desperate enough to jump into a closet and stay there until the coast was clear. But they didn’t find him here.”

  “How long do you think it was after he knocked you down that you ran out into the corridor?”

  “Oh, it couldn’t have been five minutes. Perhaps only half that time.”

  “What did Mr. Robber look like?”

  “Small, not quite so large as I; with a couple of days’ growth of light hair on his face; dressed in shabby blue clothes, with black cloth gloves.”

  “How old?”

  “Not very. His beard was thin, patchy, and he had a boyish face.”

  “Notice his eyes?”

  “Blue; his hair, where it showed under the edge of his cap, was very light yellow, almost white.”

  “What sort of voice?”

  “Very deep bass, though he may have been putting that on.”

  “Know him if you’d see him again?”

  “Yes, indeed!” She put a gentle finger on her bandaged nose. “My nose would know, as the ads say, anyway!”