The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  Bowman, at his end, waited twenty minutes, then made the usual report—the car had not passed. Hutchinson Hatch was a calm, cold, dispassionate young man but now a queer, creepy sensation stole along his spinal column. He lighted a cigarette and pulled himself together with a jerk.

  “There’s one way to find out where it goes,” he declared at last, emphatically, “and that’s to place a man in the middle just beyond the bend of The Trap and let him wait and see. If the car goes up, down, or evaporates he’ll see and can tell us.”

  Baker looked at him curiously.

  “I’d hate to be the man in the middle,” he declared. There was something of uneasiness in his manner.

  “I rather think I would, too,” responded Hatch.

  On the following evening, consequent upon the appearance of the story of the phantom auto in Hatch’s paper, there were twelve other reporters on hand. Most of them were openly, flagrantly sceptical; they even insinuated that no one had seen an auto. Hatch smiled wisely.

  “Wait!” he advised with deep conviction.

  So when the darkness fell that evening the newspapermen of a great city had entered into a conspiracy to capture the phantom auto. Thirteen of them, making a total of fifteen men with Baker and Bowman, were on hand and they agreed to a suggestion for all to take positions along the road of The Trap from Baker’s post to Bowman’s, watch for the auto, see what happened to it and compare notes afterwards. So they scattered themselves along a few hundred feet apart and waited. That night the phantom auto didn’t appear at all and twelve reporters jeered at Hutchinson Hatch and told him to light his pipe with the story. And next night when Hatch and Baker and Bowman alone were watching the phantom auto reappeared.

  Like a child with a troublesome problem, Hatch took the entire matter and laid it before Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, the master brain. The Thinking Machine, with squint eyes turned steadily upward and long, slender fingers pressed tip to tip listened to the end.

  “Now I know of course that automobiles don’t fly,” Hatch burst out savagely in conclusion, “and if this one doesn’t fly, there is no earthly way for it to get out of The Trap, as they call it. I went over the thing carefully—I even went so far as to examine the ground and the tops of the walls to see if a runway had been let down to the auto to go over.”

  The Thinking Machine squinted at him inquiringly.

  “Are you sure you saw an automobile?” he demanded irritably.

  “Certainly I saw it,” blurted the reporter. “I not only saw it—I smelled it. Just to convince myself that it was real I tossed my cane in front of the thing and it smashed it to tooth-picks.”

  “Perhaps, then, if everything is as you say the auto actually does fly,” remarked the scientist.

  The reporter stared into the calm, inscrutable face of The Thinking Machine, fearing first that he had not heard aright. Then he concluded that he had.

  “You mean,” he inquired eagerly, “that the phantom may be an auto-areoplane affair, and that it actually does fly?”

  “It’s not at all impossible,” commented the scientist.

  “I had an idea something like that myself,” Hatch explained, “and questioned every soul within a mile or so but I didn’t get anything.”

  “The perfect stretch of road there might be the very place for some daring experimenter to get up sufficient speed to soar a short distance in a light machine,” continued the scientist.

  “Light machine?” Hatch repeated. “Did I tell you that this car had four people in it?”

  “Four people!” exclaimed the scientist. “Dear me! Dear me! That makes it very different. Of course four people would be too great a lift for an—”

  For ten minutes he sat silent, and tiny, cobwebby lines appeared in his dome-like brow. Then he arose and passed into the adjoining room. After a moment Hatch heard the telephone bell jingle. Five minutes later The Thinking Machine appeared, and scowled upon him unpleasantly.

  “I suppose what you really want to learn is if the car is a—a material one, and to whom it belongs?” he queried.

  “That’s it,” agreed the reporter, “and of course, why it does what it does, and how it gets out of The Trap.”

  “Do you happen to know a fast, long-distance bicycle rider?” demanded the scientist abruptly.

  “A dozen of them,” replied the reporter promptly. “I think I see the idea, but—”

  “You haven’t the faintest inkling of the idea,” declared The Thinking Machine positively. “If you can arrange with a fast rider who can go a distance—it might be thirty, forty, fifty miles—we may end this little affair without difficulty.”

  Under these circumstances Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., etc., etc., scientist and logician, met the famous Jimmie Thalhauer, the world’s champion long distance bicyclist. He held every record from five miles up to and including six hours, had twice won the six-day race and was, altogether, a master in his field. He came in chewing a tooth-pick. There were introductions.

  “You ride the bicycle?” inquired the crusty little scientist.

  “Well, some,” confessed the champion modestly with a wink at Hatch.

  “Can you keep up with an automobile for a distance of, say, thirty or forty miles?”

  “I can keep up with anything that ain’t got wings,” was the response.

  “Well, to tell you the truth,” volunteered The Thinking Machine, “there is a growing belief that this particular automobile has wings. However if you can keep up with it—”

  “Ah, quit your kiddin’,” said the champion, easily. “I can ride rings around anything on wheels. I’ll start behind it and beat it where it’s going.”

  The Thinking Machine examined the champion, Jimmie Thalhauer, as a curiosity. In the seclusion of his laboratory he had never had an opportunity of meeting just such another worldly young person.

  “How fast can you ride, Mr. Thalhauer?” he asked at last.

  “I’m ashamed to tell you,” confided the champion in a hushed voice. “I can ride so fast that I scare myself.” He paused a moment. “But it seems to me,” he said, “if there’s thirty or forty miles to do I ought to do it on a motor cycle.”

  “Now that’s just the point,” explained The Thinking Machine. “A motor-cycle makes noise and if it could have been used we would have hired a fast automobile. This proposition briefly is: I want you to ride without lights behind an automobile which may also run without lights and find out where it goes. No occupant of the car must suspect that it is followed.”

  “Without lights?” repeated the champion. “Gee! Rubber shoe, eh?”

  The Thinking Machine looked his bewilderment.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Hatch answered for him.

  “I guess it’s good for a four column head? Hunh?” inquired the champion. “Special pictures posed by the champion? Hunh?”

  “Yes,” Hatch replied.

  “ ‘Tracked on a Bicycle’ sounds good to me. Hunh?”

  Hatch nodded.

  So arrangements were concluded and then and there The Thinking Machine gave definite and conclusive instructions to the champion. While these apparently bore broadly on the problem in hand they conveyed absolutely no inkling of his plan to the reporter. At the end the champion arose to go.

  “You’re a most extraordinary young man, Mr. Thalhauer,” commented The Thinking Machine, not without admiration for the sturdy, powerful figure.

  And as Hatch accompanied the champion out the door and down the steps Jimmie smiled with easy grace.

  “Nutty old guy, ain’t he? Hunh?”

  Night! Utter blackness, relieved only by a white, ribbon-like road which winds away mistily under a starless sky. Shadowy hedges line either side and occasionally a tree thrusts itself upward out of the sombreness. The murmur of human voices in the shadows, then the crackling-chug of an engine and an automobile moves slowly, without lights, into the road. There is the sudden clatter of an engine at
high speed and the car rushes away.

  From the hedge comes the faint rustle of leaves as of wind stirring, then a figure moves impalpably. A moment and it becomes a separate entity; a quick movement and the creak of a leather bicycle saddle. Silently the single figure, bent low over the handle bars, moves after the car with ever increasing momentum.

  Then a long, desperate race. For mile after mile, mile after mile the auto goes on. The silent cyclist has crept up almost to the rear axle and hangs there doggedly as a racer to his pace. On and on they rush together through the darkness, the chauffeur moving with a perfect knowledge of his road, the single rider behind clinging on grimly with set teeth. The powerful, piston-like legs move up and down to the beat of the engine.

  At last, with dust-dry throat and stinging, aching eyes the cyclist feels the pace slacken and instantly he drops back out of sight. It is only by sound that he follows now. The car stops; the cyclist is lost in the shadows.

  For two or three hours the auto stands deserted and silent. At last the voices are heard again, the car stirs, moves away and the cyclist drops in behind. Another race which leads off in another direction. Finally, from a knoll, the lights of a city are seen. Ten minutes elapse, the auto stops, the head lights flare up and more leisurely it proceeds on its way.

  On the following evening The Thinking Machine and Hutchinson Hatch called upon Fielding Stanwood, President of the Fordyce National Bank. Mr. Stanwood looked at them with interrogative eyes.

  “We called to inform you, Mr. Stanwood,” explained The Thinking Machine, “that a box of securities, probably United States bonds, is missing from your bank.”

  “What?” exclaimed Mr. Stanwood, and his face paled. “Robbery?”

  “I only know the bonds were taken out of the vault tonight by Joseph Marsh, your assistant cashier,” said the scientist, “and that he, together with three other men, left the bank with the box and are now at—a place I can name.”

  Mr. Stanwood was staring at him in amazement.

  “You know where they are?” he demanded.

  “I said I did,” replied the scientist, shortly.

  “Then we must inform the police at once, and—”

  “I don’t know that there has been an actual crime,” interrupted the scientist. “I do know that every night for a week these bonds have been taken out through the connivance of your watchman and in each instance have been returned, intact, before morning. They will be returned tonight. Therefore I would advise, if you act, not to do so until the four men return with the bonds.”

  It was a singular party which met in the private office of President Stanwood at the bank just after midnight. Marsh and three companions, formally under arrest, were present as were President Stanwood, The Thinking Machine and Hatch, besides detectives. Marsh had the bonds under his arms when he was taken. He talked freely when questioned.

  “I will admit,” he said without hesitating, “that I have acted beyond my rights in removing the bonds from the vault here, but there is no ground for prosecution. I am a responsible officer of this bank and have violated no trust. Nothing is missing, nothing is stolen. Every bond that went out of the bank is here.”

  “But why—why did you take the bonds?” demanded Mr. Stanwood.

  Marsh shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s what has been called a get-rich-quick scheme,” said The Thinking Machine. “Mr. Hatch and I made some investigations today. Mr. Marsh and these other three are interested in a business venture which is ethically dishonest but which is within the law. They have sought backing for the scheme amounting to about a million dollars. Those four or five men of means with whom they have discussed the matter have called each night for a week at Marsh’s country place. It was necessary to make them believe that there was already a million or so in the scheme, so these bonds were borrowed and represented to be owned by themselves. They were taken to and fro between the bank and his home in a kind of an automobile. This is really what happened, based on knowledge which Mr. Hatch has gathered and what I myself developed by the use of a little logic.”

  And his statement of the affair proved to be correct. Marsh and the others admitted the statement to be true. It was while The Thinking Machine was homeward bound that he explained the phantom auto affair to Hatch.

  “The phantom auto as you call it,” he said, “is the vehicle in which the bonds were moved about. The phantom idea came merely by chance. On the night the vehicle was first noticed it was rushing along—we’ll say to reach Marsh’s house in time for an appointment. A road map will show you that the most direct line from the bank to Marsh’s was through The Trap. If an automobile should go half way through there, then out across the Stocker estate to the other road, the distance would be lessened by a good five miles. This saving at first was of course valuable, so the car in which they rushed into the trap was merely taken across the Stocker estate to the road in front.”

  “But how?” demanded Hatch. “There’s no road there.”

  “I learned by phone from Mr. Stocker that there is a narrow walk from a very narrow foot-gate in Stocker’s wall on The Trap leading through the grounds to the other road. The phantom auto wasn’t really an auto at all—it was merely two motor cycles arranged with seats and a steering apparatus. The French Army has been experimenting with them. The motor cycles are, of course, separate machines and as such it was easy to trundle them through a narrow gate and across to the other road. The seats are light; they can be carried under the arm.”

  “Oh!” exclaimed Hatch suddenly, then after a minute: “But what did Jimmie Thalhauer do for you?”

  “He waited in the road at the other end of the footpath from The Trap,” the scientist explained. “When the auto was brought through and put together he followed it to Marsh’s home and from there to the bank. The rest of it you and I worked out today. It’s merely logic, Mr. Hatch, logic.”

  There was a pause.

  “That Mr. Thalhauer is really a marvelous young man, Mr. Hatch, don’t you think?”

  THE THEFT OF THE BERMUDA PENNY

  WITH THE PASSING of Edward Dentinger Hoch (1930–2008), the pure detective story lost its most inventive and prolific practitioner of the past half century. While never hailed as a great stylist, Hoch’s mystery fiction presented old-fashioned puzzles in clear, no-nonsense prose that rarely took a false step and consistently proved satisfying in most of his approximately nine hundred stories.

  Born in Rochester, New York, Hoch (pronounced hoke) attended the University of Rochester before serving in the army (1950–1952). He then worked in advertising while writing on the side. When sales became sufficiently frequent, he became a full-time fiction writer in 1968, producing stories for all the major digest-sized magazines, including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Saint, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. Hoch wanted to create a series character specifically for EQMM, who turned out to be the professional thief Nick Velvet (whose original name was Nicholas Velvetta), the author’s attempt to create an American counterpart to the hugely successful James Bond. The character quickly changed because Hoch didn’t like the idea of his protagonist being a woman-chasing killer; Velvet remained faithful to his longtime girlfriend, Gloria Merchant, whom he met while he was burgling her apartment and who had no idea that he was a thief until 1979. The first Nick Velvet story, “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger,” was published in the September 1966 issue of EQMM. Two major elements in the stories have made them among Hoch’s most popular work: since he will not steal anything of intrinsic value, there is the mystery of why someone would pay Nick Velvet twenty thousand dollars (fifty thousand dollars in later stories) to steal it, and then the near impossibility of the theft itself (which included such items as a spider web, the water from a swimming pool, a day-old newspaper, a baseball team, and a sea serpent).

  “The Theft of the Bermuda Penny” was first published in the June 1975 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was f
irst collected in The Thefts of Nick Velvet (New York, Mysterious Press, 1978).

  EDWARD D. HOCH

  “NICKY?”

  Nick Velvet had been far away in some private dream world when Gloria’s voice summoned him back. He put down his beer and asked, “What is it?”

  “Nicky, how can a person vanish from the back seat of a car that’s traveling sixty miles an hour on an expressway?”

  “He can’t,” Nick answered, picking up the beer again.

  “But it’s right here in the paper, Nicky! People along the New York State Thruway report picking up a young long-haired hitchhiker dressed all in white. He gets into the back seat, fastens his seat belt, and talks to the people about God. Then, suddenly they look around and he’s gone! And the seat belt is still fastened!”

  Nick grunted, only half hearing her. “If I was a detective I could solve it.”

  “Don’t you get any cases like that in your government work, Nicky?”

  “Not often.” Gloria’s mistaken impression of his government service helped cover his awkward absences, so he did nothing to correct it.

  “What about—?” she began, but the telephone interrupted her.

  It was for Nick, and he took it in the little den out of Gloria’s hearing. The voice was that of a man for whom he’d worked on two prior occasions. “Velvet? I have someone with an urgent assignment. Can you handle it?”

  “If it’s in my line.”

  “It is. The client is a young woman. Her father was a dear friend of mine. Could you meet her at the marina, where you keep your boat?”

  It was a good place for a meeting. On a summer’s weekend one or two more people would attract no attention. “How soon?”

  “One hour?”

  “Make it two,” Nick said.

  As he’d expected, the Saturday sailors were lounging on the grass in their trunks and bikinis, sipping beer or gin-and-tonics. No one noticed him as he worked around his cabin cruiser. He’d been there less than half an hour when a young woman in white slacks and a blue shirt approached him. “Nice boat,” she said.