The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  Charlie Bone had been blackmailing someone. But who?

  The man in the picture could have been Robert Raines.

  Or it could have been his double.

  The girl just might have been Angela Rhodes, but her face did not show clearly in any of the scenes.

  “You comin’ up, Doc?” Sheriff Lens called down the stairs.

  “Be right there!” I pocketed some of the pictures and told Gates to put the album away in a safe place. Then I went up to join the sheriff.

  Charlie Bone’s room was bare except for a bed and dresser and chair. He seemed to have unpacked little, and most of his clothes still rested in an open suitcase on the chair. “Nothin’ much here,” Sheriff Lens said. “Have a look.” I glanced hastily through the suitcase and the dresser drawers, but found nothing of interest. Hi Gates had no doubt been through it already, and thinking about that I wondered when he’d had the time. While we were waiting for the sheriff’s arrival?

  Or had he known of Bone’s death even before that? Had he somehow tampered with his clothing, looped the wire around his scarf?

  But for what motive? Charlie Bone certainly wasn’t blackmailing Hi Gates.

  I was on my way downstairs when I encountered the cameraman, Zeedler, on his way up to the room next to the dead man’s. I suppose he was a suspect too, but I had to trust someone. “Got a minute? Let me show you something.” We went into his bedroom and I brought out the photographs Hi Gates had discovered.

  Zeedler grunted and scratched his balding head. “Fuzzy. They look like frame blowups from movie film. There’s a lot of this blue stuff around—stag movies. They rent ’em to men’s clubs and bachelor parties.”

  “Recognize the stars?”

  He squinted at the blurred figures. “No, can’t say I do.”

  “The man could be Robert Raines.”

  “Raines? Hell, no! He’s too big a star for this sort of thing.”

  “He wasn’t always a star.”

  “Doesn’t look like him to me,” Zeedler said, returning the photos. “Where’d you get these?”

  “Found them,” I answered vaguely. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Figured out how Bone was killed yet?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  I went back outside and headed over toward the old oak tree. The body was gone and most of the others had drifted off. Zeedler’s movie camera sat on its tripod pointed at the sky. A couple of kids from a neighboring farm were playing by the plane and nobody was chasing them away. The cast and crew had simply abandoned their stage and gone off somewhere to ponder the strange passing of Charlie Bone.

  I saw something on the ground beneath the oak tree and I stooped to pick it up. It was a hard rubber ball and I wondered if it belonged to one of the children near the plane. I started to toss it in their direction, then changed my mind and dropped it into my pocket. I could see Angela Rhodes heading in my direction.

  “Hello, Dr. Hawthorne,” she said. “We haven’t had a chance to get properly acquainted.”

  “And I’m afraid we won’t have. If Granger Newmark continues with the picture he’ll certainly want another doctor on the set now.”

  “Why? You didn’t cause Charlie’s death, did you?”

  “I certainly didn’t save his life. Tell me something—how long did you know Charlie Bone?”

  “I just met him last month, when Granger was casting for the movie. But Robert’s known him for years. Charlie doubled for him in the Captain Blood stunts.”

  “Who do you think killed him?”

  She didn’t answer right away. She stared up at the tree, and then off at the plane where the neighbor kids were climbing on a wing. “It had to be someone up there, before he jumped.”

  “Raines was the only one up there.”

  “I know.”

  But was he?

  I had a sudden thought and ran off toward the plane, leaving Angela Rhodes standing there alone. “Come on, boys—off the aircraft,” I shouted, chasing them away. Then I climbed up to the rear cockpit where Bone had been seated when the plane took off. Was it possible that someone small could have been concealed in the cockpit with him—someone who strangled him and pitched his body over the side? The idea was far-fetched to begin with, and as soon as I seated myself in the cockpit I saw that it was physically impossible as well. Not even a midget could have shared the cockpit with Bone. My legs were cramped and he was a bigger man than me.

  But as I lifted myself out of the plane I saw Angela again, off in the distance, touching a finger to her smooth throat. I remembered the gesture from before. She’d touched someone else, adjusted a scarf just before the plane took off. Remembering now, it seemed it had been Raines’s scarf. But it could have been Bone’s.

  Memories, memories. They play such damned tricks on you!

  “Dr. Sam!”

  I turned and saw April, my nurse, hurrying across the field toward me. “What is it, April—one of my patients?”

  “No, Dr. Sam. But they’ve got the body in town and they need you to sign the death certificate. They couldn’t get through on the phone.”

  “All right. I’ll come along. Nothing much to do here, anyway.” I told Newmark I’d be leaving and he waved me away. There was no point in asking for my pay. I certainly hadn’t earned it.

  They’d taken the body to the local funeral parlor, where Jud Miller was waiting to do what passed in those days for an autopsy. “Can’t cut into him till you sign the paper, Doc.”

  I glanced at the corpse on the embalming table and turned away. “What about next of kin?”

  “They say he didn’t have any. Going to bury him here, I suppose.”

  “There’s no doubt he was strangled?”

  “Oh, I’ll check his insides, all right. But it looks like a strangling to me. No other marks on him except a bruise on his temple. Probably got that when they were taking him down from the tree.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. I walked over and looked at it. “Except that dead men don’t bruise like this. He was still alive when this happened.”

  “Maybe when he landed in the tree.”

  I started talking, to Jud Miller but mostly to myself. “He had to be strangled either before he jumped or while he was coming down or after he landed. Those are the only possibilities. Before he jumped Raines couldn’t have reached him, and no one could have hidden in the cockpit. While he was coming down no one could have done it, and a device attached to the parachute wouldn’t have worked in this way if it worked at all. That leaves only one possibility: he was strangled after he landed in the old oak tree.”

  Jud Miller chuckled as he got out his embalming equipment. “ ’Tweren’t no haunted tree strangled him. More likely the first person to reach him did it before the others arrived. I read a story like that once.”

  “Only trouble with that is, it was me who reached him first.”

  “Oh.”

  I signed the death certificate and went back to my office, feeling depressed. I felt right on the verge of figuring it out, but somehow it wouldn’t quite come together in my mind. The only thing I knew for sure was that no oak tree had strangled Charlie Bone. The killer was quite human, and so was the motive.

  April hadn’t yet returned and I was alone in the office. I sat down at my desk and reached into my pocket to have another look at those pictures. My fingers encountered the hard rubber ball I’d picked up earlier.

  Could that be the answer?

  Had I made the one mistake no doctor should ever make?

  I got to my feet just as the outer door opened and Granger Newmark came in. “I’ve been looking for you, Doc.”

  “Glad you’re here. I just earned my money. I know how Charlie Bone was killed.”

  “You do?”

  “I did a terrible thing this morning, Mr. Newmark.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I pronounced a man dead when he was still alive.”

  Granger Newmark smiled slightly and sli
pped a small revolver from his pocket. “You’re a smarter man than I thought. Now give me the pictures you took from Hi Gates.”

  I raised my hands slightly but made no effort to hand him the pictures. As soon as he had those I knew I’d be a dead man. “Can’t we talk about this? The pictures are in a safe enough place.”

  “I don’t have time for games, Doc. This whole thing is coming apart.” He motioned with the gun.

  “Because of Hi Gates? I suppose you didn’t figure on his going through the dead man’s belongings and finding those pictures before you got to them. Charlie Bone was blackmailing you, wasn’t he? Reminding you of the stag films you produced before you became a big Hollywood name. That sort of publicity could ruin you right now, on the brink of your success in the talkies. And Charlie knew all about it because he’d been your male star in those stag films. So you killed him, in a most ingenious manner. But when you went after the frame blowups he’d made from the stag movie, you found that Hi Gates had discovered them first.”

  “And even given some to you,” Newmark said.

  “Did you kill Gates?”

  “Not yet. He gave me the rest of the pictures without knowing quite what was going on. But you’re a different story, Doc. You know too much.”

  “You needed a dumb country doctor to work your scheme. That’s why you didn’t bring one along from the city. Charlie Bone was alive when he landed in that tree. He was simply playing the role of a dead man, as he had before, in two-reelers like The Premature Burial and The Tell-Tale Heart. I suppose it was a specialty of his. He gave his face a bluish tinge with a bit of makeup before he jumped, and tied that wire around his neck. The scarf kept it from doing any real damage.

  “He used a hard rubber ball pressed into his armpit to cut off his pulse. Maybe he had one in each armpit for all I know. Then he let his tongue protrude a bit and acted like a man who’d been strangled to death.

  “It was a break for you that the parachute went into the oak tree, because I had to examine him while balanced on a tree limb. Then when I ran in to phone the sheriff, you helped take him down from the tree. A quick blow to the temple knocked him out, and then you strangled him in full view of us all while seeming to unfasten the wire from his neck. Everyone thought Bone was already dead, of course, so even if they noticed you accidentally knock his temple they thought nothing of it.”

  “That’s very good,” Newmark said. “Now give me the pictures.”

  I ignored his request for the moment. “My only question is how you persuaded Bone to act as an accessory to his own murder. I suppose you told him it was a publicity stunt for the movie. ‘Stunt man pronounced dead revives ten minutes later.’ That sort of thing would get a few headlines, or so you could have convinced Bone. With the cast and crew around he thought he was safe.”

  “Right again!” He raised the revolver. “But we’ve had enough talk.”

  “Once I put the rubber ball together with Bone’s movie roles as dead men, I knew how it was done. Maybe his role in The Premature Burial even gave you the whole idea. And knowing how it was done, I knew you had to be the killer. Only the producer-director of the film could persuade Bone to pull that stunt. And then I remembered you bent over his body, tugging at the wire around his neck—”

  The door behind Newmark opened and April entered with a cheery “Hello there!” It was what I’d been stalling for. Newmark half turned toward her and instantly I threw myself at him, knocking his gun hand to one side.

  It was as simple as that.

  “Well,” Dr. Sam Hawthorne concluded, “that was my one fling at movie-making. Newmark pleaded guilty and served a long term in prison. And Wings of Glory was never made. The old oak tree? It was struck by lightning the following year and just toppled over.

  “If you’ll come again soon, I’ll tell you about what happened when a child evangelist came to Northmont and started curing my patients at an old-fashioned revival meeting in a tent. And about how I became the prime suspect in what happened next. Another—ah—libation before you go? One for the road?”

  THE INVISIBLE WEAPON

  IT IS UNLIKELY that you have ever heard of Nicholas Olde, less likely that you have read his only mystery book, the very scarce short-story collection The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern, and a veritable certainty that you know nothing about him—a true man of mystery. An exhaustive search through my substantial reference library and an exhausting search of the Internet revealed not a single word about him other than his authorship of that elusive volume of detective stories.

  The indefatigable researcher into the world of mystery fiction, Allen J. Hubin, uncovered the fact that Nicholas Olde was the pseudonym of Amian Lister Champneys (1879–1951), which encompasses the entire known universe of information about the author. Examination of the text of his book reveals a bit more about his detective hero, Rowland Hern. In the manner of Sherlock Holmes (whose adventures were emulated by countless authors during Arthur Conan Doyle’s lifetime), Hern is a genius private detective with a sidekick who is amazed at his friend’s brilliance and narrates the stories in first person. The stories are not very violent and, in fact, seldom deal with murder, focusing instead on crimes and capers, often in a light and breezy manner that has been compared with many of G. K. Chesterton’s tales. The murder in the present story does not break new ground, but was not yet the cliché that it became after its publication. While he is certainly a minor writer, Olde’s relatively brief tales may be read with pleasure if the reader is not overly insistent on realism.

  “The Invisible Weapon” was first published in The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern (London, Heinemann, 1928).

  NICHOLAS OLDE

  BEFORE THE SNOW had time to melt the great frost was upon us; and, in a few days, every pond and dyke was covered with half a foot of ice.

  Hern and I were spending a week in a village in Lincolnshire, and, at the sight of the frozen fen, we sent to Peterborough for skates in keen anticipation of some happy days upon the ice.

  “And now,” said Hern, “as our skates will not be here until to-morrow, we had better take this opportunity of going to see Grumby Castle. I had not intended to go until later in the week, but, as neither of us wants to lose a day’s skating, let us take advantage of Lord Grumby’s permission immediately. The castle, as I told you, is being thoroughly overhauled to be ready for his occupation in the spring.”

  Thus it was that, that same morning, we turned our backs upon the fen and trudged through the powdery snow into the undulating country towards the west until at last we came within sight of that historic pile and passed through the lodge gates and up the stately avenue. When we reached the great entrance door Hern took out Lord Grumby’s letter to show to the caretaker—but it was not a caretaker that opened to our knock. It was a policeman.

  The policeman looked at the letter and shook his head.

  “I’ll ask the inspector anyhow,” he said, and disappeared with the letter in his hand.

  The inspector arrived on the doorstep a minute later.

  “You are not Mr. Rowland Hern, the detective, are you?” he asked.

  “The same, inspector,” said Hern. “I didn’t know that I was known so far afield.”

  “Good gracious, yes!” said the inspector. “We’ve all heard of you. There’s nothing strange in that. But that you should be here this morning is a very strange coincidence indeed.”

  “Why so?” asked Hern.

  “Because,” said the inspector, “there is a problem to be solved in this castle that is just after your own heart. A most mysterious thing has happened here. Please come inside.”

  We followed him through a vestibule littered with builders’ paraphernalia and he led us up the wide stairway.

  “A murder has been committed in this castle—not two hours since,” said the inspector. “There is only one man who could have done it—and he could not have done it.”

  “It certainly does seem to be a bit of a puzzle when
put like that,” said Hern. “Are you sure that it is not a riddle, like ‘When is a door not a door?’ ”

  We had reached the top of the stairs.

  “I will tell you the whole story from start to—well, to the present moment,” said the inspector. “You see this door on the left? It is the door of the ante-room to the great ballroom; and the ante-room is vital to this mystery for two reasons. In the first place, it is, for the time being, absolutely the only way by which the ballroom can be entered. The door at the other end has been bricked up in accordance with his lordship’s scheme of reconstruction, and the proposed new doorway has not yet been knocked through the wall: (that is one occasion when a door is not a door),” he added with a smile; “and even the fireplaces have been removed and the chimneys blocked since a new heating system has rendered them superfluous. In the second place,” he continued, “the work in the ballroom itself being practically finished, this ante-room has been, for the time being, appropriated as an office by the contractors. Consequently it is occupied all day by draughtsmen and clerks and others, and no one can enter or leave the ballroom during office hours unseen.

  “Among other alterations and improvements that have been carried out is, as I have said, the installation of a heating apparatus; and there appears to have been a good deal of trouble over this.

  “It has been installed by a local engineer named Henry Whelk, and the working of it under tests has been so unsatisfactory that his lordship insisted, some time since, on calling in a consulting engineer, a man named Blanco Persimmon.

  “Henry Whelk has, from the first, very much resented the ‘interference,’ as he calls it, of this man; and the relations between the two have been, for some weeks, strained almost to the breaking-point.

  “A few days ago the contractor received a letter from Mr. Persimmon saying that he would be here this morning and would make a further test of the apparatus. He asked them to inform Whelk and to see to the firing of the boiler.