The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “But why? As you very pertinently said, to make room for the murderer. At this point, I must admit, I was criminally slow. I ought to have thought of the dummy telephone at once. But I was still looking for an ordinary blunderbuss—probably fixed to the upper shelf, and fired by some mechanical arrangement—when your lucky recollection of the corpse’s hands gave me the clue. Then it was plain sailing; we had only to find the dummy.”

  “Why didn’t he wait a little longer, and take the thing to pieces, instead of giving the alarm at once?” Prendergast wondered.

  “Probably because he didn’t dare delay for fear of exciting the suspicion of the man at the gate,” Wilson said. “Of course he didn’t expect to find us there too. He thought he would be able to send the man to the police station, and have a quiet twenty minutes to clear up. Our turning up was just a bit of bad luck for him. So was that tiny gap in the trees. Otherwise, except for the over-sight in regard to the bulb, which might very easily never have been found, I think he showed remarkable intelligence. His acting of innocent apprehensiveness was very natural indeed, and his alibi, if I hadn’t suspected him already, was just right, and not too circumstantial.”

  “Did you deduce the motive, too?” Prendergast inquired.

  “Not really. I only noted that, as both men worked in a bank, there was one obvious possibility. But there might have been a hundred others. And you see, of course, the paramount necessity of haste. If we had stayed to look for the motive, we should never have got the man.”

  * See The Death of a Millionaire, by G. D. H. and Margaret Cole.

  DEATH OUT OF THIN AIR

  THE GREAT MERLINI was not the only magician-detective created by the versatile Clayton Rawson (1906–1971). Under the Stuart Towne pseudonym, he produced four novelettes in 1940 about Don Diavolo, who sometimes performs as the Spanish Sorcerer, other times as the Scarlet Wizard. He tells a few friends that his real name is Nicola Alexander DeKolta, and they call him Nick but suspect that’s not his real name either since it is made up of the names of three great illusionists of the past.

  These stories were produced for a short-lived pulp magazine, Red Star Mystery Magazine, which ran for only four issues (June, August, October, and December 1940). The first two adventures, “Death from the Past” (originally published as “Ghost of the Undead”) and “Death from the Unseen” (originally “Death Out of Thin Air”), were published in book form as Death Out of Thin Air (1941). The second two, published as “Act I” (originally “The Claws of Satan”) and “Act II” (originally “The Enchanted Dagger”), were collected in a rare paperback volume, Death from Nowhere (1949). All four novellas and several additional short stories were collected in The Magical Mysteries of Don Diavolo (2005).

  In addition to being a professional magician, illustrator, and writer, Rawson was an accomplished editor, serving as the editor of True Detective Magazine, Unicorn Books, Simon & Schuster’s Inner Sanctum mystery imprint, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine from 1963 until his death.

  “Death Out of Thin Air” was first published in the August 1940 issue of Red Star Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in book form as “Death from the Unseen” in Death Out of Thin Air (New York, Coward-McCann, 1941).

  STUART TOWNE

  Chapter I

  The Crime at Centre Street

  LESTER HEALY walked slowly, reluctantly up the steps of the famous and dingy gray-stone building on Centre Street in which the New York City Police Department’s Headquarters is located. Had you been there watching him you would have wondered why he was entering that building without handcuffs on his wrists and a cop on either side.

  You would have spotted Lester Healy on first sight as being a crook and you would have been quite wrong. People were always making that mistake, and a good percentage of them suddenly found themselves getting their mail at Sing Sing on account of it.

  Healy’s slouchy posture, his cynical squint, the hard lean face with its ever present drooping cigarette, the underworld argot that was in his speech made him look the way you thought a gangster should look and gave you a jolt when you discovered—in court—that he was a sergeant of detectives.

  At the moment, Healy was working on a special assignment for the Bureau of Missing Persons.

  Shortly after Dr. Palgar had disappeared, Healy had picked up a rumor on the underworld grapevine that looked like a promising lead. Inspector Church had agreed that it could bear investigation and Healy had gone to work on it.

  For the past week he had been a member of New York City’s underworld. He had successfully tracked the rumor to its source and what he had discovered gave him a distinctly uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had just witnessed something that he was positive was utterly impossible, but which had happened just the same—something which he knew spelled trouble in big, nasty-tasting doses.

  Sergeant Healy was more than a match for the average crook and for a lot that rated considerably above average. His experience had taught him just about all the answers; he knew what made the underworld and its members tick.

  But this time he was up against something strange and unprecedented. This time he didn’t have an answer because he’d never met anything like it before, and deep down within him he hoped he’d never meet anything like it again. If a man stopped to think about it, the criminal possibilities were enormous, utterly unpredictable and very possibly unbeatable.

  He had decided that the smart thing for him to do was to turn in his facts and let some of the hot shots at headquarters do the worrying. He only hoped he could get them to believe he hadn’t simply developed a case of delirium tremens or taken to using narcotics.

  Healy, you see, had, under bright lights, just watched a man vanish into thin air. He had seen him fade slowly and completely into nothing at all. But it was even worse than that. He had been faced with clearly unmistakable evidence that the man who disappeared was still there under those bright lights—still there but quite invisible!

  Inspector Church, Healy knew very well, wasn’t going to accept a report like that without a good healthy argument. Church was an efficient, hard-hitting, no-nonsense cop who heartily disliked fairy stories in any shape or form, especially when they turned up in official reports.

  Only a few weeks ago he had been involved in a curious case that the newspapers had referred to as The Vampire Murder. Church was still growling about it and a smart dick was careful not to make the slightest reference to it anywhere within a couple of hundred yards of the Inspector.

  And now Healy had to take him a story like this!

  Healy unlocked the door of his office, went in, threw his hat at the coat rack in the corner and seated himself at his desk. He put his hand on the phone and then sat there for a moment considering what would be the gentlest way of breaking his news to Inspector Church. He finally took a deep breath like a man about to dive into ice-cold water and started to lift the phone receiver.

  At that moment his door opened abruptly and an excited man burst in and nearly overwhelmed Sergeant Healy. He jumped across the room, leaned over the desk, grabbed the startled Sergeant’s hand and pumped it effusively.

  He had a thick Italian accent. “You finda my leetle bambina. We are so happy! Maria, she is coming down to thank you herself. She was so afraid for Angelina and then you bring her back. I don’t know how to tell you how happy—”

  Healy slid back in his chair and disengaged his hand. The man seemed to be about to kiss him on both cheeks. “Wait a minute,” Healy said. “I haven’t found any little girls lately. Who were you looking for?”

  The happy father bent forward looking closely at the sergeant. “You—you are not Lieutenant Farello? I am so sorry. My eyes—” He gestured toward the round tinted spectacles he wore.

  “No,” Healy said. “I’m not the lieutenant. You’ll find him three doors down the hall.”

  Healy’s visitor, flustered, apologized in Italian and backed out into the corridor, closing the door after him. H
ealy frowned as the thought passed through his mind that the man didn’t look particularly Italian. But he had weightier matters bothering him and he turned again to the phone.

  That was where he made his mistake. His last one.…

  He asked the operator to connect him with Inspector Church, and when that gentleman’s booming “Hello” came over the wire he said, “Sergeant Healy speaking. I’ve got a report to make in the Dr. Palgar case. I think I’d better give it to you verbally and do the written report later. It needs action immediately.”

  “Did you get any trace of Palgar?” the Inspector wanted to know.

  “No, not yet. But I found that machine of his and something else. Something that looks like a big headache. Can I come up now and give it to you?”

  “No. I’m on the way out. The boys just fished one of Dutch Kutzman’s gunmen out of the East River. He was weighted down with machine-gun slugs. I’ve got to go take a look. I’ll stop by your office on the way and you can give me a quick once over. See you in half a minute.”

  Healy said, “Yes sir,” and replaced the phone receiver.

  Inspector Church’s office was on the floor above and it wasn’t much more than a minute later when he walked down the stairs and along the corridor toward Healy’s office. The Inspector, in his years of service, had never done the sort of undercover work that Healy did. He looked too much like a dick; a movie director would never have cast him as anything else.

  He had the heavy, broad shouldered build, the flat feet that came from his long apprenticeship of pavement-pounding on the uniformed force, and the brusque, cocksure, suspicious manner of a policeman. His jutting, square-cut jaw had a determined forcefulness about it that a good many lawbreakers had discovered was the real thing.

  But now, halfway down the corridor toward Healy’s door, his jaw suddenly dropped and the determined look was replaced by one of amazement. The Inspector’s quick walk abruptly became a wild dash.

  He had heard behind Healy’s closed door the familiar heavy crack of a gunshot.

  Church’s own gun was in his hand by the time he reached the door. As he grasped the doorknob, he heard a sound that made him throw his full weight against the door in a frantic smash. He was too late. The door was locked and the sound he had heard was the metallic click of the bolt sliding over.

  Someone inside that room had locked the door. There was no other exit except for the window five stories above Centre Street. Church pounded on the door and shouted, “Healy! What the hell is going on in there?”

  He got no answer whatever. Quickly, then, he put his gun to the door’s lock, fired twice, and threw himself against the door again. The lock still held. Church fired once more, stepped back and this time really hit the door a hard smash. It gave suddenly.

  The Inspector, falling inward, took a quick step, recovered his balance and stared at what he saw, the smoking gun in his hand lifted and ready but finding no target. Sergeant Lester Healy lay slumped forward in his chair, a streaming flow of blood moving down across his face and making a widening pool on the green desk blotter.

  Sergeant Healy was there, the chair he sat in, a desk, a hat rack, and on the Inspector’s right, behind the door, a table that bore a single-drawer filing cabinet. There was a tin wastebasket and one other chair. But that was all. Except for the Inspector himself, there was nothing and no one else in that room.

  Church, a baffled angry look in his eye, looked quickly behind the door, under the table and the desk, found nothing, and made for the window. That was closed and locked on the inside.

  Church stared at it with unbelief. Then he grabbed at the phone. As he did so, he heard a quick taunting voice behind him say, “See you later, Inspector.”

  He whirled like a top and saw the door through which he had come swinging shut! He had turned in time to catch a glimpse of it end-on, and for a moment he saw both the inner and outer sides of it at once. The door was apparently closing of its own volition!

  This uncanny sight made the Inspector hang fire for nearly a full second. Then, as the door slammed against the jamb, he sprang for it and yanked it open. There were men in the corridor outside, running toward him. Two detectives coming from the left; Inspector McShean, a uniformed cop and a secretary from the right. Church goggled at them.

  “Who,” he bellowed, “came out of this door just now?”

  He got blank looks all around as the reinforcements reached him.

  “No one at all, Church,” McShean said. “What the—”

  Inspector Church didn’t answer. He turned back into the room, took a quick close look for the first time at Sergeant Healy.

  “He’s still alive,” he said grabbing at the phone. Savagely he pounded an impatient tattoo on the receiver rest. “Operator, operator, dammit why doesn’t …” His voice trailed off as he became aware that the phone cord was dangling uselessly over the side of the desk, its cut end attached to nothing at all.

  Church put the phone down slowly. McShean rapped, “Kramer, get Pepper.” Kramer left on the double quick.

  McShean’s bright quick eyes moved around the room. Suddenly he reached out and took the gun which Inspector Church still held. Church was thinking fast and furiously of something else. He let it go, then suddenly realizing what was happening, he blurted, “Hey, what’s the idea of that?”

  McShean was examining Church’s revolver with an intent interest.

  “Three shots fired,” he said. “I heard four. But I don’t see any other gun.” He lifted Healy’s body slightly and reached beneath the man’s coat. He took a revolver from the holster there and examined it. “Full,” he said. “It has to be suicide, but—”

  “But,” Church cut in, “it can’t be suicide. “It—Brophy, get on a phone. Hurry like hell! See that men are stationed down stairs at every exit to this building at once! No one goes in or out until I say so.” He turned to McShean. “Someone—or—or something locked that door from the inside just as I reached it—after the first shot! Healy couldn’t have done it—not with that wound. It’s murder. It has to be and yet—”

  McShean didn’t like the nervous glitter in Inspector Church’s eyes, nor the jerky excited way he talked and acted. A suspicion was beginning to form in his mind that perhaps Church had been working too hard, that possibly he was sliding off in a nervous breakdown with hallucinations.

  “And yet what?” McShean asked watching Church carefully, a clinical eye peeled for further symptoms.

  “And yet,” Church answered, “it can’t be murder unless the murderer is invisible!” As Church said the word he knew that there could be no other answer.

  Just as Dr. Pepper hurried into the room, Sergeant Healy’s body made a slight convulsive motion and a moment later the doctor pronounced him dead.

  Sergeant Healy had convinced Sergeant Church that there might be such a thing as an invisible man after all.

  Chapter II

  Invitation to a Burglary

  Don Diavolo, The Scarlet Wizard, looked out across the footlights at the applauding audience that filled the great Manhattan Music Hall. His dark eyes beneath the scarlet half-mask held an engaging, devilish twinkle and his lips bore a mysterious half smile. His lithe, athletic figure bowed formally from the waist and the spotlight that centered on him made the red of his faultlessly tailored evening clothes glow like flame.

  Diavolo had just finished his suavely deceptive routine of streamlined sorcery in which impossibilities crowded onto the stage with smooth rapidity, each one a little more astounding than the last.

  Now, slowly, he turned and made a nonchalant gesture that took the great curtain behind him up out of sight to expose, in the exact center of the great bare stage, a small cabinet curtained with deep ultramarine drapes scattered with silver stars. A blue spotlight bathed it in a mysterious light; the orchestra played softly an exotic melody that had been born in the magic East.

  Don Diavolo approached the cabinet. Its floor was three feet above the stage, supported o
n slender legs that permitted an unobstructed view beneath. The magician walked once around it, his hands weaving slow mystic passes in the air. Then, as the tempo of the music began to accelerate and grow louder he clapped his hands once, sharply. The curtains at the cabinet’s front parted slightly and a dancer in the fluffy skirted traditional costume of the Imperial ballet stepped through and danced lightly, on her toes, down the short flight of glass steps that descended to the stage.

  A spotlight picked her up as she pirouetted daintily. Then a second dancer came forth, and was caught by another bright circle of moving light as she followed the first. A third, fourth, and fifth followed. And in a few moments a dozen dancers moved slowly and gracefully on the stage. But the audience no longer saw them. All eyes were fastened on the opening in the curtain through which the girls emerged.