The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries

by Ashley, Mike;

  Matthew glanced at Bertrand; Bertrand glanced at Matthew.

  “It’s like the man in the video knew Lenny wore a Moose jacket, but when he recently purchased one, he unknowingly got a slightly different moose than the one Lenny sported,” McGrath said. “It’s tough to keep track of all these marketing gimmicks, isn’t it?”

  “And while I was taking note of Mick E. Moose’s facial expression,” Pinero clocked in, “Detective McGrath was taking note of the zipper on the jacket – the zipper tongue, specifically. It looked wider, shinier than the narrow black one on Lenny’s jacket. Reason?” He plucked it out of McGrath’s shirt pocket, held it up.

  Everyone looked at the glinting tongue, waiting for it to speak.

  McGrath interpreted. “We ran it through the Lab. It can be used to mesh metal teeth together alright, but it’s also a device used for what’s called ‘facial provocation’. A device developed by a certain spy agency which shall remain nameless, that can be purchased on the black market or rigged up at home by a real tech expert. A device that when triggered throws up a preprogrammed, made-to-specs image-almost like a hologram, except more realistic. In this case, a preprogrammed image of Lenny Laymon’s face, masking the face of the real man who entered that mall and hid in it until after closing, then shut down the Zammy Jewelers security system and the mall security cameras just long enough to rob the store and make his escape.”

  Gum chewing. Foul, ragged breathing. Twin sets of teeth grinding.

  “Someone wanted to pin the robbery on Lenny; someone with technological expertise. Someone who didn’t know The Rat was already dead when he was supposedly knocking over a jewelry store.”

  Pinero said, “I talked to the warden at Stony Mountain, Matthew, asked how you spent your five years. He said you were a royal pain in the ass the first three, until you discovered the computer lab your last two. They had to almost drag you out of there when your sentence was up. Boning up for crime in the new millennium, eh, Matthew?”

  A single finger – the middle one – in the upright and locked position, was the Kolvin response.

  Pinero slapped it aside. “And guess who was doing exactly the same thing fourteen hundred miles away in the William Head pen? Your twin brother Bertrand. You guys might hate each other, but you still think alike, like identical twins will.”

  “You’re the one tried to frame me and Lenny for the jewel heist,” Matthew snarled at Bertrand, “hacking into his computer and planting that phony email, his ugly mug on your stinking face, that ring at his place!”

  “You’re the one tried to pin a murder rap on me,” Bertrand snarled back, “hacking into Lenny’s computer and planting my face in his webcam, your voice-our voice-threatening him, limping around like you were me!”

  They launched themselves at one another. Mutually assured destruction.

  Sergeant Bugler walked into the Squad Room. Detectives McGrath and Pinero were at their desks eating, yammering, the crumbs and insults flying. “Well, Bertrand Kolvin just signed his confession to the jewelry robbery,” she informed the pair, “admitting to trying to frame his brother and Lenny Laymon for the job. Apparently, he doesn’t want to face a possible murder charge.”

  Pinero stuck a pencil behind his ear, chewed corned beef and said, “Lucky we found that zipper tongue in his condo, along with enough computer equipment to stock a Radio Shack. He tossed the Moose jacket, but I guess the tongue was just too valuable – for other jobs and other frames.”

  “You think Matthew will confess to murdering Lenny?” Bugler asked, hands on her hips.

  “Maybe, once we break his alibi. We know where he was the morning Lenny was killed-faking a limp in front of Lenny’s house to implicate his brother, just to be on the safe side in case there were any witnesses around. Like ones in the sky that he may or may not know about.”

  “How do you think he killed Lenny?”

  McGrath fielded that one in a spray of coffee cake. “We’re guessing he just caught Lenny in the bathroom and overpowered him, slammed his head against the tub, killing him instantly. He worked it out to look like an accident, but he set his brother up to be the fall guy just in case it was ruled foul play. There’s no such thing as a perfect crime, after all, Sergeant.”

  Bugler nodded. “But it was actually Bertrand going into Lenny’s house the night after the murder, right? He says so, anyway.”

  “Right,” McGrath confirmed, picking his teeth. “He was planting that diamond ring to really tie Lenny into the jewelry heist. He never even saw the body – just heard the water running and assumed Lenny was taking a shower. That two man limping oddity, along with the ‘dead’ Lenny going shopping mystery, of course, is what made us realize there was a frame going on-in this case, a double frame.”

  Bugler gave her head a shake. “Instead of working together, like good twins should, they were working at cross-purposes – and didn’t even know it.”

  Pinero nodded, belched. He interlaced his fingers behind his head and propped his feet up on his desk, almost toppled over backwards. “Yup. They were going to fix The Rat for what he did to them-each in their own way – so why not kill two jailbirds with one stone by framing each other for their crimes at the same time?”

  Bugler let out a sigh. “Well, thank goodness that unlike the Kolvins, you two work so well together.”

  McGrath spluttered Java. Pinero untangled hands and feet and shot upright. “Huh!?” they gaped.

  “So well, in fact,” Bugler continued, smiling, “that I’ve canceled your transfer out of Homicide, Detective Pinero. This is one pairing that’s just too valuable to split up.”

  Death and the Rope Trick

  John Basye Price

  The legendary Indian Rope Trick is such an obvious choice for an impossible mystery that I’m surprised it hasn’t been used scores of times. In fact, I’m only aware of this one story which in itself has been tucked away in the pages of the London Mystery Magazine for over fifty years and never reprinted.

  I have been unable to trace much information about John Basye Price, who was born in 1906. He followed in his father’s footsteps in his interest in zoology and was for many years a biologist and science teacher at Leland Stanford University. He published several learned papers on his chosen subject, but just once or twice dabbled with mystery fiction, of which this is a particularly cunning example.

  On the plane en route to Central America my uncle and I paused for a moment, then lowering our voices we resumed our conversation.

  “But, Uncle Edward,” I asked, “what can this Dr Marlin hope to gain from all this? He must know he can’t do what he claims.”

  “He sounds like a monomaniac with delusions of grandeur, who may become violent when his demonstration fails,” my uncle replied. “That’s one reason I asked you to come with me.”

  “One reason?”

  “Yes, Jimmy, the other is I need someone I can trust-absolutely.”

  Filled with curiosity at the summons from my uncle, Mr Edward Dobbs, Chairman of Western University’s Board of Trustees, I had joined him at the airport, but we had no time for conversation until we were in the plane and on our way.

  Then at last I asked my uncle what it was all about. In reply he handed me a newspaper clipping, and I read:

  “CAN DO INDIAN ROPE

  TRICK,” SAYS SAVANT

  LAYS CLAIM TO $500,000

  REWARD

  San Francisco, July 6 – It was announced at Western University today that an attempt to claim the $500,000 reward offered by the late Richard Welton to anyone who can perform the Indian Rope Trick will be made in the Republic of Del Rio. The claimant is a Dr Clive Marlin, self-styled student of the occult, who has resided in Central America for a number of years.

  Richard Welton, who died three years ago, provided in his will that the reward could be claimed outside the United States in some country which had no income tax.

  Mr Welton, a life-long student of spiritualism, considered that a successful
performance of the Indian Rope Trick under test conditions would be an absolute proof of the genuineness of psychic phenomena, as even Houdini-exposer of many fraudulent mediums-never attempted it.

  As often described, but never by an eye witness, the “Indian Rope Trick” is supposed to be a demonstration of mind over matter. The yogi causes a rope to rise in the air by supra-normal means; then a boy climbs to the top of the rope and vanishes, to be rematerialized a mile or more away.

  Harry Price, the English expert, once offered a similar reward for anyone who could perform the trick, but no one ever tried to claim it. But Mr Welton thought that a much larger reward might be more effective.

  I put the clipping down. “Welton must have been crazy,” I said.

  “The courts said not, Jimmy. . . . He was eccentric-no doubt of that – but still legally sane.”

  “But how does this concern us?”

  “Directly, Jimmy. Mr Welton left two million dollars to Western University, but on the condition that we administer this $500,000 fund. I, myself, as Chairman of the Board of Trustees, have the sole discretion to grant or withold the reward to any claimant.”

  “So that’s why we’re going to Del Rio?” I said.

  “Yes. It’s all nonsense, of course, but under the terms of the trust I have to make this trip. Crazy or not, Dr Marlin has the right to attempt his demonstration.”

  A thought came to me. “This Dr Marlin may be sane but crooked,” I said. “Not knowing you, he may try to bribe you with part of the reward to give a false report on the test.”

  “No, Jimmy, if he had that in mind, he would have tried it before he put up the thousand-dollar forfeit. The will requires one to keep the University from being bothered by cranks.”

  I smiled to myself at the idea of anyone trying to offer my uncle a bribe. A slight man in early middle-age, partly bald with a fringe of dark curly hair, he had keen blue eyes that usually managed to see everything going on. By profession he was a geologist, who might have made a fortune in mining but who preferred to retire on a moderate income to devote himself to scientific studies and to his duties at Western University as Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

  “No doubt you’re right,” I said; “but why has Dr Marlin stipulated that only two persons watch his demonstration?”

  “He says that more might set up too many conflicting thought waves and make his success more difficult.”

  “I wonder,” I said. “He may be an expert magician who thinks he can deceive two persons easier than a crowd.”

  “I doubt it, Jimmy, If even Houdini couldn’t work the rope trick, I don’t think this Dr Marlin can.”

  The next morning my uncle and I left the American Consulate in Del Rio City, and in a hired car drove for half an hour along a desolate coast to Dr Marlin’s coffee finca (plantation). The house was on a slight rise near a secluded bay with a small island about two miles off-shore. At hand was a wharf with a motor-boat moored to it. Dr Marlin’s house, to my surprise, was a white two-storied mansion suggesting the Southern United States rather than Central America.

  As our car pulled up, we saw three figures awaiting us on the veranda. One, slightly in the lead, a European wearing a white linen suit, stepped forward and introduced himself as the claimant, Dr Clive Marlin. I looked at him with interest mixed with apprehension, but his manner was perfectly normal. He was a tall, distinguished-looking man of about fifty with thick iron-grey hair and a clipped moustache. A monocle was in his right eye, and his speech was apparently that of a cultured Englishman. But I thought I noticed just a trace of some foreign accent.

  After a few words to us, Dr Marlin beckoned the other two forward and presented them as his assistants, Mustapha and his son Ali. My uncle and I spoke to them in Spanish, but the two only bowed and Dr Marlin explained that they only understood Hindustani.

  Except that the two both seemed Hindus, I found it hard to believe that they were father and son. Mustapha was a big man, as tall as Dr Marlin but thicker. He wore a white Oriental costume with a turban, and most of his brown face was covered by a dark beard. His son Ali (seemingly about twenty) was shorter and very thin. I could see the ribs under his dark skin, for, unlike his father, he wore only a loin-cloth. He had no hair on his face, wore no turban, and his entire head was shaved so that his scalp glistened like rubber in the sun.

  “I suppose,” my uncle said, “Ali is the lad who will climb the rope?”

  “That is correct,” said Dr Marlin. “But not today. First you must witness the pouring of the concrete.”

  “Concrete?”

  “Yes, Mr Dobbs, we don’t want to leave any room for doubt. Today I am laying a concrete pavement over the testing-ground so that no one can claim later that Ali vanished into a trap-door under the rope.”

  We had been following Dr Marlin as he spoke, and a short distance from the house we came to a level field of about an acre, surrounded, except for two gaps, by a thick, six-foot hedge.

  In the centre were four iron poles, six feet high, set in the ground so as to form a twenty-foot square. The poles were connected at the tops by four wires designed to hold curtains.

  About a dozen native workmen surrounded a bin filled with a freshly mixed concrete. At Dr Marlin’s command they poured it on the ground, and smoothed it until the entire square between the poles was covered to a depth of two or three inches.

  “Now,” said Dr Marlin, “just as a check, will you gentlemen write your names in the concrete? It is very rapid setting, and will be hard to-morrow.”

  We did so. Before we left, my uncle managed to get a few words in private with Juan, the overseer; but Juan declared that he and all the rest of the workmen had only been there two weeks, and they knew nothing of Dr Marlin. We had already heard from the American Consul that Dr Marlin had bought his finca three years ago; he seemed to be an Englishman with plenty of money; but, aside from that, nothing was known of him.

  My uncle and I were up early the next morning, and drove to Dr Marlin’s after breakfast. I took my pistol and had a small but excellent camera hidden in my pocket. My uncle had accepted the offer of a loan of another camera from Dr Marlin the day before. But this was only misdirection. Secretly I was to take the pictures.

  We found everything ready for us. Dr Marlin escorted us to the field, after offering us cigarettes. We each took one, but when his back was turned we exchanged them for two of our own brand.

  The concrete was hard and we verified our signatures. At the sides of the poles were curtains ready to enclose the pavement. Now, however, they were open. On the pavement was Ali, clad only in a white loin-cloth.

  “Where’s the rope?” I asked.

  “Mustapha will bring it shortly,” Dr Marlin replied. “Here he comes now.”

  Through the gap in the hedge appeared a motor-tricycle. On it was Mustapha clad in his white robe and turban. He drove up on the pavement, dismounted, and from an open wire basket on the handlebars (the machine did not have a rear compartment of any kind) produced a coiled rope about twenty feet long, with a large knot on one end and a snaphook on the other. He uncoiled it and fastened the hook to an iron ring set in the centre of the concrete.

  “All ready?” asked Dr Marlin. “Oh, I forgot one thing. After the demonstration is over this morning, you may think that perhaps Ali had a twin brother who tricks you in some manner. So, Mr Dobbs, will you please take Ali’s finger-prints? As you know, even with identical twins the finger-prints are different.”

  My uncle agreed and Dr Marlin beckoned Ali forward and reached in his pocket. An expression of annoyance crossed his face. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I forgot to bring an inkpad. But never mind, I have one in my laboratory over this way. It will take only a few minutes.”

  We three, accompanied by Ali, started off towards the other gap in the hedge, away from the house. Mustapha, seated cross-legged on the pavement, started to arise to follow, but Dr Marlin motioned him to stay where he was.

  The laboratory tu
rned out to be a hut filled with chemical apparatus. It took some time for Dr Marlin to find an ink-pad among the odds and ends that cluttered up the place, but finally one was located. My uncle inked Ali’s fingers; secured his prints on a sheet of paper, made a private mark below them; and, after drying, folded the paper and put it in an inside pocket.

  We four then returned to the field, where Dr Marlin and Ali rejoined Mustapha on the pavement. Suddenly, in spite of myself, I gave a tremendous sneeze. At the sound Dr Marlin barely started, and Mustapha, like a true yogi, never moved; but Ali jumped as if he had been stung. “He seems to be under a genuine nervous strain,” I thought. My uncle and I compared watches, both showed exactly 10.10 a.m.

  As directed, my uncle and I took separate stations. I was about twenty feet from the post at the eastern corner of the square, while my uncle had a similar position at the western corner. Dr Marlin then closed the curtains on all four sides, leaving the three demonstrators inside but shut off from view. My uncle and I could each see two sides of the square, and thus covered all four sides between us.

  Dr Marlin seemed so confident that in spite of myself I could not help a wondering excitement. But there was to be another interruption. A petrol motor started up behind the curtains, and Mustapha emerged and drove away on the cycle towards the house. I noticed that the rope was back on the handlebars. Dr Marlin called out from behind the curtains that the rope had proved defective and that Mustapha would soon be back with another one. But it was quite a while before Mustapha reappeared, on foot this time, with a coil of rope over his shoulder. Parting the curtains just enough to squeeze through, he rejoined Dr Marlin and Ali inside. All was ready.

  Mustapha’s voice was heard, shrill and eerie, in a loud chant or wailing. From behind the curtain came the sound of a blank cartridge. I gave a gasp of incredulity and my uncle shouted with amazement. As if by magic, the rope shot high into the air twenty feet or more above the curtains. I forgot to breathe, but still the rope was up there like a snake twisting and writhing in the air above us. It was like a trick on a movie screen, but there was no screen there-only the rope and the blue sky. A fantastic thought of mirrors came over me. I picked up a stone and threw it at the rope, and it went right past it and fell to the ground on the other side. My scalp contracted, my spine tingled as I kicked myself to make sure I was awake.