When the postcard slid through the mail slot at a little past twelve, I was ready and waiting. I didn’t bother to bend down and pick it up. I swung the door open instead, startling the mailman so much that he stumbled back, nearly losing his balance.
“Mr Winsor,” Drayton grinned. “I’m sorry but there’s nothing for you today.”
“That’s okay,” I told him. “I was wondering if you could mail this for me,” I asked, handing him a postcard.
“No problem,” he said eagerly. “I used to mail cards for the admiral all the time.”
“I know you did.”
He must have sensed something, either in my face or in the tone of my voice. “Now, what do you mean by that?” he asked quietly. He wasn’t grinning any more.
“I figured it all out last night. The whole thing started with the postcards, but I got side-tracked for a while, never realizing that the answer was right there under my nose.”
Drayton forced a smile. “You’re talking in riddles, Mr Winsor. I still can’t figure out what you’re trying to say.”
“You’re the perfect postman, right?”
“The best in the business,” Drayton agreed.
I shook my head. “When I asked you what I should do with the admiral’s mail, you listed several options, all of them dependent on the mail’s being delivered here. You never once mentioned the routine procedure of having the post office hold it or putting in a change of address that would have sent it directly to Penny’s next of kin. It would have been easier on both of us, but you never said a word. Because you wouldn’t have seen the postcards any more. After all that time on the sidelines, you were finally in the game. You just couldn’t bear to give it up, could you?”
“Are you accusing me of tampering with the U.S. mail?” Drayton bristled.
“I’m accusing you of reading some postcards,” I said softly. “The ones Penny gave you to mail for him and the ones you delivered from his friend, Charles. You’re a chess player yourself. It’s only natural that you’d become interested in a game, especially if it were a good one. I didn’t suspect you at first. But last night I realized that somebody else must be carrying on the game with Penny’s friend Charles. You were the only one besides me with access to all the incoming postcards. And since Penny was an elderly man who spent most of his time eavesdropping from behind the door, it seemed only logical that he’d give the outgoing cards to you to mail for him. It all came down to your being the one, the only person who could keep the chess game going after Penny’s death. Charles must be a worthy opponent,” I suggested. “Are you enjoying the game?”
“All right,” Drayton said with a sheepish grin. “You caught me at it. Charles Fairfield is a top-ranked player just like the admiral was. I couldn’t resist the challenge. After all these years of trying to second-guess them, I had to see if I could beat Fairfield myself.” The heavyset postman shrugged. “All I did was write a few postcards and sign Penny’s name to them. No harm in that, right?”
“No harm if the admiral hadn’t caught you reading the cards in the first place,” I corrected him. “These past few days I’ve learned just what kind of man he was. What you did was only a minor infraction of the rules. After all, postcards aren’t meant to be private. But Penny would have complained just the same, ruining your standing as the ‘perfect postman,’ spoiling your chance to be named mail carrier of the year. But first he would have let you dangle for a while, enjoying the prolonged agony. The sight of you sweating it out, never knowing exactly when your spotless reputation would be shattered beyond repair. He waited too long this time,” I said quietly. “Long enough for you to kill him.”
“Are you crazy?” Drayton sputtered. “Penny tripped on a rug behind a locked door. No way that could be murder.”
I shook my head. “There are a couple of ways, but I didn’t figure out the right one until last night.” I dug the little loop of nylon cord out of my pocket and held it out for Drayton to see. “I found this knotted through the rug. The rug Penny tripped on when he fractured his skull.” Involuntarily both of us glanced down at the faded Oriental. “At first I thought the loop was left over from a cleaners’ tag. But then I remembered Tom Banks’s comment that the cleaners had spent ‘all afternoon’ on them. They’d done the work right here. No reason to tag them if the rugs weren’t leaving the apartment.”
I prodded the nylon loop in my open palm. “I took this over to a sporting goods store this morning. The man in the fishing department identified it as a piece of deep sea fishing line, strong enough to withstand the pull of a fighting marlin. And I know you’re a fisherman. You told me as much yourself when you talked about not being able to afford a rod and reel from the Pitt catalogue.”
“What does that prove?” Drayton demanded. Behind his thick glasses his eyes had taken on a narrow, almost glowing intensity. Casually he slipped his mailbag off his shoulder and put it down on the floor. “It’s real interesting,” he said with a slow smile. “But it still doesn’t add up to murder.”
“Sure it does,” I insisted. “I spent a lot of time this morning standing on that little rug with the door closed. Right off I noticed how the rug gets bunched up from shifting your feet around. It gets pushed up against the door and a little edge of it gets shoved between the door and the bottom of the frame. Not much,” I emphasized. “Just enough to knot a line in it.”
“Go on,” Drayton prompted me. He was still smiling, but there was no pleasure at all in his voice.
“You must have done that part of it quietly,” I continued. “Keeping well below the sightline of the peephole. It would have been easy. Most of the tenants aren’t around this time of day. Then you make your normal appearance, dropping the mail through the slot. When you hear Penny picking it up, you hurry away. The other end of the line was secured to something heavy and tough. Your mailbag is my best guess. It’s perfect for the job. The sudden pull on the line yanks the rug against the door and Penny with it. It was a pretty sure bet that something like that would fracture an old man’s brittle skull. After you hear the crash, you just walk back and cut the line with scissors or a knife.”
“You mean a knife like this?” The short but lethal looking blade suddenly appeared in Drayton’s hand.
“Just like it,” I gulped.
“I thought he was my friend,” he continued with quiet intensity. “He used to meet me at the door every day. I’d hand him his mail and he’d give me the cards to post for him. Then one day he caught me reading one of Charles’s postcards. I guess he must have been suspecting it for a while. He wouldn’t open the door after that. He’d just stand on the other side and taunt me, telling me over and over again that everyone would find out that I really wasn’t perfect. I had to kill him. Don’t you see? I am perfect. The perfect postman!”
He lurched toward me, the blade upraised. As he crossed the doorstep and stepped onto the rug, I gave the line hidden in my hand a tug. His feet went flying out from under him. The knife fell from his hand. He cracked his head against the doorjamb and sagged to the floor, unconscious but still very much alive.
“Well, that’s one ghost laid to rest,” I said to myself. I reached behind a pile of boxes and switched off the tape recorder. Then I phoned the police.
Karen came over that night, long after they’d taken the raving postman away in a strait-jacket. I felt sorry for him but not all that sorry. He’d tried to kill me, too. I’d told her all about it on the phone, rubbing it in just a little when I reminded her about restless ghosts and hauntings by mail.
I wasn’t surprised when she showed up with a peace offering. “Housewarming gift?” I asked, accepting the brightly wrapped package.
“Open it up,” she smiled.
I did just that. “But I don’t need a chess set,” I protested. “I don’t know how to play and I’m certainly not going to learn now. I don’t believe in chess.”
“What about ghosts?”
“I don’t believe in them, either.”
/>
“Then what do you believe in?” Karen demanded.
I looked around me, taking in the endless stacks of cartons and crates, untouched since the movers had left them there except for the addition of a faint coating of dust. “The scarcity of good apartments in New York City,” I said firmly. “That’s what I believe in . . . I think.”
Murder in Monkeyland
Lois Gresh & Robert Weinberg
Robert Weinberg (b. 1946) is a renowned collector and specialist in pulp magazines and pulp art who turned to writing, starting with a series featuring occult detective Alex Warner in The Devil’s Auction (1988). Lois Gresh (b. 1956) is a computer programmer and systems analyst. Their skills came together on the techno-thriller The Termination Node (1999). Their other collaborations include The Science of Superheroes (2002) and The Science of Supervillains (2004). Lois tells me that she once worked in a research establishment very similar to the one described here, but to say any more would spoil the story.
1
Once upon a time, after returning from the bank where I had the pleasure of making a six-figure deposit of the week’s earnings, I casually asked my boss, Penelope Peters, what special talent made her so incredibly successful. After all, Penelope, due to a genetic imperfection in her cells, suffered from extreme agoraphobia. She was unable to leave her home without suffering major panic attacks that left her a total mental and physical wreck. Yet, working from her office deep in the heart of Manhattan, she earned astonishing sums week after week solving problems that stumped the highest and the mightiest throughout the country, and sometime even the world. Having served as her assistant; chief bottle-washer; and eyes, ears, nose, and legs for the past five years, I had witnessed her genius so often I had become inured to her working miracles. I just wondered how.
“Brains and personality,” answered Penelope, with the barest twinkle in her green eyes. It was the punch line to one of the oldest and dumbest jokes around, and she loved using it.
“Yeah, right,” I countered, “save it for the newspapers. Tell me the truth. I’ve devoted the past five years of my life running errands, going to used book stores, attending board meetings, and catching crooks for you. It’s time I learned the secret handshake.” Then, to show that I wasn’t actually annoyed with her, I added, “Please.”
“Oh, well,” said Penelope, rising from behind her imposing ebony desk in the center of her office. “You won’t believe using the Magic 8-Ball, I assume?”
“Nope,” I replied. “Nor the ouija board explanation or the sack of old bones in the closet. I want the real stuff. So I can finally make my own way in the world, starting with a big advertisement on the internet: ‘Sean O’Brien, Investigations; formerly employed by the notorious Penelope Peters, World’s Premier Problem Solver. ‘“
Penelope frowned. “You’re not really thinking of leaving?” she asked. “It would take me years to train another assistant.”
“Decades,” I replied, with a grin. “It would take you decades. If not lifetimes.”
“Besides,” she said, “I haven’t sent you scouring used book stores for years now. I buy everything off the internet and have it delivered by Fed Ex.”
“There was that time I took the ferry to Hoboken—” I began, but she cut me off with the wave of a hand.
“Enough, enough,” she said. Penelope walked to the mahogany floor-to-ceiling bookcases that covered the left wall and laid one hand on the top of a well-read volume. “Everything I know I learned from studying this book. Read it, absorb it, and don’t forget it. That’s all you need to do to be just like me.”
That I doubted. I stand six foot two, weigh two hundred and forty pounds, and made it through college on a football scholarship. I have a degree in accounting, a detective’s badge, and a black belt in karate. I’m a fast talker, possess a near-photographic memory, and know how to follow instructions. My hair and eyes are black as coal, and nobody mistakes me for a movie star. Any resemblance between me and my boss is purely imaginary.
At five foot seven, 110 pounds, with green eyes and brown hair, Penelope Peters might have made it as a top fashion model if she lost fifteen or twenty pounds and could manage to leave her home on assignments. Since the second option was out of the question, she obviously saw no reason to consider the first. Not that I think she would have bothered. Penelope didn’t like taking orders from anyone, which was why she had set up her consulting business years before, when her agoraphobia was just starting to act up. In the time since, she’s become the problem solver that other problem solvers come to when they’re stumped. Her IQ number is off the charts, and her office is filled with rare trinkets and expensive gifts sent to her from satisfied clients throughout the world. Her brains didn’t come from any one book. But, I’m no dummy. I know what my boss is like. Besides, I was curious. I took the book.
“The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” I read aloud. “Sherlock Holmes? Everything you know, you learned from Sherlock Holmes?”
“Elementary, my dear O’Brien,” said Penelope, with a smile.
“He’s not a real person. He’s a character in a book.”
“Real or not, he knew the secret to solving mysteries,” said Penelope. “Any sort of mysteries, be they problems with business to problems with murder.”
“Which is?” I asked.
Penelope removed The Sign of Four from my hands and flipped the book open to what had to be a familiar page. She read aloud,”. . . when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“That’s it?” I said, somewhat doubtful. I must admit I wasn’t particularly impressed. Which explains, I suppose, why I’m the assistant and Penelope is the boss. “That’s all?”
“Nothing else,” said Penelope carefully sliding the book back into its place on the shelf. “A sharp mind, an attention for detail, and that sentence is all you need to solve the most perplexing puzzles ever encountered.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“You’ll see,” said Penelope.
I did, of course, less than a month later, when Penelope solved the murder in Monkeyland.
2
Imagine if you will a four-story building in the shape of a square. Think of it built out of concrete and steel, with huge panoramic windows on each of the four levels, with a round information desk on the first floor and two large elevators in a concrete hub in the center of the square. In case of fire or any other sort of disaster, the elevators immediately lock into place in the shafts and can’t be used until the “all clear” alarm sounds.
Located in the corners of the square are four sets of emergency stairs. In case of an emergency, your only escape from an upper floor is down and out to the first floor. And, try as you may, there is no possible method of accessing any of the top three floors from the first.
Attached to each of the four sides of the square is a stubby concrete and steel rectangular wing, about twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. There are no windows or openings of any kind in these rectangles, and the concrete/steel walls are over two feet thick.
Located in each wing is a single laboratory. During the day, entrance to the labs is by a security card obtained at the desk. The cards are produced each morning by a random number generator and are only good for one day. They have to be carried at all times on the upper floors. If anyone without a card is detected by the many sensors located throughout the building, alarms immediately blare and the entire building complex locks down until the violator is caught. Each lab, due to the nature of the dangerous work being conducted within, has its own air supply and is powered by its own generator.
Still, Homeland Security deemed that these precautions were not enough. Which explains the huge movable concrete slabs on each side of the lab entrances.
When I first saw the slabs, my jaw dropped and I stood frozen for a minute in absolute awe. They were, without question, the biggest door jambs ever created. Each slab stood sixty feet high b
y ten feet across and was two feet deep. They were constructed from concrete laid over a metal frame of thin steel rods. Each massive slab rested on a motorized block of titanium steel. When the complex shut down for the night, the two slabs of concrete per laboratory slide together to meet and form an immovable door-one that couldn’t be opened by anyone less powerful than Samson or Hercules.
“You expecting an alien invasion?” I wondered aloud.
“Never hurts to be prepared,” said Captain Anthony Rackham, my escort for the afternoon. “Better safe than sorry when you’re dealing with plague and ebola bacteria.”
I shuddered, the full meaning of the complex’s nickname, The Slab, hitting home. The less time I spent in this building, the better. Hopefully, Penelope was going to solve this crime quickly.
“According to the briefing I received this morning,” I said, “researchers are permitted to remain in the labs overnight when working on a project?”
“Whenever they want,” said Rackham. “Just because we’re military doesn’t mean we don’t understand the needs of scientists. Each laboratory is equipped with a refrigerator, a microwave, a cot, and a bathroom complete with shower stall. Some of our top researchers spend weeks here without leaving their labs. They’re dedicated to the safety of our country.”
What Rackham considered dedication, I defined as obsessive behavior. But I was too polite to say so. Especially since the Captain was a good two inches taller than me and looked like he stepped out of a Conan the Barbarian movie. Not that he wasn’t all slick and polished, from his sharply pressed uniform to his shiny black shoes. Rackham had been assigned to me when I first checked into the complex a half-hour before. I still wasn’t sure if he was my escort or my guard. Not that it mattered. I was here strictly as a recording device for my boss.
The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries Page 40
