“The human brain works too slowly, Jerry, even when it works straight . . . it works too slowly.”
The Impossible Murder of Dr Satanus
William Krohn
William Krohn (b. 1945) has the distinction of being the youngest writer represented in this collection. Youngest, that is, at the time he wrote the following story: he was eighteen when he submitted it to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine where it appeared a little over a year later. Krohn had read his first detective novel a couple of years earlier: John Dickson’s Carr’s masterpiece of the impossible The Three Coffins, and he was hooked. Needless to say the following story is heavily influenced by Carr, but you might as well learn from the best. Krohn wrote a second similar story which was rejected as too complex, and he moved on to other fields. He has since become a noted film critic and an expert on the work of Alfred Hitchcock, including the study Hitchcock at Work (2003). He is also Director of Creative Services for the Commercial Film Division of New Galaxy Enterprises and the editor of the online webzine RocketsAway. The following is where it all started.
The policeman was thinking about magic.
It was a strange thought for a policeman to have, but even his superiors might have forgiven him on an evening like this. It was late August, and a velvet-dark midsummer night had descended on the streets of the city. On this particular street, with its big comfortable homes and airy lawns turning from green to black in the smoky twilight, the darkness seemed to sing with a kind of summer magic that even a policeman can feel.
But Lieutenant-Detective Jerry Doran was thinking of another kind of magic – the kind which involves playing cards and white rabbits, bouquets of flowers that burst from nowhere and beautiful ladies who vanish at the wave of a silver wand. This kind of magic had somehow got loose from the safe confines of the stage and was causing Lieutenant Doran a severe occupational headache; and now he was ringing the doorbell of the one man who might help him – a man who did not believe in magic at all.
“Sometimes I think,” said Richard Sheilan as he ushered his guest into the living room, “that it takes a murder to make you come visiting. Your soul is Machiavellian, Jerry. You should have been a politician.”
“I should have been an astronaut,” Doran said feelingly, “or a short-order cook. Anything but a policeman.”
“Tch-tch,” said Sheilan. He stepped over to the liquor cabinet and extracted a bottle and two glasses. “Those were sympathetic noises,” he explained, “the kind I reserve for my un-retired friends. But I take it from what you said over the phone that you want more than commiseration.” He handed Doran a glass. “What is it this time, Jerry? Murder, of course.”
It had been a number of years since Sheilan had retired from police work and moved into his new home. He seemed quite at ease here in this large cream-colored room, as he hunched a little in his monstrous black armchair.
Sheilan was a very big man – not tall and wiry like Doran – but built on a huge scale. He stood well over six feet, on disproportionately long legs; he was big-boned and slender, with ropy-veined wrists and impressively broad shoulders. He had a ruddy complexion and what might be called ruddy hair – red-tinted where it had not already silvered with age. For all his quietness of manner he cut an imposing figure, and small people with loud voices rarely felt comfortable in his presence. He was quiet now, and the hazel eyes watched his friend’s face attentively.
“It’s murder,” Doran affirmed. “I’m surprised you haven’t read about it in the papers. It’s been getting front-page coverage ever since it broke this morning.”
“I don’t read the papers,” Sheilan said simply. “What sort of case do you mean?”
“A screwy one. The kind,” Doran said with a trace of malice, “that we save for our un-retired friends.” Sheilan snorted as Doran went on, “Mr Charles Kimball was killed early this morning in a downtown hotel. During the few seconds that the murder must have taken place, he was alone in an elevator car where no living soul could have come near him. And yet he was murdered.”
Sheilan sighed. “You’ve hooked me, Jerry,” he said. “Now I suggest that you begin at the beginning, omit the melodrama, and tell a straight story.” Doran looked belligerent. “Suppose you begin with the victim – Mr Kimball.”
“All right,” said Doran. “Mr Charles Kimball. What do you think Mr Charles Kimball was?”
Sheilan shut his eyes. “A sorcerer,” he intoned. “A student of occult mysteries who tampered with forces beyond his control—”
“Bingo!” said Doran. “Got it the first guess. Charles Kimball was a professional magician, a stage illusionist – and a damn good one, from what I hear.”
Settling back in his chair, the policeman began to tell the story . . .
Standing in the arctic glare of the blue spotlight, draped like a statue in the black robes of his profession, the magician looked for all the world like the lanky personification of some ancient plague. The skin of his hands was the color of snow, and a madman’s shock of white hair, tied with a thin ribbon, crowned his skull; his mouth was like a black sore.
Earlier in the evening the stage had been crowded with gaudy apparatus – coffin-like boxes for sawing a woman in half and cabinets for making her vanish like a puff of smoke. Now the magician stood alone under the spotlight. With a creative gesture of his cupped hands he produced a single white dove which perched for a moment on his arm and then flew away. Then another appeared, and another and another – until it seemed as if there were a hundred of them fluttering around the weirdly lit stage.
The magician was billed as Dr Satanus; he was, of course, none other than Mr Charles Kimball, an entertainer whose checkered career had embraced everything from tightrope acrobatics to cardsharping, from juggling to escape artistry. Somewhere along the line he had married a chorus girl named Margaret Linden and incorporated her into the act as his assistant. Now, after more hard work and disappointment than he cared to remember, Charles Kimball was at the peak of his career.
Backstage, the Dr Satanus troupe was getting ready to go home – home tonight being three scattered rooms in the Hotel Bowman, a second-rate theatrical establishment just off Broadway. Leo Gurney, a wiry little man with a head of curly black hair and a monkey-ugly face, was leaning against a pile of flats and tinkering with an obscure bit of machinery; in addition to his duties as stage manager, Gurney was Kimball’s right-hand man, the mechanical genius who designed and built all the illusions in the show.
There was also Dave Hooker, promotion manager and Jack-of-all-trades – presently off somewhere picking up coffee and sandwiches for a late-night snack. And, of course, there was Margaret Kimball, a still-young woman with a face and figure which could only be described in metaphors of fruit, flowers, and heavenly beings. Still dressed in her Satanic red costume, she stood in the wings and watched the finish of the dove illusion. The curtain came down to a good round of applause, and Charles Kimball swept past, gleamingly spectral in his stage trappings.
It had been a routine performance. However, one thing happened a little later that was out of the ordinary. A few minutes after the curtain dropped, Dave Hooker reappeared, a fair-haired, innocuous young man with an armful of paper bags from some nearby diner, which he quickly distributed. With one bag left over, he went to the door of Kimball’s dressing room, rapped once, and stuck in his head.
Charles Kimball started up out of his chair, his hand darting instinctively for something hidden in the dressing-table drawer. Seeing Hooker, he seemed to collect himself; he said something pleasant in reply to a question only half heard, but his hand still hovered over the drawer.
When Hooker had gone, Kimball reached inside and took out a worn-looking .32 automatic. He gripped it tightly, seeming to draw comfort from it. But his hand still shook, and when he looked at his face in the mirror he saw fear as plainly as if the word had been written there in phosphorescent letters . . .
The lobby of a hotel is seldom an inspiring sight. The lob
by of the Hotel Bowman at seven o’clock on this particular morning was no exception. It was small, and it was dirty; the fake marble linoleum wasn’t fooling anybody.
There were never many people loitering about, especially this early in the morning. Now there were only two: the sandy-haired, shirt-sleeved desk clerk and a fat well-dressed man who looked like a hog. The latter, it appeared, was waiting for someone. He had strolled in and plumped himself down a few minutes before, and now he sat quietly scanning his morning newspaper and eyeing the elevator.
As it happened, the desk clerk was also watching the elevator, which had gone up a few minutes before and was now presumably descending. He watched because he was curious about the hoggish gentleman, and because he had nothing else to do. This was important, because it meant that there were two witnesses to what happened next.
Both men heard the bump of the arriving car, and the hoggish gentleman rose from his seat, depositing the newspaper behind him like an egg. Then the elevator doors rolled open and they both saw that the only occupant of the car was lying down. Startled, the clerk moved around in front of his desk to get a closer look, and suddenly something turned over in his stomach. There was a ragged tear in the man’s coat, and something dark staining the fabric.
The next thing he knew, the desk clerk was standing at the elevator doors watching dazedly as the hoggish gentleman lowered himself beside the body. He touched nothing, but he surveyed the scene as if fixing it in his mind. Then he rose with difficulty and turned to the white-faced clerk. His own face might have been stuffed with sawdust, for all the emotion it betrayed.
“My name is Bailey,” the hoggish man said, flipping out some sort of identification. “I’m a private detective, I’ll stay here while you call the police.” The clerk’s oyster eyes blinked. “Call the Homicide Squad,” the fat man added ominously.
The body on the floor of the elevator was that of Charles Kimball, and – let it be said now – he was dead before the elevator doors opened . . .
“We’ll begin,” said Doran, “with the elevator.” He leaned forward, folding his hands under his chin like a preacher meditating before a sermon.
“First, Mrs Kimball’s testimony. She says that her husband was up early this morning, around six-thirty, and that he woke her up at about the same time. He shaved and showered and dressed, talking at some length about a mysterious appointment, but refusing to answer any of her questions. She says he looked worried, that he’d been acting a little odd all week-nervous and scared. Just before he left he said something that frightened her. He said, quote: ‘I’m going to see a man who knows secrets. ‘”
Sheilan said nothing. Doran went on, “Kimball’s appointment was for seven o’clock. He was already late when he left – Mrs K. glanced at his watch, when he asked her for it and she handed it to him, and saw that it was just after seven.
“The elevator was directly across from the Kimballs’ room, which is on the eleventh floor. Mrs Kimball followed her husband to the elevator door and stood there watching him as he pushed the button for the car, got in, and started down. Since she had her own reasons, which I’ll get to in a minute, for being worried about this mysterious appointment, she watched the floor indicator over the door, and she swears that he went straight down to the lobby without making any stops.
“Fortunately for Mrs K., we have a second witness, a celebrity-conscious maid who was in the hall at the time and recognized Kimball. We have her corroborative testimony that he was alive when he got into the car, and that he went straight down to the lobby without making any stops.”
Doran’s voice became grim. “In the lobby,” he said, “there was a man named Bailey, a licensed investigator for the Powell Detective Agency. Now, the Powell Agency is one of the finest in the city, and Bailey is one of their best men. He was in the lobby because he was waiting for Kimball; he had an appointment to meet him there at seven and turn over evidence which Kimball had hired him to collect. The evidence was to be used in divorce proceedings against Kimball’s wife.”
Sheilan smiled, but still said nothing, “There was also a desk clerk,” Doran said, “a man named Boyd. Both men were watching when the elevator reached the lobby with Kimball, dead of a knife wound in the back. They both saw it; there cannot be the slightest doubt. The inevitable conclusion—”
“– is that Kimball was killed between the time he got into the elevator on the eleventh floor and the time the car arrived in the lobby,” said Sheilan. “I think you’ve established that. How long would it take the car to make the descent?”
“About forty-five seconds. The timing checks. Mrs Kimball says it was a little after seven when her husband left their room. Bailey noted the time on the clock in the lobby when the car arrived; it was exactly 7:03.
“Now there were two ways for someone to get into that car while it was traveling between floors-through the inner car-doors or through the escape panel in the ceiling. But both ways have been definitely ruled out.
“The inner doors of the car are solid steel. As long as the car is in motion, those doors are automatically held locked in place: the car can move only so long as the inner doors remain closed. Since the car never stopped, no one could have gotten through them; for all practical purposes they were welded shut.
“The second means of entrance is also eliminated. The escape panel is a simple trap door installed at the top of most elevators as an emergency exit. Normally, it would have been possible for someone to drop through there, catch Kimball by surprise, and kill him before he had a chance to resist. But about a year ago one of the hotel’s younger guests went climbing up through this hatch and nearly got himself squashed in the elevator mechanism. The management decided on the lesser of two evils and had the trap door padlocked – from the inside.
“So you see where that leaves us. No one could have gotten through the trap door to kill Kimball; and even if he did, he couldn’t have gotten out again and left the hatch as it was found, padlocked on the inside. Unless we postulate a kind of Dr Fu Manchu elevator containing a secret passage, there was no way in and no way out. It’s an absolutely impossible crime!”
“I suppose,” said Sheilan, “that you’ve ruled out the possibility of suicide?”
“Unquestionably. For one thing, no weapon was found in the car. For another, the nature of the wounds was such that they could not have been self-inflicted. There were actually three wounds – two shallow gashes on the left arm and one deep stab wound under the left shoulder blade, penetrating straight to the heart. The blade that was used was over six inches long and about half an inch wide. Very sharp.”
Reaching into his pocket, the policeman pulled out a gun, nickel-plated with a yellowed ivory grip. He said, “We found this gun lying on the floor by the body. It’s a Colt .32 automatic, equipped with a hair-trigger and–” he produced a stubby black cylinder and clipped it on the muzzle.” – a Maxim silencer. Not the sort of thing I’d care to come up against in an enclosed space as small as an elevator car.” He handed the gun over for Sheilan’s inspection.
“I suppose,” said Sheilan, “this is Kimball’s own gun.”
“It’s his, all right – his wife identified it positively. She found it last week, hidden under a pile of underwear. He has a permit to own one, but he hasn’t carried a gun in years. But from what we’ve heard from other members of the troupe, Kimball had been acting funny all week-nervous, as if he were afraid of his own shadow. And the gun, as I pointed out, was recently acquired. It all ties in with the theory that Kimball knew he was in danger and carried this to protect himself. And the gun was never fired – he didn’t even have time to pull the trigger.”
“Hmm,” said Sheilan. “Did this notion of impending doom have anything to do with the assignment he gave to the private detective?”
“No. Kimball saw Bailey only once – three weeks ago when the magic show first came to town. He hired Bailey to do some unobtrusive prying into Mrs Kimball’s relations with Leo Gurney.”
“Aha!” said Sheilan, twirling an imaginary mustache.
“Well, now,” said Doran, “Margaret Kimball is no Lady Macbeth, but she’s good-looking enough to stir up plenty of homicidal intentions in a close-knit little theatrical family like this one. What’s more, Gurney is a first-rate mechanic with a good working knowledge of abracadabra and Hop-o-my-Thumb-modern style. And just to round things out, Gurney’s got a record. Before joining up with Kimball he served time for armed robbery. Would he commit murder to get a troublesome husband out of the way? He’d naturally be cautious, with his record, but I still wouldn’t put it past him.”
“Undeniable possibility,” said Sheilan. “I wonder that he isn’t locked up in a cell already.”
“Two reasons,” said Doran. “One: I’m not arresting anyone until I know how that elevator trick was worked. Two: I’ve been building a case against a straw dummy. Gurney had no more motive to kill Kimball than I do. Private eye Bailey dropped a bombshell – it seems that Kimball was barking up the wrong tree. His wife was playing around – but not with Gurney.”
“Dave Hooker?”
“Correct. By process of elimination. It’s not too surprising when you come to think about it. Hooker is good-looking, in a fuzzy sort of way. But he has a way of making himself – well, sort of invisible; it takes a real effort of concentration to pay attention to him when he talks. So it’s really no wonder that Kimball picked the wrong man.”
“Did Bailey communicate his discovery to his client?”
“No. Bailey’s instructions were to avoid any contact until seven this morning, at which time he planned to present his evidence and watch Kimball’s jaw drop. But somebody got to Kimball before he did.”
Sheilan raised his eyebrows. “The question being – who? Whom do you favor, Jerry? The so-called Invisible Man, with his shining motive? Leo Gurney, with his sinister past? Or Margaret Kimball, with her ironclad alibi? How did they stand up under questioning?”
The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries Page 49
