The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries

by Ashley, Mike;

  “One moment. One short moment, Miss Grey. Am I the murderer? No, dear lady. I would not be so insanely rash as to be here if I were.” She heard the thud of his knees on the floor. “The murderer is, shall we say, a friend – a mutual friend, Miss Grey.”

  There was the tinkle on the floor as of some metallic instrument.

  “What am I here for? What is my object?” His voice had a hideous relish. “A simple thing. Profit. I did not want this taken for suicide. That was his aim, Miss Grey. Mine is absolutely different. And now it is accomplished.”

  He was past her, a squat powerful figure, as soft-footed as a cat. He was silhouetted for one second in the moonlit window, gone.

  Sandra found that scream then. It was piercing, wild, full-bodied, all her healthy young lungs could do. Feet crashed in the back, Corrigan’s yell: “Who is it?”

  The house was alive with noise. Corrigan was in the room; the lights went on.

  She could only gasp: “Dow . . . Dow! He’s gone . . . through that window!”

  Corrigan was already plunging through the open casement.

  Sandra turned. She was beside the corpse. She could feel it, sense it there beside her left foot. Her hands were over her face. Something stronger than shuddering reaction, an irresistible, horrible attraction drew her like a magnet. She took her hands away.

  The glazed eyes in that staring white face looked up at her. Just the same – but not the same. In that gaping mouth the hammer-headed, fungously white plug was missing.

  Dow had cut out the corpse’s tongue!

  III

  Sunlight through the Venetian blinds of Captain Corrigtan’s office made bars of light and shade over the heap of police photographs on his desk, over Sandra’s slim hands, leafing through them. As she dropped each photograph, Gawdy picked it up, scrutinizing it with his big florid face outthrust, his blue eyes sharp. Captain Corrigan paced up and down the office. The floor creaked under his heavy step. His bullet head looked jammed between his shoulders, his hard eyes as if he had not slept all night. De Saules, incessantly fingering his spike of beard, sat a little removed, his cool eyes flitting, not over the photographs of Captain Corrigan, but over Sandra’s trim body, her velvety absorbed eyes, the color in her young cheeks.

  Sandra tossed aside the last photograph of a Chinese with a criminal record.

  “I can’t find him, Captain Corrigan. He’s just not here.”

  Captain Corrigan looked at Gawdy as if here were his last hope.

  Gawdy shook his head. “He’s none of these.”

  Corrigan came up. His voice was like an explosion. “We’ve got to find out! We’ve ransacked the Chinese quarter, combed the city all night!” His jaws clicked shut, worked. “There was nothing in the old man’s mouth to take out! Nothing! What was he after? The tongue was cut – cut by a scalpel – sliced out at the roots! Why? Why?”

  His eyes raged at all three. Gawdy’s handsome face was blank. De Saules took his hand from his beard, smoothed his brows, shook his head. Sandra bit her lip. She was thinking: “They’re stumped. The police. They can’t get anywhere. How could they? They know even less than I do.”

  Corrigan slapped the fingers of one hand on the palm of the other. “That yellow devil put that sentence on the back of the note – about the garage – merely to make us rush out pell-mell when he started the fire. He was hiding, watching the house, slipped in when we swallowed the bait. But what for? Why did he cut out the tongue? Why?”

  It was as though the repetition might batter the answer out of thin air. He jabbed both hands downward with a slicing motion. “The M.E.’s made a complete autopsy on the head. There’s nothing – nothing out of the ordinary, nothing abnormal. But there was nothing there when he examined the mouth before the tongue was cut out!”

  He was glaring at De Saules. De Saules’ eyes drifted by him as he said:

  “The maid’s the only link.”

  Corrigan swore. “The maid’s only been here from San Francisco a month. Her record’s spotless. We’ve grilled her for hours. I’m convinced she doesn’t know Dow.”

  Gawdy said in his abrupt, gruff voice: “She must.”

  Corrigan did not deign to reply. He seemed to be hoarsely talking to himself. “There’s only one way to figure it. The Chink helped – helped in some way. The acid was to get the maid for something she may not even realize she knows. Dow’s double-crossing his confederate, playing some game of his own. But what is it? What is it? Why send the acid to the maid – help his confederate on one hand, harm him on the other?”

  That was what did it. At first it was only a shock in Sandra’s mind, a kind of blankness. Corrigan’s voice hammered on:

  “Motive! Where’s the motive? Dow has no motive. The old man didn’t even know him. Hardly knew anybody. A secluded, parsimonious, harmless old man, rich as Midas. Didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

  Sandra was sitting bolt upright, her hands in a tight ball in her lap, looking nowhere.

  De Saules’ eyes met Corrigan’s coolly. “You mean, that puts the motive squarely in the family?”

  Corrigan stared at him bluntly. “Since you ask it, yes. But since he died without a will, it puts it squarely at one person – his sole heir, his daughter Marceline.”

  Sandra had moved to the window. She had the phone book in her hands. With quivering fingers she whipped through it. There was the page – the column – the name. The tiny black type seemed to throb and dance before her eyes.

  Slowly she closed the book. She looked out at the street below. The moving traffic seemed blinded out from her sight as by a sunburst.

  No! It was impossible! Could it be? Could it be? She felt her heart hammering wildly. There, in that tiny black type, was the address, the name, everything, as plain as a pikestaff, for anyone to read.

  Suite 405–406 Mohican Building.

  She— No, she couldn’t breathe even in her own heart that she had the answer! It was too wild, too crazy. Suite 405–406 Mohican Building! Tell Captain Corrigan? He would laugh! It was preposterous! Ridiculous! And yet—

  Already a plan had leaped like a wild javelin into her brain. Her eyes had the same tawny fire as when she sprang bolt upright from the clinic chair. Her lips were parted, hot.

  They can’t get anywhere. Maybe I can.

  Heavy lowering clouds, lighted by the afterglow, dappled and dull, hung over the Mohican Building. It was the end of day, when every building roundabout was pouring its outflow of bus-bound stenographers into the street. Sandra slipped into the little drugstore in the Mohican’s lobby, approached the clerk at the back.

  “A small bottle of concentrated ammonia, please.”

  With the bottle she slipped into the phone booth, loaded the only weapon she ever owned. It was an old double compact, with a flat rubber sac in the back, which she filled from the bottle like a fountain pen. She adjusted the rubber neck to fit the hole in the compact, slipped it into her bag.

  The foyer of the Mohican was noisy, swarming. The elevators had just disgorged a load of heel-clicking, chattering secretaries, gum-chewing office boys. Drifting salesmen, toothpick in mouth, gave Sandra the eye, coughed, stared after her. Sandra did not take the elevator. She walked up to the third floor, toured it rapidly, got its general layout. Particularly she noted the women’s washroom at the far end of the corridor where the stairs angled up.

  She could almost feel, like a living, ominous presence upstairs, those two rooms, Suite 405–406.

  The women’s washroom door was locked. This she hadn’t counted on. She wondered, with a quick swallow, if the cold chisel in her bag would force a door.

  She saw a beauty shop around the bend of the corridor, walked into it. The woman proprietor was just putting her hat on.

  “I’m so sorry.” Sandra turned on the utmost persuasiveness of her velvety eyes. “Can you give me a manicure? It’s something special.”

  The woman sighed, took off her hat. Sandra was hardly seated at the little table when
she reeled irregularly, clutched her head.

  “I’m awfully dizzy. I don’t – Could I—”

  “Here, dearie, here’s the key to the washroom.”

  Sandra went out, unlocked it, shot the bolt in the door. She left it that way, came back looking considerably refreshed, and had her manicure. When it was over, she went directly to the washroom, went in, reversed the bolt so as to lock herself in. Then she waited. She heard the woman fussing around to close up, the jingle of her keys in the door, her echoing steps toward the elevator.

  Sandra composed herself for a long wait. Dusk faded into night and the fire escape outlined outside the washroom window blotted into the general blackness. Little by little all sounds in the building diminished, spaced themselves farther and farther apart, died away entirely.

  In the darkness the whole hideous affair seemed to throb in pulsing outline in her head. It was so clear! So perfectly clear! That one revealing move – done right in front of her – that one act that gave everything away! How had she missed it at the time? Now it seemed to stand out like a headlight. Her racing mind thought back to that sentence of Captain Corrigan’s that had jarred realization to her. Yes, why did Dow help the murderer with one hand, harm him with the other? Because he had to! That had flashed the truth to her – the truth at least in her own mind, the answer that she had leaped to arrow-swift, with a woman’s cut – the-corners rapidity, complete disregard of details. The old man had been murdered. By oxalic acid – by a corrosive poison that he didn’t take-by an inexplicable means! Yet it was so fantastically simple! But what a chance the murderer had taken! Except that of course it would be taken for suicide, normally, for the old man would have been found dead, alone somewhere by himself. When Dow had come up to the office the preparations had been set, ready, the murder an inevitable, imminent fact – and Dow had coolly thrown a monkey wrench into them. He was playing a game of his own, playing a gambit against the murderer; and she – her breath came quick-she was playing a gambit against them both.

  Why? Her brown eyes rolled sideways. It wasn’t too late to go back. It was absolute, mad folly, what she was doing. She could still slip down out of the building, tell the watchman—

  No. She shook her head. What was she doing it for? For a feverish little waif lying in pain in a clinic, a little laughing-eyed boy who had no part in anything, who had been thrown under this murder juggernaut, crushed beneath it.

  Upstairs – she sank her teeth hard in her lip-in Suite 405–406, was the crux of the whole thing. It must be. In there, in those two rooms, something must remain, perhaps a bottle of oxalic acid, perhaps— She didn’t know. If she could get in, get out, in five minutes she might have the evidence in her hand.

  Down the corridor she heard a new, ascending, plodding step. She heard the loud clearing of an old throat, the snap of light switches. That would be the watchman. Motionless, guarding her breath, she heard his raspings and hawkings make the tour of the whole building, return with the creaking yawn of the elevator to the lobby. She heard him drag a chair along the floor, settle himself before the door.

  Then, and only then, Sandra groped out of the washroom. The hall was pitch-black. She slipped the catch, let the washroom door softly close. Quietly, gliding like a wraith, she went up the rear stairway. She knew where Rooms 405–406 were, by her preliminary tour. They were hardly twenty feet from the stairhead, on a corner, one room on each side. But as she turned the stairhead, she stopped abruptly. Light was coming through the door of 405.

  Someone was there! This cut the ground from under her feet. On the glass oblong she could see the words: “Private-Entrance 406.” She stood motionless. Who was there? What was—

  She heard the echoing scrape of a chair, the booming sound of the watchman’s voice. He was talking to someone below. Their conversation was too distorted by echo to follow.

  The elevator began its yawning ascent. Sandra flattened to the wall, immersed in shadow by the stairway as in a well. The door clanged open; she saw a fan of light, the watchman’s face, a figure emerging. It stepped very quickly out, but Sandra recognized the brilliant black eyes, the flashy brunet prettiness, of Marceline!

  Marceline! Coming up to Suite 405–406! Sandra felt a kind of explosion in her mind. What had she bagged here? Almost before she caught her breath, Marceline was inside, not by the entrance door, but by the very door marked “Private”. Sandra was watching. Voices began immediately inside. Loud, excited-one of them. The other – Sandra froze – was the bland, oily tone of Dow!

  Dow – with Marceline! Sandra’s pulse clipped off for an instant, began going like a trip hammer. The door clanged, the elevator began its yawning descent. It was now or never. Sandra slipped out, darted to the door, listened.

  Marceline’s voice came very clear. It was passionate, savage.

  “What does this mean to me?”

  “Much, dear lady.” Dow’s voice had that mocking silkiness that made leap into the mind his moon-round face, his slit-creased, almond eyes. “Why did you come here? Why did you come, for a telephone call merely naming this place? I see you are well acquainted here. Too well acquainted. Do not blanch so, dear lady. I understand. I understand completely. Come, calm yourself, please sit down, let us talk.”

  Sandra could not detect the quality of Marceline’s voice. It was too low. “What do you want?”

  “First let us look calmly at what I hold in my hand. It is very old-fashioned. Perhaps you do not recognize it. But I see you do. It has been among your father’s possessions a long time; you have seen it many times over many years. Only, dear lady, I turn it over slightly, and you see it is not quite the same. Not the original. A beautiful copy.” His voice fleered. “Why not? I made it myself. Now you understand, perhaps, a certain reckless action of mine last evening.”

  Marceline’s voice was like a physical shudder.

  “You horrible fiend.”

  “Not at all. Such a pretty thing, to me, for example. What is it, so small, so bright, that I turn thus in my palm and let the light fall upon? Why, it is the whole murder. I turn it so; you look where I point to—”

  His voice stopped on a rising note. There was an instant’s silence, then his voice flowed on. “Control yourself, dear lady. It is a shock. I see you understand. You clutch your throat, you look around, you see how the preparations were made. It was very simple. There, in that very chair, he sat. Yesterday there was no assistant, or, shall we say, I was the assistant. I held it, so. I passed it across, saying: ‘What a beautiful repair!’ And it is done, so, in the twinkling of an eye, without noise or fanfare, a simple, innocent—”

  A low sound came from Marceline like the cry of an animal. There was a rush, a scuffling, a gasped: “Give it to me!”

  “Not quite so fast, dear lady.” Dow’s oily voice hardly faltered. “It is my whole purpose to give it to you – for a price.”

  “What price?”

  The bland voice was like honey. “Now that you are a rich woman, much money is accessible to you. Ten thousand dollars will not be too much. You will have a certified check for that amount tomorrow at nine thirty. On your discretion I can count. There is so much I know, you see, so much you did not tell the police.”

  Marceline said in a terribly altered voice: “Is that all?”

  “That is all, dear lady, until the morning.”

  Marceline came out so precipitately she almost smashed the door into Sandra’s face. Sandra reeled flat to the wall. Marceline didn’t look back. She went down the corridor almost at a run.

  The lights went out. Dow was coming out. Sandra started back toward the staircase, froze. She saw, vague in the darkness, a blank bulk standing at the head of the stairs.

  Sandra’s heart seemed to leap out of her mouth like a jackrabbit. Pure primordial instinct, the kind that freezes animals into replicas of posts, of weed clumps, glued her like an integral part of the darkness to the wall. She might have been a piece of the fire extinguisher whose bulging cylinder to
uched her forehead. A man, waiting there – for what? For her? Had he seen her?

  Her eyes swung wildly. She was caught between two fires. Already Dow was coming out; she heard the pad of his feet, the door closing.

  It was an interminable moment, a moment that seemed to scream in the silence with all the voices of pandemonium. Behind her was Dow, his hand on the knob; ahead was that shape, looming silent, waiting.

  A voice from the stairhead said: “Dow.”

  Dow whirled around. Flame roared in a blasting streak across the dark. She saw Dow leap completely across the corridor like a chimpanzee. The dark was a wild havoc of noise. The man was plunging this way. Sandra had only one way to go. She flung down the fire extinguisher, fled like an antelope over its deafening crash. She made the stairhead, flew down the staircase like a streak in blackness. She twisted into the washroom, flung up the window, and darted down the fire escape.

  IV

  The sunlight gilded De Saules’ hawklike head, his back, the black spike of his beard, as he stood in the apartment lobby. His narrow eyes shifted down the line of bells, read the card opposite one: “Miss Sandra Grey.” The odor of breakfast drifted down to him through the open lobby door, muted morning noises. De Saules did not ring the bell. He lifted the topcoat on his left arm, glanced once at the bulb-like swelling, the thin tubular nose that extended one pocket. He went rapidly up the carpeted steps to Sandra’s apartment.

  Sandra herself opened the door. She was ready to go out. The morning light made a halo around her trim little shako hat, touched the freshness of her face, made her eyes vividly brown, her lips as red as cyclamen. De Saules’ hat was in his hand.

  “Good morning, Miss Grey. You’ll pardon such an early call? You’re going out, but may I have just a moment?”

  “Of course.” Sandra’s eyes widened as she let him in. De Saules did not sit down. He stood in the center of the living room, immaculate in dove-gray tweed, perfectly poised, his cool eyes mild and disarming.

  “This is rather abrupt, Miss Grey, but I am a busy man and have not much time. This will only take a moment. I have been so impressed by your splendid welfare work that I wish to make a donation to it.”