The Nine Mile Walk

by Harry Kemelman

  “It’s a theory,” I admitted grudgingly, “but it’s no more than that. You have no proof.”

  “As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, a malicious little smile playing about the corners of his mouth, “I have proof—absolute proof. We’re pretty thorough in the Army and some of us have had quite a bit of experience. You see, I did a paraffin test on McNulty—and it was positive.”

  I should have known that he had an ace up his sleeve. This time I made no effort to conceal my disappointment. My shoulders drooped and I nodded slowly.

  “What’s a paraffin test?” asked Nicky, speaking for the first time.

  “It’s quite conclusive, Nicky,” I said. “I’m not sure that I know the chemistry of it exactly, but it’s scientifically correct. You see, every gun no matter how well fitted has a certain amount of backfire. Some of the gunpowder flashes back and is embedded in the hand of the man that fires. They coat his hand with hot paraffin and then draw it off like a glove. They then test it for gunpowder—for nitrates, that is—and if it’s positive, it means that the man fired the gun. I’m afraid that winds it up for McNulty.”

  “So the oracle of the test tube has spoken?” Nicky murmured ironically.

  “It’s conclusive evidence, Nicky,” I said.

  “Evidence, eh? I was wondering when you would begin to examine the evidence,” he remarked.

  Edwards and I both looked at him, puzzled.

  “What evidence have I neglected?” asked Edwards superciliously.

  “Look at the photograph of the room,” Nicky replied. “Look at that chess game.”

  I studied the photograph while Edwards watched uncertainly. It was not easy to see the position of the pieces because the ones nearest the camera were naturally greatly foreshortened. But after a moment I got the glimmering of an idea.

  “Let’s see what it looks like set up,” I said, as I dumped the chessmen out of the box onto the table and then proceeded to select the necessary pieces to copy the position indicated in the photograph.

  Nicky watched, a sardonic smile on his lips, amused at my inability to read the position directly from the photograph. Edwards looked uneasily from one to the other of us, half expecting to find the name of the murderer spelled out on the board.

  “If there is some sort of clue in those chessmen,” he essayed, “in the way they’re set up, I mean, we can always check the position against the original. Nothing was moved and the house is sealed.”

  I nodded impatiently as I studied the board. The pattern of the pieces was beginning to take on a meaning in my mind. Then I had it.

  “Why, he was playing the Logan-Asquith Gambit,” I exclaimed. “And playing it extremely well.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Nicky.

  “Neither had I until McNulty showed it to me about a week ago at the University Club. He had come across it in Lowenstein’s End Games. It’s almost never used because it’s such a risky opening. But it’s interesting because of the way the position of the bishops is developed. Were you thinking, Nicky, that a man who was upset and about to shoot himself would not be playing so difficult a game, nor playing it so well?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was thinking not of the position of the pieces on the board,” said Nicky mildly, “but of those off the board—the captured men.”

  “What about them?” I demanded.

  “They’re all together on one side of the board, black and white.”

  “Well?”

  Nicky’s face was resigned, not to say martyred, and his tone was weary as he strove to explain what he thought should have been obvious.

  “You play chess the way you write, or handle a tennis racket. If you’re right-handed, you move your pieces with your right hand, and you take off your opponent’s pieces with your right hand, and you deposit them on the table to your right. When two right-handed players like McNulty and Albrecht are engaged, the game ends with the black pieces that White has captured at his right and diagonally across the board are the white pieces that Black has captured.”

  There flashed through my mind the image of Trowbridge as I had seen him that afternoon, awkwardly trying to light a cigarette with his left hand because his right arm hung in a black silk sling.

  “When a left-handed player opposes a right-handed player,” Nicky went on, almost as though he had read my mind, “the captured men are on the same side of the board—but, of course, they’re separated, the black chessmen near White and the white chessmen near Black. They wouldn’t be jumbled together the way they are in the photograph unless—”

  I glanced down at the board which I had just set up.

  Nicky nodded as he would to a stupid pupil who had managed to stumble onto the right answer. “That’s right—not unless you’ve dumped them out of the box and then set up only the men you need in accordance with the diagram of an end game.”

  “Do you mean that instead of playing a regular game, McNulty was demonstrating some special kind of opening?” asked Edwards. He struggled with the idea, his eyes abstracted as he tried to fit it into the rest of the picture. Then he shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense,” he declared. “What would be the point of Albrecht’s saying that they were playing a game?”

  “Try it with Albrecht,” Nicky suggested. “Suppose it was Albrecht who set up the board?”

  “Same objection,” said Edwards. “What would be the point of lying about it?”

  “No point,” Nicky admitted, “if he set it up before McNulty was shot. But suppose Albrecht set up the game after McNulty was shot.”

  “Why would he do that?” demanded Edwards, his belligerence growing with his bewilderment.

  Nicky gazed dreamily at the ceiling. “Because a game of chess partly played suggests first, that the player has been there for some time, at least since the beginning of the game, and second, that he was there on friendly terms. It is hardly necessary to add that if a deliberate attempt is made to suggest both ideas, the chances are that neither is actually true.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean,” said Nicky, “that Professor Luther Albrecht rang McNulty’s doorbell at approximately eight o’clock and when McNulty opened the door for him, he pressed a gun against his breast and pulled the trigger, after which he put the gun in the dead man’s hand and then stepped over his fallen body and coolly set up the ever-present chessmen in accordance with the diagram of an end game from one of McNulty’s many books on chess. That’s why the game was so well played. It had been worked out by an expert, by Lowenstein probably in the book you mentioned.”

  We both, the Colonel and I, sat back and just stared at Nicky. Edwards was the first to recover.

  “But why should Albrecht shoot him? He was his best friend.”

  Nicky’s little blue eyes glittered with amusement. “I suspect that you’re to blame for that, Colonel. You called in the morning and made an appointment for that evening. I fancy that was what upset McNulty so. I doubt if he was directly to blame for the difficulties encountered on the project, but as head of the project he was responsible. I fancy that he told his good friend and colleague, Albrecht, about your call. And Albrecht knew that an investigation by an outsider meant certain discovery—unless he could provide a scapegoat, or what’s the slang expression?—a fall guy, that’s it, a fall guy.”

  I glanced at Edwards and saw that he was pouting like a small boy with a broken balloon. Suddenly he remembered something. His eyes lit up and his lips parted in a smile that was almost a sneer.

  “It’s all very pretty,” he said, “but it’s a lot of hogwash just the same. You’ve forgotten that I have proof that it was suicide. The paraffin test proved that McNulty had fired the gun.”

  Nicky smiled. “It’s your test that is hogwash, Colonel. In this case it proves nothing.”

  “No, really,” I intervened. “The test is perfectly correct.”

  “The test proves only that McNulty’s hand was behind the gun,” said Nicky sharply.

&nb
sp; “Well?”

  “Suppose someone rang your doorbell,” Nicky addressed me, the same martyred look in his face, “as the Colonel did this evening, and when you opened the door, he thrust a gun against your breast. What would you do?”

  “Why, I—I’d grab his hand, I suppose.”

  “Precisely, and if he fired at that instant, there would be nitrates backfired into your hand as well as into his.”

  The Colonel sat bolt upright. Then he jumped up and grabbed his briefcase and made for the door.

  “You can’t wash that stuff off too easily,” he said over his shoulder. “And it’s even harder to get it off your clothes. I’m going to get hold of Albrecht and do a paraffin on him.”

  When I returned to the study from seeing the Colonel to the door, Nicky said, “There was really no need for our young friend’s haste. I could have offered him other proof—the chessmen. I have no doubt that the last fingerprint made on each chessman, black as well as white, will be found to be Albrecht’s. And that would be a hard thing for him to explain if he persists in his story that it was just an ordinary game of chess.”

  “Say, that’s right, Nicky. I’ll spring that one on Edwards in the morning.” I hesitated, then I took the plunge. “Wasn’t Albrecht taking an awful chance though? Wouldn’t it have been better if he had just walked away after shooting McNulty instead of staying on and calling the police and making up that story and—”

  Nicky showed his exasperation. “Don’t you see it? He couldn’t walk off. The poor devil was stuck there. He had got McNulty’s lifeless hand nicely fitted onto the gun. He was ready to leave. Naturally, he looked through the door window up and down the street, normally deserted at that hour, to make sure the coast was clear. And he saw Trowbridge trudging along. He waited a minute or two for him to pass and then looked out again only to find that the young man had stopped directly across the street and gave no indication of moving on. And in a minute or two the passengers from the Albany train would be along. And after that, perhaps our friend the Colonel, early for his appointment.”

  “So my investigation of Trowbridge wasn’t entirely fruitless, eh?” I exclaimed, rubbing my hands together gleefully. “At least, that puts me one up on the Colonel.”

  Nicky nodded. “A brash young man, that. What branch of the service did he say he was connected with?”

  “Intelligence.”

  “Indeed!” Nicky pursed his lips and then relaxed them in a frosty little smile. “I was infantry, myself, in the last war.”

  Time and Time Again

  Although it was more than two years since I had left the Law Faculty to become County Attorney, I still maintained some connection with the university. I still had the privileges of the gymnasium and the library and I still kept up my membership in the Faculty Club. I dropped in there occasionally for a game of billiards, and about once a month I dined there, usually with Nicholas Welt.

  We had finished dinner, Nicky and I, and had repaired to the Commons Room for a game of chess, only to find that all the tables were in use. So we joined the group in front of the fire where there was always interminable talk about such highly scholarly matters as to whether there was any likelihood of favorable action by the trustees on an increase in salary schedules—there wasn’t—or whether you got more miles per gallon with a Chevrolet than you got with a Ford.

  This evening as we joined the group, the talk was about Professor Rollins’ paper in the Quarterly Journal of Psychic Research which no one had read but on which everyone had an opinion. The title of the paper was something like “Modifications in the Sprague Method of Analysis of Extra-Sensory Experimentation Data,” but the academic mind with its faculty for generalization had quickly gone beyond the paper and Rollins’ theories to a discussion on whether there was anything in “this business of the supernatural,” with burly Professor Lionel Graham, Associate in Physics, asserting that “of course, there couldn’t be when you considered the type of people who went in for it, gypsies and what not.” And gentle, absentminded Roscoe Summers, Professor of Archaeology, maintaining doggedly that you couldn’t always tell by that and that he had heard stories from people whose judgment he respected that made you pause and think a bit.

  To which Professor Graham retorted, “That’s just the trouble. It’s always something that happened to somebody else. Or better still, something that somebody told you that happened to somebody he knew.” Then catching sight of us, he said, “Isn’t that right, Nicky? Did you ever hear about anything supernatural as having happened to somebody you yourself knew well and whose word and opinion you could rely on?”

  Nicky’s lined, gnomelike face relaxed in a frosty little smile. “I’m afraid that’s how I get most of my information,” he said. “I mean through hearing about it at third or fourth hand.”

  Dr. Chisholm, the young instructor in English Composition, had been trying to get a word in and now he succeeded. “I had a case last summer. I mean I was there and witnessed something that was either supernatural or was a most remarkable coincidence.”

  “Something on the stage, or was it a seance in a dark room?” asked Graham with a sneer.

  “Neither,” said Chisholm defiantly. “I saw a man cursed and he died of it.” He caught sight of a pompous little man with a shining bald head and he called out, “Professor Rollins, won’t you join us? I’m sure you’d be interested in a little incident I was about to tell.”

  Professor Rollins, the author of the paper in the Quarterly, approached and the men sitting on the red leather divan moved over respectfully to make room for him. But he seemed to sense that he was being asked to listen as an expert and he selected a straight-backed chair as being more in keeping with the judicial role he was to play.

  I spent my summer vacation (Chisholm began) in a little village on the Maine coast. It was not a regular summer resort and there was little to do all day long except sit on the rocks and watch the gulls as they swooped above the water. But I had worked hard all year and it was precisely what I wanted.

  The center of the town was inland, clustered about the little railroad depot, and I was fortunate in getting a room way out at the end of town near the water. My host was a man named Doble, a widower in his forties, a decent quiet man who was good company when I wanted company and who did not obtrude when I just wanted to sit and daydream. He did a little farming and had some chickens; he had a boat and some lobster pots; and for the rest, he’d make a little money at various odd jobs. He didn’t work by the day but would contract for the whole job which put him a cut above the ordinary odd jobman, I suppose.

  Ours was the last house on the road and our nearest neighbor was about a hundred yards away. It was a large nineteenth century mansion, set back from the road, and decorated with the traditional fretsaw trim and numerous turrets and gables. It was owned and occupied by Cyrus Cartwright, the president of the local bank and the richest man in town.

  He was a brisk, eager sort of man, like the advertisement for a correspondence course in salesmanship, the type of man who carries two watches and is always glancing at his wristwatch and then checking it against his pocket watch.

  (Chisholm warmed as he described Cyrus Cartwright, the result of the natural antipathy of a man who spends his summer watching sea gulls for the type of man who weighs out his life in small minutes. Now he smiled disarmingly and shrugged his shoulders.)

  I saw him only once. I had come in town with Doble and before going home, he stopped in at the bank to see if Cartwright was still interested in making some change in the electric wiring system in his house which they had talked about some months ago. It was typical of Doble that he should only now be coming around to make further inquiry about it.

  Cartwright glanced at the radium dial of his wrist-watch and then tugged at his watch chain and drew out his pocket watch, squeezing it out of its protective chamois covering. He mistook my interest in the ritual for interest in the watch itself and held it out so that I could see it, explaining w
ith some condescension that it was a repeater, a five-minute repeater he was at some pains to point out, and then proceeded to demonstrate it by pressing a catch so that I could hear it tinkle the hour and then in a different key tinkle once for every five-minute interval after the hour.

  I made some comparison between the man who carries two watches and the man who wears both a belt and suspenders. But though he realized I was joking, he said with some severity, “Time is money, sir, and I like to know just where I am with both. So I keep accurate books and accurate watches.”

  Having put me in my place, he turned to Doble and said crisply, “I don’t think I’ll bother with it, Doble. It was Jack’s idea having the extra light and switch in the hallway and now that he’s gone into the service, I don’t think I’ll need it. When it gets dark, I go to bed.”

  Once again he glanced at his wristwatch, checked its accuracy against his pocket watch as before, and then he smiled at us, a short, meaningless, businessman’s smile of dismissal.

  As I say, I saw him only that once, but I heard a great deal about him. You know how it is, you hear a man’s name mentioned for the first time and then it seems to pop up again and again in the next few days.