The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries Part 28

They walked down a long hall until they encountered a man standing at a desk.

"Can I help you?"

"My name is Doctor Ford," she said, "and this is Bat Masterson, the, urn, columnist. We are hoping to speak to whoever is your expert on Egyptology?"

"Bat Masterson?" the man asked. He was a small man roughly Bat's age, but he stared at the frontier legend with a little boy's enthusiasm. "Really?"

"Yes," Bat said, "I'm afraid so. Do you have an expert in, urn, Egyptology?"

"Ooh, yes, we do," the man said. "You want Mr Vartan. I'll get him for you."

"Thank you," Doctor Ford said.

"Doctor, how many of these experts could there be in Denver?" Bat asked while they waited.

"I would think only one."

"And would he know how to do this, how to . . . what? Mummify?"

"I know what you mean, and I don't know," she said. "I suppose we'll have to ask him."

They waited in silence, and after a few minutes had past the doctor looked at Bat curiously. "Did you mean that you . . . suspect this man, even though you haven't met him yet?"

"No," he said, "of course not. I just thought if he's the only expert that maybe the killer had come to see him, just like we have."

"Oh, I see."

But now that she mentioned it, why couldn't the one man in Denver who had the know how be a suspect in the crime? Bat decided he would give this jasper a real close going over and watch him carefully.

They heard footsteps c.o.king towards them and saw the small man returning with a very tall, dark-skinned man wearing a suit and tie.

"This is Mr Vartan," the small man said.

"I am Michael Vartan. I understand you were looking for me?" Vartan asked. "Sam said one of you is a doctor?"

"I am Dr Ford," Justina Ford said.

Vartan looked at her in complete surprise.

"I did not know we had any black doctors in Denver, let alone a woman. How fascinating."

"Mr Vartan?" Bat said. "My name is Bat Masterson. We would like to ask you some questions about-"

"The famous killer?" Vartan asked.

Bat closed his mouth and glared at the man.

"I am a columnist for the newspaper George's Weekly."

"Ah, but surely you are the famous Bat Masterson," Vartan said. "There could not be two men with such a name."

"I am perhaps famous," Bat said, "but not as a killer."

"I am so sorry," Vartan said. "I have offended you."

"Mr Masterson has been many things, Mr Vartan," Dr Ford said, "among them a lawman."

"And now a writer," Vartan said. "How commendable. I apologize again. You have some questions concerning what?"

"The process of mummification," Dr Ford said.

Vartan stared at them for a few moments, then said, "I have an office. Would you follow me, please?"

He led them through hallways of the museum, so that they never saw any displays except through doorways as they pa.s.sed. Eventually they came to a room with a desk and a few chairs. He invited them in to sit, and closed the door before circling his desk and seating himself.

"Please, tell me your problem."

Dr Ford looked to Bat, who took up the tale. He told Vartan about the three women who had been killed and what had been found by Dr Ford during the autopsy.

"What we need to know is," Dr Ford said, "could the organs have been removed through this small incision?"

"Interesting," Vartan said. He paused to consider and while he did he picked up an instrument from the desk. It was a long copper needle with a small hook on the end. "Do you see this? It was used by the Egyptians to remove the brain through the nasal pa.s.sage."

Bat remembered Dr Ford mentioning that earlier.

"Could it be used for the organs, too?" Bat asked.

Vartan didn't reply to Bat's direct question, but went on in his train of thought. Bat thought Vartan warmed to his gruesome subject too much.

"No one knows how the brain was removed, but it must have been in pieces," the man went on. "It could not have been removed this way as a whole."

"The organs couldn't have been removed as a whole either," Dr Ford said. "At least, not through that incision."

"The incision you refer to was indeed used to remove the organs," Vartan said, "and then they were put into a jar and buried along with the body."

Bat didn't like the way Vartan's eyes shone during the telling.

"But no one knows for sure how it was done," Vartan continued, "just as we don't quite know how the brain was removed." He set the bronze tool down. "But we know that they were."

"So no one," Bat said, "not even you, who is an expert, would be able to do such a thing now?"

"I?" Vartan asked, looking shocked. "I would never-no, no, too b.l.o.o.d.y. I would be too . . . squeamish, I think."

Bat doubted that Vartan was squeamish about much of anything. The man seemed to be enjoying the spotlight and also to Bat's trained eye from years of not only gambling but sizing up men who may or may not try to kill him he thought the man seemed amused.

"Mr Vartan," Dr Ford said, apparently unaware of these things, "has anyone else come to see you about these things in, say the past six months or so?"

"Unfortunately, no," Vartan said, making a steeple of his hands and fingers and regarding them above it. "I rarely get to speak of these things in this way."

Another thing Bat noticed about Vartan was that the man's gaze never wavered from his own. Even when he speaking to the doctor, he was looking at Bat. Many men had looked at Bat that way over the years, as if they had or were getting his measure. They had all been disappointed.

Oddly, the room seemed bare. There were no Egyptian objects of any kind on the walls, and the only one on his desk was that bronze tool sitting on the edge of his desk.

"I am so sorry these women were killed how were they killed?"

"That's still something of a mystery," Dr Ford said, "but their organs were removed after death."

"Shocking . . . in this day and age, I mean."

"Yes," Dr Ford said, "quite."

"They were peaceful in death, Mr Vartan," Bat said. "What would make them die so peacefully?"

"Well, certain poisons would have that effect," Vartan said. "There are poisons which cause horrible, painful deaths, but there are several which could cause a person to simply . . . fall asleep . . . forever. Some of these were used in ancient Egypt."

Poison was not a common form of killing in the West at least, not in what people were now calling the "old" West.

"And you would know what kind of poisons those were, wouldn't you?" Bat asked.

Vartan looked embarra.s.sed and said, "Well, I am an expert on things Egyptian."

"Yes, you are," Bat said.

"That's fascinating," Dr Ford said.

"Well," Bat said, "I think we're done here, Doctor. Obviously, Mr Vartan won't help us with anything more."

Bat got to his feet, stumbled and almost fell, righting himself by catching the edge of Vartan's desk. He knew the man must have been thinking, "What an old fool."

"Can't," Vartan said.

"Excuse me?" Bat asked, back on solid footing.

"You said I won't help you with anything more," Vartan said. "You meant 'can't'."

Bat looked the man in the eyes and said, "Did I?"

Outside the museum Dr Ford said, "What a rude man. He never looked at me the entire time."

"That's because he was lookin' at me," Bat said. "He's the one."

"I beg your pardon?"

"He did it. He killed those women and removed their organs."

"How can you-"

"He looked me in the eyes the whole time, challenging me. Believe me, Doctor, I know what that look means. He did it."

"Is that what you will tell the Chief? Would they arrest him on your word?"

"No," Bat said, "they wouldn't, but I don't think they'll have to."

"Why not?"

Bat put his hand in his pocket and came out with the bronze hook from Vartan's desk. Carefully, he wrapped it in a handkerchief and handed it to the doctor.

"How did you you took that when you stumbled."

"Yes. Check it. I'm sure there's some flecks of blood on it. He's so arrogant that he still keeps it on his desk. And I'm sure there'll be some rare poison in that museum somewhere-unless he's destroyed it all now."

Dr Ford looked down at the hook in her hands. "You think he used this?"

"I'd bet on it. But even if he didn't, he knows I know," Bat said. "He knows if he stays in Denver, I'll have him."

"But . . . if he leaves, and goes somewhere else . . . is that good enough?"

"It'll have to be, Doctor," Bat said. "It'll have to be."

But it wasn't, not for Bat Masterson. That evening, as Vartan came out of his apartment carrying a suitcase Bat was waiting, leaning against the building. He hadn't been wearing his gun that afternoon in museum, but he was wearing it now. He chose one with a pearl handle, so that it gleamed in the moonlight.

Vartan saw him and stopped. There was no slump to the man's shoulder, no diminishment of his arrogance.

"You stumbled on purpose," he said. "I realized it afterward."

"I was going to let you go," Bat said, "let you run, but I decided I had to know why. Why would you do that to those poor women?"

"I am afraid my explanation will not give you much satisfaction."

"Try me."

The man shrugged.

"To see if I could. I have studied the Egyptians for so long. I believe they were a master race. I wanted to see if I could do what they did. And after I did it once, I knew that if I kept trying, I would succeed."

"Did you do more than those three?"

"No," Vartan said, "Just those-so far."

"Just those, period, Mr Vartan."

"Now that you know the why, perhaps you would . . . ?"

"Put the suitcase down, Mr Vartan," Bat said, pushing away from the wall so Vartan could see the pearl handle, "you won't need it where you're going."

The Mystery of the Sevenoaks Tunnel Max Rittenberg Time for a couple of really old cla.s.sics. In my earlier volume I looked at the dawn of the impossible crime story and the flurry of interest following the success of The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill in 1892. Over the next couple of decades the locked-room mystery blossomed. Conan Doyle used it for at least one Sherlock Holmes story, and the American writer Jacques Futrelle, who alas went down with the t.i.tanic, created the first great impossible-crime expert with the Thinking Machine, Professor S.F.X. van Dusen. His story "The Problem of Cell 13", first published in 1905, remains one of the cla.s.sics of the impossible.

The years before the First World War saw many writers turning their hand to creating baffling crimes, but not all of these stories became as well known, and many are forgotten in old magazines. One of the most original writers of the years around the First World War was Australian-born (though of German descent) Max Rittenberg (18801965). He wrote a couple of popular series for the monthly magazines. One featured the strange cases of psychologist, Dr Xavier Wycherley, which were collected in book-form as The Mind Reader (1913). But the other series, which featured an early forensic scientist known as Magnum, and which ran in The London Magazine during 1913, never made it into book-form. Magnum is the prototype irascible scientist, far more interested in his research than in any social graces, but once presented with an unsolvable problem, nothing will deter him from seeking the truth.