The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries Part 57

"A guest!"

Corrigan stared at Wyatt. Mud splattered his patent leather shoes, the black serge bottoms of his Tuxedo trousers. The stale fumes of liquor reeked from him; his weakly boyish face, puffed with dissipation, gave a series of jerks as though he were about to fall headlong over the body. The plain-clothes man accompanying Corrigan grabbed hold of Wyatt, shoved him in a chair. Marceline's voice cut in with the same quick rapidity. There was no hint of hysteria in it now.

"It's a little difficult to explain. We found him lying outside our entry in this condition this morning. I . . . we . . . took him in and took care of him because he's a friend."

The singularity of this explanation, along with the singularity of the man's appearance, caused Captain Corrigan to look, not at the drunken Wyatt, but at Marceline. A slight movement of his head indicated the corpse.

"You're his daughter?"

"Yes. I was legally adopted at seventeen."

Corrigan narrowed his hard eyes slightly. "Oh." He switched his glance to the Vand.y.k.ed De Saules.

"You're a relative, too?"

"A very distant one." De Saules stopped fingering his beard to make a deprecating gesture. "I met Mr Delaunay for the first time yesterday."

"I see." Corrigan's head shot around. "Where's that Chinese maid?"

The butler bustled out hurriedly into the hall. Sandra sat down quietly in a corner chair, pressed her hands to her temples. It was useless to question the maid. Captain Corrigan was making random gestures like a man who has run into a brick wall. Events still whirled, a mad patchwork, in her own mind. Tags of them flared out at her. Dow's bland yellow face smiling over his cigarette; the feel of the note in her hand; the old man's tongue gaping speechlessly in his mouth as he read it; his frightful plunge headlong into the lamp to the floor. She shuddered. What vicious, horrible enigma, spurting flashes of bizarre color like some enigmatic jewel, was here?

She looked at Gawdy, sitting with his big florid face outthrust, his eyes like robins' eggs. He had seen part of it, the others another part, but only she had seen it all. Gropingly she tried to reconstruct events.

Dow that incomprehensible Chinese, with his suave, creased eyes, his impeccable English, his violet-perfumed cigarette had come up to her office, given her the bamboo tube and the note. The tube contained a horrible fate for the Delaunay maid, the note a prophecy of Mr Delaunay's death. She had carried the note to Mr Delaunay; the old man had no more than read it, when, as if by conjunction of cause and effect, he had screamed up to his feet, plunged down dead. Dead by a corrosive poison oxalic acid which seared, burned, bleached his mouth, whose action was instantaneous, which no one had administered to him!

It was impossible. It was incredible. Only the evidence of her eyes a.s.sured her of something as impossible as witchcraft. Dow the squat, suave Dow knew this! Knew Mr Delaunay was to die! Warned him of it! Why? How did Dow know about it? What was Dow to that secluded old man? Why, if Dow were behind the attempt, should he warn the very object of the crime? Was the Chinese merely a tool in the hands of- She stared at the others. Her eyes roamed over Marceline, with her flashy brunet prettiness, heightened now by a kind of feverish acuteness, her eyes as brilliant as black jewels. She looked at De Saules, fingering his spike of beard, the sly eyes in his hawklike olive face retracted, withdrawn. She looked at the drunken Wyatt, sprawled backward, breathing stertorously, his puffy weak young face already sinking into the coma of sleep. What parts did they play in this hideous, incredible puzzle?

And the baby! The boy! That tiny waif of humanity, caught up in the meshes of this horrible thing, his little body an innocent sacrifice to its hideous aim! Every time she closed her eyes, she heard him screaming. She gripped her hands until her nails pierced her palms. In some way she felt responsible for him; she could not get the sight of him off her mind, the load of him off her heart.

She stared at the Chinese maid. Corrigan was jabbing questions at her; the girl's sloe-black eyes were pitiful in terror. Sandra was sure the girl was as innocent, as ignorant of all this, as she herself. Corrigan grabbed up the note. He was reading out the part of it that said: "The acid sent to the maid is merely a subordinate matter." De Saules suddenly shoved out his hawklike head, a sharp hand.

"Look. There's something written on the other side of that!"

"What?" Corrigan whipped the paper over. He stared at a single typed sentence, read in a loud voice: "The murderer will attempt to conceal the means of murder in the garage."

"In the-" Corrigan gaped round.

"The garage! What kind of-"

The butler plunged into the room. His eyes were bulging like duck eggs.

"Sir," he shouted, "the garage is on fire!"

There was a simultaneous rush that way. Sandra went, too, as far as the kitchen entry, when a kind of jolt, an inner hunch, brought her up. It was an intuition of the same sort she had had about the baby in the office. This time she obeyed it. The others had poured out of the house. She turned and darted back to the library.

Immediately she was in the doorway a nameless fear clutched her. The lights were out. That long window had not been open, plunging a bar of moonlight across the floor.

She whirled, drawing in air for a shout, when someone slammed her against the wall, jabbed a gun into her warm throat.

"Be perfectly quiet."

She was staring into the yellow face of Dow!

The scream froze in her throat. She could no more have cried out than a block of stone. His oblique eyes were very close, creased as they had been in the office, but glittering with a lethal quality like the b.u.t.ton eyes of an adder. He was breathing very hard. Sweat made a saffron sheen on his round face. But his voice, quicker perhaps, more hissing, had still the oily blandness of the office.

"Sit down. Here."

He forced her into a chair. She was cold, paralyzed. Not three feet from her came the stertorous breathing of the drunken Wyatt; there before her was that yellow face, coolly talking.

"Do not move, Miss Grey. If you do, I shall most certainly kill you. A little diversion the garage fire to get everyone out. One moment, and your utter silence, are all I need."

He was gone from her, dragging something on the floor. At first she thought it was the stupefied Wyatt; then she realized it was the corpse. His voice was once more at her elbow.

"I will be right here, very close, so if you move, I can shoot at once." He touched her with the cold barrel. Then he was crouching, busy beside the chair.

Her mind was sick, spinning. Her eyes crawled sideways. She saw, vaguely in the dark, his squat body kneeling on the corpse, saw his shoulders working, saw the dead head move up in answer to his movements. Her soul swooned in the nadir of horror. He was doing something doing something to the body! Her frozen mind could only picture, s.n.a.t.c.hed from some long-lost childhood book, the sight of ghouls ghouls hunched so over dead bodies, their talons busy with dead flesh.

He had not stopped talking. His voice flowed on with the same oily suaveness, only a flooding together of the sibilants showing his tremendous haste. There was even a fleering, mocking note in it, as though, in spite of the desperate jeopardy of his position, whatever horrible game he was playing, he was playing it with imperturbable coolness, even bravado.

"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 cas.e.m.e.nt.

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 repet.i.tion 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 hoa.r.s.ely talking to himself. "There's only one way to figure it. The c.h.i.n.k 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 405406 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 405406 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 405406.

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, s.p.a.ced 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 405406, 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 405406 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 gla.s.s oblong she could see the words: "Private-Entrance 406." She stood motionless. Who was there? What was- She heard the echoing sc.r.a.pe 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 405406! 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 pa.s.sionate, 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-"