The Oxford Book of American Det (73 page)

Merlini, liking the Cassandra role he was playing, said, “Sure. I’ve been waiting for you. But don’t think that PK won’t give you a splitting headache, too. All a murderer would have to do to commit the perfect crime—and a locked room one at that—would be to exert his psychokinetic mental force from a distance against the gun trigger.” He pointed at the revolver on the desk. “Like this—“

Gavigan and I both saw the trigger, with no finger on it, move.

Bang!

The gun’s report was like a thunderclap in the small room. I knew well enough that it was only a stage prop and the cartridge a blank, but I jumped a foot. So did Gavigan.

“Look, dammit!” the inspector exploded, “how did you—“ The Great Merlini grinned. He was fully awake now and enjoying himself hugely.

“No,” he said, “that wasn’t PK, luckily. Just ordinary run-of-the-mill conjuring. The Rising Cards and the Talking Skull are both sometimes operated the same way. You can have the secret at the usual catalogue price of—“ Like most policemen, Gavigan had a healthy respect for firearms and he was still jumpy. “I don’t want to buy either of them,” he growled. “Do we have a date for dinner—or don’t we? I’m starved.”

“We do,” Merlini said, pulling his long, lean self up out of the chair and reaching for his coat. “Can you join us, Ross?”

I shook my head. “Not this time. I’ve got a date just now with Andrew Drake.” In the elevator Merlini gave me an odd look and asked, “Andrew Drake? What has he got to do with ESP and PK?”

“What doesn’t he have something to do with?” I replied. “Six months ago it was the Drake Plan to Outlaw War; he tried to take over the U.N. single-handed. Two months ago he announced he was setting up a $15-million research foundation to find a cancer cure in six months. ‘Polish it off like we did the atom bomb,’ he says. ‘Put in enough money, and you can accomplish anything.’ Now he’s head over heels in ESP with some Yoga mixed in. ‘Unleash the power of the human mind and solve all our problems.’ Just like that.”

“So that’s what he’s up to,” Merlini said as we came out on to Forty-second Street, a block from Times Square, to face a bitterly cold January wind. “I wondered.” Then, as he followed Gavigan into the official car that waited and left me shivering on the curb, he threw a last cryptic sentence over his shoulder.

“’When Drake mentions Rosa Rhys,” he said, “you might warn him that he’s heading for trouble.”

Merlini didn’t know how right he was. If any of us had had any clairvoyant ability at all, I wouldn’t have taken a cab up to Drake’s; all three of us would have gone in Gavigan’s car and with the siren going full blast.

As it was, I stepped out all alone in front of the big Ninety-eighth Street house just off Riverside Drive. It was a sixty-year-old mansion built in the tortured style that had been the height of architectural fashion in the 1880’s but was now a smoke-blackened monstrosity as coldly depressing as the weather.

I nearly froze both ears just getting across the pavement and up the steps, where I found a doctor with his finger glued—or frozen perhaps—to the bell push. A doctor?

No, it wasn’t ESP; a copy of the AMA Journal stuck out of his overcoat pocket, and his left hand carried the customary small black case. But he didn’t have the medical man’s usual clinical detachment. This doctor was jumpy as hell.

When I asked, “Anything wrong?” his head jerked around, and his pale blue eyes gave me a startled look. He was a thin, well-dressed man in his early forties.

“Yes,” he said crisply. “I’m afraid so.” He jabbed a long forefinger at the bell again just as the door opened.

At first I didn’t recognise the girl who looked out at us. When I had seen her by daylight earlier in the week, I had tagged her as in the brainy-but-a-bit-plain category, a judgment I revised somewhat now, considering what the Charles hair-do and Hattie Carnegie dress did for her.

“Oh, hello, doctor,” she said. “Come in.”

The doctor began talking even before he crossed the threshold. “Your father, Elinor—

is he still in the study?”

“Yes, I think so. But what—“

She stopped because he was already gone, running down the hall toward a door at its end. He rattled the doorknob, then rapped loudly.

“Mr. Drake! Let me in!”

The girl looked puzzled, then frightened. Her dark eyes met mine for an instant, and then her high heels clicked on the polished floor as she too ran down the hall. I didn’t wait to be invited. I followed.

The doctor’s knuckles rapped again on the door. “Miss Rhys!” he called. “It’s Dr.

Garrett. Unlock the door!”

There was no answer.

Garrett tried the doorknob once more, then threw his shoulder against the door. It didn’t move.

“Elinor, do you have a key? We must get in there—quickly!” She said, “No. Father has the only keys. Why don’t they answer? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Garrett said. “Your father phoned me just now. He was in pain. He said,
‘Hurry! I need you. I’m’”
—the doctor hesitated, watching the girl; then he finished “’—
dying.’
After that—no answer.” Garrett turned to me. “You’ve got more weight than I have. Think you can break this door in?” I looked at it. The door seemed solid enough, but it was an old house and the wood around the screws that held the lock might give. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try.” Elinor Drake moved to one side and the doctor stepped behind me. I threw myself against the door twice and the second time felt it move a bit. Then I hit it hard. Just as the door gave way I heard the tearing sound of paper.

But before I could discover what caused that, my attention was held by more urgent matters. I found myself staring at a green-shaded desk lamp, the room’s only source of light, at the overturned phone on the desk top, and at the sprawled shape that lay on the floor in front of the desk. A coppery highlight glinted on a letter opener near the man’s feet. Its blade was discoloured with a dark wet stain.

Dr. Garrett said, “Elinor, you stay out,” as he moved past me to the body and bent over it. One of his hands lifted Andrew Drake’s right eyelid, the other felt his wrist.

I have never heard a ghost speak but the sound that came then was exactly what I would expect—a low, quivering moan shot with pain. I jerked around and saw a glimmer of white move in the darkness on my left.

Behind me, Elinor’s whisper, a tense thread of sound, said, “Lights,” as she clicked the switch by the door. The glow from the ceiling fixture overhead banished both the darkness and the spectre—but what remained was almost as unlikely. A chair lay overturned on the carpet, next to a small table that stood in the centre of the room. In a second chair, slumped forward with her head resting on the tabletop, was the body of a woman.

She was young, dark-haired, rather good-looking, and had an excellent figure. This latter fact was instantly apparent because—and I had to look twice before I could believe what I saw—she wore a brief, skintight, one-piece bathing suit. Nothing else.

Elinor’s eyes were still on the sprawled shape on the floor. “Father. He’s—dead?” Garrett nodded slowly and stood up.

I heard the quick intake of her breath but she made no other sound. Then Garrett strode quickly across to the woman at the table.

“Unconscious,” he said after a moment. “Apparently a blow on the head—but she’s beginning to come out of it.” He looked again at the knife on the floor. “We’ll have to call the police.”

I hardly heard him. I was wondering why the room was so bare. The hall outside and the living room that opened off it were furnished with the stiff, formal ostentation of the overly rich. But Drake’s study, by contrast, was as sparsely furnished as a cell in a Trappist monastery. Except for the desk, the small table, the two chairs, and a three-leaf folding screen that stood in one corner, it contained no other furniture. There were no pictures on the walls, no papers, and although there were shelves for them, no books. There wasn’t even a blotter or pen on the desk top. Nothing but the phone, desk lamp and, strangely enough, a roll of gummed paper tape.

But I only glanced at these things briefly. It was the large casement window in the wall behind the desk that held my attention—a dark rectangle beyond which, like a scattered handful of bright jewels, were the lights of New Jersey and, above them, frosty pinpoints of stars shining coldly in a black sky.

The odd thing was that the window’s centre line, where its two halves joined, was criss-crossed by two-foot strips of brown paper tape pasted to the glass. The window was, quite literally, sealed shut. It was then that I remembered the sound of tearing paper as the lock had given way and the door had come open.

I turned. Elinor still stood there—motionless. And on the inside of the door and on the jamb were more of the paper strips. Four were torn in half, two others had been pulled loose from the wall and hung curled from the door’s edge.

At that moment a brisk, energetic voice came from the hall. “How come you leave the front door standing wide open on the coldest day in—“ Elinor turned to face a broad-shouldered young man with wavy hair, hand-painted tie, and a completely self-assured manner. She said, “Paul!” then took one stumbling step and was in his arms.

He blinked at her. “Hey! What’s wrong?” Then he saw what lay on the floor by the desk. His self-confidence sagged.

Dr. Garrett moved to the door. “Kendrick,” he said, “take Elinor out of here. I’ll—“

“No!” It was Elinor’s voice. She straightened up, turned suddenly and started into the room.

But Paul caught her. “Where are you going?”

She tried to pull away from him. “I’m going to phone the police.” Her eyes followed the trail of bloodstains that led from the body across the beige carpet to the overturned chair and the woman at the table. “She—killed him.” That was when I started for the phone myself. But I hadn’t taken more than two steps when the woman in the bathing suit let out a hair-raising shriek.

She was gripping the table with both hands, her eyes fixed on Drake’s body with the rigid unblinking stare of a figure carved from stone. Then, suddenly, her body trembled all over, and she opened her mouth again—but Garrett got there first.

He slapped her on the side of the face—hard.

It stopped the scream, but the horror still filled her round dark eyes and she still stared at the body as though it were some demon straight from hell.

“Hysteria,” Garrett said. Then seeing me start again toward the phone, “Get an ambulance, too.” And when he spoke to Paul Kendrick this time, it was an order. “And get Elinor out of here—quickly!”

Elinor Drake was looking at the girl in the bathing suit with wide, puzzled eyes.

“She—she killed him. Why?”

Paul nodded. He turned Elinor around gently but swiftly and led her out.

The cops usually find too many fingerprints on a phone, none of them any good because they are superimposed on each other. But I handled the receiver carefully just the same, picking it up by one end. When headquarters answered, I gave the operator the facts fast, then asked him to locate Inspector Gavigan and have him call me back. I gave Drake’s number.

As I talked I watched Dr. Garrett open his black case and take out a hypodermic syringe. He started to apply it to the woman’s arm just as I hung up.

“What’s that, doc?” I asked.

“Sedative. Otherwise she’ll be screaming again in a minute.” The girl didn’t seem to feel the needle as it went in.

Then, noticing two bright spots of colour on the table, I went across to examine them closely and felt more than ever as though I had stepped straight into a surrealist painting. I was looking at two rounded conical shapes each about two inches in length.

Both were striped like candy canes, one in maroon against a white background, the other in thinner brilliant red stripes against an opalescent amber.

“Did Drake,” I asked, “collect seashells, too?”

“No.” Garrett scowled in a worried way at the shells. “But I once did. These are molluscs, but not from the sea. Cochlostyla, a tree snail. Habitat: the Philippines.” He turned his scowl from the shells to me. “By the way, just who are you?”

“The name is Ross Harte.” I added that I had had an appointment to interview Drake for a magazine article and then asked, “Why is this room sealed as it is? Why is this girl dressed only in—“

Apparently, like many medical men, Garrett took a dim view of reporters. “I’ll make my statement,” he said a bit stiffly, “to the police.” They arrived a moment later. Two uniformed prowl-car cops first, then the precinct boys and after that, at intervals, the homicide squad, an ambulance intern, a fingerprint man and photographer, the medical examiner, an assistant D.A. and later, because a millionaire rates more attention than the victim of a Harlem stabbing, the D.A. himself, and an assistant chief inspector even looked in for a few minutes.

Of the earlier arrivals the only familiar face was that of the homicide squad’s Lieutenant Doran—a hard-boiled, coldly efficient, no-nonsense cop who had so little use for reporters that I suspected he had once been bitten by one.

At Dr. Garrett’s suggestion, which the intern seconded, the girl in the bathing suit was taken, under guard, to the nearest hospital. Then Garrett and I were put on ice, also under guard, in the living room. Another detective ushered Paul Kendrick into the room a moment later.

He scowled at Dr. Garrett. “We all thought Rosa Rhys was bad medicine. But I never expected anything like this. Why would she want to kill him? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Self-defence?” I suggested. “Could he have made a pass at her and—“ Kendrick shook his head emphatically. “Not that gal. She was making a fast play for the old man—and his money. A pass would have been just what she wanted.” He turned to Garrett. “What were they doing in there—more ESP experiments?” The doctor laid his overcoat neatly over the back of an ornate Spanish chair. His voice sounded tired and defeated. “No. They had gone beyond that. I told him that she was a fraud, but you know how Drake was—always so absolutely confident that he couldn’t be wrong about anything. He said he’d put her through a test that would convince all of us.”