The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries Part 59

"So," he said, "the little item returns to me. The little item that places the murder so exactly. This time it will not leave me."

The shot seemed to come from nowhere. Dow was still holding the fishbowl. He jammed it into his own face with a convulsive jerk, smas.h.i.+ng a great half-moon out of it. He whirled on his heels with a surprised look, cast the bowl like a shot-put at the floor. He kept revolving, his face a horrible gray and stretched with surprise, plunged headlong over Sandra on the sofa.

Sandra did not know if she was screaming or not. Her mind was like a black blind s.p.a.ce riven by two forked bolts. One of them was: the murderer! The murderer was in the room! The other was: under the form quivering convulsively above her, the bright object was there on the cus.h.i.+ons beside her!

It was a moment of such hideous chaos nothing seemed coherent not the yellow head, batting blindly at the sofa back, not her own hand jammed into her face, not her frantic animal convulsions to throw off that shuddering body.

Then Marceline's scream cut through everything.

"Oh, no! Not me! You're not going to kill me!"

The gun crashed again. She heard Marceline's scream. Sandra seemed sucked out of reality, her soul yawing and heeling over in blackness. She was free of that twitching form. She was half off the sofa. A new bedlam was awake a bedlam that was not in her mind. Voices. Pounding feet. Batterings. Yells.

Captain Corrigan! The police!

She was on her knees. A hand got hold of her. It got her under the jaw from behind, a hand like a steel vice. It yanked her completely from the ground, a swooping arc that almost made her swoon. She saw the bright blaze of sunlight rus.h.i.+ng toward her, felt her fierce propulsion across the rug. Then she knew he was going to use her for a s.h.i.+eld!

She was at the cas.e.m.e.nt. He was behind her. She could feel the rigid strength of his body, the sharp pressure of his hip. His breath panted hoa.r.s.ely in her hair. His left arm was clamped like a bar across her neck, both her wrists pinioned beneath it.

Outside were faces. They were picked out vivid against the green lawn, the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne. Captain Corrigan, his bullet head forward, his eyes like two slits of a knife, his hard jaw working. The policemen, the sun flas.h.i.+ng from their s.h.i.+elds, their guns half extended. The hawklike face of De Saules, his black spear point of beard jabbing up and down with irregular motions. All were staring at the face behind her, their faces etched alike with stunned, stark blankness.

They were looking into the face of the murderer the face she could not see!

Then his coat sleeve brushed by her body as he raised his arm to fire. She couldn't do anything. She couldn't move her wrists. All she could do was turn over the compact in her hand. She couldn't aim it. But her hand was jammed almost against his jaw. She got the hole in the metal cover around just as his arm swung down to shoot.

She squeezed the compact for all she was worth. The jet of ammonia shot like a cascade into his face. The contraction of his body threw her headfirst against the wall. But before she spun into blackness, before the rush through the window reached that floundering, gagging form, she caught one glimpse of his face the too florid, too blue-eyed, too handsome face of Gawdy!

Captain Corrigan was beside her. She was sitting on the sofa. The rush, tumult and furor had all gone out, now, out of the room and out of the house, taking the gold-coated bulk of Gawdy with it. Out of her mind, too she was once more clear and collected, her shako hat straight on her head, her face freshened, and except for the ache in her head, could even look back on things with a certain perspective.

Captain Corrigan's head was lowered. He was leafing through a telephone book. He jabbed his thumb at a name.

"You're right! There it is! A dentist! Dr Gawdy! Now why the devil didn't I look the guy up? Is that all you did to find it?"

"That's all." Sandra put her slim forefinger beside his thumb. "There it was in the book George Gawdy, D.D.S., Suite 405406, Mohican Building. He was Mr Delaunay's dentist for how long I don't know, but probably after he married Marceline."

Corrigan had dropped the book and was staring at a bright object on the sofa flanked by two circular gold p.r.o.ngs. "An old-fas.h.i.+oned denture a one-tooth removable bridge!" He turned it over. "And there, there's the hole in it where it was filled with the pulverized crystals of oxalic acid!"

"Yes, and through the same hole the acid got out." Sandra could not look at it without repulsion. "It's a duplicate, made by the dental laboratory man Dow, to be slipped into Mr Delaunay's mouth in place of the one he had. Under the guise of having it repaired, Gawdy got hold of it and had the hollow duplicate made."

Corrigan began a curse, checked himself. "All Gawdy did was fill it with the pulverized crystals, and plug it with a little soluble cement, so the poison would come out when the cement did!"

"Of course. And that moment happened to be when Mr Delaunay got so angry over reading Dow's warning note. He ground his teeth and dislodged the plug and the acid poured into his mouth."

Corrigan stared at her. His eyes went over her trim head, her vivid young cheeks, her wide brown eyes, in a kind of mystified stupefaction.

"How the devil did you ever happen to pick out Gawdy?"

"You helped me, Captain Corrigan." Sandra's brown eyes flashed a smile. "It was yesterday morning, in your office, when you said of Dow: 'Why help his confederate on one hand, harm him on the other?' Only because he had to. Women's minds make strange quirks, Captain Corrigan, and that made mine flash back to when Dow, in the welfare office, had given me the note. It made me see what I had entirely overlooked that Dow palmed the note he gave me. He hid it in his hand. Why? Why not hand me the note openly? It could only have been because of the presence of someone he didn't want to see it and the only other person there was Gawdy. That made it" she gestured "oh, so plain, it was just like a bombsh.e.l.l! So then I went and looked Gawdy up in the phone book, and there he was a dentist. That almost proved it, at least to me. Of course the poison had to be something to do with his teeth! It was the only way it could get into his mouth! So you see, at the bottom of the crazy way a woman's mind works, you really supplied the answer."

Corrigan took his hat off. He almost blushed.

"There's precious little credit in this for me. Go on. I'm listening. My hat's off to you. I've got my mouth open."

Sandra said with a gesture of both hands: "There wasn't anything else. I had a wild idea there might be a dental chart of Mr Delaunay's in Gawdy's office. I went up to the Mohican Building and found Dow selling the bridge to Marceline. Of course I didn't know it was a bridge, but I knew it was something that looked like a tooth."

A shadow crossed her face. "Maybe what kept me from thinking of Gawdy so long was the fact that he brought the baby up to my office. That was pure coincidence. He was coming up to see that Dow delivered the bamboo tube to me without any hitch, and finding the baby gave him a good excuse to come in." She shook her head. "I can see what Dow's whole aim was all through, to make the affair plainly a murder, so he could blackmail Gawdy's secret bride. But I still don't know why, Captain Corrigan, they sent the acid to the Chinese maid."

Corrigan grunted. "You were still unconscious when Dow gasped that part out to us with what must have been his last gallon of breath. The maid was the one that overheard Gawdy talking to the old man, examining his bridge, and suggesting that he come up to the office and have it repaired."

"So that's it!" Sandra gave a breath of relief. "I'm so glad she's cleared; I had a feeling she was honest all through."

Corrigan gave his knee a vicious cut with his hat. "No wonder the M.E. or the autopsy didn't find anything wrong with the old man's mouth! When the M.E. first looked into it, the duplicate bridge was there; when the autopsy was conducted, his honest old original bridge was there!"

"Of course. And all Dow cut the tongue out for was to get at the poisoned bridge, remove it, and replace the original harmless one; and of course then there was not the slightest thing wrong with the old man's mouth."

Corrigan's hard eyes flicked over the broken remnants of the goldfish bowl. "The young lady Marceline can consider herself d.a.m.ned lucky she only got a flesh wound. Gawdy was in here to clean up. He was going to get her and Dow and everyone he figured knew a solitary thing about it."

Sandra's eyes blazed. "And after what Marceline went through for him, did for him, out of pure, unadulterated love for him! She begged De Saules to reverse his testimony probably at the cost of saying she herself was implicated and De Saules, out of family loyalty and because he really was gone on her, agreed." She broke off suddenly. She didn't tell how De Saules had come up, tried to stop her with cycloprophane. Let bygones be bygones. She had a feeling the whole answer to Marceline's shattered life lay in De Saules.

"By George! I wish I was ten years younger!" Captain Corrigan was staring at her with his widest-open look. He got up and stood with his blunt hands on his hips. "Think of it, a girl like you, smart as they make 'em, pretty as a little dream, running around loose!" His thundering voice broke off with a grin. "How come no man has appropriated you?"

"One has." The smile in Sandra's eyes was like the deepest velvet in the world. She picked up her bag. "I'm on the way to see him now, Captain Corrigan. He's not very big, but he's gone through a lot on my account. He's waiting for me over at the clinic."

Proof of Guilt Bill p.r.o.nzini Bill p.r.o.nzini (b. 1943) is both an aficionado of the pulp and mystery magazines and a highly respected writer of crime and mystery fiction. He is best known for his long-running series featuring the unnamed private eye and former cop known simply as Nameless. His first novel appearance was with The s.n.a.t.c.h (1971) and his adventures include the double locked-room puzzler Hoodwink (1981). p.r.o.nzini has won many awards including the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement. He is married to author Marcia Muller. The following does not include any of his series characters and is probably the most audacious of the stories in this volume.

I've been a city cop for 32 years now, and during that time I've heard of and been involved in some of the weirdest, most audacious crimes imaginable on and off public record. But as far as I'm concerned, the murder of an attorney named Adam Chillingham is the d.a.m.nedest case in my experience, if not in the entire annals of crime.

You think I'm exaggerating? Well, listen to the way it was.

My partner Jack Sherrard and I were in the Detective Squad-room one morning last summer when this call came in from a man named Charles Hearn. He said he was Adam Chillingham's law clerk, and that his employer had just been shot to death; he also said he had the killer trapped in the lawyer's private office.

It seemed like a fairly routine case at that point. Sherrard and I drove out to the Dawes Building, a skysc.r.a.per in a new business development on the city's south side, and rode the elevator up to Chillingham's suite of offices on the sixteenth floor. Hearn, and a woman named Clarisse Tower, who told us she had been the dead man's secretary, were waiting in the anteroom with two uniformed patrolmen who had arrived minutes earlier.

According to Hearn, a man named George Dillon had made a 10:30 appointment with Chillingham, had kept it punctually, and had been escorted by the attorney into the private office at that exact time. At 10:40 Hearn thought he heard a m.u.f.fled explosion from inside the office, but he couldn't be sure because the walls were partially soundproofed.

Hearn got up from his desk in the anteroom and knocked on the door and there was no response; then he tried the k.n.o.b and found that the door was locked from the inside. Miss Tower confirmed all this, although she said she hadn't heard any sound; her desk was farther away from the office door than was Hearn's.

A couple of minutes later the door had opened and George Dillon had looked out and calmly said that Chillingham had been murdered. He had not tried to leave the office after the announcement; instead, he'd seated himself in a chair near the desk and lighted a cigarette. Hearn satisfied himself that his employer was dead, made a hasty exit, but had the presence of mind to lock the door from the outside by the simple expediency of transferring the key from the inside to the outside thus sealing Dillon in the office with the body. After which Hearn put in his call to Headquarters.

So Sherrard and I drew our guns, unlocked the door, and burst into the private office. This George Dillon was sitting in the chair across the desk, very casual, both his hands up in plain sight. He gave us a relieved look and said he was glad the police had arrived so quickly.

I went over and looked at the body, which was sprawled on the floor behind the desk; a pair of French windows were open in the wall just beyond, letting in a warm summer breeze. Chillingham had been shot once in the right side of the neck, with what appeared by the size of the wound to have been a small-caliber bullet; there was no exit wound, and there were no powder burns.

I straightened up, glanced around the office, and saw that the only door was the one which we had just come through. There was no balcony or ledge outside the open windows just a sheer drop of 16 stories to a parklike, well-landscaped lawn which stretched away for several hundred yards. The nearest building was a hundred yards distant, angled well to the right. Its roof was about on a level with Chillingham's office, it being a lower structure than the Dawes Building; not much of the roof was visible unless you peered out and around.

Sherrard and I then questioned George Dillon and he claimed he hadn't killed Chillingham. He said the attorney had been standing at the open windows, leaning out a little, and that all of a sudden he had cried out and fallen down with the bullet in his neck. Dillon said he'd taken a look out the windows, hadn't seen anything, checked that Chillingham was dead, then unlocked the door and summoned Hearn and Miss Tower.

When the coroner and the lab crew finally got there, and the doc had made his preliminary examination, I asked him about the wound. He confirmed my earlier guess a small-caliber bullet, probably a .22 or .25. He couldn't be absolutely sure, of course, until he took out the slug at the post-mortem.

I talked things over with Sherrard and we both agreed that it was pretty much improbable for somebody with a .22 or .25 caliber weapon to have shot Chillingham from the roof of the nearest building; a small caliber like that just doesn't have a range of a hundred yards and the angle was almost too sharp. There was nowhere else the shot could have come from except from inside the office. And that left us with George Dillon, whose story was obviously false and who just as obviously had killed the attorney while the two of them were locked inside this office.

You'd think it was pretty cut and dried then, wouldn't you? You'd think all we had to do was arrest Dillon and charge him with homicide, and our job was finished. Right?

Wrong.

Because we couldn't find the gun.

Remember, now, Dillon had been locked in that office except for the minute or two it took Hearn to examine the body and slip out and relock the door from the time Chillingham died until the time we came in. And both Hearn and Miss Tower swore that Dillon hadn't stepped outside the office during that minute or two. We'd already searched Dillon and he had nothing on him. We searched the office I mean, we searched that office and there was no gun there.

We sent officers over to the roof of the nearest building and down onto the landscaped lawn; they went over every square inch of ground and rooftop, and they didn't find anything. Dillon hadn't thrown the gun out the open windows then, and there was no place on the face of the sheer wall of the building where a gun could have been hidden.

So where was the murder weapon? What had Dillon done with it? Unless we found that out, we had no evidence against him that would stand up in a court of law; his word that he hadn't killed Chillingham, despite the circ.u.mstantial evidence of the locked room, was as good as money in the bank. It was up to us to prove him guilty, not up to him to prove himself innocent. You see the problem?

We took him into a large book-filled room that was part of the Chillingham suite what Hearn called the "archives" and sat him down in a chair and began to question him extensively. He was a big husky guy with blondish hair and these perfectly guileless eyes; he just sat there and looked at us and answered in a polite voice, maintaining right along that he hadn't killed the lawyer.

We made him tell his story of what had happened in the office a dozen times, and he explained it the same way each time no variations. Chillingham had locked the door after they entered, and then they sat down and talked over some business. Pretty soon Chillingham complained that it was stuffy in the room, got up, and opened the French windows; the next thing Dillon knew, he said, the attorney collapsed with the bullet in him. He hadn't heard any shot, he said; Hearn must be mistaken about a m.u.f.fled explosion.

I said finally, "All right, Dillon, suppose you tell us why you came to see Chillingham. What was this business you discussed?"

"He was my father's lawyer," Dillon said, "and the executor of my father's estate. He was also a thief. He stole three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of my father's money."

Sherrard and I stared at him. Jack said, "That gives you one h.e.l.l of a motive for murder, if it's true."

"It's true," Dillon said flatly. "And yes, I suppose it does give me a strong motive for killing him. I admit I hated the man, I hated him pa.s.sionately."

"You admit that, do you?"

"Why not? I have nothing to hide."

"What did you expect to gain by coming here to see Chillingham?" I asked. "a.s.suming you didn't come here to kill him."

"I wanted to tell him I knew what he'd done, and that I was going to expose him for the thief he was."

"You tell him that?"

"I was leading up to it when he was shot."

"Suppose you go into a little more detail about this alleged theft from your father's estate."

"All right." Dillon lit a cigarette. "My father was a hard-nosed businessman, a selfmade type who acquired a considerable fortune in textiles; as far as he was concerned, all of life revolved around money. But I've never seen it that way; I've always been something of a free spirit and to h.e.l.l with negotiable a.s.sets. Inevitably, my father and I had a falling-out about fifteen years ago, when I was twenty-three, and I left home with the idea of seeing some of the big wide world which is exactly what I did.

"I traveled from one end of this country to the other, working at different jobs, and then I went to South America for a while. Some of the wanderl.u.s.t finally began to wear off, and I decided to come back to this city and settle down maybe even patch things up with my father. I arrived several days ago and learned then that he had been dead for more than two years."

"You had no contact with your father during the fifteen years you were drifting around?"

"None whatsoever. I told you, we had a falling-out. And we'd never been close to begin with."

Sherrard asked, "So what made you suspect Chillingham had stolen money from your father's estate?"

"I am the only surviving member of the Dillon family; there are no other relatives, not even a distant cousin. I knew my father wouldn't have left me a cent, not after all these years, and I didn't particularly care; but I was curious to find out to whom he had willed his estate."

"And what did you find out?"

"Well, I happen to know that my father had three favorite charities," Dillon said. "Before I left, he used to tell me that if I didn't 'shape-up,' as he put it, he would leave every cent of his money to those three inst.i.tutions."

"He didn't, is that it?"

"Not exactly. According to the will, he left two hundred thousand dollars to each of two of them the Cancer Society and the Children's Hospital. He also, according to the will, left three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the a.s.sociation for Medical Research."

"All right," Sherrard said, "so what does that have to do with Chillingham?"

"Everything," Dillon told him. "My father died of a heart attack he'd had a heart condition for many years. Not severe, but he fully expected to die as a result of it one day. And so he did. And because of this heart condition his third favorite charity the one he felt the most strongly about was the Heart Fund."

"Go on," I said, frowning.

Dillon put out his cigarette and gave me a humorless smile. "I looked into the a.s.sociation for Medical Research and I did quite a thorough bit of checking. It doesn't exist; there isn't any a.s.sociation for Medical Research. And the only person who could have invented it is or was my father's lawyer and executor, Adam Chillingham."

Sherrard and I thought that over and came to the same conclusion. I said, "So even though you never got along with your father, and you don't care about money for yourself, you decided to expose Chillingham."

"That's right. My father worked hard all his life to build his fortune, and admirably enough he decided to give it to charity at his death. I believe in worthwhile causes, I believe in the work being done by the Heart Fund, and it sent me into a rage to realize they had been cheated out of a substantial fortune which could have gone toward valuable research."

"A murderous rage?" Sherrard asked softly.

Dillon showed us his humorless smile again. "I didn't kill Adam Chillingham," he said. "But you'll have to admit, he deserved killing and that the world is better off without the likes of him."

I might have admitted that to myself, if Dillon's accusations were valid, but I didn't admit it to Dillon. I'm a cop, and my job is to uphold the law; murder is murder, whatever the reasons for it, and it can't be gotten away with.

Sherrard and I hammered at Dillon a while longer, but we couldn't shake him at all. I left Jack to continue the field questioning and took a couple of men and re-searched Chillingham's private office. No gun. I went up onto the roof of the nearest building and searched that personally. No gun. I took my men down into the lawn area and supervised another minute search. No gun.

I went back to Chillingham's suite and talked to Charles Hearn and Miss Tower again, and they had nothing to add to what they'd already told us; Hearn was "almost positive" he had heard a m.u.f.fled explosion inside the office, but from the legal point of view that was the same as not having heard anything at all.

We took Dillon down to Headquarters finally, because we knew d.a.m.ned well he had killed Adam Chillingham, and advised him of his rights and printed him and booked him on suspicion. He asked for counsel, and we called a public defender for him, and then we grilled him again in earnest. It got us nowhere.

The F.B. I, and state check we ran on his fingerprints got us nowhere either; he wasn't wanted, he had never been arrested, he had never even been printed before. Unless something turned up soon in the way of evidence specifically, the missing murder weapon we knew we couldn't hold him very long.

The next day I received the lab report and the coroner's report and the ballistics report on the bullet taken from Chillingham's neck 22 caliber, all right. The lab's and coroner's findings combined to tell me something I'd already guessed: the wound and the calculated angle of trajectory of the bullet did not entirely rule out the remote possibility that Chillingham had been shot from the roof of the nearest building. The ballistics report, however, told me something I hadn't guessed something which surprised me a little.

The bullet had no rifling marks.

Sherrard blinked at this when I related the information to him. "No rifling marks?" he said. "h.e.l.l, that means the slug wasn't fired from a gun at all, at least not a lawfully manufactured one. A homemade weapon, you think, Walt?"

"That's how it figures," I agreed. "A kind of zip gun probably. Anybody can make one; all you need is a length of tubing or the like and a bullet and a grip of some sort and a detonating cap."

"But there was no zip gun, either, in or around Chillingham's office. We'd have found it if there was."

I worried my lower lip meditatively. "Well, you can make one of those zips from a dozen or more small component parts, you know; even the tubing could be soft aluminum, the kind you can break apart with your hands. When you're done using it, you can knock it down again into its components. Dillon had enough time to have done that, before opening the locked door."

"Sure," Sherrard said. "But then what? We still didn't find anything not a single thing that could have been used as part of a homemade zip."