slammed the receiver down and started for the door.
“Keeler,” he said over his shoulder, “is in Grand Central. There’s room in my car if you want to come.”
He didn’t need to issue that invitation twice. On the way down in the elevator Merlini made one not very helpful comment.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “if the judge does have a reservation on the extra-terrestial express – destination: the Outer Darkness – we don’t know what gate that train leaves from.”
We found out soon enough. The Judge stepped through it just two minutes before we hurried into the station and found Lieutenant Malloy exhibiting all the symptoms of having been hit over the head with a sledge hammer. He was bewildered and dazed, and had difficulty talking coherently.
Sergeant Hicks, a beefy, unimaginative, elderly detective who had also seen the thing happen looked equally groggy.
Usually, Malloy’s reports were as dispassionate, precise, and factual as a logarithmic table. But not today. His first paragraph bore a much closer resemblance to a first-person account of a dope-addict’s dream.
“Malloy,” Gavigan broke in icily. “Are you tight?”
The Lieutenant shook his head sadly. “No, but the minute I go off duty, I’m going to get so plas-”
Gavigan cut in again. “Are all the exits to this place covered?”
Hicks replied, “If they aren’t, somebody is sure going to catch it.”
Gavigan turned to the detective who had accompanied us in the inspector’s car. “Make the rounds and double-check that, Brady. And tell headquarters to get more men over here fast.”
“They’re on the way now,” Hicks said. “I phoned right after it happened. First thing I did.”
Gavigan turned to Malloy. “All right. Take it easy. One thing at a time – and in order.”
“It don’t make sense that way either,” Malloy said hopelessly. “Keeler took a cab from the bank and came straight here. Hicks and I were right on his tail. He comes down to the lower level and goes into the Oyster Bar and orders a double brandy. While he’s working on that, Hicks phones in for reinforcements with orders to cover every exit. They had time to get here, too; Keeler had a second brandy. Then, when he starts to come out, I move out to the centre of the station floor by the information booth so I’m ahead of him and all set to make the pinch no matter which gate he heads for. Hicks stands pat, ready to tail him if he heads upstairs again.
“At first, that’s where I think he’s going because he starts up the ramp. But he stops here by this line of phone booths, looks in a directory and then goes into a booth halfway down the line. And as soon as he closes the door, Hicks moves up and goes into the next booth to the left of Keeler’s.” Malloy pointed. “The one with the Out-of-Order sign on it.”
Gavigan turned to the Sergeant. “All right. You take it.”
Hicks scowled at the phone booth as he spoke. “The door was closed and somebody had written ‘Out of Order’ on a card and stuck it in the edge of the glass. I lifted the card so nobody’d wonder why I was trying to use a dead phone, went in, closed the door and tried to get a load of what the Judge was saying. But it’s no good. He was talking, but so low I couldn’t get it. I came out again, stuck the card back in the door and walked back toward the Oyster Bar so I’d be set to follow him either way when he came out. And I took a gander into the Judge’s booth as I went past. He was talking with his mouth up close to the phone.”
“And then,” Malloy continued, “we wait. And we wait. He went into that booth at five ten. At five twenty I get itchy feet. I begin to think maybe he’s passed out or died of suffocation or something. Nobody in his right mind stays in a phone booth for ten minutes when the temperature is ninety like today. So I start to move in just as Hicks gets the same idea. He’s closer than I am, so I stay put.
“Hicks stops just in front of the booth and lights a cigarette, which gives him a chance to take another look inside. Then I figure I must be right about the Judge having passed out. I see the match Hicks is holding drop, still lighted, and he turns quick and plasters his face against the glass. I don’t wait. I’m already on my way when he turns and motions for me.”
Malloy hesitated briefly. Then, slowly and very precisely, he let us have it. “I don’t care if the Commissioner himself has me up on the carpet, one thing I’m sure of –
“And neither,” Hicks said with equal emphasis, “did I. Not for one single second.”
“I did some fancy open-field running through the commuters,” Malloy went on, “skidded to a stop behind Hicks and looked over his shoulder.”
Gavigan stepped forward to the closed door of the booth and looked in.
“And what you see,” Malloy finished, “is just what I saw. You can ship me down to Bellevue for observation, too. It’s impossible. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t believe it. But that’s exactly what happened.”
For a moment Gavigan didn’t move. Then, slowly, he pulled the door open.
The booth was empty.
The phone receiver dangled off the hook, and on the floor there was a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, one lens smashed.
“Keeler’s glasses,” Hicks said. “He went into that booth and I had my eyes on it every second. He never came out. And he’s not in it.”
“And that,” Malloy added in a tone of utter dejection, “isn’t the half of it. I stepped inside, picked up the phone receiver Keeler had been using, and said, ‘Hello’ into the mouthpiece. There was a chance the party he’d been talking to might still be on the other end.” Malloy came to a full stop.
“Well?” Gavigan prodded him. “Let’s have it. Somebody answered?”
“Yes. Somebody said: ‘
“You didn’t recognize the voice?”
“Yeah, I recognized it. That’s the trouble. It was –
Silence.
Then, quietly, Merlini asked, “You are quite certain that it was his voice, Malloy?”
The Lieutenant exploded. “I’m not sure of anything any more. But if you’ve ever heard Keeler – he sounds like a bullfrog with a cold – you’d know it couldn’t be anyone else.”
Gavigan’s voice, or rather, a hollow imitation of it, cut in. “Merlini. Either Malloy and Hicks have both gone completely off their chumps or this is the one phone booth in the world that has two exits. The back wall is sheet metal backed by solid marble, but if there’s a loose panel in one of the side walls, Keeler could have moved over into the empty booth that is supposed to be out of order…”
“Is supposed to be…” Malloy repeated. “So that’s it! The sign’s a phony. That phone isn’t on the blink, and his voice -” Malloy took two swift steps into the booth. He lifted the receiver, dropped a nickel, and waited for the dial tone. He scowled. He jiggled the receiver. He repeated the whole operation.
This specimen of Mr Bell’s invention was definitely not working.
A moment or two later Merlini reported another flaw in the Inspector’s theory. “There are,” he stated after a quick but thorough inspection of both booths, “no sliding panels, hinged panels, removable sections, trapdoors, or any other form of secret exit. The sidewalls are single sheets of metal, thin but intact. The back wall is even more solid. There is one exit and one only – the door though which our vanishing man entered.”
“He didn’t come out,” Sergeant Hicks insisted again, sounding like a cracked phonograph record endlessly repeating itself. “I was watching that door every single second. Even if he turned
