The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

He had one arm beneath the old man’s neck, lifting his head. He froze. It was when the head came into the glare of the overturned lamp. The multitudinously wrinkled face lolled at them, eyeballs bulging, staring, glazed. It was not that which cut the breath in their throats; not the hideous grimace on his face – not even the fact of his death.

The old man’s tongue protruded from his lips. It was the color of paper. It had a coarse, pitted texture; it looked like a spongy head of swollen fungus, plugged like a stopper between his lips.

The butler was there. The maid was rocking back and forth like someone on the edge of a precipice. The bell was ringing its triple musical chime. Nobody paid any attention to it.

Marceline reeled against Sandra, clutched her arm with hands that almost tore the muscle out.

“Poisoned!” the girl gasped. “He’s poisoned!”

“Poisoned!” De Saules whipped to her. “You’re mad! How could he be?”

“The note!” Marceline screamed the words. “The note! It said he would die!”

Sandra grabbed the butler by the arm. It was like shaking a wooden image.

“Call the police! The police!”

“They’re” – the butler waved one arm wildly; he was trying, to indicate the door – “coming up-”

Sandra flashed by him, darted down the hall. Men were hammering at the door. She saw two detectives, behind them the gold bulk of Gawdy’s topcoat, his florid handsome face. She snatched open the door; the hard-eyed man in the lead touched his hat.

“Hullo, Miss Grey. We’re following up that acid business-”

Sandra caught him by the arm. “Captain Corrigan! There’s a dead man in here! Come on!”

The hard-eyed detective captain went by her in two strides. He turned long enough to snap to his companion: “Get the M.E. He’s in the car.”

Gawdy got Sandra by the arm. His bright-blue eyes were wide.

“What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

“Mr Delaunay’s dead! Murdered! That note Dow gave me – it said he would die!”

Gawdy’s high-colored features blanched. He said only one word: “Marceline!” He plunged by Sandra into the library.

The library was a scene of confusion. Marceline was screaming; the loud, continuous screams of hysteria. De Saules was ineffectually shouting at her, pleading with her. Captain Corrigan took one look out of his hard eyes, walked up and slapped her across the face.

“Shut up!” he said. “Sit down.”

It acted like magic. Marceline fell onto the sofa, stopped screaming. The room jolted into calm as if ice water had been sluiced through it.

Captain Corrigan turned around, looked at the dead man. Sandra saw even the scalp on his blunt bullet head move with surprise as he observed that outthrust paper – white tongue.

“When’d this happen?” His hard eyes swiveled like turret guns at De Saules.

“Just now, not two minutes ago!”

“What had he been drinking?”

“Drinking!” De Saules’ point of beard jabbed up and down with the irregular movement of his jaw. “Nothing! He was reading that note – that note that prophesied his death!” He darted across, picked up the crumpled rice paper from the rug. “Here! This!”

Corrigan read it. A little man with a black bag bustled in and kneeled down by the corpse, but Corrigan paid no attention. The mouth in his blunt face opened with a jerk as he looked up at De Saules.

“Where’d this come from?”

“I brought it!” Sandra’s eyes were like vivid stars. “It’s from that Chinese, Dow – the one that gave me the acid tube!”

“What!” The difference in tone as Corrigan spoke to Sandra was noticeable. “That Chinaman who brought you the acid tube! You mean he’s mixed up in this?”

“Yes! Yes! Mr Delaunay had just read it. He got very angry. He jumped up and-” She groped for words. “He simply fell over, crying out something about his tongue! That was all! He didn’t take anything; he didn’t drink anything; we all saw him!”

Corrigan looked from her to De Saules to Marceline. He looked at the note. His hard eyes had an expression as if he were surrounded by a group of lunatics. His voice reflected it. “He’s dead of a corrosive poison. He must have swallowed it right in front of you.”

“Perfectly correct.” The medical examiner’s voice was as precise as an icicle. “Absolutely typical reaction – the white tongue, the serrated mucous membrane. The throat shows the same bleaching, all the way to the head of the pharynx. It’s oxalic acid, the quickest-acting of the common poisons.”

Corrigan’s eyes shot to the group. “The quickest-acting! You hear that?” His glance swung back to the doctor. “Could it be used for murder?”

“Impossible.” The doctor pursed his lips flatly. “Not unless one of them fed it to him a moment before he fell dead. He’s a feeble old man. The reaction was instantaneous.”

Marceline burst in. It sounded for a moment as if her hysteria were about to recur. “But we saw him! We saw him! He didn’t take anything! He didn’t!”

“Yes!” De Saules’ hawklike head jabbed out. “Two, three, four of us saw it! Are you telling us we’re all mad?”

Corrigan’s eyes looked jarred in their hard depths. This weight of testimony was beginning to tell on him. His glance shot to the doctor.

“Could he have held it in his mouth?”

The doctor gave an incredulous thin snort. “My dear man, this is a corrosive acid. It serrates the mucous membrane. The first touch of it would erode his tongue.”

“But this is impossible! Impossible!” Corrigan’s eyes battered everyone in savage bewilderment. “Do you realize this is not a poison like arsenic – that’s tasteless, that you can take an hour or so before it acts – this is a corrosive, it acts instantly! He couldn’t have held it in his mouth! He couldn’t! Yet you say he didn’t take anything! How did he get it?”

“The only possibility is a capsule,” said the doctor’s thin, piercing voice. He was primly polishing a pair of half- moon glasses. “Suppose – an absurdity even on the face of it – that in some manner a capsule had been lodged in his mouth. With the swelling of the tongue, the membranes, the capsule would still be there. There is no capsule. I have examined his mouth and throat thoroughly.”

There was entire silence. Captain Corrigan sat down on the table, a slow, jarring movement. The manifest impossibility of what was before them locked them all in a kind of mental blankness. A man had been killed, before the eyes of four witnesses, in a perfectly obvious way – he had swallowed a corrosive poison – yet the thing was as impossible as that a railroad tie could be put into the mouth of a milk bottle.

Into the silence a man stumbled, executing an unsteady semicircle through the library door like the reel of a dervish. A dressing gown made a disheveled scarlet circle around him. He came up at sight of the corpse, grabbing hold of a chair and staring down with haggard, puffy eyes.

“Who’s this?” snapped Corrigan.

Marceline spoke rapidly. “He’s a guest. His name’s Lonnie Wyatt. He’s been asleep all afternoon.”

“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.