The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

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 repetition 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 hoarsely talking to himself. “There’s only one way to figure it. The Chink 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 405-406 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 405-406 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 405-406.

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, spaced 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