The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

“What is it, Doc?”

“Buckshot. Annabel thought they were wormholes, but I noticed the other side was unmarked. These were worms that went in but didn’t come out. Notice the unusual pattern they formed.” I pointed out a half-dozen small holes toward the sides and top of the door.

“A buckshot pattern would be more circular,” he argued.

“Not if something or someone had been in its way. Don’t you see, Sheriff? Fritz Heck was standing by this open door when someone fired a shotgun at him. I know they probably had one on the premises because I found an old shotgun shell in the dirt there. The missing pellets from the pattern are in Heck’s body, and judging by the close grouping of these other pellets that shotgun blast was probably enough to kill him.”

“Rusty Wagner was the only one in the house at the time.”

“Exactly,” I told him. “We’ll never know now what happened, but Wagner told you they’d been chatting about a girl they met. Maybe they argued about her, maybe Wagner picked up the shotgun that every farmhouse had in those days and tried to drive Heck from the Cloister. Maybe it went off accidentally by the front door.”

“Then he started the fire deliberately?”

I nodded. “To cover the crime. He probably made a special point of burning the body, to cover up the wounds from the shotgun pellets. When he got too close and burned his own face it added verisimilitude to his story.”

“Any coroner today would have found those shotgun pellets.”

“Probably. He certainly would have spotted the absence of smoke in the lungs, a sure sign that Heck was already dead when the fire started.”

Sheriff Lens sighed. “With Wagner dead there’s not much point in exhuming the body now.”

“None whatsoever.”

“I only wish you’d been around here a year earlier, Doc, and I wouldn’t have missed all this. It was a perfect crime.”

I shook my head. “No, Sheriff. The perfect crime was the murder of Rusty Wagner in front of this building last Tuesday. And there’s not a thing we can do about it.”

As it happened, Annabel and I were dining at Max’s Steakhouse, our favorite restaurant, a few nights later when I spotted Milt Stern drinking at the bar. “Excuse me for a few minutes,” I told her. “I’m going to talk to him.”

“Sam! You said you wouldn’t.”

But I got up anyway and went over to him. “Got a few minutes, Milt?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“I just want to chat. Over in that empty booth would be best.”

He glanced toward Annabel at our table. “You shouldn’t leave her alone.”

“This won’t take long.”

He followed me to the booth and slid in the other side. “So what’s this all about?”

“Rusty Wagner.”

“God, I feel terrible about that! It’s as if I’d murdered him.”

“You did.”

He moistened his lips and gave a half laugh. “Well, not really. The gun had a blank cartridge in it.”

“What was it that made you move here, Milt? Did you know your brother had been murdered that day up at the Cloister?”

“He wasn’t-”

“Yes he was, Milt. I saw the snapshot of the two of you and even then I noticed the resemblance. Ten years ago you left Hartford and moved here, changing your name from the German Heck to its English meaning, stern. You suspected all along that Wagner had killed your brother. Perhaps he hinted at trouble between them in one of his letters. Once here you settled down and married. Somewhere along the line you saw the Cloister door that Felix Pond had rescued from the place, and recognized those little ‘wormholes’ for what they were. When you heard that Wagner would be coming here to take part in a war-bond drive, the idea came to you.”

“What idea?”

“You would suggest to Pond that he donate that old door for the war-bond auction. Then, when the mayor was discussing a clever way to bring Wagner on stage, you volunteered to dress in a Nazi costume and fire a blank pistol at him. You knew, of course, that he’d had rheumatic fever twice as a child. Perhaps your brother mentioned it or you read it in a movie fan magazine. Such a medical history almost certainly would have left him with a weak heart, probably the reason for his draft deferral.”

“He knew in advance I was going to fire a blank pistol at him,” Milt Stern said. “That wouldn’t have caused a heart attack.”

“Perhaps not alone. But when he came onto that stage what he saw was the friend he’d killed twenty-two years ago, aged a bit but still recognizable, standing in front of that same door and pointing a gun at him. In the instant the gun went off, his weak heart failed.”

“Do you really expect anyone to believe that?”

“No,” I admitted. “Certainly not a jury.”

Milt Stern smiled at me. “Then why are you telling me this? Who else have you told?”

“Sheriff Lens knows, and the mayor soon will know. They can’t bring any charge against you, but it might be better if you left Northmont, moved back to Hartford.”

He studied my face for a long time. “Don’t you understand it’s something I had to do? Whether he lived or died was out of my hands.”

“Whether you stay or go is out of my hands, too,” I told him.

“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll take your advice.”

I left the booth and went back to join Annabel. I’d done all that I could.

A Shower of Daggers by Edward D. Hoch

Susan Holt awoke with a start, wondering why her bed felt so hard. Then memory flooded back in a blinding instant of terror and she knew she was in a jail cell, accused of murder. She opened her eyes and saw a woman in the next holding cell staring at her through the bars. “You’re awake,” the woman said.

“What? Yes. Yes, I’m awake. What time is it, please?”

“Barely daylight. Quarter to seven.”

Susan groaned. She’d slept less than three hours and her mouth felt as if it was full of cobwebs. She glanced at the lidless toilet in one corner of the cell. “Do they give you anything to eat here?”

“Pretty soon now. They’ll bring something around seven o’clock. What you in for?”

“Murder, I guess. I haven’t been charged yet.” The other woman gave a low whistle of appreciation and Susan hastened to add, “I didn’t do it.”

“Have you called a lawyer?”

“Not exactly. I called someone who’ll get me a lawyer.” She had called Mike Brentnor, her coworker in promotions at Mayfield’s, Manhattan’s largest department store. He was hardly a friend, but in the middle of the night in a strange city she was feeling desperate. Considering that she’d awakened him from a sound sleep, he’d been both concerned and reassuring, promising to be on the first morning plane out of LaGuardia, a flight that would take less than an hour.

Presently a guard brought her a breakfast tray with some juice, coffee, and a hard roll. “You’ll be brought before the judge at ten o’clock,” he said, not unkindly. “Have you seen your lawyer yet?”

“No. I think someone’s on the way.”

Mike Brentnor arrived a few minutes before nine, looking just a bit flustered. He was slim and slyly handsome, around thirty, the sort of man Susan used to see by the dozen in Manhattan singles bars. She met with him now in one of the interrogation rooms. “I phoned Marx from the airport and he gave me the name of a good criminal lawyer up here,” he told her.

For an instant she was dismayed that he’d reported to their superior, but of course Saul Marx would have to