The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

5

I arrived home around nine that night. Penelope was sitting in the TV room, watching a rerun of Law and Order. She took one look at the sour expression on my face and ordered me to the kitchen. “Julian made shrimp for dinner. There should be some leftovers in the refrigerator. Eat and drink, then report.”

It took me nearly two hours to describe my day. During the entire recital, Penelope only interrupted once. “Bats? Did you actually see bats?”

“Flying over the rooftop when I left,” I assured her. “Little ones, but definitely not birds. Bats.”

Penelope nodded then settled back and let me drone away. I did my usual fine job of imitating a video recorder, describing in great detail everything I had seen, heard, and smelled the entire time I had been away. By the time I finished, she was having difficulty covering her yawns.

“I know, it’s not very exciting stuff,” I said, “but if anyone committed a crime in that place, I’ve no idea how.”

“That’s because you’ve forgotten your Sherlock Holmes,” said Penelope, rising from behind the desk. “I’m going to bed. I suggest you do the same. Tomorrow, we’ll need to be at our best for the seance.”

“Seance? We’re having a seance?”

“Of course,” said Penelope. “What better way to identify a murderer?”

What Penelope Peters wants, Penelope Peters gets. Especially when she’s working for the government and they’re anxious for results. Wearing a black tuxedo and feeling pretty much the idiot, I answered the doorbell the next evening at 8 p.m. Standing on the steps were Captain Rackham, Mary Winfree, Otto Klax, and Marvin Arronds. Backing them up were two Marines. Our guests had arrived.

As instructed, I ushered them into the parlor, which Julian and I had earlier arranged per the boss’s instructions. A small round table sat in the middle of the room covered by a black cloth. In the center of the table was a crystal ball I had rented earlier in the day from a Manhattan theater props store. Six wood chairs circled the table. I arranged everyone exactly as Penelope wished. First came Mary Winfree, then Rackham, then Otto Klax, then me, then Marvin Arronds. The blank chair was for my boss.

Penelope entered in a swirl of black silk. She looked very much the gypsy fortune-teller with her hair up in a knot and several strings of costume jewelry around her neck. “Thank you for attending tonight’s service,” she said, nodding to everyone. “Would you please be seated.”

“This is nonsense,” said Klax, “pure nonsense,” but he sat down. No one else said anything, though they all looked puzzled.

“Now, please form a circle by holding hands,” commanded Penelope. “That includes you, Dr Klax.”

“This is a waste of time,” said Klax, pulling his hands out of his coat pockets and linking his cold fingers with Rackham’s on one side and mine on the other. “I should be back at my lab, working.”

“Working?” said Penelope. “Or planning another murder?”

“What are you babbling about?” said Klax, trying to wrench his hands free. Not that he could. Which had been the point of this entire charade, making sure Klax couldn’t use the miniature control unit the Marine guards later found in his left pocket.

“I never touched Schneider,” declared Klax. “I was in my lab all night.”

“Yes, you were,” said Penelope. “Safe and secure in your laboratory while your MEMS robots, programmed by you, climbed up through the cracks in the concrete walls and killed Professor Schneider.”

“Say what?” I was so surprised I almost let go of Klax’s cold fingers. Almost.

“MEMS robots are so small they can fit into spaces only a few thousandths of an inch wide,” said Penelope. “If artificially intelligent, they can be programmed to assemble themselves into bigger machines once they reach a specific destination. For example, they can go through small cracks between a wall and ceiling, then assemble into a larger flying robot. They can be programmed to seek and attack a specific target: in this case, Dr Schneider. Klax’s devices carried a payload of hydrogen cyanide with them and loaded it into the stinger of a mechanical mosquito.”

“Cyanide gas kills people almost instantly,” I said, Penelope’s words starting to sink in. “The results mimic a heart attack, and all traces dissolve into the body within hours. But how could a mosquito deliver enough gas to kill Schneider?”

“It was all a matter of waiting for the proper moment,” said Penelope. “Klax knew that sometime during the night Schneider would lift one of the monkeys out of its cage. With both his hands occupied, the professor couldn’t stop the attack that killed him.”

“The mechanical mosquito-”

“- flew into Dr Schneider’s nose and squirted the hydrogen cyanide into his nasal passage,” said Penelope, finishing my thought. “A small dose inhaled at such close range would kill in seconds.”

“But why?” said Mary Winfree, her questions directed at Klax, not us. “Why on earth would you want to kill Carl?”

Klax rose from the table, and towering six foot six, and having wrenched his hands free, lifted both fists in the air. “How can you even ask that question, Mary? I did all the work. He won all the awards. He got the money, the fame, the glory. And because of all that, he got you.”

“Me?” she said. “What do I have to do with this?”

“He lusted after you, and I couldn’t allow it,” said Klax, a very strange note creeping into his voice. “I wanted you, and you never even looked my way, Mary. My robot spies heard him talking to you on the phone last week. Trying to seduce you. Take you on another trip. That’s when I decided he had to die. He couldn’t have the awards that were supposed to be mine, the money and honors that were supposed to be mine, and now you, too! I just couldn’t allow it!”

“You,” said Mary Winfree, “are a very sick and misguided man. You’re crazy, Klax!”

And so it was jealousy, after all, that killed Dr Schneider. Not a monkey. Not a bat. And to my surprise, something deadly was able to penetrate the fortress called The Slab. Where nothing goes in and nothing comes out, murder took place.

The Marines found a fistful of tiny machines in Klax’s right pocket, a miniature control device in the other. Proof positive that he had used such micro-machines for murder and a grim reminder that Penelope’s subterfuge had saved anyone else from being killed.

“I had Captain Rackham bring the two of you with Klax tonight so he wouldn’t guess we specifically suspected him,” explained Penelope to Arronds and Winfree, once the Marines had left with their prisoner. “I also thought, since you were Dr Schneider’s friends, you would want to help capture his murderer.”

“An amazing deduction,” said Arronds. “How did you figure out it was Klax?”

“She asked Sherlock Holmes,” I answered.

No Killer Has Wings by Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges (1915-2006) was another of those writers who wrote prodigiously for the magazines but had very few works preserved between hard covers. You will, though, find a slim volume of his Sherlock Holmes parodies, featuring Stately Homes, in Three Porges Parodies and a Pastiche (1988), whilst The Mirror and Other Strange Reflections (2002) is a collection of his weird fiction. Porges wrote scores of ingenious impossible crime stories and a volume of those is long overdue. Here’s just one example.

***

I was beginning to think that Lieutenant Ader had finally run out of bizarre cases. He hadn’t bothered me for almost six months, or since that “Circle in the Dust” affair.