“Who fired that pistol?”
“It was a Tokarev automatic!” said Cozzens. “I’ll swear to that!”
“But there isn’t anyone here but you!” McKitrick glared helplessly around the room.
“Neverthless-” began Banner. “But let it keep awhile. There’re more important things like searches and seizures to be made.”
“Confound you, Banner!” said McKitrick, but he was in good humor about it.
“You can begin by arresting-”
The search was fruitless until Banner suggested that what they were after might be on microfilm and if they could not find microfilm in all the obvious places, it might be hidden in the electric light sockets.
That was where they found it.
They had all the proof they needed to arrest their man for espionage and murder.
And Carroll Lockyear, the export-import man, almost pulled his King Tut beard out by the roots when they confronted him.
McKitrick and the Assistant Secretary of State made impressive members of Banner’s small audience. Banner was prancing back and forth, gnawing a long stogie, as if he were holding a press conference. But he had not let the reporters in yet. They were all ganged up outside in the hall, waiting.
The Assistant Secretary of State fingered his chin reflectively. “The riddle of the sealed envelope-”
“Yaas, yaas!” Banner chuckled. “It’s simple when you know the sorta thimble – rigging that went on behind the scenes. I said in the beginning that I thought the murder was too damned impossible cuz one person alone couldn’t’ve accomplished it. Lockyear is the murderer and spy, all right, but he had forced poor Gertie to help him. Y’see, he was a Commie agent and Gertie told us that her crippled mother and her father are still stranded in East Germany. You can now see how easy it was for him to get her to agree to his scheme. He could tell her he’d get ’em outta East Germany if she played ball. If she still didn’t agree, he could easily threaten to turn the old folks over to the untender mercies of the MVD agents.”
He paused a moment before going on. “Gosling was getting onto Lockyear’s trail. Some time before the murder, Lockyear used a standard tape recorder. Lockyear let the tape run silently for three minutes, then he fired his Tokarev pistol three times near the recorder. He now had a tape recording of three minutes of dead silence, followed by three quickly fired shots. He handed that roll of tape over to Gertie for her to put in Gosling’s private office where he could get his hands on it later on. When he went into Gosling’s office to commit the murder that morning he had in his briefcase the Tokarev pistol with silencer on it, and also in the briefcase was a large manila mailing envelope that was a duplicate of the one to be delivered to Gertie’s desk by the messenger service. The gun that was delivered to Gertie by the special messenger route was probably a toy pistol, so that if the envelope were opened prematurely the whole thing could be laughed off as a practical joke.
“It was all timed to the split second. Lockyear stalled with Gosling till almost 11:30, talking business, then swiftly he pulled the silenced automatic outta the briefcase and shot Gosling in the chest three times with it before his victim could blink or cry out. Naturally the shots were not heard outside the room with the door closed. He whipped out the prepared envelope, snatched the silencer off the pistol – barrel, and shoved the pistol, still smoking, into the envelope, sealing it immediately. Next he set the prepared reel of tape on the recorder alongside Gosling’s desk – there’s one in every office and you’ve noticed that Gosling’s office had all the modern equipment – and then picked up the envelope and briefcase. It was now, according to his watch, 11:27. He flipped the tape recorder switch to on. Three minutes of dead silence, remember, then three shots. He put his arm around both the envelope and the briefcase so that the briefcase would entirely conceal the envelope to anyone waiting in the lounge. He came out of the private office and walked to Gertie’s desk on which the second envelope with the toy gun in it was lying, waiting to be delivered at 11:30 sharp. He put his briefcase down on her desk, so that it covered both envelopes. After getting Gertie to jot down his phony appointment for next Tuesday, Lockyear picked up his briefcase again –
He stopped and glowered around the room. “The three shots that were heard by the two witnesses were the ones already on the tape recorder! Cozzens even remarked that they were somewhat
“Good God!” muttered somebody in the room,
Banner cleared his throat with a big sea lion noise. “Haaak! Although Gertie had been terrorized into helping Lockyear remove a threat to his existence as a spy, she wanted desperately for one of us to know the truth. She knew she was being watched by everybody, their side as well as ours, so she couldn’t come right out and tell us about it. She drew two circles, one inside the other, on a piece of paper. She didn’t dare hint further. She was trying to call our attention to the reel of the tape recorder – circular. Yunnerstand? And she was trying to help us, boys. If she had completely obeyed the instructions of the murderer, I never would’ve found the tape still on the recorder in that office – she would’ve destroyed it. Last night the murderer killed her as a safety measure, thinking that his trail on tape had been completely wiped out.”
Locked in Death by Mary Reed & Eric Mayer
During his years with the Mongolian police Inspector Dorj had witnessed crimes in sufficient variety to inspire several Shakespearean tragedies, but until the crowbar-wielding midget sent the locked door of the circus caravan flying open the inspector had never seen a man murdered by a corpse.
Hercules the lion-tamer was, it is true, an exceptionally large and powerful corpse, but a corpse nevertheless. He lay wedged between the bed on which Dorj had last seen him and the blood-smeared door of the ancient caravan’s lavatory cubicle. His enormous hands were still reaching for his victim. Nikolai Zubov, sprawled partly under the table near the door, was now beyond Hercules’ reach, but the ugly welt ringing the circus owner’s neck made it clear what must have happened. Dorj said so.
“Clear?” muttered Dima, the midget, peering around Dorj into the disordered caravan. Dima’s bone white clown makeup ran with sweat from his efforts with the crowbar, turning his face almost as ghastly as Zubov’s. “How can you say it is clear when it seems Zubov was strangled by a dead man?”
“Of course the lion-tamer was dead,” said Batu, Dorj’s assistant. “The lion went berserk and practically disembowelled him. No one could have survived a gaping wound like that. You’re lucky you got bored and left the performance before the lion-taming act started.”
Dorj now regretted dragging the young man to the circus, which had turned out to be a sorry affair even before the accident. “You kept an eye on the caravan while I returned to town to make arrangements?”
“I would have seen anyone approaching.”
“So only Zubov and Hercules were inside?”
A cloud-like frown passed over Batu’s round, flat moon of a face, a typical Mongolian face in contrast to Dorj’s
