Saturday, November, 1941
A PHOTOGRAPH, and the knowledge that one of the individuals depicted had himself developed the picture.
It was little enough to go on, Marshall reflected as he sat at his desk and went over the latest routine reports on Jonathan Tarbell, which told him precisely nothing.
And what tied the two cases together? A phone number and a rosary.
Any of his colleagues would hoot at him, or at best smile derisively. But Marshall could not help believing that the two cases were one, and that his prime duty at the moment was not so much to crack the murder of the floater Tarbell as to prevent the murder of Hilary Foulkes.
“Let him get himself murdered,” Leona had protested sleepily after they were in bed last night. “Then it’ll be a big case and there’ll be headlines about Heir to Foulkes Estate and you can solve it and be famous. And who cares if Hilary lives or dies?”
Then Marshall had tried to explain the basic sanctity and importance of human life, any life (which was a curious concept to expound in the 1940’s), and the significance of the preventive over the punitive in a policeman’s duties until Leona said that having debated at Oxford was swell only at this hour it might wake the children. So he slept, but in his dreams he kept pursuing and trying to frustrate a barrel-chested, black-bearded man who was seeking to garotte with a rosary that oddly named fan who resembled Hilary.
There was something about a rocket too, and an old volume of Who’s What, though he couldn’t remember in the morning where they fitted in. (A complete record of this dream would have been of the greatest interest to Austin Carter or Hugo Chantrelle, both of whom were disciples of J. W. Dunne.)
The dream reminded him. He set aside the Tarbell reports, took up the phone, dialed an inter-office number, and gave instructions for a thorough canvassing of all theatrical costumers to trace the rental of a large black spade beard of the Derringer model. Probably unnecessary, but worth a try.
He hesitated, phone in hand. Then he nodded resolutely to himself, got an outside line, and dialed Hilary Foulkes’ unlisted number.
Veronica Foulkes’ “Hello” was rich with indefinite emotional overtones. Marshall could imagine her investing a grocery order, if she over stooped to so plebeian a task, with the quality of a Borgia laying in the month’s supply of acqua tofana.
“May I speak to Mr. Foulkes?”
“Who is this please?”
“The fiend with the pipe,” said Marshall perversely, and wondered if she would hang up.
She didn’t. In a moment Hilary’s smooth deep voice was asking, “Yes? Yes?”
“Marshall speaking, Mr. Foulkes.”
“Oh. Hold on a minute. I’ll take this on the extension in my study. Hold on.”
Marshall held on and wondered why Hilary always repeated everything. It was like a stammer or a tic, and probably a psychoanalyst could have fun with it.
“Yes,” Hilary resumed after a few seconds. “Didn’t want to disturb my wife, Lieutenant. She’s been terribly nervous since that bomb episode. Terribly. And what did you find out about that? What sort of bomb was it?”
“Very common type. No creative imagination. Anyone with underworld connections could pick one up easily.”
“Underworld connections? But Lieutenant . . . You can’t mean I’m being threatened by a gang?”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Mr. Foulkes. The damnedest people can have some underworld connections. Especially with the political setup in this town. I’ll lay odds that even a stranger in town like you, if he had as much as you have, could get hold of such a machine after a little nosing about and palm-greasing. Our only hope of tracing it is through a stool, and that’s not too likely.”
“Oh,” said Hilary sadly.
“But why I called: Have you thought of any more—shall I say, candidates?”
“No, Lieutenant. Heavens no. Excepting that as I said—”
“Yes. The various people you may have offended as executor of the estate. So tell me: Have you ever offended one Austin Carter?”
“Carter? Carter? Let me see . . . Oh yes. That was the man who wanted to quote all sorts of things from my father’s works and wouldn’t pay for them. I was firm about it; so then he cut out the quotations rather than pay me anything.”
“Was that all?”
“Yes, Lieutenant. Yes, excepting . . . Well,” Hilary chuckled, “I confess I may have played some small part in causing Metropolis Pictures to decide against Mr. Carter’s last novel. I naturally felt that a man who has displayed such shocking irreverence toward my father hardly belonged in the same studio that has done such fine work in producing Dr. Derringer films. Naturally.”
“Naturally,” Marshall echoed, admiring the ingenuous ingenuity with which Hilary presented his case.
“But Lieutenant—”
“Yes?”
“Do you mean to imply that you . . . that you have any evidence against this Mr. Carter?”
Marshall hesitated. “Will you be home this afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll be out to see you. I want to ask you a few more questions and give you some idea of what evidence I have. Then we can see if you wish to prefer charges.”
“My!” Hilary gasped. “This is such prompt work, Lieutenant. So very prompt. I never expected . . .”
There was a long silence. Marshall said “Yes?” twice. There was no answer. He said “Mr. Foulkes!” loudly, and he heard a groan and a sort of thudding crash. Then there was only silence on the line.
He jiggled the phone cradle fruitlessly, then hung up and dialed again. He got the busy signal; the Foulkes’ receiver was still off.
Marshall got an inter-office number, gave certain instructions, hung up, and reached for his hat.
Then, on an afterthought, he dialed the number found on Jonathan Tarbell.
2.
There was no excitement in front of the apartment hotel. No crowds, no patrol car.
“Stable doors, maybe,” Marshall said to Sergeant Ragland. “But you stay here in front of the entrance. There shouldn’t be much mid-morning traffic. Get the names of everybody that comes out and his reason for being here.” His first stop was at the manager’s apartment.
Her greeting was reserved. “Yes, I did go up to the Foulkeses’. But Mrs. Foulkes herself answered the door and assured me that her husband was working in his study as usual. I couldn’t very well force my way in, could I? And since you didn’t choose to tell me what was the matter . . .”
“All right,” Marshall said. “Thanks.”
“I hope you realize,” she went on, “that this apartment house is not accustomed to having the police—”
“Sorry. But we go where we’re needed. Thank you.”
He rode up in the elevator half-relieved. If Veronica Foulkes, in the same apartment, was not aware that anything was wrong . . . He paused in his thoughts. Unless, of course, Mrs. Foulkes herself . . .
The maid Alice answered the bell at the Foulkes apartment.
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Foulkes.”
“He’s in his study, sir, and I’m afraid he won’t want to be disturbed.”
“It’s most important. I—”
“I remember, sir. You’re the police. But even for the police I don’t like to interrupt Mr. Foulkes. He’s very particular, sir.”
“What is it, Alice?” Veronica Foulkes, in a negligee too impressively sumptuous to be seductive, came up behind the maid. Her eyes gleamed as she saw the visitor. “You again!”
“Sorry, Mrs. Foulkes. But it’s highly important that I speak with your husband at once.”
She seemed to repress a whole anthology of remarks as she glanced at the servant. “You were talking to him on the phone not half an hour ago.”
“Have you seen him since then?”
“No. He’s still in his study.”
“Then I’m afraid I must ask you to let me in. Or,” Marshall added as she hesitated, “must I use official persuasion?”
Veronica made a gesture of resignation. “Very well. Come in.”
She crossed the living-room and knocked on the door of the study. She repeated the knock twice, then opened the door.
As Marshall followed her into the living-room, a gentle voice said, “Good morning, Lieutenant.”
Marshall looked about and started. He was so amazed to behold Sister Ursula in this apartment that he had still found no words of greeting when Veronica Foulkes’ sharp scream shrilled through the room.
“He’s dead!” Veronica gasped. There seemed to be terror and genuine sorrow in her voice. She stood rooted in the doorway, unable to make her body follow her gaze to what lay on the floor.
Marshall pushed past her and bent over Hilary Foulkes. There was almost no blood; but only the ornate metal handle of the weapon was visible between the plumply fleshed shoulder-blades. The knife itself was buried. The telephone lay sprawled on the floor as inert and voiceless as its owner.
“You!” Veronica went on intensely. “Until I met you, nothing ever happened. Life was all right then. And what do you do? First you insult me, then you beat poor Hilary into unconsciousness, then you attack me, and now . . .”
Marshall rose. Some of the tension had faded from his face. “I’m sorry to be anticlimactic, Mrs. Foulkes, but your husband is still alive. And medical aid is more important right now than disrupting your version of the facts.” He went past her again into the living-room and turned to Sister Ursula. Sister Felicitas, he noticed, was there too, and as usual, asleep.
“Sister,” he said sincerely, “I don’t know how in the name of your favorite saint you got here, but I’ve never been gladder to see anyone. I’m going to ask you to be useful. If I were a sheriff I’d swear you in as deputy. Watch these women and don’t let anyone, for any reason, enter that study till the doctor comes.”
Sister Ursula nodded and said “Certainly.” The maid goggled, and the cousin whom Marshall had met before hesitated in the hall doorway, looking questioningly at Veronica.
“My husband’s dying!” Mrs. Foulkes exclaimed. “And you forbid me to—”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“I’d like to see you stop me!”
She saw. As she started toward Hilary’s body, Marshall’s hand clamped down on her wrist and a quick jerk brought her across the room and deposited her on the sofa beside the nuns. “And stay there!” he said tersely.
Marshall used the manager’s phone downstairs. To use the Foulkes phone would mean replacing the fallen apparatus, and he wanted an exact photograph of that. While the dowager-like manager dithered about murmuring prayers that the name of the house could be kept out of the papers, he requested an ambulance, a doctor, a fingerprint man, and a photographer, and thanked his stars for the foresight which had made sure before he left headquarters that such a request could be instantly filled.
Sergeant Ragland stood in the lobby, still guarding the door. “There wasn’t anybody tried to get out,” he said.
“Sorry, Rags. Come on upstairs. May be something for you there.”
“D.O.A., Lieutenant?” Ragland brightened.
“Not quite. Keep your fingers crossed.”
The Lieutenant stationed his disappointed Sergeant at the door leading into the study and confronted the assembled witnesses. Five of them, and all women. He groaned a little, but the thought of the astute Sister Ursula on the scene of the crime consoled him.
“All right,” he began. “At ten thirty-five I telephoned Mr. Foulkes. You, Mrs. Foulkes, answered the call and brought him to this phone here. He wanted to talk privately and went off to the extension phone in the study. I take it he shut the door after him?”
Veronica nodded.
“All right. Go on from there.”
“Then the manager rang the bell and wanted to see my husband, heavens knows why. I told her he was working.”
“My doing, I’m afraid. I thought that if anything had happened she might get needed help to him before I could get here. And then?”
“Then,” said Veronica Foulkes with deadly restraint, “you came.”
“But that’s a half hour later, and what happened from then on I know myself. What I want to find out now is the in-between.”
Sister Ursula spoke up. “But Mrs. Foulkes is quite correct. So far as we in this room knew, nothing happened—that is, nothing concerning Mr. Foulkes—between the time he took your call and your own arrival here.”
“You were here all that time, Sister?”
“Here in this room, with Mrs. Foulkes and Sister Felicitas.”
He turned to the maid. “And where were you?”
“In the kitchen, sir, baking. That’s why I didn’t answer the phone when you called. I’d just finished my work when you rang the doorbell, sir.”
“And you, Miss—?”
“Green,” said the cousin. “And may I hope you forget other things as easily as my name?”
Marshall blushed and felt Sister Ursula’s curious eyes upon him.
“You . . . you did send for a doctor?” the girl went on eagerly.
“Of course, Miss Green. And there’s nothing we can do for your cousin meanwhile. Any amateur attempt to shift him or to remove the knife might be exceedingly dangerous.”
“But he—?” Her voice shook a little.
“I don’t think there’s any danger. And the best way you can help him is by helping me to prevent another such attack.” His voice was surprisingly gentle. It was pleasantly unusual to find somebody who seemed really to give a damn about Hilary. “So if you’ll tell me where you were from ten thirty-five until my arrival here?”
“In my room, typing some letters that Cousin Hilary had dictated.”
“So.” Marshall frowned. “I’m not very certain of the ground-plan of this apartment.”
“I know.” The girl half laughed, and Marshall reddened again. “But it’s simple enough, at least as far as you’re concerned now. East of this living-room—on that side, that is—there’s only Hilary’s study and a bath opening off it. To the west there’s the rest of the apartment: two bedrooms and the kitchen and dinette and the maid’s room.
Marshall digested the description. “So. Then anyone—say either you or Alice—coming from the rest of the apartment to the study would have to come through this room?”
“Yes. Or of course we could go out into the hall and around. The study has its own separate entrance.”
Marshall nodded. “All right. Now, Sister, what time did you get here?”
“A little after ten, Lieutenant.”
“You were here in this room when Mr. Foulkes took my call?”
“Yes. He was in the dinette finishing breakfast. He came in here (I must say he looked rather surprised to see Sister Felicitas and me) and went on into the study.”
“And you stayed here . . . ?”
“All the rest of the time until you arrived. And if I may anticipate your next question: No one went through this door to the study after Mr. Foulkes.”
“Neither in nor out?”
“Neither.”
“And Mrs. Foulkes was with you all that time?”
“This is too much!” Veronica exploded. “Not only must you ask my guests and my dependents all the questions that you should rightfully ask me, but now you go as far as to imply—”
“Please, Mrs. Foulkes,” Sister Ursula interposed gently. “The Lieutenant has only been performing his routine duties. I hope,” she added, with what might, from any one else, almost have been a wink.
“Thank you, Sister. And Mrs. Foulkes was with you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hear any noise from the study?”
“I confess that I didn’t. Did you, Mrs. Foulkes?”
“No.” Veronica was careful to speak to the nun rather than to the officer.
“But then she and I were deeply engrossed in conversation, and Sister Felicitas, as you know, is rather deaf. I think it would have had to be a serious struggle to make itself heard.”
“So. Then it’s clear that Mr. Foulkes’ assailant came in through the hall door to the study and struck him down silently without any scuffle. All right. I think that’s all I need to ask you at the moment. Please remain here, however, until after I’ve talked with the doctor, who should be here any minute.” He rose, made a slight bow, and went into the study.
Hilary sprawled there undignifiedly in his shirt sleeves. (Today’s shirt was a delicate mauve.) The splendid red-and-gold dressing gown was draped over a chair across the room. He was still unconscious. A good thing, that. Movement before the arrival of doctor and ambulance would simply entail needless pain and danger. Marshall contemplated the hilt and its angle, and calculated that the worst damage possible would be slight. He hoped.
He fumbled in his pocket, drew out a piece of chalk, bent down, and outlined the position of the body, worrying a little about the effect of chalk marks on a Persian rug. Leona, he was sure, would raise hell.
“Lieutenant!”
He stared up. “Sister! How did you get in here? Ragland!”
The Sergeant looked abashed. “She come in right after you, Lieutenant. I thought she was with you.”
“All right. Well, Sister, since you’re here—?”
Sister Ursula stood by the hall door. “Look at this.”
Marshall looked. Not only was the button pressed which indicated that the door was locked. You could easily enough lock it behind you that way. But the night chain was on.
He said nothing. Holding the knob gently in a handkerchief, he turned it to release the lock and opened the door. With the chain on, it opened about an inch. Not conceivably far enough for a hand to reach in and hocus it.
Obstinate annoyance settled on his face. “Somebody put the latch on afterwards.”
“Who? When? Remember, Lieutenant, that no one but Mr. Foulkes went into this room before your arrival. After that, Mrs. Foulkes went only as far as the threshold. When she tried to go farther, you jerked her back. While you were gone, I obeyed your instructions and saw that no one came in here. Since then, Sergeant Ragland has been at the door.”
“So?”
“So . . . Please don’t let my presence restrain you, Lieutenant. Express yourself as freely as you please. But I’m afraid you’re confronted again with what Leona calls a locked room problem.”
3.
The doctor rose from his examination. “Nasty,” he observed. “But I’ll pull him through all right. O.K., boys!” He gestured to the ambulance attendants with the stretcher.
“Can’t you wait till the photographer gets here?” Marshall protested.
“Sorry, my boy.” He was younger than Marshall, but the phrase seemed part of his professional equipment. “Which would you sooner do: photograph a corpse or interview a healthy victim? Get along with it there.”
“Hold on. We’ll need his prints at least if we’re to learn anything from this room. If this desk yields a stamping pad . . .” It did, and Marshall busied himself with Hilary’s limp hands. “When can I talk to him?” he asked as he worked.
“Do I know? This afternoon possibly. Come around late and see. May have to put him under opiates though. Near thing, that. From where it went in, you’d expect it to have struck the heart. But the blow was directed toward the right. Odd.”
Marshall set aside the printed paper. “You can load him now. You’ll be careful of the hilt when you remove the knife?”
“Prints? I know my business, my boy, and if the murderer knew his it won’t matter anyway. See you tonight.”
“Just a minute,” Sister Ursula interposed.
“Yes, Sister?”
“Could that wound possibly have been self-inflicted?”
The doctor gave a superior snort. “Look.” He grabbed the Lieutenant, whirled him around, and jabbed a long finger at a point between the spine and the left clavicle. “Try stabbing yourself there. Just try it.”
“I’m afraid my habit is rather hampering.” Sister Ursula tried. “But it does seem as though if I had no sleeves I might reach there.”
“Reach there, certainly.” The doctor demonstrated. “Strain on the shoulder muscles, but you can reach. Possibly even strike. But you reach from below. So even if you struck with enough force to penetrate, which I doubt, the blow would be directed upwards. This wound points down.”
“You couldn’t reach there the other way?” Marshall asked. “From above?”
“Physical impossibility,” the doctor snapped dogmatically.
The stretcher-bearers had passed into the next room. Veronica Foulkes was making inarticulate little moans as her unconscious husband passed by.
“Then he positively was attacked,” said Marshall.
The doctor snorted again and stalked out wordlessly, in a sort of Groucho Marx crouch.
“So.” Marshall whistled. “Thanks for specifying that point, Sister. I’d taken it for granted—always a bad thing to do. But now we know for certain, and where does it get us?” He walked over and opened the door of the bathroom. There was one small window. A midget might conceivably have squeezed through it, but even a midget must have disarranged the neat row of shaving things arranged on its sill. (They did not include, Marshall noticed, the talc which Hilary St. J. Foulkes had nationally endorsed.)
He pushed the shower curtain all the way back. The stall was empty.
He returned to the study. One of the large windows was open. Both had screens which were hooked on the inside. He unlatched one screen and leaned out. The wall here was absolutely blank save for windows. No cornices, nothing but window sills a good fifteen feet away in any direction. Three stories below was a bare cement area.
He turned around. “The problem” he stated, “isn’t getting in. There’s nothing to show that the assailant mightn’t have been waiting in here, possibly hidden in the bathroom, when Hilary came to answer my call. But as for getting out . . . I can give you three possible descriptions, Sister, of this would-be murderer.”
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“All right. A, he is the Invisible Man in person and walked right past you out there. B, he has suction pads on his feet like a gecko, and hung on to the wall out there while he worked some sort of string-trick on the screens, then clambered to the ground or to the roof, still by suction. C, he has a pseudopodal finger that he inserted through the one-inch crack in the door to maneuver the chain into locking position. There you are; take your pick.”
“I like the first one best,” said Sister Ursula seriously. “The Invisible Man.”
“And why?”
“Remember, Lieutenant, that that is the title, not only of a novel by Wells, but also of a short story by Chesterton. As a Catholic, I naturally prefer the latter.”
Lieutenant Marshall shrugged resignedly. But before he could pursue this cryptic hint, the photographer and the fingerprint expert had arrived. The next twenty minutes were crowded.
When the experts were through, Marshall’s patience was near an end and he knew no more than he had to start with. The prints in the room were almost exclusively Hilary’s or the maid’s, with here and there a random and plausible specimen of Miss Green’s or of Mrs. Foulkes’ (and securing the specimen prints of the latter had been one of the major nightmares in the expert’s life). The hall door had only Hilary’s prints on both inner and outer knobs, and no trace of gloved smudges. The telephone also had only his.
Marshall himself lay in the chalked outline for a photograph of the crime. That is, he lay in it as well as his six foot two could fit into the outline of Hilary’s five foot nine. Then he experimented with falls from various positions, and concluded that Hilary must (as had indeed seemed obvious all along) have been struck down while he was seated at the desk telephoning. Sister Ursula checked that in the next room, with voices talking, the sounds even of Marshall’s heavier body were audible but not strikingly noticeable. You heard them only if you were listening for them.
At last the Lieutenant again confronted the women in the living-room. “I’ve done all I can here now,” he said, “and there’s nothing further I need to ask you until I’ve talked with Mr. Foulkes. You’ll be doing the police a favor if you don’t pester the hospital with attempts to see him until I notify you that he’s receiving. In the meantime, you can all be trying to remember any events of this morning or earlier that might throw light on the matter, and especially any individuals you think likely to have made such an attempt. Of course, Mr. Foulkes may, and we trust he will, be able to tell us his assailant’s identity without further ado. But we must be ready in case he can’t. Sister, may I drive you home?”
“Certainly, Lieutenant. And you have room for Sister Felicitas too?”
He had forgotten the other nun completely. One always did.
4.
Sister Ursula occupied the front seat of the sedan with the Lieutenant. Sergeant Ragland climbed in back with Sister Felicitas and felt embarrassed by the combination of back seats and nuns until he decided that he might as well take a little snooze too.
“All right,” said Marshall at last. “Now tell me why you were there.”
Sister Ursula hesitated the least trifle. “You remember what I told you about Sister Patientia and her brailling Beneath the Abyss?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she did want that work to get into the hands of the blind readers, and Mr. Foulkes’ refusal made a terrible legal obstacle. She thought that if she appealed to him personally he might perhaps relent. But she is quite unused to dealing with the public; she lives almost as though she were in a cloistered order. And since I’m the one that Reverend Mother always uses for what you might call public relations work . . .”
“Was this Sister Patientia’s own idea?”
“Well . . . I may have suggested to her that the personal approach often helps . . .”
“And how did you find out where Hilary lives?”
“I called the society gossip editor of the Times.”
“So. And all because I was working on a murder case that somehow involved a rosary of the first Mrs. Foulkes.”
“Lieutenant!” Sister Ursula frowned, but there was a smile half-hidden in her voice. “How can you accuse me of such a thing? You . . . you aren’t angry with me, are you?”
“Angry?” Marshall grinned. “Sister, when I came to see you yesterday, my chief fear was that the Tarbell affair was too dull to tempt you. Things have changed now. If there ever was a case that demanded your peculiar perspicacity, this is it. And you don’t have to worry about temptations any more. You’re right in the middle of this. And you’re going to hear all I know about it.” So he told her, from Jonathan Tarbell through the attempts on Hilary’s life on to his evening with the science fiction writers.
She nodded as he finished. “And you’re suspicious of this Austin Carter?”
“Who could help being? He has a first-rate revenge motive, if Hilary queered a film sale for him. His photographic lab must contain some cyanide preparation, such as was used in the chocolates attempt, and he owns a Dr. Derringer disguise, which figured in the bomb episode.”
“And does he,” Sister Ursula asked gently, “have feet like a gecko or a pseudopodal finger?”
“Does anybody? Until we can crack the method of this attempt, the best thing to do is to ignore it and concentrate on the others. We saw once before, or rather you saw how an absolutely impossible situation can have a perfectly simple solution. And now tell me what happened when you went calling on Sister Patientia’s behalf. Did you see Hilary?”
“He was just getting up when we arrived. I said we’d wait. And then imagine how amazed I was when our hostess came in to entertain us!”
Marshall chuckled. “Not nearly so amazed as she when she found me straddling her husband’s body with a bomb ticking beside me. But what did she want with you that day at the convent anyway?”
“I think she wanted what every person wants at some time: peace and quiet, solace and solitude. Oh, I know she’s a foolish, flamboyant, melodramatic woman, and quite possibly none too bright. But that’s all the more reason why I think she was sincere. Her whole behavior is pointless, aimless. She has no foundation, nothing fixed to cling to. And she came there seeking something solid.”
“She has a marriage. That’s solid enough for Leona and me.”
“She isn’t Leona. And you aren’t Hilary. In fact, Mrs. Foulkes seemed to have some romantic notion of breaking up that marriage and becoming a nun. ‘Abandoning the carnal wedding bed for the spiritual,’ she called it, which I assured her was hardly a correct interpretation of the Church’s attitude toward marriage.”
“So. And do you think there’s any danger of her doing that?”
“Only under the most unusual circumstances, say a very long desertion or the hopeless insanity of a husband, would there be even the remotest chance of a convent’s accepting a married woman.”
“Nothing but virgins?”
“Spinsters at least. And widows, of course.”
Marshall jerked his head up. “Widows! There’s a sweet thought. Do you suppose— Hell, this is nuts, but when religion goes fanatic no motivation is impossible. Do you suppose she could be so wrapped up in her Bride-of-Christ idea that she might make herself a widow?”
Sister Ursula smiled. “Beautiful, Lieutenant. I congratulate you on as admirably perverse a motive for murder as I have ever heard. But I’m afraid it couldn’t apply here. Mrs. Foulkes is a self-indulgent emotionalist rather than a fanatic. I can’t imagine her having the intense, the (if I may use the word in all seriousness) damnable wrong-headedness to pursue such a course. And besides, I think I cured her of her desire to join our order.”
“How?”
“Simply by showing her what we do. You know why we’re called the Sisters of Martha of Bethany. Our founder, Blessed Mother La Roche, was willing to admit that Mary had chosen the better part only because after all Our Lord said so; but she thought there was much to be said for Martha, who did all the housework while her sister was devotedly spiritual. So ours is an order that does the dirty work.
“Some of us nurse, some work with the blind, many of us simply do menial housework for poor invalid mothers. We salvage clothes, we help to establish hostels for youth and what you call floaters . . . Oh, we keep ourselves busy, Lieutenant. We glorify God by doing even unto the least of these all the good that we can. And I’m afraid Mrs. Foulkes’ vision of being a nun was composed solely of song and incense and beautiful white garments.”
Marshall grinned. “I guess that’ll hold her. And what did you talk about this morning?”
“Mostly more of the same. Though she didn’t quite out and say it, what she wanted to know was if there were any religious orders in which one could be ecstatically holy by doing nothing whatsoever.”
“And did this religious tête-à-tête happen to verge upon, say, rosaries?”
“Oddly enough, yes. But I don’t think I learned anything. She brought the matter up herself. She said that she had read a pious memoir of her father-in-law’s first wife which mentioned that unusual devotion of the Stations, and she wondered if it was such a rosary that she had seen in my hand. I said it was, and she wanted to know where it came from; but I managed to evade the question. I asked if perhaps her husband had such a rosary as a family relic, but she did a little evading herself and left us with the score tied.”
“Love all. Nice Christian result. And goose-eggs seem to be what this case runs to . . .”
“It was nice of you to drive us home,” Sister Ursula said after the car had stopped at the convent and she had waked Sister Felicitas. “And your next step?”
“To find out where Austin Carter was at ten-thirty this morning.”
“Good luck. And,” she added, “watch out for that pseudopod.”
5.
There was a sound of rapid typing behind the door of the Nitrosyncretic Laboratory. Marshall knocked.
Over the typing came a casual, “Go to hell!”
Marshall opened the door.
Half the room was filled with mysterious apparatus which he took to be for the developing and printing of pictures. The rest of the room contained a couch, a desk, and bookcases, filled chiefly with pulps. On one wall hung a vivid picture of a space ship being engulfed by what was presumably a space octopus. On the far wall, too distant to read distinctly, was a hand-drawn chronological chart.
Austin Carter typed three lines without looking up. Then he jerked the paper from his machine, laid it on a pile of manuscript, and said, “If I had any conscience, Marshall, I should firmly tell you to go to hell and stay there. But I’ve reached a good stopping place and I could stand a moment’s rest and some beer. Join me?”
“Thanks.” Marshall sat on the couch. “The room’s a let-down after that admirable sign.”
Carter went to a small refrigerator, such as usually serves for infant formula, withdrew two cans of beer, punctured them, and handed one to his guest. “Your health, sir!”
He was tall, this Carter, even a little taller than the Lieutenant, and of one same even slenderness from shoulders to hips. He held himself rather stiffly and moved with precision. Marshall groped for what the man reminded him of, and finally decided that it was Phileas Fogg, who went around the world in eighty days.
“I had an interesting time last night,” he said. “Afraid Matt has seduced me into a new field of pleasure.”
“Good. Always glad to make converts. Have you read any of Matt’s stuff?”
“Not yet.”
“He’s a comer. Bit weak on the science side, but first-rate on fantasy.”
Marshall glanced at the typewriter. “What did I break in in the midst of?”
“That? I think maybe that’s going to be fun. Wheels-of-If sort of thing, you know.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. Remember I’m an innocent.”
“Well, it’s— You know a little about modern time theory? J. W. Dunne, or maybe Priestley’s popularizations of his work? But we needn’t go into the details of that. To put it simply, let’s say that every alternate implies its own future. In other words, whenever anything either could happen or not happen, it both does and does not happen, and two different world-lines go on from there.”
Marshall thought a moment. “You mean that, say at this point in history, there will be one world if Hitler goes on unchecked or another if he is defeated?”
“Not exactly. That’s old and obvious. What I mean is that there will be one world in which he goes on unchecked and another in which he is defeated. Each world exists as completely as the other. And so in the past. We are in a world in which the American revolution was a success. There is a world in which it was a failure.
“Now for instance in this story: I’m writing about a world in which Upton Sinclair won the EPIC campaign here in California, but Landon beat Roosevelt in ’36. As a result California drifts more to the left and the nation to the extreme right until there is civil war, ending in the establishment on the west coast of the first English-speaking socialist republic. From there on . . . but I’m not too sure yet myself of all the details. You’d better wait and read it.”
Marshall whistled. “You boys think of the goddamnedest things.”
“Oh, the concept’s not original with me. Just this application. I think Stanley Weinbaum was the first to play with it seriously in his Worlds of If in the old Amazing. Then there’s de Camp’s brilliant Wheels of If, and a Broadway turkey called If Booth Had Missed, and an excellent short story of Stephen Vincent Benet’s about if Napoleon had been born twenty years earlier. And of course there’s If, or History Rewritten, by Belloc and Chesterton and Guedalla and a dozen others—noble book!—or on a less cosmic plane, just the if’s of a human life, there’s the Dunsany play If or Priestley’s beautiful intellectual thriller, Dangerous Corner.’’ He reeled off this comprehensive bibliography as casually as he drank his beer.
“I’ll try some of those,” said Marshall.
“The best thing in that book of collected If essays is one called If Lee Had Lost at Gettysburg. You read that title and do a double take and say, ‘But he did lose.’ Then as you read on, you realize that the essay is written as by a professor living in the world in which Gettysburg was a great Southern victory, speculating on the possibilities of an if-world in which it was a defeat (that is, of course, our world) and thereby revealing the nature of his own. Dazzling job, and you know who wrote it? Winston Churchill, no less. There’s a certain satisfaction in claiming him as a brother fantasy writer.”
“I’ll watch out for this story of yours,” Marshall said, and meant it. “What’s its name?”
“EPIC. Don Stuart likes one word titles, and that has a good double meaning in this case. Only it won’t be under my name; it’ll be by Robert Hadley.”
“Why?”
“Because all the Austin Carter stories have to fit that chart over there. They’re all interdependent—running characters and a consistent scheme of the future. That is, the events of story A are part of the background to story N happening a thousand years later. Sort of a millennial and galactic comédie humaine, and hard as hell to keep track of without that chart. And even with it. So whatever’s outside the series is by Robert Hadley—that is, in a one-cent market or better. I don’t like to hurt the commercial value of those names, so whenever I sell a reject for under a cent it’s by Clyde Summers.”
Marshall found himself fascinated, almost against his will. Austin Carter was possibly a trifle too fond of hearing himself talk, but he talked well. Another man’s shop talk, if the man is intelligent, is the most interesting listening to be found; and this particular brand of shop talk was exceptionally so.
Nevertheless, the Lieutenant was there on duty. “What are your working hours?” he asked.
“I get up around eight-thirty as a rule, and I’m down here pounding by nine-thirty. Grab lunch whenever I feel like knocking off, and then if it’s going good work on till three or four. Some men, I know, work best at night; but I like daytimes unless I’m rushing against a deadline.”
“You’ve been working all day on this?”
“Yes, except for a sandwich a little while ago, and doing pretty nicely. It flows today.”
“And alone, of course?” Carter looked at him oddly, and Marshall shifted to, “I mean, I wonder if you have many intruders like me?”
“No, and frankly I’d add ‘Thank God’ if you hadn’t happened to hit me just at a moment when I was glad to knock off. Like another beer?”
“Thanks, I think I will. Tell me, Carter. You have a nice speculative mind. Do you ever apply it to other problems than science and fantasy?”
Austin Carter handed over the beer. “You mean like murder?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“I remembered your wife was a fan. Thought maybe she’d been springing some problem on you.”
“As a matter of fact, that’s just the case. She’s trying her hand at a whodunit herself, and she’s written herself into a locked room that she can’t get out of. I thought maybe you’d like to play.”
Carter nodded. “Go ahead. I’ll try anything. Kick an idea around enough and sometimes you get places.”
“All right: You’ve got a man with a knife plunged into his back at such an angle that the doctor swears the wound can’t possibly be self-inflicted. He’s in the study of his apartment, a room that has three doors. One of these leads to a dead end in a bathroom. One has three absolutely reliable witnesses in front of it who swear that no one has used it. The third is chained from the inside, and opens only an inch so that no hand could conceivably have reached in to fasten that chain. The window screens are latched on the inside, and the wall outside the windows, which are three stories from the ground, is absolutely sheer. She was trying a locked room to end all locked rooms, and I’m afraid she’s over-reached herself.”
Marshall was watching his host carefully throughout this recital, but he failed to detect the slightest flicker of guilty knowledge. Instead a growing grin of amusement spread over Carter’s lean face. He took a long swig of beer and announced, “Simplicity itself, my dear Watson.”
“That’s nice,” Marshall observed dryly. “So how did the murderer get out?”
“Well, I can think of three possible methods: A, he never got out because he never was there. The dagger was conveyed through space and plunged into the victim’s heart by teleportation. See Charles Fort and don’t laugh too hastily. If stones can fall from the ceiling in a closed room, if people can burn to death on unburnt beds, teleporting a dagger should be simple. Not that I’m certain of the angle of the direction on a teleported stab; but aside from that, do you like it?”
“Go on.”
“B, the murderer dissembled his component atoms on one side of the wall, filtered through by osmosis, and reassembled them on the other side. Not that I think much of that one. I’m inclined to believe the conscious or subconscious rearrangement of the corporeal atoms accounts for the change of a werewolf and for the vampire’s ability to pass through locked doors; but I doubt if any normal, non-supernatural being has mastered the power.”
Marshall entered into the spirit of the thing. “Is there any guarantee that the murderer is normal and non-super-natural?”
“In a whodunit, yes. Rules of the game. In life, of course, you couldn’t be so sure, could you? But C, and far more likely, the murderer simply entered and left through the fourth dimension of space. Remember that to a dweller in two-dimensional space, the problem of how to enter a square bounded on all four sides is a fantastic and insoluble one. To us, there’s nothing to it; we simply enter through the third dimension. For instance—”
His deft fingers arranged four matches in a square on the desk. “Our friend Ignatius Q. Flatman” (who was a paper clip) “wants to get in there. He tries each wall of the square, Im-possible. But I can simply lift up Ignatius . . . so . . . and put him plumb square in the middle of his impossible situation. Just so your murderer could leave the locked room by means of another dimension perpendicular to all three of those we know. Or maybe prettier yet: maybe Something lifted him up out of that room, just as I now lift up Ignatius, and maybe Something will eventually, in Its whimsical mood, drop him . . . so . . . right into your lap.”
Marshall picked up Ignatius Q. Flatman and began twisting him cruelly. “That’s all?”
“Did I say three? Well, here’s a fourth, and this I like best. D, the murderer entered the room by perfectly ordinary methods and left it equally ordinarily, probably by the living-room door.”
“But the evidence states—”
“I know. Only you see, the murderer did this at— What time did the murder occur?”
“Between ten-thirty and eleven.”
“Then the murderer left around say nine o’clock.”
“Before the murder?”
“Of course. He committed the murder, set the dials of his trusty time machine back an hour or so, and left the room. He could lock every conceivable exit from the inside and then calmly go back and leave by one of those exits before he had locked it. And better yet, to the Impossible Situation he could add the Perfect Alibi. He could then call on the detective in charge of the case and be visiting with him at the exact hour when the murder was being committed.”
“I’m groggy,” said Marshall.
“You see why we can’t have detective stories in science fiction? It’s the one impossible form for Don’s hypothetical magazine of the twenty-fifth century. So many maneuverings are logically possible that you could never conceivably exclude the guilt of anyone. So you understand now how childishly simple your locked room is to a science fictioneer?”
“I understand.” Marshall sounded a little grim.
“And now, Lieutenant, maybe you’ll be so kind as to tell me if you have any idea who killed Hilary?”
Marshall was drinking beer when this grenade was so lightly tossed at him. His spluttering did not do his suit any good, and it was the one that had just come back from the cleaners. Now he was on his feet, and towering over the seated Carter.
“Unless,” he said slowly, “you can offer me some convincing explanation of that remark, you’re going to take a little trip downtown.”
“I believe I am supposed at this point to light a cigarette nonchalantly? Very well, I hereby do so.” The flame of the match was steady in his hand. “Of course I knew who you were, Lieutenant. No, Matt didn’t betray you; but I remembered your name faintly from accounts of the Rheem business and the Harrigan case, and I knew that Concha Duncan was a Harrigan. So when you, a homicide detective presumably on duty, come here and listen obligingly to my ravings until you get a chance to ask where I was this morning, I begin to have my suspicions. Then you propound in detail a ‘hypothetical’ murder case supposedly being written by your wife. That was too much, Lieutenant. My own wife writes, I know, and very well indeed thank you; but I doubt if she’d do much with two children to look after. No, you miscast your wife so grievously that I became sure I was being Grilled for my Guilty Knowledge of a true murder.”
“And why Hilary?” Marshall insisted quietly.
“Then it was? You don’t mind if I emit a small Yippee!, do you?”
“You admit that you’d be glad to see him dead?”
“Of course. That’s why I guessed that your visit concerned him. You’d mentioned him last night, and he was the only person I could think of that I might possibly have a motive for murdering.”
For a moment the two men contemplated each other in silence. Then Austin Carter said, “Another beer?”
Marshall relaxed. “No, thanks.”
“I’ve heard sinister rumors that the police won’t accept the hospitality of murderers.”
“That’s the British for you. We’re not so ritualistic. But I’ve got to go talk with Hilary.”
Carter raised an eyebrow. “Lieutenant! Spiritualism yet?”
Marshall smiled. “No. You see, Carter, the attack failed. Hilary Foulkes is still very much alive.”
Carter was startled and displeased. “Oh well,” he said after a pause. “Half a loaf . . .”
“Of course.”
“And I’m not under arrest?”
“We’ll see what Hilary has to say. Thanks for the beer.” Marshall paused in the doorway. “By the bye, confidential-like, which of those methods did you use?”
“The time machine, of course. Care for a demonstration?”
“Some other time. Soon.”
The typing was resumed almost as soon as Marshall had shut the door behind him.
6.
Marshall mounted the impressive steps leading to the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. At the Emergency Hospital they had told him, “He was well enough to move all right, and he insisted he wanted to recover in comfort.” And the Cedars, which is the hospital in Hollywood, was of course far more fitting for a Foulkes scion than the Emergency.
“I’d like to see Mr. Foulkes,” he said at the desk.
“Lord, no. I’m from the police.”
“Oh. Just a moment. I’ll see if he can see you.”
Marshall frowned. “He’s all right, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but—”
A young man with buck teeth said, “What room’s Hilary Foulkes?”
“Are you from the press?” the girl repeated.
“Sure thing, baby?” The youth waved a card.
“Go right on up. Third floor. The floor desk will direct you.”
Marshall gasped. “Look!” he expostulated. “You keep the police waiting while you send that pup—”
“I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Foulkes left orders to admit only the press. If you’ll wait a—”
But Marshall was already in the elevator. He didn’t bother to be polite at the third floor desk. He showed his badge and said “Foulkes?” in a derby-hat voice.
There were five men in Hilary’s room, all with pencils and pads. There was a pneumatic nurse deftly arranging flowers. And there was Hilary, propped up in bed, leaning forward to ease the wound in his back but looking otherwise as good as new. “D-e-r,” he was saying, “r-i-n, g-e-r. Oh, Lieutenant, glad to see you. Very glad. Can you imagine it? Some of these youths haven’t read the Dr. Derringer stories.”
“A corrupt generation,” Marshall observed. “As soon as the limelight begins to tire your eyes, Mr. Foulkes, there are a few matters I’d like to take up with you.”
“Lieutenant,” one of the reporters echoed. “Say! You wouldn’t be from Homicide, would you?”
“It’s an honorary commission from the Swiss navy,” said Marshall, and watched the nurse abstractedly while Hilary made certain that every significant detail of his father’s career went into the reporters’ notebooks. Two books, presumably rushed from home for the occasion, stood by the bedside: Life and Dr. Derringer: An Autobiography by Fowler Foulkes, and Foulkes the Man by Darrell Wimpole. But Hilary never found the need to refer to them. He knew his subject as thoroughly as an actor in Tobacco Road must have known his lines toward the end of the run, or perhaps more appropriately, as thoroughly as a priest knows the words of the daily sacrifice of the Mass. The ritual words had their ritual gesture too. Instead of the gnawing of a turnip or the sign of the Cross, this was the pulling of a lobe. And with this echoing tug at the ear, Hilary seemed to recapture a little of the domineering dignity so characteristic of his father’s publicity photographs.
“By the time,” Marshall said when the last of the pressmen had left, “that all that goes out over the A. P. and the U. P., it ought to sell a few thousand more Foulkes items.”
“You mean . . . ?” Hilary laughed. “Why, Lieutenant, I do believe you think me guilty of playing this up simply to stimulate the influx of royalties. Heavens, I am shocked at such an idea. Shocked. It’s simply that I owe so much to my father. Everything, you might say.”
“You might.”
“So naturally I feel that it is incumbent upon me to keep his memory green. I could hardly pass up the one pleasant aspect of this most astonishing occurrence.”
“You’re cool, Mr. Foulkes, aren’t you?”
“I’m alive,” said Hilary simply. “Alive. And that in itself is such a sheer and beautiful relief that I don’t care to contemplate how close to death I was.”
Marshall turned to the nurse. “Could you go have a beer or something? I’m afraid this conference is confidential official business.”
The nurse looked from the badge to the Lieutenant’s face. “I like Dick Tracy’s jaw better,” she said, but she left.
Hilary leaned farther forward. “Tell me, Lieutenant, have you arrested him?”
Marshall nearly sighed with relief. “Then you did see who it was. And I suppose the press learned it before I did. Well, come on. There’ll be a warrant out for him in nothing flat.”
“Oh no, Lieutenant. You misunderstand me. I thought that by now you’d know.”
Marshall swore. “I not only don’t know Who, but I haven’t the remotest idea of How. But start in at the beginning; maybe your story will give me some sort of a lead.”
“I was talking to you,” Hilary said slowly. “You remember. You were asking me about Austin Carter—” He broke off sharply. “Did he do it? Austin Carter, I mean?”
“Sure,” said Marshall sourly. “He confessed. He did it with his little gadget.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do I? But go ahead. We’ll catch up on Mr. Carter later.”
“Very well. I was talking to you, as I say, when suddenly I heard a light footfall behind me. I started to turn, but before I could do so I felt a terrible pain between my shoulder-blades. A terrible pain. It was accompanied by a blow so strong that it knocked me forward against the desk. I tried to rise, but I lost my balance and fell to the floor. And that is the last that I remember until I was in the Emergency Hospital.”
“You saw nothing, and you heard only a ‘light footfall?’ ”
“Correct, Lieutenant.”
“Could you gage anything by that footfall? Male or female? Large or small?”
“I’m afraid not. I didn’t have time to listen carefully.”
“It surprised you?”
“Very much.”
“Then wouldn’t that perhaps indicate male and heavy? If the sound could possibly have meant the not abnormal presence of your wife or the maid, you mightn’t have been so startled.”
Hilary beamed. “Beautiful, Lieutenant, beautiful. I am convinced that you will have apprehended this villain in no time. No time at all.”
“Now tell me: When you went into the study, was the night chain fastened on the hall door?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure I don’t know. It usually is.”
“And were the windows open or closed?”
“Closed.”
“All of them?”
“I open one window when I go in to settle down for my morning’s work on the estate accounts. But this morning I had come directly from the breakfast table to the phone.”
Marshall grunted. “Gecko,” he said.
Hilary peered at him curiously. “Yes, Lieutenant?”
“Hell, I might as well tell you. Even if a window was God knows why opened, nobody could get in or out through those windows.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Your wife and two visiting nuns were watching the door to the living-room. No one came out between the phone call and when I found you. And the night chain was on the hall door.”
“My . . . !” said Hilary in an awed voice. “My . . . !”
“In short, if it weren’t for the medical evidence on your wound, I’d suspect you of staging the whole thing for the sake of that press conference you just had—all purely to keep your father’s memory green, of course.”
“Lieutenant! Then this . . . Why, it’s a locked room! Heavens, I am fortunate!”
“Fortunate?”
“Because it’s you on the case. That Harrigan business was a locked room too, and look how neatly you disposed of that. So neatly. Why, you’re the ideal man for this. And it’s the ideal case for you.”
“That’s nice.”
“And there must be some way of telling who was in there and attacked me. Fingerprints?” he suggested with the layman’s blind confidence.
“Only yours and the maid’s. Even yours alone on the dagger, with superimposed smudges, some of which were doubtless made in extracting it from you. Which while we’re at it . . .” He reached into his breast pocket and produced a murderously beautiful piece of Persian metal work. “Do you know this?”
“Why, of course! That’s my paper cutter. It was my father’s. The Zemindar of Kota Guti presented it to him after reading The Purple Light. So many people think that was my father’s best book, although he himself always preferred The Missions in Twilight. What do you think, Lieutenant?”
“I’ll take up esthetics with you later, Mr. Foulkes. God knows there’s nothing I like better than talking about Dr. Derringer; but right now I want to know if this back-stabbing paper cutter was on your desk this morning?”
“Frankly, Lieutenant, I don’t know. Frankly. I was hurrying to answer the phone. I didn’t notice my desk.”
“It’s unlikely that the murderer reached over your shoulder to snatch up the weapon. It was probably taken earlier, which would indicate . . . Was it there yesterday?”
“Yesterday? Yes. Yes, I’m sure. I used it to open my mail.”
“At what time?”
“About three.”
“Then at some time between three yesterday and ten-thirty this morning, this knife was stolen. Or even if the murderer somehow snaffled it right from under your nose, its use still implies familiarity with your study.” Marshall ran his thumb along the blade. “See how short that is? That’s what you probably owe your life to. The same wound with a longer blade could have been fatal.”
“But Lieutenant . . .” Hilary’s round face was puzzled.
“Yes?”
“There isn’t anyone familiar with my study. Oh, of course Ron and Jenny and Alice. But all these others that we’ve spoken of, the people whom I may have offended as executor—that’s all been by mail.”
“So. And your brother-in-law?”
“Vance? But he’s I don’t know where and anyway . . .”
Marshall rose. “Just the same, I’d like to have a complete list of all your potential business enemies.”
“I think Jenny could give you that more easily than I could. Miss Green, that is. She sometimes acts as my secretary, you know. She understands all about files and things.”
“I’ll speak to her. And I want you to know, for your own comfort, Mr. Foulkes, that there’s going to be a police guard in the corridor of this hospital until you leave and another at your home thereafter. And I’d advise you not to see any newspapermen except in groups, and even then not without checking their credentials. I would advise you not to see them at all, but one impossible problem is enough to tackle at a time.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Thank you. And you’ll let me know when you catch my murderer, won’t you?”
That last request was so touchingly childish that it set Marshall off on a new train of thought. Perhaps that was the key to Hilary: his infinite childishness. Like a child he avidly hoarded his treasures, like a child he marveled adoringly at the perfection of his wonderful father, like a child . . . Marshall thought of the ripe-fleshed Veronica Foulkes. What would it be like to be married to a child?
A telephone booth reminded him of a distasteful but necessary piece of routine work. He stepped in, dropped his nickel, and dialed the Duncans’ number. They lived in the apartment house across the street, but he preferred the impersonality of a phone for this purpose.
He was glad that Concha answered. “Terence Marshall speaking,” he said, “and don’t tell Matt. Is he in earshot?”
“He went out for a walk. But what is this, Lieutenant? I suppose I ought to feel flattered when a handsome officer asks me to keep secrets from my husband, but I’m just plain puzzled.”
“Only this: Where was Matt this morning?”
“Working, of course.”
“You were in the apartment too?”
“I was ironing and mending. All but when I went out to shop.”
“How long were you gone?”
“A half hour or more. Maybe almost an hour.”
“And this was when?”
“Between ten and eleven. But Lieutenant, you sound like an alibi. I mean, like trying to check one. Are you—?”
“Please, Concha. You’ll understand soon enough what this is all about. And you’ll see why I insist you don’t say a word to Matt about this. For the sake of routine, I had to check up on him; but there’s no use worrying him.”
“And he’s in the clear?” Concha’s voice was breathless.
“He’s in the clear,” Marshall lied, and hung up.
7.
The newspapers did well by the event. Even in the midst of wars and rumors of wars, the mysterious stabbing of a celebrity is always welcome, and Hilary had gladly provided further details of bombs and poisoned chocolates. The story was enriched by a brief biography of Fowler Foulkes and a condensed bibliography of his best known works; and all in all neither Hilary nor his publishers had the slightest cause for complaint.
Bernice Carter was reading the evening paper when her husband emerged from the Nitrosyncretic Laboratory. “Fate, milord, is just,” she observed.
“Hilary?” Austin Carter asked casually.
“Uh huh. Somebody tried to carve him up under highly unlikely circumstances. That’ll teach him to frustrate film sales. Here’s the paper; you can— But hold on a minute!”
Carter struck a match on the stone fireplace and lit a cigarette. “Yes?”
“How did you know I meant Hilary?”
“People,” he sighed, “keep asking me how I know things. Haven’t they any faith in E.S.P.? Don’t they realize my latent potentialities as a telepath?”
“But how did you know?”
“My trusting helpmate . . . That Lieutenant Marshall dropped in this afternoon and, as I believe the proper phrase goes, grilled me. Oh, very unobtrusively, you understand.”
“And what did you do?”
“What should I do? I confessed, of course. Worked out a magnificent scheme for committing murder with a time machine. I think it’ll make a good novelet for Don.”
Bernice smiled. “Scavenger! Here I try to frame my imaginings out of whole cloth, but you simply grab everything that happens and twist it into science fiction. Thank God at least for Don’s strict standards of censorship. They’re all that prevents my most intimate secrets from being broadcast to every newsstand at a cent a word.”
“A cent and a half, I think,” Austin Carter said judiciously. “They’d surely rate a bonus.”
“But, sweet . . .” Bernice’s cool voice was for once a trifle perturbed.
“Yes, madam?”
“If the Lieutenant thought you were worth grilling . . . You haven’t—you aren’t tied up with this in any way, are you? You didn’t . . . do anything to Hilary?”
“No, madam.” His voice was level and convincing.
Bernice smiled again. “Then why the hell didn’t you?”
8.
Veronica Foulkes threw down the paper. Her teacup rattled ominously as she stirred it. “Not a word about me! Why, Hilary might not even have a wife for all that . . . that rag says.”
“Come now, Veronica,” Jenny Green protested. “How can you worry about a trifle like that when Hilary’s lying there in that hospital—”
“—in perfect ease and comfort with a beautiful nurse and reporters simply flocking around him. No, Jenny, I haven’t much sympathy to waste on Hilary. Heaven knows how he got into this trouble, but I think he’s come out of it very luckily. Hilary doesn’t know what nerves are, any more than you do.”
“But is he out of it? If they’ve made all these attempts, they aren’t going to stop now, are they?”
Veronica set down the cup she was lifting. “My God, Jenny! That’s true. They might come back and . . . Oh but no. That dreadful Lieutenant has given him a police guard and it’s coming home with him and we’re perfectly safe. So do relax, dear. Can’t you see how I need soothing? A woman with my nerves can stand only so much.”
Jenny Green left a fresh cup untouched and rose. “I see. You know, Ron, I can stand only so much too.”
“You can stand . . . ! Oh but my dear! And what concern is it of yours, I’d like to know? Oh, I know Hilary is your cousin, and very fortunate you’ve been having such a lovely home here with us, and that’s all the more reason you should show a little consideration for me. How many wives, I ask you, would let their husbands bring relatives into their own house to live with them?”
“Come off it, Veronica.” Jenny Green was not quite smiling. “If you hadn’t tolerated me in your lovely home, Hilary would have had to have a typist. And how many wives would let their husband et cetera as above?”
Veronica laughed. “Now that, my dear Jenny, is simply nonsense. Do you think for a moment that I could be jealous of Hilary? Do you think I don’t know . . .” She stopped herself. “All I can say is, if any woman could ever lure Hilary into being unfaithful to me, she’d be welcome to what she got. And what do you think that means to a woman of my—”
“Veronica.” Jenny’s voice was cold. “Sometimes I think it would be better for everyone, and certainly for Hilary, if you would simply stop talking and go ahead and take either a lover or the veil. But I’m afraid the trouble is you’d want to do both.”
“How dare . . . !” Veronica’s ordinarily throaty voice grew speechlessly shrill. “If Hilary ever— Where are you going?”
“To my room. I need to do some typing for Hilary.”
Veronica Foulkes, left alone, bit her lips, stamped her foot, and squeezed from her eyes the start of a spate of tears. Then abruptly she reconsidered, wiped her eyes, and examined her face in a compact mirror. It was possible that reporters might call.
9.
The green-furred, six-legged corpse of the blasted thryx slung across his brawny shoulders, Captain Comet made his laborious way over the endless Martian desert. For two days he had seen no sign of life, save for the thryx, whose murderous attack he had foiled at the last minute by the decompo-rays of his blaster.
Now even the blaster was no longer of use. It needed recharging, and that must wait until he found the space ship again. His emergency sythetic rations were dwindling too. Gah-Djet, the mechanical brain, was in the hands of the xurghil smugglers. Adam Fink was a clanking prisoner in the power of the mad priests of Ctarbuj. And the Princess Zurilla . . .
Captain Comet shook his weary head to clear it of these dismal thoughts. The bright orange blood of the thryx dripped down his shoulders as he mounted yet another of the endless dunes of rosy Martian sand. Might the space ship lie beyond this one? His radio-sensitive indicator gave clear evidence of a source of atomic power somewhere nearby.
He topped the dune. And there, spread out before in the shadow of evening, gleamed . . .
Was it a typical Martio-mirage? Or was it . . . his heart stopped . . . was it the fabulously Lost City of Xanatopsis?
Joe Henderson jerked the paper from the typewriter. “Now I wonder,” he said quietly in answer to his own question. Then he looked at the couch. “Still counting ping-pennies?”
M. Halstead Phyn granted a negative. “Reading the paper.” He was silent for a minute, then let out a loud Kee-rist! “But in spades!” he added feelingly.
“What is it?”
“Look at this. Just look at this, will you?”
Joe Henderson read the article. “My!” was all he said.
The agent was aflame. “But look, Joe. It’s perfect. See, it says here this is only the latest of a series of attempts. All right, so if anybody’s working on a series he’s not going to stop with this installment. He’s going to carry right on, and the tag’s going to put the quietus on Hilary.”
“But why should you be so hepped up about it?”
“Why? Remember the deal with Galactic about the reprints? So now Hilary gets polished off, and who’ll be the executor of the estate? I don’t know for sure, you understand, but it’s odds on that it’ll be Vance Wimpole. All right, so Vance is executor. We can talk to him. He’s in the business. And after publicity like this, a Dr. Derringer reprint series’ll clean up. We won’t be able to turn ’em out fast enough. They’ll melt away from the stands, but melt! It’s perfect. Joey boy, if you ever prayed, do some tall praying for me now!”
“I don’t know,” Joe Henderson drawled. “I don’t know as I could pray for a man’s death. Not even,” he added after mature reflection, “for Hilary’s.”
“It’s dog eat dog in this racket, Joe. The hell with a conscience.”
“Besides,” Henderson added practically, “how can you be so sure Vance’ll kick through?”
“I’m sure enough. Oh, I’m sure all right.” A new and even brighter light began to glint in Phyn’s little eyes. “You know what, Joe? Vance never uses an agent, does he? Always sells direct?”
“Far’s I know.”
“I think . . . Yes, I think I’m going to handle all D. Vance Wimpole’s sales after this. He doesn’t know it yet; but he’s going to be glad to do it. Glad.” Phyn relaxed on the couch, grinning to himself.
10.
Concha Duncan set the steak on the table at once proudly and ruefully. “I’ll have to learn to be a better cook, Matt. I can broil a good steak, but . . .”
Matt whetted the carving knife, with a gleam in his eyes betokening an already whetted appetite. “Steak’s all right by me. Show me the man that doesn’t welcome it.”
“I know. But you keep saying I ought to shop within the budget and I keep getting good advice from Leona on what to do with cheap cuts and they go all wrong so I get some more steak, and look what it does to the budget If you’d only let me . . .”
Matt cut through crisp brown into succulent red and watched rich warm juice flow onto the platter. “Now, darling. We won’t go into that again. We are living on my income. Such, God help us, as it is.”
“All right.” Concha seated herself and began to serve the peas and the mashed potatoes. “I think they’re good this time for once. No lumps. Maybe I’ll reach up to Leona’s standards yet.”
“Leona,” Matt stated, “is probably the most admirable wife man ever had. And I wouldn’t swap you for her, not even with Terry and Ursula and the Lieutenant’s salary thrown in.”
Concha blew a kiss across the table and said, “Sweet.”
“And the potatoes are wonderful.”
“The man said they were an extra good shipment. Oh, when I was out shopping I ran into Doris Clyde. You wouldn’t know her, but she was at school with me. Awfully nice girl. And first thing I thought when I saw her was, ‘Maybe here’s a girl for Joe.’ Only it turns out she’s married. He’s a draftsman out at Douglas and doing ever so well.”
“Everybody we meet outside of the M.L.S. is either in aircraft or in social service. They’re the two great professions of the day. And the draft coming up for tomorrow. I bet you could get some symbolism out of that if you worked on it . . . But why is it you women are always trying to find a girl for Joe? Bernice is just as bad. Why not leave the poor boy alone?”
“Because he’s . . . I don’t know . . . he’s so kind of sweet and helpless. You go all over motherly and you think the poor lamb needs a Good Woman.”
“He wouldn’t want a Good Woman if he had her. I think what Joe really wants is an honest-to-god bitch unhung, like his villainesses. Good women bore him terribly—or at any rate, that’s his story.”
“But the . . . the other sort’d be so bad for him. He’s so kind and gentle.”
“Then leave well enough alone. I’m glad your girl friend was married. Any other exciting adventures while marketing?”
“No . . . Matt . . . ?”
“Yes?”
“Were you home all the time I was gone?”
“Sure. Why? Expecting a delivery or something?”
“No, it’s just . . . Oh, I just wondered.” They ate in silence for a moment. “Matt . . . do you think you really ought to talk that way you did the other night at the Marshalls? I mean about . . . you know.”
“About murdering Hilary?” Matt asked cheerfully. “Darling, was that shiver what is technically known as a wince? I’ve always wondered what one looked like.”
Concha laughed. “Don’t be silly. A wince is what you pull buckets out of wells with.”
“Oh. I thought it was something you made jelly out of.”
“Or of course,” Concha suggested, “it could be what you start a bedtime story with. Wince upon a time . . .”
Matt looked into her eyes. “All right. Bright gay nonsense dialog. Swell. Only something’s worrying you. What’s wrong about Hilary?”
“I . . . I heard it on the radio while I was working in the kitchen this afternoon. Matt: Somebody did try to kill Hilary.”
Her husband stared at her. “Well shut my big mouth!” he said softly.
11.
In the lounge car of the Lark, Pullman train from San Francisco to Los Angeles, a tall thin man with a pale face and flaming hair sat contentedly with two highballs and a blonde.
“. . . and just as I fired,” he was saying, “the jaguar sprang between us. The force of the rifle bullet was so great that it carried him right on into the gaping jaws of the lion, so violently that the lion choked to death. Thereby saving me one bullet.”
“I don’t believe it,” said the blonde.
D. Vance Wimpole smiled to himself. “I’ll try another one. This evening I read in the paper, much to my astonishment, that a murderous attack had been made on my brother-in-law. He was stabbed almost to death in a room that was locked or watched at every entrance. No one could have got in or out, and there in the middle of the room lay my brother-in-law with a dagger in his back. Do you believe that?”
“No,” said the blonde.
“I don’t blame you.” Wimpole twirled his drink meditatively. “I don’t blame you at all. That’s why I’m going to Los Angeles, you know. If anybody’s really set on murdering my brother-in-law, I wouldn’t think of missing the fun for worlds. But meanwhile—”
“Hn?” said the blonde.
“Meanwhile the night is young and first we’re going to have another drink and then there’s no telling what may develop.”
“I believe that,” said the blonde.
12.
Sister Ursula had learned nothing fresh from the newspaper accounts, but the facts of Hilary’s locked room continued to plague and distract her as she aided Sister Rose in arranging the altar for tomorrow’s Mass.
Tomorrow would be November second, All Souls’ Day, the day that the church consecrates especially to the memory of the dead. Hilary would recover from this wound; that seemed certain. But murderers are a notoriously persistent breed. By another All Souls’ Day, would there be his departed soul to pray for? And perhaps another, a soul that had departed this body in a small chamber filled with gas?
And there was the floater Tarbell, so nebulous a character, whose soul had already gone to the private judgment. Animula vagula nebula, Sister Ursula thought wryly, and then shifted to more appropriate church Latin: Requiescat in pace.
And is not that, she mused, a fitting prayer for the living too? Let them rest in peace. Those who suffer and struggle and strive to kill, let them rest in peace. Let us rest in peace.