Charade

 

Being back in the private room where we’d dined on the night of the murder was eerie. With the elegant moldings on the ceiling and the portraits of serious-looking men (mostly) and women (a few) on the walls, it was all just the same. That didn’t seem right. Murder should have changed something.

Besides, a hundred years had passed. No, it was only one day short of a week. I took Lynda’s hand and held it.

Over the next ten or fifteen minutes I watched the faces of people who came into the room: Father Joe Pirelli, looking his age, face lined and warn; Ralph Pendergast, by turns agitated and pompous; Karl Hoffer, chatting in that infuriatingly rational way refined on the talk show circuit; Lamont Miller, curious and asking lots of questions; Willie Nelson, going by the name of Lem Carpenter, a fish out of water in the elegant surroundings. Quandra Hall and Howard Fitzwater came in last, together, not fighting. Three of Erin’s finest, including the unflappable Officer Gibbons, stood on the edges of the room, looking about as casual as a Marine Corps color guard.

Somewhere in that crowd, if Mac was right, lurked the face of a double murderer.

When Quandra and Fitzwater had arrived, Mac cleared his throat, a sound roughly equivalent to that of a bull in heat. The nervous chatter around the room dried up like an overcooked hamburger.

He asked everybody to sit down and we did, spread out over two tables.

“I wish to begin this highly irregular convocation by thanking you all for coming,” Mac said.

“The conventional response that you are welcome would be highly hypocritical on my part,” Ralph retorted. “I, for one, am here under protest. The only reason I am here at all is because of my respect for Father Pirelli, who requested my presence.”

Talk about ‘hypocritical’ . . . !

“I thought it important that we hear you out, Sebastian,” Father Joe said, “but to call this gathering merely ‘irregular’ is a substantial understatement.”

Mac nodded. “Understandably, the entire concept of what I propose, re-enacting the murder of Rodney Stonecipher, has been dismissed as, quote, corny.” He seemed pained that he couldn’t come up with a longer word. “However, this corniness has a purpose. I intend to demonstrate how the murder was accomplished. For without that demonstration, no one in this room would believe my explanation possible.”

“Shitfire,” Fitzwater mumbled.

“Mr. Fitzwater, would you consent to play the part of the late Mr. Stonecipher?”

The beefy businessman looked around uneasily, as if expecting a trap but not being able to figure out whether the trap would be sprung by saying yes or by saying no.

“I don’t like the - oh, what the hell, why not. I’m not really going to get killed, am I?” He forced a laugh, like a man who knows his joke isn’t really very funny.

“With all of these armed policeman on hand, you should feel perfectly safe,” Mac assured him. I had a feeling that wasn’t just for Fitzwater’s benefit. “Just be certain to follow my instructions to the letter. Now for the telephone call that Rodney Stonecipher answered that night.”

Mac waved his cell phone in Lynda’s direction. “Would you be so kind?”

“Sure.”

Another prize-winning first-person account, she must have been thinking.

Mac handed her the phone and a small index card with writing on it. “Dial the phone number written there, please.”

There was something strange in Lynda’s gold and brown eyes, something I couldn’t read. “But, Mac, this is -”

“ - part of the demonstration,” Mac said. “Please do as I ask.”

She dialed the number.

The phone in the adjacent room, the murder room, rang faintly behind the half-closed door. That sound sent pins and needles creeping all over my body. It was like being back on the murder night with one difference: This time I knew the ringing of the phone heralded somebody’s death, which creeped me out even though it was only make-believe.

“Professor Hoffer, please answer the phone - as you did that night,” Mac said.

The psychologist nodded indulgently and crossed the room. He opened the door of the little study all the way and went in. Every eye in the larger room seemed to be on the open doorway as the ringing of the phone stopped.

“Hello,” Lynda said into the mouthpiece of her phone, breaking a near-absolute silence. “Is Peter Gerard there, please?”

“But I didn’t say that,” Lamont Miller protested loudly.

Hoffer stuck his head out of the study. “I know you now,” he told Lamont. “I had you in a class once. Lamont Somebody. What do you have to do with this business?”

“All will become clear shortly, I assure you,” Mac said. “Professor Hoffer, please proceed.”

Hoffer emerged from the study. “This is where I come out and the victim goes in.”

If you’d been there, maybe you’d have felt a little chill, too, at the casual use of the word “victim.”

“You have that backwards,” Mac pointed out. He was standing near the door to the study. “Mr. Stonecipher enters the room and then you come out after you give him the phone. Please return to the study until you hand over the phone.”

Saying nothing, but looking exasperated, Hoffer obediently went back into the room.

Howard Fitzwater stood up. “I’m not any kind of an actor. What do you want me to do?”

“Go into the room, close the door behind you, and accept the telephone from Professor Hoffer. Make sure the other door - the one into the hallway - is locked as it was on the murder night.”

“But it wasn’t,” Hoffer called from inside the study. “You thought it was at first, but I showed that it wasn’t. It had to have been unlocked. That’s the only way the killer could have gotten in.”

“The door was locked,” Mac said firmly. “The murderer’s mode of entrance will become apparent as we progress through this demonstration.”

Fitzwater closed the door.

“You must realize,” Mac told the rest of us, “that during this moment, and through most of what is to follow, the remaining members of the dinner party were engaged in spirited conversation. We were not paying attention to this door or this room.”

“Wasn’t it enough to live through this once without having to do it all over again?” Ralph asked the room at large.

Hoffer came out of the study, starting to close the door behind him.

“One moment,” Mac said, putting out his hand to stop the closing door. “Mr. Fitzwater - Rodney Stonecipher - from this point on you are dead. Put your head on the desk, please. That means you cannot speak if your name is called. Do you understand?”

“It’s your party, pal,” came Fitzwater’s muffled voice.

Mac closed the door and started back toward the rest of us.

“But you’re getting this all wrong,” Hoffer said crossly. “He isn’t dead until the second time I knock.”

Mac hit his forehead, a hammy gesture, in my opinion. “By thunder, you are right, of course!” He quickly took several large steps, bringing him back to the door of the study. His back to us, he knocked briskly. “Mr. Gerard, are you about finished in there?”

The same words Hoffer had used the week before, as best I could recall.

“Just a second,” came the answer, even more muffled than the last time Fitzwater had answered Mac.

“Fitz was right - he’s no actor,” Quandra said. “He blew his lines by talking. You told him before not to answer because he’s supposed to be dead.”

“Actually, he didn’t say a word,” Mac said.

Silence hung in the room, a silence so heavy it was almost tangible, like the air on a hot and humid summer day. Mac was clearly crazy; the only question was whether he was also dangerous. That was what I read on the faces as I looked around the room. I gave Oscar full marks for not exploding, but it was a near thing.

“What you thought was the victim talking just then was actually me,” Mac said. “I imitated Howard Fitzwater’s voice, using my rather basic skills in ventriloquism to make it appear that he was talking to us through the door. But for the purposes of our demonstration, he was dead - just as Mr. Stonecipher was dead when Karl Hoffer left him in that room on the murder night. Hoffer used the same technique that I just demonstrated to make it appear that his victim was still alive at that point. The illusion worked, and everyone else present believed that Mr. Stonecipher must have been killed later when Hoffer had the perfect alibi of being under constant observation by the rest of us.”

Hoffer looked around the room, seeing all eyes on him and Oscar’s men cautiously moving their hands in the direction of their firearms.

Oscar himself stood up. “That’s a damned serious accusation, Mac.”

Hoffer forced a raw chuckle. “Serious? You call that serious? Ventriloquism! I’ve met a lot of gullible people in my travels, but even the spiritualists would find that a tough one to swallow.”

“Tough to swallow?” Mac repeated. “I hardly think so. Not when the accused is a former professional magician who included ventriloquism in his act when performing for children. Not when he was several feet away from an audience paying him scant attention, little suspecting he would be attempting to gull them in the process of setting up a perfect alibi for murder. And certainly not when the same simple trick fooled all of you here tonight.”

Hoffer looked around as if trying to measure whether anyone was buying what Mac was selling. Everyone seemed to be listening intently, even Ralph and Oscar.

“I don’t know when I subconsciously began to suspect that something like that had been done,” Mac went on, “but all along I was dogged by the feeling that a grand misdirection was at work here.

“The breakthrough, however, came when Lamont Miller here stepped forward to tell me he had mistakenly dialed the number of that study phone on the evening of the murder. All of us who were here for hours that night could testify that only one call came in on the phone in all that time. It had to have been Lamont - with a wrong number. And so Karl Hoffer had to have been the person who answered. Lamont even said the voice sounded familiar - and Lamont is a psychology major for the time being.”

“I had Professor Hoffer last semester,” Lamont spoke up. “Yeah, it was him on the phone all right.”

“I was certain of that,” Mac said. “Why, then, did Hoffer say there was a call for Peter Gerard when in fact it was a wrong number? Only one reason made sense - to lure Mr. Stonecipher to his death. And when I noticed that the other door to the room was locked, Hoffer pretended to discover that it was merely jammed, thus opening the possibility that someone from the outside had entered and committed the murder. The door really had been locked from the inside, however, and there was no outside killer. Karl Hoffer, who entered through the only door anyone could have come through, killed Rodney Stonecipher.

“Only when I had reasoned this out did I remember that when Hoffer returned to this room afterward, he sat in Mr. Stonecipher’s chair next to me. His subconscious well understood that the previous occupant would not be needing it.”

“But the Gerard murder!” I objected. “Whoever did this killing must have done that one, too - and Hoffer couldn’t have. He was at home. I called him there myself within minutes of Gerard’s murder, or maybe even at the very same time.”

Hoffer delivered a Mona Lisa smile. “Thank you, Cody. I was wondering when you would say that. I have been somewhat amused by this nonsense up to now, but I’m afraid I insist -”

Mac interrupted. “Lynda, what telephone number did you call at my request tonight when the phone in the other room rang?”

“It’s Jeff’s - the phone in his apartment.”

“That phone, which is on my property and owned by me, is equipped with call forwarding. I activated that feature before I came here tonight, arranging it so that when Lynda called Jefferson’s number the call was forwarded to that phone in the study. I submit that Karl Hoffer did the same: To establish an alibi for himself, he told Jefferson to call him at home at the time he would be in that apartment after killing Peter. He then put his phone on call forwarding, sending Jefferson’s call - or any others that might have come through - to the phone at the murder scene. Undoubtedly he didn’t send it to his cell phone because that would have been obvious. Thus he created the impression that he was home during the second murder. It was another air-tight alibi, another illusion based on misdirection.”

Hoffer’s air of bemused tolerance slid away like a banana peel. He was openly agitated now. “You shouldn’t be doing this to me. I’m not really a well man. My heart - ” His hand stole in that direction - then swiftly dived into his suit coat and pulled out a gun.

Oscar and his men were as fast as Hoffer, but no faster. It looked like a Mexican standoff.

“I really wish you hadn’t made me do this, McCabe,” Hoffer said. I bet he meant it, too.

“Be sensible, Hoffer,” Oscar growled. “You’re facing four trained police officers with weapons drawn. You can’t get us all.”

Father Joe closed his eyes in pain. “Why did you kill those men, Professor Hoffer?”

Hoffer looked at Mac, who was closer to his gun than anybody and made a bigger target. “Did you figure out that part, too?”

“I think so. Rodney Stonecipher did graduate work at the University of Cincinnati and had written a thesis before he had his breakdown. The thesis was never submitted. My conjecture would be that you met him at a low point in his life, when he was depressed and badly in need of money, and you bought the thesis from him. Then you enrolled in a graduate degree program at Michigan State and submitted his work as your own - “The Psychology of Self-Deception,” it was called, according to your curriculum vitae on the St. Benignus website. You never expected to see Mr. Stonecipher again. When you did see him again it was such a shock that you panicked.”

“I didn’t panic,” Hoffer snapped. “I thought fast and adapted to the situation. You learn to do that when you perform magic for kids.

“He shouldn’t have come here. He would have spoiled everything for me just when I was on the verge of making it really big. How would it look if the man who exposed miracles turned out to be a fraud himself? I would have been ruined. I couldn’t have that.”

“But how did he threaten to expose you?” Lynda asked. “When did he have the chance?”

“He didn’t. I didn’t give him the chance. As soon as I recognized him, I knew he had to be disposed of. I didn’t know who he was at first, you see. It was the way he talked about self-deception after dinner, even using phrases from his thesis, that’s what made me remember him. And the way he looked at me, I could tell he knew me, too. So I started thinking about how to kill him. The phone call, the wrong number, showed me the way. It was Providential, you might say.” His killer-smile gave me the creeps. “I called Rodney into the room and crushed his head as soon as he took the phone. He never saw it coming.”

“My God!” Lem Carpenter put his head in hands.

“What about Gerard?” Oscar asked. “Why did you kill him?”

“He came into my office and started asking questions. I was afraid he was getting too close. But this one I planned. I worked out the alibi in advance and bought a gun. I dressed like a postman and hid the gun in my bag. It wasn’t a real postman’s bag and the ‘uniform’ was really just a blue shirt and gray pants, but I knew nobody looks twice at a postman. You see what you expect to see - just like you hear what you expect to hear when somebody knocks on a door and an answer comes back. It fooled everybody except you, McCabe, damn your soul.”

He lifted the gun.

Oscar moved forward. “Hoffer, don’t -”

But Hoffer ignored him. He shoved the gun up to the roof hoof his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The room thundered and shook like a freight train.

I turned away, my stomach queasy. Lynda wrapped her arms around me in a hug.

In the still aftermath of the horrible shock, I heard the door of the study jerk open. “What the hell’s going on out there?” Howard Fitzwater bellowed.