101 Mystery Stories

38 The Crooked Picture John Lutz

The room was a mess. The three of them, Paul Eastmont, his wife, Laura, and his brother, Cuthbert, were sitting rigidly and morosely. They were waiting for Louis Bratten.

“But just who is this Bratten?” Laura Eastmont asked in a shaking voice. She was a very beautiful woman, on the edge of middle age.

Cuthbert, recently of several large eastern universities, said, “A drunken, insolent sot.”

“And he’s a genius,” Paul Eastmont added, “in his own peculiar way. More importantly, he’s my friend.” He placed a hand on his wife’s wrist. “Bratten is the most discreet man I know.”

Laura shivered. “I hope so, Paul.”

Cuthbert rolled his king-size cigarette between thumb and forefinger, an annoyed look on his young, aquiline face. “I don’t see why you put such stock in the man, Paul. He’s run the gamut of alcoholic degeneration. From chief of homicide to — what? If I remember correctly, you told me some time ago that they’d taken away his private investigator’s license.”

He saw that he was upsetting his sister-in-law even more and shrugged his thin shoulders. “My point is that he’s hardly the sort of man to be confided in concerning this.” He looked thoughtful. “On the other hand, half of what he says is known to be untrue anyway.”

The butler knocked lightly, pushed one of the den’s double doors open, and Louie Bratten entered. He was a blocky, paunchy little man of about forty, with a perpetual squint in one eye. His coarse, dark hair was mussed, his suit was rumpled, and his unclasped tie hung crookedly outside one lapel. He looked as if he’d just stepped out of a hurricane.

“Bratten!” Paul Eastmont said in warm greeting. “You don’t know how glad I am to have you in on this!”

Cuthbert nodded coldly. “Mr. Bratten.”

Laura stared intently at her hands, which were folded in her lap.

“Give me a drink,” Bratten said.

Paul crossed to the portable bar and poured him a straight scotch, no ice.

Bratten sipped the scotch, smacked his lips in satisfaction, and then slouched in the most comfortable leather armchair in the den.

“Now, what’s bugging you, Paul?” he asked.

Cuthbert stood and leaned on the mantel. “It’s hardly a matter to be taken lightly,” he said coldly.

“How in hell can I take it lightly,” Bratten asked, “when I don’t even know what the matter is?”

Paul raised a hand for silence. “Let me explain briefly. Several years ago, before Laura and I had met, a picture was taken of her in a very — compromising pose. This photo fell into the hands of a blackmailer named Hays, who has been milking us for two hundred dollars a month for the past four years. Recently Hays needed some cash badly. He offered to give me the photo for five thousand dollars.”

Paul Eastmont glanced protectively at his embarrassed wife. “Naturally I agreed, and the deal was made. The negative, incidentally was destroyed long ago, and I happen to know that the photo wasn’t reproduced at any time since by taking a picture of it. That was part of the original blackmail arrangement. It’s the only picture in existence, an eight-by-ten glossy.”

“Interesting,” Bratten said.

“But Hays turned out to be a stubborn sort,” Paul went on. “He gave me the photograph yesterday, and like a fool I didn’t destroy it. He saw me put it in my wall safe. Last night he broke in here and tried to steal it back.”

“And did he?”

“We don’t know. Clark, the butler, sleeps in that part of the house, and he heard Hays tinkering about. He surprised him as he ran in here.”

“Terrific scotch,” Bratten said. “Did you have the photo?”

“Yes. It wasn’t in the wall safe. As you can see, he hurriedly rummaged about the room, lifting cushions, knocking over the lamp, we think looking for a place to hide the photo. Then he leaped out the window.”

“Caught?”

“Hurt himself when he landed and couldn’t run fast enough. Shot dead by the police just outside the gate. And he didn’t have the photo on his body, nor was it on the grounds.”

“Hays was a smart blackmailer,” Bratten said. He squinted at Paul. “You left the room as it was?”

Paul nodded. “I know your peculiar way of working. But the photo must be in this room. We looked everywhere, but we didn’t disturb anything, put everything back exactly the way we found it.”

“Ah, that’s good,” Bratten said, either of the scotch or of the Eastmonts’ actions. “Another drink, if you please.” He handed the empty glass up to Cuthbert, who was the only one standing.

“Really,” Cuthbert said, grabbing the glass. “If I had my way we wouldn’t have confided this to you.”

“We never did hit it off, did we?” Bratten laughed. “That’s probably because you have too much education. Ruins a man sometimes. Restricts his thinking.”

Cuthbert reluctantly gave Bratten his fresh drink. “You should be an expert on ruination.”

“Touch. That means touché in English.” Bratten leaned back and ran his tongue over his lips. “This puts me in mind of another case. One about ten years ago. There was this locked-room-type murder—”

“What on earth does a locked room murder have to do with this case?” Cuthbert interrupted in agitation.

“Everything, you idiot.”

Paul motioned for Cuthbert to be silent, and Bratten continued.

“Like they say,” Bratten said, “there’s a parallel here.” He took a sip of scotch and nonchalantly hung one leg over an arm of his chair. “There were these four brothers, rich, well-bred — like Cuthbert here, only with savvy. They’d made their pile on some cheap real estate development out West. The point is, the business was set up so one of the brothers controlled most of the money, and they didn’t get along too well to start off with.”

He raised his glass and made a mock bow to Cuthbert. “In language you’d understand, it was a classic sibling rivalry intensified by economic inequality. What it all meant was that if this one brother was dead, the other three would profit a hell of a lot. And lo and behold, this one brother did somehow get dead. That’s when I was called into the case by a friend of mine, a local sheriff in Illinois.

“Seems one of the brothers had bought a big old house up in a remote wooded area, and six months later the four of them met up there for a business conference or something. The three surviving brothers’ story was simply that their brother had gone into this room, locked the door, and never came out. Naturally not, lying in the middle of the floor with a knife in his chest.”

“I fail to see any parallel whatever so far,” Cuthbert said.

“The thing of it was, this room was locked from the inside with a sliding bolt and a key still in the keyhole. The one window that opened was locked and there wasn’t a mark on the sill. It was summer, and the ground was hard, but I don’t think we would have found anything outside anyway.”

“Secret panel, no doubt,” Cuthbert said.

“Nope. It did happen to be a paneled room, though. We went over that room from wall to wall, ceiling to floor. There was no way out but the door or the window. And to make the thing really confusing, the knife was wiped clean of prints, and there was nothing nearby the dying man could have used to do that, even if he’d been crazy enough to want to for some reason. There was no sign of a struggle, or of any blood other than what had soaked into the rug around the body.

“Without question the corpse was lying where it fell. On the seat of a chair was an open book, and on an end table was a half-empty cup of coffee with the dead man’s prints on it. But there was one other thing in the room that caught my attention.”

“Well, get it over with and get to the business at hand,” Cuthbert said, trying to conceal his interest. “Who was it and how was it done?”

“Another drink,” Bratten said, handing up his glass. “Now here was the situation: dead man in a locked room, three suspects with good motives who were in the same house at the time of the murder, and a knife without prints. The coroner’s inquest could come to no conclusion but suicide unless the way the murderer left the room was explained. Without that explanation, no jury could convict.”

Bratten paused to take a long pull of scotch. “The authorities thought they were licked, and my sheriff friend and I were walking around the outside of the house, talking about how hopeless things were, when I found it.”

“The solution?” Cuthbert asked.

“No. A nail. And a shiny one.”

“Good Lord,” Cuthbert said.

“Doesn’t that suggest something to you?”

“It suggests somebody dropped a nail,” Cuthbert said furiously.

“Well, I tied that in with what had caught my attention inside the room,” Bratten said, “and like they say, everything fell into place. We contacted the former owners of the house, who were in Europe, snooped around a bit, and that was that. We got a confession right away.”

Cuthbert was incredulous. “Because of a nail?”

“Not entirely,” Bratten said. “How about another drink, while you’re up?”

Cuthbert turned to Paul. “How do you expect this sot to help us if he’s dead drunk?”

“Give him another,” Paul said, “and let him finish.”

His face livid, Cuthbert poured Bratten another glass of scotch. “What was it you saw in the room that you connected with the nail you found?”

“A picture,” Bratten said. “It was hanging crooked, though everything else in the room was in order. It’s things like that that bring first daylight to a case.” He looked at Cuthbert as if he were observing some kind of odd animal life. “You still don’t get it?”

“No,” Cuthbert said, controlling himself. “And as I first suspected, there is no parallel whatsoever with our problem.”

Bratten shrugged. “What the brothers did was this: through their business, they gathered the materials secretly over a period of time and got things ready. When the time was right, they got their victim to go there with them and stabbed him on the spot, then wiped the knife handle clean. They had the concrete block foundation, the floor, the roof and all but one of the walls up. They built an L of the big house so there were only two walls to bother with. They even had the rug and furniture down and ready.

“After the victim was dead, they quickly put up the last wall, already paneled like the rest on the inside and shingled with matching shingles on the outside, and called the police. In short, the locked room was prefabricated and built around the body.”

Cuthbert’s mouth was open. “Unbelievable!”

“Not really,” Bratten said. “No one would think to check and see how many rooms the house had, and they did a real good job on the one they built. Of course on close examination you could tell. The heating duct was a dummy, and the half of the molding that fined against the last wall had dummy nail heads in it.

“But from the outside the room was perfect. The shingles matched and the metal corner flashing was a worn piece taken from another part of the house. The trouble was they didn’t think to use old nails, and they didn’t want to leave the inside of that last wall bare when they fit it in place.”

“An amusing story, I admit,” Cuthbert said. “True or not. Now if you’ll be so kind as to point out this damned parallel you keep talking about...”

Bratten looked surprised. “Why, the picture, you imbecile! The crooked picture on the last wall!” He pointed to a cheap oil painting that hung on the Eastmonts’ wall.

“But that picture is straight!” Cuthbert yelled in frustration, “It is immaculately straight!”

“Exactly, you jackass. It’s the only thing in this fouled-up room besides my drink that is immaculately straight. And I suspect if you look between the painting and cardboard backing, you’ll find your photograph.”

They did.