Cue For Murder

Chapter One. Prologue

THE MURDER MYSTERY at the Royalty Theatre was solved through the agency of a house fly and a canary.

The fly discovered the chemical evidence that so impressed the jury at the trial, but the canary provided a psychological clue to the murderer’s identity before the murder was committed. Basil Willing is still troubled by the thought that it might have been prevented if he had read the riddle of the canary sooner.

It began with the canary. Though birds are unblessed with public relations counsels this one made the first page of the Times one spring morning when a weary make-up man snatched a filler at random from the galley file to plug a hole at the bottom of column three.

BURGLAR FREES BIRD

New York, April 28—Police are puzzled by the odd behavior of a burglar who broke into Marcus Lazarus’ knife-grinding shop near West 44th Street shortly before dawn yesterday. Nothing was stolen but the intruder opened the cage of Lazarus’ pet canary and set the bird free. The shop is hardly more than a shack in an alley leading to the stage door of the Royalty Theatre.

On April 28 at eleven o’clock in the morning, Dr. Basil Willing unfurled a copy of the Times at breakfast on a plane from Washington to New York. He read the war headlines with the sensation of individual littleness that an ant must have during an earthquake. It was a relief to come across such a human item as BURGLAR FREES BIRD. That was criminal behavior on a conceivable scale; pleasantly trivial after the murder of peoples, the robbery of continents, and the perversion of cultures. The little puzzle teased his imagination as prettily as a problem in chess or mathematics.

Why risk incurring the severe penalties for burglary by breaking into a shop without stealing anything? Why prolong the risk by lingering on the premises to free a canary from its cage? Was this erratic burglar a man of sentiment who broke into the shop solely in order to free a bird from a cage that was cramped or dark or dirty? A telephone call to the A.S.P.C.A would have been far less risky and more permanent in its effect. But if freeing the bird were an afterthought, what sort of burglar would be distracted from the serious business of burgling by such a frivolous impulse?

At the moment Basil believed his knowledge of this “crime” would always be limited to the few facts contained in the news item. The construction of a plausible hypothesis within such narrow limits was a mental exercise as strict, and therefore as stimulating, as the composition of a sonnet. But the longer he played with those few facts, the more clearly he realized that no hypothesis he could construct embraced all the facts adequately. If this were an anagram, some of the letters were missing. The letters he had spelled only nonsense words and stray syllables, unintelligible and tantalizing as a message in an unknown code.

That afternoon Basil stopped at Police Headquarters to discuss a sabotage case with Assistant Chief Inspector Foyle of the Police Department.

“Well, well!” For once the Inspector’s shrewd, skeptical face was off guard, relaxed and friendly. “I thought you were marooned in Washington for the duration!”

“At the moment I’m working with the New York office of the F.B.I.”

“As a psychiatrist or an investigator?”

“A little of both. Very much the sort of work I used to do for the D.A. If it weren’t for you I’d be in uniform by this time.”

“What have I to do with it?”

“You gave me my first chance to apply psychology to the detection of criminals. Now I’m supposed to be applying it to the detection of spies and saboteurs. But I ought to be with some medical unit. I’m under forty-four, I have no wife or children, and I’ve been in the Medical Reserve Corps ever since the last war. I went straight from Johns Hopkins to a casualty clearing station, and it was through shell-shock cases that I first became interested in psychiatry.”

“Don’t worry, doc,” said Foyle dryly. “They’ll call you up quick enough if they need you. They probably think that anybody who speaks German like a native and reads a crooked mind like a book is more useful doing what you’re doing now. . . . Funny thing happened to me the other day. I was walking down Whitehall Street sort of fast, the way I always walk when I’m thinking, and a recruiting sergeant sees me and comes rushing up to me with a big smile. Then suddenly he stops and his smile goes out like a light and he shakes his head and turns away. When he first saw me he thought I might do because I’m still thin and wiry and can move fast; but when he got close enough to see my gray hair and the lines in my face he wasn’t interested any more. I suppose I should’ve been glad in a way, but I wasn’t. I felt the way I did the first time a truck driver called me ‘pop’ instead of ‘buddy.’”

War talk brought the morning paper to Basil’s mind, and that in turn reminded him of the canary.

“Yeah, it was sort of funny,” admitted Foyle. “I got a report on it from the precinct this morning. I thought it might be a publicity stunt.”

“For whom?”

“Wanda Morley. Her new show opens at the Royalty in a day or so, and the knife-grinder’s shop is right next door. But her press agent swears he doesn’t know a thing about it, and her name hasn’t been mentioned in connection with it. If there were any tie-up it would’ve come out by this time.”

“Is there anything of value in the shop?”

Foyle laughed. “You should see it! Nothing but a grindstone and a lot of rusty old knives and scissors.”

“Has Lazarus any enemies who might do a thing like that just to annoy him?”

“He says not. If people wanted to annoy him wouldn’t they have stolen something? Or injured the bird? It was perfectly all right—just out of its cage flying around the room when Lazarus came to his shop to work yesterday morning. Then he noticed the door of the cage standing open and the broken latch at the window. Those were the only signs that anyone had been there.”

“But why?” persisted Basil.

“That’s your headache, doc. My job is to catch the guys who do wrong—not to worry about why they do it! Maybe you can tell me why they always push forward at a fire when we tell them to stand back?” The Inspector weighed his next words. “I wish it hadn’t been a knife-grinding shop.”

Basil’s interest quickened as if someone had supplied one of the missing vowels to his anagram. “So that’s it?”

“Looks that way. We made quite sure nothing had been stolen. That can mean only one thing: “Somebody wanted to sharpen a knife—without witnesses.”

“Murder?”

“Sure. With malice prepense. But there’s nothing we can do about it. No fingerprints. No clues. . . .”

Outside in Centre Street, the east wind struck through Basil’s spring overcoat with a sudden, keen thrust. Somebody wanted to sharpen a knife. . . . In his mind’s eye, he saw the dark, faceless figure in the gray, dreamy light just before dawn sliding a moistened thumb along a blade secretly sharpened to a slicing edge. There would be the low humming of a grindstone and a spray of cold blue sparks; but no one would be likely to see or hear anything at that hour in a little shack in an obscure alley running through the theatrical district. Why such stealth unless the purpose were murder in its most inhumane form—with the premeditation of a surgeon and the callous blood-letting of a butcher? That was sound enough as police logic, but . . .

With an almost audible click, new facts and old fell into juxtaposition. His anagram had become less intelligible than ever. If this were murder in its most in humane form, why free the canary?

Like most modern psychiatrists, Basil Willing believed that no human being can ever perform any act without a motive, conscious or unconscious. The unmotivated act was a myth like the unicorn or the sea serpent. Even slips and blunders had their roots in the needs of the emotional nature. He had used his knowledge of that fact to solve his first murder case. But what was the motive here? What feeling had informed the hand that unlatched the door of the canary’s cage yesterday morning?

However pitiful a winged creature in a cage may be, a murderer planning to use a knife against a fellow human being is hardly in the mood for pity. . . .

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