Footprints on the Ceiling

Chapter Seventeen: EIGHTEEN FATHOMS DEEP

It was the bends, all right. Hesse’s office had found that out, and the Assistant Medical Examiner who had done the post mortem was standing on his ear, not believing it.

It was Floyd, too. Arnold verified the appendicitis scar and supplied Gavigan with another print of the snapshot Leach had taken into town that morning.

“It’s him all right.” The Inspector grunted, scowling at the print darkly. “Malloy didn’t tumble when he saw the other print because he didn’t see the body yesterday. He was out after a guy who stole two king cobras from the zoo.”

“This is what I get for neglecting my daily paper,” Merlini said, helping himself to another sandwich from the tray Mrs. Henderson brought. “Cobras? Interesting too.”

“Yeah. Sure. Only that wasn’t Floyd. Malloy found the guy and put him in a cage at Bellevue. He was a Harlem witch doctor. Tend to your knitting, will you? Maybe you can figure out what happened to Floyd’s mustache.”

“What happened to—”

“You heard me.” Gavigan pointed to the photo. “The body had no mustache. But Arnold says Floyd was wearing one as usual when he left here Wednesday night. Why’d he shave it off?”

The picture was a candid shot of a heavy-set, rather flabby man holding a tall drink in his hand. He had his mouth open and was making an unsteady-looking gesture. Arnold’s lighting was nice, but his model was no movie actor. He had permanent-looking morning-after circles under his eyes, sleek black hair combed straight back, a pudgy, flat-ended nose, and a small mustache, carefully pointed at the ends.

Merlini said, “That newspaper description what put you on, Gail?”

“Yes. And with the symptoms what they were—”

“Any idea what Floyd, or anyone, would be doing high and dry on the 21st floor of a midtown hotel — dead of the bends, of all things?”

“The bends don’t bother me so much. They might not have hit him for several hours. I don’t get this lack of clothes and the locked room. A wrong room at that.”

Gavigan said, “Instead of the usual murder victim in a locked room with the question—How’d the murderer get out? — we’ve got a body, dead from natural causes, and the question—How’d he get in, and how’d his clothes get out? The desk clerk, the elevator boy, and the floor clerk on 21 say they never saw him before — that might be on account of the missing mustache. But they’d certainly have noticed if he was running around the place without any clothes.”

“Natural causes?” Merlini asked. “Just how natural a death is the bends. Doctor?”

“It’s not exactly ordinary, if that’s what you mean; but it couldn’t very well be homicide, either. Accidental death is what the verdict would read.”

“What makes you so sure it couldn’t be murder?”

Gail smiled in a professionally superior way. “Compressed air as a murder device mid be original and clever — in fiction. Couple of ways it might be done — but in actual practice they’d both be damned impractical.”

“Unless, being an inventive cuss, as I suspect he is, our murderer overcame the disadvantages. What are they?”

“Well, method number one would consist in popping your victim into a compression chamber, building up an atmospheric pressure of something over two atmospheres, and then suddenly allowing it to drop back to normal. Difficulty there is that a cylindrical steel chamber large enough to hold a man and fitted with the usual battery of pumps or compressed air tanks is not only an expensive but an unwieldy murder weapon. The disposal of the weapon would be even more of a headache than the disposal of the body.”

“What happens when you build up the air pressure and release it too suddenly?”

“It carbonates the blood, literally turns the victim into a human soda-water bottle! “Most of the 78 percent of nitrogen in the air is ordinarily exhaled, but, under pressure, much of it passes into solution in the bloodstream and is deposited in the various fatty tissues, nerve tissues, and joint liquids throughout the body. If the external pressure is reduced gradually, the lungs have time to filter the gas out again; but if the drop is too rapid, the nitrogen returns to a gaseous state wherever it happens to be at the time and forms bubbles in the bloodstream and tissues. Same as when you take the cap off a soda-water bottle. The bubbles rupture blood vessels, tear the tissues, and shatter the nerves, and you’ve got a nice case of either sand hog’s itch, the staggers, the chokes, or the bends.”

“The itch, the staggers, and the chokes,” Merlini said, “are all as descriptive as anything. Why the bends?”

“When the bubbles are so bad that you can’t hold your arms and legs straight because of the pain, you’ve got the bends. It’s one of the more exquisite forms of torture.”

“How soon would death occur?”

“That would depend on the amount of pressure, the length of time one was exposed to it, and the time taken getting out from under it. If a bubble or a cluster of bubbles formed an embolus blocking blood to parts of the brain or heart, death might occur in a couple of minutes. Otherwise, it might be anything from that on up to several days, usually one to 24 hours.”

“Any cure, once you have it?”

“Sure. Recompression. Get back into the compression chamber and back under the original pressure. Then reduce it slowly enough so that the gases can escape normally through the lungs.”

“You said two murder methods,” Gavigan put in. “What’s the other?”

“Same principle, but without the chamber.” Gail lighted a cigarette and gestured with it. “But you couldn’t use it on just anyone. Your victim would have to be a diver and you’d have to be the man at the pumps. Impractical on two counts, you see. The air you send down has another purpose besides giving the diver something to breathe. With the usual rubber diving dress the air has to be compressed enough so that it equals the pressure of the surrounding water at whatever depth the diver’s in. At 100 feet, for instance, there’s a total of nearly 50 tons of water pressing on the surface of his body; and he needs 44 pounds pressure per square inch to keep from being flattened. If you pulled him up too quickly, you’d get the same result as with the compression chamber. The usual procedure is to bring the diver up slowly, with stops of various durations at different depths — stage decompression. But as a murder device, the simpler thing to do would be to give him ‘a squeeze.’ There’s a nice murder method no one’s used. Death by implosion.”

“You’re bubbling over with murder methods,” Gavigan punned, unconsciously. “What’s that one?”

“An implosion is just the opposite of an explosion. Can’t you imagine what all those tons of water pressure would do to you if the man on topside at the pumps suddenly let your air pressure go? The water literally pushes you right up into your helmet. They take you out with a spoon. Divers have facetiously referred to the results of a squeeze as ‘strawberry jam.’ ”

Merlini spoke suddenly: “Can the floor clerk on 21 see the door of 2113 from where she sits?”

“What?” Gavigan turned to him. “Oh, no. It’s around a turn in the corridor, but she’s smack in front of the elevators. It’s the only way in except for the service elevator. The fire door only opens out. She swears she never set eyes on him before. Barring a duplicate key, which isn’t likely because the locks were all changed recently, there’s no way he could have got into that room except up the fire escape and in through the window. The chambermaid left that open an inch or two for ventilation. But she’s positive she locked the door — they’ve had some room thefts there recently, and the staff is all lock conscious. Anyway, both door and window were locked when that bellhop took the schoolteacher up.”

“Yale lock?”

“Yes. Locks behind you as you go out, but you couldn’t get in without a key of some sort; there were no picklock scratches inside the lock. And even if he’d rented the room very recently and had a duplicate key cut — well, there wasn’t any key with him in the room. And he couldn’t have been airing himself on the fire escape and then crawled back into the wrong room because the soles of his feet were perfectly clean, There’s not a damned bit of evidence to show he didn’t simply materialize in that empty room, nude and dead.”

“Any fingerprints?”

“Not a smell of one, not even Floyd’s. Everything nice and tidy the way the maid left it, except for a corpse where it shouldn’t be.”

“The situation is certainly contrary,” Merlini said. “We’ve been plagued with disappearing men all morning, and now it’s a horse on the other foot. A production trick, instead of a vanishing trick. The mystery is not how the murderer escaped, but where did the corpse come from?”

“Yeah. And if it’s a trick you’ve got listed in your catalogue, I’ll buy it. I want to know—”

“His feet were clean. That’s your clue. If he was dressed when he came into that room, then his clothes melted or something. I don’t like that. Reminds me of the Great Ceeley and the beautiful, but not so bright, wench he hired in London for a lightning-change illusion. Will Goldston made her a trick three-in-one costume that consisted of a British army uniform, a Belgian uniform — this was in ’15 during the early days of the war — and Britannia’s dress. They fitted skin-tight and one on top of the other, each costume with a concealed cord that ended in a differently shaped button, which, when pulled, caused its particular costume to collapse, instantly revealing the one next underneath. The button on the Britannia outfit was to enable her to shuck that quickly in her dressing-room after the act. But on opening night when Ceeley fired the gun — her cue to pull the first button — she brought the house down. She pulled all three buttons at once! Instead of a lightning change it was a lightning strip-tease! And not so very tantalizing either.”

Gavigan cut in brusquely “Save your reminiscences for your memoirs. What do you mean, the clean feet are the clue?”

“They suggest that if he was undressed when he entered that room, he didn’t walk in. Were his hands clean too?”

“Yeah. So he didn’t walk on his hands.”

“And must have been carried in. While, if he was dressed when he entered, someone must have removed his clothes. In either case I give you Mr. X again.”

“Uh-huh,” Gavigan muttered, pacing the floor irritably. “Somebody carried him in via the fire escape, dropped him on the floor, closed the window, locked it, and walked out the door, letting it lock behind him. Somebody the hotel help paid no attention to because he was familiar to ’em — because he has a room there.”

“And a room off that same fire escape. Have you checked on rooms 2013 and 2213 and so on?”

“There should be a report on my desk now. I had that done as a matter of routine. Phone headquarters, Malloy, and see if Murphy uncovered anything.”

Merlini spread the deck of cards out along his arm, balancing them from wrist to shoulder. His arm dropped suddenly, pulled in, and then shot out with lightning-like rapidity. His hand scooped at the cards, gathering them neatly from mid-air as they fell. “Glad you like the solution, Inspector. In case you haven’t noticed, it clears up another thing or two also. Now that we know it’s Floyd, we know why the body was nude.”

“We do?”

“Of course. You saw Floyd’s clothes upstairs. Marquis is his tailor; and the suits are all custom made, imported fabrics and the like. Ripping out labels and laundry marks wouldn’t have prevented identification. You’d only have had to query half a dozen of the swankiest tailors, and you’d have got the corpse’s name with a complete set of his measurements in no time. The person who carried that body in there realized that. So he simply took away the clothes altogether. I like the direct way he solves a problem like that. And he gets another orchid because he also realized that, if a photo of the corpse should make the papers, some of Floyd’s friends or relatives might recognize him. So he simply undressed him a bit more. He shaved off the mustache.”

“Yes. I’ll go along with you on that. It hangs together. Might be why the body was moved, too. A body in an empty, unregistered-for hotel room doesn’t give us anything to link to. Not a half-bad way to dispose of a body at that. But since it wasn’t murder, why the devil—”

“You’re starting that premise from the wrong end, Inspector. You mean, with all that monkey business afoot, it might very well be murder. And that’s not all. The person who typed that letter and forged Floyd’s name may have done so in order to mislead Floyd’s intimates further. If they did notice a report of an unidentified corpse answering fairly well to Floyd’s description, it wouldn’t register because they would think he’s neither dead nor missing, but on a trip. Furthermore he’s apparently written a letter that he mailed after the body was found. Someone has a flair for detail.”

“And the person who did the body-moving,” Gavigan added, “the mustache shaving, and the clothes swiping also had access to this typewriter! Our one list of suspects does for both bodies! And Arnold could have done all that — all except — except how the hell did he plant that letter on the 1:20 train? He was eating lunch here with four witnesses. And — Malloy! Take Quinn and go over those people upstairs. Find out what they were up to night before last, especially 1 a. m. Get alibis. Quinn, you check and find out if that water taxi brought Floyd back here after Henderson took him in. I’m going to look at that houseboat. If anyone did any diving it was out there. I’ll want Hunter and you, too, Brady. And lock that darkroom as you leave and hang on to the key.”

Merlini got to his feet. “I want to make a phone call first.” His long legs carried him quickly up the stairs and out, before Gavigan had a chance to get inquisitive.

And that reminded me of something. So, as we all went up and through the kitchen, I slipped, as unobtrusively as possible, into the back stairway I’d noticed there, leading to the second floor. But Gavigan saw me.

“Hey. Where’d you think you’re going?”

“Bathroom,” I said, trying to make it sound urgent.

He frowned but let me go. I headed for the phone in Linda’s room and found it was the one Merlini had chosen. He was replacing the receiver as I came in.

“Did you know you’re a wanted man, Ross?” he said. “I’ve been talking to Burt. He says that theater crowd you work for is wild. The director, the producer, and both angels have all been in his hair trying to locate you. They’ve got a private detective agency on the job and they had your description included in a Missing Persons broadcast about an hour ago.”

“That bad? I’ll ask for a raise. Let’s have that phone if you’re through. I’ve just remembered that a friend of mine was looking for you yesterday. I promised him something. Hello. City desk—”

I gave Ted an earful, no more than the Inspector would have to dish out as soon as the reporters caught up with him, but enough to make some nice fat headlines. He acted as if there hadn’t been anything to slap on the front page for the last month except the weather. And, if I hadn’t hung up on him finally, I’d be talking yet.

“Now you’ve gone and done it,” Merlini said. “If Gavigan ever — wait!” He took his handkerchief and polished off the phone receiver. “You should know better than to leave your prints on the scene of your crime.”

“Come on,” I said impatiently. “Let’s go. The Inspector might shove off without us.”

I headed for the window and the sun deck, that being the most direct route. Merlini followed me; but, as we went toward the flight of steps, he said, suddenly, “Wait, Ross.”

He had halted near another window, attracted by what he saw inside. He peered in for a moment and then rapped lightly on the pane. The sound acted with electric swiftness on the man who sat there, intent at something on the writing desk before him. He jumped guiltily and his head jerked, turning toward the window. It was Colonel Watrous. He saw us and with quick pantomime beckoned us in, holding an admonitory finger to his lips.

Merlini lifted the window sash, and we crossed the sill quietly. Watrous wore a pair of earphones clamped over his head, and the wire attached to them led to an open, brown suitcase, its interior completely filled by what appeared to be a built-in combination radio and phonograph. The raised lid disclosed a revolving phonographic turntable and sound arm. One end of the suitcase, also hinged, was lowered, showing a bakelite panel bearing rheostat and tuning dials.

The Colonel, still watching us, twisted one of the dials slightly, an intent listening look on his face. I noticed a second wire issuing from the machine that ended in a round black microphone hanging against the wall above the desk.

“I was about to come and get you,” Watrous said, in a half whisper. “That’s Rappourt’s room.” He gestured toward the wall on which the mike hung. “Brooke’s in there with her and planning to take French leave. He’s going to blackjack the police launch man and cut for it.”

“Is this,” Merlini asked, “an eavesdropping machine?”

“Yes. Latest thing in detectors — doesn’t require a mike in the other room. You merely put it against an outside wall and it picks up the vibrations and amplifies them. It’ll record, too. Listen.” He lifted the sound arm, snapped a switch labeled Playback, and moved the sound arm an eighth of an inch back on the record. “I got this to keep tabs on Rappourt,” he added, “when I began to suspect she might be faking.” He fell silent as the soundbox point touched the disk. Ira’s voice came, in mid-sentence, somewhat indistinct and slurred, rising above a rumbling undercurrent of hollow sound:

“—too damned hot around here. I’m going to knock over that dick at the boat landing and take it on the lam now.”

“I couldn’t get any more after that,” Watrous said, reversing the playback switch. “They’re still talking but it’s too low to catch.” He moved one of the dials again, listening.

Merlini held out his hand for the earphones. “Get anything on Rappourt?”

“No. Nothing.” Watrous shook his head and passed over the headset. “Except — well, what’s Brooke running for? And what do we do? Face him with it or lie low and catch him in the act?”

Merlini held the phones against his ears, listened briefly, and then answered, “Neither, just yet.”

He returned the headset, went quickly to the door and out into the hall. We heard him knock sharply at Rappourt’s door. Watrous listened, one hand at his dials. I stepped to the hall quickly and heard Rappourt’s voice raised.

“Yes? Who is it?”

“Merlini.” He pushed the door in without waiting for an invitation. “Looking for you, Brooke. The Inspector wants to see you.”

Ira didn’t answer immediately. Then he said smoothly. “Yes. Of course. Be down in just a moment.”

“He’s in a hurry, Brooke.” Merlini was insistent.

Behind me I heard Watrous jerk his mike from the wall, close the suitcase and slide it under the bed. He came to stand beside me in the doorway just as Brooke came out into the hall. Rappourt remained where she was. Merlini, Watrous, and I followed Brooke downstairs.

Malloy and Quinn were in the living-room questioning Miss Verrill. As our procession started through, Malloy said, “Just a minute. I want you two. Brooke and Watrous.”

“Keep him happy, Colonel,” Merlini said, herding Brooke on and out. And to Malloy, “The Inspector wants Brooke.”

Merlini led the way quickly toward the boathouse. Inspector Gavigan was there, waiting with Brady and Hunter. The skipper of the police launch was warming her up.

Gavigan looked at us, scowled at Brooke and said, “Not you. Captain Malloy wants—”

Merlini stepped close to him and whispered rapidly. Gradually the Inspector’s face brightened. Brooke was puzzled. The frown he directed at Merlini’s back was venomous. Then he caught me watching him. His face smoothed immediately into a blank disinterest.

Gavigan’s objections had evaporated. He indicated all of us. “Get aboard,” he commanded.

I could see the diver’s two assistants on the deck of the houseboat as we approached. Then, off to the left, I made out a cluster of bubbles breaking on the river’s surface and indicating Mr. Novak’s position. One of the assistants, a square-jawed, beefy man, wore a chest phone and headset. He talked into the mouthpiece and kept a careful watch on the pressure gauge attached to a hooked-up series of four compressed-air tanks that lay on the deck. The other man, at the rail, was paying out air hose and life line.

“Any more luck?” Gavigan inquired.

The man with the phone shook his head. “No. Not yet. Pretty dark down there. He’s feeling around for those boats.”

The single room in the houseboat cabin was fitted out as a combination workshop and drafting-room. A half-finished drawing on tracing linen was tacked on the drafting table, and blueprints hung along the walls. In the center of the room stood a water-filled glass aquarium. Floating on the water was a small, excellently constructed model of what was apparently Brooke’s Suction Salvage device. A jointed steel tube, capable of extension and retraction, descended from the underside of a dredgelike, flat-bottomed boat and terminated in a scooplike open maw that rested on the bottom.

The various pieces of a diving suit hung from hooks on the wall, and the round helmet with its great, goggling glass eyes stared at us from a corner. Merlini picked up one of the heavy, lead-weighted shoes and examined it closely. “They’ve been cleaned up,” he said, “But there are some traces of silt.”

“All right, Brooke,” Gavigan said flatly. “It’s time for you to start talking. There’s a whale of a lot you can add to your statement, and I know it. So begin.”

“I don’t understand. About what?” The innocently bewildered way he blinked at the Inspector from behind his glasses was expertly done.

“Floyd. We’ve found him. You might start with that.”

Brooke’s eyebrows rose together like twin elevators. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I know nothing about him. I haven’t seen him since night before last at dinner.”

Gavigan bore down. “That won’t do, Brooke, and you know it. Floyd’s told us a lot. He admits that, after leaving the island the other night, he came back here to the houseboat while the others were busy at a séance. He went down in that diving suit to look at the wreck. You stayed topside and took care of his air. You might as well admit it.”

There was a faintly greenish hue on Brooke’s face that grew as Gavigan talked. Then for a long moment he said nothing. Finally he made his decision. “All right. So what? He came back here. He dived. I took him into town again. He said he was coming back. He didn’t. Since you’ve talked to him, you know, I suppose. I don’t.”

“Who left the island in that boat last night?”

“I don’t know. Why should I? I wasn’t there.”

“You might be interested in knowing that the boat’s been found on the other side at 130th St. Who knew about that boat besides yourself and Floyd?”

“If Floyd says I know about that boat, he’s lying.”

“I see. How did Floyd get back to the island after Henderson took him in?”

“Water taxi. And it picked him up again afterward.”

Gavigan grinned. “There’s only one water taxi on this river, and it didn’t make any trips out here Thursday night.”

“The driver’s lying, too. Floyd tipped him not to talk.” Gavigan took a step toward him and stuck his chin out. Merlini said quickly, “And what did Floyd find on the bottom?”

Brooke turned, ignoring Gavigan. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“Perhaps. But we’d like to hear your answer. His story and yours don’t check too well so far. We thought we’d match them and try to cancel out the — er — the misstatements from each.”

“Do you want to tell us now,” Gavigan asked ominously, “or have it sweated out of you at headquarters?”

Brooke shrugged. “If you’ll stop barking at me, I’ll tell you now. If Floyd’s spilled it, there’s no point in my keeping quiet. He knew that Lamb intended to get a diver to investigate. He was impatient. Maybe he had last-minute doubts. I don’t know. He wanted to get a look first, himself.”

“Why’d he have to go down in the middle of the night?” Gavigan rapped suspiciously.

Brooke raised an eyebrow. “That means nothing. At 110 feet it’s pitch black at any time. And the diving in this river has to be done at slack water. Low tide was at 10:30.”

“The séance was to cover the diving, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yes. Partly. He didn’t want Lamb to know. He begged off the séance, had Henderson take him into town, and came back in the taxi. Why he tells you about the diving and won’t admit that, I don’t know. He dived and he satisfied himself that it was the Hussar.”

“He found a couple of bucketfuls of guineas?”

Ira’s hesitation was lengthy. Then he said, “Yes.”

“Where are they?”

“He took them with him.”

“Why? Why didn’t he run in and show them to Lamb and Linda? It was proof wasn’t it?”

“Yes. But — I don’t know why. He was running the show. Ask him.”

Merlini said, “How long was Floyd down?” His voice came from the doorway, where he stood looking at a typewritten sheet of paper thumbtacked to the wall.

“Just a bit under an hour. He fouled his lines once, and it took him about 15 minutes to get untangled.”

“How much decompression did you give him?”

“I followed the reading on that diving table. Three minutes at 20 feet, 10 at 10, plus the two allowed for hoisting him—15 altogether.”

Merlini took out the thumbtacks and carried the sheet to the drafting table. Then he rummaged through a stack of books on the bunk in the corner. He found one, seated himself, and turned to the index. I caught a glimpse of the title: Deep Diving and Submarine Operations by R. H. Davis.

“Did you advise Floyd against diving?” he asked.

“Yes,” Brooke nodded slowly. “He hadn’t done any in ten years. He’s lots heavier and he’s been drinking too much. But he went anyway.”

“Don’t you think you should have refused to assist him? He couldn’t dive without your help.”

Brooke looked at him a long time. “What do you mean by that? He was all right when he left me— Oh! I begin to get it. The bends hit him later. Did you get him into a decompression tank?”

Merlini didn’t bother to look up from his book. He thumbed the pages rapidly. “You know we didn’t.”

Gavigan followed up quickly. “Floyd died of the effects of his diving an hour or two afterward. At the Hotel McKinley. You were there. You undressed him, shaved off his mustache, carried his body down the fire escape, and shoved it into an unoccupied room. Very clever. No clues to identify. What did you do with his clothes — and the guineas?”

Ira took an involuntary step backward toward the door. “Floyd told you all that, too, I suppose. Rappourt get a psychic message for you?”

“Maybe. You believe that’s possible, don’t you?”

“I–I don’t know — I—”

“Changing your mind all of a sudden, aren’t you? We know more, too. This houseboat has been an excuse for a lot of funny stuff. Pretending to be hard at work out here, you’ve been commuting in to town in that boat of yours instead. After you moved Floyd’s body, you came back to the island, typed a note on the typewriter at the house, forged Floyd’s signature, and put it aboard the 1:20 for Buffalo yesterday afternoon. You wanted it to look as if he were still alive. A play for time. But you made a couple of boners. You picked a lousy train, and you used the wrong typewriter. Well?”

“I’ve heard enough. I want a lawyer.”

“And, finally, you were overheard just a few minutes ago laying plans to knock one of my men on the head and take it on the lam. I have a witness to that.”

“That’s a lie.”

“You’re under arrest. Take him in, Malloy.”

Brooke didn’t move. “Charged with what?” he asked.

“Moving a body without a permit, forging, falsifying and concealing evidence. Also murder.”

Brooke looked at Gavigan steadily for a moment. Then he took a cigarette from his pocket, tapped it on the back of his hand, and, turning, walked to the door. He stopped there and said stiffly, “I’m allowed one phone call before you jug me. I want to instruct my lawyer to start a suit for false arrest. You’ve put your foot in it, Inspector.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Gavigan said lightly. “Get going.”

Merlini spoke up. “Before you go, Brooke. This decompression table you used. Take a look at it.” He stepped forward with the sheet in his hand.

Brooke scowled suspiciously and glanced at the chart. I saw his eyes become suddenly bright and sharp. When he looked up, there was excitement on his face. His voice crackled.

“This isn’t the same chart! It’s not right! Someone—”

“I wondered if you’d say that. Look.” Merlini held-out the diving book and pointed. “It checks with the Navy tables in this book. And Floyd should have had 57 minutes of decompression time. Not 15.

Ira stared at the book. “Someone — someone—”

“You’re quite right. Someone changed the tables. It’s murder after all, Inspector, and with a brand-new weapon. One that even the Doctor didn’t think of. Brooke,”—Merlini’s voice was edged and fine—“who else knew that you and Floyd were going to dive?”

“No one,” Brooke said shakily. “No one but Madame Rappourt. Damn her!”