Footprints on the Ceiling

Chapter Eight: S O S

My hand moved on the bed, hunting for the flashlight I knew lay there somewhere.

“Merlini!” The whisper was low, but recognizable.

“Here,” Merlini said softly. “Watrous?”

“Yes. I just saw someone on the sun deck crawl in the window of Linda’s room.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Man.”

“Good. Clear the decks for action.” His chair creaked lightly as he got up. “Where are those flashlights, Ross?”

“I’ve got one here,” I said. “There’s another on the dresser.” I aimed my flash in that direction and snapped it briefly.

“Thanks,” Merlini said. “Got it. Now. Quiet like mice.”

After a moment the streak of light along the edge of the door appeared again, and I saw Merlini’s figure against it, listening. I started to move toward him when the light slit vanished and the faint creak of a hinge came from the hall where another door opened. Soft footsteps moved outside and stopped before our door.

The skin along the back of my neck tightened. I held my torch ready. But Merlini made no move.

The footsteps sounded again, quietly, receding down the hall.

Merlini’s whisper came finally, “You two stick here.”

The door swung in. He edged out into the hall and disappeared. He left the door open behind him. I went cautiously across and peered out.

He was moving carefully down the corridor away from me. At the corner where the head of the stairs began, he stopped and flattened against the wall.

Across the hall the door of Linda’s room stood half open. Watrous stood close behind me, one hand on my shoulder.

A sound came from downstairs then, the muffled clicking of a phone being dialed, and, after a short silence, the indistinct murmur of a voice. The conversation was brief, and when the voice stopped abruptly, Merlini quickly returned. We closed the door and stood behind it, trying, all three at once, to peer out through the narrowest of cracks.

“When he comes into the light at the top of the stairs,” Merlini ordered, his lips against my ear, we go out. Have that gun where it shows.”

The quiet, previously unnoticed tipping of the clock on Floyd’s dresser swelled, loud in the silence, and much slower. I heard the Colonel’s heavy breathing and felt the tense alertness where my shoulder touched Merlini’s. A full minute passed, that seemed like ten — and nothing happened. Once I thought I heard a distant rattle that might have been the turning of a knob and the sliding of a bolt.…

Merlini breathed a soft, sudden “Damn!” and jerked the door wide. He pointed at Linda’s door, his voice still low.

“In there, Colonel,” he commanded. “At the window. If anyone shows on that sun deck, yell out.”

I followed him at a swift, silent double-quick down the carpeted stairs. The library was dark. Merlini’s flash clicked, made one hasty circuit of the room, and snapped off.

“Those French windows,” he said. “He went out that way. Take a look.” I heard him snatch at the phone and begin dialing.

I reached the window, pulled it open, and stood part way out, seeing nothing in the black.

“Operator, give me Bronx 6-3824 and hurry it; police speaking.… Someone replaced that missing length of wire, Ross. I rather expected that. And he may try to make way with it again so… Hello. You, Gavigan? Merlini speaking. Listen hard. And get it all the first time. Ross Harte and myself are sitting right smack in the middle of as pretty a murder investigation as you ever saw. And we need help. How we need help!.. No, it’s not a gag. Shut up and listen. We’re on Skelton Island in the East River with all the boats scuttled and the phone disconnected until a minute ago. And it may go out again any moment. We’ve turned up one murder, a spot of arson, some grand suspects — one of them planning to fly out at dawn. Canada, he said. Your cue — hello!”

He clicked the phone. “Hello!” I heard him hang up. “Line’s dead again. Out with you.”

His light shot out and we plunged through the window,” racing for the sun-deck stairs.

A dark, thin line of black slithered down past my face, and I tripped, the phone wire tangling about my feet. Merlini passed me as I dropped, caught myself on extended hands, and sprang up almost without pause.

When my head came above the upper level, he was running down the stretch of empty sun deck toward the place where it curved out of sight around the corner. He hurdled a deck chair, stopped sharply at the corner, and put his head around, his light moving. Then he hurried back to where I stood before the window of Linda’s room. It was open. Inside there was only blackness and silence.

The bright finger of his light reached in, touched the sheeted body in the chair, and the flat, still body of Colonel Watrous on the floor. He lay face down, heels toward the window. The light glistened on the bright, shattered bits of his glasses in the carpet and on a wet, red stain behind his right ear.

We crossed the sill. Merlini knelt by the body and pulled it over onto its back.

“Bathroom, Ross! Water!” His light indicated a door.

Water spilled from the glass as I ran back. Merlini held Watrous in a half-sitting position, one arm around his shoulders. The man’s head hung back loosely, chin toward the ceiling, mouth open. But I saw his eyelids flicker.

A new voice from the window said coldly, “What the hell are you—?”

Lamb stood there, staring in. Then he lifted one leg and put it across the sill. Except for his coat, he was fully dressed.

The Colonel moaned slightly as the water hit him, and spluttered into the glass as Merlini tilted it before his lips. Then, dazedly, he sat straight; and one hand fumbled at his head. His face without the pince-nez seemed oddly nude and his eyes watered.

“You’ll feel better in a minute, Colonel,” Merlini said. “Someone gave you a nasty sock, but I don’t think it broke anything.” He switched on a small bedside light and brought a first-aid box from the bathroom. He applied cotton and antiseptic to Watrous’s head. I opened a can of adhesive and ripped off a piece.

Lamb said, “What happened?”

The Colonel looked at Merlini. “Who — Did you see him?”

“No. Didn’t you?”

“No.” The Colonel’s voice was shaky. “Window open when I came in. Couldn’t see all of sun deck without putting head out. Gun poked out around edge of window. Voice, man’s voice, whispered, ‘Quiet! Stand up! Turn around!’ I did. I heard him come in. Then something hit me. That’s all I — my glasses — where—?” His fingers touched the broken pieces on the floor.

“Your window open on the sun deck, Lamb?” I asked.

“Yes. Sat smack in front of it smoking a cigar. Couldn’t sleep: Heard you running like hell. Saw flashlight. Thought I’d better come see.”

“Your room’s around the corner, at the back?” Merlini asked.

“Yes.”

“No one come your way and drop off the sun deck?”

“He disappeared damn quick,” I said. “He must have been up here working at that wire when we came out. What other windows open off the sun deck?”

Lamb answered, “Watrous’s, Rappourt’s. Around back near mine. But Arnold’s is the next one over.” He turned back to the window and looked out. “Wonder why he hasn’t heard this?”

“Whoever it was,” Merlini stated, “could have gone on through this room and into any of the others on the other side of the house. Down and out the front door for that matter. There aren’t any alibis. Headache, Colonel?”

Watrous had pulled himself shakily to his feet and stood, one hand holding tightly to the back of a chair. “Yes,” he said.

“Get him to his room, Ross. Give him these.” Merlini handed me two capsules.

Watrous said, “No, I’m all right. We’ll have to look around. Must find out—”

“Well take care of it, Colonel. You sleep it off. Go on. You’re no good without your glasses anyway.”

He protested a bit more. “I’ve some others. I—” Then he wavered a bit. “All right,” he said, giving in.

I took him to his room and put him to bed.

When I got back, Merlini stood in the hall before the closed door of Linda’s room, arguing in a low whisper with Lamb.

“You get into your room,” he said, “and stay there. I’ll handle this. No use waking the others. It’s too late. We wouldn’t learn a thing.” Merlini put his hand on the knob of Floyd’s door.

“I don’t like this at all,” Lamb growled. He looked at us both suspiciously. “How the hell do I know—?” Then he shrugged his heavy shoulders and walked quickly along the hail to his room at the end.

Merlini waited until the door had closed after him. Then: “Quick, back in there.” His head jerked toward Linda’s door.

I slid in and he followed, pulling the door to, softly.

“No lights,” he said, “and pull that shade.”

As I did so, he locked the door to the hall. Then his flash blinked on, and I saw him take an automatic from his pocket, look at it interestedly for a brief moment, and re-pocket it.

“We’d better get at that burglary I mentioned, before something else happens.” He crossed the room.

“Where did you get that gun?”

“It’s Lamb’s.” He lifted a framed Bakst costume sketch from the wall and disclosed the black, square and shiny dial of a small wall safe.

“What tuition do you charge for a course of pickpocket lessons? I’d like to sign up. It makes detecting so simple.”

“I’m not giving one this semester,” he said. “Here, hold this light for me. I’ll demonstrate the ABC’s of safe cracking.”

From his vest pocket he took what I thought, at first, was a watch, until I noticed that its face carried only a single sensitive hand that quivered as he held it.

“Harry Houdini gave me this little gadget,” he said. “It’s the only one there is — which is just as well.”

On one edge of the dial where the winder of a watch would be, was a small cup-shaped projection. He held this against the face of the safe and moved it about, turning the safe’s dial with his other hand. Finally he held it on one spot and then turned the lock dial slowly, watching the small hand that wavered and, now and again, jumped slightly. When this happened, he twisted the dial in the opposite direction.

“What do you expect to find in there?” I asked.

“Loot, of course. Maybe a motive. I don’t know. There.”

He pulled at the door, and it swung out. He took the flashlight and directed it at the safe’s interior. His arm reached in and brought out three school slates like the one we had seen before. Handing them to me, he explored again, fishing out a checkbook and a letter-size leather case.

He ran quickly through the check stubs. “Nothing much there,” he said. “A $100 check to Rappourt marked Contribution Psychical Society, but the rest all innocent enough.”

He opened the leather case and removed a crisp legal document. I saw the printed words on the face: The Last Will and Testament of—and the typewritten name, Linda May Skelton.

As he looked quickly through the document, I started to examine the slates. Chalked on the first was a scraggly uncertain outline of Skelton Island and, in the corner, a somewhat florid signature that I made out as Capt. Pole.

Halfway through the small, scratchy handwriting of the message that covered the second slate, Bow at 108 feet beam 112 four feet silt two tar—, I stopped suddenly and put the slate down. I took Merlini by the arm and drew him hastily toward the window. “See that?” I asked.

Toward the left, along the shore, and back a bit from the water we could see the lighted square of a window. And it blinked irregularly, but purposefully, on and off — Dots and dashes!

“So, someone does know Morse code after all,” Merlini said softly. “Ross, why weren’t you a boy scout?”

“Didn’t know what I was missing,” I said. “Sorry. I’ll join up tomorrow. That’s Doc Gail’s place isn’t it? Do we pay him a call?”

“Thought you were sleepy?” he chuckled. “Yes, I think we do.”