Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 2, July 1973

The Methodical Cop by Bill Pronzini

Death had held grisly carnival in that dark house of hate. Who was the killer? I’d find out — if he let me live to do it.

Detective-Sergeant Renzo Di Lucca had been a cop for twenty-seven years, a dedicated, patient and observant cop. Next to his wife Rosa who had borne him three sons and who made the best fettucine in the world, Di Lucca loved police work more than anything else.

There was, however, one particular facet of police work that he did not like at all, breaking in rookies newly elevated to the detective squad.

Which, naturally, was the one assignment he invariably drew.

Di Lucca didn’t know if Captain Hearn always paired him with the rookies because he was the senior member of the squad, and patient, and well-versed in police procedure; or if it was because the captain had a well-hidden streak of leprecaunlike Irish humor; or if it was that every man is supposed to bear a sometimes heavy cross. He only knew that he always drew the rookies, and that there was nothing he could do except to steel himself and make the best of it.

There were problems with every rookie. They were overconfident, or they were too nervous, or they were top eager, or they were just plain incompetent, like that cousin of the police commissioner with whom Di Lucca had spent three painful months the year before. There was always something new to face.

Take the young rookie, Tim Corcoran, with whom he had been paired for the past three weeks. The problem with Corcoran was not cockiness or nervousness or any lack of competence. Contrarily, he was a graduate of the Police Academy who had made two admittedly fortunate arrests of a major nature within six months of one another, sufficient to get him promoted to the detective squad. And although it had taken Di Lucca twelve years of pounding a beat, in the days when beats were still pounded, to make the same grade, he didn’t in the least begrudge Corcoran’s abrupt rise. These were changing times, and youth, if capable, had to be served.

Corcoran also wore modish clothes and had hair as long as the department would-allow, plus an affinity for dark glasses and hard-rock music. That, too, was all right; Di Lucca was a progressive thinker, and two of his three sons had hair down to their rumps and wore beards and one of them was even trying to be a writer.

No, the trouble with this particular rookie, this Corcoran, was that he had an imagination.

There was nothing wrong with having an imagination, but Di Lucca thought you ought to be able to control it and to back it up with simple logic. Not so with Corcoran. He allowed this imagination of his to run wild, to the point where he forgot logic and some of the basic precepts of police work. Nothing was ever simple as far as Corcoran was concerned; there were always hidden meanings. The most routine squeals, which was all the two of them had handled thus far, became puzzles of magnitude in Corcoran’s rampant imagination.

Di Lucca had tried patiently to teach him that investigative police work was really a pretty simple, ordinary kind of thing. Cases were solved by legwork and careful observation and time-tested procedures. Corcoran said he understood that, and went right on illogically overworking his imagination.

Sitting at his desk in the squad room early one Friday morning, near the end of their first week on the night trick, Di Lucca watched Corcoran poring over the unsolved files, something the rookie did every chance he got. He was thinking, Di Lucca was: all we need now is a murder case, one of those fancy ones where you’ve got suspects and clues and a crazy set of circumstances.

And so, of course, the telephone rang...

On their way to answer the squeal, Corcoran, who was driving the departmental sedan, said for the third time since they had left the squad room, “A murder, Rennie! We’re finally going to investigate a murder.”

Di Lucca sighed. “Don’t sound so happy about it.”

“I’m not happy, I’m a little nervous,” Corcoran told him. He was tall and baby-faced, and had bright brown eyes behind his dark glasses and a lot of freckles that matched in color his stylishly shaggy hair. “The victim’s name is Simon Warren, right?”

“That’s what the guy on the phone, Prentiss, said.”

“Is he somebody important?”

“Well, I never heard the name.”

“The address is pretty important.”

“I guess it is,” Di Lucca admitted, and wished somebody else had taken the call, though it was inevitable that he and Corcoran would catch a murder squeal sooner or later. Still, he wished it had been later; and some place other than Lookout Point, which was the city’s most fashionable district.

He sat slumped on the seat, waiting patiently for Corcoran to get them through the early-morning fog to Lookout Point — a short, plump man with a sad Italian face, a receding hairline, and enormous black eyes that were at once mild and shrewd. His suit, in contrast to Corcoran’s mod-cut double-breasted, was ultra-conservative and hung badly on him. He had never been able to find an off-the-rack suit that fit him properly, and he couldn’t afford to have one tailor-made, not with three sons, one of whom was trying to be a writer.

Corcoran was silent the remainder of the trip, for which Di Lucca was grateful, and finally they reached Lookout Point and located the address Di Lucca had been given on the phone.

The house was a huge Tudor with a gabled roof, set well back from the street on elevated ground and fronted by an acre of lawn landscaped with oak trees. A paved entrance drive climbed upward on the left.

They went up the drive, and it hooked into a loop in front of the house, circling a rectangle of lawn with a stone fountain in the middle. Parked at the far edge of the circle was a black-and-white cruiser, and two uniformed cops were standing there with a red-headed woman wearing a gray jersey dress. Corcoran pulled up next to the cruiser.

Di Lucca knew the uniformed cops, and one of them said, “We just got here, Sergeant. This is Miss Becky Hughes; she lives here.”

Di Lucca introduced himself and Corcoran. Miss Hughes was in her mid-twenties, gray-eyed and abundantly endowed with female assets. Her red hair, worn flipped under, appeared to have been hastily combed; the red lacquer on her long nails was chipped, and one of the nail points had been broken or bitten off.

She said, “I was Simon Warren’s — um, secretary. It certainly is a terrible thing, what happened.”

Di Lucca nodded and asked, “Where would the deceased be?”

“Inside, in the library. Prentiss is with him.” She shuddered. “He said he wanted to make sure nothing was disturbed.”

“Anyone else in the house at the moment?”

“George Charon and Everett Finney.”

“Who would they be?”

“Simon’s nephews. They have different names because Simon had two sisters that died, you know?”

Di Lucca said, “I see. Do all of you live here?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Uh-huh. Well, suppose you show us where the library is.”

She said she would, and Di Lucca told one of the uniformed cops to remain there to wait for the lab crew; the other one went with them into the house, and across a wide foyer hung with silver-framed, antique mirrors, and down a corridor to one side.

Miss Hughes stopped before a set of double oak doors which had been pulled not quite together, leaving a six-inch gap between them.

“Here it is,” she said. “But I don’t want to go in there again, if it’s all the same to you. I can’t stand the sight of blood or dead people.” She shuddered again. “I’ll be in the parlor with George and Everett, okay? It’s the other way off the foyer.”

“All right, Miss Hughes.”

She turned and walked away down the corridor. Corcoran, with his dark glasses off, and the uniformed cop watched her appreciatively. Di Lucca was looking at the doors and deciding that they had been forced open recently; a twisted piece of metal that was part of an inside bar-lock arrangement could be seen in the opening between the two halves.

Di Lucca told the uniformed cop to stay in the corridor. Then he knocked on one of the doors, said, “Police,” loudly, and pushed it open. He and Corcoran went into the library.

It was a large room that looked as if it belonged in a Victorian English manor house. Floor to ceiling bookshelves covered two walls; damask drapery partially concealed a third, revealing at least one window; and a huge brick fireplace, with a rectangular brick hearth in front of it, comprised the fourth wall. There was a maroon carpet, two large Victorian chairs, a matching sofa, a polished-wood reading table with six leather-backed chairs, and ornate reading lamps and ceiling fixtures.

The dead man lay prone on the carpeting at a right angle to the fireplace hearth, just in front of it. One arm was out-flung over his head, and there was a dark stain of blood spreading out from under his chest. He had been in his sixties. He wore a wine-colored dressing gown, slippers, a pair of striped pajamas.

A thin, fifty-ish man, white-haired, long-faced, wearing a black suit but no tie, had been sitting on the sofa. He stood up as Di Lucca and Corcoran entered, and came stiffly toward them.

“Mr. Prentiss?” Di Lucca asked him.

“Yes, sir.” Prentiss had a soft, sepulchral voice. “It was I who called you. I am — I was Mr. Warren’s butler.”

Di Lucca introduced himself and Corcoran, and then went to where the body lay and knelt down beside it. It was difficult to tell from the dead man’s prone position, but it appeared that he had been shot in the chest — shot because that was what Prentiss had told him on the phone. There was nothing else to see just yet.

He straightened again. “Anybody touch or move the body?”

“No, sir,” Prentiss answered.

“You were the one who found him. Is that right?”

“I was, yes.”

Di Lucca looked at Corcoran, and saw with mild satisfaction that the rookie had his note pad out, pencil poised over it. He said, “Can you tell us what happened here, Mr. Prentiss?”

“I’ll try, sir. I’m still somewhat in a state of shock.” Prentiss was silent for a moment, then he went on, “I get up at six-thirty every morning. This morning I was dressing when I heard the report of the gun shots, so it must have been six-forty or thereabouts. I rushed out of my room on the second floor, came downstairs, and looked first in the parlor. I saw and heard nothing. Then I came to the library, and Mr. Warren was moaning behind the closed doors. I tried the doors, but they were locked. I was quite distraught, and I... well, I struck the doors several times with my shoulder until finally they burst open.”

Di Lucca asked, “And Mr. Warren was lying where he is now, in front of the fireplace?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was he still alive when you reached him?”

“Barely alive,” Prentiss said. “I started to turn him over, to see how badly he was injured, but then he spoke and I—”

“Spoke? He said something before he died?”

“Yes, sir. He said — well, it doesn’t seem to make much sense but I distinctly heard the words: ‘Pick up sticks’.”

“ ‘Pick up sticks’?”

“I am quite positive those were his exact words, sir.”

“Do you have any idea what he meant?”

“I’ve thought about it carefully, sir, and I can’t imagine what significance the words could have.”

Di Lucca glanced at Corcoran, who was no longer writing on his notepad; his face was eager and intensely thoughtful, and Di Lucca knew his imagination had begun working on ‘pick up sticks’. He sighed inaudibly and said to Prentiss, “Did Mr. Warren say anything else?”

“No, sir. He died then. There was nothing I could do.”

“What happened next?”

“There was quite a bit of confusion. Miss Hughes and Mr. Charon and Mr. Finney had arrived by then — they are the other members of the household — and everyone seemed to be speaking at once. I looked around the room, but I did not find the weapon which had killed Mr. Warren. I also examined the windows, thinking that perhaps a burglar was responsible, but they were and are unbroken and securely locked. Then I telephoned—”

“Locked?” Corcoran interrupted. “Locked from the inside?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And didn’t you say all of the library doors were locked too?”

“Yes, sir, they were.”

“Then Simon Warren was killed in a locked room!”

“I am afraid it would seem so,” Prentiss said.

Corcoran’s eyes were wide. “A locked room! A dying message!” He looked at Di Lucca. “Lord, Rennie!”

Yeah, Di Lucca thought. He said to Prentiss. “Was Mr. Warren in the habit of getting up as early as you do?”

“He was not. He usually arose at nine.”

“Well, do you have any idea what he was doing here in the library so early?”

“No, sir. It’s quite odd.”

“What do you think happened here this morning?”

Prentiss’ lips pursed. “I would imagine, sir, that since the room was locked, and since no one could have entered or left the premises who does not belong here, either Miss Hughes or Mr. Finney or Mr. Charon did it. That one of them, the guilty one, was not in bed at the time of the shooting.”

“Would you say they all had reason to kill Simon Warren?”

“I would,” Prentiss said firmly. “The same reason: money.”

“Money?”

“Quite so. You see, Mr. Warren was something less than generous with his considerable assets.”

“You mean he was tight?” Corcoran asked.

Prentiss looked at him distastefully. “Yes, if you prefer.”

Di Lucca asked, “Where did the Warren money come from?”

“Antiques,” Prentiss answered. “Until his retirement two years ago, Mr. Warren was quite a well-known dealer in antiques.”

“I see. And you say there was some friction over money between Mr. Warren and the others who live here?”

“To put it mildly, sir. Miss Hughes, Mr. Warren’s secretary, complained constantly that he paid very little salary and she has something of a penchant for fine clothes and expensive adornments. Mr. Finney is what was once termed a playboy, also with quite expensive tastes and little allowance with which to indulge them. Mr. Charon, unfortunately, is addicted to horse racing. Each of them wanted or needed money, and I’m quite sure, sir, that each of them was mentioned prominently in Mr. Warren’s will.”

“Are you also included in the will, Mr. Prentiss?”

“I believe so, sir,” Prentiss said with dignity. “However, money has never been a particular consideration in my life — and with myself, at least, Mr. Warren was not ungenerous.”

“Uh-huh. Well, do you know of any threats the others might have made against Mr. Warren’s life?”

“Not in so many words, no, sir. At least not in my presence.”

“Did anything happen last night — an argument, like that?”

“Not to my knowledge. It was quite a normal evening.”

“Are there any guns in the house?”

“I believe Mr. Warren had one, sir, but I do not know where it is.”

“Do any of the others own a gun?”

“As far as I’m aware, no, sir.”

Prentiss had nothing else to tell them of import, and Di Lucca asked him to wait in the parlor with the others.

When he and Di Lucca were alone, Corcoran said, “What do you make of all of it, Rennie? How do you figure the old man was murdered in a locked room? And what could ‘pick up sticks’ mean?”

“Now how would I know?” Di Lucca asked. “We only been here ten minutes.”

“But a locked room, a cryptic message from a dying man, probably naming his killer...”

“Procedure, Corcoran,” Di Lucca reminded him. “We’re cops, remember. We got a procedure to follow.”

“Sure, Rennie, but—”

“Come on, let’s go over the room a little.”

Di Lucca went first to the entrance doors and looked again at the bar-lock arrangement. The doors had obviously been fastened from the inside when Prentiss broke them open, and as far as he could see there was no way the bar could have been put in place from anywhere except the inside. Besides that, there was the time element; Prentiss had gotten to the library no more than a couple of minutes after the shooting.

He crossed to the damask drapery and examined the windows, which looked out on a flagstone terrace. They were locked, as Prentiss had said, and even when unlocked would not have opened far enough on short hinges to admit anyone larger than a child.

Di Lucca turned. There were no other doors in the room, no other windows, just the bookshelves and the fireplace and the furniture. He went to the shelves and saw that Simon Warren’s library was extensive: classic novels, history, books on antiques, mythology, biography, philosophy. But there was nothing else to see; no hidden panels or strange contraptions or foolishness such as that.

Di Lucca realized Corcoran was no longer at his side, and pivoted away from the bookshelves. The rookie was on his hands and knees on the fireplace hearth, between a small stack of cordwood and an antique set of fire tools, peering up the chimney.

Wearily, Di Lucca crossed the room and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Looking up the chimney,” Corcoran answered.

“Well, I can see that.”

“Nothing up there but soot.”

“What did you expect to be up there?”

“I don’t know, I was checking. It’s too narrow for a man to squeeze through, too.”

Di Lucca was somewhat incredulous. “Did you think the murderer came down the chimney, shot the old man, and then went back up it again?”

“I was only trying to be thorough,” Corcoran said defensively. “This is a locked-room mystery, and the answer has to be in here somewhere. I wonder—”

Di Lucca didn’t want to know what he was wondering, and he was saved from immediately finding out by the sound of voices out in the corridor. There was a knock on the door. Di Lucca said, “What is it?” and the uniformed cop put his head through and announced that the lab crew had arrived. A moment later half a dozen men trooped in, carrying cameras and lab kits, and, in the case of the assistant medical examiner, a battered black doctor’s bag.

Di Lucca conferred with the man in charge of the lab crew, Joe Dillon, and told him what kind of thing they apparently had; Dillon said that if there was something to be found in the library, they would find it. Then Di Lucca went out to the corridor and told the uniformed cop to get his partner and to search the grounds on the chance that the murder weapon had somehow been gotten out of the house.

The patrolman nodded and hurried away, and Di Lucca turned and saw that Corcoran was fiddling with the double entrance doors. He had pulled them nearly shut from inside the library, and was examining the bar-lock arrangement.

“Rennie,” he said suddenly, “I think I found something.”

He opened one of the doors and Di Lucca went in and said, “What is it?”

“Well, look at this door lock. It seems to have been kind of loose — I mean, even before Prentiss broke the doors open. Here, I’ll show you what I mean; I’ll go out in the corridor and you close the doors and hold the bar-lock in place.”

He went into the hallway, and Di Lucca shut the doors and held the bar-lock across them. Corcoran pressed against the doors from without, and even with the pressure Di Lucca was applying, the two halves parted slightly. The rookie’s left eye was visible in the small vertical opening.

“You see, Rennie?” he asked.

Di Lucca opened the doors again. “See what?”

“What could have happened. The murderer could have pressed against the doors just like I did, until they parted that half inch or so. Then he could have wedged a gun into the crack, peered along the sight, and shot old man Warren there in the library: you can see the body from the door; it’s on a direct line. Murder in a locked room!”

Di Lucca said patiently, “Why?”

“Why? Why what?”

“Why would the murderer want to kill Warren that way? Why would the old man be locked in the library at six-thirty in the morning in the first place? Why would the killer be skulking about in the corridor with a gun? And why aren’t there any gouges or scrapes in the wood edges of the doors, which there would be if a gun was wedged between them?”

“Oh,” Corcoran said.

“Come on,” Di Lucca told him, “it’s time we went and had a talk with the two nephews and Miss Becky Hughes.”

They left the library and started down the corridor. Corcoran said meditatively, “One two, buckle my shoe; three-four, shut the door.”

Di Lucca looked at him. “What was that?”

“The old nursery rhyme. You know: five-six, pick up sticks.”

“Nursery rhymes,” Di Lucca said.

“Well, I’m trying to concentrate on that angle now. ‘Pick up sticks’ has got to mean something, doesn’t it?”

“If Prentiss was telling the truth, it does.”

They reached the door to the parlor, and entered — and Di Lucca felt as if he had stepped more than a hundred years into the past. It was furnished in a combination of styles: ranging from New Gothic to Biedermeier, circa 1850, with paneled oak walls and furniture in a variety of polished woods.

There was a buffet that was mahogany veneer on pine, covered by a tapestried black cloth; a walnut sofa upholstered in blue brocade, with matching chairs; oak end tables. White cotton curtains were on the windows, and the carpeting was blue chenille. In one wall was a fireplace that had a beige marble mantelpiece and a tinted mirror above it, and an embroidered birch firescreen in front of it. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling.

Corcoran took it all in a little disbelievingly, and Miss Hughes, who was sitting on one end of the sofa, said, “It kind of throws you at first, doesn’t it? Simon — Mr. Warren — loved antiques, and every room in the house is, you know, a different period.”

Di Lucca was looking at the two men who sat on the matching walnut chairs. One of them was dark-haired and handsome, dressed in a suede jacket and doeskin slacks; the hair was wavy and fashionably long, as were his sideburns and his Continental-style mustache. The other man had sandy hair, pale blue eyes, a petulant mouth, and agitated hands; he wore a polo shirt and brown slacks.

Both of them stood up and the dark-haired one said, “I’m Everett Finney. You’d be Lieutenant Di Lucca, right?”

“Sergeant Di Lucca.”

“Oh, sorry. This is my cousin, George Charon.”

“How do you do,” Charon said.

Di Lucca introduced Corcoran. Finney asked. “Have you found out anything yet about Uncle Simon’s death?”

“We’re still investigating,” Di Lucca told him noncommittally. “Have you and your cousin and Miss Hughes been here together since the shooting?”

“More or less,” Finney answered. “We went to our respective rooms to dress while Prentiss was calling you people, and then met here a few minutes later.”

“Did any of you leave the house for any reason?”

Finney and Charon shook their heads, and Miss Hughes said, “Well, I went out to meet those nice uniformed officers when they got here, but nowhere else.”

“All right,” Di Lucca said. “Now what I’d like to do is ask each of you some questions — individually, if you don’t mind. Is there some place private that’s close at hand?”

Prentiss, who was standing regimentally by the curtained windows, wearing an expression of hostility directed at the other members of the household, indicated a closed door at the far side of the parlor. “In there is a small sitting room, sir.”

“Thanks.” With Corcoran at his heels, Di Lucca crossed to the door and opened it; the sitting room, being more or less a part of the parlor, was furnished similarly if less luxuriantly. He pivoted in the doorway and said, “Miss Hughes?”

She sighed and stood up and went into the sitting room. Di Lucca shut the door and invited her to sit down on the blue brocade loveseat along one wall.

“Now then, Miss Hughes,” Di Lucca began, “suppose we start with your whereabouts at the time of the shooting.”

“I was in bed.”

“On the second floor?”

“Yes, my room is next door to Simon’s — Mr. Warren’s — down at the end.”

“You heard the shots?”

“I sure did. It sounded like cannons going off.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I didn’t know what it was. I was still half asleep. Then I heard Prentiss running downstairs, and pretty soon some banging sounds, and I put on my negligee thing and ran down there. Prentiss and George and Everett were all there in the library, with poor Simon on the floor, dead and everything. I almost fainted when I saw the blood.”

“Did you see Finney or Charon before you went into the library, hear them on the stairs?”

“I heard somebody run down just after Prentiss, but I didn’t see who it was.”

“Only one person?”

“Maybe two. I was still half asleep.”

“Did Prentiss tell you what Mr. Warren said before he died?”

“Oh, that ‘pick up sticks’ thing? I don’t know what Simon meant by that. Isn’t Pick Up Sticks a game for kids or something?”

Di Lucca said, “Do you have any idea who murdered Mr. Warren? Or why?”

“No. How could it have happened in a locked room like that? I don’t understand it at all.”

“You don’t think Mr. Warren’s two nephews were involved?”

“Everett and George? Gosh, I don’t know. They’re both awfully sweet. Maybe Prentiss did it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t like him very much,” she said. “He’s pretty snooty.”

“I see. We understand there’s been some friction about money. Is that right?”

“Oh, sure, I guess so. Simon was a real penny-pincher. I had to practically beg on my hands and knees for a new dress, or for a tiny little raise in my salary.”

“What about Finney and Charon?”

“Well, Simon was always telling them they were a couple of spongers and that as long as they didn’t want to work for a living, they’d have to be content with what he gave them to live on. He could be real mean at times, Simon could.”

“Did Finney or Charon ever threaten him?”

“Threaten? You mean, say they’d kill him?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I don’t think so. They were always shouting at Simon, and he was always shouting at them, and I never paid much attention. I guess one of them could have.”

“Do either of them own a gun?”

“A gun? I never saw a gun anywhere around here.”

Di Lucca said that would be all for the moment, and asked Miss Hughes to send Everett Finney in. She went out, and after a time Finney entered the sitting room and sat where Miss Hughes had, on the loveseat; he appeared relaxed.

“I suppose you want to know where I was when my uncle was murdered,” he said.

“To begin with, Mr. Finney.”

“Like everybody except Prentiss and my uncle, and the murderer, I was in bed. Six-thirty in the morning is an ungodly hour. Anyway, the shots woke me up. I got out of bed and put a robe on, and Prentiss was making a lot of noise running downstairs and shouting. When I got to the library, the doors were open and Prentiss was kneeling on the floor beside my uncle.”

“Did you see Miss Hughes or your cousin?”

“No. I was the first one down after Prentiss, and George and Becky came into the library after I did.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I can’t honestly say. I suppose, though, since the room was locked, that either George or Becky killed him. How it was done I have no idea. Pretty clever, though, that locked-room business.”

“Why do you suppose one of them is guilty?”

“This was hardly a happy household, sergeant,” Finney said. “None of us got along particularly well with Uncle Simon, except Prentiss. The reason we didn’t get along with him was because he horded his damned money like a miser and none of us exactly is used to the life of a pauper.”

“Did you have trouble with your uncle about money?”

“Naturally. But I’d hardly kill him over it. After all, he didn’t have too many years left and I have the idea that we’re all mentioned in his will. He had no one else to leave his money to, after all. George and Becky are greedier than I am, and less patient.”

“I see.”

“Sorry if I seem callous. You’d have had to know my uncle to understand the lack of grief. And of course there’s the money. I freely admit to liking that much more than I liked the old man.”

“What do you think your uncle’s dying words mean?”

“ ‘Pick up sticks’? I haven’t the slightest. Maybe he was delirious, or Prentiss misunderstood him.”

“Do you own a gun, Mr. Finney?”

“Certainly not. What possible use could I have for a gun?”

“Did you ever see a gun anywhere around the house?”

“No. If anyone has one, they’ve kept it well hidden.”

Di Lucca asked Finney a few more questions, learned nothing, and dismissed him. When he had gone through the door, to summon George Charon, Corcoran frowned and muttered, “Five-six, pick up sticks. Five-six, five-six.”

“Are you still reciting nursery rhymes?” Di Lucca asked him.

“There’s something about five-six, Rennie.” He scowled deeply, and then his face brightened and he snapped his fingers. “Sure!”

“Now what?”

“Five-six, what are five-six, Rennie?”

“Numbers,” Di Lucca said, frowning.

“Sure, numbers, but what else?”

“This is no time for guessing games, son.”

“Five-six, the fifth and sixth letters of the alphabet.”

“So?”

“Everett Finney,” Corcoran said. “E and F, the fifth and sixth letters of the alphabet! Rennie, maybe Warren was trying to name Finney as his murderer when he said ‘pick up sticks’.”

Oh boy, Di Lucca thought. Patiently he said, “Now come on, Corcoran. You really think a dying man is going to be thinking up cryptograms to name his killer? Why wouldn’t he just say ‘Finney’?”

“Who knows how the mind of a dying man works? Besides, he didn’t say ‘Finney’ or ‘Charon’ or any other name; he said ‘pick up sticks’.”

“Yeah,” Di Lucca admitted. “Evidently he did.”

George Charon came in then and took his place on the loveseat. His hands moved in their agitated way over the legs of his trousers. His story was substantially the same as Miss Hughes’ and Finney’s: he had been in bed at the time of the killing; he had been awakened by the shots. He had pulled on a robe and come downstairs to find Prentiss and Finney standing over the body of his uncle. He did not own a gun, was in fact afraid of the things, and knew of no weapons in the house. He had no idea how Simon Warren had been murdered in a locked room, and he had no idea what ‘pick up sticks’ meant.

When Di Lucca asked him if he cared to offer an opinion as to who the murderer was, Charon said without hesitation, “My cousin, Everett Finney.”

“You sound pretty positive, Mr. Charon.”

“Who else could it have been? Becky Hughes is beautiful but much too stupid to pull off a locked-room murder. Prentiss was devoted to the old man. Nobody else could have gotten in or out of the house. And I sure as hell didn’t do it. That leaves Everett.”

“Did you see or hear him run downstairs after the shooting, as he claims to have done?”

“I don’t recall hearing him — probably because he was already downstairs, after shooting Uncle Simon.”

“Was there any special bad feeling between Finney and your uncle?”

“Nothing special. They just generally despised one another. I often wondered why Uncle Simon didn’t throw Everett out of the house. But he believed strongly in looking after family, so he allowed him to stay and paid his way, such as it was. Everett was always demanding more money to spend on women and nightclubs and fancy clothes.”

“You didn’t have any quarrels with your uncle, Mr. Charon? The same type of quarrels over money?”

Charon lowered his eyes. “Well, yes, I suppose I did. I’ll have to admit that Uncle Simon was hardly a generous man.”

“You follow the horse races. Is that right?”

“Who told you that?” Charon demanded angrily.

“Is it true?”

“Well, what if it is? A man has to have some kind of hobby.”

“Has yours been a successful one?”

“Oh, I’ve lost a few dollars. I don’t deny that. And I owe a little bit of money at the moment, nothing major. I could have used an extra thousand or two. But that doesn’t mean I killed my uncle to get it.”

There was nothing more to be learned from George Charon, and Di Lucca sent for Prentiss. He questioned the butler again, extensively, but aside from making it obvious that he did not like or approve of Miss Hughes, Everett Finney, or George Charon, Prentiss had nothing further of significance to offer.

In the parlor once again, Di Lucca said, “I’ll probably want to talk to all of you again later on, so don’t plan on going anywhere for a while. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you’d all wait right here in the parlor until Mr. Warren’s body is removed and the laboratory people are finished.”

Prentiss nodded, Miss Hughes sighed, Finney shrugged, and Charon looked irritated, but none of them said anything. Di Lucca and Corcoran left the parlor and returned to the library. The lab crew was still going over the room. The body of Simon Warren was lying as it had been earlier, although the assistant ME would have turned it to make a preliminary examination; a chalk outline anhad been drawn on the carpet around it.

The lab chief, Dillon, said, “We haven’t turned up anything at all so far, Rennie — nothing that would explain how the murder was committed in a locked room. And no sign of the murder weapon.”

“Anything else we can use?”

“A mass of fingerprints, most of them smudges. We vacuumed the carpet and the hearth, and we’ll sift through the bag downtown. That’s about it up to now, I’m afraid.”

Di Lucca turned to the assistant ME. “Doc?”

“Victim was shot twice in the chest with what was likely a small caliber weapon. That’s all I can tell you until I do a post.”

Di Lucca nodded and went over to stand by the entrance doors, to wait until the crew was finished. Corcoran began to prowl the room, tapping walls, examining the bookshelves, looking, apparently, for hidden panels.

After a time Corcoran took notice of the books themselves, peering at the titles on the spines as he walked along. Then he stopped and peered harder at a particular section. He took one book off the shelf, opened it, studied it, and put it back; then he removed another, and a third. His eyes began to glitter, and he said, “Damn!” softly.

Di Lucca glanced over at him, and Corcoran hurried up to him and said, “Old man Warren had a pretty large collection of books on mythology. Did you notice that, Rennie?”

“More or less,” Di Lucca answered without much interest.

“Greek, Roman and pagan mythology,” Corcoran said. “Particularly Greek.”

“All right,” Di Lucca said patiently, “you’ve got another idea. Let’s hear it.”

“Well, it might sound a little far-fetched at first, but it all fits. Greek mythology is the key, and Warren was obviously pretty well versed on Greek mythology. I don’t know much about it myself, but I remember a couple of things from when I was in school—”

“Never mind the buildup, son.”

“Okay, then. Including the butler, we’ve got four suspects, right? Well, let’s take a look at George Charon for a minute. He pronounces his name Char-on, doesn’t he?”

“Stop asking rhetorical questions,” Di Lucca told him mildly, “and get on with it.”

“Char-on,” Corcoran repeated. “But there’s another way to pronounce that name: K-ron. K-ron.”

Di Lucca just looked at him.

“In Greek mythology,” Corcoran went on excitedly. “Charon is the ferryman of Hades, the one who takes the newly arrived dead across the river to hell!”

Di Lucca kept on looking at him.

“Don’t you get it?” Corcoran asked.

“No,” Di Lucca said.

“That river is called Styx, the River Styx. Pick up... Styx! Pick up... Charon. George Charon, Rennie, Warren was trying to tell Prentiss that George Charon was his killer!”

“My God,” Di Lucca said, not without reverence.

“It fits, Rennie, it all fits.”

“At least one thing doesn’t fit.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, use your head, Corcoran. It’s the same thing that was wrong with your other idea: it’s illogical. A dying man is not going to be thinking up riddles involved K-ron and the River Styx to name his killer. He’s just not going to do it, Corcoran.”

“But Rennie—”

The lab man, Dillon, came over then — to Di Lucca’s relief — and said, “We’re finished, Rennie. We’ve been over everything. If there’s anything here we can’t find it.”

“Okay, Joe, thanks.”

The two uniformed patrolmen came in and reported that they had searched the grounds without finding any sign of a gun. Dillon said, “You want us to have a look at the rest of the downstairs, Rennie?”

“Yeah. Corcoran and I will probably take the people here up to the second floor pretty soon, and go through the rooms up there. The murder weapon has got to be in this house somewhere.”

The assistant ME joined them. “All right if we take the body away now, Rennie?”

Di Lucca looked over at the body of Simon Warren, as he had been doing until Corcoran interrupted him, and gnawed the inside of his cheek. He said, “You know, there’s something about him that bothers me and I’m not sure yet what it is. Another fifteen or twenty minutes, if it’s okay with you.”

The assistant ME shrugged. “You’re in charge. I’ll tell the ambulance boys you’ll call them when you’re ready.”

“Right.”

The lab crew and the assistant ME filed out, taking the uniformed cops with them. Corcoran said, “What bothers you about the corpse, Rennie? Maybe it’d help if you talked it over.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. It’s just a feeling I got. Look, Corcoran, why don’t you go into the parlor and watch your ferryman from Hades?”

Corcoran appeared hurt. “I still think that’s a possibility.”

“Sure, it’s a possibility. Now go on, will you, I want to be alone here for a few minutes.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go, son, go.”

Corcoran went, not happily.

Fifteen minutes later Di Lucca came out of the library, found Joe Dillon and two of his men, and told them they didn’t need to go over any more of the house.

“The answer,” he said, “is all in the library.”

Dillon was surprised. “This I’ve got to see.”

“Go on in there,” Di Lucca said. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

He went across the foyer and into the parlor. Corcoran was standing by the birch fire screen, and the four members of the Warren household were sitting silently, apart from one another, around the room.

“I’d like everyone to come into the library with me,” Di Lucca said.

Corcoran looked attentive. George Charon asked, “What for?”

“I’ll explain pretty soon. Come along now.”

They all left the parlor and proceeded into the library, where Dillon and the other members of the lab crew were standing around looking either skeptical or anticipatory. Miss Hughes saw that the body of Simon Warren was still on the carpet, shuddered, and said, “Why haven’t you taken him away?”

“Pretty soon now,” Di Lucca told her. “Suppose you all sit over there on the sofa.”

They trooped to the sofa obediently, and Corcoran stepped up to Di Lucca and whispered, “What is it, Rennie? Did you find out something?”

Di Lucca sighed, pretended not to have heard him, and went to stand behind the body. All eyes were on him, and he felt vaguely foolish, being on stage like that; but this was the simplest way to do things, and hopefully the most productive. He cleared his throat.

“Now then,” he said, “what we got here, we supposedly have a locked-room mystery. Only it isn’t.”

“It isn’t?” Corcoran said.

“No, it isn’t,” Di Lucca told him patiently. “We also got a dying message, and that’s authentic enough but not the way my partner here seems to think. What he thinks, Simon Warren was trying to name his killer directly; but that’s not what he was trying to do at all.”

“It isn’t?” Corcoran said.

“No, it isn’t,” Di Lucca told him patiently. He glanced over at the butler. “We’ll take the dying message first. Mr. Prentiss, how did Simon Warren say those last words of his — ‘pick up sticks’?”

Prentiss was puzzled. “How did he say them, sir?”

“Well, what I mean, did he say them just like that: ‘Pick up sticks’? Or did he say: ‘Pick... up... sticks’, with a pause between any of the words?”

Prentiss worried his lower lip. “I believe he said the words without a pause, sir.”

“Except maybe at the end?”

“At the end?”

“Like this: ‘Pick up sticks...’, with his voice sort of trailing off.”

“Why, yes, now that I think of it.”

“So maybe ‘pick up sticks’ wasn’t all he was trying to say. Maybe there were some other words, a sentence, and he died before he could get the rest of it out.”

Charon, Finney, and Miss Hughes were leaning forward now, listening intently. Finney asked, “What other words could he have wanted to say?”

“That’s not too difficult to figure out, when you look at the way he’s lying there on the floor. That position has bothered me for some time, something about it.”

“What?” Corcoran said. “I don’t see anything unusual.”

“Well, look at his right arm,” Di Lucca said. “You see the way it’s outflung? Now that’s not an unnatural position for a dead man, but if you want to think about it another way, it could also be that he’s pointing at something, right?”

Everyone stared at the dead man, and at the outflung right arm, and at what it could be pointing at.

“The fireplace,” Dillon, the lab man, said.

“Not exactly, Joe. Something on the hearth.”

“The stack of cordwood?”

“Where the cordwood was before your boys moved it. Right?”

“Sticks!” Corcoran exploded. “Sticks!”

Di Lucca gave him a tolerant look. “That’s it, Corcoran. What Simon Warren was trying to say was: ‘Pick up sticks of cordwood’.”

Dillon said, “But there’s nothing there, Rennie, you can see that. I moved the stack myself when we vacuumed the hearth.”

“There’s something there, all right. The murder weapon, among other tilings. But it’s pretty carefully concealed and you wouldn’t have expected anything like it in the first place. Besides, you can’t see it unless you get down close to it.”

Di Luca moved around the body and stepped onto the hearth and knelt at the spot where the cordwood had been originally. His fingers probed at the cracks between several of them, where earlier he had found wedged a tiny bit of evidence that even the vacuuming had failed to dislodge. Then he tugged lightly, activating a spring — and four bricks, fastened together on their underside by a hinged metal plate to form a kind of door, swung upward. There was now a squarish opening in the hearth.

Corcoran moved quickly next to Di Lucca, and peered into the open space. “A floor safe,” he said wonderingly. “The door to a floor safe.”

Di Lucca looked at the wide-eyed quartet on the sofa. He said, “Mr. Prentiss, you told me you didn’t know where your employer kept his ready cash and his valuables — and maybe his gun.”

“No, sir, I didn’t know. I had no idea there was a safe in the fireplace hearth. I’m quite amazed.”

“What about the rest of you?”

They shook their heads.

“Well, that’s a pretty clever hiding place for a safe, all right,” Di Lucca went on; “the kind of place a man who knew a lot about antiques and antique methods would choose — and also the kind of place a man who didn’t trust most members of his household would choose. But it wasn’t quite clever enough. What happened here is fairly obvious now: The murderer learned of the safe somehow, and got ahold of the keys to open it; it’s one of those key-lock types. He came in here this morning to riffle it, and Mr. Warren also came in for some reason we’ll find out later and caught the killer with the safe open. The murderer panicked and shot Warren with Warren’s gun, which was and no doubt still is inside the safe.”

“But the locked room,” Corcoran said. “How did the killer get out and lock the doors from the inside?”

“Like I said before,” Di Lucca told him, “this isn’t any locked-room mystery. It didn’t figure to be one from the beginning. For one thing, Simon Warren was shot twice and the gun was nowhere to be found; that obviously rules out suicide. So what’s the point in making a locked-room mystery out of it, from the killer’s standpoint? Murder is murder, and he was sure to be one of the suspects in the investigation. If he had set out to commit murder in a locked room, he’d shoot Warren once, put the gun in the dead man’s hand, and let suicide be the natural verdict. No, what this was, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, an improvisation, and not a particularly brilliant or original one at that.”

“Rennie, you still haven’t explained the locked room.”

“It’s simple,” Di Lucca said. “What the killer did, he shot Warren in his panic, and then realized the shots would bring the others down almost immediately. He couldn’t rush out of the library for fear of being seen, so he did the next best thing to prevent immediate discovery: he ran over and locked the doors.

“Now he had bought himself a few seconds of time. So he came back to the safe, dropped the gun inside, closed the door, lowered the bricks, and put the cordwood back in place in a hurry.

“Later, he could come back, he thought, and remove the gun and the valuables. Well, by this time Prentiss was banging on the doors, and all the murderer did was to go over there and get behind them. Prentiss broke the doors open, and ran to the body; his full attention was on Simon Warren, and so was that of the others who rushed in shortly afterward. Warren had seen the killer put the gun back into the safe — maybe without wiping off his fingerprints; but dying as he was, he apparently didn’t see where the murderer had gone. As a result, he tried to tell Prentiss where the safe and the gun were.

“As for the murderer, he waited behind the door half until everybody else was in the library, and then came out last, as if he too had come running downstairs. Which means that there’s only one person who could be guilty, and that’s the last person into the library. And just to clinch it: The killer told me the sound of the shots was like cannons going off, but a small caliber gun triggered inside this room wouldn’t make that much noise, especially to someone supposedly in bed on the second floor rear. And finally, I found wedged into the door bricks a tiny broken fingernail point, a red-lacquered fingernail — Corcoran!”

The rookie managed to close his mouth long enough to grab and hang onto the bitterly struggling Becky Hughes before she could get out through the library doors.

In light of the evidence against her, Miss Hughes confessed to the murder of Simon Warren, substantiating everything Di Lucca had postulated. She also revealed that she had discovered she was not, after all, included in Warren’s will; that, combined with the old man’s stinginess, had decided her to commit theft and then to disappear to another part of the country. She had learned of the safe by spying on Warren, and had pilfered the keys to open it from his room that very morning.

But Warren had awakened as she was leaving, had followed her covertly downstairs, and had caught her at the open safe. He threatened her with police action as well as expulsion from the house, and the threat had been responsible for her panic and for the shooting. As Everett Finney said, she was not nearly as dumb as he had pretended to be but she was every bit as ignorant.

A matron was summoned; and Joe Dillon, having gotten the keys from where Miss Hughes had returned them to the ring in Simon Warren’s bedroom — while Charon and Finney were dressing — opened the safe and found the murder gun and lifted two clear latent prints off of it. When the matron and Becky Hughes left together, Corcoran and Di Lucca trailed the pack in the departmental sedan.

Corcoran kept looking at Di Lucca with open admiration, and finally he said, “Man, you were great back there, Rennie. Brilliant!”

Di Lucca shrugged self-effacingly. “It was police work, Corcoran,” he said. “Observation, recall, addition of facts, procedure. Plain and simple police work.”

“And imagination,” Corcoran said. “You really used your imagination, Rennie.”

Di Lucca released a soft breath, slid down on the seat, and closed his eyes. Rookies, he thought wearily. What did I ever do to deserve the rookies?