More Oddments

Quicker Than the Eye (with Michael Kurland)

When I returned from the dressing area at the rear of the Magic Cellar nightclub, the houselights were dimming for Christopher Steele’s grand finale. I sat down quietly at the corner table I shared with four of the top brass of Lorde’s Department Store (“Serving San Franciscans Since 1927”), and watched Steele raise his hand to cut off thunderous applause.

He waited until the room became completely silent. Then he said, “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. You have been very attentive to my small displays of illusion, and I feel you should be rewarded. I shall show you something that is impossible, something that cannot be done. You are about to witness an effect that you will wonder about and talk about for the rest of your lives. You will tell people about it, and they will not believe you; but you will have seen it with your own eyes.” He paused, smiling enigmatically. “I would appreciate your silence for the next ten minutes.”

Steele bowed and stepped back to center stage. Ardis, his assistant — who had been with him longer than I had been his manager — joined him. They stood facing the audience, fingertips touching, while two stagehands brought in an ornate golden chair and placed it at the rear of the stage.

“The greatest mystery of all,” Steele said, “is the mystery of time. Time and its effect on Man. The mystery of aging, of life and death. I present to you now a visual allegory and, if I may, a miracle!”

He stepped forward, and Ardis, at his nod, walked to the high-backed chair and sat. The lights dimmed to a single spot.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Steele intoned, “please keep your seats and do not be alarmed at what you see here now. I invoke the aid of Osiris, Egyptian God of Life. Oh mighty Osiris, keeper of the mysteries, guardian of the keys, make your presence felt — on this stage tonight. Come forth, come here, come — now!”

Slowly, so slowly that you weren’t really sure that it was happening, Ardis began to change. She slumped over in her seat and her arms and hands became lined and wrinkled. Her legs grew twisted, gnarled. Her face became ancient beyond the ages of Man, as old as Time.

She straightened up and stared out at the audience, this incredibly old hag, and her eyes flashed, even sunken as they were in the parchment of that ancient face. As we watched, the very flesh became transparent, the white dress she wore grew evanescent — and both disappeared, revealing the skeleton beneath. Finally the skeleton was all that remained. Then it collapsed in on itself, leaving only a pile of bones and a handful of dust on the chair.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your attention,” Steele said, as the lights went up and broke the spell. “That ends my show for tonight.”

The audience stared. The chair, with bones and dust, remained. Finally one man began to clap and again everyone broke into thunderous applause. As it died down Steele smiled and clapped his hands twice, sharply. There was a flash of light, a puff of smoke, and Ardis — young and beautiful — stood once more beside him. This broke up the audience completely. They whistled, stamped and screamed while Steele and Ardis bowed low and then walked off the stage.

The houselights came up and the waitress appeared by the table with a fresh round of drinks. I gave my attention to my guests.

Old Mrs. Lorde herself sat opposite me, straight as a mannequin despite her eighty-plus years. She wore a severe black dress accented only by a massive gold choker. An ebony cane with a solid-gold handle cast in the shape of an elephant was her only other adornment. On my left were Victor Schneider, manager of Lorde’s Department Store — a tall, stately man with a small moustache — and Lillian Royce, buyer in the women’s clothing department and a very attractive brunette in her mid-twenties. On my right was a thin nervous man with a voice that just managed not to squeak: Lewis Thorp, the store’s assistant manager.

“That was quite a performance,” Schneider said, sampling his drink, a Magic Cellar specialty called a Levitation. “Quite a performance indeed.”

Mrs. Lorde concurred. “I must say, I am very impressed with Mr. Steele. His act will be good for Lorde’s image as well as for business. Very dignified and impressive. At first, you know, when I heard about this after returning from Europe last week, I thought it was cheap and vulgar publicity.”

She was talking about Steele’s next engagement, which was to spend two weeks in a hermetically sealed, glass-topped coffin in Lorde’s front window — beginning tonight. The idea had been Steele’s originally, but after many weeks of subtle talks I had managed to convince Schneider that he had thought of it. A good theatrical manager is a good con man.

“My late husband, you know,” Mrs. Lorde continued, “was very fond of magicians. He’d seen the Great Carter as a youth and it impressed him greatly. Of course, watching magicians was only a minor passion compared to his love of stamps.”

Schneider looked at his watch. “Speaking of Mr. Lorde’s stamps,” he said, “I’d better call McCarthy. I want to make sure of the time he and his men are coming to move the collection.”

Ian McCarthy was curator of the Lorde’s Collection, one of the finest of United States issues in the world, featuring the only mint copy of the Hayes Two-and-a-Half-Cent Vermilion, probably the most valuable presidential portrait in existence. The entire issue was believed to have been destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake until, in 1929, this single stamp was found in the drawer of a desk being auctioned off by the post office. Mr. Lorde bought the stamp at auction for $22,000 — an incredible price for the time — in honor of his wife who was distantly related to Lucy Webb Hayes, the President’s wife.

The collection was periodically moved from one to another of the sixteen state-wide branches of Lorde’s — tonight it was going to Sacramento, as usual late at night with top security precautions — and, as you’d expect, it brought in many an admiring philatelist. The main branch here in San Francisco maintained a stamp room which dispensed both rare and common stamps to eager buyers — the practical approach. Old man Lorde had been a hard-nosed businessman as well as a collector.

“Perhaps you had better go over to the store immediately,” Mrs. Lorde said to Schneider. Her voice had a hard edge to it, as it had all night when she’d addressed him. I had the feeling she was not exactly pleased with her manager, for some reason.

“Yes, perhaps I should,” Schneider said. He stood and offered me his hand. He was one of those people who think politeness is what separates Man from the Lower Orders. Lillian Royce seemed to think this was an admirable quality.

When Schneider had given Miss Royce a radiant smile and departed, Lewis Thorp leaned toward me and said in his high voice, “Tell me, Booth, how does Steele do that aging trick?”

Trying not to wince at the word “trick,” I cupped my hand to my mouth confidentially. “Magic,” I whispered.

Lillian Royce giggled.

Steele was sitting in front of the triple mirror removing his makeup when I entered his dressing room minutes later. “Beautiful show,” I said. “You left them breathless.”

“Thank you, Matthew.” He began to don the outfit he would wear in the coffin for the next two weeks: black pants, black turtleneck sweater, black jacket, very somber and correct for a coffin with a glass top. “Have the Lorde’s people left for the store?” he asked.

I said they had. “There’s a limousine waiting for us out front.”

“Was the coffin delivered?”

“Yes. Thorp told me it arrived around six.” I had been at Steele’s house across the bay in Berkeley at three, when the movers had picked up the apparatus from his basement workshop.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Matthew,” he said. With his thick black hair, dark complexion, and deep-set eyes, the all-black costume made him look somewhat sinister.

Ardis joined us, wearing a simple white dress as provocative as any of her stage costumes; her long, auburn hair was now arranged in a precise manner. She linked her arm familiarly through Steele’s and we walked out to the waiting limousine. Ardis lived in a private wing of Steele’s enormous house, and was his closest friend and confidante. If there were any other quality to their relationship, only they knew of it.

The limousine took us swiftly and silently through a foggy San Francisco night to Post Street. Lorde’s main entrance was floodlit, and there was a large crowd on hand. The publicity I had planted in articles, columns, and local TV shows had paid off.

Steele and Ardis waved to the crowd and hurried inside the store; it was 9:50 and the entombment was set for ten o’clock. I would have gone in with them, but the security guard at the door wouldn’t let me pass. The store was isolated except for a few top employees because of the collection. I went over to the window to see how the coffin looked in place. On a two-foot marble pedestal, set about five feet back from the floor-to-ceiling window and parallel to it, the coffin was of dark, polished wood. Inside, through the thick glass top, you could see the white satin lining Steele would be lying on for the next two weeks. The angle, and a couple of lights inside the coffin, gave a clear view of the inside and of Steele, once he entered. When the glass top was set in place, the crack would be sealed with hot wax, presently bubbling on a brazier to the left of the coffin.

The only other items in the window were a large calendar to record the passage of the days of Steele’s entombment, a large clock to tick off the seconds, minutes, and hours, and two posters in the Houdini style of flamboyance — gaudy electric-blue and yellowish-red announcements of the greatness of Christopher Steele, which were behind the coffin.

Mrs. Lorde and Victor Schneider entered the window, followed by Steele, Ardis, and a committee of four reputable citizens who would examine the coffin and pour the wax to seal the lid and deprive Steele of his air supply. In the eleven years I’ve been with Steele I’ve seen maybe a hundred of these committees, and there hasn’t been one yet which could spot a gaff unless it reached up and popped them on the nose. Their chances of spotting this gaff — the gimmick that enabled Steele to work the effect — were exactly zero. As a matter of fact, so were mine; Steele had refused to allow me to examine the coffin while he was working on it.

Steele gave an introductory speech to the crowd via microphone and loudspeaker while the committee probed and prodded at the coffin. He explained how fakirs of the East had developed techniques for shallow breathing that enabled them to live for extended periods of time with little oxygen. He told of the years he had spent mastering this technique and that of slowing his heartbeat. Then he climbed into the coffin and the glass lid was lowered into place. Schneider and one of the committee members poured the molten wax into the groove around the lid. Steele now had maybe five hours of air left. Two weeks is three hundred and thirty-six hours...

“How does he do it?” a voice asked behind me; it was Lillian Royce. “These tricks of his, I mean, like that scary thing in the Magic Cellar where the girl turns into a skeleton?”

I had the feeling that she wanted to talk to someone about anything at all, and I was there and the effects were a convenient topic. I’m always willing to talk with a beautiful woman, and the effects are not really secret, just sort of confidential.

“First of all,” I said, drawing her to one side, “don’t ever call them tricks. They’re effects, or slights, or illusions, but never tricks.” I could see Steele’s face at the extreme angle I was standing, but no more of him. It seemed to shimmer slightly by some illusion of the lighting as I turned away.

“Tell me,” Lillian insisted, “how does he do it?”

“I warn you,” I said, “magic is funny in one way: when it’s explained it seems silly and obvious, no matter how powerful the effect was when you saw it. That’s why magicians never explain their effects. You’re being fooled, and people resent being fooled.”

“I can’t figure it out,” Lillian said. “I admit he’s fooled me.”

“It’s called the Blue Room Illusion,” I told her. “Maybe fifty years old. It involves a peculiar optical property of glass.”

“What’s that?”

“If a plate of perfectly clear glass is dark on one side and well lit on the other, it turns into a mirror on the lighted side. You’ve probably noticed this on windows at night.”

“Where was the glass?” Lillian asked.

“Picture the stage,” I told her. “Ardis comes in wearing that sexy white dress and goes to the chair at the back. The lights dim except for a couple of spots on her. Steele goes into his spiel. That’s when it happens. A sheet of clear plate glass — a giant, damned expensive sheet of clear plate glass — is slid into place on concealed tracks diagonally across the stage. It’s invisible to the audience because it’s meticulously cleaned and evenly lighted on both sides.

“Then, slowly, the lights on the far side of the glass are lowered and the lights on this side” — I wiggled my fingers to indicate which side — “are raised. The glass turns into a mirror, reflecting the image of an identical chair at right angles to the stage, concealed in the wings. An assistant in a copy of Ardis’ costume, made up to look incredibly ancient, is sitting in the chair. The gradual change of lights makes it look as though Ardis herself is aging.”

Lillian looked incredulous. “What about the skeleton?”

“While Ardis is in darkness she gets out of the chair and is replaced by the skeleton. Then the lights change again and the glass is silently slid back.”

“Gosh,” Ardis said, appearing behind me with an armful of posters, “I thought it was magic.”

“Ardis,” I said, “meet Lillian Royce. She buys.”

“Indeed?” Ardis said. “Excuse me.” She pushed through the crowd and began tacking up display posters on one of the wooden boards framing the exterior of the window. They were identical to the yellow-red ones inside, behind the coffin.

I turned back to Lillian. “I’ve just had a brilliant idea,” I said. “Why don’t we—”

A sudden loud flapping sound cut off the rest of what I was going to say, and Lillian and I and the rest of the crowd shifted our gaze to Ardis and her poster. She had slipped: tacked up the top of the poster, stretched out the bottom, and then let go. The poster had, of course, rolled back up.

“The unflappable Ardis,” I said to Lillian. “Well, there’s always a first time. As I was about to ask you, why don’t we go over to Franscatti’s and get something to eat?”

“I’d love to,” Lillian said.

“Sounds good,” a new high-pitched voice cut in, and Lewis Thorp appeared at my elbow. “You won’t mind if I join you?”

I was trying to figure out how to answer that politely when Mrs. Lorde emerged from the front door and saved me the trouble. “Mr. Thorp,” she called, waving her cane at us, “I wish to see you. You too, Miss Royce.” She looked disturbed, angry. “Will you both come up to my office, please. I won’t keep you long, Miss Royce.”

“The Queen Mother calls,” Thorp said.

“Do you mind going on ahead?” Lillian asked me. “I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

“As soon as she could” turned out to be about twenty minutes after I had arrived at Franscatti’s, which caters to the late-night crowd. “I’m sorry. There were some things...” She sat down in the booth across from me, looking distracted and unhappy. “I couldn’t find Victor,” she said.

“Schneider? Why were you looking for him?”

“We’re... friends,” she said vaguely. “Something peculiar is going on, and I don’t know what it is. Mrs. Lorde is angry, and Victor is... Oh, I don’t know where Victor is.”

“He’s probably gone home to sleep, like any sensible man.”

“No, I don’t think so. He wouldn’t leave the store until Mr. McCarthy came to move the stamps, and Mr. McCarthy hadn’t arrived yet when I left. He’s due any time.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m sure Schneider is around somewhere. There’s no need to worry.”

I ordered spaghetti with white clam sauce, and when it came it seemed to cheer Lillian up a bit. We started to talk of, among other things, my life as a magician’s manager. “While Steele’s lying in that coffin practicing shallow breathing or whatever,” I said, “I’m going to be getting TV crews down to film it; keeping crowds in front of the window day and night; seeing that it’s played up on local and national news. He lies there while I do all the work, which is why he’s a genius and I work for him.”

“Does he do this sort of thing often?” she asked.

“He doesn’t like to repeat himself,” I answered. “There’re people who make a living just getting buried, but Steele is doing it because he’s never done it before. It’s a challenge, and he can’t turn down a challenge of any kind. That’s the way he is.”

“Are these effects original?”

“Some are. In Steele’s case there’s something original in every effect — and his presentation is always original, created to fit his stage personality. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a challenge.”

It was past 11:30 when we walked the three blocks back to the store. The crowd was still there but its focus had shifted from the coffin in the window to the main door. Drawn up in front were three police cars, a couple of unmarked vehicles with red lights suction-cupped to their tops, and an ambulance.

Steele was snug in his coffin in the great window to the left of the entrance, serenely staring at the ceiling. After checking on him we pushed our way through the crowd. Judging by their conversation, none of them had any idea of what was going on.

A uniformed cop stood at the door, repelling traffic. When we gave him our names he let us in and told us to go up to the executive offices on the second floor. He wouldn’t tell us anything else.

Mrs. Lorde was sitting in rigid solitude in the middle of a large Regency-for-the-masses couch, with both hands firmly twined around the butt of her gold-handled cane. Lewis Thorp sat in a hard-backed chair opposite, wearing an expression that indicated a submerged and unpleasant emotion. Also present were two stoic patrolmen.

“What happened here?” I demanded of the group at large.

Thorp looked over at me sourly, then switched his gaze to Lillian. “It’s Schneider,” he said. “He’s been killed.”

“Oh!” Lillian’s hand went to her mouth, and all the blood drained out of her face. She managed to stumble over to the couch nearest us and drop onto it. She began to weep softly.

“Mr. McCarthy found him,” Mrs. Lorde said. “In the Stamp Room.” She proceeded to explain that when McCarthy and his men had arrived at the store, they hadn’t been able to get into the Stamp Room because they couldn’t locate Schneider, who had the only key. Mrs. Lorde had sent Schneider to the Stamp Room to do some last-minute inventorying, and insisted that was where he had to be. So, with her permission, McCarthy and his men had broken the door in. “He was lying on the floor in front of the sales counter,” she finished. “Nothing they could do for him. Terrible thing. Terrible.”

At that moment a man entered through the wide door to the executive-office area, and we all turned our attention to him. He was short and stocky and wearing a gray suit, the vest of which was buttoned over a blue shirt and old-school-stripe tie. “Sorry to keep you waiting so long,” he said, “but there was some routine that had to be gone through first.” He glanced at Lillian still sobbing on the couch, and then looked over at me. “You’d be Matthew Booth, is that right?”

“Yes,” I said. “And you?”

“Lieutenant Garrett. Homicide.”

“Was Victor Schneider’s death accidental?” I asked him.

“Not likely. Medical examiner says he was struck in the throat by a blunt object about the size of a thumb, which pierced the skin and the thyroid cartilage, crushing said cartilage and closing the trachea. In plain English, he choked to death because he could no longer breathe. Nasty way to die.”

Lillian had raised her head to listen, but now she made a keening sound — one of horror and grief — and lowered her face into her hands again. I thought of saying something to Garrett about his insensitivity, but then I realized he knew exactly what he was doing. He’d been watching Lillian and the rest of us closely as he talked.

“Perhaps it wasn’t murder at all,” a voice suggested, and I looked over to see Ardis had entered the room; I’d been wondering where she was. “Perhaps the poor man tripped and fell against that thumb-sized something you mentioned.”

“I’m afraid not, Miss,” Garrett said. “Any such object would have traces of blood, and there are none.”

“Then you didn’t find the weapon either?” I asked.

“Not yet. But it’ll turn up eventually.”

“If Schneider was murdered, who could have done it?”

“We don’t make guesses,” Garrett said, which meant he didn’t have any idea who had done it. “Everyone in this room, it seems, has no concrete alibi for the time of death — except perhaps you, Mr. Booth. Anyone here could be guilty. Or none of you, for that matter. Although, as far as we can tell right now, no one else could have gotten into the store. And you few could play hide-and-seek for hours in this huge empty place.”

“What about motive?” Ardis asked.

“After we talk to everyone here, maybe we’ll know more along that line.” Another noncommittal answer. “Our first thought, of course, was robbery, since the murder took place in the Stamp Room with the Lorde’s Collection. But the collection appears to be intact; Mr. McCarthy is checking it now.” He frowned. “We don’t even know — yet — how the killer got into or out of the Stamp Room. The only key is still on Schneider’s key ring; and the windows are barred with half-inch steel that hasn’t been touched in thirty years.”

So there it was: what appeared to be a locked-room murder. I thought of Steele downstairs in his glass-topped coffin (the murder would spell the end of his two-week planned illusion; Lorde’s now had all the publicity it could handle, whether negative or positive). But Steele wouldn’t be too upset, I knew. Puzzles fascinated him; the more bizarre a puzzle was, the better he liked it. The man thrived on challenges, as I’d told Lillian earlier. Consequently life was never dull around Christopher Steele — but this was the first time I knew of a murder being part of the amalgam.

“I’d better go look at Christopher,” Ardis said. “He must be curious to find out what’s going on outside his little glassed-in world.”

“You’ll have to do it from inside, Miss,” Garrett said. “The uniformed officers at the door have orders not to let anyone out.”

“Really!” Mrs. Lorde said. “You don’t think any of us are going to run away?”

“It’s not that,” Garrett explained. “We may want to search each of you before you leave.”

“Looking for what?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“I’ll stay inside,” Ardis assured the lieutenant, and headed off toward the escalator.

“Why,” Garrett asked, “does she want to look at him?”

“I think she wants him to look at her,” I explained. “They have a sign language they use for a mind-reading act. You see—”

“Incredible! Absolutely incredible!”

We turned around. A small, gray man had appeared at the door and was waving a magnifying glass about. “Incredible! Who would have thought such? Impossible! Not even gummed!”

We all stared at each other while the lieutenant strode over to the little man. “Calm yourself, Mr. McCarthy. What is it?”

McCarthy thrust something tiny into Garrett’s face. “Here,” he said. “Look at this!”

“It’s a stamp?” Lieutenant Garrett asked.

“It is not! When you asked me to go through the stamps I said to myself this is a waste of time, a complete waste of time...”

“You said it to us too, Mr. McCarthy.”

“I was mistaken. It’s incredible. This is the Hayes Two-and-a-Half-Cent Vermilion. But it isn’t. It’s an imitation. And not even gummed! Looking at it through the glass, even an expert might have missed it. Incredible!”

“What’s the real stamp worth?” Garrett asked the old man.

“Priceless,” McCarthy said. “Whatever someone will pay for it. It’s one-of-a-kind.”

“Well, what’s it insured for?”

“I believe two hundred thousand dollars. But you understand its intrinsic value could be much higher, depending upon just how badly someone else wanted the stamp.”

“It looks like someone wanted it pretty badly,” Garrett said. “Let’s get that magician up here.”

“You don’t think—” I started.

Garrett looked at me. “What don’t I think?”

“Christopher Steele couldn’t have anything to do with this,” I said. “He’s been locked in a coffin in plain view of a crowd of people since ten o’clock.”

“That may be,” Garrett said, “but he’s the only one who was in the store at the time of the murder who isn’t here now, so we might as well have him. Maybe he can give us a little insight into locked rooms — professionally, that is.”

“I’d be delighted, Lieutenant,” Steele’s deep stage voice said behind us. We turned and saw him standing in the doorway with Ardis.

“Where the hell did you come from?” Garrett demanded.

“Ardis told me what was happening. I had her break the wax seal around the lid and let me out.”

“It was all news to you, was it?”

Steele smiled faintly. “I’ve been sealed inside that coffin for the past three hours, Lieutenant. I did see the arrival of the police vehicles, of course, but I had no idea what had happened.”

“I’d like to have a close look at that coffin of yours,” Garrett said. “Unless you have objections?”

“Certainly not.” Steele’s eyes began to gleam. “Did I understand you to say you’d like me to examine the locked room where the murder took place?”

Garrett thought about it. “That might be an idea,” he said. “You ever use a locked-room gimmick in your act?”

“Various effects that could be applied to a seemingly locked room,” Steele said. “But remember, there is no such thing as a ‘locked room’ in the sense we’re using the term. People cannot walk through walls.”

I suppressed a chuckle, and Steele glared at me. One of his best effects is to have masons come on stage and build a brick wall in full view of the audience. Then Steele proceeds to pass through it. Houdini invented that one.

Steele shifted his gaze back to the lieutenant. “Can I see that room now?”

“All right. It can’t hurt anything. In fact, why don’t we all adjourn to the Stamp Room. The lab crew’s gone by now.”

So all of us went down to the Stamp Room. There was a chalk outline where the body had lain on the worn maroon carpeting, but nothing else seemed out of place. Jutting out from the wall on the right were eight display cases filled with trays of stamps and envelopes, with printed cards telling what each was and in some instances giving historical data. At the rear was a long glass counter with stamps, stamp albums, books about stamps; these were the items for sale by Lorde’s. On the counter top was a telephone, several reference books, catalogs, a charge-card machine, and some pencils. The left side of the room had three eight-foot-high shelves, like stacks in a library, running parallel to the wall with the door; these had trays of stamps and first covers, some of which were for sale and some of which belonged to the Lorde’s Collection. The windows were directly opposite, behind the counter. Not only were the bars firmly in place, but the sash was painted to the frame.

Steele walked to the middle of the room and turned in a slow circle, studying everything in it, and I knew that the single turnaround had fixed every detail of the Stamp Room in his mind.

He stared at the counter briefly, turned and walked to the display cases on the right. “Where was the stamp?” he asked.

“Third case from the rear,” McCarthy told him. “Incredible!”

“We’ll worry about the stamp later,” Garrett said. “Well, Steele? Do you see anything we might have missed?” His voice was tinged with irony.

“Perhaps,” Steele said. “Mr. McCarthy, what did you do when you found the body?”

“I left the room and called the police.”

“You didn’t touch anything in here?”

“I know better than that.”

“You didn’t call from this phone?”

“No. I didn’t want to disturb anything.”

Steele nodded and turned to Garrett. “You said the room was locked from the inside. Surely there are cylinders on both sides of the door?” With his air of positive command, it didn’t occur to the detective that he should be asking the questions and Steele responding. Steele’s carefully nurtured stage personality had some use away from the footlights.

“There are,” Garrett admitted. “But there’s only one key, and it’s supposed to be in the possession of the manager at all times, because of insurance regulations. It was found in his pocket.”

“May I see it, please?”

Garrett asked another officer to get the “evidence envelope,” and the man nodded and left the room. “We’ll find the killer,” the lieutenant said to Steele. “But to make a case, we have to know how he got out of the room. Can you tell us?”

Steele offered his hand. “I accept the challenge.”

Garrett, who was unaware that he had issued a challenge, shook hands — and then frowned.

“This isn’t a publicity thing, is it? It better not be. I want no statements to the press unless you clear with me first.”

“No publicity, I assure you, Lieutenant. The challenge of the puzzle itself is my reward. Just give me access to the information as you collect it, and I promise you the mystery will be satisfactorily solved. As I said before, there’s no such thing as a locked room.”

The officer came back with a large manila envelope and handed it to Garrett, who ripped it open and dumped the items inside onto a glass counter. “Schneider’s pockets, contents of,” he said.

Steele picked up the key ring and isolated and examined the Stamp Room key. “Not copied recently,” he told Garrett, “and no impression taken.”

“How do you know?”

“Simple,” Steele said. “Your laboratory will say the same. If it had been copied there would be some sign of it on the lands, where the copying pantograph would be pressed against it. If it had been impressed, then some miniscule particle of wax or clay would have adhered to the inner surface of this groove.”

“All right, Steele,” Garrett said. “You see anything else there?”

“Not at the moment,” Steele answered, but his eyes had a secretive look that I recognized. He was onto something, and he wasn’t ready to share it. Steele has a flair for the dramatic and, on occasion, the melodramatic, and his timing is excellent.

There was a point that was bothering me, and I decided to ask: “Doesn’t this room have a burglar alarm?”

Garrett nodded. “It does, but not on the door.”

“That’s right,” Thorp said. “The alarm system is wired into the display cases. It sets off a silent alarm in the office of the private security outfit we use.”

“Then why didn’t the alarm go off when the Hayes stamp was stolen?” I asked.

Garrett turned to Thorp. “That’s a damn good question. Where’s the alarm control box?”

“Outside in Sportswear. In a recessed wall cubicle.”

“Who has the keys?”

Thorp colored slightly. “Key; there’s only one. I have it. One of my duties is to activate the alarm system after closing.”

“Let’s see it.”

Thorp pulled it from his pocket. It was a single key, too large to fit on any ring; about as long as a fountain pen, and thicker around, with an irregular series of grooves on one end and a large round handle on the other.

“Fascinating,” Steele said, taking it from Thorp’s hand and examining it. “It must be over thirty years old.”

“The alarm system is older than that,” Thorp said. “We’ve been taking bids on modernizing it.”

“This thing must be a chore to carry around.” Steele hefted the key. “It’s solid brass — and look how shiny it is.”

“I usually keep it in the safe. Only take it out to turn the system on and off.”

“How do you get into the store without setting off the alarm, then?” Garrett asked.

“I don’t. The alarm covers the entrance doors, and it goes off when the first person comes into the store in the morning. He has to call the security people immediately and identify himself. It’s usually me or Mr. Schneider. Then I reset the alarm.”

“Who else has the combination to the safe?”

“Victor Schneider had,” Thorp said. “Only he.”

“That poses a question,” Garrett said. “Thorp here could have turned off the alarm, but he couldn’t get into the room.”

“Are you suggesting—” Thorp’s face flushed dark red.

“Just speculating,” Lieutenant Garrett said. “It’s my job. Now, Schneider could have come in here and turned off the alarm, but then we’d have to assume he had an accomplice, since he didn’t murder himself.”

“Didn’t he have to have the alarm off to inventory the stamps?” Mrs. Lorde asked. “That’s what he was doing. I asked him to do the first inventory, then Mr. McCarthy would do the second. We always do two.”

“It’s a physical inventory,” McCarthy said. “He didn’t have to touch them or examine them, just make sure they were there. He just peered through the glass.”

“One second,” Steele said. He disappeared down one of the short aisles between the display cases on the right. “Is this the inventory control sheet?” he asked, coming back out with a clipboard in his hand.

“Yes,” McCarthy said.

“Where did you find it?” Garrett demanded.

“On top of the case, about halfway along. It’s checked off to item number three-twenty-six. Where would that be?”

“Right about where you found the clipboard,” McCarthy said.

“So Schneider got it in the middle of his inventory,” Garrett mused.

“He caught someone stealing the stamp,” Thorp said.

“How was the stamp stolen without the alarm going off?”

“A duplicate key could have been made,” I volunteered. “Someone could have taken an impression of the lock; it’s right out there in plain view of any customer with a piece of wax.”

Steele glared at me. “It’s not that easy. I could have done it, but that’s my profession and I’ve had twenty years’ practice. Few amateurs could have done it.”

“Well, a man is dead and a valuable stamp is missing,” Garrett said. “Somebody did something. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to question each of you separately. Miss Royce, I understand that you and Mr. Schneider were good friends.”

Lillian nodded her assent. She still seemed dazed.

“Would you come with me, please?” Garrett asked gently. “Let’s talk about it.” He led her out of the Stamp Room and we all more or less straggled behind. Garrett preempted the private office for interrogation, with Mrs. Lorde’s grudging permission.

Steele called Ardis over to us. “Are you still friendly with that young lady who works for the phone company?”

“As far as I know,” she said.

“Get hold of her. Find an open phone. Tell her—”

“But it’s—”

“I know, it’s three o’clock in the morning. We’ll take her out to dinner next week. Have her get over to the billing computer and get a list of all numbers called from this store since ten o’clock this evening.”

Ardis went off. Magicians’ assistants are used to doing whatever their boss asks of them without question and without hesitation. It’s a necessary prerequisite of the job; otherwise one of them can wind up embarrassed, injured, or dead.

Magicians’ managers, however, are another matter. “Why do you want the list of numbers?” I asked Steele.

He gave me one of his enigmatic smiles. “Perhaps we’ll find nothing, and perhaps a great deal,” he said.

“Thanks a lot.”

Steele walked over to where Mrs. Lorde was leaning on her cane, scowling down at the floor. “I wonder if I might ask you a few questions,” he said.

She lifted her head and regarded him with one eye. “What questions, young man?”

“I’ll be brief. I imagine you must be distressed by the death of Mr. Schneider and the loss of the Hayes Two-and-a-Half-Cent Vermilion.”

“The stamp is insured,” Mrs. Lorde said. “A man’s life is infinitely more important than a piece of gummed paper. Even a man like Victor Schneider.”

Steele raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”

“Meaning Victor Schneider was a fool and an incompetent. If he had not died, I would almost certainly have replaced him.”

“Incompetent as a store manager?”

“Indeed. His accounting procedures were dangerous and he had a knack for purchasing unsalable merchandise without consulting anyone. If I had not been in Europe for more than a year, I would have discovered this much sooner.”

“How long had Schneider been your manager here?”

“A little over two years.”

“I see,” Steele said. “Did you have someone in mind as his replacement?”

“Of course. Lewis Thorp.”

“Did Thorp know of your displeasure with Schneider? Did he know that he was next in line?”

“He did not. I tell no one what I intend to do until I do it. However, I did plan to speak to Lewis about Schneider tonight; that is why I summoned him to my office earlier. There were interruptions and then this murder and theft, so I did not have the chance to carry out my intention.”

“You hadn’t as yet mentioned to Schneider that his job was in jeopardy, is that correct?”

“It is. I was waiting until our CPA firm completed an independent audit this past week, but when I had their report, I knew nothing more than I had previously. There are incompetents in every business. So I called a second CPA firm; they will begin their audit next week.”

“You suspected a shortage, Mrs. Lorde? Embezzlement?”

She tapped her cane sharply on the hardwood floor. “Not exactly. Victor Schneider was a fool but not a knave; he lacked the intellectual capacity for knavery. No, I merely suspect mismanagement due to incompetence. But our CPA’s are also incompetent. They couldn’t tell, they said, if there were any discrepancies. Do you believe that? Well, I expect the new firm I’ve hired will be able to tell.”

Steele nodded thoughtfully.

“I suppose you think it’s rude of me to speak so harshly of the dead,” Mrs. Lorde said, “but Death is too close a companion for me to hold in reverence.”

“A man in death is just what he was in life,” Steele said sententiously. “Neither more nor less, and he should be remembered thus.” He gave the old woman a courtly bow, and we turned away.

I studied his face, and he had the air of someone doing mental mathematics. He said, “Tell me, Matthew, about your friend, Miss Royce. Have you any idea of her feelings toward Lewis Thorp?”

I thought back to my dinner conversation with Lillian. The subject had come up, briefly. “He made a pass at her once, which she repulsed. Subsequently he got himself a steady girlfriend and ignored Lillian — Miss Royce. She happily ignored him also.”

Steele fell silent, pondering again as he led the way to Lewis Thorp’s office cubicle.

Thorp was sitting at his desk. He looked up and gave us a wan smile as we approached. “Well, Mr. Steele,” he said, “any new developments?”

Steele shook his head. “I’d like to hear your ideas.”

“If you mean about how poor Victor was murdered in a locked room,” Thorp said, “I can’t help you. It seems like a baffling crime.”

“So it does,” Steele agreed.

“Victor must have been killed by whoever stole the stamp,” Thorp said. “He must have walked in on him — the thief, I mean.”

“That’s not likely,” Steele said. “He would have known that the theft would be uncovered in the murder investigation.”

“Maybe he just wanted time to get the stamp out.”

“No, I don’t think the theft has anything to do with the murder. Just an unfortunate coincidence.”

Thorp worried his lower lip for a moment. “There is one other possibility,” he said. “Our books have just undergone a surprise audit. The rumor is that there was a major discrepancy.”

“You think Schneider may have been tapping the till?”

“I knew Victor rather well. He had his faults, as we all do, but he seemed to be a basically honest man. But he was extravagant in his tastes, and he may have needed money. If he was embezzling from the store and someone found out about it, he may have tried to blackmail him. And suppose they had a fight of some kind, and Schneider was killed by accident. Or suppose he had an accomplice who thought that the audit would reveal Schneider’s duplicity and killed to keep himself in the clear.”

“How could such an embezzlement have been accomplished?” Steele asked.

Thorp considered. “What was done — if anything at all was done — was probably a juggling of purchase records; false requisitions to dummy firms, with the money paid by Lorde’s siphoned off. That’s done to firms like ours periodically; we have to be on the watch for it. And any one of a dozen people in the store might have helped Schneider falsify records.”

“I see. It’s an interesting theory, in any case. I appreciate your candor, Mr. Thorp.”

Thorp nodded, and Steele and I left him in his cubicle. When we returned to the front area, I saw that Ardis had come up from downstairs and was beckoning across the floor to us. Steele went immediately to meet her. I was about to follow, but Lillian Royce appeared and intercepted me, clutching at my arm.

“I... I’d like to speak with you, Matthew,” she said. Her nails dug into the tweed of my jacket.

“Of course.”

“I know I shouldn’t impose, but... there’s no one else I can talk to just now about Victor.”

I took her hand. “I understand,” I said.

“I’ve just come from a long talk with Lieutenant Garrett. I did most of the talking. He kept asking questions. I told him the truth, that I was having an affair with Victor. Everyone seemed to know that already. Victor was a nice man, you know. Ineffectual, weak, easily taken advantage of — but he meant well, he always meant well. And they seem to think I might have killed him. Why would I want to kill Victor? Why would anyone—?” She broke off abruptly and buried her face against my shoulder. I could feel her tears against my neck, but she didn’t make a sound. I held her.

It was perhaps two silent minutes later when Steele and Ardis came over to us. “I dislike interrupting,” he said quietly, “but you could help me if you would, Miss Royce.”

Lillian took a deep breath, and then stepped away from me and faced Steele.

He said, “Matthew mentioned your describing Mr. Thorp’s acquisition of an inamorata — a girlfriend. Do you know her?”

“Yes,” Lillian answered. “Ginny Epworth.”

Steele nodded again. Just then Lieutenant Garrett came out of the private office. “Oh, Steele!” he called, then waited until he reached us to continue: “One of our lab men has a farfetched theory on how the killer got into and out of the Stamp Room, but I’d like you to hear it anyway.”

“I don’t have to, Lieutenant,” Steele said. “I know how it was done.”

“What?”

“And I believe I can name the killer of Victor Schneider.”

My mouth, I think, dropped open. So did Garrett’s. There was a silence; then Garrett said warily, “Go ahead.”

“My proof is, at the moment, merely inferential,” Steele said. “But if you will bear with me, I believe I can suggest a means for establishing the killer’s identity.”

“Just name him.”

“If you would join us in the Stamp Room, and bring the others with you — and if you would then give me ten minutes to propound a little scenario — I’ll give him to you.”

“Just name him,” Garrett repeated.

“It wouldn’t do you any good; you couldn’t arrest him. Give me ten minutes, and I guarantee you can arrest him.”

“I can’t authorize you to ask any questions in the name of the Police Department.”

“I won’t be asking any.”

Garrett thought it over, then shrugged. “You’ve got your ten minutes,” he said.

We stood or sat on two sides of the Stamp Room, facing each other. Ardis, McCarthy, Lillian, and I were by the door, with a plainclothesman in the doorway. Across from us, Thorp, Mrs. Lorde, and Lieutenant Garrett were in front of the counter. Steele, of course, stood in the center of the room; it was his show.

“I would like to attempt an experiment,” Steele said, slowly turning around, his eye catching and examining each of us in turn. “Before I do, I should tell you that there is no magic, nothing mystical in what I am about to do.”

I suppressed a smile. Always watch a magician most closely when he tells you there is no trick. Steele had everyone else’s complete attention.

“There is a psychic aura of the past that is always with us,” Steele continued. “It seems to be strongest in the presence of death — particularly violent death. Some people believe that this psychic aura explains the phenomenon we call ‘ghosts,’ other experimenters equate it with that strange sense that what is happening has happened before: what the French call deja vu.” Steele was using his intense, mellifluous, almost hypnotic stage voice on us, a voice which compelled suspension of disbelief until the effect — whatever he was after — was accomplished.

“With experience and help, a few sensitive people have been able to read this aura and unfold the story it conceals. I am going to attempt to do this in this room. I will need your help.”

Mrs. Lorde was skeptical and impatient. “What is it you want us to do?” she asked.

“Patience,” Steele said. “I am about to tell the story that I read in the psychic patterns of this room. I may appeal to one or more of you for help as I go along. Verbal help. That’s all I require.”

“Go on,” Garrett said.

Steele raised his arms above his head. “Let us go back,” he said. “Back almost four hours, to the act of murder and all that led up to it.” He began prowling about the room, examining the walls, the windows, the display cases, the two aisles between the stacks, and even the floor — as though there were words written there for him to find. “I see this room,” he said. “It is empty, waiting. Now Victor Schneider enters. He has come to inventory the stamps; he has a list in his hands and he is checking the stamps off against it, not really examining them but merely seeing that they are there.

“He checks the counter first. Then he goes over to the stacks...” Steele disappeared down one of the aisles, then returned and pointed dramatically at the door. “The murderer!” he announced. Everyone stared at the plainclothesman, who was blocking the doorway.

“The door slowly opens,” Steele continued, his finger still pointing, “and the murderer enters. He closes the door behind him. I think — yes, he locks it.”

“Now wait a minute,” Garrett protested. “Schneider had the only key to the room — we know that.”

“Do we?” Steele asked. “I told you, Lieutenant, that there is no such thing as a ‘locked-room’ mystery. The murderer had a key — a duplicate key no doubt made some time ago by Victor Schneider and foolishly given to the killer for the sake of expediency. The murderer used it to get in, and he locked the door with it when he left.”

“Then where is it now?” Garrett demanded.

“I have no idea. Let me go on.” Steele stared about the room again, as if to relocate the aura. “The killer is in the room. What does he do? Does he attack Victor Schneider? No. He doesn’t see Schneider. He thinks he is alone. He advances—” Steele advanced “—to the counter. Is it the stamp he’s after?”

Steele paused before the case that had held the Hayes Two-and-a-Half-Cent Vermilion and contemplated it. “No. There is no aura of violence about this case. It was something else. What?” He ran his hand a foot above the counter as though it were a sensitive antenna tuning in to the auric vibrations. The hand paused and quivered over the far right end of the counter. “The telephone,” he said.

“What?” Garrett asked.

“He picked up the telephone. He dialed an outside number.”

“What number? Who was he calling?”

“Why come in here to use the phone?” Lillian Royce asked. “There are fifty telephones in the store.”

Steele pressed his hands to his forehead. His audience was obviously still with him, but I was beginning to wonder just what the hell he was doing. “I sense fear; fear, and a need for privacy. This person — the killer — locked himself in here to speak on the telephone of something so private that the overhearing of it was a mortal threat to him. Unfortunately for Victor Schneider, he did overhear this conversation.”

Steele moved again to the stacks. “What exactly was it that Schneider overheard? The facts of a crime — yes, I sense a crime. Perhaps the killer was making plans with the person at the other end of the wire, plans for immediate escape with the ill-gotten gains of this crime, this theft...”

“The Vermilion!” Garrett said.

“No, not a stamp. Not a physical theft. Cheating or embezzling perhaps. Yes — and the killer was laboring under a misconception; he thought his crime had been discovered, that he faced a prison sentence, that his only alternative was to flee as quickly as possible.”

Steele pointed a finger at the phone. “So Victor Schneider, overhearing all of this, decided to confront the person. And did so.” He spread his hands, and then clapped them together. “Just so quickly are created a killer, and a corpse. No premeditation; just the sudden, overwhelming need to suppress a criminous act... Isn’t that right — Lewis Thorp?”

Thorp looked startled, but not as startled as the rest of us; I guess he’d seen it coming. “What are you talking about?” he demanded, his voice harsh.

“There are records, you know, Mr. Thorp,” Steele said, walking toward him. “The phone company must have a record of your call. And the person you called—” Steele held his hand above Thorp’s head as though drawing forth thoughts “—the young lady you called... Miss Epworth.”

Thorp brushed aside Steele’s hand. “What is this? An accusation based on a damned mind-reading act? I don’t have to put up with this. I called Ginny. Of course I called Ginny. Why shouldn’t I?”

“From what phone?” Steele asked softly.

“What do you mean? How do I know what phone? I don’t remember what phone.”

“And the key, Mr. Thorp; how will you explain the key?”

“You mean to this room? I don’t have a key to this room.”

“But you know where it is, because you put it there,” Steele said. “And I’m going to take you to it.”

“You must be crazy,” Thorp said, backing away.

“You’re going to take my hand,” Steele said, “and then I’m going to take you to the key — wherever it is.”

We all watched, hypnotized, as Steele took hold of Thorp’s wrist. “Come,” he said, “let’s go find that key. All you have to do is think about where it is, and I’ll lead you to it.” He pulled Thorp across the room, very much against Thorp’s will. “And you can’t help thinking about it, can you? That little brass key that nobody knew you had. Just lock the door behind you and hide the key and no one could ever prove you were in the room.”

Steele literally pulled Thorp out of the room as he kept up the patter. We all followed behind at a respectful distance. Of course, now I knew what he was doing. It was very impressive on stage, and even more so now when it was being used to trap a murderer. “Just come along,” Steele said, pulling Thorp by the wrist. “Which way? Where would you have put it? Over here?” He went to the left, toward the furniture department. “No, I think not.” He turned to the right again, with Thorp behind him, still in his firm grasp. “Down here, I think. Surely not too far away, wouldn’t want to get caught with it. Paused here to think, did you? Now down here? Ahof course!” He stopped before a glass display case full of wallets and other leather goods. “Somewhere in here.”

“This is ridiculous!” Thorp shouted, but there was panic in his voice. “What does it prove if there is a key in this case? You probably put it there yourself, Steele.”

Steele smiled. “Do you really think that /would need a key to enter the Stamp Room, or any other room?”

Lillian came forward and slid the lock off the door to the case. Steele then opened the door with one hand, the other still firmly wrapped around Thorp’s right wrist. “Where now?” he said, his hand running along the top of the various leather items. “I think... ah, yes!” He pulled a key holder from one of the trays. There were two keys in it for display, one brass and the other silver. “One of these,” he said positively. He lifted the brass one by the ring. “This.”

Lieutenant Garrett pushed forward. “Let me see that.”

“Here you are, Lieutenant. Handle it gently. I think you’ll find Mr. Thorp’s fingerprints on it.”

“What if it is my key?” Thorp’s voice was higher and louder than he’d intended. “That doesn’t prove anything!”

“Speaking of keys,” Steele said to Garrett, “I suggest you examine the burglar-alarm key — which no one but Mr. Thorp uses, by his own admission — carefully under a microscope. You’ll no doubt find traces of blood at the tip, even though Mr. Thorp scrubbed it bright before putting it in this case.”

Of course! I thought. Thorp must have had the key in his possession when Schneider confronted him in the Stamp Room; this was the weapon, with its wide blunt tip, that he had in his fear driven into Schneider’s throat.

Thorp realized, too, that he was trapped; that Garrett had all the evidence he needed now. His gaze dropped and he sagged in Steele’s grasp. Lieutenant Garrett read him his rights, and he was handcuffed and taken away with no fuss at all.

Everyone was talking at once, looking at Steele as if he were some kind of wizard. When Garrett got them calmed down, he asked the question in all their minds: “All right, Steele, how the hell did you do that business with the key? You really didn’t have it spotted beforehand?”

“I had no idea where it was until Thorp ‘told’ me,” Steele answered. “It’s a technique called Muscle Reading. They were doing it in the Middle Ages.”

“Probably getting burned as witches too,” Garrett said. “How does it work?”

“There are several books on it,” I told him. “Professor Otto Dirk’s is probably the best. Published in 1937. Four hundred pages. I have a copy, if you’d care to see it sometime. The technique involves reading a person’s subconscious reactions by keeping a tight grip on a muscle, usually in the arm.”

“It works so good that you can pull the person?”

“It works better when you pull the subject. Something about his pulling away harder in the direction he doesn’t want you to go.”

“You live and learn,” Garrett said. “But listen, Steele, there are a couple of other things that need clearing up. For one, how did you know Thorp had made a telephone call from the Stamp Room?”

“Simple deduction, Lieutenant. He’d gone in there; he had to be doing something. What does the room offer, really, except privacy? The only lines to the switchboard open at night are those in the executive offices and the Stamp Room. You’ve seen the cubicle Thorp had to work in. A phone call was the only logical conclusion. He had no way of knowing that Mrs. Lorde’s suspicions were directed at Schneider and not at him. With his burden of guilt, he saw accusing fingers in every gesture.”

“I suppose so,” Garrett said. “Which reminds me, I’ve got to dispatch someone to pick up Thorp’s girlfriend, this Ginny Epworth; she’s obviously an accessory to his embezzlement. But before I do that, suppose you give me another logical deduction: what happened to the missing stamp? Who stole it?”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. Despite my pose, I am not omniscient. Perhaps Thorp took it. Perhaps poor Schneider took it, for some reason we might never know. Perhaps some unknown individual took it; after all, no one has examined it closely for weeks, according to Mr. McCarthy. I doubt if it has anything to do with the murder, in any case. And I imagine it will turn up eventually.”

Garrett sighed. “All right, Steele. You’ve been a great help, I admit it. You deserve a publicity break, so I’ll see to it you get most of the credit for solving Schneider’s murder. It’s the least I can do.”

Steele smiled — and so, of course, did I.

Two hours later — it must have been almost dawn — Steele and Ardis and I were sitting in the kitchen of his Victorian house in the Berkeley hills. I had escorted Lillian Royce to her San Francisco apartment, and then I had come across the bay to ask Steele some questions before going home myself.

My first question was: “How did you do it?”

His eyes, deceptively mild, raised from a mug of steaming coffee to meet mine over the table. “How did I do what?”

“The Hayes Two-and-a-Half-Cent Vermilion, damn it.”

“Oh. Ardis—”

She tossed him one of the two rolled-up posters she had brought home with her from Lorde’s — the two that had been behind the coffin inside the front window. Steele unrolled it, and his fingernail then scraped lightly at an upper corner, the mottled yellowish-red (vermilion) background to the gaudy drawing of himself. A small rectangle of paper came free, and when I leaned close I saw that two thin corner mounts of transparent plastic, the type used to mount photographs in albums, were affixed to the poster. The rectangle was a picture of President Rutherford B. Hayes.

I stared at the stamp. “You could have told me,” I said.

“I don’t like to worry you unnecessarily, Matthew.”

“Yeah,” I said. “All right — how did you get out of the coffin?”

Ardis said, “The Blue Room Illusion, or a variant of it. The coffin’s lid is a double pane of glass. The bottom pane drops down at a forty-five degree angle. At the same time the lights on one side of the coffin go off, and a set on the other side come on, turning the glass into a mirror.”

“Uh-huh. Then Steele disappears, and what the viewers see is—”

“—a reflected image of a photograph of Christopher pasted along the inside of the coffin, invisible from the street.”

“Right,” I said. “And the necessary distraction?”

“When I let that poster flap, remember? Everyone looked at me, and Christopher rolled out a hinged panel on the other side. In exactly fifteen minutes, I provided him with another distraction, and he mounted the stamp on the poster with one motion, and rolled back into the coffin. While you were having dinner, that was.”

I asked Steele, “You picked the lock on the Stamp Room door?”

“Of course.”

“How about the alarm?”

“I turned it off. With a duplicate key. I took an impression of the alarm lock as a customer in the Sportswear Department last week.”

“One more question: you didn’t figure out that Thorp had made a phone call from the Stamp Room through deduction alone, did you?”

“Not really. When I entered the room the second time, with you and everyone else, I saw immediately that the telephone had been moved. So I knew that someone had made a call in the interim — either Schneider or his killer, since McCarthy and the police had not used the instrument.”

“You know,” I said, “this insane passion of yours for taking on all challenges, and for creating your own when there’s none around, almost got you rung in for murder this time. If your timing had been off, or if someone had spotted the stamp...”

“But it wasn’t, and no one did,” he said. “I had to solve poor Schneider’s murder to make sure I wasn’t implicated in the appropriation of the Vermilion or in the homicide itself. Now there was a challenge.”

I shook my head wearily. “You’re going to return the stamp, naturally.”

“Naturally. I’ll arrange for it to be found somewhere in Lorde’s. And its ‘theft’ will forever remain a mystery.”

“What next, you maniac?” I asked him. “What next?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered. “I’ve sort of been considering the crown of Henry the Seventh.”

The hell of it was, I couldn’t tell whether or not he was kidding...