No Coffin for the Corpse

Chapter Twenty: The Last Solution

I turned to Merlini. “You and your sleight of hand,” I roared. “Now look what you’ve done!” I started toward Kay. “Why did you come to this room just now? Why—”

Flint grabbed my arm. He roared even louder. “You pipe down! I’ll do the questioning. Well, Miss Wolff?”

She nodded at the window which Leonard had left partly open and which no one had thought to close. “My room is the next one over. I heard voices in here, Merlini’s and yours. I thought I heard Merlini accusing me—” She looked at him with round eyes, still not quite believing it.

“I apologize, Kay,” Merlini said quickly. “I’m sorry. Don’t believe everything you hear. Is that gun of yours loaded?”

She shook her head. “No. I took it from the gun room as I came upstairs. When the police arrest the wrong person and then go away leaving us with a murderer — well, I felt safer—”

Lovejoy, who had picked the gun up and examined it, said, “She’s right. It’s empty.”

“And that,” Merlini said, “lets her out, Lieutenant. The murderer wouldn’t arrive bent on killing Smith with an unloaded gun.”

“She wouldn’t have come here to meet Smith anyway,” I put in. “She knew he was dead. I told her.”

Flint turned to Merlini. “You’re not still trying to make me believe that you called anyone on that phone?”

“I am. I did call someone. But not Miss Wolff. The case against her won’t stand a good close look. Ross did not see her go out the window. I was only talking fast, trying to keep you quiet until the person I did phone should arrive. But now, with this door wide open and our voices broadcasting the fact that we’re here, the trap is a washout. And I am, apparently, going to have to do some even faster talking to get out from under the case you’ve built up against me.”

He stopped. His head jerked around toward the door.

The burglar alarm was ringing once again and from outside the house, as it had once before that morning, came the quick starting roar of a car.

“Lieutenant,” Merlini said, “there goes your murderer.”

For a moment Flint hung fire. Then, as the pistol shots cracked out, he roared, “Lovejoy! No one leaves this room. Watch them!” And he was gone.

Merlini looked at Lovejoy. “You’d better get out an alarm, Sergeant. And quickly. Flint is going to have trouble. The police cars are all parked down the drive. By the time he reaches one—”

The sergeant made a startled grab for the phone.

I looked at Merlini. “Your sleight of hand slipped a bit, didn’t it?”

“It wobbled some,” he admitted. “But the trap did work. The murderer heard our voices just now when Kay came in. Having had no news of Smith’s death, having seen the fingerprint on the flower vase indicate that he had returned, and having received my phone call, it looked as though Smith were here and that we had got him — alive, kicking, and ready to talk. It looked as if there was nothing to do but get out fast.”

Kay said, “Merlini, who are you talking about? If someone doesn’t tell me something soon, I’ll—”

Merlini looked at me. “Ross, you tell her.”

“Tell her what? Haggard, Galt, Dunning, Phillips, Scotty — if you can show me how a single one of them could possibly have been in this room when Wolff was shot—”

Sergeant Lovejoy’s voice, angry and baffled, roared at us across the phone. “Dammit, do you know who took it on the lam in that car or don’t you? I don’t know who to tell them to stop!”

“You should,” Merlini answered. “Ross told you some time ago. Mrs. Wolff.”

Lovejoy stared at him uncertainly. “If this is more of your sleight of hand—”

“No, Sergeant. Cross my heart and hope to die. That’s the last solution. There are no more.”

“It was the first one too,” I growled. “And you had to pretend it was wrong so you could step into the spotlight and finish things off with a lot of pretty fireworks. It seems to me that just for once you might let someone else—”

“But, Ross,” he objected. “I didn’t say you were wrong. I merely asked you some questions. Luckily you didn’t have the answers, lost confidence, and began to doubt—”

“Luckily?”

“Yes. If I had agreed with you, if we had convinced the lieutenant and he had made an arrest, then he could never have made it stick. He wouldn’t have had enough concrete evidence to put in his eye, or in the district attorney’s. And he would have discovered that even the nicely built castle of deductive reasoning he did have was built on sand.”

“But if she is the only possible person who could have been in this study when Wolff was shot—”

“That’s the trouble. From Flint’s point of view she isn’t. The whole train of reasoning that proves she must have shot Wolff is based directly on your testimony that no one had left by and no gun had been thrown from the window, and on my testimony that no one had left by the door. Accept those statements as fact and the only solution to the problem of the vanishing gun must be just what you said — that she swallowed it. But neither of us had the least bit of corroboration. When the attorney for the defense got through pointing out that I get my living by deception, that you had a motive as big as all outdoors, and that we were both guilty of burglarous entry the jury would begin having reasonable doubts by the dozen.

“The moment our statements are doubted the whole locked-room situation collapses. Mrs. Wolff is not the only possible suspect. There’s a case against you — you shot him and dropped out the window; there’s a case against Kay — she shot him and did the same; there’s a case against me, the best of the lot — I shot him and left by the door. I knew that in order to escape that predicament we’d have to turn up some evidence against Mrs. Wolff that a jury could really get its teeth into. And then, before there was a chance, you turned my hair gray by popping out with the correct answer way too soon.”

“And so you popped your trick questions,” I said unhappily. “Flint is right. Never trust a magician. That question about the flower vase had nothing to do with the case at all. You’re the colored man in that woodpile. You added that bit of embroidery in order to convince Mrs. Wolff that Smith was back again. And then you insisted I had no case until I had explained it. Was that fair?”

“It was necessary. I had to give you something to worry about until I could set and bait my trap. But it wasn’t so unfair. Flint gave you the answer before the pay-off, you know. And, for good measure, I gave you one of the other answers as well. When I threw Kay to the wolves I told you that you had made a mistake in assuming that Smith shoved you out the window. I told you that the murderer did it, thinking that she was getting rid of Smith’s body.

“But I couldn’t very well explain when the trap gun was fired or where Smith went to after leaving the study. I was trying to cook up a case against Kay, and both those answers point directly at Mrs. Wolff.”

“I give up,” I said. “When was the trap gun fired?”

“You give up too easily. You heard it fired. We all did.”

Kay objected. “But, Merlini, the only shots we heard were the ones Anne fired in her bedroom.”

Merlini nodded. “And how many did you hear?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t count them. There were a lot.”

I tried to remember. “We heard two shots, then three, and she opened her door and backed out into the hall still blazing away. She fired twice more. I’ll be damned!”

“Seven shots,” Merlini said. “Yet her gun held six and there were only six bullet holes in the walls of her bedroom. I’m afraid I didn’t realize that until a bit late myself, not until Lovejoy found the trap gun and we knew it had been fired. When I tried to figure out when that could have happened, I began counting shots and bullet holes. Then, a moment later the medical examiner phoned and reported a powder burn on Smith’s face. That tore it. It he was the one who had gone into the study and tripped the trap gun, Mrs. Wolff couldn’t have been shooting at him in the bedroom as she said. She was shooting at nothing and her barrage not only misdirected our attention from the study, as you said, but also covered the sound of the trap gun as well.”

“But,” Kay objected, “I don’t see why Smith went into the study at all. That was a dead end. Why didn’t he go through Anne’s room and out the window?”

“That’s what he intended to do,” I said. “But she sidetracked him into the study where the trap gun was. When he ducked after posing for the picture, she met him at her door, whispered that Leonard was outside and—”

“Wait, Ross,” Merlini said, shaking his head. “Flint didn’t like that whispering. Neither do I. There’s a much simpler method. All she had to do was lock her door. Smith does the only thing he can do — he jumps for the study. As soon as she hears the report of the trap gun she blazes away with her own gun, backs out of her room into the hall, and comes to a stop directly against the study door. She was making sure that the door had closed and locked behind Smith.

“Later, she did what I pretended to Flint that Kay had done. She went to the study to get rid of the body. But, since Dudley was still awake in his room next door, she didn’t dare show a light that might shine out on the water and be seen from his window. Nor was there any moonlight to show her, when she pulled the body up onto the window sill, that she was making a slight mistake in identity. And Ross, do you remember that when you got your head up above water you saw that the study light had been turned on? And remember who I told you had turned it on?”

I nodded glumly. “Yes. I do now. Dudley Wolff. He had the damned bad luck to walk in on a murderer just as she was getting rid of what she thought was her victim’s body. That’s why she shot him.”

“And then,” Merlini went on, “before she could get out and back to her own room, before she could even do what Flint accused me of — get outside the study door, lock it, and begin pounding on it as though she had just arrived — before she could make a move, I was there at the door doing some pounding of my own! Why that didn’t turn her hair white I don’t know. She had dropped straight from frying pan into a roaring red-hot blaze of fire. She stood there in a locked room, her husband’s body at her feet, and a gun in her hand.

“Anyone’s first instinctive reaction, even in as hopeless a situation as that, would be to rid themselves somehow of that gun. She couldn’t put it in Wolff’s hand and give out a suicide story. Even if he hadn’t been shot twice and in the wrong places, his fear of death made his suicide highly unlikely. Throwing it out the window was nearly as bad. That would be the first place the police, not finding it in the room would look. The vest-pocket gun which she had taken from the collection for the reason Ross gave, that it was small enough for a woman to carry unnoticed on her person, was still far too large to carry unnoticed out of any such situation as this. The voices in the hall outside told her that the police had already arrived. The search she would get would be thorough enough to uncover any gun no matter how small.

“But I doubt that Anne Wolff, in the moments during which I tried frantically to pick the lock on that door, even needed to think through and discard those possibilities. Another and much better one would have occurred to her almost at once. One of the standard methods of producing the spirit lights that had been her special mediumistic forte is the use of a vial of oil in which phosphorus has been dissolved. When the solution is uncapped and exposed to air in the dark it glows with a pale-yellow light. Mrs. Wolff concealed this evidence of fraud by using the subtle but common magician’s principle of deception known as the ‘unlikely means.’ She had practiced an ability to accomplish an action which the ordinary investigator would never suspect simply because it is so unlikely that it never occurs to him. She concealed her spirit-light vial in the same way Jeanne Veiller, Mrs. Duncan, and other mediums hid their ectoplasm. The gun was no larger. She removed the unfired cartridges and swallowed it.

“Then, because this created an apparently impossible situation, similar to those given us by the ghost who had already twice vanished inexplicably, the obvious line to follow was to pretend that he had done it again. The police might not swallow any such theory as that, but the gun’s absence and the prevalence of ghost stories they’d get from all sides would at least confuse the investigation and delay her arrest long enough for her to get an opportunity to cut and run for it. So she dropped the key she had taken from her husband’s ring behind the desk where she later said someone or something had been hiding. Then she lay down, kept her fingers crossed, and played possum.”

“And then,” I said, “I’ll bet she really did pass out. When you pulled me out of the water, she was face to face with the paralyzing fact that the man who cannot die was still living up to his reputation!”

Merlini nodded. “It must have been discouraging to say the least. She realized that the trap gun had missed, that she had disposed of the wrong body, that Smith was still alive and well-aware that she had tried a second time to kill him. And to top that off, her attempt to mislead the police by throwing suspicion on a dead man would boomerang disastrously the moment they found him still alive and heard his—”

“Just a minute,” I interrupted. “Still alive, but, as you proved so thoroughly, invisible. Now disprove it.”

“Why? He was invisible. He left the study just as you said. He went across into the bedroom and discovered that his flashlight wouldn’t work. I pointed out that he could not leave by the window, the door to the hall, or the door to the bathroom. But is it my fault that you forgot that there is another door in that room?”

“Another door?”

“Yes. The closet door. It’s not exactly a way out of the room, but it is a place to hide — the only place. When Mrs. Wolff was carried in, searched, and put to bed, there was no particular reason for anyone to go poking around behind the dresses in that closet. The police were naturally concentrating on the study, the missing gun, and your very suspicious presence in the water below the window. It wasn’t until nearly three hours later, when you told us your story and Tucker found fingerprints to back you up, that we found out that the ghost had been in the study. It was a bit late then. In the meantime Doctor Haggard had given Mrs. Wolff the sleeping tablets which she promptly coughed up along with the gun as soon as he had gone out. Then — well, what else would happen once she was alone?”

“Smith,” Kay answered in an awed voice. “He came out. He may even have found her with the gun in her hands!”

“Go on. And then—”

“Then,” I said, “it’s stalemate. He’s got her cold on two charges of attempted murder and one successful one. But if she can escape conviction, he can blackmail her for the lion’s share of what she’ll get under Wolff’s will. Or he could if he wasn’t trapped there in her room. The moment he’s found, he’s going to have to talk fast and confess to attempted blackmail and assault in order to pin the murder rap on her before she tries to pin it on him.”

Merlini nodded. “The only possible chance of escaping that many-horned dilemma is for him to get out of that room and clear of the house. Mrs. Wolff, who has tried so hard all along to kill Smith, now has no choice but to help him escape. They wait until the upper hallway is clear for a moment, a long and nerve-racking wait because that doesn’t happen until just before dawn when Flint’s men have finished their examination of the study. Then Mrs. Wolff slips out and goes after a flashlight. It may be a bit awkward if she’s spotted, since Haggard’s sedative is supposed to have put her out of action, but it’s their only chance. Smith can’t try to leave by that route because if anyone gets the smallest glimpse of him the fat really would be in the fire.

“I can imagine that Smith, knowing all too well by now that he can’t trust her out of his sight, doesn’t like this procedure one little bit. But he has no choice and, not being able to see just how she can double-cross him without putting her own neck in a noose, he underestimates her once again. During that three-hour wait she has figured out a way. She knows that even if he escapes, it still leaves her holding the bag. She can expect him to bleed her of every cent of the inheritance she’ll get and she has no guarantee at all that even then he may not some day turn her in as revenge for the twice she’s tried to kill him. When she goes down the hall she puts plan number three for the elimination of the phoenixlike Mr. Smith into action. She makes for the kitchen, picks up the dry ice, and goes down through the basement to the garage.”

“Wait,” I broke in. “Her experience as a medium made the vanishing-gun trick possible, but what about the dry ice? Why would she think of a stunt like that?”

“Same reason, Ross. The cold breezes that sometimes waft themselves through a séance room are not the ghostly emanations from the Beyond the medium pretends, but result much more prosaically from a concealed blowing mechanism and dry ice, which is exactly the setup she used this time. She knew that in the small space of a closed car the ghostly breezes would be deadly ones. The printed warnings on a dry-ice container are enough to indicate that. She could have put the ice in her own car, given Smith the keys, and said later that she had left them in the car. But, since that’s just what Kay had done, it was simpler and more misleading to use her car instead. She planted the murder gun there too, partly as a means of getting it out of the house and partly so that suspicion would fall and this time remain on what, she hoped would at last be a dead Mr. Smith. That would close the case.

“Then she took Kay’s flash and returned to her room either by the way she had left, or now that she had a light, more probably by the more direct and less risky trellis route. She threw a scare into Smith by reporting that the estate was overrun with police and convinced him that, since it’s daylight, his best chance of running the gantlet is to make a quick break for it in the car. It was good advice as far as it went, and Smith’s one thought by then was to get as far away as fast as possible. When Dunning nearly caught him at it in the garage, that only hastened his flight.”

“Okay, Mastermind,” I growled, still annoyed at the way he had crossed me up, “that answers everything except the one about the escaped lunatic and the speed of the river under his rowboat.[5] But if you had it figured out as neatly as all that you could have talked Flint into agreeing—”

Merlini shook his head. “I’m not so sure, Ross. He might have asked me question number five, the one I didn’t ask you because I don’t have the answer. And if he didn’t ask it, she would have.”

“Question number five?”

“Yes. Mrs. Wolff tried to get Smith with the trap gun, she shot her husband, and she succeeded finally in getting Smith with the dry ice. Her motive each time was desperation. She was trying frantically to save her own neck. But what about that first time when she tried to kill Smith by leaving him in the grave? We haven’t got a motive for that.”

“What’s wrong with the one I gave you? She couldn’t trust him not to turn around later and blackmail her?”

“If she couldn’t trust him, why use him as an accomplice at all? She had more sense—”

“Who else could she use? Shallow-breathing burial-alive experts don’t grow on every bush.”

“All right. That brings up question number six. Why did she have to try to blackmail her husband in that very unusual manner? You talked very glibly and fast to the effect that it wasn’t much fun being married to Dudley. You said that if she tried to cut loose by any of the usual means he’d blow up in his customary manner and see to it that she didn’t get away with any cash. That’s weak. I don’t like it. She’s clever enough to have thought of some way that didn’t include murder. Yet she didn’t. Why not? We know all her motives except the most important one — the original one that set the whole train of fireworks off.”

Lieutenant Flint’s voice came suddenly from the doorway. “I hope we get it, but our chances aren’t good.”

“She got away?” asked Merlini.

“No. We got her. Tucker was bright enough to have Ryan stick with the cars when they parked them down the drive, just in case. When he heard the shots and I heard the getaway car coming he swung one of the police cars out across the drive. She came around a curve and smacked into it head on. Doctor Haggard says she won’t be answering any questions for some time, if then.”

Flint got the answer though. He brought it backstage a week later, just before the first performance of Merlini’s Hocus-Pocus Revue which was opening on schedule, courtesy of an angel named Kathryn Wolff.

“Here’s the motive you wanted,” he said, laying out on Merlini’s dressing-room table a large scrapbook, a newspaper clipping, and a telegram.

The latter read: Man answering Zareh Bey description operated religious cult racket here until three months ago under name Zorah the Mystic. Wanted on charges of using the mails to defraud. — Capt. J. J. O’Connor, Los Angeles Police Department.

“That’s what he’s been up to since he died on the Morro Castle,” Flint said. “When the going got rough he ducked out and came East. He was staying in a cheap hotel over on Tenth Avenue. When we searched his room we found this.”

The lieutenant picked up the newspaper clipping which I recognized as part of one of the picture layouts in the series of articles I had written about Wolff. It was a shot of Mr. and Mrs. Wolff at the annual banquet of the National Association of Chemical Trades and Industries. Dudley, who had just been elected president, was beaming. Mrs. Wolff, caught off guard by the photographer, was plainly bored stiff.

“And then,” Flint continued, “I located the booking agent who handled Zareh Bey back in ’33 and ’34.” Flint opened the big scrapbook, across the cover of which was lettered: Zareh Bey, The Man Who Cannot Die — Press Notices. “The dates on these clippings tell a good bit of the story. The agent gave me the rest. Zareh blew in to the country in ’29 just after Rahman and Hamid started the burial-alive ball rolling. They were all featured vaudeville headliners for a year or two, but then the supply of fakirs began to exceed the demand, the novelty wore off, vaudeville died on its feet, and by ’33 Zareh is playing two-bit carnivals. In ’34 he decided to have a go at the South American circuit, but he was working on a shoestring and somebody slapped an attachment on his show before he got any farther than Havana. He was head over heels in debt, and then his wife walked out on him. He took the Morro Castle back. You can see why he didn’t deny the newspaper reports of his—”

“Did you say wife?” Merlini put in.

Flint turned a few more pages of the scrapbook and then put his finger on a one-column half-tone cut. The caption beneath read: Medium Produces Strange Spirit Lights in Séance.

“She was the added attraction that entertained the customers while Zareh Bey took his underground nap. Recognize the lady?”

“Yes. She was still married to him at the time of the fire?”

Flint nodded. “You get the idea. And she never got a divorce before marrying Wolff because she didn’t know she needed one.”

“But,” I said, “she finds out when husband number one sees her picture in the papers and discovers who she’s married. He returns from the dead and threatens to tell Wolff that his wife is guilty of bigamy unless she can give him a few good reasons why not — preferably in unmarked bills of large denomination. She can’t pay off because she has no money of her own and Dudley is distinctly not the sort who’d give her any such amount and no questions asked. Zareh Bey won’t take that for an answer. She has to think up another one. So she suggests that they blackmail Wolff together. And, since he doesn’t scare easily except on one count, they play upon his fear of death and get him to believe he has killed a man by staging the phony death and burial of Mr. Smith.”

“A scheme,” Merlini added, “having possibilities that intrigue Zareh Bey. And a few that he doesn’t notice. Mrs. Wolff had a talent for schemes that worked two ways. This one would not only give her the lever she needed to handle Wolff, but would, at the same time, cancel out husband number one by putting him back in the grave she thought he had been in all along. If the man who could not die had only stayed dead he might still be alive.”

“And the real joker,” Flint said, “is that Zareh Bey didn’t actually have anything on her at all. It she believed he was dead when she married Wolff, she did it in good faith and it doesn’t count as bigamy. But she doesn’t know enough law. She tries to kill him off, and because he’s the world’s champion zombi, she has to strike three times before he’s out and shoot husband number two as well. If I ever get another case like it, I’m going to crawl into a hole, pull it in after me, and do some shallow breathing myself.”

Burt Fawkes hurried in. “Overture’s on,” he announced. “Let’s go.”

Merlini stood up, made a gesture with his empty hand and produced a theater ticket from nothing. “Fifth row, center aisle,” he said, handing it to Flint. “We bury ’em alive, burn ’em alive, and saw ’em in two. Just the sort of thing every policeman should know. Go out front and enjoy yourself. I have to finish dressing. Burt, hand me those rabbits.”

A few minutes later, as I waited in the wings with Kay for her first cue, I gave her a kiss for good luck.

“Now go out there and disappear into thin air. But don’t you dare fail to come back.”

“I won’t,” she promised. “I’m going to haunt you for a long time to come. Scared?”

“Well maybe just a little. But I like it.”