The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

THE PULP CONNECTION by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini(b.1943)is a prolific writer of mystery stories, westerns and science fiction, and also a fine anthologist, selecting material from his enviable collection of pulp and digest magazines. Indeed the old pulps are crucial to solving the following story. In the mystery fiction field, Pronzini is probably best known for his stories and novels featuring the Nameless Detective, which began with The Snatch (1971)and include two story collections: Casefile (1983)and Spadework (1996). Quite a few of the stories are impossible crimes.

The address Eberhardt had given me on the phone was a corner lot in St Francis Wood, halfway up the western slope of Mt Davidson. The house there looked like a baronial Spanish villa – a massive two-story stucco affair with black iron trimming, flanked on two sides by evergreens and eucalyptus. It sat on a notch in the slope forty feet above street level, and it commanded an impressive view of Lake Merced and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Even by St Francis Wood standards – the area is one of San Francisco’s moneyed residential sections – it was some place, probably worth half a million dollars or more.

At four o’clock on an overcast weekday afternoon this kind of neighbourhood is usually quiet and semi-deserted; today it was teeming with people and traffic. Cars were parked bumper to bumper on both fronting streets, among them half a dozen police cruisers and unmarked sedans and a television camera truck. Thirty or forty citizens were grouped along the sidewalks, gawking, and I saw four uniformed cops standing watch in front of the gate and on the stairs that led up to the house.

I didn’t know what to make of all this as I drove past and tried to find a place to park. Eberhardt had not said much on the phone, just that he wanted to see me immediately on a police matter at this address. The way it looked, a crime of no small consequence had taken place here today – but why summon me to the scene? I had no idea who lived in the house; I had no rich clients or any clients at all except for an appliance outfit that had hired me to do a skip-trace on one of its deadbeat customers.

Frowning, I wedged my car between two others a block away and walked back down to the corner. The uniformed cop on the gate gave me a sharp look as I came up to him, but when I told him my name his manner changed and he said, “Oh, right, Lieutenant Eberhardt’s expecting you. Go on up.”

So I climbed the stairs under a stone arch and past a terraced rock garden to the porch. Another patrolman stationed there took my name and then led me through an archway and inside.

The interior of the house was dark, and quiet except for the muted sound of voices coming from somewhere in the rear. The foyer and the living room and the hallway we went down were each ordinary enough, furnished in a baroque Spanish style, but the large room the cop ushered me into was anything but ordinary for a place like this. It contained an overstuffed leather chair, a reading lamp, an antique trestle desk-and-chair and no other furniture except for floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered every available inch of wall space; there were even library-type stacks along one side. And all the shelves were jammed with paperbacks, some new and some which seemed to date back to the 1940s. As far as I could tell, every one of them was genre – mysteries, Westerns and science fiction.

Standing in the middle of the room were two men – Eberhardt and an inspector I recognized named Jordan. Eberhardt was puffing away on one of his battered black briars; the air in the room was blue with smoke. Eighteen months ago, when I owned a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, the smoke would have started me coughing but also made me hungry for a weed. But I’d gone to a doctor about the cough around that time, and he had found what he was afraid might be a malignant lesion on one lung. I’d had a bad scare for a while; if the lesion had turned out to be malignant, which it hadn’t, I would probably be dead or dying by now. There’s nothing like a cancer scare and facing your own imminent mortality to make you give up cigarettes for good. I hadn’t had one in all those eighteen months, and I would never have one again.

Both Eberhardt and Jordan turned when I came in. Eb said something to the inspector, who nodded and started out. He gave me a nod on his way past that conveyed uncertainty about whether or not I ought to be there. Which made two of us.

Eberhardt was wearing a rumpled blue suit and his usual sour look; but the look seemed tempered a little today with something that might have been embarrassment. And that was odd, too, because I had never known him to be embarrassed by anything while he was on the job.

“You took your time getting here, hotshot,” he said.

“Come on, Eb, it’s only been half an hour since you called. You can’t drive out here from downtown in much less than that.” I glanced around at the bookshelves again. “What’s all this?”

“The Paperback Room,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“You heard me. The Paperback Room. There’s also a Hardcover Room, a Radio and Television Room, a Movie Room, a Pulp Room, a Comic Art Room and two or three others I can’t remember.”

I just looked at him.

“This place belongs to Thomas Murray,” he said. “Name mean anything to you?”

“Not offhand.”

“Media’s done features on him in the past – the King of the Popular Culture Collectors.”

The name clicked then in my memory; I had read an article on Murray in one of the Sunday supplements about a year ago. He was a retired manufacturer of electronic components, worth a couple of million dollars, who spent all his time accumulating popular culture – genre books and magazines, prints of television and theatrical films, old radio shows on tape, comic books and strips, original artwork, Sherlockiana and other such items. He was reputed to be one of the foremost experts in the country on these subjects, and regularly provided material and copies of material to other collectors, students and historians for nominal fees.

I said, “Okay, I know who he is. But I-”

“Was,” Eberhardt said.

“What?”

“Who he was. He’s dead – murdered.”

“So that’s it.”

“Yeah, that’s it.” His mouth turned down at the corners in a sardonic scowl. “He was found here by his niece shortly before one o’clock. In a locked room.”

“Locked room?”

“Something the matter with your hearing today?” Eberhardt said irritably. “Yes, a damned locked room. We had to break down the door because it was locked from the inside, and we found Murray lying in his own blood on the carpet. Stabbed under the breastbone with a razor-sharp piece of thin steel, like a splinter.” He paused, watching me. I kept my expression stoic and attentive. “We also found what looks like a kind of dying message, if you want to call it that.”

“What sort of message?”

“You’ll see for yourself pretty soon.”

“Me? Look, Eb, just why did you get me out here?”

“Because I want your help, damn it. And if you say anything cute about this being a big switch, the cops calling in a private eye for help on a murder case, I won’t like it much.”

So that was the reason he seemed a little embarrassed. I said, “I wasn’t going to make any wisecracks; you know me better than that. If I can help you I’ll do it gladly – but I don’t know how.”

“You collect pulp magazines yourself, don’t you?”

“Sure. But what does that have to do with-”

“The homicide took place in the Pulp Room,” he said. “And the dying message involves pulp magazines. Okay?”

I was surprised, and twice as curious now, but I said only, “Okay.” Eberhardt is not a man you can prod.

He said, “Before we go in there, you’d better know a little of the background. Murray lived here alone except for the niece, Paula Thurman, and a housekeeper named Edith Keeler. His wife died a few years ago, and they didn’t have any children. Two other people have keys to the house – a cousin, Walter Cox, and Murray’s brother David. We managed to round up all four of those people, and we’ve got them in a room at the rear of the house.

“None of them claims to know anything about the murder. The housekeeper was out all day; this is the day she does her shopping. The niece is a would-be artist, and she was taking a class at San Francisco State. The cousin was having a long lunch with a girl friend downtown, and the brother was at Tanforan with another horseplayer. In other words, three of them have got alibis for the probable time of Murray’s death, but none of the alibis is what you could call unshakable.

“And all of them, with the possible exception of the housekeeper, have strong motives. Murray was worth around three million, and he wasn’t exactly generous with his money where his relatives are concerned; he doled out allowances to each of them, but he spent most of his ready cash on his popular-culture collection. They’re all in his will – they freely admit that – and each of them stands to inherit a potful now that he’s dead.

“They also freely admit, all of them, that they could use the inheritance. Paula Thurman is a nice-looking blonde, around twenty-five, and she wants to go to Europe and pursue an art career. David Murray is about the same age as his brother, late fifties; if the broken veins in his nose are any indication he’s a boozer as well as a horseplayer – a literal loser and going downhill fast. Walter Cox is a mousy little guy who wears glasses about six inches thick; he fancies himself an investments expert but doesn’t have the cash to make himself rich – he says – in the stock market. Edith Keeler is around sixty, not too bright, and stands to inherit a token five thousand dollars in Murray’s will; that’s why she’s what your pulp detectives call ‘the least likely suspect.’”

He paused again. “Lot of details there, but I figured you’d better know as much as possible. You with me so far?”

I nodded.

“Okay. Now, Murray was one of these regimented types – did everything the same way day after day. Or at least he did when he wasn’t off on buying trips or attending popular-culture conventions. He spent two hours every day in each of his Rooms, starting with the Paperback Room at eight am. His time in the Pulp Room was from noon until two pm. While he was in each of these Rooms he would read or watch films or listen to tapes, and he would also answer correspondence pertaining to whatever that Room contained – pulps, paperbacks, TV and radio shows, and so on. Did all his own secretarial work – and kept all his correspondence segregated by Rooms.”

I remembered these eccentricities of Murray’s being mentioned in the article I had read about him. It had seemed to me then, judging from his quoted comments, that they were calculated in order to enhance his image as King of the Popular Culture Collectors. But if so, it no longer mattered; all that mattered now was that he was dead.

Eberhardt went on, “Three days ago Murray started acting a little strange. He seemed worried about something, but he wouldn’t discuss it with anybody; he did tell the housekeeper that he was trying to work out ‘a problem.’ According to both the niece and the housekeeper, he refused to see either his cousin or his brother during that time; and he also took to locking himself into each of his Rooms during the day and in his bedroom at night, something he had never done before.

“You can figure that as well as I can: he suspected that somebody wanted him dead, and he didn’t know how to cope with it. He was probably trying to buy time until he could figure out a way to deal with the situation.”

“Only time ran out on him,” I said.

“Yeah. What happened as far as we know it is this: the niece came home at twelve forty-five, went to talk to Murray about getting an advance on her allowance and didn’t get any answer when she knocked on the door to the Pulp Room. She got worried, she says, went outside and around back, looked in through the window and saw him lying on the floor. She called us right away.

“When we got here and broke down the door, we found Murray lying right where she told us. Like I said before, he’d been stabbed with a splinterlike piece of steel several inches long; the outer two inches had been wrapped with adhesive tape – a kind of handle grip, possibly. The weapon was still in the wound, buried around three inches deep.”

I said, “That’s not much penetration for a fatal wound.”

“No, but it was enough in Murray’s case. He was a scrawny man with a concave chest; there wasn’t any fat to help protect his vital organs. The weapon penetrated at an upward angle, and the point of it pierced his heart.”

I nodded and waited for him to go on.

“We didn’t find anything useful when we searched the room,” Eberhardt said. “There are two windows, but both of them are nailed shut because Murray was afraid somebody would open one of them, and the damp air off the ocean would damage the magazines; the windows hadn’t been tampered with. The door hadn’t been tampered with either. And there aren’t any secret panels or fireplaces with big chimneys or crap like that. Just a dead man alone in a locked room.”

“I’m beginning to see what you’re up against.”

“You’ve got a lot more to see yet,” he said. “Come on.”

He led me out into the hallway and down to the rear. I could still hear the sound of muted voices; otherwise the house was unnaturally still – or maybe my imagination made it seem that way.

“The coroner’s people have already taken the body,” Eberhardt said. “And the lab crew finished up half an hour ago. We’ll have the room to ourselves.”

We turned a corner into another corridor, and I saw a uniformed patrolman standing in front of a door that was a foot or so ajar; he moved aside silently as we approached. The door was a heavy oak job with a large, old-fashioned keyhole lock; the wood on the jamb where the bolt slides into a locking plate was splintered as a result of the forced entry. I let Eberhardt push the door inward and then followed him inside.

The room was large, rectangular – and virtually overflowing with plastic-bagged pulp and digest-sized magazines. Brightly coloured spines filled four walls of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and two rows of library stacks. I had over 6,000 issues of detective and mystery pulps in my Pacific Heights flat, but the collection in this room made mine seem meager in comparison. There must have been at least 15,000 issues here, of every conceivable type of pulp and digest, arranged by category but in no other particular order: detective, mystery, horror, weird menace, adventure, Western, science fiction, air-war, hero, love. Then and later I saw what appeared to be complete runs of Black Mask, Dime Detective, Weird Tales, The Shadow and Western Story; of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Manhunt; and of titles I had never even heard of.

It was an awesome collection, and for a moment it captured all my attention. A collector like me doesn’t often see anything this overwhelming; in spite of the circumstances it presented a certain immediate distraction. Or it did until I focused on the wide stain of dried blood on the carpet near the back-wall shelves, and the chalk outline of a body which enclosed it.

An odd, queasy feeling came into my stomach; rooms where people have died violently have that effect on me. I looked away from the blood and tried to concentrate on the rest of the room. Like the Paperback Room we had been in previously, it contained nothing more in the way of furniture than an overstuffed chair, a reading lamp, a brass-trimmed rolltop desk set beneath one of the two windows and a desk chair that had been overturned. Between the chalk outline and the back-wall shelves there was a scattering of magazines which had evidently been pulled or knocked loose from three of the shelves; others were askew in place, tilted forward or backward, as if someone had stumbled or fallen against them.

And on the opposite side of the chalk outline, in a loosely arranged row, were two pulps and a digest, the digest sandwiched between the larger issues.

Eberhardt said, “Take a look at that row of three magazines over there.”

I crossed the room, noticing as I did so that all the scattered and shelves periodicals at the back wall were detective and mystery; the pulps were on the upper shelves and the digests on the lower ones. I stopped to one side of the three laid-out magazines and bent over to peer at them.

The first pulp was a 1930s and 1940s crime monthly called Clues. The digest was a short-lived title from the 1960s, Keyhole Mystery Magazine. And the second pulp was an issue of one of my particular favorites, Private Detective.

“Is this what you meant by a dying message?”

“That’s it,” he said. “And that’s why you’re here.”

I looked around again at the scattered magazines, the disarrayed shelves, the overturned chair. “How do you figure this part of it, Eb?”

“The same way you’re figuring it. Murray was stabbed somewhere on this side of the room. He reeled into that desk chair, knocked it over, then staggered away to those shelves. He must have known he was dying, that he didn’t have enough time or strength to get to the phone or to find paper and pencil to write out a message. But he had enough presence of mind to want to point some kind of finger at his killer. So while he was falling or after he fell he was able to drag those three magazines off their shelves; and before he died he managed to lay them out the way you see them. The question is, why those three particular magazines?”

“It seems obvious why the copy of Clues,” I said.

“Sure. But what clues was he trying to leave us with Keyhole Mystery Magazine and Private Detective? Was he trying to tell us how he was killed or who killed him? Or both? Or something else altogether?”

I sat on my heels, putting my back to the chalk outline and the dried blood, and peered more closely at the magazines. The issue of Clues was dated November 1937, featured a Violet McDade story by Cleve F. Adams and had three other, unfamiliar authors’ names on the cover. The illustration depicted four people shooting each other.

I looked at Keyhole Mystery Magazine. It carried a June 1960 date and headlined stories by Norman Daniels and John Collier; there were several other writers’ names in a bottom strip, a couple of which I recognized. Its cover drawing showed a frightened girl in the foreground, fleeing a dark, menacing figure in the background.

The issue of Private Detective was dated March, no year, and below the title were the words, “Intimate Revelations of Private Investigators.” Yeah, sure. The illustration showed a private eye dragging a half-naked girl into a building. Yeah, sure. Down in the lower right-hand corner in big red letters was the issue’s feature story: “Dead Man’s Knock,” by Roger Torrey.

I thought about it, searching for connections between what I had seen in here and what Eberhardt had told me. Was there anything in any of the illustrations, some sort of parallel situation? No. Did any of the primary suspects have names which matched those of writers listed on any of the three magazine covers? No. Was there any well-known fictional private eye named Murray or Cox or Thurman or Keeler? No.

I decided I was trying too hard, looking for too specific a connection where none existed. The plain fact was, Murray had been dying when he thought to leave these magazine clues; he would not have had time to hunt through dozens of magazines to find particular issues with particular authors or illustrations on the cover. All he had been able to do was to reach for specific copies close at hand; it was the titles of the magazines that carried whatever message he meant to leave.

So assuming Clues meant just that, clues, Keyhole and Private Detective were the sum total of those clues. I tried putting them together. Well, there was the obvious association: the stereotype of a private investigator is that of a snooper, a keyhole peeper. But I could not see how that would have anything to do with Murray’s death. If there had been a private detective involved, Eberhardt would have figured the connection immediately and I wouldn’t be here.

Take them separately then. Keyhole Mystery Magazine. Key-hole. That big old-fashioned keyhole in the door?

Eberhardt said, “Well? You got any ideas?” He had been standing near me, watching me think, but patience had never been his long suit.

I straightened up, explained to him what I had been ruminating about and watched him nod: he had come to the same conclusions long before I got here. Then I said, “Eb, what about the door keyhole? Could there be some connection there, something to explain the locked-room angle?”

“I already thought of that,” he said. “But go ahead, have a look for yourself.”

I walked over to the door, and when I got there I saw for the first time that there was a key in the latch on the inside. Eberhardt had said the lab crew had come and gone; I caught hold of the key and tugged at it, but it had been turned in the lock and it was firmly in place.

“Was this key in the latch when you broke the door down?” I asked him.

“It was. What were you thinking? That the killer stood out in the hallway and stabbed Murray through the keyhole?”

“Well, it was an idea.”

“Not a very good one. It’s too fancy, even if it was possible.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“I don’t think we’re dealing with a mastermind here,” he said. “I’ve talked to the suspects and there’s not one of them with an IQ over a hundred and twenty.”

I turned away from the door. “Is it all right if I prowl around in here, look things over for myself?”

“I don’t care what you do,” he said, “if you end up giving me something useful.”

I wandered over and looked at one of the two windows. It had been nailed shut, all right, and the nails had been painted over some time ago. The window looked out on an overgrown rear yard – eucalyptus trees, undergrowth and scrub brush. Wisps of fog had begun to blow in off the ocean; the day had turned dark and misty. And my mood was beginning to match it. I had no particular stake in this case, and yet because Eberhardt had called me into it I felt a certain commitment. For that reason, and because puzzles of any kind prey on my mind until I know the solution, I was feeling a little frustrated.

I went to the desk beneath the second of the windows, glanced through the cubbyholes: correspondence, writing paper, envelopes, a packet of blank cheques. The centre drawer contained pens and pencils, various-sized paper clips and rubber bands, a tube of glue, a booklet of stamps. The three side drawers were full of letter carbons and folders jammed with facts and figures about pulp magazines and pulp writers.

From there I crossed to the overstuffed chair and the reading lamp and peered at each of them in turn. Then I looked at some of the bookshelves and went down the aisles between the library stacks. And finally I came back to the chalk outline and stood staring down again at the issues of Clues, Keyhole Mystery Magazine and Private Detective.

Eberhardt said impatiently, “Are you getting anywhere or just stalling?”

“I’m trying to think,” I said. “Look, Eb, you told me Murray was stabbed with a splinterlike piece of steel. How thick was it?”

“About the thickness of a pipe cleaner. Most of the ‘blade’ part had been honed to a fine edge and the point was needle-sharp.”

“And the other end was wrapped with adhesive tape?”

“That’s right. A grip, maybe.”

“Seems an odd sort of weapon, don’t you think? I mean, why not just use a knife?”

“People have stabbed other people with weapons a hell of a lot stranger,” he said. “You know that.”

“Sure. But I’m wondering if the choice of weapon here has anything to do with the locked-room angle.”

“If it does I don’t see how.”

“Could it have been thrown into Murray’s stomach from a distance, instead of driven there at close range?”

“I suppose it could have been. But from where? Not outside this room, not with that door locked on the inside and the windows nailed down.”

Musingly I said, “What if the killer wasn’t in this room when Murray died?”

Eberhardt’s expression turned even more sour. “I know what you’re leading up to with that,” he said. “The murderer rigged some kind of fancy crossbow arrangement, operated by a tripwire or by remote control. Well, you can forget it. The lab boys searched every inch of this room. Desk, chairs, bookshelves, reading lamp, ceiling fixtures – everything. There’s nothing like that here; you’ve been over the room, you can tell that for yourself. There’s nothing at all out of the ordinary or out of place except those magazines.”

Sharpening frustration made me get down on on knee and stare once more at the copies of Keyhole and Private Detective. They had to mean something, separately or in conjunction. But what? What?

“Lieutenant?”

The voice belonged to Inspector Jordan; when I looked up he was standing in the doorway, gesturing to Eberhardt. I watched Eb go over to him and the two of them hold a brief, soft-voiced conference. At length Eberhardt turned to look at me again.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “I’ve got to go talk to the family. Keep working on it.”

“Sure. What else?”

He and Jordan went away and left me alone. I kept staring at the magazines, and I kept coming up empty.

Keyhole Mystery Magazine.

Private Detective.

Nothing.

I stood up and prowled around some more, looking here and there. That went on for a couple of minutes – until all of a sudden I became aware of something Eberhardt and I should have noticed before, should have considered before. Something that was at once obvious and completely unobtrusive, like the purloined letter in the Poe story.

I came to a standstill, frowning, and my mind began to crank out an idea. I did some careful checking then, and the idea took on more weight, and at the end of another couple of minutes I had convinced myself I was right.

I knew how Thomas Murray had been murdered in a locked room. Once I had that, the rest of it came together pretty quick. My mind works that way; when I have something solid to build on, a kind of chain reaction takes place. I put together things Eberhardt had told me and things I knew about Murray, and there it was in a nice ironic package: the significance of Private Detective and the name of Murray’s killer.

When Eberhardt came back into the room I was going over it all for the third time, making sure of my logic. He still had the black briar clamped between his teeth and there were more scowl wrinkles in his forehead. He said, “My suspects are getting restless; if we don’t come up with an answer pretty soon, I’ve got to let them go on their way. And you, too.”

“I may have the answer for you right now,” I said.

That brought him up short. He gave me a penetrating look, then said, “Give.”

“All right. What Murray was trying to tell us, as best he could with the magazines close at hand, was how he was stabbed and who his murderer is. I think Keyhole Mystery Magazine indicates how and Private Detective indicates who. It’s hardly conclusive proof in either case, but it might be enough for you to pry loose an admission of guilt.”

“You just leave that part of it to me. Get on with your explanation.”

“Well, let’s take the ‘how’ first,” I said. “The locked-room angle. I doubt if the murderer set out to create that kind of situation; his method was clever enough, but as you pointed out we’re not dealing with a mastermind here. He probably didn’t even know that Murray had taken to locking himself inside this room every day. I think he must have been as surprised as everyone else when the murder turned into a locked-room thing.

“So it was supposed to be a simple stabbing done by person or persons unknown while Murray was alone in the house. But it wasn’t a stabbing at all, in the strict sense of the word; the killer wasn’t anywhere near here when Murray died.”

“He wasn’t, huh?”

“No. That’s why the adhesive tape on the murder weapon – misdirection, to make it look like Murray was stabbed with a homemade knife in a close confrontation. I’d say he worked it the way he did for two reasons: one, he didn’t have enough courage to kill Murray face to face; and two, he wanted to establish an alibi for himself.”

Eberhardt puffed up another great cloud of acrid smoke from his pipe. “So tell me how the hell you put a steel splinter into a man’s stomach when you’re miles away from the scene.”

“You rig up a death trap,” I said, “using a keyhole.”

“Now, look, we went over all that before. The key was inside the keyhole when we broke in, I told you that, and I won’t believe the killer used some kind of tricky gimmick that the lab crew overlooked.”

“That’s not what happened at all. What hung both of us up is a natural inclination to associate the word ‘keyhole’ with a keyhole in a door. But the fact is, there are five other keyholes in this room.”

“What?”

“The desk, Eb. The rolltop desk over there.”

He swung his head around and looked at the desk beneath the window. It contained five keyholes, all right – one in the rolltop, one in the centre drawer and one each in the three side drawers. Like those on most antique rolltop desks, they were meant to take large, old-fashioned keys and therefore had good-sized openings. But they were also half-hidden in scrolled brass frames with decorative handle pulls; and no one really notices them anyway, any more than you notice individual cubbyholes or the design of the brass trimming. When you look at a desk you see it as an entity: you see a desk.

Eberhardt put his eyes on me again. “Okay,” he said, “I see what you mean. But I searched that desk myself, and so did the lab boys. There’s nothing on it or in it that could be used to stab a man through a keyhole.”

“Yes, there is.” I led him over to the desk. “Only one of these keyholes could have been used, Eb. It isn’t the one in the rolltop because the top is pushed all the way up; it isn’t any of the ones in the side drawers because of where Murray was stabbed – he would have had to lean over at an awkward angle, on his own initiative, in order to catch that steel splinter in the stomach. It has to be the centre drawer then, because when a man sits down at a desk like this, that drawer – and that keyhole – are about on a level with the area under his breastbone.”

He didn’t argue with the logic of that. Instead, he reached out, jerked open the centre drawer by its handle pull and stared inside at the pens and pencils, paper clips, rubber bands and other writing paraphernalia. Then, after a moment, I saw his eyes change and understanding come into them.

“Rubber band,” he said.

“Right.” I picked up the largest one; it was about a quarter-inch wide, thick and strong – not unlike the kind kids use to make slingshots. “This one, no doubt.”

“Keep talking.”

“Take a look at the keyhole frame on the inside of the centre drawer. The top doesn’t quite fit snug with the wood; there’s enough room to slip the edge of this band into the crack. All you’d have to do then is stretch the band out around the steel splinter, ease the point of the weapon through the keyhole and anchor it against the metal on the inside rim of the hole. It would take time to get the balance right and close the drawer without releasing the band, but it could be done by someone with patience and a steady hand. And what you’d have then is a death trap – a cocked and powerful slingshot.”

Eberhardt nodded slowly.

“When Murray sat down at the desk,” I said, “all it took was for him to pull open the drawer with the jerking motion people always use. The point of the weapon slipped free, the rubber band released like a spring, and the splinter shot through and sliced into Murray’s stomach. The shock and impact drove him and the chair backward, and he must have stood up convulsively at the same time, knocking over the chair. That’s when he staggered into those bookshelves. And meanwhile the rubber band flopped loose from around the keyhole frame, so that everything looked completely ordinary inside the drawer.”

“I’ll buy it,” Eberhardt said. “It’s just simple enough and logical enough to be the answer.” He gave me a sidewise look. “You’re pretty good at this kind of thing, once you get going.”

“It’s just that the pulp connection got my juices flowing.”

“Yeah, the pulp connection. Now, what about Private Detective and the name of the killer?”

“The clue Murray left us there is a little more roundabout,” I said. “But you’ve got to remember that he was dying and that he only had time to grab those magazines that were handy. He couldn’t tell us more directly who he believed was responsible.”

“Go on,” he said, “I’m listening.”

“Murray collected pulp magazines, and he obviously also read them. So he knew that private detectives as a group are known by all sorts of names – shamus, op, eye, snooper.” I allowed myself a small, wry smile. “And one more, just as common.”

“Which is?”

“Peeper,” I said.

He considered that. “So?”

“Eb, Murray also collected every other kind of popular culture. One of those kinds is prints of old television shows. And one of your suspects is a small, mousy guy who wears thick glasses; you told me that yourself. I’d be willing to bet that some time ago Murray made a certain obvious comparison between this relative of his and an old TV show character from back in the fifties, and that he referred to the relative by that character’s name.”

“What character?”

“Mr Peepers,” I said. “And you remember who played Mr Peepers, don’t you?”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Wally Cox.”

“Sure. Mr Peepers – the cousin, Walter Cox.”

At eight o’clock that night, while I was working on a beer and reading a 1935 issue of Dime Detective, Eberhardt rang up my apartment. “Just thought you’d like to know,” he said. “We got a full confession out of Walter Cox about an hour ago. I hate to admit it – I don’t want you to get a swelled head – but you were right all the way down to the Mr Peepers angle. I checked with the housekeeper and the niece before I talked to Cox, and they both told me Murray called him by that name all the time.”

“What was Cox’s motive?” I asked.

“Greed, what else? He had a chance to get in on a big investment deal in South America, and Murray wouldn’t give him the cash. They argued about it in private for some time, and three days ago Cox threatened to kill him. Murray took the threat seriously, which is why he started locking himself in his Rooms while he tried to figure out what to do about it.”

“Where did Cox get the piece of steel?”

“Friend of his has a basement workshop, builds things out of wood and metal. Cox borrowed the workshop on a pretext and used a grinder to hone the weapon. He rigged up the slingshot this morning – let himself into the house with his key while the others were out and Murray was locked in one of the Rooms.”

“Well, I’m glad you got it wrapped up and glad I could help.”

“You’re going to be even gladder when the niece talks to you tomorrow. She says she wants to give you some kind of reward.”

“Hell, that’s not necessary.”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth – to coin a phrase. Listen, I owe you something myself. You want to come over tomorrow night for a home-cooked dinner and some beer?”

“As long as it’s Dana who does the home cooking,” I said.

After we rang off I thought about the reward from Murray’s niece. Well, if she wanted to give me money I was hardly in a financial position to turn it down. But if she left it up to me to name my own reward, I decided I would not ask for money at all; I would ask for something a little more fitting instead.

What I really wanted was Thomas Murray’s run of Private Detective.