The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

THE STOLEN SAINT SIMON by Michael Kurland

Michael Kurland (b.1938) first established his name in the science fiction field in the psychedelic sixties, when he wrote several amusing books which turned a number of accepted sf icons on their head, including Ten Years to Doomsday (1964), written with Chester Anderson, and The Unicorn Girl (1969). Although he has continued to produce novels using sf themes, he has broadened his writing to cover crime and mystery fiction. Sometimes, as in Star Griffin (1987), he blends the two. His early book, A Plague of Spies (1969), received an Edgar Allan Poe Scroll from the Mystery Writers of America. He has produced several Sherlock Holmes pastiches featuring Moriarty – The Infernal Device (1979), Death by Gaslight (1982) and The Great Game (2001) – and continued the excellent Lord Darcy series started by Randall Garrett, Ten Little Wizards (1988), which is chock full of impossible crimes, and A Study in Sorcery (1989). The following story gives us not one but two impossible crimes.

First thing Monday morning Junior called me into his office and told me the tale, leaning back in his battered wooden chair until it looked like only an abiding faith kept it from falling over backwards, with his feet propped up on the well-scarred top of his desk. The front office at Continental Investigations & Security’s Los Angeles branch holds a reception area and several interview rooms, all done in well-polished light wood and glass, where our well-groomed lads and lasses listen sympathetically and nod and take notes and impress the hell out of our clients. The “back room” is actually three rooms; one a safe-room for our more confidential files, one with three couches and a small refrigerator and coffee machine for operatives who have to spend the night – or the week – and the third is Junior’s office. Abe Wohlstein Junior is older than sin and not at all presentable, but he knows everything there is to know and he runs the place.

After reminding me that Fiduciary Mutual Insurance was one of our larger accounts, and suggesting that I simulate an air of respect while dealing with them, Junior sent me over to Fid Mut’s Century City office to see a claims agent named Jamieson.

“It’s this old picture,” Jamieson said. “It’s disappeared. The way they tell it, there’s no way it could have gone, and there isn’t anyone who could have taken it, but it’s gone anyway.” A short, narrow, prissy-looking man with a thin black moustache above thin lips, he looked as though he was prepared to disapprove of me at the slightest provocation. But maybe that’s just the way he looked.

I lowered myself into the chrome and black chair by his desk. “The way they tell it?”

“Exactly. The way they tell it, it’s simply impossible.” He smirked. “But we know there’s nothing impossible, don’t we?”

I told Jamieson that I’d take his word for it, that epistemology wasn’t my field, and suggested that he get on with the story. He looked at me with a hurt expression, as though he had just been bitten by a pet guppy.

“The family is named Czeppski,” Jamieson said, playing tippity-tap on his computer keyboard and peering at the screen, “Graf Maximilian and Grafin Sylvia.” He turned to me. “Graf and grafin – that’s Polish for count and countess.”

“German,” I said.

“Whatever,” he said, looking annoyed.

“The Poles use German titles sometimes,” I said to mollify him. He didn’t look mollified. I stared out the wide picture window. We were on the 37th Floor. I could make out part of Santa Monica through the smog which stretched out in an unbroken layer below me. It was a brown smog day. I understand the green smog is more damaging to your lungs. They say the smog is getting better. They don’t say better than what. The sun was somewhere above, and I saw shadows below but no glitter. The smog ate the glitter.

“They’ve been in the United States for about six months,” Jamieson said. “There’s also a daughter named Paula. They left the painting in storage in Paris, and it was just shipped over to be auctioned. An old family heirloom that’s been buried in a barn for the past sixty years.” He scissored a Polaroid from the folder with two well-manicured fingers and handed it to me. It was a medieval-looking painting of a thin man in a dirty white robe with a halo that looked as if it originated in his left nostril and ended in his right ear. His hand was bent at an unnatural angle and pebbles were falling out of it onto a group of emaciated children below. The predominant colours were red, brown and gold.

“Interesting,” I said, “but is it art?”

“It should bring at least two million at auction,” Jamieson told me. “It is a fourteenth-century depiction of Saint Simon of- ah – someplace – feeding the children.”

“Pebbles?” I asked.

“Apparently he threw them stones, which miraculously turned into loaves of bread when they caught them.”

“I’ll bet he was surprised,” I said.

“The painting was authenticated before it left Europe,” Jamieson said. “It’s insured for one-point-two million. It disappeared last night from the Czeppski apartment. Graf Maximilian wants a cheque. I want to know how it happened – where it went.”

“You offering a reward?” I asked. A polite way of asking whether Fiduciary Mutual was willing to buy the painting back from the thieves. They always were unless they thought it was an inside job. Most insurance companies have the ethical standards of rattlesnakes without the rattles. They should be required by law to tie rattles on as a warning when dealing with claimants.

“Not just yet,” Jamieson said. “I assume they hid it somewhere. But the police did a thorough search and couldn’t find it. That’s why I called your office. You find it, then we don’t have to cut a cheque.”

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” I said.

CI &S does most of Fiduciary Mutual’s investigative work, so I was familiar with their procedures, even though I’d never worked with Jamieson before. They didn’t like hiring detectives, and they only did it when they were convinced that something was wrong. It was then our job to prove that something was wrong so they could justify the expense. If we actually found the painting, we’d be in line for a reasonable, but not excessive, bonus.

The folder held about a dozen pages of the sort of paperwork that corporations use to give everyone a feeling that no stone is being unturned. There was a copy of the original insurance application; an international form with all the questions asked in three languages above neat rectangular boxes just too small to write in the answers. The questions had been answered in English, I noticed, in a small, round hand written with a fine point fountain pen. We detectives notice details like that. There were copies of several documents which served to authenticate the picture: a letter from an art expert certifying, I suppose, that the painting was, indeed, art; a formal document on a kind of gridded paper of an odd size that detailed the tests that had been performed on the paint, establishing that it was at least five hundred years old; and a very formal letter from an art historian putting the painting in its proper place in the history of art. The first two documents were in French, the third in English.

The shipping documents showed that the painting had been packed and shipped by a firm picked by the insurance company, one that regularly did the same for entire shows for major art museums. There was a detailed diagram of the shipping crate. There was a document from the shippers certifying that they had turned the painting over to Graf Czeppski in the same condition as they received it. What I assumed was Czeppski’s signature was scrawled across the bottom.

I photocopied the three pages in the Czeppski folder that actually told anything about the Czeppskis, along with the four page police report, while Jamieson called the graf for me and made an appointment for three o’clock that afternoon. Then I headed to the Beechwood Cafe for lunch. It’s a piece of the old Hollywood that hasn’t been discovered by the tourists yet, so the locals tend to hang out there. There’s something soothing about eating surrounded by old writers and young actors. I studied the information on my photocopies over my natural sandwich with chunk white tuna. If there was anything there to tell me where the St Simon picture was hidden, I didn’t see it.

The Czeppskis had lived in Paris for over thirty years, since before daughter Paula was born. They had survived their years of poverty by doing an equestrian act in the Cirque Montmartre; horses cantering around the ring, graf and grafin cavorting on and off the horses’ backs. A few years ago, while the Soviet empire was busy crumbling, they had gone back to their ancestral estate outside of Szczecinek, a small town in northern Poland which was called Neustettin by the Germans when they thought they owned it. The estate had long since been carved up into pig farms, except for the chateau, which had housed a Soviet Army signals battalion. A little over a mile from the chateau the stable to the Czeppski horse farm, which had once held fifty horses, was still standing. Twenty-seven families lived in it now.

Graf Maximilian dug up what remained of the family fortune from behind the stable, where his father had buried it in 1939 as the Nazis closed in. It consisted of some very valuable jewellery, the tangible result of four centuries of oppressing the serfs; some silver plate used to entertain fellow nobles and royalty when they dropped by; some papers proving the family title to a sizable chunk of southern Poland that the Polish government was not about to give back; and the St Simon. He had immediately taken his family and his heirlooms back to Paris, where he had folded the act, sold the horses and a bit of the jewellery and had the St Simon authenticated.

The image of St Simon stoning the children was painted on a thin cedar board about 86 centimetres high and 62 centimetres wide. Which, for the metrically challenged, is about two feet by three feet. The art experts had decided that it had been painted in Germany in the fourteenth century, probably one panel of a polyptych that formed the altarpiece in a church of St Simon. A painting that might very well be another panel of the polyptych hung in the Valletta art museum on Malta.

The police report told as implausible a story of grand theft as ever I have read. The Czeppskis’ apartment was on the eighth floor of a brand new high-rise building at the intersection of Wilshire and Brass, just west of Beverly Hills. All expensive, all elegant, and not at all where I would choose to live in the midst of a major earthquake fault zone. They had left their apartment early evening last night, except for daughter Paula, who didn’t leave until a little after eleven. None of them was wearing or carrying anything that could have concealed a two-by-three foot inflexible cedar board. According to the concierge on duty, and I could just picture his grin when he said it, the way Paula was dressed she would have had trouble concealing a toothbrush.

The painting had been there shortly before they left – several reputable citizens had been over for cocktails and could testify to that. It had not been there when Graf and Grafin Czeppski returned from what the reporting officer had written down as “a benefit for indignant actors” at about two in the morning. The only ways downstairs from the Czeppskis’ apartment were by the elevator, which wouldn’t stop at any floor between the resident’s and the lobby, and a staircase which you could enter at any floor but only leave at the lobby floor. There were security cameras in the elevator and at every landing in the staircase. The staff claimed to have seen nothing unusual between when the Czeppskis left and when they returned, and a check of the security camera tapes backed them up on that.

I could see why Fid Mut was suspicious. I had no opinion yet. I hoped to form one within the next few hours.

The doorman admitted me to the lobby, the concierge called upstairs to make sure I was a welcome guest, and then a lobby man walked me to the elevator and punched 8 for me, in case I had forgotten how. He used a key to activate the panel, and then removed it; so even if I had wanted to get off at another floor, the elevator wouldn’t have stopped.

Graf Czeppski met me at the door. A tall man with rounded corners wearing a brown suit, a white, button-down shirt with vertical green stripes, and a forest-green tie as wide as his smile, he shook my hand with a hardy, vice-like grip. I managed to pull the hand free before any of the larger bones were broken, and returned his smile.

“You are agent Stanley Baum,” he said, “of the insurance company?”

“Yes, sir,” I agreed. Not exactly right, but close enough for jazz, as we used to say. I wondered whether I was supposed to call him “your excellency,” or “your highness,” or something, but then decided not to worry about it. We are all equal here in the Land of the Free, although some are more equal than others. But such inequalities as exist are seldom based on previous patents of nobility.

“Come quite in,” he invited. “Look over the house. Question the servitors. This thing is surely a mystery. We are anxious for it to have a solution.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I told him.

He showed me into the living room. It was a study in chiaroscuro. The walls and drapes were white, the wall-to-wall carpet was black. The drapes which covered the wide picture window hung from a thick black rod and were accented with black cords. There was a long black couch in the shape of an L framing the centre of the room, a large, low black table in front of it, and an easy chair of the same pattern as the couch across from it. They looked modern, but the other pieces in the room – several severe-looking straight-back white chairs, an armoire, and a small desk that had been done in a black stain so that the wood grain showed through – all looked to be of an older European pattern. They might well have been antiques.

His wife and daughter were there, but there wasn’t a servitor in evidence. The wife, sitting on one of the straight-back chairs, was thin of body and lip, with a sharp nose. She blended in with the chiaroscuro motif; wearing a straight-line black dress with a touch of white lace around the narrow collar, and had a single strand of pearls the size of walnuts around her neck and a ring with a diamond the size of a major metropolitan area on the ring finger of her right hand. She seemed distinctly annoyed at having to speak to me. I couldn’t tell whether it was because I was a detective or because the lapels on my jacket were too narrow.

The daughter, sitting on the couch at the short end of the L, was the woman I had been dreaming about at least once a week since I was seventeen. I won’t tell you what sort of dreams they were, but I imagine you can guess. A blue-eyed blonde with sharply chiselled features, she was wearing charcoal grey slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and had that air of quiet elegance that looks so natural and is so difficult and expensive to acquire. She had a lithe, slender, athletic-looking body, and looked to be somewhere around thirty, but I could have been off by a decade in either direction; I’m very bad at guessing women’s ages. I’m not much better with men, but I seldom find myself wondering about a man’s age.

The graf introduced me and I settled on the corner of the couch away from the daughter, as the chairs looked too fragile to hold me, and pulled out my pocket notebook. Not that I needed it, my memory is trained and practiced, but it gave me that air of authority that I otherwise lack. “If you could tell me what happened,” I said to the room at large.

“We’ve told all that already,” Grafin Sylvia said, staring down the edge of her nose at me. “To the police and to that other insurance person. I don’t see any need to repeat it for a third time.” She was perched on a delicate-looking chair of blackened wood with a white cushioned seat.

Paula shifted in her seat. “In my opinion -” she began.

Grafin Sylvia swivelled to look at her and snapped, “We don’t need your opinion!”

Paula’s face flushed a deep red, and she took several deep breaths, but then she calmed down and nothing more came of it. A pity. Perhaps later I could take her aside and ask her what she had been going to say.

I stood up, stuck the notebook in my jacket pocket, and buttoned the jacket. “I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you,” I said. “I was told that you were anxious to get your cheque for the painting. I’ll find my own way out.”

“Now, now,” the graf said, with a broad smile on his face, intercepting me on the way to the door. “You’ll have to excuse my wife. She is extremely troubled about all this. It has upset her terribly.” He glared at his wife and snapped a few words to her in what I assume was Polish.

The grafin allowed a sneer of anxiety to cross her face. “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression, Mr, ah, Baum. This has all been so fatiguing.”

“I’m sure losing a two-million dollar painting must be quite tiring,” I said, returning to the couch. I took my time settling back onto the cushion and opening my notebook again, and then looked back up at my audience. “Tell me about your household staff.”

There was a short pause while they thought this over. “Well, there’s Feodore,” Paula said, leaning forward. Her teeth, I noticed, gleamed with a whiteness that her toothpaste manufacturer would have approved of, but they looked somehow sharp.

“Feodore?”

“The butler,” Paula explained.

“We keep quite a small establishment here,” the grafin said. “Only a butler and two maids. But of course the building has a concierge service which supplies many of our needs.”

Of course. “Has Feodore been with you long?” I asked.

“About five years,” the grafin said. “We brought him with us from Paris. The two maids we acquired here.”

“Where are they from?”

“One is from Guatemala. Maria. The other, Estafia, is from Honduras. They are quite bright and capable, and seem completely trustworthy.”

“And besides,” Graf Czeppski broke in, “they were off yesterday, when the theft happened.”

“Could they have snuck in without your knowing it?” I asked.

“They don’t have keys,” the graf said. “The concierge staff has to let them in.”

“Ah,” I said, making a random squiggle in my notebook. “Then I guess that lets Maria and Estafia out. What about Feodore?”

“He, also, was away at the time of the theft. He is away for this whole week. Some family matter he had to take care of.”

“It was an outside job,” Paula said. “Did you not read the police report?”

The police report said no such thing, but I decided not to point that out. “I try to form my own opinion,” I told her. “The police and I have different goals.”

“Yes,” Grafin Sylvia said. “The police are trying to catch the miscreant who took our picture. You are trying to find a way to avoid paying us one million and two hundred thousand dollars.”

“I am trying to recover the picture,” I said, standing up and putting the notebook in my pocket. “Which will save the insurance company one point two million dollars. But it will also get you back your St Simon; which, I understand, is worth considerably more than that.”

The graf shrugged a broad shrug. “I am told it will bring over two million dollars at auction,” he said, “but who knows? There is no guarantee. And after the auction house takes its twenty per cent commission – there is little to choose.”

“I see,” I said.

He took a step toward me, put a finger on the middle button of my shirt, and pushed slightly. “But that is not to say that I would have any reason to arrange for the theft of my own picture,” he said in a flat, controlled voice, which was trying to suggest suppressed anger, but seemed overly theatrical. “I know what you people at Fiduciary Mutual are suggesting, but I don’t know why you’re suggesting it, except in some obscene attempt to refuse to pay the claim. You didn’t hesitate to collect the rather substantial premium – and to make me pay for the authentication of the picture and the too-expensive shipping costs.”

I stepped forward and he hastily jerked his finger out of the way. “I don’t work for Fiduciary Mutual,” I told him. “I am a private investigator specializing in cases of fraud and embezzlement. My employer is Continental Investigations & Security.” We were nose-to-nose. I hoped my breath was okay; I didn’t want to offend. His breath smelled faintly of licorice. “Fiduciary Mutual calls us in when they want to be absolutely sure that there has been no hanky-panky. If I tell them you’re clean, then they’ll cut you a cheque tomorrow.”

“Hanky-panky,” the graf said.

“And it is us that they suspect of this hanky-panky?” the grafin asked.

“I don’t know that they suspect anyone,” I told them, prevaricating perhaps just the smallest bit. “They suspect the situation. It appears to be an impossible crime, but there are no impossible crimes, only misunderstood crimes. They have sent me to see if I can understand it.”

There was a prolonged silence as everyone thought this over. Graf Czeppski’s belligerent attitude disappeared in a wave of good fellowship, and he smiled a broad smile at me. “Then it is to our interest to help you ascertain what happened, is it not?” he asked.

“It is,” I assured him.

“Then ask your questions.”

I nodded. “The painting was delivered the day before yesterday. It actually arrived in Los Angeles the day before that, but it was held up in customs. Late last night it was gone. Who, aside from your guests of yesterday evening, knew that the painting was here?”

“The persons from the shipping company,” the grafin suggested.

“And?”

“Lasser & Sons, the auction gallery,” Graf Czeppski said. “They were to pick it up here today.”

That I knew. It was delivered to the Czeppskis instead of directly to the gallery because Lasser & Sons’ insurance for this particular auction wouldn’t start until today. “Did any of you tell anyone?” I asked. “Among your friends, not connected to the gallery.”

Grafin Sylvia lifted her nose higher to stare at me down it. “Are you suggesting that one of our friends might have done this?” she asked in a voice that would chip stone.

“Of course I am,” I said. “Tell me which of your friends you could swear wouldn’t steal a quarter of a million dollars, and I’ll cross him or her off the list.”

“A quarter of a million?” Paula asked. “I thought -”

“Thief’s wages,” I told her. “These days valuable and unique artwork is hard to fence. Whoever took it will be lucky to get that much for it.”

After a few more questions I excused myself to prowl around the apartment. The Czeppskis stayed in the living room, trying to ignore the fact that a private detective was poking through their drawers and closets. I tried to think of places that the police might have missed on their search, and I poked and prodded a few possibilities, but nothing came of it. There was a bit of white powder at the bottom of one of the drawers in Paula’s bedroom which interested me for a moment, but it proved to be some sort of chalk. The windows in the two bedrooms looked out over a locked courtyard to which the tenants did not have a key, so the painting had probably not been lowered out a window. Unless a confederate was stationed in one of the apartments below. I made a note to check on the tenants in the suspect apartments.

I pulled aside the curtains in the living room. One of the rungs holding the curtains to the oversized curtain rod was not looped over the rod. Paula, who was watching me, did not restrain herself from making comments as I felt along the curtain to make sure a two-by-three foot slab of wood had not been inserted into it somewhere. “Ah!,” she exclaimed, “The great detective has found a clue! Not there? Perhaps it has been sewn into the carpet!”

Like Gaul, the large picture window behind the drapes was divided into three parts: an unopenable centre section framed by two smaller casement windows. I cranked open the one on the left and peered out. The window faced West, with a splendid view of the facade of the 1930s apartment building across brass Street. That building only went up ten stories, so the tenants above the tenth floor in this building might have a wonderful view of the tops of buildings in Santa Monica, and maybe even a glimpse of the ocean. Directly below was the black tarred roof of the two-storey parking garage, access to which was available only to workmen, who had to sign out the key. According to building security, the key had not been signed out for three weeks until the police used it this morning. There were a couple of old white fivegallon cans and a coil of black rope visible on the roof, but no painting.

“Perhaps the painting has flown out the window,” Paula contributed.

I squinted around at the wall outside the window. There was a hook set in the concrete facing to the right of the window, presumably for the window washers, but no painting dangled from it. A four-inch ledge ran below the window, extending a foot or so past it on either side. There was no painting secured to the ledge.

I surveyed the kitchen and the butler’s pantry, areas in which few Czeppskis ever set foot, according to Maria, who was putting various cheeses on a platter when I intruded. The Czeppskis were entertaining that evening, and the concierge was expected to send up food, kitchen staff and waiters momentarily. The plates were stacked in the kitchen, and the silver, freshly shined, much of it sporting what I assumed was the Czeppski crest, was lined up on a table in the butler’s pantry. The two rooms were, as far as I could tell, devoid of religious artwork.

I thanked the various Czeppskis for their co-operation and told them someone would be in touch, and rang for the elevator. On the way down, I tried pushing various buttons to see what would happen. Nothing happened until I pushed the stop button, and then the elevator jerked to a stop and a loud alarm went off. Two lobby men and a police detective awaited me on the ground floor when I arrived.

“I don’t know what possessed me,” I said, stepping out of the elevator. “I just had an irresistible impulse to see what would happen if I pressed that button.”

“Don’t say anything else until I read you your rights,” the detective said. “This time we’ve got you cold!” His name was Gibson, and we’d worked together on a few cases here and there in the past.

“I confess all,” I told him. “I was led astray by evil companions in my youth. Hello, Gibson. You going up to see the graf?”

“Oddly enough I’ve been waiting down here for you,” Gibson said. “I didn’t want to involve the department in whatever horrible falsehoods you were telling the Czeppskis.”

Seeing that I neither needed help nor required restraining, the two lobby men returned to their stations. Gibson and I walked over to a couch set in an alcove in the lobby next to the building office. “You have something for me?” I asked. Contrary to the usual notion, public and private detectives actually tend to work fairly closely together when the opportunity presents. They get paid for apprehending the bad guys and we for retrieving the loot, and everybody’s happy – as long as we on the private side remember who has the badge.

“Actually I called your office and Wohlstein told me where to find you,” Gibson said. “There’s something I’d like you to take a look at. A little sort of locked room mystery, just the sort of thing you like. Actually it’s right across the street, which is what you call a coincidence.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” I told him, “and just because I’ve been lucky a couple of times -”

Gibson snorted. “Lucky! Listen, if I had your kind of luck I’d be police commissioner. Not that I’d want the job, it’s too political. What about the Marsden case? What about the Gallico job? Who but you would have thought he hid the pearls in the butter?”

I sighed. “Okay, let’s take a look,” I said. “But don’t be disappointed if I don’t come up with anything.

“I don’t expect miracles,” he said, but he lied.

The building Gibson took me to was the one across Brass Street that obscured the view from the Czeppskis’ window of things westerly. A uniformed officer in the lobby let us in, and we took the ancient elevator up to the ninth floor. “The rental office says the place was rented furnished to a guy named Pedersen about three months ago,” Gibson said over his shoulder, leading the way down the corridor. There were eight doors fronting the corridor, by which I deduced that there were eight apartments on the floor. The door to 8-C was open and the crime scene forensic crew was busy inside. An assistant medical examiner was kneeling by the supine body of a white male who looked to be in his forties. The corpse had a couple of holes in his chest. At first glance from ten feet away I would have said he was shot; there wasn’t enough blood evident for stab wounds. But snap opinions like that are dangerous, there are too many variables. If the poor guy had been stabbed by an ice pick to the heart, for example, there probably would have been no blood at all.

“It’s a one bedroom,” Gibson told me. “Nothing special. Looks like all the furniture came with the apartment. Pedersen, if that’s who he is, didn’t have much of his own. Only some clothing.”

“If that’s who he is?”

“No identification on the body. We’re having the rental agency send over the woman who handled the rental to see if she can identify him.”

I nodded. “So what’s the mystery?”

Gibson gave a half-nod toward the corpse. “The deceased was seen to enter the building shortly after ten last night. At ten seventeen the nine-one-one operator got the call that three shots had been heard from this apartment. When the first officers arrived at – “ Gibson flipped open his notepad “- ten twenty-two, there was a crowd of people gathered around the door. Two of them had been in the hall when the shots were heard. Nobody came out that door. They pounded on the door and yelled for a while, but they very wisely decided not to break in. After all, as far as they knew there was someone with a gun inside.” Gibson paused and looked up from his notepad.

“Let me guess,” I said. “When the cops broke in there was nobody inside but the recently deceased.”

“You’ve got it in one,” Gibson said. “It was locked and bolted from the inside. They had to kick the door down to break in.” He gestured at the door, which was splintered and off its hinges, showing the effects of violent entry.

“No other exit?”

“None.”

“Windows?”

“In the living room, a picture window that doesn’t open flanked by two of those louvre-type windows that open like Venetian blinds and you’d have to be a cat to get in or out. In the bedroom, a sash window that’s locked from the inside and enough dust around it so’s it hasn’t been opened any time recently.”

“Secret passages or trap doors?”

“You’re kidding.”

“Did you look?”

“Yeah, we looked. If we don’t come up with something better, we’ll probably send a squad down to take the place apart, but I’m damn sure it’ll be a waste of time. I think what we got here is the invisible man. You know – like the Shadow. The guy possesses the power to walk out of rooms without nobody seeing him.”

I raised one eyebrow, a gesture I’ve been trying to perfect since high school. “Life is a glorious cycle of song!” I said. “Two impossible crimes on the same day.”

“It’s why you private dicks get the big money,” Gibson said. “I hear what with overtime and everything you must be clearing pretty close to minimum wage.”

“Yeah. And I hear the police department isn’t political any more.”

He shook his head sadly and I shook my head sadly and I stuck my hands in my pockets and started into the room.

“Wait a second,” Gibson said. “We got to put on booties before we go in.” He had someone toss him a couple of pair of the white cotton tie-ons that you’re supposed to wear over your shoes to make sure you don’t track anything into a crime scene, and we put them on. “Keep your hands in your pockets,” he told me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

I walked slowly around the living room, trying to keep out of the way of the crime scene people, and stared at things. I had no idea what I was looking for. The walls of the living room were landlord green up to waist level, and covered with a fading rose-pattern wallpaper above. There was a beige couch and matching stuffed chair that looked as though they had come into the world during the Eisenhower presidency, a low coffee table well decorated with cigarette burns, and a pair of lamps on end tables that only Southern California landlords don’t find funny. A television table sans television set sat across the room from the couch. A floor lamp, one of the sort that was a steel rod with a shaded bulb at one end and four claw feet at the other, was lying on the floor by the window. I peered into the bedroom, which contained a bed and a dresser, and one of those sliding-door closets that stood open and empty.

One wide set of mini-blinds covered the three sections of the living room window. They were pulled up as far as they could go. I looked out of the central picture window, which looked as if it had been cleaned recently except for a couple of greasy-looking circles high on the glass. I rubbed my finger across them and saw that they were on the outside of the glass. The Czeppskis’ building loomed at me from across the street. There were a pack of wooden matches, a souvenir of Hollywood key ring devoid of keys, and a small dab of either clay or putty on the window sill, some of the small number of things present that hadn’t been supplied by the landlord. I turned back to Gibson. “Bullets?” I asked.

“As far as we can tell, two in the deceased and one in the wall – over there above and to the right of the front door.”

“Recent?”

“You thinking he was shot earlier and the sounds they heard in the hall were, maybe, a recording?”

“Just something to eliminate,” I said.

“They could smell the gunpowder in the hall, and Dr Gadolfus here says that the deceased bought it right about the time the shots were heard.”

The assistant medical examiner looked up. “That’s right,” he said.

“Did you find the gun?” I asked Gibson.

“It was lying next to the body,” he told me. “A Browning.380 automatic. But he didn’t shoot himself- that would be too easy. No powder burns. He was shot from at least six feet away.”

I shrugged. “The murderer was hiding in the room and mingled with the crowd in the hall when they broke in,” I suggested.

“Only the two officers went in,” Gibson told me, “and only two officers came out. They say so, and so do the civilian witnesses.”

“Just an idea,” I said.

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Give me a minute.”

“Here’s something weird,” Dr Gadolfus said, pausing in his labours. In an instant he had five people gathered around him and the body, eager for a view of something weird. “I didn’t notice until I turned this work light on,” he explained, “because his hands were in shadow. But look at his thumbs.”

The body was in something approaching full rigor mortis, and the hands were turned palms down. Dr Gadolfus held a mirror under the right hand so we could see. The ball of the thumb appeared to be dark purple – almost black. “The left thumb is the same,” Dr Gadolfus said, “I’d say this man has been fingerprinted recently.”

“Modern fingerprint fluids don’t do that,” Gibson said.

“Maybe he was just an old-fashioned sort of guy,” I said, but I was thinking of something else. Finally a useful idea had occurred to me. And if I was right, each of these two impossible crimes solved the other. I went slowly around the room, peering at the walls and floor, looking for something – anything – that would fit in with my theory. Finally I spotted it. There was a slight bit of plaster dust – just a touch – in a crack in the floor by the wall, opposite the window.

Gibson came over to see what I was doing. “You ought to get yourself one of them big lenses like Sherlock Holmes used,” he said, slapping me on the back.

I straightened up. “You want to make lieutenant?” I asked him.

“What are you talking about?”

“The credit for solving this one won’t do me any good,” I said. “I’ll give it to you.”

“You been here for, what, twenty minutes, and already you know who the invisible man is?”

“I know who and how, and about half of why,” I told him. “You want it?”

“No joke?”

“No joke.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Take a couple of uniformed officers and go across the way,” I told him, “Up to the Czeppskis’ apartment. Read Paula – that’s the daughter – her Miranda rights and tell her that Feodore is still alive and he’s identified her, or that he wrote her name in blood as he lay dying – something like that. The shock should do it. I’m betting she’ll confess.”

“Who’s Feodore?” Gibson asked.

I pointed to the corpse. “The Czeppskis’ butler,” I told Gibson. “That’s him.”

“Where do you get that from?”

“His thumbs. Like you said, that’s not fingerprint fluid. That’s the colour a butler’s thumbs turn when he’s been polishing the silver.”

“That’s a stretch,” Gibson said.

“The Czeppskis have a room full of freshly-polished silver,” I told him.

“Why the girl?” he asked me. “How’d she do it?”

“You arrest her,” I told him, “then we’ll talk.”

“Even if that is the Czeppskis’ butler, I can’t just walk in there and arrest this girl on your say so,” Gibson said. “Give me something.”

I pointed to the floor. “See that white stuff in the crack? It’s plaster.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Watch!” I said. I prodded at the wall with my forefinger, feeling something rough under the wallpaper as I went. When I had it fairly well located, I turned around. The crime scene crew had all paused what they were doing to watch me. If I was wrong, I was going to feel pretty foolish. But I wasn’t wrong. “Lend me a scalpel,” I asked Dr Gadolfus.

He fished in his bag and passed me a disposable scalpel, still nicely wrapped in aluminum foil. I peeled it out and ran the blade carefully around the edge of the outline I had mapped out. The rectangle of wallpaper fell away, revealing a two-by-three-foot wood panel that had been carefully inserted into a matching hole cut into the plaster and lathe wall. I gingerly pulled it out and turned it around. “Meet Saint Simon,” I said. “He’s worth about two million dollars.”

Gibson shook his head. “Good enough for me,” he said. “You must know something. I’ll go pick up the Czeppski girl.”

It was close to midnight when I set the St Simon painting down on the floor of Junior’s office, leaning it up against the wall. Junior was there, of course. He might have been called back when he heard I was coming in with the painting, but I think he lived there. “Two million dollars on the hoof,” I told him. “You’d better put it in the safe ‘till morning.”

He stared at the painting for a minute, his eyes narrowed, then he turned to me. “Gibson called,” he told me. “The girl confessed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought she would.”

“She’s not really Czeppski’s daughter,” Junior said. “She’s his mistress. The daughter’s still in Paris. Married to a schoolteacher, apparently. Has no intention of leaving.”

“So that’s it,” I said. “So the mistress was planning to skip with the butler and the painting.”

“She says the wife was trying to kill her, so she had to get out. They had an agreement, one of these menages à trots, but the wife was beginning to feel pushed out, so she was pushing back. The girl was tired of the arrangement, and I suppose the graf, anyway, so she decided to head out and take a little something with her.”

I nodded. “It sounds right,” I said. “The two ladies didn’t seem to be on the best of terms.”

“How’d she do it?” Junior asked. “How’d she get the painting out of there? How’d she get out of the room after she shot what’s-his-name?”

“Feodore,” I said. “Didn’t she tell Gibson?”

“She’s too busy crying and blaming Feodore for everything. She was in the apartment when he walked in. He was supposed to be in San Francisco waiting for her. She realized that he was planning to take the St Simon himself and split, so they had a big fight and she shot him. In self-defence, she says.”

“Could be,” I said. “It was a good plan, but it just wasn’t her lucky day.”

Junior produced a bottle from his desk drawer and put it, and two glasses on the desk. “Fid Mut will be pleased to get that thing back,” he said. “Just what was their plan?”

I picked up the bottle to see what he was drinking this month. It was a California pear brandy. I’d never had pear brandy. I tried it. It was good. I poured some more and organized the story in my mind. “Some of this is guesswork,” I told him, “but I think most of it will hold.”

“Let’s hear it,” Junior said.

“The apartment Feodore was killed in was their trysting-place,” I said. “It may have been picked for its location, or the location might have suggested the scheme, I don’t know.”

“Just what was the scheme?”

“I’m getting there. Paula and Feodore decided to leave and take the painting with them. Since they would be the obvious suspects, they had to make it look as though it would have been impossible for them to have done it. I would guess that Feodore was supposed to make himself visible in San Francisco when the painting went missing. A couple of days before the theft they ran a string – probably a high-strength monofilament fishing line – between the Czeppskis’ front window and the front window in the other apartment. They looped it around the metal rod of a standing lamp, that was pushed up against the louvered window on the left side of the picture window, and took it back across the street. It was probably tied off to a hook outside the Czeppskis’ window to make sure it wasn’t seen by the Czeppskis. From the street eight floors below it would be completely invisible.”

“So they pulled the painting across the street on a string?”

“No. Remember, Feodore wasn’t supposed to be there. On the day of the theft Paula waited until ma and pa Czeppski left, and then tied a rope – I’d guess a one-inch braided nylon line from a naval supply store – to one end of the monofilament and pulled it through. It looped around the lamp rod and returned, and she tied both ends off. Then, using the curtain rod from the Czeppskis’ apartment for balance, she walked across the rope with the picture strapped to her back. Remember, the Czeppskis had a circus act. What do you want to bet that Paula was a high-wire performer in that circus?”

“Son of a bitch!” Junior remarked.

“She went in through the picture window. The glass pane, I assume, had been previously loosened in its frame. There were two little circles on the glass where she used one of those suction clamps to hold the pane. The old wallpaper on the living room wall had been peeled back, and a hole cut in the plaster and lathe to hold the St Simon. Then she pasted the wallpaper back down. Which, presumably, is when Feodore walked in.”

“If he was there to steal the painting and run off by himself, why didn’t he wait?” Junior asked.

“He did wait,” I told him. “The painting was supposed to have been delivered the day before, but it was held up in customs. So the robbery was scheduled for the day before. He didn’t know it had been changed.”

“So she shot him and went back out the window.”

“Right. Then she put the glass pane back and smeared some putty around the outside to hold it in place – I found a dab of putty on the window sill. She may have even stuck some framing around it or even a nail or two. It must have taken two or three minutes – and all the time a crowd was banging at the front door.”

“The lady has good nerves,” Junior commented.

“I’d say so. She walked across an eighty-foot length of rope both ways pretty much in the dark. Then when she got back to her apartment she had to put the curtain pole back and rehang the curtains. And in the dark – she couldn’t turn the lights on in case someone saw her standing in the window and wondered what she was doing – she missed one of the rungs on the curtain. Then she coiled up the rope and dropped it out the window.”

“That’s quite a story,” Junior said. “Any more to it?”

I shrugged. “I guess that’s pretty much it. Then she stripped down to something brief and clinging so the building staff could see she that she wasn’t leaving with the St Simon, and went out for a night on the town. If I hadn’t picked up on a few little pointers – the curtain rung, the coil of rope on the roof of the garage, the plaster dust – she might have gotten away with it.”

Junior mused for a minute. “She probably left fingerprints all over that room,” he said. After all, she wasn’t planning to kill anybody. But her prints probably aren’t on file anywhere here in the ‘states, and there wasn’t anything to connect the two apartments except proximity. You’re right, if Gibson hadn’t asked you to look things over, she might have walked away from it. What made you suspect her in the first place?”

“She got a little too talkative and nasty when I was looking out the window. I thought she was trying to distract me by getting me mad, and I wondered just what she was distracting me away from.”

Junior drank up his pear brandy and went over to pick up the St Simon. “I’ll put this in the safe,” he said. “You go home and get some sleep. If Fid Must doesn’t find some way to renege on the bonus, I’ll see that you get most of it.”

“More than I expected,” I told him, “but welcome just the same.”