At the back of the building Norman found the other entrance, a plain house door. He rapped, but there was no answer. He tried the knob. It turned, but the door did not give.
Norman walked back to the office. It was after eight-thirty now. At any moment he should see Carruthers, and he still had not made up his mind what to do. He would be almost relieved to discover that he had made a mistake in the appointment and had another day to think it over.
During his tour of inspection, someone had unlocked the front door. He entered the main building and went straight to the office.
(“You realize, of course, Mr. Carruthers, my position in this matter …”)
In the office, behind the belittered desk, sat the business manager of the theater, the aged and oily Adam Fennworth. He looked up beaming as Norman entered. “Ah, Mr. Harker! Delighted to see you. Mr. Carruthers was talking to me only last night about your magnificent play.”
So he had liked it, and the simple negative solution was out. “That’s what I came here to talk about,” Norman said.
“And there’ll be much to talk about, young man, I can tell you. Mr. Carruthers has great plans for you. And from what he told me, your play sounds like the most stimulating work that’s fallen into our hands in many months.”
“Yes,” said Norman hesitantly. He never knew how to answer praise. A panning you could argue about, but a rave … “I had an appointment with Mr. Carruthers this morning. Do you know if he’s showed up yet?”
“There was no one here when I unlocked this morning. But Mr. Carruthers is usually most punctual. Have you looked in the workshop?”
“I was out there. The door’s locked, and I didn’t get any answer.”
“Hm. If Mr. Carruthers is occupied in an experiment, he is apt to forget everything that goes on around him. And yet I know he doesn’t want to miss you. He said to me only last night, ‘Fennworth, that Harker boy is something phenomenal. He’ll do for us what Odets did for the Group Theater.’ I think, Mr. Harker, you’d better try the workshop again.”
“I don’t like to disturb him while he’s working.” Surely, Norman found himself thinking against his better judgment, a man with such acute critical taste could not be all bad.
Fennworth rose from behind the desk. “I’ll go along with you. Then if he’s annoyed at being disturbed, he can take it out on the old man. Eh, boy?”
“That’s very kind of you, sir.” Norman shrank a little as Fennworth put a heavy arm around his shoulders. But he had made up his mind. Despite this repulsive old man, despite all that he had heard of Carruthers last night, he would have his play produced here if it were humanly possible. The drowning man does not complain if the spar is not spotlessly clean.
Adam Fennworth’s raps on the white frame door produced as little result as Norman’s. He too rattled the knob, then bent down and looked through the keyhole. When he straightened up, his old face was grave.
“That door,” he said, “is locked on the inside. The key is in the hole. And no one answers.”
For a moment Norman’s mind was a confused jumble of mysterious indication slips, fifty thousand dollar insurance policies, young Irish detectives, and rumbling volcanoes. Then he said more rationally, “Maybe he’s asleep. Locked himself up to work, tired himself out, and dropped off.”
Fennworth did not seem reassured by the suggestion. “Perhaps. But I think we should make sure that—After all, experiments with fire are dangerous. There’s the chance …” He bent down to the keyhole again. “But how can we get in?”
“You haven’t a key?”
“No. And it would be absurd to go bursting in doors, even though …”
Norman stooped over. There was a narrow space between the lower edge of the door and the floor. “A newspaper,” he muttered. “Or better yet a stiff piece of cardboard.”
Fennworth seemed confused. “But what good would that—?”
“Harker, the handy man around the house. Here.” Several used cardboard cartons stood about behind the theater, filled with theatrical waste. Rapidly Norman emptied one of these, ripped off one side, and thrust it halfway under the door.
“Ah!” Fennworth exclaimed appreciatively. “Your talents are not confined to playwriting, my boy.” He knelt down and thrust at the keyhole with a pencil. “Push the key through and then pull it under, eh?”
“Exactly,” Norman nodded.
“Far better than breaking down doors. An ingenious young man indeed.” But in a moment Fennworth rose disconsolate. “The pencil is too thick. I’ve succeeded in pushing the key part way out, but it catches on the edge. Have you anything better to use?”
Norman reached in his pocket and produced a long thin piece of metal. “The omnipotent hairpin,” he announced, “was never half so useful as a pipe tool. Here, let me try.”
He bent down and squinted through the keyhole. He could see the key dangling, its wards caught on the edge of the hole. Even with the pipe tool it was not easy to dislodge, but at last it fell. Gingerly he drew the cardboard toward him. But the clearance was not quite enough. The key came as far as the inner side of the door, then stopped.
With noble disregard for his suit, he dropped flat on his stomach and set to work again with the tool. Pulling the cardboard all the way out left the key lying on the cement floor just inside the door, and a little deft angling brought it outside.
He rose and dusted himself off. “There you are, sir.” It was an odd key, he reflected, or rather a key cut from an odd die. The handle was a solid disc, with no hole for carrying it on a chain or hanging it from a hook. The key looked new. Its metal, even at the operative end, was shiny and unscratched.
“Thank you, my boy.” Adam Fennworth’s pudgy hand trembled as he inserted the key in the lock. “I trust fervently that you are right about his sleeping. You’ve no idea, lad, how much Mr. Carruthers means to—”
The door swung inward. Adam Fennworth started to limp in, then turned, fell back against the wall of the garage, and looked as though he would sink to the ground. Norman started toward the door, but Fennworth waved him back. “No,” he said feebly. “No …”
Norman went on and looked in.
His pipe dropped from his mouth. A hot cinder lit on the back of his hand, but he felt nothing.
He closed the door and turned to Fennworth. “Shall I call an ambulance?”
“His face,” the old man whimpered. “He had such a strong face.”
Norman phoned not only for an ambulance, but also for the police. When he looked up from this second call, he saw Adam Fennworth standing in the doorway of the office, feebly supporting himself against the jamb.
“You shouldn’t have come in here,” Norman said. “One of us ought to stay out there until—”
“I couldn’t,” the old man gasped. “I couldn’t stay where he was … And all …” His speech was faltering, and he barely held himself on his feet.
“Is there anything to drink here?”
The old man tried to collect his thoughts. “Second drawer … left …”
Norman drew out the bottle and frowned as he saw the brand. Rupert Carruthers had not been extravagant in his tastes. He unscrewed the top, took a quick one, wiped off the mouth of the bottle, and handed it to Fennworth. “You stay here with this. I’ll wait out by the …”
He couldn’t finish the sentence. Nor could he stand guard in the workshop itself. He did take one more look, one glance at the disordered room, the scorched walls, and the thing that lay on the floor; but the smell of burned flesh still hung in the air and drove him outside again.
It seemed a matter of days before anyone arrived, but he was still smoking the pipe which he had loaded when he took up this watch and his thoughts were still groping helplessly for a way out of their vacuum. For you can’t think when you first meet death. It’s very well to talk about it and read about it and even write about it, but to see it and—and smell it …
The first to answer his summons were two white-coat
ed young men with a stretcher. “In here?” one of them said.
Norman nodded. They went in, but came out again almost at once. “Look, Mac,” said the first. “You put in that call?”
Again Norman nodded.
“O.K. But listen, Mac, when you got a stiff, you say you got a stiff, see? You don’t need no ambulance. We don’t move nothing till there’s been a checkup, see?”
A heavy-set man in uniform approached them. “O.K., boys,” he announced. “We’re taking over.”
The whitecoat gave a mock salute. “We’re on our way, Sergeant. And listen, Mac. The next time you find a nice crisp stiff, you want the coroner’s office, see? Not the emergency hospital.”
“Leave him be,” said the Sergeant. “The average guy, now, he don’t have much experience along these lines.”
The white-coated men left, stretcher and all. “What do I do now?” Norman asked.
The Sergeant took out a package of Lifesavers and began breaking the foil. “You wait right here with me. The Lieutenant’s inside with the old guy. He’s shaken up pretty bad. No use in dragging him out here again right away. Want a Life-saver?”
“Thanks.”
The two men were silent. After a moment the Sergeant began to unbutton his uniform coat. Then he reached his large hand into his bosom. Norman watched with interest, expecting the production of a hefty black notebook in which his statement would be taken down after a formal caution. But when the hand emerged it held no notebook, but the latest issue of the pulp-paper Dread Stories, with a cover showing a near-naked blonde hanging by her long hair over a gigantic form of meat-chopper. The sergeant leaned back against the wall of the garage-workshop and settled down to a comfortable session of reading and munching.
By now Norman was able to look almost calmly at the fact of Carruthers’ death and to wonder what it meant. It clearly wrote finis to any hopes of having his play produced here; but he found himself if anything even more concerned with what its effect might be on Sarah’s career. He could not pretend, after all he had heard yesterday, to any crocodile sorrow at the loss to the world of Rupert Carruthers; but how many losses to how many other people did that death entail? And what, he wondered at the very back of his mind, would it mean to the career as private detective of Fergus O’Breen?
The Sergeant shut his magazine regretfully. “Here comes the Lieutenant,” he grunted.
Norman looked around. The rangy young man approaching was Detective Lieutenant A. Jackson, brother to the actor Paul and friend to Fergus.
Jackson barely nodded at the waiting witness. He went inside the workshop and stayed there, while Norman smoked restlessly and the Sergeant lost himself in dread horrors. At last he stuck his head out and said, “Harker?”
“Yes.”
“Come on in here. Sergeant, you keep an eye open. If any of the theater people turn up, get their addresses and shoo ’em on about their business.”
Norman entered the workshop reluctantly. With its lathes and vises and tools and shavings, it looked like any man’s puttering shed, but curiously overlaid with an atmosphere of the theater and now of death. The Lieutenant had opened the windows and thrown a cloth over the body. The room was bearable, but no more than that.
Jackson sat on the edge of a workbench, from which his long legs still reached the floor. “All right,” he began. “Let’s hear it. Say from when you got here this morning.” He made no notes (Norman felt disappointed), but listened intently to the story.
At its conclusion the Lieutenant nodded. “That’s clear enough. And when you saw the body here, what did you do?”
“Do?” Norman hesitated. “Why, I … I phoned for an ambulance and the police.”
A light seemed to be breaking in Jackson’s mind. “Aren’t you,” he said slowly, “the man I saw here Tuesday with Fergus O’Breen?”
“Yes. When” (Norman tried to repress a smile) when Betsy asked you for your autograph.”
“Never mind that. But you’re a friend of Fergus’?”
“I haven’t known him long, but—yes, I guess you’d say that.”
“That accounts for it.”
“For what?”
“Look, Harker.” Jackson stretched his legs. “You find a man who’s been in an accident. All right, so you call an ambulance if he’s alive or you notify the coroner if he’s dead. And if the coroner’s office decides it’s suspicious, maybe they call in the police. That’s the ordinary, normal reaction. But nobody but a friend of Fergus’ could think a guy was at once alive enough for an ambulance and murdered enough for the police.”
“Murdered?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying what you must have thought, and why you must have thought it. Now murder is a damned serious idea to go tossing around like a bubble dancer. I remember a case I worked on last year. Natural death, pure and simple. But the rumor of murder got around, and pretty soon damned if there wasn’t a real murder to avenge the one that never happened. So I want to scotch any such possibilities right here and now. Since you found the body, people’ll be asking you a lot of questions, and you’d best know the straight official dope to hand out: this death is an accident.”
“O.K.,” said Norman. “It’s an accident.”
“And what’s more, I’m going to convince you. In the first place, Carruthers was alone in this room and locked in. Now if I know my Fergus, he’s going to try to prove some jiggery-pokery about that, and if he can do it he’s welcome to. The window catches were turned and covered with dust. The front door has cobwebs around its padlock. And this door was locked on the inside with the key in the lock, and I’d call his attention to the handle of that key.”
“But if he was alone,” said Norman, “how—?”
“How was he killed? It’s obvious. Have a look at the body.” He started to jerk back the cloth.
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Norman hastily.
“O.K. The face is terribly burned and there’s been a sharp blow to the back of the skull. I don’t know which killed him; that’s up to the coroner. But it’s easy to reconstruct how it happened. He’s working alone here late at night. The business manager tells me he was experimenting with fire effects. He goes too far in his experiments, and boom! Explosion, sheet of flame blinding and scorching him, he stumbles backward, hits his head on the edge of that lathe—and that’s all there is to it.”
“Can you be so sure?”
“Damned right I can. See? There’s even dried blood there on the lathe. It’s as clear a case as I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s clear enough,” said Norman frowning, “if that is Rupert Carruthers.”
“If that is …?” For a moment Jackson mirrored Norman’s frown, then changed to a broad grin. “By God, Harker, you’re worse than Fergus. Don’t trust that identification because the face was burned? Well, Fennworth made the identification; and when I hinted he could have made a mistake in his excitement, he told me about two scars I could look for to check. I looked; and there they were. To make the routine sure, we’ll have his dentist identify the false teeth; but there isn’t any doubt on the matter. And now,” he swung himself down off the workbench, “you run along and give my love to Fergus. And both of you keep your mouths shut. I don’t want any more trouble around here.”
“I’d like,” Norman ventured, “to ask one more question.”
“Which is?”
“Why were you here on Tuesday?”
“That’s the trouble with this modern generation! No reverence for authority. Look, Harker, I’m the inquisitor.”
“Oh well,” said Norman. “They don’t shoot you for trying.”
“But I’ll tell you what. I’ll answer that in exchange for one piece of information from you.”
“My past is an unwritten book. I’ll take the chance.”
“O.K. But I can’t figure out what good it will do you to know why I was here on Tuesday. It had something to do with the Randolph case. I bet you never heard of it.”
“I,” said Lieutenant Jackson resignedly, “am surrounded by Fergus O’Breen.”
“But how does the Randolph case—” Norman stopped. He was thinking of Fran Owen lying on the floor of Joe’s with a clipping beside her.
“Officially, you know, that case was never closed. Last week the Cincinnati police got an anonymous letter from Los Angeles tipping them off that they’d find a valuable witness at this address, and they had us check up on it.”
“Anything in it?”
“Hell no. Crank stuff. Happens with every unsolved case. You should see the letters we get every so often about William Desmond Taylor. And now that you’ve learned exactly nothing from your question, let me ask mine.”
“Go ahead.”
“What the sweet hell is Fergus doing here? He’s no more an actor than I am. And what does he mean shushing me when I go to speak to him?”
“He’s working.”
“You mean professionally? He’s here in this theater as a private investigator?” Jackson began to look as though he had dismissed the case too quickly. “What’s he on the trail of?”
“Nothing in your line. The father of one of the actresses thought the place was a racket and hired Fergus to prove it.”
“And is it?”
“It is.”
Jackson looked down at the covered body. “Tell Fergus I may drop in on him. But unofficially, you understand. Where there’s a corpse and a racket, you want to know more about things. But there’s not a doubt on earth,” he now sounded almost regretful, “that that death is an accident. That’s all Fergus is onto here? Just this exposé stuff?”
As Norman hesitated, a rap came on the door. “That’ll be the doctor,” said Jackson. “Not that there’s much for him to find out except time. But was there anything else?”
The Case of the Solid Key Page 8