by Mike Ashley
“We’ve been saying all along that the ground over those coffins was solid and undisturbed, and that’s perfectly true. But the ground on the creek side was a different story. The coffins were being moved, remember, because the waters of the flooded creek had so eroded the banks of the creek that some coffins were actually visible, held only by the tree roots that enveloped them. The morning of the murder I watched your crews shovel away the soft dirt and chop out those roots.”
“Then you saw that I didn’t—”
“I saw what you wanted me to see, Earl. That dirt was soft because it had been removed and replaced the night before. You went down there and saw one coffin virtually free of the earth, its corner badly damaged. You were afraid I, or one of the other trustees, would raise a fuss if we saw that, so you removed it yourself, using the block and tackle on your flatbed truck. You placed the coffin on the truck, carefully hiding it beneath a bulky folded tarpaulin and some tools. You had two crews digging, concentrating on their own efforts, not paying much attention to each other. At some point when I’d strolled off examining tombstones it was easy enough for you to yank off the tarp and reveal one more coffin. I remember thinking that the second and third coffins appeared on the truck before I knew it.”
“If he pulled that trick he must have killed Mullins,” the sheriff argued.
“Not at all. Earl had been in trouble with the trustees before and he was afraid we’d fire him for sure if we saw how bad he’d allowed that Brewster plot to get. He was only worried about his job. He had no way of knowing a murderer would find the coffin in the early morning hours and decide it was the perfect place to hide a body.”
Sheriff Lens was still sceptical. “Who’d have a motive for killing the old guy?”
“Someone who’d used him to assemble parcels of land for the new college. Someone in a position to hear the talk about a possible new community cemetery with Shinn Corners and use that information to buy up property, then derail that project and sell the land to the private college for a huge profit.”
“You talkin’ about one of the trustees, Doc?”
“Exactly. No one else would have had the knowledge and the position to bring it off. No one else could have enlisted Mullins’s help when he was in virtual retirement. I found the name I expected on those deeds over in Shinn Corners this afternoon. Mullins must have threatened to talk, or maybe tried a little blackmail. It’s doubtful that anyone but another board member could have lured him to the cemetery early that morning, probably on the pretext of checking the erosion, and then killed him. The killer had to know about the tool shed, and the extra overalls, to protect his clothing from bloodstains. The killer might even have had a key, in case the shed was locked. The trustee put on the overalls, picked up the hedge trimmers, and went out to meet Mullins when he arrived. A quick thrust beneath the rib cage and it was over. The coffin lid was unscrewed and Mullins was added to those long-dead bones. Only there was too much blood, and a damaged coffin that allowed it to seep through and be seen.”
“Which one, Doc?”
“Even without the name on those courthouse records I would have known. The overalls covered everything except the killer’s collar and the top of the tie. Why were the dead man’s collar and tie missing? Certainly he’d worn them. Mullins even wore them to summer picnics. No, the blood didn’t get on the victim’s collar and tie but on the killer’s! A few drops splattered above the protective overalls. So the killer discarded his and replaced them with the victim’s. The bull-necked Mullins would have had a collar big enough to fit any of the other trustees.”
“Which one, Doc?” Sheriff Lens asked again.
“There was only one possibility. Miss Taylor is a woman, after all, with no need for male attire. Randy Freed and I wear shirts with attached collars. Only the dead man and Dalton Swan still wore the detachable collars. Dalton Swan, president of the board of trustees, whose term began before the land deal was closed, who was in the best position to hush up any proposal for a community cemetery and buy the land for himself, who could have gotten Mullins to front for him with the college people, who knew about the tool shed and could have killed Mullins and hidden the body without difficulty, who would have needed to replace his own bloodstained collar and tie before appearing that morning at his bank. The collar and tie you found can be traced to Swan. That and the land deal should be all the evidence you need.”
“Dalton Swan . . .”
“That’s your killer. Go get him, Sheriff.”
DEATH RIDES THE ELEVATOR
Lois H. Gresh & Robert Weinberg
Lois H. Gresh (b.1956) works in the computer industry as a programmer and systems analyst and has written hundreds of technical manuals. She has written many short science fiction and horror stories and her first novel, The Termination Node (1999), an ingenious computer technothriller, was co-written with Robert Weinberg. Weinberg (b.1946) is an American author, bookdealer and editor who has written several novels of fantastic fiction, including a series featuring occult detective Alex Warner, starting with The Devil’s Auction (1988).
Dedicated to the “other” Roger Whitaker
It’s fortunate that Will Rogers never met Cyrus Calhoun. Otherwise, Rogers’ view of his fellow man might have changed forever. Calhoun was a prime example of a self-centred, obnoxious, cold-hearted banker with no redeeming graces. He liked to brag that he didn’t care one bit about his fellow man – just his client’s money. As the controlling stockholder of Manhattan National Trust, the nation’s fifth largest Savings and Loan, Calhoun made more enemies in a week then most men made in a lifetime. Not that it mattered to the multi-millionaire. He treated ordinary people like peasants. Or worse, like ants to be stepped on. Until one fine day when he learned that stepping into the wrong place at the wrong time can get anyone, rich or poor, into a lot of trouble.
An odd twist of serendipity crossed my path with Calhoun’s on his day of reckoning. My boss, Penelope Peters, relied on Manhattan National for all of her banking needs. Which means, since Penelope never left her home on Manhattan’s West Side, every Friday I drove to the bank’s main office and deposited the week’s earnings. Some weeks were better than others, but rarely was our deposit less than ten thousand dollars.
Penelope Peters is a genius and she knows it. She charges her clients accordingly. They pay her fees without complaining because by the time they reach Penelope, there’s no other choice left. She’s the final resort, and despite her astronomical fees, her schedule is booked months in advance.
While Penelope does the thinking, I do the chores. My name’s Sean O’Brien and I serve as Penelope’s connection with the outside world. I do most of the household shopping – except for food, which is handled by the boss’s chef, Julian Scapaletto – as well as keeping the books, paying the bills, and just about anything else Penelope requires. I’m thirty-five, stand six feet two, and weigh two forty. I have a degree in accounting, a private detective’s badge, and a black belt in karate. Sherlock Holmes has his Dr Watson, Nero Wolfe his Archie Goodwin, Timmy has Lassie. Penelope Peters has me. It’s strictly a business arrangement and I’m not complaining. Working for Penelope Peters is always interesting. Plus, she pays me a hell of a salary, more even than I think I’m worth.
My first and only encounter with Cyrus Calhoun occurred on Friday, August 20,1999.1 was standing patiently in line to make the weekly deposit. It had been a good week and there were cheques worth fifteen thousand dollars in my attache case. I was wearing a dark grey, double-breasted pinstripe suit, white shirt, and grey and black tie decorated with pictures of Bogart and Bergman from Casablanca. No tie without a picture was my motto. It was a Christmas gift from my boss.
Around the house, if I’m not working, I dress in casual slacks and a polo shirt. On business, I always wear a suit and tie. Since I represent Penelope everywhere outside her home, she insists I project a prosperous image. God forbid anyone should think she wasn’t rich. Her explanation was short and simple. �
�Rich people who never leave their houses under any circumstances are merely eccentric. Poor people who act the same way are thought to be insane. Considering the choices, I prefer eccentric.”
Anyway, waiting for a teller, I was reviewing the latest video releases in my mind. Friday nights Penelope preferred watching a movie on the large screen TV in the parlour. We’d been exceptionally busy during the past few months so had not seen anything since early summer. Since the boss likes mystery or spy flicks, I was debating the relative merits of Ronin versus The Negotiator. Ronin starred De Niro and Jean Reno, both of whom I liked. The Negotiator had Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey. Penelope liked Jackson from Pulp Fiction, which I thought was overrated. So, I stood there, lost in thought, weighing the pros and cons of which film to rent, when suddenly a woman’s shriek broke the normal hush of the bank’s lobby.
A shriek is different from a scream. Take it from someone who served two years as an MP in Germany. A scream blends loud and distressed. A shriek combines horror and fright. Screams are bad, shrieks are much worse.
Tucking my case under one arm, I leapt over the guide rope and sprinted in the general direction of the shrieks. The location wasn’t far, around a twenty-foot long wall of fine marble. I skidded to a stop five feet from the spot. A young woman, dark hair, dressed in a bank uniform, was frozen solid in front of an elevator door. Her hands covered her eyes while her mouth continued to howl like a police siren. One of the bank’s security guards, an old geezer with white hair, had his arms around the woman, trying to calm her down. Another five or six people, all dressed in business clothes, surrounded the elevator door. More were arriving every second. White faces were changing to vomit green. A man about my age, dressed in a three-piece suit that cost my salary for a year, stumbled hurriedly out of the crowd. He looked ready to heave up his breakfast. Wordlessly, I pointed to the nearest bathroom. Then, using my considerable weight and muscle, I shouldered my way through the growing crowd to see what had caused the ruckus.
The elevator was a fancy one. There were no mirrors like in most elevators. The rich prefer not to look at their wrinkles. Instead, the walls were decorated with fine mahogany panelling, highlighted with gold leaf. A large dropped light fixture on the ceiling provided bright white illumination. The thick green carpet seemed to be an expensive weave. A wall plate indicated that the elevator was for the private use of Cyrus Calhoun, the bank’s CEO.
As to Mr Calhoun, he was the cause of the woman’s shrieks. Or to be precise, his two parts were the cause of her distress. The body of the millionaire was sprawled in the rear right corner of the elevator, shoulders wedged tight against the walls. They were able to make such close contact because there was nothing between them to serve as a barrier. Calhoun’s head, a limp, bloody ball, rested on the green carpet in the middle of the car. The banker’s eyes were wide open, as if curious about the stir his appearance had caused.
Obviously, the decapitation had taken place in the elevator car. The walls, ceiling, and floor were covered with blood. Blood still trickled down his chest in a small but steady stream. I’m no doctor but I knew enough about killing to know Calhoun hadn’t been dead more than a few minutes. The scene was one of the most striking sights I’ve encountered in all my life. A man’s head and body, chopped apart, in what essentially was a locked room. From what I could gather from the babbling of the shrieker, she had been walking past the private elevator when the doors opened and she saw the corpse. One point she made perfectly clear. No one else had been in the elevator when it came to rest. The corpse had been all alone.
Sensing a mystery and perhaps some money, I flipped out my pocket phone and dialled home. Penelope answered on the fourth ring.
“Hello,” she said in that odd way of hers, making the word into a statement, not a question.
“No time for pleasantries,” I said. “I’m at the bank. Cyrus Calhoun, in two separate pieces, just arrived by his private elevator to the first floor. Head’s on one side of the car, body’s on the other. A witness who saw the door open claims nobody else was inside. Sound interesting?”
“Possibly,” said Penelope. “Manhattan National Trust can’t afford a long, drawn-out mystery. Notoriety is bad business, especially for banks. If there’s no rational explanation found, call me back when possible. Give my regards, as always, to Inspector Norton. I’m sure he’ll be there shortly.”
“Speak of the devil,” I said, as I switched off the phone and snapped it closed. Give bank security an A for effort. They had New York’s top homicide cop, flanked by an entire team of specialists, here quicker than dialing 911. He glared at me with his usual “what the hell are you doing here, O’Brien?” stare but didn’t bother to stop and say hello. Once he spotted me, Norton always concluded I was at the scene of the crime for a reason. More often than not, he was right. I work for Penelope Peters, and her job is solving problems. Including such problems as murder, robbery, arson, and kidnapping. Penelope hates crime like any good, upstanding citizen. Only in her case, she makes it pay.
“What a mess,” declared the good Inspector, looking inside the elevator. His voice sounded like a truck driving over gravel. A big-boned man, he stood six feet four and weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. Entirely bald, with sunken cheeks and a beak-like nose, Norton looked like a walking skeleton. A bout with lung cancer five years ago had nearly killed him. No more cigars for the Inspector. Unable to function properly without something in his mouth, he constantly chewed gum. “What a stinkin’ bloody mess.”
His hawk-like gaze swept the crowd of onlookers like a vulture sizing up possible meals. “Nobody leaves. I want statements from everybody in this hall.” His brows curled into a deep frown when he looked at me. “Especially you, O’Brien. I want to know exactly how you’re involved in this disaster.”
Immediately, everyone near me moved two steps back, as if they’d suddenly discovered a rabid dog in their midst. Norton knows how to make a guy feel two feet tall. That’s one of his more endearing talents.
He waved his team of experts forward. “Find me some answers,” he said. “The sooner the better.’
The interrogations lasted about an hour. The Inspector handled some, his assistant Stanley Dryer the rest. Nobody had much to tell. Norton, of course, left me for last. He was about to give me the third degree when three middle-aged men dressed in thousand-bucks-a-pop suits emerged from an elevator across the hall. They headed in a beeline for Norton. Following them, dressed in a green-grey uniform was a short, stocky man with a confused expression on his face. The name-tag on his outfit identified him as Roger Stern, building engineer.
Standing only a few feet from Norton, I tried valiantly to blend in with the scenery. Fortunately, nobody paid much attention to me. At my weight and size, remaining unnoticed is not one of my greatest talents.
“I’m Garrett Calhoun,” said the tallest of the men. Lines of grey streaked his black hair and his lips were thin and bloodless. “Cyrus is my brother. A terrible tragedy, Inspector. Terrible, terrible. Any clues about how it happened? Was his death an accident?”
Norton snorted. His tongue emerged, wrapped in gum, then retreated. “Accident? Unlikely when a man’s been decapitated. Not the usual method to commit suicide. Sorry, Mr Calhoun, but your brother was murdered.”
“Impossible,” interjected the second suit. Shorter than Cyrus Calhoun’s brother Garrett, this one was plump, wore thick brown plastic glasses, and had a trace of black moustache. “All three of us saw Cyrus enter the elevator alone. It’s his private car. He only rides it between the fortieth floor and the lobby. Entire journey takes less than a minute. You’re not suggesting someone climbed into the elevator somehow, chopped off my father-in-law’s head in one minute, and then disappeared? That’s absurd.”
“I don’t believe I caught your name?” said Norton.
“Tom Vance,” said the guy with the glasses. “I’m married to Grace Calhoun, Cyrus Calhoun’s daughter and Garrett’s niece.”
&nbs
p; “Well, thanks for the info, Mr Vance,” said Norton, ever calm and polite. He could have been discussing the weather instead of a brutal murder. There was no outrage left in Norton. He’d seen too many dead bodies to get angry. To him, solving crime was a job, not a crusade.
The Inspector turned to the third member of the group. “Ralston Calhoun, right?” Norton asked. “I believe we met once or twice at the Mayor’s Spring Fundraiser.”
The man, tall and slender, with light brown hair and light brown eyes, nodded. Of the three, he was the youngest by a dozen years or more. “Your prime suspect,” said Ralston, with a slight twist of a smile. “Cyrus was my stepfather. With him dead, I stand to inherit a hefty fortune.”
“Nah,” said Norton. “Department furnished me details about the corporation. You make a great suspect, but so do your two relatives. As the three surviving stockholders in the company, you’ll all do quite well with Calhoun dead. None of you has to worry about begging on the street. It’s common knowledge you’ve been asking the old man to step down from the Board of Directors for years, and that he’s constantly refused. Dry those big crocodile tears. Everybody hated the old bastard. After I get statements from all of you, you’re free to go and get yourself smashing drunk. I know that’s what I’d do if I owned shares in this bank. From what Mr Calhoun senior stated, I assume you all alibi each other?”
“Exactly,” said Vance. “None of us could have had anything to do with the crime. It was right after our weekly board meeting. We were all upstairs in the reception lobby of the fortieth floor, saying goodbye to old Cyrus when the elevator door closed. We didn’t know anything unusual had taken place until we got a phone message from the front desk.”
“Didn’t exactly rush down here,” said Norton. “Talking to your lawyers first, I expect. Give your statements to my assistant, then you’re free to go. Good luck with the press.”
He frowned, rubbed his eyes. The usual signs he was getting a headache. I couldn’t blame him. Murders in rooms locked from the inside were bad enough. But a murder in an elevator riding down forty stories?