But He Was Already Dead When I Got There

by Barbara Paul

  “I’ve got a better idea.” Simon stepped out onto the terrace, turned his head away, and thrust a gloved fist through the glass panel nearest the doorknob.

  The sound of breaking glass made both cat and woman start. “Oh my—that did make a bit of noise, didn’t it?” Dorrie caught sight of a black, orange, and white tail twitching nervously from beneath the sofa. “Do you suppose anyone heard?”

  “We’d better leave—come on.”

  She glanced toward the mantlepiece. “What about that clock? It’s worth several thousand at least.”

  “Leave it—we’ve got more than we can carry now. Oh … the lights. The lights were off when we got here.”

  Dorrie frowned. “Would a burglar who’d just killed a man stop to turn off the lights?”

  “You’re right. Let’s go.” Simon went out on the terrace, wondering how they were going to get all their loot over the wall. “We’ll have to toss this stuff over, I suppose, one piece at a time. Or—wait a minute.” The walled terrace encircled only three-fourths of the house, leaving the front entrance clear. At each end of the terrace was a metal gate—locked from the outside only. “Darling, see if you can lift the latch on that gate. My arms are full.”

  Dorrie managed to get the heavy gate open and held it while Simon passed through. But when she tried to prop it open—to make it appear as if the burglar had left in a rush—it swung to behind her and fastened with a noisy click.

  “Oh well,” said Simon. “The police will figure that’s what happened to the burglar, too.”

  The latch on the library door clicked and the door itself slowly began to inch open. Godfrey Daniel was instantly alert.

  Malcolm Conner peered into the room, and grimaced at what he saw. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Malcolm stood quite still for a few moments, gazing in confusion at the glorious disarray around him. He took in the gaping file cabinet drawers, the papers scattered everywhere, the sofa cushions on the floor, the desk drawers pulled out and turned upside down.

  Finally he focused his attention on Uncle Vincent. He crossed over to the desk and pulled Nicole’s scarf out of his jacket pocket. Carefully he untied the knots; and using the scarf to handle each piece, he placed half the broken alabaster Hermes on the desk and the other half on the floor.

  Malcolm stepped back to examine the effect. Satisfied, he stuffed the scarf back in his pocket and left, absent-mindedly switching off the lights as he went.

  Bored, Godfrey went back to sleep.

  The lights clicked on. Godfrey yawned and resettled himself, waiting patiently to see what this one was going to do.

  Lionel Knox leaned against the closed library door, gazing in horror at the scene before him. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. Slipping off one glove, he quickly crossed to the desk and felt for a pulse in Uncle Vincent’s left wrist. Finding none, he stood in a brown study for a while, barely aware of the cat rubbing against his leg.

  Lionel put his glove back on. He hunkered down and picked up a piece of paper from the floor and glanced at it. He dropped it, picked up another. Godfrey leaped to the back of the sofa, catching Lionel’s eye. “What happened here, Godfrey?” he asked. The cat blinked at him.

  Methodically Lionel started working his way through every piece of paper in the room. He’d look at each one only long enough to see what it was and then go on to the next. The job took him nearly half an hour, and when he finished he still didn’t have what he was looking for.

  Lionel sat on the floor thinking, his forearms resting on his knees. Godfrey trotted up between the man’s knees and raised his head to be petted; Lionel obliged. “I think I know what happened,” he told the cat.

  With a new sense of purpose, Lionel got up and went around behind the desk. Gritting his teeth, he took hold of Uncle Vincent’s shoulders and pulled him back so that the dead man was sitting more or less upright in the wheelchair. Lionel grasped the chair’s handgrips and wheeled Uncle Vincent out to the middle of the room. There he unceremoniously dumped the corpse on the floor. “Sorry, Uncle Vincent,” Lionel muttered. “It’s necessary.” He fetched the automatic from the desk and shoved it under Uncle Vincent’s body.

  He went back to the desk again and picked up the blood-stained blotter—and caught sight of the manila folder that had been underneath. Bernstein, Paul, the tab read in Uncle Vincent’s spidery handwriting—the private investigator’s report. Lionel read through the typewritten report and glanced again at the revealing photographs that accompanied it. He took both the folder and the blotter to the fireplace where he put a match to them; soon both pieces of evidence were going up in flames. Lionel stepped backward away from the fire—and trod on Godfrey Daniel’s tail.

  The cat let out a scream to wake the dead; Lionel jumped a foot and Godfrey scooted to safety. Lionel’s mouth had turned dry; someone must have heard that godawful noise. He looked around the room hastily, thinking there was something else that needed to be done. But the cat’s cry had disconcerted him; he couldn’t concentrate. When he felt he couldn’t safely linger any longer, he switched off the lights and opened the library door a crack.

  And heard someone coming down the hall stairway.

  Lionel quickly shut the door again, and—because he couldn’t think in the dark—switched the lights back on. A small black-white-orange face watched him anxiously from under the sofa. There was only one other way out of the library. Lionel raced across the room—jumping over Uncle Vincent—and pushed open the double doors.

  The first thing he saw on the terrace was the wrought-iron table shoved up against the wall. He leaped up on the table and vaulted to the top of the wall—no mean feat for a man so unathletically disposed as Lionel Knox. He dropped down on the other side of the wall, twisting an ankle as he fell.

  The first light of dawn was beginning to show as Lionel got up and limped painfully away.

  Gretchen Knox was walking down the hallway from the bathroom when she heard the scream. She’d only just removed her earplugs after several hours of blissful silence, and the sudden noise unnerved her.

  The cat, she thought, it must be the cat. But the scream had had an almost human sound to it; and even if it were Godfrey Daniel, why would he let out a yowl like that unless something had happened to him?

  Gretchen knew she wouldn’t get back to sleep without finding out; it was almost morning anyway. She went down the stairs, calling the cat. A faint answering meow sounded from the library.

  She opened the library door, and a black, white, and orange blur streaked out past her. But Gretchen didn’t notice; she stood transfixed by the sight of the dead body lying in the middle of the floor. What on earth? She came out of her shock and hurried over to the corpse; one touch was all she needed to tell her he was thoroughly dead. “Oh, damn it, Uncle Vincent!” she said crossly.

  Her first instinct was to go back and shut the library door. “Now why did I do that?” she murmured. To give herself time to think, obviously. She picked up one of the sofa cushions from the floor, put it on the sofa, and sat down. For the first time she took in fully the utter mess the room was in. She sat there scowling, trying to figure out what it all meant.

  She looked over the room carefully, foot by foot. Gradually the scowl lines began to disappear from her face. Then she was almost smiling. Then she was smiling. She jumped up and started gathering the papers up from the floor, thrusting them any which way into the file folders. When she had all the papers collected, she put the folders back into the file cabinet.

  Next she replaced the other sofa cushions. She closed the double doors leading to the terrace, being careful of the broken glass. Then she put the desk drawers back, filling each one with the pens and paper clips and other paraphernalia that had been dumped on the floor. That done, she stood in the middle of the room and examined it again—and noticed a few things missing. She ran out of the room and came back a few minutes later carrying an ivory owl, a Donovan ironstone vase, an eighteenth-century music box, a
small silver luster jug, and a brown and white sardonyx ashtray. These items she placed at appropriate places around the room.

  Once again she surveyed the room. At last she gave a satisfied little nod and left the library, turning out the lights and closing the door behind her. She started up the stairs and then changed her mind and used Uncle Vincent’s elevator instead. She’d just reached her own door on the second floor when the alarm clock went off in Mrs. Polk’s room on the floor above.

  Barney wasn’t in his room. How vexing! Mrs. Polk thought. Just when she needed him the most!

  She searched the house quietly, not wanting to wake Miss Gretchen. She found the manservant in the kitchen, asleep on one of the breakfast nook benches—shameful! Mrs. Polk shook his shoulder, rather roughly. “Barney! Wake up!” she hissed. “Do you hear me, Barney? Wake up!”

  Bjarne Pedersen fought his way up out of a Valium-and-alcohol stupor. He was vaguely aware of Mrs. Polk’s high voice calling him from a long distance away. He felt hands tugging at him, forcing him into an upright position.

  Then the hands and the voice went away, and Bjarne’s head drooped forward on his chest. But not for long; after what seemed only a second or two the hands and the voice were back, and with them the smell of coffee. He managed to get one eye open enough to see Mrs. Polk’s anxious face peering into his.

  “Drink the coffee, Barney!” Mrs. Polk urged him. “Something terrible has happened and I need you!” When he made no move to take the cup, she held it up to his lips. “Hurry, Barney! There’s not much time! Miss Gretchen will be waking up any minute now!”

  A tea-drinker by preference, Bjarne had to down two cups of the noxious stuff before Mrs. Polk would tell him what the “terrible” thing was that had happened. And when she did tell him, it was terrible indeed. Now shocked fully awake, Bjarne lurched to his feet and stumbled after the housekeeper to the library.

  There it was—the thing he’d feared the most. Mr. Vincent lay sprawled on the floor, head bloodied and ugly, as dead as they come. All Bjarne’s fears about his future came rushing to the front, and he had to squeeze back the tears. When he could speak, he said only one word. “Police?”

  “I haven’t called them yet,” Mrs. Polk said tightly. “There’s something I want you to do first. It’s not decent to leave him there like that—contemptuous, somehow. He should be behind his desk, where he belongs. Pick him up, Barney.”

  A phrase from a thousand television shows floated into Bjarne’s head. “Isn’t that, uh, tampering with the evidence?”

  “I don’t care,” Mrs. Polk said rigidly. “I don’t want anyone to see him like that. And what difference could it make anyway? He’s just as dead either place.”

  Bjarne wasn’t up to arguing with her. Besides, in a way she was right; there was something obscene about leaving Mr. Vincent sprawled out like that. Bjarne found no pleasure in seeing a once-powerful man brought low. He stooped down and wrestled the dead man back into the wheelchair.

  Mrs. Polk gasped. “Look!” She pointed to the automatic pistol on the floor. “That must be the gun that killed him! It looks like Mr. Vincent’s gun, doesn’t it?”

  It did. But the wound on Mr. Vincent’s head didn’t look like a gunshot wound to Bjarne—not that he had all that much experience with bullets and the kinds of holes they made. “Better bring it along,” he told Mrs. Polk.

  Bjarne wheeled the body to behind the desk; when he stopped the chair, Mr. Vincent slumped forward across the desk top, his right arm extending stiffly out to the side. Mrs. Polk approached, gingerly carrying the automatic by the barrel between thumb and forefinger. She placed the gun on the desk top just a few inches beyond Mr. Vincent’s outstretched right hand.

  “You left your fingerprints,” Bjarne said, and wiped the barrel clean with his handkerchief.

  Mrs. Polk sighed. “Now we’re ready to call the police,” she said.

  5

  A good old house, Lieutenant Frederick Toomey thought. Well maintained, not cuted up by restorers and the like. Toomey puffed his way up the front steps. He was a shortish man who grew a little rounder every year; he’d bought his last suit one size too large in the mistaken notion that others would think he’d recently lost weight. His protruding eyes were heavily lidded and his lank hair had never once been blown dry. He did not cut a dashing figure. The uniformed officer stationed at the door nodded him in.

  The inside of the house was even better. Furnishings that were solid and expensive without being ostentatious. Paneled walls and high ceilings. The kind of place Lieutenant Toomey wanted to own himself someday, but knew he never would. He followed the sound of voices to the library.

  The crime lab boys were there, and Dr. Oringer from the medical examiner’s office. Lieutenant Toomey’s captain had told him a detective was already at the site, and Toomey groaned when he saw it was Sal Rizzuto. Rizzuto wasn’t a bad cop, but he had one habit that drove Lieutenant Toomey wild. He deliberately spoke bad English; he thought it made him sound cool, man. Street-wise.

  Avoiding Sergeant Rizzuto for the moment, Toomey headed toward Dr. Oringer. “Hello, Doc. What can you tell me?”

  “Morning, Fred. Well, he was killed by a blow on the head, struck from the front—looks as if the murder weapon’s that broken statuette over there. Position of the wound indicates a right-handed killer. Time of death—midnight or before.”

  “Midnight or before? Can’t you pin it down more than that?”

  Dr. Oringer gestured toward the fireplace. “Tell me what time that fire went out and I can. You know how an overheated room delays the onset of rigor. When it wears off I can run some tests and tell you more.”

  The only thing Toomey knew about the victim was his name. He took a quick look at the corpse before it was zipped up into the body bag. “How old was he, would you say?”

  “Late seventies. He was paralyzed from the waist down. The housekeeper says stroke.”

  Toomey had noticed the wheelchair. And now it was going to be up to him to catch the big, brave soul who’d struck down a helpless invalid.

  Dr. Oringer left with the body. Sal Rizzuto strutted over, an open notebook in his hand, working hard at appearing blasé. “Mornin’, Lieutenant,” he said casually, as if he started every day with a murder investigation. “Looks like the victim surprised a burglar in the act. Fairly cut-and-dried. Farwell pulled a gun but the thief got the jump on ’im—conked ’im with that there statuette on the desk.”

  The top of the desk held both pieces of the broken statuette in separate plastic bags as well as Vincent Farwell’s gun, similarly encased in plastic. A tape outline marked the position where the upper half of the body had lain. Toomey noticed the gouge mark the bullet had made along the surface. “Must have been a pretty hard blow to break that statuette,” he remarked.

  “Naw, that stuff’s alabaster,” Rizzuto said surprisingly. “Carves easy, breaks easy. Prolly wouldna killed a younger man.”

  Toomey raised a mental eyebrow and said, “I wonder if our killer knew that. But he might not have had time to think—just grabbed the nearest thing that looked like a weapon and struck out. What else have you got?”

  “Farwell’s billfold under the desk—cash and credit cards missin’. Marks of a stretch band on the victim’s left wrist—watch was taken. Might be other things gone, too. The housekeeper was too strung out to talk when I got here. Her and the valet or butler or whatever he is, they’re in the kitchen.”

  Toomey nodded, staring at the painting on the wall. “Wonder why he didn’t take the Degas?”

  Rizzuto shrugged. “Must be a copy.”

  “Or that music box on the end table? That’s got to be worth a nice piece of change.”

  “He just got spooked and took off after he killed the old guy. He was interrupted, like.”

  “He wasn’t too spooked to stop and take the victim’s watch and clean out his billfold.”

  “Yeah, thass right. Well, maybe he dint think the box was worth nothin
’. Look, we found a coupla other things.” Rizzuto went over to one of the men from the crime lab and came back with three plastic bags. “This here’s a page from a letter. It was underneath the sofa.”

  Toomey took the plastic bag and read the first page of a letter to Vincent Farwell from his insurance agent. Farwell had evidently inquired about increased coverage for his household goods, and the letter was a response explaining terms. “What are these little prick marks up in the corner?”

  “Huh.” Rizzuto peered closer. “They look like pinholes.”

  Toomey pursed his lips. “Some of my album covers at home have little holes in them just like those. Is there a cat in this house?”

  The other man shrugged. “I dunno.” He handed Toomey another plastic bag. “Here’s somethin’ else.”

  Toomey read the name on the instrument inside: Infralux. “What is it?”

  “An appliance.”

  “I can see it’s an appliance, Rizzuto. What’s it for?”

  “Beats me. It was on the floor behind that leather chair. But there ain’t no outlet in that wall there.”

  “Mm. A piece of paper under the sofa. An appliance out of place. Sloppy housekeeping? What’s in that last bag?”

  “The bullet. Thirty-eight caliber, looks like, same as Farwell’s gun. You can see where the bullet hit the desk and changed trajectory so it went off toward the fireplace, where it got deflected to over there behind the sofa.”

  “Interesting. He would have had to be pointing the gun almost parallel to the desk top when he fired—and only slightly downward. Rizzuto, bring me a chair.” Toomey sat down behind the desk on the chair the Sergeant brought. “You’re the killer—stand in front of the desk. Okay, now come at me.”

  Rizzuto pantomimed grabbing something from the desk and raising it over his head to deliver a blow, while Toomey jerked open a desk drawer and pulled out a pencil he pointed toward the Sergeant. At no time was his hand aiming along the direction of the furrow made by the bullet.