Charlie Chan The Silent Corpse

by Earl Derr Biggers

  THE SILENT CORPSE

  by Robert Hart Davis

  CHARLIE CHAN MYSTERY MAGAZINE, February 1974.

  The hurricane struck the island suddenly, trapping the guests and Charlie Chan on Burdon Point - but greater than the fury of the storm was the terror when it was learned Lionel Burdon had been murdered!

  I

  THE HANDSOME, white haired man had fallen asleep at his handsome mahogany desk in the book lined study of his handsome home. His right elbow rested on the wide arm of his chair and his torso slanted that way. Although his killer entered silently, the slight click of the door closing half-roused the man from his after-dinner slumber.

  His killer smiled down into the sleep-ridded eyes and said, “Let me make you more comfortable, Lionel.”

  “Thanks,” Lionel Burdon mumbled. “Can’t imagine why I’m so sleepy.”

  “You’re tired,” the killer told him. “You’re not a young man any more. Here - let me…”

  As a left hand straightened the slumberer’s torso, the right put a Smith and Wesson revolver against his right temple and pulled the trigger.

  The sound of the discharge was shockingly loud in the room, but the killer remained untroubled by the possibility of discovery, knowing there was no one within earshot beyond the room’s thick, book-sheathed walls with its massive wooden door securely closed.

  Lionel Burdon’s head was a sickening sight. A torrent of blood poured from the hole in his right temple, blood mixed with bits of flesh, bone and greyish white brain matter. The ugliness of this achievement failed to disturb the killer who was troubled by a quite different concern. This was the credibility of Lionel Burdon’s suicide among those who had known him well. It was not a large worry, however - for everyone would have to accept the fact of Burdon’s self destruction.

  The killer had planned everything to perfection.

  The pistol placed carefully on the rich red carpet, the fact that the pistol belonged to the corpse, the matching of bullet and barrel, even the recent indications of powder marks on the victim’s right hand should the authorities choose to apply a paraffin test - all added up to evidence impossible to controvert.

  The killer left the room silently, conscious of a difficult job well done…

  II

  ALTHOUGH the white spired brick chapel was less than five hundred yards from the main house, the small funeral party covered the distance in chauffeur driven limousines. Charlie Chan ordinarily would have preferred to walk but the mounting fury of the hurricane made footing it out of the question.

  The services had been brief and simple, after the Unitarian fashion, and the coffin had been mercifully covered. Even with a mortician’s napkin draped over the wound, a man who has blown out his brains with a thirty-eight calibre pistol is not a reassuring sight.

  Dr. Smith, the Burdon family physician, shared the soft upholstery of the Continental with the Honolulu Chief of Detectives. He said, “The chapel always makes me feel that I am in New England instead of on the island of Hawaii.”

  Chan said, “Either in New England or Hollywood. It reminds me very much of Forest Lawn.”

  Dr. Smith, watching the windswept and rain-lashed cypresses that lined the winding drive bend low before the rising storm, said nervously, “I have four cases waiting in Hilo.”

  Chan, who had known the eminent Chinese-American physician for many years, wondered a little at the nervousness. Dr. Li Mok Smith had always impressed him as a man of almost preternatural calm. Perhaps, he thought, it was the hurricane. Low atmospheric pressures, which invariably accompany such a storm, affect most people one way or another.

  He said, “Li, if we’re to be marooned on Burdon Point, we could be in quarters much less comfortable.”

  Chan, himself, had a full docket awaiting him on the island of Oahu. As the big car pulled slowly under the porte cochere of the main house, he wished that he, too, were back in his own bailiwick, but Chan was quite willing to accept the inevitable.

  Curiosity gnawed at him, curiosity both personal and professional, and he was inclined to welcome a prolongation of his visit to Burdon Point as an opportunity to seek and perhaps find answers to the questions plaguing him.

  Ordinarily, when a man like Lionel Burdon died, the acknowledged leader of one of the half dozen great families in any state, a man of great distinction and even greater power and reputation, his funeral would have been that of at least a petty prince, with the governor himself in attendance. It was because Burdon had committed suicide that Chan was there instead.

  There had been much inter-island telephoning once the date of the funeral was set. While the Burdon family, or its surviving clan-chiefs, felt that a representative of the executive should be present, it also felt that the presence of too high-level an official would bring the inevitable and unwanted newspaper and television reporters and camera crews in his wake.

  Ultimately, Honolulu Detective Inspector Charlie Chan had been tapped for the chore. He was not only sufficiently distinguished but was noted for his discretion and his ability to render himself invisible to the media representatives when such invisibility was desired. He had been known long and favorably to the deceased, having attained the status of valued friend after managing to restore safely to her home the kidnapped Lenore Burdon not merely unharmed but without payment of ransom.

  The hurricane, watched by trackers for two weeks as it approached the islands, was also a factor. While the funeral had been timed well ahead of the predicted arrival of the tropical storm on Hawaii’s west coast, there was always the possibility that it would get there ahead of schedule - which had, in fact, happened.

  Charlie Chan had thus flown from Oahu early that morning, arriving barely in time to attend the services. Now, with both wind and water rising at a furious pitch, it appeared that his stay on Burdon Point, along with that of other guests, would be prolonged.

  “…without a toothbrush,” he remarked in an aside to Dr. Smith as they were ushered into the entry hall of the main house by an immense and solemn faced Negro butler resplendent in gold-frogged blue broadcloth livery.

  Although, at the time of Lenore Burdon’s kidnapping, Chan had been in two of the Burdon mansions on Oahu, he was unprepared for the truly baronial scale on which Burdon Point was conceived and maintained.

  As with the chapel, New England was very much present in the mahogany topped double railing of the gracefully curved banisters, in the white wall paneling and in the dour primitive ancestral portraits of earlier Burdons who glowered tight lipped and probably toothless out of their plain gilt oval frames.

  In a deceptively simple living room off the entrance hall, where biscuits and a superb claret punch were being served, Chan stuck close to Dr. Smith, which was not difficult since they were the only non-family persons present. There had been no chance for private conversation between the two quasi-officials before the ceremony at the chapel.

  In the course of his long career as a police detective in Honolulu, Chan had viewed and investigated at least a thousand suicides, most of them easily understandable. As a rule, he had learned, men and women destroyed themselves violently when facing incurable diseases, when driven insane, when confronted with unendurable prospects of failure in business or even in love, or when hopelessly hooked on narcotics habits they could no longer manage to support.

  There were other, more obscure causes for suicide, and these, too, were comprehensible. However, there were a few whose motivation for self murder had remained stubbornly beyond the bounds of any applicable logic. To Chan, Lionel Burdon’s suicide was among these. In his quietly unassertive way, Lionel Burdon was, to all outward evidence, one of the most vitally alive human beings,
one of the most interested and interesting men, Chan had ever met.

  Yet, Burdon had pressed a revolver muzzle against his right temple and blown out his brains. Chan had talked to his opposite number at Hilo by telephone about it before leaving his Honolulu office to drive to the airport.

  According to that official, the evidence of suicide was incontrovertible. The position of the body, the angle of bullet entry, the powder burns in the skin surrounding the wound - all spelled self destruction. Paraffin tests had even detected the presence of powder markings on the gun hand itself.

  Still, Chan found it hard to accept. Hence, his cornering of Dr. Smith, who had been Lionel Burdon’s personal physician on Hawaii.

  “Li,” he said, “have you any idea why?”

  The physician shrugged and shook his head, then said, “Charlie, it beats me. Of all the men I’ve ever known…” he let it hang.

  “How about his health?”

  “I checked him every six months for the past eight years, the last time six weeks ago. For a man sixty-one years old, he had the body and mind of a man twenty years younger. His muscle tone was perfect, his reaction timing above normal in quickness, his blood pressure one-twenty over eighty. You and I should have it so good.”

  “Mental health to match?”

  Dr. Smith spread his hands wide, said, “Charlie, you know I’m no psychiatrist, so I’m hardly qualified to give you an answer. But, off the record, he was probably the sanest son of a bitch I ever knew in my life. He never saw a shrink unless it was social.”

  “Come on, you two,” said a sweetly low-pitched feminine voice. “Don’t try to spoil the wake with shop talk. You won’t succeed.”

  Dr. Smith murmured something about its being the quietest wake he had ever attended and wandered away. Looking after him briefly, Chan received a definite impression that the physician had seized the opportunity to get away from his questioning. He wondered why, since the evidence of suicide was incontrovertible and the questions had been elemental.

  “Inspector Chan,” said the low-pitched feminine voice, “aren’t you going to say hello to your victim?”

  “Pardon, Mrs. Wilmot,” Chan said, lapsing into the pidgin English that had once been his trademark. “Most rude.” Then, regarding Lenore Burdon Wilmot for the first time, “Victim bloom like beautiful bronze chrysanthemum.”

  The girl he had rescued from kidnappers nine years before had indeed bloomed into a most attractive woman - nor was the bronze chrysanthemum simile inapt, since the curling cap of her hair bore close resemblance to the flower.

  Her wide-set eyes were grey green, her slightly uptilted nose dusted with freckles against the healthy tan of her complexion. Her basic black dress, with its inevitable single strand of perfectly matched pearls, suggested that the coltish teenager whose rescue he had achieved had become a stunningly contoured young matron.

  “How perfectly charming,” she said. Then, mimicking him gently, “But come as no surprise from captivating detective chief.”

  Dropping the pidgin, Chan said, “Seriously, Lenore, it’s nice to see you thriving - even on such an occasion.”

  Trouble flickered over the attractive face, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “That’s one thing about us Burdons,” she said, “we thrive and thrive and thrive.”

  The troubled look flickered again. Lenore Burdon Wilmot opened her mouth to speak, but, before she could say whatever was in her mind, an intruder shattered the brief tete a fete.

  Red-haired, hound-dog lean and lined of countenance, even in mourning Zachariah Burdon seemed to wear his medals. His light blue eyes lit up the room, the sardonic twist of his oblique mouth suggested verbal devastation to come. The fact that he was sopping wet added to his charisma of drama.

  He said, “Hello, Charlie. Glad you made it - though it looks as if you’re going to be stuck here for a bit.” His voice carried with it a grainy resonance that cut through other conversations like a laser beam.

  “Uncle Zach,” said Lenore, “you’re all wet!”

  Zachariah Burdon grimaced, then brushed his condition away with a decisive gesture. “I’ve been closing the west storm shutters upstairs,” he said. “Half of them were wide open. It’s lucky we aren’t flooded right now.”

  Lenore Burdon Wilmot said, “But Harriet said she was going to see to that. She stayed home from the services to make the house watertight.”

  Rudely, Zachariah Burdon said, “I’d like to get my hands on that old bat right now.” With his free hand - the other carried a cup of punch - he indicated the soaked condition of his chest and shoulders.

  “Uncle Zach!” said his niece. “I didn’t know you cared for Harriet that way.”

  “You’re making my flesh creep,” said Uncle Zach with a visible shudder. Then, worried, “Where in hell could she have gone?”

  “Not far in this weather,” said Lenore.

  As the wet and disgruntled Zachariah Burdon wandered away, presumably in search of the missing Harriet, Chan became aware of the intensity of the raging tropical storm. A moment of silence had fallen over the assemblage in the living room. Even through the heavily insulated walls of the house, the roar of angry surf and wind, the unbroken lash of driving rain, made themselves felt as well as heard in the snug haven of shelter.

  A native Hawaiian, Chan had lived through his share of early autumnal hurricanes. They were a part of the Island way of life. But this was the first time he had been exposed to such a storm on the wide open west coast of Hawaii itself. Even within the stolidly built mansion of concrete and brick, there was a sense of standing stark naked in the teeth of the gale.

  “I’d better take you up to your room,” Lenore said, “if it isn’t under water. I can’t imagine why Harriet didn’t get the windows closed in time. It’s so unlike her.”

  Moving gracefully, she led Chan back into the majestic hall and up the winding double staircase, which divided itself at a landing midway in its rise to curve north and south into a balcony that squared the circle of the hall itself.

  As they proceeded upward, taking the left turn, to a hallway lined with doors, tables and other ancestral portraits, Lenore said over her shoulder, “I’m afraid the family has long since appropriated the rooms on the lee side of the house.”

  Midway along the corridor, she turned right through a half-open door and stopped dead just inside it with a cry of dismay. Over her shoulder, Chan saw that the opposite side of the large bedroom was indeed partially under water. Evidently, the stout wooden storm windows had been put in place too late to prevent a minor flood. A padded window seat that ran almost the width of the room was sopping, the whole far breadth of the burgundy carpet was dark with a wide water stain and the rim of fine hardwood floor visible between rug and window seat looked as if it had been freshly hosed.

  A young man and young woman, looking intensely mod despite the suitable somberness of their attire, were engaged in attempting to soak up the worst of the water with an apparently endless supply of costly looking bath towels. While Chan and Lenore stood watching them, the girl looked up at them and grimaced.

  “I’d like to wring Harriet’s neck,” she said.

  Beneath a vast amount of long, almost coal black hair, an arrestingly piquant young face, from which blazed light beryl blue eyes, gazed up at them. As she tossed a hopelessly wet towel onto a pile of a ready discarded towels in a corner, bracelets and neck chains jingled rather like the wind chimes that dangled from Chan’s own porch roof back on Oahu.

  “Carol!” said Lenore. “Where are the servants?”

  The young man rose and replied, “Those that aren’t busy downstairs are doing the rest of the west bedrooms. What a mess!”

  He was a lithe leopard of a youth clad in charcoal flare trousers and a frilled white shirt with black trim. His face, framed by neatly styled middle-brown hair and sideburns, was not handsome but attractive. His eyes, which were darkly topaz in hue, gazed from Lenore to Chan with an intensity that was just
short of a hypnotic glare.

  Lenore introduced them. “Charlie, this is my cousin Carol and this is Armand Kent.”

  “A hell of a way to greet a guest,” said the youth, “especially such a distinguished one as Inspector Chan. Why couldn’t we move him across the hall?”

  While the other three discussed and discarded the possibilities of a transfer - the house was simply too full for any such move to be practicable - Chan turned his thoughts toward the missing Harriet. Though he had met that unique member of the Burdon clan but once, her impact had been unforgettable.

  It had occurred when Chan restored Lenore to her parents, Lowell and Ellen Burdon, following his successful rescue of the girl from her kidnappers. Actually, Chan had been considerably embarrassed at the time by the fact that the Burdon family made, or tried to make, more of a hero of him than he felt his actions merited.

  Since deep collusion had been involved between “victim” and her supposed “kidnapper” - something far more frequent in such crimes than is generally believed - the Chief of Detectives had always felt that his main achievement had been to keep the story out of the press. A very young and very headstrong Lenore Burdon had fallen head over heels in love with a handsome Kanaka filling station attendant, who had cooked up the scheme of getting their non-marriage off to a prosperous start by milking Lenore’s family via the fake kidnap route.

  That the boy had died when his car smashed while he was fleeing the scene was, Chan supposed, regrettable, though he was not even sure of that.

  It was then that the Burdon clan, and Lionel Burdon in particular, had won Charlie Chan’s undying respect. Instead of fostering the bewildered girl’s resentments by punishing her, they had rewarded Lenore with increased family responsibilities.

  But it was Harriet Burdon MacLean who stood most sharply etched in Chan’s memory. When he brought the stunned and grief stricken girl home to a fine old mansion on a palm covered hilltop overlooking the city of Honolulu, Harriet had opened the door before he could pull the bell.