by John Lutz
Semloh didn't like the man's pale eyes. A vicious sparkle in them.
"Some small fame is attached to me," Semloh said with a smile. "Professionally useful, at times."
"Mr. Semloh doesn't exactly use super-logic, either," Ladester said.
"In whatever form, your help will be appreciated," Phillip Rank said, though he looked vaguely apprehensive. "We'd all like to see the murderer of my brother caught."
"If all of you would like to see that happen," Semloh said, "I assume you believe an outsider committed the crime."
"Why of course!"
"It's possible," Sheriff Ladester said. "That's part of the problem."
"Suppose you show me the problem," Semloh suggested.
Ladester led Semloh from the room, down the hall to a sweeping staircase and up to the second floor.
"Quite an impressive house," Semloh said, "though a bit baroque."
"Five bathrooms," Ladester remarked lazily. "Who in the hell'd want five bathrooms?"
"I suppose you'd need them if all the bedrooms were 'ccupied," Semloh said.
"Six bedrooms on this floor, and Rank's office, and a library." Ladester led Semloh through a spacious hall with a parquet wood floor to a closed, dark stained door. He pushed the door open and let Semloh step inside.
It was a neat workman-like office. Filing cabinets along one wall, a large bookcase, electric typewriter on a stand. Slumped over the desk facing what appeared to be a French window was Brighton Rank, a neat round bluish hole near the crown of his balding skull. In the finger of Rank's right hand was a pencil, the note paper beneath the hand was blank but for a short S-shaped scrawl. On the carpet near the filing cabinets lay a small caliber chromed pistol. "Don't appear to be any prints on the gun," Ladester said. "Wiped cleaner'n a eye-tooth."
"Clean," Semloh said. "Everything the way it was found?"
"So I'm told. I didn't touch anything."
"Those French doors?"
"Unlocked," Ladester said. "And they go out to a small porch with steps running to the garden below. The killer could have entered and left that way."
"Any sign of that happening?"
"Nope. No sign it didn't happen, either. Ground's hard from a month's drought."
"What are their respective stories?" Semloh asked, pointing with a pudgy finger at the floor to represent the people below. "None of them seem particularly grieved by Rank's death."
"None of them are, I guess," Ladester said. "Rank had the reputation of being a one way S.O.B."
"Who heard the shot?"
"All of them. And Mrs. Drae, who rang the front doorbell a few seconds after the hot, claimed she caught a glimpse of a stiff-legged ma' running between the trees along the drive."
Semloh raised his almost nonexistent brows. "Stiff-legged?"
"She said he was sort of lurching along. She had an appointment with Rank to try to talk him into giving to some charity or other, and he says she was thinking about that and didn't pay too much attention."
"Where do the members of the household say they were when they heard the shot?"
"Mrs. Rank was in the kitchen preparing a late breakfast; Phillip Rank claims he was in the bath near his bedroom downstairs shaving; Ward Rank was reading a book in the room we left downstairs; and Simon Crane was in his downstairs office typing some of Rank's dictation for next week's column. Nothing particularly interesting in that column, incidentally."
"Then everyone was downstairs."
Ladester nodded. "Or say they were. The house is plenty big enough for any of them to have shot Rank, run downstairs and pretend to come from somewhere on the ground floor to the foot of the stairs. They all say when the shot was fired they hurried upstairs to Rank's office. Confusion all over the place. The door was open, and they barged in and found him dead. Then Mrs. Drael rang the bell and asked who the limping man was. She had an appointment to see Rank at ten o'clock, so apparently the killer didn't."
Semloh walked about casually, examining the corpse and everything else in the room with seemingly passive interest. Then he motioned to Sheriff Ladester that they could go back downstairs.
As Semloh and the sheriff reentered the ground floor room, Ward Rank looked up at them with distaste. He was languidly smoking a cigarette in a long pearl holder. Semloh instinctively disliked cigarette holders and people who held them.
"Solved?" Ward Rank inquired.
"Almost," Semloh said. He noticed that Phillip Rank was staring at him, his hands in the pockets of his rumpled trousers as he rocked back and forth nervously on his heels. Elda Rank seemed the most composed person in the room. She was seated next to Simon Crane, who was slumped with what appeared to be absolute despondency in the corner of the large sofa.
"Have you finished with things, Sheriff?" Mrs. Drael asked from where she stood near the window. "I mean is it all right for me to leave, to go home now?"
Ward Rank looked aghast. "You mean you'd walk out in the middle of the act?"
"Why don't you shut up!" Simon Crane said with surprising viciousness from the sofa. "Don't you realize your own brother's been killed?"
"Past tense," Ward Rank observed. "Nothing to be done about it now."
"Do you have any ideas?" Elda asked Semloh.
He noticed for the first time that her gray eyes were large and strangely enchanting, and there did seem to be a muted sorrow in their depths.
"Deduce, super sleuth," Ward Rank said.
Simon Crane glared at him.
"Mr. Semloh has his own methods," Sheriff Ladester said firmly. "Give him time."
"Oh, I think the facts are becoming murkier," Semloh said and began to pace absently as he talked. "We will use what I call my process of illogicality. There are very few clues, and in all likelihood the murderer was an intruder in If that is true we will probably never learn his identity anyway, so let's discard that possibility and work on the theory that a member of the household is guilty."
"Preposterous!" Ward Rank said, clamping his cigarette holder between his teeth.
Semloh shrugged. "You all have motive: Mr. Rank's money in the instance of his wife. The same motive plus sibling rivalry in the instance of his brothers. As for Simon Crane, he might well be in a position to take over Mr. Rank's column himself. It's done that way I understand, the protégé-secretary filling the breech."
"I don't deny it," Simon Crane said. "I intend to attempt just that."
"What you call your 'process of illogicality'," Ward Rank said disgustedly, "is exactly that. Illogical!"
"Of course," Semloh said. "When a premeditating murderer plans his crime, he anticipates that his pursuers will use logic. Thus he attempts to throw them off the track by arranging circumstances that logically point away from him. He expects logical chains of deduction. Therefore for the sake of this exercise we will assume that what is logical is untrue."
"For instance?" Simon Crane asked interestedly.
Semloh's lips curved up, his mustache down. "Mr. Rank was found dead at his desk, killed apparently as he was beginning to write something. So we will assume he was killed somewhere else."
"Ridiculous!" Ward Rank snorted.
Semloh's smile widened. "Possibly. But who knows where it might lead? We strike what the murderer has fabricated, here and here; and here it crumbles. And the truth is revealed."
Though he still took slow, measured steps, there was something predatory now in Semloh's pacing. "In the back of Mr. Rank's head is a bullet hole, a fired revolver lies on the floor. We will assume he was not shot."
"I still don't understand," Phillip Rank said perplexedly. "Why will we assume that?"
"Because it might well be exactly what the murderer doesn't want us to assume. You see, if your brother wasn't killed in his office, he was killed somewhere else in the house."
"That's logical," Elda Rank said.
"Nothing is perfect," Semloh replied. "If we went right down the line — taking only the illogical alternatives in sequence, there would be
a certain consistency and perverted logic of sorts in that."
"True," Simon Crane said, nodding, "I suppose."
"Now why would Mr. Rank have been shot if not to kill him?" Semloh asked himself and the room in general, pacing almost imperceptibly faster. "To make it appear that he was killed from behind, perhaps. Seems reasonable, so we will reject it. Another possibility is that the killer was trying to disguise the nature of the first wound."
"That doesn't seem too likely," Sheriff Ladester drawled. "A bullet wound from that caliber gun is too small to disguise much of anything."
"It isn't likely the death wound would be smaller than a bullet hole," Semloh agreed, "so for the moment at least we will consider that it was. Perhaps an even smaller caliber bullet caused death, though an autopsy would be able to determine that."
"Possibly my brother wasn't killed," Ward Rank said acidly.
Semloh appeared thoughtful. "Possibly not."
Ward Rank waved a hand disgustedly. "This charade isn't getting us anywhere!"
"I've found," Semloh said, "that with my method of counter-deduction, one sometimes arrives at one's destination quite suddenly and unexpectedly."
"Murdered in another room," Ladester drawled reflectively, "then carried to his office, placed in his desk chair, posed in a writing position then shot. It would take a strong man with a lot of nerve to do that."
"Excellent!" Semloh said enthusiastically. "So in all unlikelihood it was a woman. A woman like -"
There was a strangled sob. Mrs. Drael suddenly leapt from the sofa and flung herself at Semloh, clawing and screaming. "How could you!" she shrieked, as Simon Crane caught her waist and pulled her back.
"A moment, Mrs. Drael," Semloh said calmly.
Sheriff Ladester moved quickly to stand in the doorway.
Mrs. Drael stopped, stared at the sheriff, then turned to face Semloh, clenching and unclenching her fists. Then something inside her seemed to buckle, and her soft, poised body settled in resignation. "You were right," she said in a drained voice. "I came secretly up the back way to Brighton's office. He was working, and we went to the library to talk while he did some research. I killed him, struck him with my high heeled shoe as he bent to pick up something I'd dropped."
"Of course," Semloh said. "You're the only one here without apparent motive or opportunity. An ill-conceived love affair?"
"A hate affair. He was going to write about me in his column." Mrs. Drael's pale complexion blanched even paler. "He discovered that I'd been an accessory long ago in a well publicized murder case; he was going to expose me for publicity!"
"So you decided to kill him first?"
Mrs. Drael shook her head. "I was going to try to exchange some other information I had concerning the case for his silence. Only he wouldn't listen so I had no choice."
"Then you carried him down the hall to his office?" Ladester asked unbelievingly.
"I had to leave that way anyway, so I dragged his body down the parquet hall on a throw rug — it's a trick I learned a long time ago. Then I arranged things to make it look like an intruder had shot him at his desk and left, running around the house and ringing the doorbell to place myself outside at the approximate time of the murder. I even pretended I'd seen someone outside just in order to give the police a suspect."
Mrs. Drael's heart-shaped middle-aged face turned suddenly to a mask of fury and her lips drew away from her teeth as she spat the words at Semloh and everyone in the room. "Brighton Rank got exactly what he deserved!"
No one argued with her as the sheriff led her away.
"I don't believe it!" Ward Rank was saying incredulously around his cigarette holder. "How did you do it? It simply defies all reason!"
"Perhaps," Semloh sighed, staring unblinkingly and with vague sadness in the direction the sheriff and his captive had gone. "But then it's an unreasonable world, isn't it?"
UNTIL YOU ARE DEAD, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January, 1980, © 1979 by Davis Publications, Inc.
THE CHESS PLAYERS, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, May, 1994, © 1994 by John Lutz.
EXPLOSIVE CARGO, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, October, 1977, ©1977 by Davis Publications, Inc.
GAMES FOR ADULTS, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, December, 1971, ©1971 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc.
THE BASEMENT ROOM, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, October, 1973, ©1973 by Renown Publications, Inc.
DOUBLE MURDER, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January, 1981, ©1981 by Davis Publications, Inc.
FAIR SHAKE, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, April, 1968, ©1968 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc.
HEAT, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September, 1985, ©1985 by John Lutz
LIFE SENTENCE, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Magazine, August, 1975, ©1975 by Leonard J. Ackerman Productions, Inc.
ON JUDGMENT DAY, Espionage, August, 1985, © 1985 by Leo 11 Publications, Ltd.
DEATH BY THE NUMBERS, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, November, 1977, ©1976 by Renown Publications, Inc.
A HANDGUN FOR PROTECTION, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, September, 1974, ©1974 by Renown Publications, Inc.
PROSPECTUS ON DEATH, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, July, 1971, ©1971 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc.
UNDERSTANDING ELECTRICITY, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, August, 1975, ©1975 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc.
THE MAN IN THE MORGUE, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, February, 1978, © 1977 by Davis Publications, Inc.
THE EXPLOSIVES EXPERT, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September, 1967, ©1967 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc.
MEN WITH MOTIVES, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Mystery Magazine, August, 1975, ©1975 by Leonard J. Ackerman Productions, Inc.
TWICE REMOVED, Espionage, February, 1985, ©1984 by Leo 11 Publications, Ltd.
WINDS OF CHANGE, Espionage, December, 1984, ©1984 by Leo 11 Publications, Ltd.
THE LEMON DRINK QUEEN, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, February, 1974, ©1974 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc.
NOT JUST A NUMBER, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, July, 1976, ©1976 by Renown Publications, Inc.
KING OF THE KENNEL, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, November, 1968, ©1968 by Renown Publications, Inc.
ABRIDGED, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, October, 1968, ©1968 by Renown Publications, Inc.
MAIL ORDER, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, April, 1975, ©1975 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc.
GOING, GOING . . . , The Executioner Mystery Magazine, April, 1975, ©1974 by Leonard J. Ackerman Productions, Inc.
MOON CHILDREN, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Mystery Magazine, May, 1975, ©1974 by Leonard J. Ackerman Productions, Inc.
THE OTHER SIDE OF REASON, Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, December, 1974, © 1974 by Renown Publications, Inc.