Nine Times Nine

by Anthony Boucher

  “We can try. I’ll count three, and we’ll both hit it at once. Between us we ought to—”

  “Just a moment.” Matt recognized the cool voice of Sister Ursula, and turned to see the two nuns in the other doorway of the chapel. “Did I understand that you think something has happened to Mr. Harrigan?”

  “You did.”

  “I devoutly hope that nothing has happened.” She crossed herself and glanced at the picture of the Virgin. “But if anything has, don’t you think it would be better to make sure?”

  “How?”

  “Go around and look in the French windows.”

  The complete sensibility of this suggestion cooled Matt off. Of course. See what’s happened and then if—well, you might as well face it—if you have to call the police, they can do whatever’s necessary themselves. Much more sensible.

  Matt kept muttering these scattered thoughts to himself as he went around again to the croquet ground. Now that he was close to the windows he could see the room clearly in the firelight. And he could see—he stopped swallowing for a minute and his throat got dry—he could see the body of Wolfe Harrigan lying on the floor by the desk, with the face shot half away.

  He could also see that there was no one else at all in the room.

  Chapter 6

  Ten years ago Terence Marshall was a familiar name to American newspaper readers. He was one of those freak combinations that make such good copy: a Phi Beta Kappa man, a Rhodes scholar, and an All-American football player. His young opinions on this and that received nation-wide publicity, a fact most distressing to him now in his serer and soberer thirties.

  Then he went to Oxford on his scholarship, and the feature writers found another anomaly to publicize. Marshall’s public career was at an end; but a chance friendship brought him to his true life-work. The young man who sat next to him at a Rugger game and kindly explained the peculiar features of British football to the dazed American turned out to be the son of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard; and Terence Marshall had his eyes opened to the inside aspects of law enforcement and detection.

  On his return to Los Angeles he declined with impartiality offers of teaching positions and contracts in professional sports. Starting from the bottom, he had become a patrolman on the Los Angeles police force. His rise had been sure, if not spectacular. The taxidermist episode already referred to was the closest approach to an important case which he had handled; but he had not muffed any of the lesser routine which came his way. He was now a Detective Lieutenant, and beloved of the D.A.’s office as the one detective on the force whom you could trust to round off a case that would stand up unassailably in court.

  Now Terence Marshall stood in the drawing room of the Harrigan home, undertaking what might well prove to be the first major case of his career. He was an impressive figure: six-feet-two in height, a hundred and ninety pounds in weight, ruggedly homely in features, and already a trifle gray in hair.

  “Officer Drake,” he was saying, “took down your preliminary statements when he came in the squad car, but I’d like to go over them with you again, while the medical officer is getting his report ready. First, let’s settle the time element. When did any of you last see Wolfe Harrigan?”

  After a little pause, Concha spoke. Her voice showed a resolute effort to be calm and helpful, but her emotion betrayed itself in a wavering pitch, ludicrously like a boy’s changing voice. “I went into the study late in the afternoon. Mr. Duncan was there, and I took him away to play croquet with me.”

  “Time?”

  “I—I really don’t know. I think about five o’clock.”

  “Duncan?”

  “About that, near as I can estimate.”

  “So. Now did anyone see Harrigan after five o’clock?”

  “I cannot say,” Joseph announced, “that I saw my poor brother, but …”

  “Well?”

  “I spoke with him. I rapped on the door, but he shouted out that he was working and told me to go away.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Shortly before six. I remember thinking that there was over an hour before dinner. It was just after that that I joined the two young people on the croquet lawn.”

  “When was that, Duncan?”

  Matt had been thinking. “The way I work it out is like this, Lieutenant. When I—when I looked in through those French windows, I checked the time. It was just 6:15. That’d make it about two minutes earlier when we saw the figure in the yellow robe. I think Miss Harrigan came into the house about ten minutes before that, and Mr. Harrigan—Mr. Joseph Harrigan, that is—had joined us on the lawn about five minutes earlier.”

  Concha and Joseph nodded their agreement.

  “All right,” said Marshall. “Then at 5:55, roughly, Mr. Harrigan shouted at his brother. At 6:13, Duncan and Joseph Harrigan see a man in his study and try to get in. At 6:15, Duncan sees the body. Can anybody fill in the time gap there?”

  Silence.

  “Now then. You’ll understand I have to go through with the routine no matter how open-and-shut a case may seem. I’ll have to ask each of you to account for himself during those twenty minutes. Miss Harrigan?”

  Aunt Ellen was quiet and submissive. Her eyes were doubly red from weeping and from her cold. “Let me see. I went into the chapel a little after six. The sisters and I had been discussing a plan for a new wing to the orphanage, and I wanted to say a private prayer for its success. I was there until—until Joseph and Mr. Duncan came in.”

  “And before six?”

  “I was with the sisters in my sitting room upstairs.”

  “Do you ladies agree on the time?”

  It was Sister Ursula who spoke. Matt reflected that he had not yet heard one sound from Sister Felicitas. “I couldn’t swear to it, Lieutenant, but it was something like that.”

  “And where were you after six?”

  “Miss Harrigan was kind enough to ask us to have a glass of port and a slice of fruitcake before we left. She rang for the butler, who brought the repast up to the sitting room. We were still there when we heard all the commotion and came down.”

  “Duncan and Harrigan we’ve heard. You, Mr. Harrigan?” He directed the question at Arthur, who was sitting atilt in his chair, seemingly more preoccupied with whether he dared smoke than with the tragedy.

  “I was in my room,” he mumbled.

  “Doing what?”

  “Reading. Waiting for the nuns to leave.”

  “Why for that?”

  “Because I had to chauffeur them.”

  “And how long were you there?”

  “About an hour, I guess, before I heard all the thumping.”

  “That leaves only you, Miss Harrigan. Where did you go when you left the croquet lawn?”

  “To the kitchen.”

  “The kitchen?”

  “Sometimes Janet lets me help. She says, you never can tell, I might marry a poor man. I like it.”

  The Lieutenant smiled for the first time since his arrival. “And you were there until the noise at 6:15?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Now, did anybody, during these twenty minutes, hear the shot fired? No one? Miss Harrigan, you were in the chapel next door. Didn’t you—?”

  “I heard nothing.”

  “And none of you saw anyone else—I mean anyone who had no right to be here? All right. Will you please all wait here? I want to talk to the servants and have a good look at the study.”

  The presence of the Lieutenant had kept them all drawn up to the standards of formal behavior. Now the tension relaxed. Aunt Ellen fell to sniffling, and Concha suddenly flung herself to her knees, buried her face in Sister Ursula’s dark-blue habit, and began sobbing terribly.

  “The Lieutenant,” Joseph passed judgment, “seems a sound young man. Courteous, too. Nothing of the rubber hose about him.”

  Arthur sniffed. “He knows you’re a big shot, Uncle Joe. It’d cost him his badge.”

  R.
Joseph Harrigan frowned. “This is neither the time nor the place for such sarcasm, Arthur. I think, furthermore, that you might have the decency to refrain from smoking.”

  Matt guiltily tucked back the package he had started to take out. The group sat in silence.

  An officer stuck his head into the room. “Which of you is Duncan?”

  Matt rose. “I am.”

  “Lieutenant wants to see you in the study.”

  The body was gone; that helped. A photographer was folding up his tripod, and a scrawny middle-aged man with a black bag sat on the couch. The Lieutenant stood, unconsciously in one of Wolfe Harrigan’s favorite attitudes, in front of the fireplace. The fire was dead now, apparently put out with water.

  “All right, Duncan,” Marshall said as Matt entered the room. “Where do you fit into this?”

  “What do you mean, where do I fit in?”

  “I mean what are you doing here? You don’t belong with the Harrigans. You aren’t their kind of people. So where do you fit in?”

  Matt felt himself on the defensive. “I’ve been working with Mr. Harrigan.”

  “Working? What on?”

  “He took me on as a—I guess you might call it an assistant—a sort of combination laboratory-worker and ghost-writer.”

  “Been with him long?”

  “Only since Friday.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Since Friday.”

  “So. You meet him and right like that you’re his assistant. Nice work, and you got it. Maybe you better tell me a little more.”

  Matt told him, sketchily and uncomfortably.

  “Writers’ Project,” Marshall repeated. “So. I know your head there; I’ll have a word with him. And things start happening in this household as soon as you get here. Interesting. Very. But that isn’t what I called you in here for. Sit down.” Matt sat down on the couch beside the middle-aged man, who nodded in affable silence.

  “You,” the Lieutenant went on, “were the last person, according to all the testimony, who was in this room for any length of time. Miss Harrigan came in only briefly, and the brother didn’t even get past the door. Now when you were here, was the room all barricaded?”

  “Yes. As I told you, there’d been an attack on Mr. Harrigan Friday night. He wasn’t taking any more chances.”

  “All right. Now I’m asking you to look over this room and tell us if everything is the way it was when you were last in here. Especially the exits and entrances. Don’t worry about touching things; we’ve been all over the place.”

  As Matt went around the room, his amazement mounted. The French windows were securely bolted at top and bottom. The small high windows on either side of the fireplace were fixed and immovable anyway. The hall door, broken down by the police, was now propped up against the wall, its bolt still shot into the locking position. That left only the chapel door with the push button lock. You could go out that way and pull it shut and locked behind you; but Aunt Ellen had been sitting out there.

  He paused in his tour. “This is crazy.”

  “You’re telling me,” Lieutenant Marshall snorted. “But you’re sure this is the way it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Anything else wrong?”

  Matt looked about. “The papers on the desk have been rearranged since I last saw them, I think; but that’s what you’d expect if he was working there. The fire’s out. It was going good when I was in here.”

  The middle-aged man spoke for the first time. “Don’t mention that damned fire to me.”

  “The doc’s sore and I don’t blame him. That fire was blazing like a furnace—played hell with his job. The body was so warm it might have just finished dying that minute.”

  “But why put it out?”

  “Somebody might have been burning something. If they were, they succeeded. All we found was that.” Marshall gestured at a small piece of metal on the table.

  “A silencer. Then no wonder nobody heard the shot.”

  “Right. Now take a look at the automatic. Ever see it before?”

  Matt examined it. “I can’t say for sure. I don’t remember any identifying marks. But it’s just like the one I took away from the Swami.”

  “So. Thought that might be it. And was the silencer on it then?”

  “I can’t quite … Yes, I remember now. It was.”

  “I expected as much. Great help the weapon’s going to be in this. Notice anything else?”

  “That scratch on the desk. I’m positive that wasn’t there this afternoon.”

  “Any ideas what might have caused it?”

  Matt examined the scratch closely. It was about two inches wide and ran some six inches in from the edge of the flat-topped desk. Not a deep scratch—just enough to take off some of the varnish. “No,” he said at last. “Afraid I haven’t.”

  “And just why,” demanded the Lieutenant, “do you keep darting eager glances at that bookcase?”

  “Darting is good.”

  “I don’t get it. What are you looking for?”

  “There’s one thing I’d hoped for, and don’t find.”

  “Something that was here before?”

  “No. Something I hoped might be. A dart in a filing case.”

  The Lieutenant and the doctor exchanged puzzled glances. “Did you indeed? And why might you have expected that?”

  Matt told him of Wolfe Harrigan’s idea of leaving a clew, and of the dart in the Swami’s file. “So I had hoped,” he finished, “that there might be a dart in the Ahasver file. It could have helped.”

  “Look at the file,” said Marshall tersely.

  Matt looked. In the back of the file labeled AHASVER he could make out a small pricked hole. “Then it was—?”

  “We found it there. Took it out for fingerprints. Smudgy, but only Harrigan’s own.”

  “Then doesn’t that settle it?”

  “Does it? Come on. We’re going back to the family. You can go whenever you’re ready, Doc. I’ll get your full report in the morning.”

  The family group looked as though no one had spoken a word since Matt left it. Sister Felicitas and Aunt Ellen were telling their rosaries. Sister Ursula’s hand was stroking Concha’s black hair. The girl’s shoulders had stopped shaking. Arthur was dissecting a cigarette with uncertain fingers. Joseph was doing nothing, majestically.

  “All right,” said the Lieutenant. “I’ve had men at the Temple of Light ever since I heard this story. Tonight’s their big Easter service; Ahasver can’t get away. In a few minutes I’m taking you, Mr. Harrigan, and Duncan over there to see if you can identify Ahasver as the figure you saw.”

  Concha looked up. Her face was sad and tear-streaked; but it lacked the terror which Matt had seen there before. “Then it was—that man?”

  The Lieutenant did not answer directly. “Your father was planning to break up his racket; that’s motive enough. He put the curse of death on your father last night—there’s premeditation. Your uncle and Duncan saw a man in his fancy-dress costume in the study. And your father left a strange sort of dying message pointing to him as the murderer.”

  “Isn’t that enough?” Joseph demanded. “I’ll confess that I never took Wolfe’s crusading seriously enough; but now I plan to follow in his footsteps myself. That such dangerous maniacs should be allowed at large—”

  “Oh, sure, that’s enough, I guess. But … Miss Harrigan, how long were you in that chapel?”

  “Around ten minutes, I think, Lieutenant.”

  “You’re sure of that? People can guess at time very inaccurately. Mightn’t it have been more like one minute, or two at the most?”

  “No.” Aunt Ellen was firm. “I was just meditating on the fifth mystery. I remember distinctly.”

  “On the what?”

  “When we say the rosary,” Sister Ursula put in, “we meditate on a mystery—some aspect of Our Lady’s life—for each decade, or set of ten beads. Miss Harrigan means that she had alm
ost finished the rosary.”

  “And how long does that take?”

  “It generally takes me,” said Aunt Ellen, “about ten minutes. So I must have been in the chapel at least that long.”

  “And who did you see come out of the study?”

  “Why, no one, Lieutenant.”

  “In all those ten minutes you didn’t see anyone go in or out of your brother’s study?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “All right,” said Marshall patiently. “At 6:13 Duncan and Harrigan saw a man in a yellow robe in the study. At 6:15 Duncan looks in again and he isn’t there. So. Now every door and window was locked securely from the inside except the door to the chapel, which could have been locked from outside. And in front of that door Miss Harrigan had been sitting for ten minutes and had not seen a soul.”

  Sister Ursula frowned. “But that’s not possible.”

  “Miracles,” said Marshall with a trace of professional bitterness, “are in your line, aren’t they?”

  “To God,” Sister Ursula reproved him, “all things are indeed possible. But I find it hard to discern the hand of God in this. There must be some mistake in the evidence.”

  “There’s no mistake,” the Lieutenant groaned wearily. “A nice, pretty open-and-shut case. Only one possible suspect. And the trouble is, the whole thing just plain couldn’t have happened. Well …! Come on, Mr. Harrigan. Duncan. We’re going to talk to this Ahasver. And in the meantime, I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave a couple of men here.”

  Joseph seemed about to protest, then apparently changed his mind. “A wise precaution, Lieutenant. We cannot be too careful with such dangers at large.”

  “That’s the way to look at it.”

  “Oh, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, Sister?”

  “Do you want us here, or may we go back to the convent?”

  “I’ll have a police car take you back.”

  “Oh. Thank you very much.”

  “It isn’t funny.”

  “No. But it is funny to think of the Mother Superior when we drive up in the police car.”

  Aunt Ellen left with her brother and the Lieutenant. Matt lingered a moment, feeling that there was something he could say to Concha, some little word that might help; but he could think of nothing.