Nine Times Nine

by Anthony Boucher

  “He was evil, you must understand, because he believed only in the evil superstitions of the old order. His brain and his soul were filled with the perversions of Paul and Luke, rendered still more perverse by generations of popes and cardinals. He was dangerous because he sought to destroy the Light! and it was needful that the Light should destroy him. I was the agent of that Light.

  “Last night all of us, all the children of the Light, set upon Wolfe Harrigan the Nine Times Nine, as was commanded of me by the Ancients. From that setting came my strength. I am not an Ancient, though some of my followers flatter me by thinking so. I am not the Light, but am to bear witness of the Light. In myself I am but a poor Jew lost in the maze of immortality, and I cannot release my astral body at will unless strength be given me from otherwhere. Through the Nine Times Nine, this strength was given me, and I fulfilled my mission.”

  Marshall was conquering the hypnotic spell of Ahasver’s words. “How?” he asked skeptically.

  “While part of me preached here to the Twelve of the Nine, the other and more vital part went—”

  “This is poisonous rot!” R. Joseph interrupted. “I refuse to countenance an astral body, no matter how well it explains that devilish locked study. My brother was killed by a man, not a spirit. I saw that man, and it was this charlatan. If he hopes to delude us with tales of astral bodies—”

  “May I continue, officer?”

  “Go ahead. I understand your feelings, Mr. Harrigan, and God knows you’ve got my sympathy; but let’s hear this out.”

  “Thank you, officer. I am not certain of the exact time, but it was shortly after six o’clock when I went to Mr. Harrigan’s home. He was locked in his study. Apparently he had feared the Nine Times Nine, but he did not realize how futile his precautions were to prove. Weapons …” (Ahasver seemed to be picking his words cautiously) “weapons, I need hardly tell you, cannot be carried on the astral body. I had intended using the psychic powers of the Ancients, as I had once been compelled to do in Tibet, but when I saw the automatic on his … desk, I resolved on that means instead to conserve my psychic energy. I shot him in the face, that his lying mouth might be wiped out forever. For is it not written—”

  “All right. Where did he fall?”

  “Have I not told you enough? I shall continue my story when you have charged me.”

  Marshall rose. “That’d be ducky, wouldn’t it? Just the publicity you need. Sorry, brother. Thanks for a good show.”

  Outside the temple a plainclothes-man stepped up to the Lieutenant, exchanged a few words, and went back to his post. Evidently Marshall, for all his patent scorn, was not taking any chances.

  “May I return to my own home?” R. Joseph Harrigan demanded. “If even that contemptible murderous heretic is free to follow his own devices, surely I—”

  “Wait a minute. Don’t get on your high horse before I can even answer you. Sure, you can go home. Were you your brother’s lawyer?”

  “In private affairs, yes. His professional work, of course, was carried on in collaboration with the District Attorney’s office.”

  “I’ll get in touch with you tomorrow about his will. So long, and watch out for astral bodies. Like a police escort home?”

  “I’ll take a cab over on the boulevard.” R. Joseph looked disappointed, as though this courteous treatment had done him out of a chance to be indignant.

  “How about me?” Matt asked.

  “You’re coming back to the house and help me go over Harrigan’s papers. If he was training you for an assistant, you ought to be more help to me than any of the others.”

  “So you really think,” Matt wondered as they drove off in the police car, “that Ahasver’s in the clear?”

  “Who said that? I refused to arrest him because that was what he wanted. He’d have had a lawyer there with a writ and a hundred and eight depositions first thing tomorrow morning, and been out and free again like a nice pretty martyr. Just what the doctor ordered.”

  “Then you think—”

  “I think,” said Lieutenant Marshall heavily, “that a beard and a robe prove almighty little.”

  Chapter 8

  “Wait here,” Lieutenant Marshall ordered, and Matt dutifully waited in the dark hallway while the officer disappeared into the study. From inside came the clicks of a telephone dial and then the Lieutenant’s voice, unusually subdued.

  The house was otherwise silent, not with the stilly hush of death, but with the quite ordinary silence of a home whose inhabitants have all gone to sleep. It was hard to believe that violence and terror had invaded this calm place only a few hours before.

  Matt lit a cigarette and tried to devote his mind to the problem of that study, where something in a yellow robe had come and been seen and killed and vanished as though it had never been. He had got no further than the rankly fantastic notion of a secret passageway when the Lieutenant reopened the door, which had been restored during their absence to some semblance of working order by an anonymous carpenter on the force.

  “Come in,” Marshall commanded. He paused, as though judging how much to say. “That was Mike Jordan I was talking to,” he said at last. “I’ve known him for years, known him well, too; and if he says a man is to be trusted, I’ll take his word for it. You seem to have clicked with him on the Project, pink slip or no pink slip.”

  “He was swell to work with.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” the Lieutenant added hastily. “This doesn’t put you out in the clear with wings sprouting and a nice little halo labeled ‘Innocent.’ It just means that I can use you for what I want without worrying too much about it.”

  “And what do you want?”

  Marshall took up his stance again in front of the fireplace. “Families,” he announced didactically, “know damned little about themselves. If you want a phony picture of a man, faked and hoked out of all recognition, just go to his nearest and dearest ones. Any case I’ve ever walked into, after a week I could tell you more about each person involved than any one of them could have told about another. We see them raw. We see the essence, without all the prettifactions that ordinary life builds up around them.

  “But all that takes a little time. As I said, about a week. Now in this case, you’ve got all the advantages of the police: you come into the family cold, you see them under tension and excitement, you get the outside viewpoint; but you’ve got a head start on us by two days. You haven’t been here long enough to start in taking everybody at the family evaluation; but you have seen enough to know a little more than I do.

  “So, frankly, I’d like you to stick around. I want to talk out loud to you, and I want you to talk. You can be damned useful if you want to.” He paused again, then looked straight at Matt. “Is it a deal?”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “All right. Let’s have us a little open forum. I’m not asking you for a statement. I just want talk. Tell me anything you think of, ask me what you want to know within reason, and let me do the sifting. If we hit on something vital, you can make a formal statement later. This is strictly off the record.”

  “Look. I’ll lead with a question. Does this approach mean you think this is a family crime?”

  “Hell, Duncan, I don’t know. To answer that I’d have to start my own talking out loud.”

  “It’s not a nice thought,” said Matt reflectively.

  “Is murder ever a nice thought? Does it make murder any the more pleasant, any the cleaner, if the murderer has nothing to do with the victim, or at most a strict business relationship? Is the pervert who picks a stranger for experiment, the business-man who gets rid of his partner for the benefit of his pocket, a decenter sort of chap than the daughter who kills her father because living with him is hell?

  “No, Duncan; if we’re going to talk about this case, you’ve got to realize that a murderer is a murderer. There are no degrees of murder save those the law recognizes, and I mean the law, and not the arrogant whims of a bemused jury. Murder—�
�� Marshall broke off and looked somewhat abashed. “Sorry, Duncan. I did debating at Oxford; it seems to stick in the blood.”

  “Go on,” Matt grinned. “I think I like this better than your official style.”

  Marshall laughed. “If you knew how hard I sweat all day to hide the fact that I used to be—God help me!—a Phi Bete …! All right. I won’t worry about you. I’ll say what I feel like saying, and not give a damn whether it seems to come from the detective lieutenant or from the Rhodes scholar.”

  “But do you,” Matt persisted, “think that this is a private and personal crime, rooted in this house?”

  “As I said, I don’t know. It’s this way: No matter how much scientific criminology may accomplish, no matter how many clews point in what directions, the first thing a police detective wants to know is: Who wanted him dead? Motive is a stronger indication than any proof of means or opportunity. It all comes around to the good old Cui bono? And if Captain Harding heard Latin dropping from my fair lips, he’d have my badge.

  “Now in this case we’ve got a man whose very life provides us with two completely separate sets of motives. He was (a) a rich man, who (b) exposed criminals. And there you are. His richness means—I think we’re safe in assuming till we’ve read the will—that anybody in the family had a motive.”

  “Come now,” Matt broke in. “That’s nonsense. I’ll admit people might kill a distant relative for inheritance, but your own brother, your father …”

  Marshall sighed. “The trouble with you is, you believe in humanity. If you’d ever known a woman—and a charming woman she was, too—who’d insured her three children and then poisoned them one by one so she could keep her fancy man in the proper style …”

  Matt gave in. “As you please. I still don’t believe it, but go ahead.”

  “All right. That’s one group of motives: anyone who might get money from his death. The other group is the criminals, the religious racketeers. Any one of them might have killed him, either to avenge past exposures or to forestall future ones. This could be either of two kinds of crime—and your guess is as good as mine as to which it is.”

  “If motive lets you down, how about the means and opportunity that you mentioned so scornfully?”

  “A lot of help means is. Wolfe Harrigan was shot with the automatic you took from the Swami. Yes, we’ve checked its number; it was sold, quite openly, to Hermann Sussmaul about a year ago. He claimed he was being persecuted—threats against his life—managed to get a permit. I suspect some palm-greasing somewhere. The ballistic check-up has come through, too. There’s no question that that was the means.

  “All right. So what? You gave that gun to Harrigan Friday night. Nobody admits having seen it since. He probably kept it in his desk here. He might have taken it out for any reason—perhaps telling the story of Friday night. No, means is no good.”

  “There’s another possibility.”

  “I think I know what you mean. That he gave it back to Sussmaul Friday night after you left, and so it does mean Sussmaul. All right. Can you see Harrigan, can you see any man, under the circumstances, saying, ‘Here. You forgot your pistol. Drop around again, and better luck next time’? Can you imagine that?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll take it that the automatic was here, probably right in this room, over the weekend; and that anyone who had access to Wolfe Harrigan also had access to the gun. In other words, Opportunity provides Means. The two points are one.”

  “And how about Opportunity?”

  “You know as much about that as anybody. Let’s postpone for a moment the question of how the murderer got out of this room; and we’re left with the fact that anybody could have got in. Anybody, that is, that Wolfe Harrigan wanted to let in. Miss Harrigan was with the nuns earlier, but she had come down here alone. Joseph was wandering around. The cook is uncertain on time, there might have been a gap between the time the girl left you and the time when she showed up in the kitchen. Arthur was alone in his room.

  “And nobody was where he could see this hall door. Anyone from outside who knew about the back entrance could have slipped in that way—if, of course, Wolfe was willing to admit him. Opportunity doesn’t even serve to tie things down to the family, though at first glance you might think so. To be sure, nobody, not even the servants, recalls seeing anybody suspicious around here; but murderers are apt to be sort of shy about being seen.”

  “So where are we?” Matt asked.

  “Exactly nowhere.”

  “We do know, though, of one person who had definite intent upon the life of Wolfe Harrigan.”

  “Two,” Marshall corrected, “if you count Ahasver and the Nine Times Nine. But you still like Sussmaul the Swami, don’t you? All right. We’ll see. He’s being dragged in tonight. I’ll see what I can get out of him tomorrow.”

  Matt jumped. “What was that?”

  The light rapping on the door was repeated. Cautiously, his right hand resting on his service pistol, Marshall opened the door.

  One of the officers on duty stood there, holding out a note. “Almost forgot this sir. That nun left it for you.”

  At about this time Detective Sergeant Krauter stood in the midst of a disarrayed and disgusting apartment. The windows had been open to the cold night ever since the detective’s entrance, but the sickening smell of stale cheap incense still poisoned the room.

  There had been no need for such a thorough search. Either the Swami Mahopadhyaya Virasenanda was in his customary abode or he was not. But the Sergeant’s wife liked fortunetellers (though happily of a less expensive class), and Sergeant Krauter had taken a malicious and unofficial pleasure in playing hell with the joint.

  Now he turned beaming and surveyed the havoc which he had wrought with the hyperdeluxe furnishings. “I guess he ain’t here,” he said satisfied.

  The manager pulled her dressing gown even tighter around. her. “I told you that five times already,” she insisted. “Nobody’s seen him here since Friday night. He went out then and he hasn’t come back.” She caught a disturbing glimpse of herself in the gold-framed mirror and saw flecks of cold cream which her hasty wiping had missed. “Now will you get out?”

  “But how do you know he ain’t been here?” Krauter was being persistent. “You can’t see everybody that comes and goes.”

  “I—I was watching for him,” the manager admitted defiantly.

  “So!” Krauter pounced. “Behind in his rent, was he? Making trouble around the house?”

  “The Swami,” she retorted indignantly, “is as fine a tenant as ever I had. Never a breath of trouble from him. And not only does he pay his rent on the dot, but he used to give me free scryings—even the purple ones. If you only knew, officer, how much happiness a man like the Swami can bring into a woman’s life, you wouldn’t be persecuting him in this absurd manner.”

  “Happiness!” the Sergeant snorted. “Lady, if you only knew—” He broke off; his wife’s notions, heavy though they weighed on him, were not official business. “Why were you watching for him?”

  The manager turned her head away and tried unsuccessfully to dab at the cold cream with a corner of her sleeve.

  “Come on. What made you suspicious? Let’s have it.”

  “Oh, well. I’m sure the Swami must have had some very good reason for it, but all the same I was a little worried. After all this is a respectable house, and—”

  “Out with it, lady.”

  “He … I saw him in the hall and he was tightening his belt only he didn’t think anybody was looking and he—he was Carrying a Gun.”

  The Sergeant groaned. All that work to learn just what they knew to start with. “O.K.,” he said. “I’ll be going. But you remember if that rat shows up and you don’t phone headquarters, you’ll be liable for …” He paused and then found a legal phrase of just the right impressiveness. “For harboring a fugitive.”

  The manager opened the door with impatient relief. But the Sergeant had halted on his wa
y out. “When was this apartment cleaned last?”

  “Friday morning.”

  The Sergeant looked reflectively down at the ashtray. One half of the cigarettes in it were ordinary half-inch stubs. The others were almost two inches long, and bent double.

  Lieutenant Marshall unfolded the nun’s note, read it rapidly, and passed it to Matt. It ran:

  MY DEAR LIEUTENANT:

  Please do not think this a frivolous request. The Harrigans or Dr. Magruder can assure you that I am not given to whims.

  I am asking you to ascertain whether any files or books other than the Ahasver file show signs of having been pricked by a dart.

  I shall not affront your professional intelligence by giving reasons for this request. In fact, I fear it is presumptuous of me to make it, since such a search has doubtless been conducted already.

  Sincerely yours,

  MARY URSULA, O.M.B.

  “What does she mean?” Matt demanded

  “She means that I’m a damned fool, but she’s too polite to say so. She’s right too; I am. Even after I heard your story, I never thought of looking for another dart-prick. Well, Duncan, here’s your chance to do police work. We’ve going hunting.”

  It was long slow work. The Lieutenant produced a magnifying glass from his pocket and Matt found one on the desk. Carefully they scrutinized the backs of each file under the dart board. They had not been at it long when the Lieutenant let out a premature cry of gleeful discovery, only to grunt disgust and shove the file back into its place.

  “What’s up?” Matt asked.

  “Thought I had something there. Hole pricked in the back of the Swami Sussmaul file. But then I remembered your story of Friday. Of course there would have to be.”

  “And there’s only one hole?”

  “Only one.”

  Matt made the next discovery—oddly enough not among the files, but in one of the volumes of history in the case with them. The Lieutenant looked at the book and tossed it aside with a snort.

  But after the most thorough search, that volume was the only one which bore the telling mark. “It would have to be in this bookcase,” Marshall reflected. “The others are too far away for him to aim straight, and the angle would be next to impossible. And yet all we can find is this.” He flipped the volume open to its title page and read: