Murder Impossible

by Jack Adrian (ed)

  Joachim ordered a bottle of dry German Riesling for himself, of course. Big snob—the guy really makes you so sore at times that it almost ruins your appetite. That's unless you eat at Garibaldi's, of course. First there was soup, called aux Matrons, a warm chestnut broth that would have been a meal for anybody. Joachim—needless to say—ordered something called Potage Crème de Potiron—a kind of pumpkin soup. Then Garibaldi brought us a fisherman's dream of flaked mackerel with gooseberry sauce. For the light entree I had stuffed artichokes. Joachim had kidney sauté in white wine. But it was the main dish that was really worth waiting for. The head waiter rolled up a tray of roast guinea fowl, floating in its own rich brown juices. It was a meal to drive you crazy. Even Joachim was impressed, and believe me—that's something.

  Anyway, about halfway through the meal, Joachim pulled the joker. He asked Garibaldi if we could see the kitchen. I really thought that was it. But the old pud didn't seem to mind—just waltzed us down the shining marble floors to a couple of big swinging doors. Inside, we walked past a blend of aromas like you've never smelled before. No wonder Leffington loved this place, no wonder he had invented a couple of dozen disguises to come every day, three times a day.

  It still beat me though, and I wondered if I'd ever figure this one out. How could a gourmet like Leffington eating at a place like this starve to death? Joachim and I walked the entire length of the kitchen—past row on row of what seemed a thousand different dishes, each one smelling and looking more delicious than the last, Joachim all the time keeping up a lively conversation with Garibaldi about the better Dallas restaurants. What a kick—I guess I made a pretty corny tycoon.

  Anyway, Garibaldi let us see it all—the shining pots, the white refrigerators, the oyster bar and pantry, the rare imported foods from at least two dozen different countries. Garibaldi never took those sparkling brown eyes off you, and you got to like him after a while. Matter of fact, I thought we were barking up the wrong tree. I told Joachim so at dessert.

  Joachim delicately punctured the Oeufs à la Neige Garibaldi had brought him and looked up at me, his eyes cold hard. 'Just what do you think Leffington's trouble was?' he asked, sarcastically.

  'Starvation,' I said. 'So what?'

  'So what,' Joachim repeated. 'And just where did Leffington dine, may I inquire?'

  'Here, of course!' I told him.

  'Ah,' he said, making a wry smile. 'Then where is the logical place to look for Edmond Leffington's murderer?'

  'Murderer!' I whispered. 'But—'

  'Come now,' Joachim said, twirling his silver cigarette holder in my face, 'lets get down to fundamentals.' He belched and took a bite of his Oeufs à la Neige. 'As you once so sagely remarked—famous gourmets just don't starve to death. That's the only clear cut thing about this case.'

  Joachim gave me a dirty look and ordered the cheque. We sat a few minutes longer—in silence—over a demi-tasse and a thimble full of Crème Yvette, which (as I mentioned) is the speciality of the house. But don't get any ideas about the cordial—we knew it wasn't poisoned or anything. Joachim had taken a mouthful of it home the previous night, and the lab boys at the office had analyzed it that morning. It was just Crème Yvette. Very good—but Crème Yvette.

  One thing bothered us though. A halfhour after we left Garibaldi's we had that tremendous hunger again. Although we could still taste the liqueur, we were just as hungry as though we'd had no lunch at all. We went immediately to Child's and ordered steaks.

  That's when Joachim really started thinking.

  Next day Joachim was changing into the outfit of an Italian duke. He seemed pretty confident, and it made me a little sore that I didn't too.

  'It's all so embarrassingly easy,' he explained. I asked him what he meant.

  'Garibaldi and his fabulous entrees, Leffington's demise,' he said, 'All of it.'

  Leave it to Joachim—he refused to say anymore. Had to take all the credit himself.

  When Garibaldi met us in the vestibule, Joachim was wearing sun glasses. This was it. The effect on Garibaldi was shattering. Somehow all the showmanship seemed to drain out of the old boy's performance. He led us to our table like a sleepwalker.

  I was fully prepared to order the menu this time—determined not to leave Garibaldi's hungry again. I ordered the most expensive items on the menu: Crisp hearts of Sardinian Hummingbirds in Almond Sauce; Pâté des Rana Pipiens served on Croustade with Asparagus tips and Carrots Vichy. For wine, I ordered a Hungarian tokay called 'Hegyaljai." Then for dessert, I chose two real jawbreakers: Pizza Figliata and pousse-café. Wonderful place—it improved your vocabulary as well as your appetite.

  Matter of fact, I was enjoying the meal so much, I had completely ignored Joachim. When I happened to look up between pigeon livers, I was surprised to find he had touched none of the food before him. He sat there, with his dark glasses, chain smoking cigarettes. Matter of fact, he was behaving very strangely—not even seeming to see the waiter or the captain when the various dishes were served, and once addressing the waiter as 'Garibaldi,' even though the two looked as much different as Joachim and me.

  It was not until the after dinner Crème Yvette, that Joachim touched a thing. He sipped it slowly and seemed really to enjoy it. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, and smiling, told me I was making a dope of myself.

  I pushed the Pizza Figliata aside and asked him what he thought he was talking about.

  'Don't you think it's a little silly to scrape an empty plate?' he said, looking over at the heaping of Figliata on my dish.

  'Maybe those glasses are ruining your eyesight,' I suggested. I put them on, and the Figliata was still on my plate.

  'Just wait,' Joachim said. Then he told me how he'd taken a wing of guinea fowl home in his handkerchief the previous day. His hand had never left the coat pocket where the greasy wing was hidden. On his arrival at Child's, however, the handkerchief was empty and spodess.

  I stopped listening to him long enough to look through the green glasses at the head waiter approaching our table. You can imagine my surprise when he turned into Garibaldi right on the spot—even worse when my Figliata just plain disappeared.

  I guess Garibaldi saw my expression, because he hightailed it on through the kitchen doors, Joachim and me right after him.

  It was when we were both in the kitchen that we got the meataxe.

  Ever visit an empty house? A very empty house? That's what this room was like now that the shining pots and refrigerators were gone.

  We looked the entire length of the emptiest kitchen either of us had ever seen—just bottle after bottle of that Crème Yvette lining both walls on wooden shelves—and at the far end of the pantry—behind some garbage pails—Garibaldi cringing like a two bit hood.

  The weather beaten trunks under the kitchen told us the story of Garibaldi. They also answered the strange death of Desmond Leffington. Garibaldi wasn't a murderer—he was just a cheat.

  LUIGI GARIBALDI

  Munich—Florence—London

  CONJUROR-MAGICIAN-

  HYPNOTIST

  A Full Course Dinner in the

  MIND'S EYE

  Joachim called the police. I went down the street to Nedick's and had a hamburger. With.

  JOEL TOWNSLEY ROGERS

  The Hanging Rope

  In 1945 the American publishers Simon & Schuster issued in their Inner Sanctum Mystery series a book that is surely one of the dozen or so finest mystery novels of the 20th Century, Joel Townsley Rogers' The Red Right Hand.

  It's a book impossible to summarize, impossible to describe. Perhaps the best thing, to give all those unfortunate enough never to have read it a flavour of what is on offer, would be to list a few of the basic ingredients: an ugly little red eyed murderer with a torn ear called Corkscrew who doesn't seem to exist. . . a psychopathologist, soon to die, who specializes in aberrant mentalities (notably the split personality) . . . a speeding car with a wailing horn and a dead passenger that vanishes ... a narrator who ju
st possibly might be implicated in the murders, just possibly might be going out of his mind ... a hacked off hand . . .

  But no, that won't really do. All of those elements—give or take a bloody ear or hewn off hand—may be found elsewhere. And such a list may well hint at the nightmarish atmosphere, the hallucinatory nature of what takes place, but it certainly takes no account of what is in fact one of the most extraordinary aspects of the book—indeed, of Rogers as a writer—which is his torrential, unstoppable prose. Having gotten up a full head of steam on the very first page, he doesn't let up for even a paragraph throughout the book's 65,000 word length, and one is carried along in this unrelenting spate to a climactic and bloody confrontation that is quite unforgettable. It is, in all ways, a genuine tour de force.

  Almost as breathtaking (especially in its construction) is his last novel The Stopped Clock (1958) which begins powerfully with an atrociously beaten woman left for dead by her would be murderer, crawling in agony, and with agonizing slowness, around her house trying desperately to lock all doors and windows because she knows he's coming back to finish the job—and ends just a half hour later in an astonishing blaze of violence. A half hour in real time, that is, for in between beginning and end lies a 100,000 word novel detailing the woman's life and the events that led up to that frenzied assault.

  One invariably leaves Rogers' fictional worlds in a state of high tension—but a word of warning to those who, on the strength of this encomium, might be contemplating taking him up. Rogers is not for the speed reader. He is not for those who scan the page, extracting the juice but not the pith. You need (to mix the metaphor) to keep your eye on the ball when reading him, for he had a nasty habit of sliding crucial information into his torrential text when you least expected it.

  As here, in this forgotten tale that I and my coeditor are particularly proud to have had a hand in resurrecting. The Hanging Rope, a 30,000 word novella, bears all the hallmarks of Joel Townsley Rogers at his best and with all cylinders firing. Pulp writing of the very highest order, it careers along at a breakneck pace and ends with an awe inspiring twist. In a phrase, sheer class.

  JACK ADRIAN

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Beanpole Man and the Cat Man

  If Kerry Ott, the playwright, hadn't detested a bad play with all his mind and to his dying breath, the murder in the Royal Arms apartment house that night might have been written off as unanswerable. Or at best have been ascribed to some vague, intangible, amorphous third visitor who old Dan McCue had had, in addition to the beanpole and the cat man—the lawyer and the priest—after they had both made their departures.

  And yet there was nothing complicated about the killings. They were actually one of those classics of crime simplicity, with a definite place where they occurred, a limited number of men who could possibly have committed them, and the police already at the door before they were completed. Practically every detail about them was apparent at a glance, except how the killer had got away. We'll take the scene, first.

  The murders took place in the fourth floor rear apartment, apartment 4C, consisting of large library living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom and bath, hallway, and four or five closets—of Mr. Daniel McCue, the wealthy retired contractor and political sachem. The weapons used were a wine bottle and a fireside poker for the first killing, and sharp steel for the second—crude and simple weapons, with more blood than was necessary spilled and spattered about. Old Dan McCue himself was done to death at three minutes after midnight; the terrified girl within the next dozen minutes, according to those who heard her scream.

  It was as simple as that. A dozen minutes, a locked apartment, and two dead. The killer must have been present to do his killings, at the time they were committed. Up to the last terrible minute he must have been there, desperate and cornered, with the alarm raised before he had completed his work, and the police already at front and back.

  And yet there was no one who saw him. He might have been as invisible as smoke or mist. As transparent as the highball glass he finished off before he killed old Dan McCue. As thin and sharp as the steel he used on that girl's warm throat.

  Perhaps in that moment in the hallway as he pushed past the doorway of the murder bedroom, in the flash of the silver blow that fell, Tuxedo Johnny Blythe had seen his face. Yet the vision was so quick, he fell so suddenly, he could not be sure of what had struck him. The big blue clad cop had fled by then. The rustling in the kitchen had ceased. Tuxedo Johnny lay there dazed, the only living thing, as far as he knew, within that death apartment. And there was no answer to how the murderer had got away.

  He said to Big Bat O'Brien of homicide, going through the murder apartment afterwards, 'We were within thirty feet of her when he killed her. Right at the door. It must have been only a matter of seconds. But he wasn't there. Nobody. There just had to be some way.'

  'Front door locked on the inside, Johnny,' Big Bat enumerated. 'Fire escape window locked on the inside. Bars on all the other windows. He couldn't have, but he did. And unless someone turns up who saw him and can identify him, there's not a thing in God's world to pin it on him, either. The damned cup of custard must have been wearing gloves. He didn't leave a print.'

  Not a print that could be identified as belonging to a murderer exclusively. The homicide men had dusted everything by then. There were Paul Bean's prints (the lawyer's), of course, and Father Finley's (the purring priest's), as was to be expected, since they had both visited old Dan McCue that night. But they had both left before the murders.

  'He was smart,' said Tuxedo Johnny. 'He was smart, and I played it dumb—you're right, Bat. Still I'd like to be able to figure out, just for my own personal satisfaction, how he could have got away. There had to be a way.'

  Well, there was a way of escape, though they were a little late in discovering it . . . There had to be a way, and so there was. Only one, but one was all he needed.

  At half past eleven that night, according to his later statement to the police, Paul Bean, old Dan McCue's lawyer, had decided that it was time for him to say good night. He had set down his highball glass, put his cigar butt in the tray on the smoking table beside his chair, glanced at his watch and unfolded his long stiltlike legs.

  'Time for the hay, Dan,' he remarked in his profound and lugubrious voice. 'I've always got a load of work at the office in the morning. I'll try to drop in with a tentative will draft tomorrow evening for you to look over.'

  'No need to rush it,' said old Dan. 'Plenty of time before I die.'

  'That's what you think,' said Paul Bean. 'I'll be around again soon, anyway.'

  'Here, boy, you haven't finished out your drink,' old Dan said. 'You've left the half of it.'

  'Put a tag on it, Dan, and save it for me the next time,' said Paul Bean.

  He opened the lid of the silver humidor on the satinwood desk and selected another corona before departing. He picked up the magnum of champagne with a pink ribbon around its neck, which he had brought under his arm, unwrapped, and had given to old Dan for his birthday tomorrow. He examined the label again, then set it down.

  Old Dan McCue, in his green silk dressing gown and easy slippers, with his glass and cigar, did not bother to accompany Paul Bean to the front door. Paul Bean frequently dropped in of evenings for a short visit, living only three or four blocks away on Park Avenue as he did, and the formality wasn't necessary.

  With his cigar in his mouth, the tall attenuated lawyer had gone along the hall towards the front door, past the doorways of dining room on the left and bedroom on the right. He had not opened the coat closet, not having even a hat to bother with in the warm September night. He had opened the front door of old Dan McCue's apartment, and had gone on out, closing the door behind.

  Paul Bean was better known, of course, as Pole Bean. It would have taken a man with a great deal of originality not to have called him that. In college twenty years ago, where he had been a pole vaulter, there had been a comedy pretence of being unable to d
istinguish him and his bamboo apart; and he had never cleared the bar without some wit in the stands yelling a protest that he had merely dug his heels into the ground and heaved his pole across.

  That is known as a sense of humour to those who have it. He had none himself. He was a cautious and careful lawyer, however. Besides being old Dan's counsel, he had been his son-in-law for a dozen years, having been married to Dan's late daughter Sue.

  She had died six months ago in a rather tragic and hideous way, of a cat scratch which had developed into tetanus, and for which serum had been used too late. It had been an event shattering to old Dan, not to speak of Paul Bean himself, following as it had the death of Dan's only son, by drowning, a few years before. It was for that reason that Paul Bean made it a point to drop in once or twice a week for a brief visit. With the added reason tonight of bringing old Dan the bottle of birthday champagne.

  He had brought up, just incidentally, the matter of Dan's making a will, which Dan had never done. Perhaps with a subconscious superstition, like many men, that to do so was a kind of invitation for death. Or perhaps out of mere procrastination, not believing that he, with his great powerful body and long lived ancestors, at a mere sixty years of age would not have still another thirty years to go.

  Paul Bean, being a lawyer, realized better the uncertainties of life, however. He knew that there were various hospitals and other charities which Dan would like to have benefit by moderate bequests and probably some personal friends, like harmless and slighdy demented Father Finley. It would be a good thing too, to have himself as executor, since he was acquainted with all of Dan's affairs. Old Dan had seemed not unacquiescent to the idea, Paul Bean thought. If he had not agreed, at least he had not disagreed.