4 - Stranger Room: Ike Schwartz Mystery 4

by Frederick Ramsay

  Sam slowly and painstakingly walked the men through the scenario she’d laid out for Ike previously. As she spoke, Ike removed and displayed the appropriate document copies they’d received and, then the ones found in the upstairs bedroom. When she finished, Hergenroder scratched his head and fixed her with his best defense attorney stare.

  “This is all speculation, is it not?”

  “Not quite,” Ike answered for her. He was not going to have his deputy harassed by a slick defense attorney.

  “If I understand you correctly, you allege my client, when confronted with the story, only a story, mind you, of a potential blot on the family escutcheon, so to speak, pulled out an antique pistol, shot the poor man, and somehow managed to secrete him in a room which was, by your own admission, securely locked from the inside, correct?”

  “Nicely put, Counselor, yes that is what we allege. Grotz was a mediocre freelance writer. His wife said he had stumbled on the ‘big one’ as she put it. He might have been writing a book about the Civil War, but that would hardly constitute the ‘big one.’ He had blackmail in mind, and your client is nearly broke. His only real asset is this house and what’s left of the original acreage. His whole life has revolved around his family’s history. A revelation like the one Grotz threatened to make would ruin him, emotionally, financially, and socially. There was no way he was going to let that happen.”

  “And so he murdered the blackmailer?”

  “Not right away, I don’t think, he had to prepare first.”

  “Prepare?”

  Billy entered the room arms extended, palms up, and shrugged a sorry.

  Ike nodded, paused, and pulled open the desk’s drawers. On the third one, he smiled.

  “Yes, prepare. The problem with killing Grotz? He would be the prime, no, the only suspect. Except for his daughter, there was no one else here who could have done it, you see? And she was, according to her father and our interview, dead to the world upstairs. What is the only reason someone would go to all the trouble of arranging something as complicated as a locked room mystery?”

  “No idea. I’ve never run across one except in works of fiction.”

  “Exactly. Why indeed? The only reason would be to distract us from the obvious. The only person with a motive, and we have demonstrated that absolutely, and opportunity, is your client. He needed to divert us. Thus, the locked room.”

  “Very well, assuming that to be the case, and I am not as convinced you have the case you think you have, how did he do it?”

  “That’s the interesting part. Grotz’s death is the second locked room murder to have occurred in this house, in that stranger room.”

  “Yes, so your deputy said.”

  “The first occurred in 1864. Mr. Lydell’s ancestor, the first Jonathan Lydell, killed Franklin Brian, the southern agent working out of New Jersey, for much the same reason as the current Lydell killed Anton Grotz. These papers,” Ike held up a handful of documents, “contain the letters from Brian to his brother. Lydell the first, if you will, the traitor, had informed Union Troops of the location and movements of General Early’s units operating in the Valley. Brian felt he needed to take care of that Lydell. He, in turn, tumbled on what Brian had in mind, killed him first and then locked him up.”

  “You’ve already alleged that. You have a problem, Sheriff. You cannot prove the first murder, even if you wanted to, and the same holds for the current one. Once again—how?”

  “Your client told me that his family members were packrats. Somewhere along the way he found a diary, a document…something, describing how the first lock-up was accomplished. Before he dispatched Grotz, he found it, collected the things he needed to pull it off, and then killed our victim.”

  “You have this alleged document?”

  Lydell’s rheumy gaze slid to the fireplace. A thin smile crossed his face. Ike followed his line of sight to the fireplace.

  “I hope you had the foresight to stir those ashes around, Mr. Lydell. Otherwise we could reconstruct most of that paper.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Schwartz,” he croaked. Smug did not do justice to the expression on his face.

  “No matter. The how was easy enough to figure out, once I understood about the keys.”

  “You have no way of…a man of your background could not possibly have…” Lydell’s face turned ashen.

  “Keys?” Hergenroder stood and peered at his client.

  Billy, who had been watching Lydell closely, stepped up to Ike and murmured in his ear. “He don’t look too good, Ike.”

  Ike faced around, glanced at Lydell, whose complexion had turned gray-green, and said, “I think it would be a good idea to get an ambulance over here.”

  To Hergenroder he said, “Yes, keys. Door keys, clock keys, keys hidden in a tree stump—keys.”

  “Not possible,” Lydell said in a gravelly voice and slid further into the cushions on the sofa.

  “Very possible, simple, in fact. So simple, a descendent of the shirt maker to the Tsar could figure it out. When I asked Lydell to identify his pistol and anything else found in the stump, he hesitated. He had to acknowledge the pistol and the ammunition. He’d reported them stolen, after all. But he was stuck on the other objects. There was also a key and a box of Indianhead pennies. The pennies had some value and he wanted very much to claim them but if he did, he’d have to take the key, too. And he couldn’t do that or, as they say, the cat would be out of the bag.”

  “I am not following you.”

  “Before we arrived, but after the door was forced, Lydell switched one of the keys. Later he hid his pistol, some ammunition, and the key in the tree stump. He didn’t count on a trespasser finding them and ultimately their coming into our hands.”

  “Again, I’m lost here.”

  “You are, but Mr. Lydell knows exactly what I’m talking about.” Ike removed the key, obtained from the tree stump, and laid it on the table. “Look at that key. Do you notice anything special?”

  “Besides the fact it’s rusty, no.”

  “It’s old, handmade probably in the 1860s, and different from these others.” Ike pulled out two keys from the desk drawer.

  “You can’t know.” Lydell said in a weak voice. His face had shifted to gray-blue.

  “How about that ambulance, Billy.”

  “On its way, Ike. I know CPR, I’ll watch him.”

  “The cross-sectional area at the end, Mr. Hergenroder. This key was made from square stock, the others from round. Does that suggest anything?”

  “Sorry. I’m a lawyer, Sheriff, not a locksmith.”

  “Would you like a demonstration?”

  “No!” Jonathan Lydell slid off the sofa and landed on the floor like a bag of laundry. “Martha Marie, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. His eyes rolled up, he coughed one last time, his jaw snapped shut, and he went limp.

  Billy leapt to his side and took a carotid pulse. He looked up at Ike and shook his head.

  “Try,” Ike said. Billy began CPR. In the background a siren wailed as their ambulance drew closer.

  Too late.

  Chapter 46

  By the time the last of the gawkers cleared the area and the Picketsville fire department, ambulance, and crews pulled away, lights flashing but sirens muted, it was mid-afternoon. The sun had already started its descent westward and shadows crept across the roadway. Ike, his four deputies, and Lydell’s attorneys stood on the porch and watched as the vehicles turned the corner and headed for Stonewall Jackson Memorial Hospital in Lexington. Lydell’s stay there would last only long enough for an official death certificate to be generated and then he would join his daughter at Unger’s funeral establishment in Picketsville. Smoke from a chimney drifted down the street scenting the air with burning softwood, apple, Ike guessed. A little early but it would turn chilly in a few hours.

  Silas Mumpford, who had had little to say throughout the morning’s interview, shook his head and clucked,
“Terrible way to go.”

  “I’m not sure. Quick, apparently painless, and better than dying in jail,” Ike said.

  “I don’t think he would have gone there, do you?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You really think you could get a conviction?”

  “Not for me to say. It would depend on the DA, but for my money, if I were prosecuting the cases, that old man would be locked up for the rest of whatever remained of his life. How many men will kill a child of theirs to preserve their reputations?”

  Hergenroder cleared his throat. “You don’t know that he did. Your take on what happened on that stairway is, at best, an untested assumption. I could get him off. Except for the petechial hemorrhages, the case against him for the daughter’s death is purely circumstantial. And, as I said before, there are too many other possible explanations for the hemorrhages. The poor man would sit there in court looking ancient, weak, and broken. Reasonable doubt, Sheriff. No jury would ever convict him on a charge of murder two.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. DA’s call.”

  “And the locked room business. I would hammer away at that. And the rest of your case, elaborate as it is, is also entirely circumstantial. Maybe it was blackmail…maybe not. Fingerprints on his own gun that he’s reported stolen…an unemployed writer he didn’t know—couldn’t have known…Sheriff, your chances of a conviction would be slim to none. Again, picture the poor old man who just lost his daughter in a tragic accident, sick, tired—you get the picture. He walks. If you can’t put him in that room with the body, your case is toast.”

  “But I can put him in that room—him and his namesake ancestor as well, for that matter.”

  “You mean you weren’t bluffing about knowing the method just to get Lydell to crack? You really do know?”

  “No, I wasn’t bluffing and, yes, I can show you how it was done.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. If I thought you had pretended to know the secret and the old man had a heart attack because he believed you, I would have been pretty upset, more than upset, in fact. I might have brought charges against you. You really weren’t bluffing?”

  “Not at all. Would you like to see how he did it?”

  Hergenroder hesitated. He glanced at his wrist watch and seemed about to leave. Mumpford broke in, “I would. Yes, indeed, I would very much like to see how it was done.”

  Ike retrieved the keys from the parlor. “Okay. Again, please look at these three keys. They are all similar except in one important way.”

  The two attorneys and four deputies crowded around and studied the keys.

  “You told us that the rusty one was square in its cross sectional area but I don’t get the significance. The other two are identical except one seems longer than the others.”

  Ike led them to the stranger room door. He unlocked it with the longer key. Then as they watched he demonstrated that each of the three could lock and unlock the door from the inside.

  “Three keys,” he lectured. “It’s important. All three will throw this bolt. Now watch.”

  He inserted each of the shorter keys in the lock from the outside and demonstrated that they were not long enough to throw the bolt.

  “Now then, Lydell claimed this key was in the lock on the inside and prevented the longer key from working.” He held up one of the shorter keys. “But in fact it was this key.” He held out the rusty one. “See, with either of the shorter keys in the lock from the inside, and slightly off-center, the bolt cannot be moved from the outside.”

  “So, the door had to be locked from the inside. How?” Mumpford asked.

  Hergenroder held one key up. “Someone could have used pliers to grab the end of the key and turn it from the outside,”

  “I thought of that—very thin needle nosed pliers, perhaps. But the distance from the outer key hole to the tip of the key in the lock is just too great—maybe two and a half inches. Even if you could reach in that far, you couldn’t open the pliers’ jaws, grip the tip and then turn it, and especially a rounded one like this.”

  “You’d need a special tool, then.”

  “Not special in the sense you mean, but yes, special. Look, let’s assume Lydell used the rusty key, the one he put in the tree stump.”

  “Back up. What has happened up to this point?”

  “Right. First he shoots Grotz in the back. As with his daughter, Grotz isn’t dead. He steps over and shoots him once more in the forehead. I think he did this in the parlor next door.”

  “Why?”

  “The carpet that Grotz was lying on did not go with this room. Whatever else Lydell may have been, you can see from the way this house is decorated, he had a sense of style and color. That carpet came from next door. I’d bet on it. In fact, when we’re done here, I’m going to shift the rug under the coffee table, in there, and see if we can’t dig out one slug and turn up some trace blood stains.”

  “All right. So, next, he drags Grotz in here and then what?”

  “Then he puts the rusty key in the lock like this,” Ike slipped the key in the lock from the inside. “And then he uses this.” He produced a clock winder from his pocket.

  Hergenroder squinted at the object and said, “What the Hell is that? It looks like a crank.”

  “Clock winder,” Mumpford answered, “judging from the length of the stem, it must be from a pretty big cabinet clock.”

  “Correct. Look at the end. The shaft had a square cavity in it designed to fit over a clock winding stem—a square winding stem, you see?” Enlightenment appeared on their faces. “I’m sure it was this one, there is still something that smells like bee’s wax in the end. I expect he put that there to make it sticky. Anyway, as Mr. Mumpford has noted, this winder has a very long shaft. It’s the special tool you imagined, Mr. Hergenroder. Watch. I slip this winder in the lock from the outside, fit it onto the square end of the key that is already in the lock, pull the door to, and use it like a crank to throw the bolt. Once done, I pull it out but I leave the inner key off center. Try to unlock this door.”

  Hergenroder took the larger key from Ike and tried to insert it in the lock and failed. “I’ll be damned, the room is locked from the inside.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And in the excitement of discovering the body—”

  “He switched the keys, just in case.”

  “But he didn’t count on a descendant of the Tsar’s shirt maker to figure it out.”

  “Or that a kid, named Tommy, would raid the tree stump after he cached the pistol, ammo, and the key.”

  “How did you figure it out, anyway?”

  “Routine police work. Any of these deputies could have done it.”

  The four in question looked dubious.

  “Okay, I was standing in front of an antique clock trying to follow a conversation that I really did not want to hear, and there it was right in front of me. The clock had a winder like this one. I used it to wind the clock and I remembered the rusty key and…” Ike spread his hands.

  At a signal from Ike, Billy reentered the parlor. The remaining six stood quietly staring at the door. Hergenroder exhaled and turned to Ike.

  “Can I ask you a personal question, Sheriff? What do you intend to do with all this?”

  “All this…what?”

  “My client is dead. Are you planning to make this whole business public? After all, you solved a locked room mystery, possibly two locked room murders, involving this area’s most prominent citizens. That is not something someone does everyday. It could create a great deal of very positive publicity for you.”

  “Not my thing, Counselor. As you said, the man is dead. I can’t see dragging him through the mud now. No, I’ll write a report and file it. That’ll be the end of it.”

  “The locked room, though…” Mumpford said.

  “I’ll give the details to Dr. Leon Weitz at the college. He’s writing a book about spies and the Civil War. He’ll be happy to have it. It ties up a loose end. Hardly anybo
dy reads those academic tomes and, if they do, they will not care much one way or the other about your client. This house and family are probably going to end up as a chapter.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff. I was afraid you might be one of those publicity seeking, political animals like your…”

  “Like my father?”

  “I didn’t want to say it, but yes.”

  “No problem. I love my father and normally I would take offense, but not today.”

  “No offense intended.”

  “Bullshit. Billy, what did you find under the coffee table?”

  “Dug out the slug like you guessed.”

  “Mr. Hergenroder, do you have any more reasonable doubts?”

  “We’re done here, Sheriff. Perhaps we’ll cross swords again some time.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  Chapter 47

  The sun hovered over the mountains to the west, poised to make its daily plunge beyond the valley’s western horizon. Thin cirrus clouds drifted across the sky promising a spectacular sunset. Ike had the grill lighted and generous burgers wrapped in waxed paper ready on the counter when Ruth drove up. She struggled up the steps of the A-frame dragging a heavy suitcase.

  “You planning on moving in?”

  “Would you object if I did?”

  “Nope, but that isn’t just an overnight bag, I think.”

  “Very observant, Ike. That’s why you’re such a good cop.”

  “Thank you, I think.” He reached out and took the handle and lifted the case to the landing. “What’s in here, your rock collection?”

  “You must be getting weak in your old age, Hon. I carried this down a flight of stairs, across a parking lot, and put it in my car.”

  “Hon? Where did that come from?”

  “I spent an hour on the phone with a distant cousin from Baltimore.”

  “Gotcha. So the case is…?”

  “We said we’d try to be discreet, remember. No more sneaking around the President’s house, my house, in the middle of the night and so on. You remember, we had a conversation—”

  “I remember. The case…what’s in the case?”