The Third Mystery

by James Holding

  Landon snapped his fingers. “Better yet!”

  He ran the red betrayer into an alley, where he abandoned it, emerged on a parallel street, doubled back around the block, entered the long public market, and mingled with the crowd of shoppers. No one connected the noise of pursuit with this apparently casual arrival. He purchased an armful of vegetables, a bag of bananas, and several coconuts. The load, supported on his left forearm, afforded a partial screen of celery and turnip tops. He quite naturally cocked his head to one side to keep his purchases from falling; and with his free hand he held a banana, which he ate as he strolled up Dryades Street, paralleling Saint Charles, through slums within a stone’s throw of the main drive of New Orleans.

  His thoughts, sharpened by his recent narrow escape, began to assemble the contradictory fragments of evidence that pointed to the slayer of Professor Foster. Thus far, he had been dodging too much lead for thought.

  Foster had not been forced by the thief to open the safe. On the contrary, the thief had obtained the combination by photography, had opened the safe himself, had been surprised by the professor’s unexpected return, and had killed in self-defense. This eliminated Dumaine: the professor was returning to meet the dealer. It let out Chris Panopoulos and his thugs. They would have been in touch with Dumaine’s movements, unless the Frenchman had staged the robbery—and that likewise was out. Barloff was the only remaining suspect—but how hang it on him?

  Landon suddenly halted. The pieces clicked. He glanced about. No pursuit in sight. He was in front of a cheap clothing store.

  Entering, he asked, “Can you fix me up with a hat?”

  The proprietor could, and quickly did.

  “You keep these vegetables for me—I’ll be back later.”

  With his new hat pulled down over his eyes, he strode briskly and resolutely to the Foster mansion.

  Eloise admitted him, her dark eyes dismayed. “Oh, Ray, what in the world do you mean coming here in broad daylight? I tried to tell you, but you hung up. The police know that you met me last night. That cab driver’s story in the paper was faked, to trap you. Get away from here—”

  “You don’t know the half of it!” he retorted with a wry smile. “Collins recognized me at Bennett & Keene’s stock exchange a few minutes ago. Let’s go up to the library, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  On the way up the stairs, he briefly sketched his clash with Barloff, and his run in with Collins only a few minutes ago.

  Eloise sighed and sank into a chair. “You simply must get out of town, Ray! Don’t stay here another moment!”

  “Nothing doing. I’m playing a hunch.”

  “Collins will surely lead the police—” She stopped. A car drew up before the house. Eloise parted the window drapes. “They’re here now! Hide in that little storeroom, and when they enter you can—”

  “No go,” said Landon, stepping to another window. “The whole place is surrounded. Plainclothes and uniformed cops.”

  Another car pulled up to the curbing. A riot squad with sawed-off shotguns emerged. Landon regarded Eloise with a grim smile.

  “Can’t make it. Dozens of ’em, and they mean dead or alive. Pay day, darling!”

  “I know where you can hide. They’ll never think of looking in the—”

  But before Eloise could name the corner that would afford a refuge, they heard footsteps in the hallway.

  Chapter 09

  The Murderer at Bay

  Eloise screamed. London whirled. Four plainclothesmen, with drawn pistols, stood in the entrance of the library. At their head was John Healy, the Chief of Detectives who had promised to take Landon, dead or alive, within twenty-four hours.

  “Stand fast, Landon, and hoist ’em! Way up!” Healy’s voice was calm, but the fierce gleam in his steel-blue eyes and the unwavering muzzle of his service thirty-eight told Landon that the gray-haired veteran was more formidable than a whole squad of his subordinates.

  “Oh, all right,” agreed Landon. Then, with an amiable grin, “Mighty glad you brought Mr. Collins along.”

  In the background Landon saw Professor Foster’s secretary. It must have been his keys that had enabled the police to make their silent entry.

  “Put the irons on him,” snapped Healy. “I’ll keep him covered. And watch your step!”

  “If you have some extra handcuffs,” said Landon, as the steel clicked about his wrists, “put ’em on Bert Collins.”

  “Come along, and cut out the bull!” growled one of the coppers, prodding him with the muzzle of his pistol, but Healy’s eyes gleamed with sudden interest.

  “What’s that?” he demanded.

  “I’m telling you who killed Professor Foster,” answered Landon. “Shall I prove it to you now, or after you’ve let him go?”

  Eloise regarded Collins with dark eyes narrowed and glittering. Healy turned to the secretary and sized him up.

  “Wait a minute! Let’s listen to this!” he said.

  “Ridiculous!” protested Collins. “He’s crazy. I was at the same party as Miss Foster until after midnight, and I can prove it by—”

  “Your lady friend was so pie-eyed that she wouldn’t know whether you left her alone for two minutes or twenty,” retorted Landon. “Or long enough to kill Foster, shag me, and call the police. It’s only a short taxi ride from here.”

  Collins started; then, after a perceptible pause during which he vacillated between derision and dignified denial, he countered, “Preposterous! Who saw me leave the party? And why should I have killed my employer?”

  “Because you’d embezzled a bunch of his Liberty Bonds,” said Landon. “There had been fifty thousand in bonds in Professor Foster’s box in the bank. The professor never visited the box himself—always sent you. You stole—and sold—exactly ten thousand five hundred, I think, Bert.”

  Collins paled at Landon’s mention of so exact a figure.

  Landon continued, turning to Healy, “When the twenty-five thousand dollars was placed in the professor’s wall safe, to buy the prayer rug, Collins saw his chance to make a theft which would not be traced to him. He intended to use part of the stolen money to replace his earlier speculations, and still be nearly fifteen thousand to the good. He did use part of the stolen money that way this morning!”

  Collins swallowed, licked his lips. He dropped his eyes to avoid Eloise’s accusing eyes. But Healy looked incredulous.

  “You and Collins may have been in cahoots,” he suggested. “How about it? Can you prove your story?”

  “He can’t.” But Collins’ protest was a prayer.

  “Hell I can’t!” retorted Landon. “You were buying bonds at Bennett & Keene’s this morning—to replace your theft before the estate was settled. Where’d you get the ten thousand five hundred dollars to pay for them?”

  “Spit it out, Collins,” growled Healy. “Either Landon is nutty, or you’ve got plenty to explain. Why were you so anxious to have us catch Landon?”

  “Open Foster’s safe deposit box at the bank,” said Landon. “That’ll prove it.”

  “Look into it, O’Toole,” directed Healy. “Right now!”

  “I took the bonds,” admitted Collins, seeing the futility of denial. “But I didn’t kill him. And you can’t—I didn’t leave the party, I tell you!”

  “Shut up!” barked Healy. “If you’d steal, you’d kill. Never mind the bank right now, O’Toole. Take charge of this bird.” Steel closed about Collins’ wrists.

  “But I didn’t kill him! He didn’t catch me opening the safe. I couldn’t open it. He never gave me the combination.”

  “He’s right,” Eloise reluctantly admitted, as Healy caught her eye.

  “So of course he’d have given it to me, a comparative stranger?” was Landon’s ironic retort.

  “But you could have asked him to open it on some pretext, and then stabbed him!” cried Collins, regaining his courage.

  “No fingerprints were found on the dial,” countered Landon. Then, as Healy
nodded, he continued, “If Foster had opened his own safe, would either he or the person that killed him have wiped Foster’s prints off?”

  “Bull’s-eye!” exclaimed Healy. “Someone that knew the combination to open that box—and you, Collins—”

  “But I didn’t know the combination, I tell you!”

  “Oh, yes, you did,” contradicted Landon, his face grim, his eyes hard and relentless. “You made a movie of the professor when he opened the safe, and you read the numbers from the film. Eloise, get the camera. Sergeant, pull out the big drawer of that desk.”

  The front of the drawer came away in the officer’s hand.

  “Now pull out the rest of the drawer.” The officer did so.

  “See that plugged-up hole in the back? This camera”—Landon took the Cine-Kodak from Eloise— “isn’t cranked. It runs by clockwork, and by jerking a string tied to the release Collins could have made the film without anyone’s noticing that he was operating a camera concealed in the desk.”

  “How about it, Collins?” demanded Healy. “Suppose there is a hole in that desk?”

  Collins’ face was white. His voice cracked as he desperately denied Landon’s assertions. Then, a sudden, triumphant gleam in his eyes, he said: “Find the film! That’ll prove his point!”

  Healy gritted his teeth. Collins’ ready defiance proved that there must have been such a film—and that it must also have been destroyed.

  “Too bad,” he muttered. “Take ’em both along.”

  “Too bad hell!” countered Landon cheerfully. “I found a piece of the film. He forgot to burn all of it. It’s in my left coat pocket. Somebody get it.”

  Healy reached into Landon’s pocket and produced about a foot of miniature movie film. Collins slumped into a chair. He exhaled a long sigh.

  Healy snatched the scrap of film from Landon’s fingers.

  “Quick! Give me that reading glass!” Then, as he peered at the film: “You could get those numbers if you enlarged it enough on a screen.”

  He whirled toward Collins, who was staring dully at the mocking, silvery-gleaming safe, and thrust the scrap of film under his nose.

  “Come clean!” he barked. “Thought you burned it all, eh? D’ya want to confess now, or”—Healy’s heavy hand clutched him by the shoulder—“do I have to take it out of you at headquarters?”

  Collins shrank from the scrap of film as though it were a living serpent. His muttered reply was scarcely articulate.

  “I was sure he—everyone would be away. But he came back and caught me opening the safe. I killed him, but I didn’t intend—in the beginning—”

  “And then you phoned Whitman’s party and got me to come to the house, to take the rap?” demanded Landon.

  Collins nodded, muttered, “Yes.”

  “Take him away,” commanded Healy. “Landon, you’re still under arrest, until I can check up on the rest of your doings.”

  Healy removed Landon’s handcuffs, phoned headquarters, then listened to Landon’s account of the intricate mesh of treachery and counter-treachery that had been connected with Shah Ismail’s prayer rug.

  When Landon concluded, the gray-haired detective put his hand on his firm chin, pursed up his lips and narrowed his eyes thoughtfully.

  “Hm!” he said. “And no wonder! Shah Ismail’s prayer rug, is it? Faith, and it’s Satan’s prayer rug I call it. We have a request in at Headquarters right now to send it to the Persian chargé-d’affaires at Washington, for return to his country. It’s a national relic and sacred to an important sect of Moslems. No wonder it caused all this trouble!

  “But where did you find that little piece of film? How would a smart fellow like Collins be that careless and leave it lying around?”

  Landon glanced at Eloise and grinned. “I didn’t find it. Miss Foster and I made it.”

  “What?”

  “Sure. Look closely. That’s me in front of the safe. Miss Foster shot it last night to find out whether you could really get the combination that way. I noticed the plug in the desk, but didn’t connect it up in my mind with the camera until about half an hour ago. It had never occurred to me to bluff the case. But when Collins fairly asked for it, I finally tumbled. This piece is a negative, but Collins didn’t notice that. And luckily, it caught fire while I was drying it, so that he thought it was a piece which he himself hadn’t completely burned. He was too scared just now to be observant.”

  “But why didn’t you bring the film to Headquarters?” demanded Healy. “Your story would—”

  “If I had come to Headquarters, I’d have gotten a hunk of rubber hose over the bean, and the papers would have said, ‘The police are momentarily expecting a confession’. Furthermore, I didn’t get the embezzlement slant until I heard Collins buying bonds instead of selling them. And it wasn’t until after I’d stolen that motorcycle and made my escape and calmed down again that it occurred to me that the pictures had been taken through the hole in the desk. That made things click.”

  “But just the same,” objected Healy, “you shouldn’t have shot at those cops last night, and socked that motor cop this morning. He might have shot you. You took an awful chance making that useless getaway.”

  “So did Bert Collins,” grinned Landon. “And as soon as you get out of here, I’m going to take a much longer chance.”

  As he spoke, his eyes shifted and he regarded Eloise inquiringly.

  “If you never take any worse risks,” she said, “you’ll live a long time.”

  TO REMEMBER YOU BY, by Rufus King

  Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1957.

  Jane Maxon, who was an only child and idolized her father, had just turned thirteen when her father contracted his fatal illness. This occurred on the morning following her birthday, at which Maxon had given her, among her other presents, a gold locket shaped as a heart, to be worn around her neck on a slender chain.

  “Always,” he said to her for some peculiar reason, “to remember me by.”

  “I don’t have to remember you,” Jane answered with clear logic, “because you are here.”

  The next day Fred Maxon announced at breakfast, “I feel a cold coming on. One of those things with chills.”

  Jane’s stepmother Aurelia (a dazzle sort of a woman whose make-up stood out frankly for the cosmetics that it was) put down her cup of hot chocolate and said with concern, “I’ll telephone Dr. Campanelli and make an appointment.”

  “Nonsense, Aurelia. A couple of aspirins will do the trick.”

  “Fred, I insist. Your skin looks sort of yellow. It has that jaundice look.”

  Aurelia checked the flash of exultation in her eyes. At last the break had come after all her patient waiting: the genuine touch of illness that a doctor could earmark with a positive diagnosis—the genuine illness in which, during its clinical course and unfortunate ending, the doctor could retain complete confidence in his diagnosis.

  Jaundice.

  Aurelia considered the disease thoughtfully, rummaging in her extensive knowledge of medico-legal lore—a knowledge developed through the sad conclusion of two previous carefully concealed marriages.

  …a sub-acute type of poisoning may develop if arsenic compounds are administered in small doses at repeated intervals…the victim may develop a toxic degeneration of the liver which progresses to an acute or sub-acute yellow atrophy accompanied by an intense toxic jaundice…

  Dr. Campanelli agreed with Aurelia. It was jaundice, all right, but nothing to worry about. Dr. Campanelli had not, but should have, retired. He was seventy years old and had been in active practice in Halcyon (a town on the eastern seaboard of Florida, somewhat north of Miami) for the past thirty of them, after having disposed of his office in Michigan.

  He was aware of the modern strides in medicine, but he placed only cautious stock in them, maintaining that their beneficial effects were too capriciously offset by unhappy reactions to the newer powerful drugs. He started his medication for Max
on by prescribing proper dosages of ammonium chloride for a catarrhal jaundice.

  It irked Maxon to stay in bed. He was an active man and devoted to the sea. His great-grandfather had established the Maxon Line of cargo carriers, and it was natural that this love for the waters of the earth should be in his blood.

  “When I die,” he had often said, “I want to be cremated and have my ashes scattered in the Atlantic Ocean.”

  It was an odd but not patently noticeable fact that Aurelia, of late, had taken to quoting him on it whenever she could do so without the remark seeming forced or obvious.

  During the second week of Maxon’s clinical course his eyes puffed up, and he developed an intolerance to light, and Dr. Campanelli shifted his medication to eyebright (Euphrasia) as an astringent tonic.

  For the third week of Maxon’s by now debilitating illness Dr. Campanelli relied on dosages of calomel for the drug’s antiseptic action upon what he had come to decide was a badly developed state of gastric enteritis.

  Then Maxon died.

  It was Jane’s first experience with the death of a loved one (her mother had died at Jane’s birth) and, being a special sort of child, she was icily moved rather than hysterically shaken. She kept her small tanned face an expressionless mask over the irreparable sadness that confounded her.

  “It’s like cutting off an arm or a leg,” she said with precocious wisdom to her best friend Lily Blaine. “You can’t get it back, so you have to learn to live without it.”

  “You’re hard, Jane,” Lily said admiringly. “You have a will of iron.”

  “So is a turtle hard. It has to be because of its soft insides.”

  After the bland undertaker and his pale assistant had finished fixing up Papa and had put him in a coffin set on trestles in the Florida room, arranging the floral offerings from all of Papa’s friends around it, Jane went in and stood in solitary contemplation beside it.

  Monsignor Lavigny, coming softly into the room with the gliding effect of mercury in motion, found her there. The prelate, who resembled the portraits of Cardinal Richelieu to an extraordinary degree, was a yearly snowbird from the frozen winters of the Province of Quebec. He rented a house next door to the Maxons’ each season, living in modest luxury with a housekeeper, a chauffeur, a Cadillac car, and a cellar of vintage wines. Although not of the same faith, Monsignor Lavigny had stepped over both to express his neighborly sympathy and to add his prayers for the dead.