The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

Paul Dawn had a way with suspects. He managed to extract more information from witnesses in his own quiet, unintentional way than the bulldozing, browbeating Stanley Fledge. Paul explained it by saying that he “caught them off guard,” which is probably just as good an explanation as any.

  Agnes Seabrook was a cute little blonde with a nice smile and a vacant head. Her husband was more the studious type. He was a short young man, slightly pudgy in spots, with big eyes peering out from behind dark-rimmed glasses. With the appearance of two representatives of the Law, he appeared to be rather flustered.

  “And I’ll say right now,” he said hotly, “that this is getting to be downright annoying. Police dropping in every minute of the day to ask me stupid questions. I couldn’t even get down to the office today.”

  “I’m really very sorry, Mr. Seabrook,” Fledge said soothingly, “but routine is routine. I think I can promise you that this will be the last time we question you.”

  “It better be. Enough is enough. I’ll say right now that—”

  Fledge cleared his throat. “Now, Mr. Seabrook, will you tell me again what happened last night?”

  “For the five thousandth time. We had dinner with Uncle George. At nine o’clock he had to leave, so we walked him to the elevator. The elevator came. He said goodbye. He pushed the button for the first floor. He said goodbye again. The elevator door closed. And that was that.”

  “Your neighbor, Mrs. Battleman, saw all this too?”

  “Yeah. Old leather-puss came out to take in her evening paper. Only I think she really wanted to catch a look at Uncle George. Big financier and all that. She’s an old sneak, anyway.”

  “She is not an old sneak, Phil!” Mrs. Seabrook spoke up for the first time, indignantly. “She’s a charming and cultured woman. And she’s one of the nicest girls I know.”

  “Girls,” Philip sneered. “If that ‘girl’ is a day under seventy-five I’ll eat her bustle.”

  “You’re absolutely certain that Mr. George Seabrook was alive when that elevator door closed?” Fledge asked.

  “He didn’t look dead,” Agnes Seabrook said tentatively.

  Philip drew himself up in what he meant to be a haughty manner. “I can still tell a live man from a corpse, Inspector,” he said.

  “Now,” said Fledge, veering off on another tack, “what about motive? Mr. Seabrook, can you think of any possible reason why anyone should want to kill your uncle?”

  “I’m sure I can’t tell you.” Philip glared at Fledge defiantly. “Seems to me that’s your job, Inspector.”

  “So it is.” Fledge turned to Agnes. “Can you think of any reason?”

  “Of course,” she said. “There are a lot of people who’d want to kill Uncle George.”

  “Ah! Who?”

  “Well, Philip and myself, for instance.”

  Philip’s face grew red. “You’re a fool, Agnes,” he exploded.

  “No, I’m not.” She faced the Inspector. “You were bound to find out sooner or later. We didn’t like George Seabrook. Not many people did. He was horribly conceited, pompous, self-righteous, possessive—that’s about all the words I can think of. Anyway, that’s the kind of awful old man he was. He didn’t like Philip getting married to me, and when he did he decided he was going to give me a sort of six months period of inspection. For the last six months, since we were married, George Seabrook has been inviting himself up to the apartment for dinner almost every week. And you know why? Just so he could look me over and see if he ‘approved’ of me. Well, we didn’t like that. We don’t like being pawed over, and dissected by a rich relative. There were times when I felt like killing him myself.”

  Here was a phenomenon, Paul thought. A dumb woman with brains. For lack of anything better to do, he decided to ask a question. “You’ll pardon me, Mrs. Seabrook—” His voice was quiet enough but they all started at the sound of it. “I was just wondering—if you really detested your uncle so much, why did you tolerate him all this time?”

  “Just what I was about to ask,” Fledge said.

  “Money!” Philip Seabrook burst out suddenly. “What did you think? Uncle George was a rich man, and I’m not. But I was his only living relative. And if you can’t follow it from there—”

  “You stood to gain everything?” Fledge asked.

  “I stood! I do get everything. Uncle’s lawyer phoned me this morning. And I’m not particularly sorry or humble about it either. As a matter of fact, it’s a relief that he’s dead. I never did get Rockefeller’s salary.”

  There was a strained pause.

  Well, now, this is nice, thought Paul Dawn. It isn’t often that he had a perfect motive, wrapped in a neat little bundle, deposited in his lap. But Inspector Fledge was hesitating. Under ordinary circumstances, a police officer would arrest a suspect on an admission like that. But not in this case. Fledge could do nothing. Paul smiled as he wondered how the Inspector was going to charge anybody with a murder that nobody could have committed.

  With a sudden pang of worry, Paul wondered how he himself was going to figure this thing out. The fact remained. Somebody must have got into that elevator—except that nobody could have got into it.

  “Have any questions before we leave, Paul?” said Fledge rising.

  “Uh—yes. Just one.” He looked at the Seabrooks with that same sleepy expression. “Mr. or Mrs. Seabrook—perhaps you can tell me one thing. Can you think of a five letter word meaning ‘to fall prostrate’ and the last letter is ‘t’?”

  The very puzzled Seabrooks stared blankly and the two detectives left.

  Out in the hallway, Fledge was completely bewildered. “Listen, Paul, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Maybe it was suicide,” Paul muttered.

  “Suicide!” Fledge spoke in a murderously calm voice. “And how, tell me, did our suicidal corpse STAB HIMSELF IN THE BACK?”

  “Perhaps,” said Paul maliciously, “he was a contortionist.”

  Dr. Herbert Martin was one of those big, hearty, robust physicians who are never without their bedside manner. Paul and Fledge found him in his downtown office, and were treated to an effusive greeting.

  “Sit down, gentlemen! Glad to see you. Anything I can do to help? Horrible affair, isn’t it? Well, well, well. What is it you want to know?”

  The doctor had a trick of rubbing his big ham-like hands together in a businesslike manner while speaking.

  “We’d just like to know once more what happened, Doctor.” Fledge was polite but still official.

  “What happened? Now let me see.” The doctor paused thoughtfully. “I’d just come back to the apartment from a call I’d been making. Patient was an old woman I’ve been treating for years. She’s a hypochondriac and pays me a lot of money to tell her there’s something the matter with her. She’s as healthy as a horse, really. Healthier. But I’ve got to make a living. At any rate, I arrived at the house just as the elevator door was closing. I pushed the button and waited. The indicator started at the first floor and went up to the fifth. Then it started down again. Around that time, another tenant—a woman—arrived and we waited together.”

  “Miss Flora Kingsley?”

  “So I discovered later. I’m new to the building and I don’t usually get very friendly with neighbors anyway. Trouble with all us New Yorkers. Stick to ourselves too much. But that’s beside the point. Miss Kingsley and I waited till the elevator reached our floor. It stopped and I pulled open the door. Then—then I saw him.” It seemed to Paul that Dr. Martin was trembling just slightly. “He was bunched up in the corner of the elevator, his back to the wall. I rushed toward him, but I told Miss Kingsley to stay back. She waited in the doorway and watched. I bent down by the body and saw the knife. She screamed. ‘He’s dead,’ I said. ‘Go phone the police!’ At first she was frozen to the spot. I didn’t want her to get hysterical, so I ordered her to phone the police. In a few minutes she returned and we waited together. Then you arrived, Inspector.”

  Convin
cing enough, Paul thought. “Doctor,” he drawled, “you were George Seabrook’s physician?”

  “Yes. I was.” Martin’s gaze was level and unflinching.

  “Wasn’t in good health, was he?”

  “No, he wasn’t. He had heart trouble. Bad kidneys. Fainting spells. Bad headaches. A great deal of pain, I imagine.”

  “Enough pain, do you think, to make him commit suicide?”

  The doctor hesitated a moment. Then finally he said, “Perhaps.”

  “That’s not very definite.”

  “That’s as definite as I care to be.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Martin.”

  “Oh, by the way,” Martin said. “That’s a puzzler, isn’t it—how the murder was committed?”

  “Certainly is,” said Paul. “Talking of puzzlers, do you know a five letter word meaning ‘to fall prostrate’? The last letter is ‘t.’ ”

  “Crossword puzzles?” Martin said jovially. “Used to work them. Got out of the habit these days.”

  “Do you know the word?” Paul inquired.

  “No.”

  Paul could understand why Miss Flora Kingsley had remained a spinster all sixty years of her life. She had tight lips, a drawn white face, and two piercing, highly menacing eyes. She looked to Paul as if she had escaped from a Boris Karloff movie. And the fact that she wore her hair in a very modern fashion only served to increase the ghoulish effect.

  “What do you want to ask me?” Miss Kingsley asked in a flat, metallic voice.

  “Miss Kingsley, we’d just like your story of what happened last evening.”

  She told them in short, precise sentences as if she knew it by heart. It corroborated what Dr. Martin had told them almost exactly. Paul especially noticed how she described her reactions to the murder.

  “I was quite broken up,” she said. “Dr. Martin said that the man was dead, and after that I must have screamed. An exceedingly undignified thing to do.”

  “You used to work for Mr. Seabrook, Miss Kingsley?”

  “Yes. I did.” Her lips tightened. “Many years ago.”

  “Why did you leave him?”

  “He retired from business.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No.”

  Paul spoke suddenly in a lazy voice. “Miss Kingsley, is it possible that Mr. Seabrook retired because his business failed?”

  Her fingers gripped the side of her chair.

  “Yes. That’s possible.”

  “And wasn’t there a rumor at the time that the reason his business failed was because Mr. Seabrook had been drawing illegally from the funds of his stockholders?”

  “It was never proved!” she cried, jumping to her feet. It was her first sign of emotion. She subsided wearily into the chair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Yes. I’d heard that.”

  “You believed it?”

  She nodded her head.

  “Thank you. Uh—do you ever do crossword puzzles, Miss Kingsley?”

  She looked at him with a very suspicious expression for a moment. Then her face hardened. She rose to her feet and faced both of them squarely.

  “Would you gentlemen leave now?”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Paul said gently.

  “No. I didn’t, did I? Good afternoon.”

  They were in police headquarters that evening.

  “Blind alleys,” Stanley Fledge shouted. “Dead ends,” Stanley Fledge yelled. “Stone walls,” Stanley Fledge screamed. “And elevators. Damn it all, that’s what gets me. I could take each one of them and sweat it out of them—if I only had some sort of a clue about the elevator. How did the murderer get into that elevator? What happened? Am I going nuts? Am I dreaming all this? How did the murderer get into that elevator?”

  “The murderer didn’t get into that elevator,” said Paul very calmly.

  Fledge’s mouth fell open; his eyes bulged.

  “What?”

  “I said—the murderer didn’t get into that elevator.”

  “Do you know how it was done?”

  Paul Dawn lit a cigarette with a steady hand. He puffed once and let the smoke pour out of his nostrils. “I knew how it was done some time ago. The question was,” he said, “to prove it.”

  “And did you—” Fledge gulped helplessly, “did you—prove it?”

  “I did. Come up to my office tomorrow morning and find out all about it.” He rose from his chair. “You’d better come early. At ten-thirty the morning paper arrives, and I’ll be very busy—doing the crossword puzzle.”

  Paul Dawn kept a bottle of scotch in his desk drawer—for medicinal purposes. After he learned what the real solution was, Inspector Fledge was astounded enough to dispose of half the bottle in three large gulps.

  “It’s so simple,” Paul said. “So easy. I really saw it all the time.”

  And it was simple. Very simple. But ingenious, Paul hastened to add. It was especially ingenious the way he explained it.

  “All you’ve got to do is look at it with imagination. That’s why these impossible crimes are right up my alley. I might not have a lot of things. Initiative or energy. But I certainly have imagination.”

  Inspector Fledge would be the last to deny it.

  “Here’s the way it really happened,” Paul said. “In solving these impossible murders we’ve got to take a hard, unsentimental view. You’ve got to discount ghosts, or invisible men, or complicated contraptions operated by radio control. You’ve got to get it into your head that there is no such thing as an impossible murder.

  “That’s what I got into my head right from the start. George Seabrook was killed. Someone entered that elevator and shoved a knife into his back. In order to enter the elevator, the murderer had to come in, obviously, by an entrance. There is, however, only one entrance to the elevator. You searched it through and through yourself. You found only one entrance. I searched it through and through. I found only one entrance. That entrance is the elevator door. Therefore the murderer must have entered when the elevator door was open.

  “But it’s impossible for the elevator door to be open while the elevator is in motion, and in the course of this affair the elevator door was open only twice. It was open while the elevator was on the fifth floor, and while the elevator was on the first floor.

  “Therefore George Seabrook was killed while the elevator was either on the fifth floor or on the first floor.

  “Well, let’s see about these two times. When Seabrook got into the elevator he was alive. When he pushed the elevator button he was alive. When the door closed he was alive. Three different people confirmed that, including a woman who can be considered an outsider. From this we conclude that Seabrook couldn’t have been killed while the elevator was on the fifth floor.

  “So he must have been killed while the elevator was on the first floor!”

  “But as soon as the elevator door opened at the first floor,” objected Fledge, “two different witnesses saw Seabrook lying on the floor with a knife in his back!”

  “Did they? That is where we’ve been making our mistake all along. What do we know, and what are we only surmising? The witnesses say that Seabrook was lying on the floor with a knife in his back. But the witnesses only saw Seabrook from the elevator doorway. Seabrook’s back was toward the wall. Actually all that both of these witnesses saw was Seabrook lying on the floor. Miss Kingsley was standing in the doorway all the time. Contrary to what she says, she couldn’t possibly have seen that knife in Seabrook’s back.”

  Fledge waved his hand at Paul like a child asking to be called on in class. “Hold on!” the Inspector said. “The action is moving too fast for me. So what if Miss Kingsley didn’t see the knife—Dr. Martin did!”

  “Did he?” Paul paused and smiled with satisfaction. “That’s exactly my point, Fledge. Did Dr. Martin see the knife in Seabrook’s back, or did Dr. Martin merely say that he saw a knife in Seabrook’s back?

  “Let’s piece together the facts. Martin says that Miss Kingsley
screamed and then he said, ‘He’s dead!’ Miss Kingsley says that Martin said ‘He’s dead!’ first, and then she screamed. Why should one of them lie? It’s my guess that Martin lied because he made that exclamation ‘He’s dead!’ for a purpose. He cried out ‘He’s dead!’ in order psychologically to plant in Miss Kingsley’s mind the false idea that she had seen Seabrook dead, when all she had really seen was Seabrook lying on the floor.

  “Well, knowing that Seabrook wasn’t dead, what was wrong with him? And there comes one of the greatest twists of Fate that I have ever encountered in my life. Remember my five-letter word meaning ‘to fall prostrate.’ The last letter is a ‘t.’ Well, that’s exactly what Seabrook did. He gave me my definition. He ‘fell prostrated.’ He fainted!

  “Don’t you see? Seabrook had one of his fainting spells while going down in the elevator. Dr. Martin said he was subject to them. When the elevator reached the first floor, Martin saw Seabrook lying there. He realized instantly what had happened. An idea sprang to his mind. He saw how he could take advantage of the fact that Seabrook had fainted in an elevator.

  “Immediately he began to play up the idea that Seabrook was dead, all for Miss Kingsley’s benefit. He rushed over to the body. He shouted ‘He’s dead!’ He pointed to an imaginary knife in Seabrook’s back that Miss Kingsley couldn’t possibly see because of the body’s position. All the time he kept her at a safe distance from Seabrook. He made it all seem very cold-blooded and realistic. By the time Dr. Martin had finished his little scene he had poor Miss Kingsley actually believing she had seen a corpse.

  “Then he got rid of her—he ordered her to phone the police.

  “This is another point against Dr. Martin. He was the only one in the whole bunch who was alone with Seabrook from the moment the old man got into that elevator!

  “While Miss Kingsley was phoning, Martin bent down beside Seabrook and put on his doctor’s rubber gloves. He had them in his medical bag. And we know he had his medical bag with him because he had just come back from a call. He put on the gloves, stabbed Seabrook in the back, and put the gloves back in the bag.

  “Martin probably felt absolutely safe. As long as Miss Kingsley held up—and he was sure she would—he had nothing to worry about. Because she could always alibi him by testifying that Seabrook was dead at a time when Martin couldn’t possibly have killed him. Get it?”