The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  Unless, Haviland thought to himself, the lynching spirit gets into them. He was thinking of an old man in a red vest and a green necktie and a diamond twinkling on his little finger. He was thinking of a broken window pane—and of the way he’d seen mobs act before in his time.

  Someone gripped the sleeve of Haviland’s coat and he looked down into the horror-struck face of Elizabeth Deering, Jerry Mahoney’s girl.

  “It’s true then,” she whispered. She swayed on her feet, holding tight to Haviland for support.

  “It’s true they found some things belonging to the kids,” he said. “That’s all that’s true at the moment, Miss Deering.” He was a little astonished by his own words. He realized that, instinctively, he was not believing everything that he saw in front of him. “This whole area was searched last night before dark,” he said. “No one found any schoolbooks or coats or berets then. No one saw the station wagon.”

  “What’s the use of talking that way?” Peabody said. His eyes were narrowed, staring at Liz Deering. “I don’t want to believe what I see either, Mr. Haviland. But I got to.” The next words came out of the fat man with a bitterness that stung like a whiplash. “Maybe you’re the only one in Clayton that’s lucky, Liz. You found out he was a homicidal maniac in time—before you got married to him.”

  “Please, George!” the girl cried. “How can you believe—”

  “What can anyone believe but that?” Peabody said, and turned away.

  Liz Deering clung to Haviland, sobbing. The tall man stared over her head at the hundreds of people grouped around the quarry’s edge. He was reminded of a mine disaster he had seen once in Pennsylvania; a whole town waiting at the head of the mine shaft for the dead to be brought to the surface.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Liz Deering, with sudden energy.…

  Clayton was a dead town. Stores were closed. Joe’s Diner was closed. The railroad station agent was on the job, handling dozens of telegrams that were coming in from friends and relatives of the parents of the missing children. The two girls in the telephone office, across the street from the bank, were at their posts.

  Old Mr. Granger, a teller in the bank, and one of the stenographers were all of the bank staff that had stayed on the job. Old Mr. Granger was preparing the payroll for the Clayton Marble Company. He didn’t know whether the truck from the company’s offices with the two guards would show up for the money or not.

  Nothing else was working on schedule today. Even the hotel down the street had shut up shop. One or two salesmen had driven into town, heard the news, and gone off down the dugway toward the scene of the tragedy. A few very old people tottered in and out the front doors of houses, looking anxiously down Main Street toward the dugway. Even the clinic was closed. The town’s doctors and nurses had all gone to the scene of the disaster.

  Down the street a piece of newspaper had been taped over the hole in Pat Mahoney’s front window. Pat Mahoney sat in the big overstuffed armchair in his living room. He rocked slowly back and forth, staring at an open scrapbook spread across his knees. A big black headline from a show-business paper was pasted across the top.

  MAHONEY AND FAYE BOFFO BUFFALO

  Under it were pictures of Pat and Nora in their jeweled cowboy suits, their six-shooters drawn, pointing straight at the camera. There was a description of the act, the dance in the dark with only the jewels showing and the six-shooters spouting flame. “Most original number of its kind seen in years,” a Buffalo critic had written. “The ever popular Mahoney and Faye have added something to their familiar routines that should please theater audiences from coast to coast. We are not surprised to hear that they have been booked into the Palace.”

  Pat closed the scrapbook and put it down on the floor beside him. From the inside pocket of his jacket he took a wallet. It bulged with papers and cards. He was an honorary Elk, honorary police chief of Wichita in 1927, a Friar, a Lamb.

  Carefully protected by an isinglass guard were some snapshots. They were faded now, but anyone could see they were pictures of Nora with little Jerry at various stages of his growth. There was Jerry at six months, Jerry at a year, Jerry at four years. And Nora, smiling gently at her son. The love seemed to shine right out of the pictures, Pat thought.

  Pat replaced the pictures and put the wallet back in his pocket. He got up from his chair and moved toward the stairway. People who knew him would have been surprised. No one had ever seen Pat when movements weren’t brisk and youthful. He could still go into a tap routine at the drop of a hat, and he always gave the impression that he was on the verge of doing so. Now he moved slowly, almost painfully—a tired old man, with no need to hide it from anyone. There was no one to hide it from; Jerry was missing, Liz was gone.

  He climbed to the second floor and turned to the attic door. He opened it, switched on the lights, and climbed up to the area under the eaves. There he opened the wardrobe trunk he’d shown to Haviland. From the left side he took out the cowboy outfit—the chaps, the boots, the vest and shirt and Stetson hat, and the gun belt with the two jeweled six-shooters. Slowly he carried them down to his bedroom on the second floor. There Pat Mahoney proceeded to get into costume.

  He stood, at last, in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. The high-heeled boots made him a couple of inches taller than usual. The Stetson was set on his head at a rakish angle. The jeweled chaps and vest glittered in the sunlight from the window. Suddenly old Pat jumped into a flat-footed stance, and the guns were out of the holsters, spinning dizzily and then pointed straight at the mirror.

  “Get ’em up, you lily-livered rats!” old Pat shouted. A bejeweled gunman stared back at him fiercely from the mirror.

  Then, slowly, he turned away to a silver picture frame on his bureau. Nora, a very young girl, looked at him with her gentle smile.

  “It’ll be all right, honey,” Pat said. “You’ll see. It’ll be another boffo, honey. Don’t you worry about your boy. Don’t you ever worry about him while I’m around. You’ll see.…”

  It was a terrible day for Clayton, but Gertrude Naylor, the chief operator in the telephone office, said afterward that perhaps the worst moment for her was when she spotted old Pat Mahoney walking down the main street—right in the middle of the street—dressed in that crazy cowboy outfit. He walked slowly, looking from right to left, staying right on the white line that divided the street.

  “I’d seen it a hundred times before in the movies,” Gertrude Naylor said, afterward. “A cowboy, walking down the street of a deserted town, waiting for his enemy to appear—waiting for the moment to draw his guns. Old Pat’s hands floated just above the crazy guns in his holster, and he kept rubbing the tips of his fingers against his thumb. I showed him to Millie, and we started to laugh, and then, somehow, it seemed about the most awful thing of all. Jerry Mahoney had murdered those kids and here was his old man, gone nutty as a fruitcake.”

  Old Mr. Granger, in the bank, had much the same reaction when the aged, bejeweled gun toter walked up to the teller’s window.

  “Good morning, Mr. Granger,” Pat said, cheerfully.

  Mr. Granger moistened his pale lips. “Good morning, Pat.”

  “You’re not too busy this morning, I see,” Pat said.

  “N-no,” Mr. Granger said. The killer’s father—dressed up like a kid for the circus. He’s ready for a padded cell, Mr. Granger thought.

  “Since you’re not so busy,” Pat said, “I’d like to have a look at the detailed statement of my account for the last three months.” As he spoke, he turned and leaned against the counter, staring out through the plate-glass bank window at the street. His hands stayed near the guns, and he kept rubbing his fingertips against the ball of his thumb.

  “You get a statement each month, Pat,” Mr. Granger said.

  “Just the same, I’d like to see the detailed statement for the last three months,” Pat said.

  “I had to humor him, I thought,” Mr. Granger said later,
“So I went back to the vault to get his records out of the files. Well, I was just inside the vault door when he spoke again, in the most natural way. “If I were you, Mr. Granger,” he said, “I’d close that vault door, and I’d stay inside, and I’d set off all the alarms I could lay my hands on. You’re about to be stuck up, Mr. Granger.”

  “Well, I thought it was part of his craziness,” Mr. Granger said, later. “I thought he meant he was going to stick up the bank. I thought that was why he’d got all dressed up in that cowboy outfit. Gone back to his childhood, I thought. I was scared, because I figured he was crazy. So I did close the vault door. And I did set off the alarm, only it didn’t work. I didn’t know then all the electric wires into the bank had been cut.”

  Gertrude and Millie, the telephone operators, had a box seat for the rest of it. They saw the black sedan draw up in front of the bank and they saw the four men in dark suits and hats get out of it and start up the steps of the bank. Two of them were carrying small suitcases and two of them were carrying guns.

  Then suddenly the bank doors burst open and an ancient cowboy appeared, hands poised over his guns. He did a curious little jig step that brought him out in a solid square stance. The four men were so astonished at the sight of him they seemed to freeze.

  “Stick ’em up, you lily-livered rats!” old Pat shouted. The guns were out of the holsters, twirling. Suddenly they belched flame, straight at the bandits.

  The four men dived for safety, like men plunging off the deck of a sinking ship. One of them made the corner of the bank building. Two of them got to the safe side of the car. The fourth, trying to scramble back into the car, was caught in the line of fire.

  “I shot over your heads that first time!” Pat shouted. “Move another inch and I’ll blow you all to hell!” The guns twirled again and then suddenly aimed steadily at the exposed bandit. “All right, come forward and throw your guns down,” Pat ordered.

  The man in the direct line of fire obeyed at once. His gun bounced on the pavement a few feet from Pat and he raised his arms slowly. Pat inched his way toward the discarded gun.

  The other men didn’t move. And then Gertrude and Millie saw the one who had gotten around the corner of the bank slowly raise his gun and take deliberate aim at Pat. She and Millie both screamed, and it made old Pat jerk his head around. In that instant there was a roar of gunfire.

  Old Pat went down, clutching at his shoulder. But so did the bandit who’d shot him and so did one of the men behind the car. Then Gertrude and Millie saw the tall figure of Mr. Haviland come around the corner of the hotel next door, a smoking gun in his hand. He must have spoken very quietly because Gertrude and Millie couldn’t hear him, but whatever he said made the other bandits give up. Then they saw Liz Deering running across the street to where old Pat lay, blood dripping through the fingers that clutched at his shoulder.…

  Trooper Teliski’s car went racing through the dugway at breakneck speed, siren shrieking. As he came to the turn-in to the old quarry, his tires screamed and he skidded in and up the rugged path, car bounding over stones, ripping through brush. Suddenly just ahead of him on the path loomed the crane from the new quarry, inching up the road on a caterpillar tractor. Trooper Teliski sprang out of his car and ran past the crane, shouting at the tractor driver as he ran.

  “To hell with that!” Teliski shouted. Stumbling and gasping for breath, he raced out into the clearing where hundreds of people waited in a grief-stricken silence for the grappling for bodies to begin.

  “Everybody!” Teliski shouted. “Everybody! Listen!” He was half laughing, half strangling for breath. “Your kids aren’t there! They’re safe. They’re all safe—the kids, Jerry Mahoney, everyone! They aren’t there. They’ll be home before you will! Your kids—” And then he fell forward on his face, sucking in the damp, loam-scented air.

  Twenty minutes later Clayton was a madhouse. People running, people driving, people hanging on to the running boards of cars and clinging to bumpers. And in the middle of the town, right opposite the bank, was a station wagon with a yellow school bus sign on its roof, and children were spilling out of it, waving and shouting at their parents, who laughed and wept. And a handsome young Irishman with bright blue eyes was locked in a tight embrace with Elizabeth Deering.…

  Haviland’s fingers shook slightly as he lit a cigarette. Not yet noon and he was on his third pack.

  “You can’t see him yet,” he said to Jerry Mahoney. “The doctor’s with him. In a few minutes.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Jerry said. “People thought I had harmed those kids?”

  “You don’t know what it’s been like here,” Liz Deering said, clinging tightly to his arm.

  Jerry Mahoney turned and saw the newspaper taped over the broken front window, and his face hardened. “Try and tell me, plain and simple, about Pop,” he said.

  Haviland shook his head, smiling like a man still dazed. “Your Pop is an amazing man, Mr. Mahoney,” he said. “His mind works in its own peculiar ways … The disappearance of the bus affected him differently from some others. He saw it as a magic trick, and he thought of it as a magic trick—or, rather, as part of a magic trick. He said it to me and I wouldn’t listen. He said it is a magician’s job to get you to think what he wants you to think and see what he wants you to see. The disappearance of the children, the ghastly faking of their death in the quarry—it meant one thing to your Pop, Mr. Mahoney. Someone wanted all the people in Clayton to be out of town. Why?

  “There was only one good reason that remarkable Pop of yours could think of. The quarry payroll. Nearly a hundred thousand dollars in cash, and not a soul in town to protect it. Everyone would be looking for the children, and all the bandits had to do was walk in the bank and take the money. No cops, no nothing to interfere with them.”

  “But why didn’t Pop tell you his idea?” Jerry asked.

  “You still don’t know what it was like here, Mr. Mahoney,” Haviland said. “People thought you had done something to those kids; they imagined your Pop knew something about it. If he’d told his story, even to me, I think I’d have thought he was either touched in the head or covering up. So he kept still—although he did throw me a couple of hints. And suddenly, he was, to all intents and purposes, alone in the town. So he went upstairs, got dressed in those cowboy clothes and went, calm as you please, to the bank to meet the bandits he knew must be coming. And they came.”

  “But why the cowboy suit?” Liz Deering asked.

  “A strange and wonderful mind,” Haviland said. “He thought the sight of him would be screwy enough to throw the bandits a little off balance. He thought if he started blasting away with his guns they might panic. They almost did.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Liz said, “is how, when he fired straight at them, he never hit anybody!”

  “Those were stage guns—prop guns,” Jerry said. “They only fire blanks.”

  Haviland nodded. “He thought he could get them to drop their own guns and then he’d have a real weapon and have the drop on them. It almost worked. But the one man who’d ducked around the corner of the building got in a clean shot at him. Fortunately, I arrived at exactly the same minute, and I had them all from behind.”

  “But how did you happen to turn up?” Jerry asked.

  “I couldn’t get your father out of my mind,” Haviland said. “He seemed to know what was going to happen. He said they’d be searching for the kids, whether I told them to wait at home or not. Suddenly I had to know why he’d said that.”

  “Thank God,” Jerry said. “I gather you got them to tell you where we were?”

  Haviland nodded. “I’m still not dead clear how it worked, Jerry.”

  “It was as simple as pie a la mode,” Jerry said. “I was about a half mile into the dugway on the home trip with the kids. We’d just passed Karl Dickler headed the other way when a big trailer truck loomed up ahead of me on the road. It was stopped, and a couple of guys were standing around the tai
l end of it.

  “Broken down, I thought. I pulled up. All of a sudden guns were pointed at me and the kids. They didn’t talk much. They just said to do as I was told. They opened the back of the big truck and rolled out a ramp. Then I was ordered to drive the station wagon right up into the body of the truck. I might have tried to make a break for it except for the kids. I drove up into the truck, they closed up the rear end, and that was that. They drove off with us—right through the main street of town here!”

  Haviland shook his head. “An old trick used hundreds of times back in the bootleg days. And I never thought of it!”

  “Not ten minutes later,” Jerry went on, “they pulled into that big deserted barn on the Haskell place. We’ve been shut up there ever since. They were real decent to the kids—hot dogs, ice cream cones, soda.

  “So we just waited there, not knowing why, but nobody hurt, and the kids not as scared as you might think,” Jerry laughed. “Oh, we came out of the dugway all right—and right by everybody in town. But nobody saw us.”

  The doctor appeared in the doorway. “You can see him for a minute now, Jerry,” he said. “I had to give him a pretty strong sedative. Dug the bullet out of his shoulder and it hurt a bit. He’s pretty sleepy—but he’ll do better if he sees you, I think. Don’t stay too long, though.”

  Jerry bounded up the stairs and into the bedroom where Pat Mahoney lay, his face very pale, his eyes half closed. Jerry knelt by the bed.

  “Pop,” he whispered, “You crazy old galoot!”

  Pat opened his eyes. “You okay, Jerry?”

  “Okay, Pop.”

  “And the kids?”

  “Fine. Not a hair on their heads touched.” Jerry reached out and covered Pat’s hand with his. “Now look here. Two-Gun Mahoney …”

  Pat grinned at him. “It was a boffo, Jerry. A real boffo.”

  “It sure was,” Jerry said. He started to speak, but he saw that Pat was looking past him at the silver picture frame on the dresser.