The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries

by Ashley, Mike;

  A Chinese girl stood in the door.

  “You sent for me, sir?”

  “Ah . . . oh . . . yes.”

  Sandra sprang up.

  “You’re Helen Ying?” she asked.

  The girl turned her oval face to her. She was comely, with jetblack, long-lashed, modest eyes. She curtseyed. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you know who would try to send acid to you?”

  “Acid!” The girl’s eyes went wide. “To me! No, ma’am!”

  “A Chinese man just came to my office and tried to get me to bring you a bamboo tube filled with sulphuric acid. It was fixed so that if you held it toward you, the natural way to open it, the acid would have spurted all over your face and throat.”

  The girl clutched at herself, aghast. Her eyes were like saucers.

  “He said his name was Dow. He claimed to be your cousin. Do you know him?”

  The girl shook her head dumbly. Sandra searched the wide jet-black eyes. They were as candid as her own.

  “A young, flashily dressed man, very well educated, smoked gold-tipped cigarettes. Have you any idea who he was?”

  “No, ma’am. None . . . none at all.”

  The Vandyked De Saules asked with a sly smile: “No love affairs, or anything like that?”

  “No, sir.” The girl did not raise her eyes. “I do not know any men here in the city at all.”

  “My dear girl, don’t lie.” De Saules fingered his point of beard. “You must know him, otherwise there’d be no point—”

  “Suppose we hear what this says,” said old Mr Delaunay, ripping open the rice-paper envelope. He took out a typed sheet of paper, read in a slow, loud voice:

  Mr John Delaunay:

  You are about to die.

  The acid sent to the maid is merely a subordinate matter.

  Do not stay alone by yourself.

  Do not eat or drink anything.

  This is the only way to show that your death is not suicide, but murder.

  No human agency can prevent your death.

  “What’s this?” For an instant the old man’s tongue moved speechlessly in his open mouth. “Me! My death! What infernal madness is this?”

  His daughter Marceline gasped: “It’s a death threat!”

  De Saules cried to Sandra: “This Chinaman, this Dow, gave that to you?”

  “Yes! Yes!” Sandra was stunned, bewildered. “Dow – Dow, the same one that gave me the acid tube!”

  “Who would dare do such a thing!” With the quick irascibility of age the old man flew into a rage. His mild eyes flashed, he banged his cane on the floor, he ground his teeth, flung the note down and stamped on it. “Call the police! I’ll have that scoundrel if it’s the last thing—”

  He lurched suddenly sideways. It was not a step; it was as though he had been struck from the side. The blackthorn cane flew from him. He screamed out:

  “My tongue! My throat!”

  Sandra could only see his face, twisted, demoniac. He was tearing at his mouth in a frenzy. Then he fell backward in a frightful spasm, struck a floor lamp, plunged like a senseless blind hammer to the floor.

  II

  It was so horrible and swift it left them riveted. Sandra felt only a jar in both shoulder blades, as though she had been driven back in her chair. Then De Saules was plunging at the body.

  “Mr Delaunay! Mr Delaunay!”

  He had one arm beneath the old man’s neck, lifting his head. He froze. It was when the head came into the glare of the overturned lamp. The multitudinously wrinkled face lolled at them, eyeballs bulging, staring, glazed. It was not that which cut the breath in their throats; not the hideous grimace on his face – not even the fact of his death.

  The old man’s tongue protruded from his lips. It was the color of paper. It had a coarse, pitted texture; it looked like a spongy head of swollen fungus, plugged like a stopper between his lips.

  The butler was there. The maid was rocking back and forth like someone on the edge of a precipice. The bell was ringing its triple musical chime. Nobody paid any attention to it.

  Marceline reeled against Sandra, clutched her arm with hands that almost tore the muscle out.

  “Poisoned!” the girl gasped. “He’s poisoned!”

  “Poisoned!” De Saules whipped to her. “You’re mad! How could he be?”

  “The note!” Marceline screamed the words. “The note! It said he would die!”

  Sandra grabbed the butler by the arm. It was like shaking a wooden image.

  “Call the police! The police!”

  “They’re” – the butler waved one arm wildly; he was trying, to indicate the door – “coming up—”

  Sandra flashed by him, darted down the hall. Men were hammering at the door. She saw two detectives, behind them the gold bulk of Gawdy’s topcoat, his florid handsome face. She snatched open the door; the hard-eyed man in the lead touched his hat.

  “Hullo, Miss Grey. We’re following up that acid business—”

  Sandra caught him by the arm. “Captain Corrigan! There’s a dead man in here! Come on!”

  The hard-eyed detective captain went by her in two strides. He turned long enough to snap to his companion: “Get the M.E. He’s in the car.”

  Gawdy got Sandra by the arm. His bright-blue eyes were wide.

  “What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

  “Mr Delaunay’s dead! Murdered! That note Dow gave me – it said he would die!”

  Gawdy’s high-colored features blanched. He said only one word: “Marceline!” He plunged by Sandra into the library.

  The library was a scene of confusion. Marceline was screaming; the loud, continuous screams of hysteria. De Saules was ineffectually shouting at her, pleading with her. Captain Corrigan took one look out of his hard eyes, walked up and slapped her across the face.

  “Shut up!” he said. “Sit down.”

  It acted like magic. Marceline fell onto the sofa, stopped screaming. The room jolted into calm as if ice water had been sluiced through it.

  Captain Corrigan turned around, looked at the dead man. Sandra saw even the scalp on his blunt bullet head move with surprise as he observed that outthrust paper – white tongue.

  “When’d this happen?” His hard eyes swiveled like turret guns at De Saules.

  “Just now, not two minutes ago!”

  “What had he been drinking?”

  “Drinking!” De Saules’ point of beard jabbed up and down with the irregular movement of his jaw. “Nothing! He was reading that note – that note that prophesied his death!” He darted across, picked up the crumpled rice paper from the rug. “Here! This!”

  Corrigan read it. A little man with a black bag bustled in and kneeled down by the corpse, but Corrigan paid no attention. The mouth in his blunt face opened with a jerk as he looked up at De Saules.

  “Where’d this come from?”

  “I brought it!” Sandra’s eyes were like vivid stars. “It’s from that Chinese, Dow – the one that gave me the acid tube!”

  “What!” The difference in tone as Corrigan spoke to Sandra was noticeable. “That Chinaman who brought you the acid tube! You mean he’s mixed up in this?”

  “Yes! Yes! Mr Delaunay had just read it. He got very angry. He jumped up and—” She groped for words. “He simply fell over, crying out something about his tongue! That was all! He didn’t take anything; he didn’t drink anything; we all saw him!”

  Corrigan looked from her to De Saules to Marceline. He looked at the note. His hard eyes had an expression as if he were surrounded by a group of lunatics. His voice reflected it. “He’s dead of a corrosive poison. He must have swallowed it right in front of you.”

  “Perfectly correct.” The medical examiner’s voice was as precise as an icicle. “Absolutely typical reaction – the white tongue, the serrated mucous membrane. The throat shows the same bleaching, all the way to the head of the pharynx. It’s oxalic acid, the quickest-acting of the common poisons.”

 
Corrigan’s eyes shot to the group. “The quickest-acting! You hear that?” His glance swung back to the doctor. “Could it be used for murder?”

  “Impossible.” The doctor pursed his lips flatly. “Not unless one of them fed it to him a moment before he fell dead. He’s a feeble old man. The reaction was instantaneous.”

  Marceline burst in. It sounded for a moment as if her hysteria were about to recur. “But we saw him! We saw him! He didn’t take anything! He didn’t!”

  “Yes!” De Saules’ hawklike head jabbed out. “Two, three, four of us saw it! Are you telling us we’re all mad?”

  Corrigan’s eyes looked jarred in their hard depths. This weight of testimony was beginning to tell on him. His glance shot to the doctor.

  “Could he have held it in his mouth?”

  The doctor gave an incredulous thin snort. “My dear man, this is a corrosive acid. It serrates the mucous membrane. The first touch of it would erode his tongue.”

  “But this is impossible! Impossible!” Corrigan’s eyes battered everyone in savage bewilderment. “Do you realize this is not a poison like arsenic – that’s tasteless, that you can take an hour or so before it acts – this is a corrosive, it acts instantly! He couldn’t have held it in his mouth! He couldn’t! Yet you say he didn’t take anything! How did he get it?”

  “The only possibility is a capsule,” said the doctor’s thin, piercing voice. He was primly polishing a pair of half-moon glasses. “Suppose – an absurdity even on the face of it – that in some manner a capsule had been lodged in his mouth. With the swelling of the tongue, the membranes, the capsule would still be there. There is no capsule. I have examined his mouth and throat thoroughly.”

  There was entire silence. Captain Corrigan sat down on the table, a slow, jarring movement. The manifest impossibility of what was before them locked them all in a kind of mental blankness. A man had been killed, before the eyes of four witnesses, in a perfectly obvious way – he had swallowed a corrosive poison – yet the thing was as impossible as that a railroad tie could be put into the mouth of a milk bottle.

  Into the silence a man stumbled, executing an unsteady semicircle through the library door like the reel of a dervish. A dressing gown made a disheveled scarlet circle around him. He came up at sight of the corpse, grabbing hold of a chair and staring down with haggard, puffy eyes.

  “Who’s this?” snapped Corrigan.

  Marceline spoke rapidly. “He’s a guest. His name’s Lonnie Wyatt. He’s been asleep all afternoon.”

  “A guest!”

  Corrigan stared at Wyatt. Mud splattered his patent leather shoes, the black serge bottoms of his Tuxedo trousers. The stale fumes of liquor reeked from him; his weakly boyish face, puffed with dissipation, gave a series of jerks as though he were about to fall headlong over the body. The plain-clothes man accompanying Corrigan grabbed hold of Wyatt, shoved him in a chair. Marceline’s voice cut in with the same quick rapidity. There was no hint of hysteria in it now.

  “It’s a little difficult to explain. We found him lying outside our entry in this condition this morning. I . . . we . . . took him in and took care of him because he’s a friend.”

  The singularity of this explanation, along with the singularity of the man’s appearance, caused Captain Corrigan to look, not at the drunken Wyatt, but at Marceline. A slight movement of his head indicated the corpse.

  “You’re his daughter?”

  “Yes. I was legally adopted at seventeen.”

  Corrigan narrowed his hard eyes slightly. “Oh.” He switched his glance to the Vandyked De Saules.

  “You’re a relative, too?”

  “A very distant one.” De Saules stopped fingering his beard to make a deprecating gesture. “I met Mr Delaunay for the first time yesterday.”

  “I see.” Corrigan’s head shot around. “Where’s that Chinese maid?”

  The butler bustled out hurriedly into the hall. Sandra sat down quietly in a corner chair, pressed her hands to her temples. It was useless to question the maid. Captain Corrigan was making random gestures like a man who has run into a brick wall. Events still whirled, a mad patchwork, in her own mind. Tags of them flared out at her. Dow’s bland yellow face smiling over his cigarette; the feel of the note in her hand; the old man’s tongue gaping speechlessly in his mouth as he read it; his frightful plunge headlong into the lamp to the floor. She shuddered. What vicious, horrible enigma, spurting flashes of bizarre color like some enigmatic jewel, was here?

  She looked at Gawdy, sitting with his big florid face outthrust, his eyes like robins’ eggs. He had seen part of it, the others another part, but only she had seen it all. Gropingly she tried to reconstruct events.

  Dow – that incomprehensible Chinese, with his suave, creased eyes, his impeccable English, his violet-perfumed cigarette – had come up to her office, given her the bamboo tube and the note. The tube contained a horrible fate for the Delaunay maid, the note a prophecy of Mr Delaunay’s death. She had carried the note to Mr Delaunay; the old man had no more than read it, when, as if by conjunction of cause and effect, he had screamed up to his feet, plunged down dead. Dead by a corrosive poison – oxalic acid – which seared, burned, bleached his mouth, whose action was instantaneous, which no one had administered to him!

  It was impossible. It was incredible. Only the evidence of her eyes assured her of something as impossible as witchcraft. Dow – the squat, suave Dow – knew this! Knew Mr Delaunay was to die! Warned him of it! Why? How did Dow know about it? What was Dow to that secluded old man? Why, if Dow were behind the attempt, should he warn the very object of the crime? Was the Chinese merely a tool in the hands of—

  She stared at the others. Her eyes roamed over Marceline, with her flashy brunet prettiness, heightened now by a kind of feverish acuteness, her eyes as brilliant as black jewels. She looked at De Saules, fingering his spike of beard, the sly eyes in his hawklike olive face retracted, withdrawn. She looked at the drunken Wyatt, sprawled backward, breathing stertorously, his puffy weak young face already sinking into the coma of sleep. What parts did they play in this hideous, incredible puzzle?

  And the baby! The boy! That tiny waif of humanity, caught up in the meshes of this horrible thing, his little body an innocent sacrifice to its hideous aim! Every time she closed her eyes, she heard him screaming. She gripped her hands until her nails pierced her palms. In some way she felt responsible for him; she could not get the sight of him off her mind, the load of him off her heart.

  She stared at the Chinese maid. Corrigan was jabbing questions at her; the girl’s sloe-black eyes were pitiful in terror. Sandra was sure the girl was as innocent, as ignorant of all this, as she herself. Corrigan grabbed up the note. He was reading out the part of it that said: “The acid sent to the maid is merely a subordinate matter.” De Saules suddenly shoved out his hawklike head, a sharp hand.

  “Look. There’s something written on the other side of that!”

  “What?” Corrigan whipped the paper over. He stared at a single typed sentence, read in a loud voice: “The murderer will attempt to conceal the means of murder in the garage.”

  “In the—” Corrigan gaped round.

  “The garage! What kind of—”

  The butler plunged into the room. His eyes were bulging like duck eggs.

  “Sir,” he shouted, “the garage is on fire!”

  There was a simultaneous rush that way. Sandra went, too, as far as the kitchen entry, when a kind of jolt, an inner hunch, brought her up. It was an intuition of the same sort she had had about the baby in the office. This time she obeyed it. The others had poured out of the house. She turned and darted back to the library.

  Immediately she was in the doorway a nameless fear clutched her. The lights were out. That long window had not been open, plunging a bar of moonlight across the floor.

  She whirled, drawing in air for a shout, when someone slammed her against the wall, jabbed a gun into her warm throat.

  “Be perfectly quie
t.”

  She was staring into the yellow face of Dow!

  The scream froze in her throat. She could no more have cried out than a block of stone. His oblique eyes were very close, creased as they had been in the office, but glittering with a lethal quality like the button eyes of an adder. He was breathing very hard. Sweat made a saffron sheen on his round face. But his voice, quicker perhaps, more hissing, had still the oily blandness of the office.

  “Sit down. Here.”

  He forced her into a chair. She was cold, paralyzed. Not three feet from her came the stertorous breathing of the drunken Wyatt; there before her was that yellow face, coolly talking.

  “Do not move, Miss Grey. If you do, I shall most certainly kill you. A little diversion – the garage fire – to get everyone out. One moment, and your utter silence, are all I need.”

  He was gone from her, dragging something on the floor. At first she thought it was the stupefied Wyatt; then she realized it was the corpse. His voice was once more at her elbow.

  “I will be right here, very close, so if you move, I can shoot at once.” He touched her with the cold barrel. Then he was crouching, busy beside the chair.

  Her mind was sick, spinning. Her eyes crawled sideways. She saw, vaguely in the dark, his squat body kneeling on the corpse, saw his shoulders working, saw the dead head move up in answer to his movements. Her soul swooned in the nadir of horror. He was doing something – doing something to the body! Her frozen mind could only picture, snatched from some long-lost childhood book, the sight of ghouls – ghouls hunched so over dead bodies, their talons busy with dead flesh.

  He had not stopped talking. His voice flowed on with the same oily suaveness, only a flooding together of the sibilants showing his tremendous haste. There was even a fleering, mocking note in it, as though, in spite of the desperate jeopardy of his position, whatever horrible game he was playing, he was playing it with imperturbable coolness, even bravado.