Mac waved his cell phone in Lynda’s direction. “Would you be so kind?”
“Sure.”
Another prize-winning first-person account, she must have been thinking.
Mac handed her the phone and a small index card with writing on it. “Dial the phone number written there, please.”
There was something strange in Lynda’s gold and brown eyes, something I couldn’t read. “But, Mac, this is -”
“ - part of the demonstration,” Mac said. “Please do as I ask.”
She dialed the number.
The phone in the adjacent room, the murder room, rang faintly behind the half-closed door. That sound sent pins and needles creeping all over my body. It was like being back on the murder night with one difference: This time I knew the ringing of the phone heralded somebody’s death, which creeped me out even though it was only make-believe.
“Professor Hoffer, please answer the phone - as you did that night,” Mac said.
The psychologist nodded indulgently and crossed the room. He opened the door of the little study all the way and went in. Every eye in the larger room seemed to be on the open doorway as the ringing of the phone stopped.
“Hello,” Lynda said into the mouthpiece of her phone, breaking a near-absolute silence. “Is Peter Gerard there, please?”
“But I didn’t say that,” Lamont Miller protested loudly.
Hoffer stuck his head out of the study. “I know you now,” he told Lamont. “I had you in a class once. Lamont Somebody. What do you have to do with this business?”
“All will become clear shortly, I assure you,” Mac said. “Professor Hoffer, please proceed.”
Hoffer emerged from the study. “This is where I come out and the victim goes in.”
If you’d been there, maybe you’d have felt a little chill, too, at the casual use of the word “victim.”
“You have that backwards,” Mac pointed out. He was standing near the door to the study. “Mr. Stonecipher enters the room and then you come out after you give him the phone. Please return to the study until you hand over the phone.”
Saying nothing, but looking exasperated, Hoffer obediently went back into the room.
Howard Fitzwater stood up. “I’m not any kind of an actor. What do you want me to do?”
“Go into the room, close the door behind you, and accept the telephone from Professor Hoffer. Make sure the other door - the one into the hallway - is locked as it was on the murder night.”
“But it wasn’t,” Hoffer called from inside the study. “You thought it was at first, but I showed that it wasn’t. It had to have been unlocked. That’s the only way the killer could have gotten in.”
“The door was locked,” Mac said firmly. “The murderer’s mode of entrance will become apparent as we progress through this demonstration.”
Fitzwater closed the door.
“You must realize,” Mac told the rest of us, “that during this moment, and through most of what is to follow, the remaining members of the dinner party were engaged in spirited conversation. We were not paying attention to this door or this room.”
“Wasn’t it enough to live through this once without having to do it all over again?” Ralph asked the room at large.
Hoffer came out of the study, starting to close the door behind him.
“One moment,” Mac said, putting out his hand to stop the closing door. “Mr. Fitzwater - Rodney Stonecipher - from this point on you are dead. Put your head on the desk, please. That means you cannot speak if your name is called. Do you understand?”
“It’s your party, pal,” came Fitzwater’s muffled voice.
Mac closed the door and started back toward the rest of us.
“But you’re getting this all wrong,” Hoffer said crossly. “He isn’t dead until the second time I knock.”
Mac hit his forehead, a hammy gesture, in my opinion. “By thunder, you are right, of course!” He quickly took several large steps, bringing him back to the door of the study. His back to us, he knocked briskly. “Mr. Gerard, are you about finished in there?”
The same words Hoffer had used the week before, as best I could recall.
“Just a second,” came the answer, even more muffled than the last time Fitzwater had answered Mac.
“Fitz was right - he’s no actor,” Quandra said. “He blew his lines by talking. You told him before not to answer because he’s supposed to be dead.”
“Actually, he didn’t say a word,” Mac said.
Silence hung in the room, a silence so heavy it was almost tangible, like the air on a hot and humid summer day. Mac was clearly crazy; the only question was whether he was also dangerous. That was what I read on the faces as I looked around the room. I gave Oscar full marks for not exploding, but it was a near thing.
“What you thought was the victim talking just then was actually me,” Mac said. “I imitated Howard Fitzwater’s voice, using my rather basic skills in ventriloquism to make it appear that he was talking to us through the door. But for the purposes of our demonstration, he was dead - just as Mr. Stonecipher was dead when Karl Hoffer left him in that room on the murder night. Hoffer used the same technique that I just demonstrated to make it appear that his victim was still alive at that point. The illusion worked, and everyone else present believed that Mr. Stonecipher must have been killed later when Hoffer had the perfect alibi of being under constant observation by the rest of us.”
Hoffer looked around the room, seeing all eyes on him and Oscar’s men cautiously moving their hands in the direction of their firearms.
Oscar himself stood up. “That’s a damned serious accusation, Mac.”
Hoffer forced a raw chuckle. “Serious? You call that serious? Ventriloquism! I’ve met a lot of gullible people in my travels, but even the spiritualists would find that a tough one to swallow.”
“Tough to swallow?” Mac repeated. “I hardly think so. Not when the accused is a former professional magician who included ventriloquism in his act when performing for children. Not when he was several feet away from an audience paying him scant attention, little suspecting he would be attempting to gull them in the process of setting up a perfect alibi for murder. And certainly not when the same simple trick fooled all of you here tonight.”
Hoffer looked around as if trying to measure whether anyone was buying what Mac was selling. Everyone seemed to be listening intently, even Ralph and Oscar.
“I don’t know when I subconsciously began to suspect that something like that had been done,” Mac went on, “but all along I was dogged by the feeling that a grand misdirection was at work here.
“The breakthrough, however, came when Lamont Miller here stepped forward to tell me he had mistakenly dialed the number of that study phone on the evening of the murder. All of us who were here for hours that night could testify that only one call came in on the phone in all that time. It had to have been Lamont - with a wrong number. And so Karl Hoffer had to have been the person who answered. Lamont even said the voice sounded familiar - and Lamont is a psychology major for the time being.”
“I had Professor Hoffer last semester,” Lamont spoke up. “Yeah, it was him on the phone all right.”
“I was certain of that,” Mac said. “Why, then, did Hoffer say there was a call for Peter Gerard when in fact it was a wrong number? Only one reason made sense - to lure Mr. Stonecipher to his death. And when I noticed that the other door to the room was locked, Hoffer pretended to discover that it was merely jammed, thus opening the possibility that someone from the outside had entered and committed the murder. The door really had been locked from the inside, however, and there was no outside killer. Karl Hoffer, who entered through the only door anyone could have come through, killed Rodney Stonecipher.
“Only when I had reasoned this out did I remembe
r that when Hoffer returned to this room afterward, he sat in Mr. Stonecipher’s chair next to me. His subconscious well understood that the previous occupant would not be needing it.”
“But the Gerard murder!” I objected. “Whoever did this killing must have done that one, too - and Hoffer couldn’t have. He was at home. I called him there myself within minutes of Gerard’s murder, or maybe even at the very same time.”
Hoffer delivered a Mona Lisa smile. “Thank you, Cody. I was wondering when you would say that. I have been somewhat amused by this nonsense up to now, but I’m afraid I insist -”
Mac interrupted. “Lynda, what telephone number did you call at my request tonight when the phone in the other room rang?”
“It’s Jeff’s - the phone in his apartment.”
“That phone, which is on my property and owned by me, is equipped with call forwarding. I activated that feature before I came here tonight, arranging it so that when Lynda called Jefferson’s number the call was forwarded to that phone in the study. I submit that Karl Hoffer did the same: To establish an alibi for himself, he told Jefferson to call him at home at the time he would be in that apartment after killing Peter. He then put his phone on call forwarding, sending Jefferson’s call - or any others that might have come through - to the phone at the murder scene. Undoubtedly he didn’t send it to his cell phone because that would have been obvious. Thus he created the impression that he was home during the second murder. It was another air-tight alibi, another illusion based on misdirection.”
Hoffer’s air of bemused tolerance slid away like a banana peel. He was openly agitated now. “You shouldn’t be doing this to me. I’m not really a well man. My heart - ” His hand stole in that direction - then swiftly dived into his suit coat and pulled out a gun.
Oscar and his men were as fast as Hoffer, but no faster. It looked like a Mexican standoff.
“I really wish you hadn’t made me do this, McCabe,” Hoffer said. I bet he meant it, too.
“Be sensible, Hoffer,” Oscar growled. “You’re facing four trained police officers with weapons drawn. You can’t get us all.”
Father Joe closed his eyes in pain. “Why did you kill those men, Professor Hoffer?”
Hoffer looked at Mac, who was closer to his gun than anybody and made a bigger target. “Did you figure out that part, too?”
“I think so. Rodney Stonecipher did graduate work at the University of Cincinnati and had written a thesis before he had his breakdown. The thesis was never submitted. My conjecture would be that you met him at a low point in his life, when he was depressed and badly in need of money, and you bought the thesis from him. Then you enrolled in a graduate degree program at Michigan State and submitted his work as your own - “The Psychology of Self-Deception,” it was called, according to your curriculum vitae on the St. Benignus website. You never expected to see Mr. Stonecipher again. When you did see him again it was such a shock that you panicked.”
“I didn’t panic,” Hoffer snapped. “I thought fast and adapted to the situation. You learn to do that when you perform magic for kids.
“He shouldn’t have come here. He would have spoiled everything for me just when I was on the verge of making it really big. How would it look if the man who exposed miracles turned out to be a fraud himself? I would have been ruined. I couldn’t have that.”
“But how did he threaten to expose you?” Lynda asked. “When did he have the chance?”
“He didn’t. I didn’t give him the chance. As soon as I recognized him, I knew he had to be disposed of. I didn’t know who he was at first, you see. It was the way he talked about self-deception after dinner, even using phrases from his thesis, that’s what made me remember him. And the way he looked at me, I could tell he knew me, too. So I started thinking about how to kill him. The phone call, the wrong number, showed me the way. It was Providential, you might say.” His killer-smile gave me the creeps. “I called Rodney into the room and crushed his head as soon as he took the phone. He never saw it coming.”
“My God!” Lem Carpenter put his head in hands.
“What about Gerard?” Oscar asked. “Why did you kill him?”
“He came into my office and started asking questions. I was afraid he was getting too close. But this one I planned. I worked out the alibi in advance and bought a gun. I dressed like a postman and hid the gun in my bag. It wasn’t a real postman’s bag and the ‘uniform’ was really just a blue shirt and gray pants, but I knew nobody looks twice at a postman. You see what you expect to see - just like you hear what you expect to hear when somebody knocks on a door and an answer comes back. It fooled everybody except you, McCabe, damn your soul.”
He lifted the gun.
Oscar moved forward. “Hoffer, don’t -”
But Hoffer ignored him. He shoved the gun up to the roof hoof his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The room thundered and shook like a freight train.
I turned away, my stomach queasy. Lynda wrapped her arms around me in a hug.
In the still aftermath of the horrible shock, I heard the door of the study jerk open. “What the hell’s going on out there?” Howard Fitzwater bellowed.
Last Things
“Apparently Karl Hoffer always took the easy way out,” Mac said. “That is why he never became a really great magician: He did not have the capacity for taking pains to perfect his craft.”
“He was good enough to fool the rest of us, mostly Ph.D.’s, on the night he killed Rodney Stonecipher,” I said.
“The most sophisticated people are the easiest to fool. That is why scientists so often fall prey to mediums, psychics, and the like. Children, on the other hand, are a magician’s toughest audience.”
It was a couple of frantic days after Hoffer’s suicide. Quandra and Fitzwater had left town, with Fitzwater saying he’d like to come back and make a movie in Erin. Mac and I were sitting in Mac’s office at St. Benignus, doing a post-mortem on all that had happened.
“In the end it turned out to be a locked room mystery after all,” he said. “However, the locked room was part of the solution instead of part of the mystery. This case is unique in the way it stands one of the most ancient conventions of the detective story on its head.”
While Mac was patting himself on the back, I was still trying to figure out the ancient history - Hoffer’s original connection with Stonecipher. I’d already decided he must have paid somebody in the student records office at UC to tip him off if anybody seemed to be nosing around. Or maybe he just cultivated a friend there.
“Why was he so eager to tell me he was at UC when that established a potential link between him and Stonecipher?” I asked.
“Because what you suspected - that his academic credentials were spurious - was even worse. If there was an irregularity in his master’s degree, there was probably one in the Ph.D. as well. Bringing that to light would simply destroy his whole image as an explainer of miracles and un-masker of frauds. He expected to make a lot of money out of that image.
“The knowledge that Stonecipher and Hoffer had both been at UC should not have been that damaging, anyway. It is a large university with many graduates in this region and the two men were not there at the same time. The connection was really just a minor coincidence - perhaps one that brought the two together when they first met. I suspect that Hoffer, already seeking an easier alternative to the life of an itinerant performer, was giving a performance at the hospital where Mr. Stonecipher was being treated. Somehow they struck up a deal that Mr. Stonecipher regretted and felt ashamed of for the rest of his short life.”
“One thing still bothers me about your charade, Mac,” I said. “Fitzwater was alone in the murder room with the murderer - and the room has a back door for a quick exit.”
“That door was guarded by another of Oscar’s officers,” Mac said. “Still, I would not b
ring up the subject with Mr. Fitzwater. There is still one loose end, by the way. I would like to know how Hoffer secured access to the apartment where he murdered Peter.”
“Ah, I talked to Oscar about that one,” I said. “It seems that Susan Gramke was, let’s say, earning a lot of extra credit with Hoffer after hours. He had a key to her apartment. And he knew her well enough to be pretty sure she wouldn’t tell anybody about it after the murder because she wouldn’t want the hassle - hassle with the police, hassle with her straight-laced parents when they found out about Hoffer. She went for the easy way out, too.”
I heard footsteps behind me, followed quickly by a harsh voice. “Now, what, McCabe? How dare you demand that I come here?”
“Please sit down, Ralph. Demand is much too strong a word. When I called and suggested that we meet here I was merely trying to spare you some potential embarrassment. There could be spies in your office who would be eager to make common knowledge out of what is going to happen between us in the next five minutes.”
I was pretty sure that Mac just wanted to confront Ralph on Mac’s own turf this time, and Ralph knew it. He never took his eyes off Mac while he slid down into a chair.
“Nothing that will happen here could possibly embarrass me,” he said.
Mac ignored that. “I understand that Howard Fitzwater has talked of filming a motion picture in Erin - possibly on the campus itself,” he said conversationally, unwrapping a cigar.
Ralph smirked. “I might as well speak frankly, McCabe. There is a strong feeling on the board of trustees that the economic effects of a film being made on or near this campus would be salutary . . . but scarcely enough to redeem your actions in this disgraceful affair.”
Mac arched an eyebrow. “Indeed? You believe I behaved badly, and so I did. And what of Karl Hoffer’s culpability?” He stuck the cigar in his mouth, as if for emphasis.
“Hoffer never would have encountered Rodney Stonecipher in what was to him a threatening context if you hadn’t hired Stonecipher for that ridiculous prank to begin with.” Mac’s involvement had come out in The Erin Observer & News-Ledger. “You are indirectly responsible for his death.”
Holmes Sweet Holmes Page 22