“Then the maid used the house phone to try calling Mary’s and Seymour’s cell phones. She could hear them ringing inside the office, but there was no answer. The maid went to talk to the cook to try to decide what to do next. Both the maid and the cook went to the office door, and they heard the door unlock. Mary came out of the office and told them to call 911, because her husband needed an ambulance.
“The cook went to call 911, and the maid went into the office and saw Seymour on the floor with the handle of a knife sticking out of his chest. ‘He’s been killed,’ the maid said, and evidently Mary fainted dead away.
“The next thing Mary remembers is a medic reviving her. The medics had discovered that Seymour was dead, and they called the police. The police arrested Mary. I’m trying to get her released on bail.”
“The spouse is always the first suspect,” I repeated to Charlene. “Is there any evidence?”
“The police crime scene unit found the only two windows in the office to be securely locked from the inside,” Charlene continued. “The door is the only other entrance to the office. The maid swears that the office door was locked before Mary came out. Seymour was killed with a Japanese knife that was taken from a display in the office. According to both Mary and the maid, no visitors came to the house yesterday. The police consider the case to be open and shut.”
“That sounds like a classic ‘locked room mystery,’” Rachel said. “All the evidence points to Mary. Are you sure that she’s innocent?”
“No, I’m not,” Charlene admitted. “I’ve known them both for several years, because I’ve represented their business on a few occasions. They seem like good, ordinary people, but I don’t know them intimately. The last time we met, there seemed to be some tension between the two of them, but I don’t know anything specific.”
“Can we examine the crime scene?” Rachel asked.
“Yes, the crime scene unit has finished their examination, but the office is still sealed with crime scene tape. I’ve gotten permission for you to examine the office as part of the suspect’s defense team. The only restriction is that you be accompanied by the detective in charge.”
“Who’s in charge?” Rachel asked.
“A detective named Jack Avery,” Charlene replied.
“We know Jack,” Rachel said.
Oh great! I thought. Him again! Avery wasn’t my favorite detective, although he was the only detective I knew. Avery had a “thing” for Rachel, and they had been on at least two dates that I knew of. Avery is a straight arrow, a no nonsense detective who reminded me of Joe Friday, the detective played by Jack Webb on the old Dragnet TV series. Rachel said that he reminded her of Detective Cho on The Mentalist TV series.
“Well that’s good,” Charlene said. “Just give him a call and schedule a crime scene visit.”
“Is there anything else you can tell us about the case?” Rachel asked.
“No, the police haven’t released an official report yet.”
“We’ll need to meet with your client at some point,” Rachel said.
“I’m working on that,” Charlene replied. “I’m trying to get her released on bail, but that may not be possible given the circumstances. If there’s no bail, I’ll arrange a meeting in jail. Here’s the Martingale’s address,” Charlene said as she handed Rachel an index card. “There’s also the address of their business on the card.”
“Thanks Charlene,” Rachel said. “We’ll keep you informed on what we find out.”
“It was good to see you again, Charlene,” I said.
“Well don’t be such a stranger then,” Charlene replied. “Y’all keep in touch.”
We left Hastings-Cooley’s offices and got into Rachel’s car.
“I think Charlene likes you,” Rachel said.
“I like her, too. She’s an impressive woman.”
“I’d better call Jack right now,” Rachel said as she speed-dialed Avery. Of course, she had his number on speed dial. Rachel put her phone on speaker.
“Hi, Rachel.”
“Hi Jack. I’ve got you on speaker phone with the Professor.”
“I guess you’re calling about the Martingale murder.”
“That’s right, Jack. We need to see the crime scene.”
“I expected that. I can meet you there in half an hour. Do you have the address?”
“We’ve got it. We’ll meet you there.”
“That was quick,” I said as Rachel disconnected.
“Jack doesn’t mess around. He always wants to wrap things up as fast as possible.”
“Where is the Martingale house?”
“It’s in Dunthorpe.”
“Well, we’ve got plenty of time to get there,” I said as Rachel pulled out of the parking garage.
Dunthorpe is an affluent, unincorporated suburb just south of Portland.
“You know, Linus Torvalds lives in Dunthorpe,” I said.
“Who the hell is Linus Torvalds?”
“He’s the programmer who developed Linux.”
“What the hell is Linux?”
“Never mind, it’s just a computer operating system, nothing you would care about.”
“You are such a nerd, Professor. Clyde Drexler lives in Dunthorpe. Everybody knows Clyde.”
“Yes, everybody knows Clyde ‘The Glide’ Drexler. At least everybody that’s a basketball fan.”
“You aren’t a basketball fan are you Professor?”
“No, not really, but you can’t live in Portland without knowing about Clyde Drexler.”
“Wait a minute, ‘Clyde’ is a Scottish name, isn’t it?” Rachel asked.
“Uh, sure, I guess so.”
“Your middle name is Clyde, isn’t it?”
“You know, I’m getting tired of this guessing game,” I replied.
“That’s it! I knew it! You are Robert Clyde Walker.”
“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
“Absolutely!” Rachel giggled gleefully. “You can’t keep a secret from me, Clyde.”
“Well you can’t blame me for trying.”
“I guess not. It’s a good thing Clyde Drexler popularized the name, otherwise it would be pretty dorky.”
“It was pretty dorky when I was a kid.”
“Which explains why it isn’t on your driver’s license and why you kept it a secret for fifty years. Only a P.I. with my skills could possibly discover it.”
“You just guessed it.”
“I deduced it, and don’t forget, luck counts,” Rachel said. “It took a lot of sleuthing before I discovered it.”
“Your sleuthing turned up zilch. You just kept guessing.”
“Yeah, but my expert ability to read people let me know when I guessed correctly. Don’t you start minimizing my innate abilities.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I replied.
We arrived at the Martingale residence a few minutes early, but Avery was already there. He met us at the door and ushered us in. The office door was on the right wall of the entry hall. There was crime scene tape across the door. Avery removed the tape, opened the door and we all three went in.
“I’m not surprised that you’re on the case,” Avery said. “Nothing but magic could possibly account for anybody but Mrs. Martingale killing her husband.”
Detective Avery was also one of the few people that we had told about magic. We had to tell him when we were working on the Case of the Wizard’s Sphere. He was skeptical at first, but a demonstration convinced him that magic is real.
“There’s no tape outline of the victim on the floor,” I observed.
“You watch too much TV,” Avery said. “We don’t do that. I brought some photos.”
Avery handed us some crime scene photos. One showed the victim lying beside the desk on his back with an ornate knife handle sticking out of his chest.
“The knife came from that display rack,” Avery said as he pointed to a sword display stand on a bookshelf. The stand could hold two swo
rds, but only one sword was on the stand.
“It must be a wakizashi,” I said. “The katana is still on the display stand.”
“That’s right,” Avery said. “There’s a photo of it.”
Rachel selected a photo that showed a bloody wakizashi lying on a lab table.
“What’s a wakizashi?” Rachel asked.
“It’s a short samurai sword,” I said. “The long sword is called a katana. The Japanese samurai carried both.”
“So the murder weapon was already in the room when the murder happened,” Rachel said.
“The weapon, the victim and the murderer,” Avery said. “I’m afraid this case solves itself. I don’t see any way out for your client.”
“Were there any other wounds on the victim?” Rachel asked.
“No, none.”
“Does it take a strong person to stab a man in the heart like this?”
“Not with that knife. It’s very sharp.”
“Is anything missing from this room?” Rachel asked.
“Not that we can tell. There’s no sign of a search. If anything is missing, the hypothetical thief would have to have known where it was, or else he had time to do a very neat search,” Avery said.
“I don’t see a computer,” Rachel observed.
“Crime scene took the laptop,” Avery replied.
While I was listening to Rachel and Avery talk, I looked around the room. It was a large home office, roughly square about fifteen to twenty feet on a side. The windows looked out onto the front yard and were on the right wall as you entered the office through the doorway. The desk was set so that Seymour faced the door with the windows on the wall to his left. There were built-in bookshelves on the wall behind the desk as well as on the wall opposite the windows. There was no fireplace. There was a couch against the wall between the two windows. An armchair and small side table sat across the room from the windows about four feet from the built-in bookcase. Two side chairs sat in front of the desk.
Since I was Rachel’s consultant on magical matters, I looked for possible evidence of magic. I noticed that there was enough unoccupied floor space between the door and the desk side chairs to draw a magic circle. In my experience, the magic circle is used mostly for the Spell of Translocation. Although there was space for a magic circle, there wasn’t one drawn on the floor. Speaking of the floor, a large oriental rug covered most of the hardwood floor from behind the desk to the doorway.
Rachel was examining the desk, going through the drawers, and Avery was watching her intently. I examined the locks on the two windows. They were good latches that required two different levers to be moved in opposite directions to unlock the windows. I also noticed magnetic pickups on the windows for an alarm system.
There were three paintings on the wall with the windows. I looked behind each of them, but there was no safe. The only other place a wall safe could be hidden was behind a bookshelf.
“Did you find a safe?” I asked Avery.
“A safe? No, no safe.”
I made a mental note to ask Mary about a safe.
“Professor, would you check for magic?” Rachel asked as she moved away from the desk.
“Sure,” I said. I had brought my magic bag in with me, so I went over to the desk and pulled out the telescoping aluminum tripod and my Coriolis. I drew the symbol on the Coriolis that turns it into a detector of magic. I extended the tripod and suspended the Coriolis from it.
“What’s that?” Avery asked.
“It’s a magic detector I said. Rachel, you’d better give me your amulet.”
Rachel removed her Mojo from around her neck and gave it to me.
“What’s that?” Avery asked.
“Magic,” Rachel replied.
I put the Mojo in the steel box I carry in my magic bag. I didn’t want its magic to interfere with my test. Next, I held the Coriolis still and then gently released it. Immediately the Coriolis began making small clockwise circles. Gradually, these circles increased in speed and diameter until the pendulum was making circles about one and a half inches in diameter.
“Clockwise,” I said. “Magic has been worked here in last two days, probably in the last twenty-four hours.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Avery said.
“Maybe not in a court of law,” Rachel replied, “but it’s proof to us that magic is involved and our client may be innocent.”
“You’re going to need a lot more than that to get your client off the hook,” Avery said.
“Did you learn anything from your interviews with the maid and cook?” Rachel asked Avery.
“The maid lives here, but the cook only comes in from four to eight PM. The only things we learned are that the Martingales had no visitors yesterday, and that the office door was definitely locked before Mrs. Martingale came out.”
“Was there any blood on Mary or her clothing?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean much.”
“Was there any blood on the knife handle?”
“No.”
“How about fingerprints?” Rachel asked.
“Yes, there were prints,” Avery answered. “The knife had been handled a lot, and the prints overlapped. We identified most of the prints as Seymour’s, a couple were Mary’s, and there were some that we couldn’t identify.”
“The ones you couldn’t identify—were they too smudged?”
“No. We ran them through IAFIS and didn’t find a match.”
“But only a couple of the prints were Mary’s,” Rachel stated.
“That’s right, and they could have been old, but she could have used a cloth or glove when she held the knife.”
“Did you find a cloth or glove?”
“No gloves, but there was an eight-inch square microfiber cleaning cloth on the desk. You can see it in one of the photos.”
“Was there any blood on that cloth?”
“No.”
“What’s Mary Martingale’s story.”
“She says she woke up in an armchair and saw her husband on the floor with the knife in his chest. She told the maid to call 911, and then she fainted. That’s her whole story. It’s no alibi at all.”
“That’s all she remembers?”
“She said that she and her husband were discussing a shipment of antiques from China. They had a disagreement about the authenticity of some items, but she doesn’t remember resolving the agreement or anything else until she woke up in the chair.”
“That sounds familiar, doesn’t it Professor?”
“Yes, it sounds like a sleeping spell was cast,” I replied.
“That’s just speculation,” Avery said.
“Let’s call it a working hypothesis,” I replied. “This same thing has happened to Rachel.”
“Still, none of this speculation will clear your client,” Avery said.
“That’s why we’re private investigators and not private speculators,” Rachel said. “Now we investigate. I know that you can’t do anything with this new information. You’re the only law enforcement officer that we know of who is even aware of magic. It’s all up to us now. We’ll have to get some hard evidence before you can eliminate Mary as a suspect, but does this cast enough of a shadow of a doubt for you to recommend bail for Mary?”
“I don’t know how I could recommend bail at this point,” Avery said. “But I could tell the district attorney that we aren’t opposed to bail and that we don’t think Mrs. Martingale is a flight risk.”
“Thanks, Jack. That’s all that I could expect. You have a good heart.”
“Let’s just keep this to ourselves, OK?” Avery grumbled.
“It’s a deal,” Rachel said. “Right, Professor?”
“Right,” I agreed.
We wrapped up our crime scene investigation, thanked Avery again, and buckled ourselves into Fred.
“Here’s your Mojo back,” I said as I removed the amulet from the steel box.
“Thanks,” Rachel replied as we left Duntho
rpe headed for our home in Northwest Portland.
Chapter 11
“This is kind of spooky, Professor.” Rachel said as we drove back to the Goose. “A Snoozer Wand falls into our lap, and we get a case involving the use of a sleeping spell. Is this another coincidence?”
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means,” I quoted.
“The Princess Bride!” Rachel exclaimed.
“Ding, ding, ding. Congratulations, you win the movie trivia prize.”
“I can’t believe we both like the same movie,” Rachel said. “Now get your mind back on the case.”
“As you wish,” I replied. “Getting back to coincidences, if Mary was put to sleep with a Snoozer, it can’t be the same one that we have. Seymour was killed last night, and we’ve had the Snoozer since Saturday.”
“Do you think there could be more than one Snoozer?” Rachel asked.
“I think there could be, but we don’t have any way to know. Maybe we should talk to Gabriel.”
“Good idea. We can call him when we get back to the Goose.”
“You know, a magician could have easily translocated into that locked office at the Martingale’s house. There was plenty of unobstructed room on the floor for a magic circle.”
“But there wasn’t a magic circle on the floor. The magician would have to use the ‘automatic return’ feature of the Spell of Translocation, and that only gives you thirty seconds before you’re automatically returned to your original location. Thirty seconds isn’t long enough to put Mary to sleep and then kill Seymour.”
“What if there were two magicians?” I speculated. “What if two people translocated into the office, one stepped out of the circle, and the other one automatically returned to their original location? Then the one left behind could put Mary to sleep, kill Seymour, and do whatever else he wanted to do. Then the second magician could translocate back to the locked office, the first magician could step into the circle, and then both would be automatically snapped back home before Mary woke up.”
Crimes of Magic: The Yard Sale Wand Page 8