A Room to Die In

by Jack Vance

  Sheriff Metzger leaned against the table and spoke, looking at no one in particular. “I apologize for assembling you in this rather dramatic fashion. I assure you it’s not our customary procedure in cases of this kind.”

  “Cases of what kind?” demanded Edgar Maudley, who apparently had resolved beforehand to put up with no nonsense.

  Metzger examined Maudley with detachment. “I refer to the death of Roland Nelson, and also”—he consulted a list—“the deaths of Elaine Gluck, Harvey Gluck, and Pearl Nelson, which I hope will be clarified. To this end I’ll appreciate the help of all of you. Inspector Tarr has been in charge of the case, and he has a few questions to ask.” The sheriff settled into a seat beside the district attorney, who muttered something to him. The sheriff nodded.

  Tarr consulted some notes he had scribbled on a piece of paper. He rose to lean on the back of his chair.

  “This thing starts with the marriage of Pearl Maudley Orr to Roland Nelson. It was not a successful marriage; it lasted only a few months. Shortly after the separation, Mrs. Nelson died in an automobile accident. I think everyone here is familiar with the circumstances, and I’ll say no more except to point out the obvious fact that Roland Nelson profited greatly by her death. He inherited money and securities worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, as well as valuable books, rugs, and art objects.

  “Mrs. Nelson died intestate; The California and Pacific Bank, which managed her affairs, was appointed administrator of her estate, and an interval of six months elapsed before Roland Nelson came into his inheritance. During this six months Mr. Nelson had very little cash. He rented an old house from Mr. Jones, and he also worked for Mr. Jones. I understand that he was not a very satisfactory employee. Right, Mr. Jones?”

  “Right,” said Martin Jones.

  “You fired him?”

  “Correct.”

  “How did this affect your personal relations with Mr. Nelson?”

  “No difference. I got along with him just as well after I fired him as before. He wasn’t making any money for me, and he knew it.”

  “You rented him your old family home for eighty-five dollars a month.”

  “Correct.”

  “During this time you completed the house at five sixty Neville Road and allowed Mr. Nelson to move in?”

  “Correct.”

  “Why did he want to move?”

  Jones shrugged. “I didn’t give him any choice. I wanted to sell the old place. He had no complaints; I let him have the new house for the same rent.”

  “Do you know if he had any visitors during this period?”

  Jones grinned. “While he was still at the old house I think he once conducted a séance, or something of the sort. Mr. and Mrs. Cypriano were there. I watched for a few minutes, but nothing much happened.”

  Tarr turned to Alexander Cypriano. “Do you recall such an occasion, Mr. Cypriano?”

  “Naturally.” Alexander was clearly uncomfortable.

  “What happened?”

  “Very little. Mr. Nelson, after reading certain books belonging to his wife, had become interested in psychic phenomena. The occasion Mr. Jones refers to was not a spiritualistic séance, but an experiment to see if a person’s natural telepathic powers are enhanced by special conditions.”

  “What sort of special conditions?”

  “Hypnotism.”

  “Who was the subject?”

  “My wife.”

  “Were your experiments successful?”

  “Not to any significant degree. My wife is not a good hypnotic subject.”

  “How long did these experiments continue?”

  “On this single occasion. None of us was more than superficially interested. In fact, I’d forgotten the incident until Mr. Jones just recalled it.”

  “This experiment took place in the first house Mr. Nelson rented from Mr. Jones—the old house?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you ever visit him in the new house?”

  “No.”

  “How about you, Mrs. Cypriano?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Mr. Maudley?”

  “I visited him once,” said Maudley with dignity, “in an attempt to arrange an equitable division of Mrs. Nelson’s property.”

  “Did you actually enter the house?”

  “No. Mr. Nelson was insulting and offensive, and we remained outside. We did not come to any understanding. At any rate, no understanding satisfactory to me.”

  “In fact, to emphasize his position he wrote out a will and showed it to you?”

  “He had the insolence to ask me to witness it. The effect, of course, was to cut me off completely from my cousin’s property.”

  “Which you had hoped to inherit?”

  “Naturally. Mr. Nelson practically gave my cousin’s house to the Cyprianos, though it was as much a liability as an asset because of faulty construction.”

  Martin Jones said gently, “That sounds like slander to me. You asking for a bust in the nose?”

  “Slander?” Edgar Maudley snorted. “Truth is a completely adequate defense against a charge of slander. Only an incompetent or worse would omit reinforcing steel from the foundations.”

  “Those were my instructions.”

  “Nonsense. There was no need to skimp. My cousin was a wealthy woman. Mr. Orr, her husband at that time, was not only wealthy but a cautious and conservative man.”

  “Who studied ghosts and mind reading and hypnotism. He was a screwball.”

  Tarr broke into the exchange. He asked Alexander Cypriano, “When Mrs. Nelson learned of the faulty foundation, what was her attitude?”

  Cypriano darted a quick, malicious look at Jones. “She was surprised and angry. She said that she would see that repairs were made. After she died, Mr. Nelson and I came to an understanding, and I agreed to perform the necessary repairs.”

  Tarr examined his notes. “On March third, Elaine Gluck visited Roland Nelson and disappeared. On May twenty-fifth, approximately, Roland Nelson died. He was discovered on May thirtieth in circumstances strongly suggesting suicide. During my investigation I found evidence of blackmail. It crossed my mind that Nelson might have murdered Mrs. Gluck—a notion that was reinforced when we eventually found Mrs. Gluck’s strangled body. I might say here that Miss Nelson”—he nodded toward Ann—“insisted from the first that her father would neither pay blackmail nor commit suicide. I could see no alternative theory.”

  “On the evening of Saturday June eighth, Miss Nelson, arriving home, encountered her mother’s husband, Harvey Gluck, who had arrived unexpectedly from Los Angeles. They went up to her apartment together. Mr. Gluck had occasion to use the bathroom and was garroted by someone waiting there. Under the circumstances it’s clear that Miss Nelson was the intended victim. But why should anyone wish to kill Miss Nelson? Well, she is now a girl of considerable wealth. Who would inherit from her if she died? She has no close relatives; her mother and father are both dead. Her nearest kin live in North Carolina. The money cannot revert to the Maudleys. So gain is not a credible motive.”

  “It would seem, then, that Miss Nelson is a threat to someone. Remember that she has never accepted the theory of suicide in connection with her father’s death, even though no other theory presented itself. The study in which Mr. Nelson died was almost hermetically sealed. The door was bolted securely, the windows clamped shut, the damper in the chimney fixed in the ‘shut’ position. Murder seems impossible. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say this: to shoot someone and leave the room in the condition in which I found it is impossible.”

  “Could Mr. Nelson somehow have been persuaded to raise a pistol to his forehead and pull the trigger? There are conceivable circumstances where this might be the case—an elaborate practical joke to astound someone watching through the window, perhaps. But surely Mr. Nelson would have checked and double-checked the gun to make sure he was in no danger of shooting himself.”

  “In any event, whatever the p
lot—if such a plot existed—the fact that Miss Nelson was a victim of attempted murder makes it appear that she either suspected or was in a position to suspect it. Hence, by a kind of backward reasoning, we must take very seriously the idea that Roland Nelson was indeed murdered.”

  “What did Miss Nelson learn? What was she about to learn? In the first place, she was baffled by a series of peculiar events and circumstances. One was the three shots heard by Mr. Nelson’s neighbors, the Savarinis, about the time or shortly after Mr. Nelson died—never satisfactorily explained. Another was: Why hadn’t her father paid his rent when he had ample funds?”

  “She was also puzzled by the fact that the bookcase standing along the wall that separated the living room from the study—the case facing into the living room—had made nine dent marks in the vinyl flooring, although it had only six legs—three sets of two each, the two in each set being nine inches apart from back to front. The extra dent marks were approximately five and a half inches from the front legs, between the front and back legs.”

  “Obviously, that bookcase had once stood in a different position. Away from the wall—further out into the room? But in that case there should have been twelve dents in all, not nine—two sets of six. So it couldn’t have been that.”

  Tarr fixed them with a glittering eye. “That the bookcase had once stood in a different position had to be, from those extra three dents. But if it wasn’t because the bookcase stood away from the wall, it had to be because the bookcase extended into the wall. Obviously, that’s impossible . . . unless there hadn’t been a wall there.

  “The solution came to Miss Nelson this morning, when she noticed carpenters fastening two-by-four partitions to concrete slabs using a stud driver—a kind of tool, almost a gun, which shoots nails through wood into concrete. The sound of the shots suggested her father’s death—the three shots heard by the Savarinis. Could it be that the three shots had been not the reports of a gun but the reports of a stud shooter? Somebody building something? A wall?”

  Tarr glanced at Ann with unabashed admiration. “Miss Nelson pictured the dents the bookcase had left in the flooring. She eliminated the further-out-into-the-room theory because it would have left three more marks than were actually there. She embraced the back-into-the-wall theory because that’s the only theory that explains those three extra dents where there should have been six—the wall stood where the missing three marks lay. In other words, again, somebody had built a wall. That wall, the wall that turned the end of the living room into apparently a second room, the study. And for the wall to be built, the bookcase in the living room obviously had to be shifted the thickness of the wall, out further into the living room, where it now stands.”

  Tarr was all business now; Ann had never seen him so cold and inevitable-looking.

  “I consulted a carpenter an hour ago. He tells me that a wall like the one in the house where Nelson lived would typically consist of framing three and five-eighths inches in thickness, with half an inch of plasterboard on one side, a quarter inch of plywood on the other, and two baseboards half an inch thick—adding up to five and three-eighths inches. . . in other words, just about the distance between the front dents and the extra dents in the vinyl tiling.

  “So it now becomes clear—thanks to Miss Nelson-how her father could have been murdered in such a way that suicide seemed the only answer. That living room was originally a single room; there was no study. Nelson was shot; then a wall was constructed across that end of the living room to create a study, sealing him in.

  “According to my carpenter consultant, the wall would have to be braced upright. The study side would be finished, the plywood varnished, the door hung and bolted securely. Then the inner baseboards—those on the study side of the wall—would be nailed to the floor, along the line the wall would eventually occupy, and molding would similarly be attached at the ceiling line.

  “Next, the killer would clean the study carefully, sort through Roland Nelson’s papers, leave a note suggesting blackmail. He would shift the study bookcase back to the wall line. He would slip around the edge of the wall to the living room side, shove, slide and pry the wall into place, so that it fitted squarely across the room, tight against the moldings and baseboard inside the study. He would then nail the studs at each side into the living-room wall; and then, to secure the bottom plate, he would use a stud driver. One shot to the right of the door, two shots into the longer section to the left of the door would be necessary. He would then apply plasterboard, tape the joints and the angles where the new wall met the ceiling and side walls, paint the plasterboard, install a length of baseboard. Lo and behold, the corpse of Roland Nelson would thereupon repose in a room that was truly locked.”

  Tarr looked around the room from face to face. “Incidentally, this is not just speculation. Today Miss Nelson and I examined the original blueprints of the house on Neville Road. These blueprints show no study—only a long living room. When Roland Nelson came into possession of his wife’s books, he arranged the bookcases back to back to function as a kind of partition, thus creating a sort of open-face study. This fact may have planted the locked-room idea in the murderer’s mind. And he sure succeeded! He created a true locked-room, without gimmick, illusion, sleight of hand—without person or agency concealed in the room.” Tarr gave a slow nod of respect for the still unnamed craftsman’s ingenuity.

  He again consulted his notes. “I asked my carpenter consultant how long such a job would occupy a man, and I asked how the noise could be muffled— because if a chance passer-by, or the Savarinis, heard sounds of hammering and sawing, the game would be given away.”

  “An expert craftsman, I was told, could probably complete the job in three or four days, working hard. By precutting the lumber, by predrilling nail holes, and driving home the nails with a rubber mallet, he could both speed up the job and reduce the noise to nearly nothing. Only the sound of the stud driver driving nails into the concrete would have to be heard.”

  “After the wall was in place only two jobs remained: to move the living-room bookcase back against the new wall—and to arrange for the corpse of Roland Nelson to be found. Because Mr. Nelson lived a very secluded life, he might have remained locked in that ‘study’ for years.”

  Tarr’s voice had been easy, pleasant, pitched at a conversational level. Now he leaned forward, and his look lost all its geniality. “Miss Nelson was faced with another puzzle: Why was her father killed? Well, something turned up to satisfy all the conditions. A chance word supplied the key to the puzzle: insurance.”

  “Miss Nelson paid a visit to Albert Eakins, the gentleman sitting to my right. Mr. Eakins, did Roland Nelson ever call on you?”

  “He did,” said the insurance man.

  “What was the purpose of his visit?”

  “He wanted to take out a comprehensive policy: fire, flood, vandalism, public liability—the works—on a house he had just bought.”

  “Did you visit the house?”

  “I happened to drive past one day and found Mr. Nelson in the front yard planting rosebushes. I stopped to chat a moment. Mr. Nelson asked me what I thought a fair price for the house would be. I told him probably thirty thousand dollars. He told me that he had bought it for twenty-two thousand because the owner was in financial difficulties. I assured him he’d made an excellent buy and could certainly sell the house at a profit.”

  “So there was never any blackmail, you see,” said Tarr. “Roland Nelson had merely bought a house.” He turned to Martin Jones. “That’s our case, Mr. Jones.”

  Martin Jones rose. “I’ve heard all I’m going to hear. I’ve got to get back to my job.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Sheriff Metzger pleasantly.

  Martin Jones darted toward the door. Tarr sprang after him, and Jones whirled and knocked Tarr down. As the deputies jumped forward, Jones, his back to the door, flashed a heavy clasp knife, the steel as brightly cold as his eyes. “Anybody want to get cut?”


  Sheriff Metzger got ponderously to his feet. “Here, put that thing away. You’re likely to hurt somebody.” He lumbered over to the contractor and simply took the knife.

  Ann’s abiding image of Martin Jones was to be that of a sullen small boy discovered in an act of mischief by a stern and sorrowful father.

  The deputies seized Jones’s arms.

  “Lock him up,” said the sheriff. “Or maybe you’d like to make a statement first?”

  Martin Jones said dully, “All right, I confess. I’m only sorry I didn’t get her.” He nodded toward Ann. “She’s been in my hair ever since I first laid eyes on her.”

  Tarr was wiping blood off his lip. “How did you talk Roland Nelson into giving you twenty thousand cash and a thousand a month? He could as easily have given you twenty-two thousand cash.”

  Martin Jones’s mood of co-operation had departed. “It’s your story, not mine. Tell it any way you like.”

  “Here’s a guess. You gave him a deed, but asked him not to register it for a few months. Perhaps you admitted that you’d used the house as collateral on a loan and needed twenty thousand to clear title, or you gave him other security for his money. In any event, you asked Nelson to keep the deal secret. Nelson agreed—though naturally he had to tell the insurance agent.”

  Arthur Eakins said in a deeply solemn voice, “Mr. Nelson asked me to say nothing about the situation.”

  The deputies tugged at Martin Jones’s arms. Jones took a deep breath and for a moment seemed to exude his old air of sullen purpose. Then his shoulders sagged, and he was led away.

  CHAPTER 14

  After the Cyprianos and Maudley left, Ann, torn by a dozen conflicting urges, went to sit in Tarr’s office. An hour later he came in and flopped into his chair. He showed no surprise at Ann’s presence.

  “Did he say anything more?” asked Ann.

  “He talked. He’s a queer one—doesn’t seem to give a damn. He hasn’t even asked for a lawyer.”

  “He’s probably worried more about his men loafing on the job than anything else. Did he say anything about Elaine’s murder?” Ann’s hands twisted.