The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

“Did he put this room in, or did you?”

  “Oh, it was his, of course. They were great gamblers in those days. His games started right after lunch, and he’d have dinner served in here; then they’d keep on playing far into the night, interrupting only for a midnight snack. Often they were still going at breakfast time. We seldom push it quite that hard these days—we almost always break up by two A.M.”

  “And the only way in is the way we came?” asked Timuroff.

  “He didn’t like unexpected interruptions, so he made the place a little hard to reach. It has its private washroom—that door by the fireplace opens into it. But”—Dr. Grimwood winked—“Albright did love his exits and his entrances, so he installed one other. I’ll show you.” Putting down his drink, he went to the huge armoire. “Come and take a look. There’s a sliding panel in the back, another in the wall behind it, and of course a secret passage with a flight of stairs going back upstairs. The cabinet’s from the Low Countries, and it’s an ancient one. It weighs at least a ton, with those enormous wrought-iron hinges and that lock—” He broke off suddenly. For a long moment he was completely still. “That’s strange,” he said. “I could’ve sworn I closed those doors myself this afternoon. And what is that?”

  The doors stood a tiny fraction of an inch ajar; and Timuroff saw that that was a white piece of pasteboard showing its corner under one of them.

  Frowning, the doctor picked it up. “Look,” he said, and handed it to Timuroff, and when he said the word the half-forgotten chill swept through the room again.

  The card was crushed and torn. Timuroff took it, and on its face he read: Hendrik J. van Zaam, and under that Industrial Liaison, with an address in Los Angeles.

  The doctor’s face was gray. “Wh-what was he doing in this room?” he asked. He asked it of the air, a question to which there could be no answer. Then, without thinking, he pulled the armoire doors open—and recoiled instantly.

  High on its left side, Timuroff saw a great black iron hook.

  Van Zaam, his loose skin pallid as a shroud, was hanging there.

  CHAPTER IV

  Their Exits and Their Entrances

  Metallically, the ship’s clock struck six bells into the silence—and Timuroff realized that it was three o’clock and marveled fleetingly that so short a time could have encompassed all that had occurred since the curtain fell on Don Giovanni.

  Van Zaam hung suspended by a cord wound twice around his weight-stretched neck, a cord so hard and thin that it had cut and bruised the flesh it violated. His almost colorless blue eyes bulged sightlessly. His cruel mouth hung open, showing a sagging, swollen tongue. He was only too clearly dead. But the terror and revulsion he had inspired in others had not died with him. His life was gone, but evil clung to him like a miasma—to be dissipated, thought Timuroff, only with his body’s ultimate decay. Florencio Pambid had been quite right about the man, but certain people must have found him useful—a thought quite as disquieting as he himself had been, or as his murdered body, hanging there.

  Forcibly, Timuroff turned his mind into more pragmatic channels. He saw that Dr. Grimwood, hands trembling violently, was staring blankly at the terrible corpse; and very quietly he closed the doors of the armoire. He urged the doctor down into a chair. He fetched his glass.

  “Hector,” he said, “you’d better drink this down. Do you think you’ll be all right?”

  “Th-thank you. I’ll be…better in a moment.” He downed his drink; held out his glass. “Till now,” he said, as Timuroff refilled it, “Munrooney’s murder didn’t seem quite real. But this one—this is different. Everything’s been changed.” For a moment, he closed his eyes. “This sort of thing—till now I’ve kept it out.”

  “Well, when it forces its way in,” said Timuroff, “the best thing one can do is act. I’ll call Pete Cominazzo.”

  “Good Lord! Penny’ll be here any minute now. She—she mustn’t see that,” He struggled to his feet. “My God, I hope she isn’t bringing him down through the passageway!”

  “Is there a phone here?”

  “B-behind the bar. Push the white button down. Then dial nine—that rings them all.”

  Timuroff pushed and dialed, and almost instantly three voices answered. “Inspector Cominazzo?” he snapped, and two phones clicked down as Pete replied. “That you, Pete? Can you get hold of Dr. Grimwood’s secretary?… She’s right there? Good. Tell her she’s not to come down here. But you’d better get here on the double.… Yes, there’s something new—another murder.… What?” He heard a woman’s voice, anxious, in the background. “No, he’s all right.…Yes, I’ll put him on.”

  He gave the phone to the doctor, and waited till Mrs. Short had been informed and reassured. Then, “Pete’ll be here directly,” he said. “Hector, this all keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. First there’s a rare old khanjar, and now we find him”—they both glanced round at the armoire—“strangled with a bowstring. The Turks were always fond of that—back in the seventeen hundreds, they did it to a relative of mine. This string looks very much like one of theirs. I’m not just making tasteless jokes, but if anyone wanted me involved, this would be just the way to manage it.”

  “But why, Alastair?”

  “Perhaps because my low opinion of His Honor is well known. Perhaps to make confusion even worse confounded. Perhaps because somebody thinks I can be exploited or manipulated—”

  He was about to add that the last possibility was one he found distinctly irritating, but at that point quick steps and voices came from the billiard room, and a moment later Pete Cominazzo entered with a wiry, grayhaired detective named Stevens. They looked harassed and tired.

  Pete took the room in at a glance. “So we’ve got another one,” he said bitterly. “We would—at three A.M. Who is it this time—the governor? Jimmy Hoffa? Joan Baez? Don’t anybody tell me. Just let me guess.”

  “You aren’t even warm,” Timuroff answered, pointing at the armoire. “But then neither is he.”

  Pete reached the doors in three strides; jerked them open. He stepped back abruptly. For a moment, he made no sound at all. Then a low, unsteady whistle escaped his lips. “Whee-e-ew! Thanks for the shudders!” He turned. “Tim, who is this guy?”

  Stevens said nothing. He held his breath for a few seconds, then released it with a gasp.

  “He—he was not a guest,” Hector Grimwood told them unhappily. “That is, he was not—invited.”

  “I should hope not! Christ, I wouldn’t invite that creep to his own funeral!”

  “Somebody did,” Timuroff pointed out, handing Pete the business card. Then, briefly, he filled him in on the bartender’s story and the doctor’s reaction.

  There was a long, long silence while Pete stood there frowning, as though the act of waiting could force that hanging corpse to tell whatever secrets lay behind its presence there.

  “In case you’re wondering,” Timuroff remarked presently, “that is a Turkish bowstring round’ his neck.”

  “I don’t like it,” Pete muttered, not really answering him. “I don’t like any of it. I was hoping we’d be up only against local talent. If this buzzard’s what he seems to be—and that ‘Industrial Liaison’ can cover up a lot of nastiness these days—the media are really going to go ape.” Firmly, he closed the armoire doors again. “Well, all we can do about it is get to work.”

  “How did he get down here?” Stevens asked.

  “There are several ways,” the doctor answered. “We have two elevators and two sets of stairs, as you know. He could’ve used the main ones or gone down through the service areas. Or of course somebody could’ve led him through the secret passages.”

  “The what?” Pete exclaimed. “What was that you said?”

  “The secret passages,” repeated Dr. Grimwood, almost cheerfully. “The house is honeycombed w
ith them. I always try to show them to my guests. Alastair—that is, er, Tim—will tell you. I brought him through one from the library to this floor, behind my workshop. But all are more or less connected. This one from the armoire leads, one way and another, to the formal sitting room, to Lucrece’s room, to Penny Anne’s, and to a closet off the main hall.”

  “You mean one of them comes out here, out of the wall, right behind that body? And that it goes straight up to where the mayor was killed?”

  “Well, not straight up, Inspector. But it does get there.”

  “My God!” sighed Pete. “Now they tell me.”

  “Oh, dear!” said Dr. Grimwood. “I suppose I should have mentioned it. But we’ve always taken these passages so much for granted—” He broke off helplessly.

  “Well, we’ll just have to do the best we can in the barndoor-locking department. Jeff’s been on the horn to headquarters, and some of the boys are coming back to do the spade work on this van Zaam character. When he’s been carted off, I’m going to leave Inspector Stevens here in charge and try to catch up on a little sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a big and nasty day. Before I go, though, I want to make absolutely sure those passages are clear. Why don’t we take a tour of them right now?”

  “Surely you—you don’t want to start here?”

  “Behind van Zaam? God, no! We can start someplace else and work back. By the time we’ve made the circuit, they’ll have him taken down. Till then, Steve can stay and hold his hand so he won’t be stolen.”

  The bowels of Dr. Grimwood’s residence turned out to be even more ramified than Timuroff had suspected; and the guided tour convinced him that unless one belonged to some dedicated special interest group—the Borgias, for example—secret passages could very soon become a bore. No clues turned up; no carelessly dropped handkerchiefs, no subtle cigar ashes, not so much as a tom clipping from the morning paper. Timuroff politely stifled yawns, and Pete Cominazzo patiently insisted that every door and sliding panel be secured and sealed. By the time they reached the poker room again, van Zaam was gone; and when they finally went upstairs once more the lab men had done their job and taken off.

  Penelope Anne Short was waiting for them in the library. She rose to greet them, and Timuroff, caught off guard, barely suppressed his instant impulse to exclaim, “Hello, Evangeline!” Instead, he acknowledged Dr. Grimwood’s introduction as gracefully as possible, considering that Mrs. Short was very lush indeed and that his mind insisted on undressing her with a quite indecent intimacy. Indeed, it took him several seconds to realize that Penny Anne—red lips, dark eyes, black hair, and all—was much older than her mechanized twin sister, or even to notice the stocky middle-aged woman to whom she had been talking, whom the doctor presented as his housekeeper.

  “Mrs. Hanson and her husband have been with me almost since I got the house,” he said. “When was it exactly, Mrs. Hanson?”

  “September eighteenth, 1944, it was, sir.” Mrs. Hanson blushed a shocking pink. “How could I forget it? Hanson just discharged from the navy on his disability—and me, a little virgin fresh from Lassen County.” She sniffled sentimentally. “Or almost one, at least—we’d only just got married. Imagine! Coming to this house, with the doctor, and his mechanical lady—there was but the one in those days—and, well, everything!”

  She subsided, and Dr. Grimwood completed the introductions ceremoniously, announcing that Timuroff was the world’s foremost authority in his field, that Inspector Cominazzo was a splendid fellow even if his name did sound like the forced marriage of two extremist parties, and that the murders would speedily be solved.

  “They’d better be!” declared Penny Anne. “It was quite bad enough when the mayor was killed, but this one—ugh!” She shivered. “Do—do you think it’s safe for us to even stay here, Heck?”

  The nickname came as a surprise. Her voice was deep and musical; and the way she spoke it, together with her whole manner to the doctor, at once defined their relationship as firm and normal and affectionate. Timuroff decided that he approved of her.

  “Now, Penny Anne,” said the doctor soothingly. “The Inspector here has everything in hand.”

  “I’m leaving three men here, Mrs. Short,” Pete told her. “We’ve searched the secret passages, and they’re clean. Now they’ve been locked and sealed; so have the poker room and…er…Lucrece’s room upstairs. I don’t think you have to worry.” He turned to Dr. Grimwood. “Doctor, are all your phones on the switching system?”

  “Why, yes—though Penny has a direct outside line.”

  “Good. Why don’t you show us how to work it? The press is going to start bugging you the minute they catch on there’s been a second murder, and if you want your rest you’d better let the PD run interference for you.”

  “That would be good of you. Calls from friends can be turned over to the Hansons—their apartment’s over the garage. They’ll know who to put through to us.” The doctor patted his secretary’s well-rounded arm. “Penny Ante here has had a very trying day, so I’m going to prescribe a sleeping pill for her.”

  Relaxing visibly, Mrs. Short smiled back at him. “Heck always calls me Penny Ante when he’s quieting me,” she told them. “It’s a put-down, sort of, coming from an old poker player, but I don’t really mind.”

  Pete surveyed the room, as though uncertain whether yet another murder might not still turn up. “I guess that’s all for now,” he said.

  “If you gentlemen could stay a little longer,” offered Mrs. Hanson, “I’d fix you ham and eggs.”

  “Inspector Stevens and the boys just might take you up on that,” Pete answered, “but it’s four thirty—Mr. Timuroff and I are going to head on home.”

  “I’ll bet you have a pretty little wife just waiting up for you.” Mrs. Hanson, regarding Inspector Cominazzo’s manly frame, turned pink again. “Well, we enjoyed your being here anyhow. That is, we would of excepting for those awful murders. That is—”

  Gently, Hector Grimwood shushed her. He thanked Pete Cominazzo for his kindness. He thanked Timuroff for making a bad time much easier to bear. He walked them to the door, and ushered them courteously out into the chill of early morning.

  The door clicked to behind them, and they walked in silence to the car. Timuroff backed it out and, in low gear, sent it down the dark declivity of Kemble Street.

  “You’re strangely quiet,” he said to Pete after a block or two.

  “I’m sulking,” replied Pete morosely. “I tell you, Tim, I wish Chiefy had put his boy Kielty in instead of me. Then when the roof falls in it’d be him under it.”

  “Calm yourself,” said Timuroff. “I’ll not abandon you.”

  “You mean you’ll stand at my right hand and keep the bridge with me? Well, at least that’s appropriate. Do you know why our friend Dr. Grimwood made Lucrece? No? Well, as a boy they sent him to a Christian Brothers school. There was a Brother Padraic there, who had a thing on Ancient Rome. So little Hector had to memorize ‘Horatius,’ with gestures, and give it every time they had the parents in—and in a toga. Anyhow, when he’d made his pile and could do anything he wanted, he got to thinking: if Lucrece had just put up a fight instead of lying back and then committing suicide, Lars Porsena wouldn’t have marched on Rome, Horatius would never have had to keep the bridge, Macaulay’s poem wouldn’t have been written, and he himself would have been spared his ordeal. So he programmed his little lady so that if anybody tried to spread her legs apart, even the least bit, she’d stop reciting, scream, and stab him. Okay, no Tarquin, no rape, no Etruscan army, no bridge, no poem, no performance for young Hector. It sure put Brother Paddy in his place, even if he was forty years dead.”

  “And our mayor in his.”

  “Tim, you don’t know the half of it. The PD doesn’t often suppress evidence, especially in this kind of murder, but this time we did, for the
time being at least. We even swore Doc Grimwood and his Penny Anne to secrecy. Maybe we can keep it quiet until the trial—if there ever is a trial.”

  “It must be something really interesting,” said Timuroff.

  “Oh, it is, it is! When they found His Honor, His Honor was exactly where they said. Only he hadn’t any pants on. And his shorts were lying there next to him. And he had the door all locked from the inside.”

  Timuroff was surprised but not astounded. He said as much. “And you retrousered him before the photographs were taken?”

  “No, Harrell has better sense than that. He took the first shots himself with Wallton and a couple others looking on, and didn’t touch a thing until Chiefy got there. That was only a few minutes, because Wallton phoned him at home right after calling headquarters. Chiefy gave the order to reshort, retrouser, and reshoe his Leader—Munrooney did have socks on, by the way—and of course the damn fool brought Baltesar and Hemmet in on it, so now they know about it too.”

  “There!” said Timuroff. “That is why young men become photographers. Can’t you imagine Harrell’s shots in Playboy, probably with a profound interpretation by some expert, say Eldridge Cleaver?”

  “I’m glad somebody has a sense of humor,” grumbled Pete. “Just don’t forget—the van Zaam bit isn’t half as funny, and they both happened in the doctor’s house. By the way, what do you think of him?”

  Timuroff was serious instantly. “He is a dirty old man,” he answered. “But he’s a very rare and superior sort of D.O.M. Most of them are just dirty young men or dirty middle-aged men grown senile. He isn’t. Pete, I like him. Of course, he’s mad—but then he’s a gentleman, and you have to be insane to be one nowadays.” For a long moment, he was silent. “But I also realize,” he added slowly, “that it was his house, his mechanical woman, and his party. Besides, even at his age, he is probably still strong enough to have strangled van Zaam and hung him up there single-handed. So there we are.”