Exeunt Murderers

by Anthony Boucher

  I had them all there when I walked into the Flaxners’ store. Rose was sniffling and nervous. Joe was comforting her like a big brother, only not quite, and Helen Kirk was watching them. Gino and Lafferty sat apart, saying nothing.

  I walked in and said, “Well, I’ve found him.”

  Rose sat up and asked, “Who?” as if she was afraid of the answer.

  I said, “The trick-or-treat. The one that rang the doorbell last night.”

  Rose half-screamed. She said, “You can’t. He’s dead.”

  I walked back to the door and fetched in the kid. I said, “This is Terry. He—”

  I didn’t get any further, because just then Lafferty, following my suggestions on the phone, quickly and carefully shot the gun out of Joe Flaxner’s hand.

  “Gee, it was awful,” Terry told us. This was after the squad car took Joe away. “There I was ringing the doorbell, and all of a sudden there was this Thing behind me. It was just like what I was playing at being was all of a sudden real, and it was too big. And the man opened the door and the Thing fired at him and he fell down holding his stomach, and then the Thing grabbed me in its long arms and ran away. And when we were out of sight, it told me not to say a word ever or it’d come and get me the way it got him. I ran all the way home and I felt funny all night.”

  I said, “Joe was smart. His scheme meant we’d be looking for a little killer, and his height alibied him. But he wasn’t too smart; he should’ve picked a better witness than Rose. Only the fact that I believed she was really scared to death kept me from throwing the whole story out. She was a natural for an accessory, and I’m still not too sure—”

  “I’ll show you,” Rose said wildly. “I wouldn’t help—a murderer. I’ll even tell you where the gun went.”

  She did, and then I said, “Now I’ll tell you. I’ll give you five to one it’s this rod right here that Joe pulled today. I’m pretty sure that San Francisco train story was a gag to make you think he was the big strong man to rely on in time of murder.”

  Lafferty said, “Okay. But what put you on the trail of Joe?”

  I said, “It wasn’t the ghost, I hoped, and it wasn’t Helen Kirk and it wasn’t Gino. Their alibis stood up. So it wasn’t under five feet. So it wasn’t the trick-or-treat. So it used a real trick-or-treater for its front. So find the one that got scared last night.

  “It had to be Joe. He had a strong motive—it was obvious he wanted Rose—and no alibi. And it was Joe. You know, it’s the damnedest thing: nine times out of ten, it just naturally is the guy it has to be.”

  The trial was easy. The gun was almost enough, but Terry’s identification of the voice and even the sweat-type testimony helped. And Joe’s big, silent tough-guy act didn’t help him, not even with Rose.

  I was some worried about Terry. So was his mother, and for a while she didn’t like me much. But once he found out it wasn’t a Thing, but just a murderer, like any Junior G-man can take in his stride, it was all right. In fact, the last time I saw him he was mad at me. I wouldn’t try to get him a ticket to Joe’s execution.

  (1945)

  The Catalyst

  Anne said: “I’m so glad you can make it for dinner on Saturday. We’re having Gregor Stolz for the weekend. I think you’ll enjoy him.”

  I said something noncommittal about how I was sure I would, and certainly wouldn’t think of missing one of Anne’s curries. I looked in the mirror as I hung up the phone and my face was as blank as my words. There wasn’t anything I could say—there wasn’t any way I could tell Anne that having Gregor Stolz for the weekend meant murder.

  I didn’t know it officially. There wasn’t any definite evidence I could point to, and my job is supposed to be cracking murders, not preventing them—though that’s any man’s job.

  The oddest thing was that I not only didn’t know who might be killed, I had no idea who’d do the killing. I only knew that Gregor Stolz meant death.

  I noticed him first on the Harkness case. You may not remember that—it didn’t get much of a play in the papers because Harkness cracked up and the psychiatrists took over and it never came to trial. Maybe you remember something about a man who was devilishly jealous of his sister and she got married secretly. Since he was old-fashioned enough to use a straight razor he was all equipped when he heard about the marriage.

  Stolz came into it when we were trying to learn how Harkness had found out about the marriage. He was a friend of the family, I guess you call it. He admitted seeing Harkness earlier in the evening the night it all happened, and finally he admitted that he might have let something slip which gave the brother an idea of what was going on.

  Something about him was familiar and it bothered me, but it wasn’t until the Harkness case was all wrapped up that I placed him.

  He’d been a witness in the Bantock business, and I’m pretty sure you’ll remember that. It was splashed all over the papers.

  BERKELEY BANKER RUNS AMOK.

  Bantock came home plastered one night, took his World War I Service .45 and finished off his wife and his mother because they hated each other and both of them had threatened to leave and he couldn’t live without either of them. He didn’t either—live, I mean—not any longer than the time consumed by the trial and appeal.

  And Gregor Stolz was the casual acquaintance whom Bantock had met in an Oakland bar that night. The defense had used him to emphasize how much Bantock had been drinking, to try to get a verdict of manslaughter instead of murder for him.

  The name was familiar from someplace else, too. I remembered it when Captain Strudd cited the Martin case as an example of how a murderer gets what’s coming to him. Young Martin at the University fed arsenic to his uncle only to learn that all Uncle’s money went to a foundation to prove that Queen Elizabeth wrote Shakespeare. He was furious on discovering the terms of the will, and kept saying that a friend named Gregor Stolz had assured him of his first-hand knowledge that he was Uncle’s heir. Martin was so mad about being fooled that he never even tried to play innocent. The trial was a formality, and Stolz never appeared as a witness.

  Gregor Stolz had come to the Bay Region about six years ago. Since that time there had been seven murders and three suicides among the people he knew. For the most part, they didn’t know each other—he seemed to have many circles of friends. He got around. So did Typhoid Mary, I guess.

  At first it might look like what insurance people call a “prone.” An accident prone is a guy who’s always around when industrial accidents happen—he doesn’t cause them, he doesn’t do anything, but if he’s in a plant the insurance company’s going to lose money. What sailors call a Jonah—same thing. And Gregor Stolz was a murder prone, a carrier, if you like that comparison better.

  But you look closer and you see that Gregor Stolz had let something slip to Harkness, he had talked to Bantock in the bar while the banker was drinking himself into a killer, he had given young Martin an odd idea of Uncle’s will …

  I was interested, to put it mildly. I did some checking on Gregor Stolz. His record was clean enough, on the surface. Born in Austria, came to America as a child, well-educated in the East, had a little money of his own and held a half-dozen insignificant jobs before he came into a good thing—a bequest almost as screwy as Martin’s uncle. He was assured a good income from a trust for life so long as he wrote pamphlets and gave lectures propagandizing for a duodecimal system of numerical notation, whatever that was. I did check on the death of the man who had left him his trust fund. At the age of 87, he had died peacefully in his sleep while Gregor was a thousand miles away.

  My favorite bar in San Francisco is the Tosca. The drinks are good and cheap, the customers are mostly elderly Italian businessmen who are good Joes, the walls live up to the name with paintings of Puccini and scenes from the story, and the juke-box is quiet and stocks a lot of opera.

  I was drinking a caffé espresso, a strong, bitter, steamed coffee with brandy in it, and listening to the juke-box when I recogn
ized the voice from the next stool talking with the barkeep.

  I turned around to Gregor Stolz and said: “Hi! How’s the witness?”

  His face smiled politely. He said: “You remember me, Lieutenant?”

  “Harkness,” I said, meaningfully.

  He looked mournful and said: “A dreadful thing.”

  I couldn’t contradict him. I just added: “Bantock.”

  “That poor man,” he said sorrowfully.

  I said: “Martin.”

  His eyes got smaller and he looked at me carefully. I went on. I went down the list of seven murders and threw in the three suicides for good measure. When I was through, he said: “You are a good policeman, Lieutenant. You notice things and you collect data. Will you have another drink?”

  I said, “Thanks” and he ordered. Then he sighed, said, “Yes, I have encountered more than my share of human tragedy.”

  I said that was too bad, indeed it was, and just how did he explain it?

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant.” His voice was soft and low. “Of course, as a mathematician and lecturer, I do have a theory …”

  “Yes?”

  The drinks came and he sipped his thoughtfully. “I think that every life has a possible murder in it. Or, rather let me express it a trifle more exactly—every domestic situation contains an inherent motive for murder. You are a married man, Lieutenant?”

  “No.”

  He smiled and said: “How fortunate. But marriage is not the only domestic situation. Everywhere there is murder, lurking, dormant. Most of these murders never happen—at least on the physical plane, which is perhaps the kindest way. But now and then something happens to stir the sleeping dogs. As for me, you may simply say that I bear a peculiar scent which arouses dogs from sleep.”

  The coffee tasted more bitter than usual. I said: “How unfortunate.”

  “Or if you prefer a chemical metaphor—you know how two chemicals may lie side by side inactive until a third is placed with them. The third takes no part in the resulting reaction, but it is essential to it.”

  “I’ve been to high school,” I said. “A catalyst.”

  He nodded. “I assure you, Lieutenant, that I am almost afraid to meet new people. Too often have I seen this catalytic explosion. And yet my work—my writing and lecturing—makes contacts for me. I can hardly avoid it.”

  I finished my drink. “I’m weeping,” I said. “It’s just too pathetic about your fatal scent. But let me tell you something.”

  “Yes?” he asked warily.

  “The next time I run into any reactions with you as catalyst, you’re going to see how you like indefinite confinement as a material witness.”

  He smiled and his voice had a light lilt to it. “That is the best you can do, Lieutenant, isn’t it?”

  “You know what I ought to do.”

  “And you know there isn’t a jury on earth that would pay attention. Especially since the peculiarities of legal purity would insist on the trial of one case at a time.” He slid easily off the chair. “Goodbye, Lieutenant. We shall probably meet again some day.”

  I didn’t see Gregor Stolz again until Anne’s dinner party, when I saw him next to Anne helping her pour the sherry. He liked to help people.

  Anne was dressed in something long and white that made her look fresh and floating, the way she had looked that night after her graduation when we decided rookie policemen shouldn’t think about marriage. The men wore tuxes, which I’m not used to, but it was the least you could do to justify that enormous house and grounds up on Queen’s Road.

  I told Otis I was glad to see him and I meant it. He was the husband Anne deserved and I don’t mean his money. He’d have done all right without that. He was a research chemist at Conch Oil and you know the kind of mind that means—sharp and precise and just a little nervous and erratic. His eyes grinned at me through the thick glasses, but there were some fine new wrinkles around them that hadn’t been there last time, and I didn’t think they came from grinning. He took me over and introduced me to a good-looking young Navy officer, his cousin, Lieutenant Commander Quentin Lyons.

  Then Anne brought Gregor Stolz up to us—he was being helpful, carrying the tray of sherry glasses—and said: “I don’t know if you’ve met the lieutenant? Mr. Stolz.”

  I said: “We’ve met.”

  “Under most distressing circumstances,” Stolz added gravely.

  Anne said simply, “I’m sorry” and didn’t ask any questions. It showed a nice tact, but it might have been better if she’d pried a little.

  The commander took over the story he’d evidently started on earlier, about action he had seen in the South Pacific before being transferred to shore duty. I watched Anne while he talked and she reminded me of something but I couldn’t place it. Something from a play, I thought.

  When we went into the dining room, my eyes popped the way they always do when I see one of Anne’s curries. I said: “Whew! What a spread! And just what,” I pointed to one of the twenty-odd small dishes, “is that?”

  Anne laughed. “That’s a new idea. Specialty of the house. It’s rendered lamb fat—you know, like pork cracklings, only lamb.”

  Otis put his arm around her. “She looks like this and she can cook. What did I ever do to deserve her?”

  “What indeed?” said Gregor Stolz.

  It was a harmless remark, you’d think. Just a natural follow-up to Otis’s line—banal echo-effect. But Otis’s eyes met Stolz and something shot along his glance through his spectacles. Anne looked at the commander and for a second I would say her face showed terror.

  Then she said: “Take whatever suits your taste and pile your plates very full—it’s unrationed lamb.” And it was just another dinner party, only better cooked than usual.

  For a little while I didn’t pay much attention to the talk. I let my mouth glow with a blend of flavors and textures that was like good music. When I paid attention again, Gregor Stolz was talking.

  “The logic of it is so absolute,” he said, “that it is doomed to failure. Some things are too cleverly true ever to be accepted.”

  Such as, I thought, the pattern of murder prones. But I went on listening.

  “Place yourself,” he said, “back at the point when arithmetic was made possible—the invention of the zero. And then ask yourself why the numeral one followed by the zero should mean ten.”

  “But what else could it mean?” Anne asked.

  Gregor sighed with humorous patience, and Otis and the commander seemed to agree with him.

  “My dear lady,” Gregor went on, “take any number—let us say the succession of figures one-two-three-four. Now what does that mean, not in the decimal system, but in a system of any base?”

  “I guess,” Anne ventured, “it just means one times a thousand and two times a hundred and—”

  Her husband interrupted her. “My dearest sweet, what Mr. Stolz obviously means is that, whatever number is the base of your system, one-two-three-four means one times the third power of that number, two times the second power, three times the first power, and four times the zero power—which, of any number, is one.”

  “Of course,” Stolz agreed. “That is all the meaning of the numerals themselves. It is simply a convention of our civilization that one-two-three-four means one thousand, two hundred and thirty-four. In the duodecimal system, it means one great gross, two gross, three twelves and four—in other words, what you would call 2056.”

  “And is that good?” I asked.

  He laughed. “There is nothing miraculous in that special example, it is true. But the conveniences of the duodecimal system are great, so great that certain army supply depots have unofficially adopted it for such problems as figuring cubic content. And I use it myself for all my private calculations. Once one is trained to think in it, it is so much simpler.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He told me why at great length. And I found myself listening intently, partly because the subject was int
eresting, which I hadn’t expected, and partly because I realized that Gregor Stolz was very much in earnest. He intensely believed in this duodecimal business. It was alive inside him.

  Otis had his pencil out and was figuring on the tablecloth. Anne didn’t notice him—not because she was absorbed in the numbers, but because she was talking to Commander Lyons. I wasn’t happy when I saw her look at him, nor once when I saw Gregor Stolz steal a side glance at them both.

  Otis looked up from his scrawls. “This is swell,” he said. “It’s a cinch once you twist your mind the right way. Bet I could work out a table of logs if I had time.”

  “It’s been done,” Stolz said, “and they’re rather more helpful than—”

  I looked at my watch. I said: “I’m sorry, Anne, but I’ve got to be on duty tonight, and first I’ll have to change out of this monkey-suit.”

  They made all the polite noises and Otis and Anne went with me to get my coat.

  When I came out of the house, Gregor Stolz was waiting for me. He didn’t have anything to say. I think he just wanted to smile at my futility.

  I said: “Not here. You get that, Stolz? These are my people. Not here!”

  He smiled. “‘And what’s he then that says I play the villain?’”

  I spotted the quote. Berkeley cops surprise people that way. I said: “Iago? Don’t overrate yourself.”

  “Overrate? When that poor fool was … catalyst to only four deaths?”

  I said: “Three. He wasn’t catalyst to Emilia.”

  “Such erudition, Lieutenant!”

  “I like Shakespeare. He knew what makes people tick. And I’m beginning to catch your tickings, Stolz. You like numbers. You like things you can shove around and make jump through hoops. It feels good. So you try it on a living scale and that feels good, too. But not here.”

  I turned around and walked off. I wished we hadn’t talked about Othello. Now I knew what Anne had reminded me of when she was listening to the commander.

  She loved me for the dangers I had passed,