Ripper (26 page)

"Men are witches, too," said DeClercq. "How do you rationalize that with female hegemony?"

"Some pretenders link the Goddess to a Horned God so they can sit around naked and diddle each other with their minds. That's not witchcraft. That's not
Wicca.
Dianics seek to reclaim the wisdom and power of the witch as
female
healer, mystic, midwife, and nurturer. To do that it's necessary to shut out men, so Dianic covens are for women only."

Joe smiled for the first time.

"We're witches without the
warts."

And so began Brigid Marsh's militant Amazon phase. She and her son spent the next three years at the commune, out of which came her call to arms
Mannequin.
Getting fucked-over from getting fucked does things to your mind, so misandric anger sizzled on every get-even page. Her theory was men are sex-driven ogres who consciously choose to subjugate women for their own gratification, and nothing would change until women as mothers conditioned the next generation of males to think and behave in a proper feminist manner. The "war against women" had to be turned into a "war against men" if their misogynous plot was to be foiled. And the battleground was their sons.

No more Gidget.

Gone was the mannequin.

The file contained pictures taken at the commune. Hard-faced from years of abuse, you could see the hatred of men in the Earth Mothers' eyes. And standing among them were several young boys. Including the towhead Samson.

Staring at the witches of Amazonia, Robert wondered how you condition a boy to think and behave in the proper feminist manner? Being a mother was surely one of the two most powerful careers on Earth. Be a good boy and you get the tit? Be a bad boy and you get the hairbrush or the enema syringe? Or was it more forceful than that?

If the Dianics of Amazonia were all like Jocelyn Kripp, he didn't want to meet the third-stage-male who came out of their Frankenstein's lab.

Male sexuality is nitroglycerine.

Deadman's Island

Coal Harbour, Vancouver 

2:00
P.M.

"A murderer is hiding in this list," Franklen said. "And fifty thousand dollars is riding on your choice."

Sitting behind the pilot in the floatplane bumping the dock, a hail of rain drumming the metal fusilage overhead, sheets of rain slapping the porthole window to his left, darts of rain pocking the swells that rocked and rolled the pontoons, Zinc ran his eyes down the photocopied list.

Lou Bolt 

Zinc Chandler 

Sol Cohen 

Luna Darke 

Glen Devlin 

Elvira Franklen 

Stanley Holyoak 

Alexis Hunt 

Al Leech 

Pete Leuthard 

Barney Melburn 

Adrian Quirk 

Colby Smith 

Wynn Yates

Uncapping his pen, Zinc struck
Zinc Chandler
off the list.
And Then There Were "Thirteen,"
he thought, cribbing Agatha Christie.

"Did you solve it?" A voice to his right.

"Hardly," Zinc said, laughing. "I just got the list. Have to meet the suspects first. I'm new to this."

"I mean
The Judas Window"
the man beside him said, indicating the novel in Chandler's lap. "Undoubtedly the best locked room Carr wrote. And since Carr owned the field, the best locked room ever."

Zinc eyed the mystery he had borrowed from Miss Deverell's bookmobile back in Saskatchewan. "Carr's Carter Dickson?"

"Same guy," the old man replied. "As John Dickson Can-he wrote about Dr. Gideon Fell. As Carter Dickson about HM, Sir Henry Merrivale. For my money, the finest who and howdunits written."

Elvira Franklen sat in the seat behind Chandler, impatiently watching the shore for the last stragglers to arrive. One plane had already departed for wherever they were going, a secret known only to the pilots of Thunderbird Charters. The airborne plane was banking west over Stanley Park.

"Wynn's the genre's authority on locked rooms," Franklen said. "He wrote the definitive study, which won the Edgar at last April's Mystery Writers dinner."

"Congratulations," Zinc said, shaking Wynn's knobby hand. "I hope the puzzle this weekend's not a locked room, Elvira? If it is, game's over, and we can all go home."

Wynn smiled sheepishly. "I still get stumped."

Wynn Yates was a shriveled-up little guy whom Chandler instantly liked. His face looked like unoiled leather baked in the sun for most of a century. Like Elvira, he was in his eighties. On the ride in from the airport, she'd given Zinc a thumbnail sketch of his "rival sleuths." Yates was born in Alaska in 1911. His father, who made a career of failure, went bankrupt several times. At ten, Wynn ran away to join the rodeo. At fifteen, he sailed around the world. For fifty years he toiled as a journalist in Washington State, starting as a sports reporter and working up to editor emeritus of the best Seattle paper. For fun he wrote the gardening column, which is how he met Franklen, the green thumb queen of B.C.

Watching their body language, frail though it might be, Zinc detected subtle hints of something romantic between them.

Elvira, you sly fox.

Wynn, you libertine.

On retirement, Yates had turned to mystery criticism, penning
The Sex Life of Ellery Queen, The Gray Cells of Hercule Poirot,
and
The Mean Streets of Philip Marlowe. The Locked Room Unlocked
was his latest.

"Didn't solve it," Zinc said, of
The Judas Window.
"The howdunit got me. The whodunit I'm still reading."

"No one solves it," Yates said, "though the answer is maddeningly simple. In your line of work such puzzles must seem unrealistic. In our line of work they're the purest form of crime. The first detective story was a locked room. Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' 1841. Death by throttling in a seemingly inaccessible room."

"An 'Ourang-Outang' dunit," Zinc said, thanks to his stakeout with Caradon in the Ghoul case.

"The most famous Sherlock Holmes story is also a locked room. 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band,' 1892. Death by fright in a locked bedroom."

"A 'swamp adder' dunit," Zinc said, proud of his trivial pursuit so far.

"Tricking the reader often involves a fiendish array of death traps and diabolical machines. A prime example," Yates said, "is Wilkie Collins's 'A Terribly Strange Bed,' 1852. The canopy topping a four-poster bed is lowered by means of a ratchet to smother the sleeping victim."

A bark of laughter from the rear interrupted them. Chandler, Yates, and Franklen turned in their seats. Discounting the pilot, the man in back was the only other passenger aboard. He was reading
Kiss
by Ed McBain.

"Listen to this," Bolt said, grinning from ear to ear.
"Detective/Third Grade Randall Wade looked as mean as tight underwear.
Now that's the best one-line description I've ever read."

Chandler and Yates laughed in tandem; Franklen merely smiled. Perhaps you had to be male to get the full grasp of the simile.

"Two more coming," the pilot apprised.

Bolt glanced left out the window, squinting to see through the rain. In profile, his face displayed simian features: a cramped receding forehead with a strong chimpanzee jaw, a gorilla nose squashed flat by an unducked punch. His leer reflected a mind as clean as a Cairo sewer, his sprawl of a tongue parting his lips as he watched the female landlubbers negotiate the heaving dock. An I-want-what-I-want-when-I-want-it sexuality came off him like a bad smell, branding him in Zinc's mind as a back-door man whose ham-fists would beat his chest in dominating triumph when he came.

Ugh,
Chandler thought.

Lou Bolt, according to Franklen's thumbnail sketch in the cab, wrote gritty LAPD police procedurals. He wore one of those baseball caps American bulls prefer, the peak so erect it made him look like Donald Duck. Highway patrol his motorcycle jacket declared; undercover drug squad whispered his jeans; we walk the beat clomped his heavy-soled boots.
Cop groupie,
Zinc thought, taking in the clothes. On first impression he disliked Bolt as much as he liked Yates. The guy actually
sniffed
the woman who climbed up into the plane.

"I'm Luna Darke," she announced to those already aboard. "And this is my daughter Katt."

The teenager tipped her top hat like a gentleman. A Tarot card, Zinc noted, was tucked in the band. Death. Card
XIII.
A skeleton with a scythe.

"Seems we have a stowaway," Franklen said to the captain, a pimple-faced kid who could be playing hooky from school.

"Want to fly the plane, Katt?" the pilot asked, patting the seat beside him.

"Rad," Katt said, working her way to the front.

Luna Darke plopped into the seat next to Franklen, kitty-corner to Zinc and behind Wynn Yates. As she slumped, the slit up her skirt bared one thigh, challenging Chandler to submit to her will. Her eyes threw him a smoldering I-dare-you look . . . until she noticed the square indent where the surgeon had entered his brain. Yanking her skirt shut like a curtain closing a matinee, she switched to the look she'd give a sideshow freak.

"Last minute screw-up, Elvira." Luna nodded at Katt. "The choice was I bring her, or stay behind myself."

"Two heads are better than one," Franklen said. "Perhaps she'll give you the edge."

"For fifty thousand dollars, I hope so," Darke replied.

Zinc could see her at Woodstock twirling naked among the boys, all peace, love, have a nice day, and what do you think of my tits? He could see her marching topless in last summer's protest, all men have freedom, why don't we, and what do you think of my tits? Antsy at the bottom, jiggly at the top, she was Playboy bunny, Earth mother hippie, and strip-Jack-naked freewoman in one. Five'd get you ten she had a tattoo on her rump.

Bolt went back to reading.

Darke and Franklen yakked.

Katt learned how to fly the plane.

And Wynn Yates said:

"I feel guilty, keeping it to myself. Want a quick lesson in] how to solve a locked room?"

"You bet," Zinc said. "I have a premonition I'll need it."

He was right.

It is one of the elementary principles of practical reasoning,
Zinc recalled Miss Deverell quoting from Conan Doyle,
that when the impossible has been eliminated the residuum, however improbable, must contain the truth.

"The Three Coffins,"
Yates said, "is Carr's most famous book. Published in 1935, it contains the classic 'Locked-Room Lecture' by Dr. Gideon Fell. Fell outlines seven situations involving 'a hermetically sealed room, which really is hermetically sealed, and from which no murderer has escaped because no murderer was actually in the room.'

"One: it isn't murder, but a series of coincidences ending, in an accident that looks like murder."

"The victim's skull is cracked," Zinc said, "as if by a bludgeon, but actually he fell and struck a piece of furniture?"

"Two: it is murder, by impelling the victim to kill himself or meet an accidental death."

"Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte?"
said Zinc.

"A better example is watching a film interspliced with subliminal messages prompting the fatal action. Years ago a test was done where split-second
Buy Popcorn
ads were spliced into a drive-in movie. The popcorn stand was mobbed at intermission.

"Three: it is murder, by a mechanical device planted in the room."

"The bed with the ratchet," said Zinc.

"Another ingenious device is Carr's 'The Wrong Problem.' " The old man's eyes were shrewd and sharp. This was his element.

"Four: it is suicide, intended to look like murder. A man stabs himself with an icicle, which then melts and evaporates.

"Five: it is murder, complicated by illusion or impersonation."

"The magician's sleight of hand? Sawing a woman in half? 'They do it with mirrors'?" Zinc said.

"Example: thought to be alive, the victim lies dead in a watched room. The murderer, dressed to look like the victim, enters, sheds his disguise, then turns and exits as himself. The illusion is the two passed at the door.

"Alternative example: the victim lies dead in a locked room. The murderer, with witnesses, shines a flashlight in though the window from outside. A shadowy figure moves within, but when the room is entered, no one's there. Unknown to the witnesses, the killer had taped a small silhouette to the flashlight lens.

"Six: it is murder, committed by someone outside the room, though it appears the killer must have been inside."

"The victim is stabbed through the keyhole while snooping?" Zinc said.

"The door-bolt within is drawn across by using a magnet outside."

"A knot in the window frame is removed to shoot the victim through the knothole, then replaced?"

"You're catching on." Wynn laughed.

"Seven: the victim is thought to be dead long before he actually is."

"A man locks the door, then faints in a room?" said Zinc. "The door's broken down and the first person in kills him while those following are distracted?"

"You graduate with honors as teacher's pet," said Yates. "Every locked room is a variation on those seven themes, yet knowing that, we still get stumped."

"I'm ready," Chandler said, shadowboxing the air.

"Locks, keys, and sealed rooms aren't essential to the problem," said Yates. "A body found with its throat cut on a sandy beach unmarked by any footprints except those of the victim offers the same puzzle. How did the murderer kill and escape without leaving tracks?" "By using a bullwhip with a razor tied to the end," said Zinc.

"By throwing a knife-edged boomerang," Wynn countered.

"The victim's a hemophiliac whose blood doesn't clot while the tide goes in and out."

"The victim's a—"

"Land ho," Franklen said, sighing with relief. "The last pilgrim arrives."

Barely visible through the rain was the city's downtown core. Huddled like a waif at its feet was the shack of Thun-derbird Charters. From the shack to the plane on the water stretched a gangway and hundred-foot dock. The woman sea-legging down the gangplanks struggled against the storm, suitcase lugged in one hand, umbrella opposite fighting the wind to block the slanted rain. She wore a black tight-waisted jacket over black slacks tucked into black cowboy boots, and a black trenchcoat that flapped about her like Dracula's cape. Her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail held by silver heart-shaped clips, wayward strands snake-danced about her face, masking it. Near the plane, she looked up, and Zinc's heart was gone.