tantaliz (28 page)

Apart from the unique problem set by the circumstance of the sealed room is the problem of how the crime could have gone undiscovered for so long a period, the doctor's estimate from the condition of the body as some twelve to fourteen days.

Twelve to fourteen days—

Annixter read back over the remainder of the story; then let the paper fall to the floor. The pulse was heavy in his head. His face was grey. Twelve to fourteen days? He could put it closer than that.
It was exactly thirteen nights ago that he had sat in the Casa Havana and told a little man with hexagonal glasses how to Mil a woman in a sealed room!

Annixter sat very still for a minute. Then he poured himself a drink. It was a big one, and he needed it He felt a strange sense of wonder, of awe.

They had been in the same boat, he and the little man—thirteen nights ago. They had both been kicked in the face by a woman. One, as a result, had conceived a murder play. The other had made the play reality!

"And I actually, tonight, offered him a share." Annixter thought "I talked about 'real' money!"

That was a laugh. All the money in the universe wouldn't have made that little man admit that he had seen Annixter before—that Annixter had told him the plot of a play about how to kill a woman in a sealed room! Why, he, Annixter, was the one person in the world who could denounce that little man! Even if he couldn't tell them, because he had forgotten, just
how
he had told the little man the murder was to be committed, he could still put the police on the little man's track. He could describe him, so that they could trace him. And once on his track, the police would ferret out links, almost inevitably, with the dead woman.

A queer thought—that he, Annixter, was probably the only menace, the only danger, to the little prim, pale man with the hexagonal spectacles. The only menace—as, of course, the little man must know very well.

He must have been very frightened when he had read that the playwright who had been knocked down outside the Casa Havana had only received "superficial injuries." He must have been still more frightened when Annixter's advertisements had begun to appear.
What must he have felt tonight, when Annixter's hand had fallen on his shoulder?

A curious idea occurred, now, to Annixter. It was from tonight, precisely from tonight, that he was a danger to that little man. He was, because of the inferences the little man must infallibly draw, a deadly danger as from the moment the discovery of the murder in the sealed room was published. That discovery had been published tonight and the little man had had a paper under his arm—

Annixter's was a lively and resourceful imagination.

It was, of course, just in the cards that, when he'd lost the little man's trail at the subway station, the little man might have turned back, picked up
his
, Annixter's trail.

And Annixter had sent Joseph out He was, it dawned slowly upon Annixter, alone in the apartment—alone in a windowless room, with the door locked and bolted on the inside, at his back.

Annixter felt a sudden, icy and wild panic.

He half rose, but it was too late.

It was too late, because at that moment the knife slid, thin and keen and delicate, into his back, fatally, between the ribs.

Annixter's head bowed slowly forward until his cheek rested on the manuscript of his play. He made only one sound—a queer sound, indistinct, yet identifiable as a kind of laughter.

The fact was, Annixter had just remembered.

Robert Arthur

"A completely new way to escape from a locked room!" Gordon Waggoner's eyes glowed and he ran an almost translucent hand through hair as silvery as dandelion seed "Though technically I suppose I should call it a 'sealed room.' The idea only came to me last Friday, the first, and I already have the plot worked out in detail. Think of it, my fifty-first locked-room mystery—and no two alike!"

"Congratulations!" Harrison Mannix said, concealing a stab of envy. "That calls for another drink. Oh, François!"

The small bar of the Fontainebleau, on 52nd Street, was snug against an early September fog that prowled New York like a damp gray alley cat François, flushed from hurrying drinks to the big, barren room upstairs where a monthly meeting of the Mystery Writers of America was being held, brought a rum-and-cola for Waggoner, Rhine wine and soda for Mannix. The blond, middle-aging writer never touched anything stronger than wine—he prided himself on keeping his head clear even when relaxing. You never knew when a plot idea would pop into your mind, and mystery writing being the highly competitive business it is these days, a man couldn't afford to forget the smallest notion that might be incorporated into a book. At least Mannix, who was finding new ideas harder to come by, couldn't

They touched glasses. "Skoal!" Mannix said. Then, with just the proper touch of disinterest, "How did you hit on it?"

"You know how these things are," Gordon Waggoner answered. "They come when you least expect it. This one, as it happens, came out of a chance conversation."

He was about to say more when two members from the group upstairs came down, hunting for François, who was muttering to himself as he tried to mix a dozen drinks at once. His black eye-patch giving him the appearance of a genial pirate, Brett Halliday paused, plucked a brandy from the almost-ready tray, and Clayton Rawson, an angular Merlin, reached for a whiskey that vanished in midair before he could get it to his lips. With solemn indignation he demanded and got another, and paid for it with a bill that exploded in bright flame as François took it The small, stout Frenchman sighed as the two returned upstairs, made a note on a pad, and went on mixing drinks.

Waggoner remained silent after Halliday and Rawson had gone, and Mannix, by way of jogging him, remarked, "I hope you're not going to use a detachable window-frame that looks solid, because John Dickson Carr has already used that."

"Carr!" the little man snorted. "Carr is good, very good, but you don't think I'd repeat anything he's used, do you? Oh, no, when Carr and Queen and the others upstairs read it, they'll wonder why they didn't think of it themselves."

Momentary anxiety clouded Waggoner's puckish features.

"At least, I don't
think
it's been used. But you never can be sure. Especially with Carr. He's written so many stories that even he's forgotten—

"No, I'm sure it's new. I'll have it finished by the end of the month."

"I wish I could plot as easily as you," Mannix said warmly. Flattery was the one thing the shy, introspective little Waggoner responded to. The year round he lived by himself in his rented stone cottage in Connecticut, writing an incredible amount of fiction and carrying on a voluminous and usually acrid correspondence with other mystery writers. These monthly visits to the meetings of the New York chapter of the MWA—Mystery Writers of America—were his only social outings. Usually he simply sat and said nothing, even to colleagues to whom he might have written a five-page letter only the day before. It was sheer luck that he wasn't interested in the lecture on ballistics to which the rest of the MWA membership was listening in the room above, thus giving Mannix a chance to chat with him. Even though they lived only two miles apart, in western Connecticut, Waggoner did not encourage the younger man to drop in.

"Everybody knows you're the best plotter in the business," Mannix added—thinking,
If I can get him to tell me the gimmick, then steer him off by telling him it was used years ago
— "I'll certainly be looking forward to reading it"

"I think you'll enjoy it" Waggoner rose to the lure. "I'm going to make my central character a mystery writer—a complete scoundrel who becomes the victim." He cleared his throat "Ah—I hope you won't mind if he seems a little like you, Harry. Just superficially, of course."

"Why should I?" Mannix asked heartily. "An English setting, I suppose?"

"Oh, no—America. Rural Connecticut, in fact Country very much like the region where I live."

"I see. An old revolutionary house, then? Big chimney flues-wide floor boards—loose siding on the house—plenty of ways to get out of a locked room."

"Nothing of the sort!" Waggoner crowed. "The murder will take place in a modern cottage. A fireplace, yes, but with a flue so small only a cat could get out Two doors, both nailed shut by heavy boards across the inside. Three windows similarly barred, the boards being no more than four inches apart The roof tightly constructed with solid sheathing, insulating paper, and shingles, not one of which is out of place. The floor solid concrete, covered by linoleum. The walls solid stone. No concealed entrances, no Judas windows, no doors sealed shut by gummed paper drawn against the inside cracks by strong suction. How would you get out of a room like that, eh?" he demanded.

"I don't know," Mannix answered. "Are you sure it can be done?"

"Perfectly sure." Waggoner smiled slightly and rose, reaching for his hat, a shapeless black felt, I have to hurry if I'm going to make my train. I'll start writing it in the morning. . . . You're not coming back to Connecticut tonight?"

"No," Mannix told him. "Matter of fact, I'm flying to Hollywood tomorrow. An eight weeks' contract with Twentieth Century Fox to do a screen treatment. Henry Klinger arranged it"

"Congratulations" Waggoner said. "See you when you get back."

He scuttled for the door, strands of silvery fluff flying where they escaped beneath his hatband. Mannix ordered another Rhine wine and soda and moodily carried it upstairs, where he found a vacant chair at the rear of the crowd. Someone from the New York police department was lecturing on ballistics, with slides, and Mannix regretted he had left the bar.

Many members were making notes, but he saw that Percival Wilde had his eyes closed, while John Dickson Carr was squirming in his seat, as if waiting for an opportunity to contradict the speaker. Rex Stout sat in a rear row, stroking his beard, his expression somehow suggesting benevolent tolerance—the tolerance of a man who has already appeared in print with some of the very material the note-takers around him were so busily recording. Little Helen Reilly, who probably had forgotten more about police procedure than most of the writers present would ever know, gazed longingly into an empty glass and eavesdropped on the whispered conversation which Larry Blochman was carrying on in French with one of the newer MWA members, Georges Simenon, who had transformed himself into a Connecticut squire, thanks to the enviable international success of his Inspector Maigret

Mannix, eavesdropping himself, found that they were discussing French royalty rates, and ceased to listen. It was true that the official motto of the organization was
Crime Does Not Pay-Enough
, but he sometimes felt that the discussions of royalty rates and contracts which ensued whenever two or more mystery writers met were overdone. This feeling had been growing on him more particularly of late, as his own earnings dwindled.

Abandoning any pretense of giving attention to the speaker of the evening, he slumped in his chair and sipped his drink. He did not bother with such minutiae of mystery writing as ballistics, or even fingerprints. Primarily, he wrote tales of chase and violence, based upon a recipe of rapid action which made clues and explanations not only unnecessary but frequently impossible.

However, he had had a considerable success with a couple of locked-room plots some years before, and as he waited for the meeting to be over he moodily pondered his failure to get Gordon Waggoner to confide in him. He owed his publisher a book, and perhaps, with a little changing around—

He was still brooding when the speaker finally finished and the meeting broke up. The suburbanites hurried homeward. Most of the remainder transferred themselves to a nearby hotel suite where Brett Halliday and Helen McCloy, a husband and wife team who were not collaborators but individually turned out completely different types of mysteries, presided over an auxiliary party that usually lasted until dawn. By the time it broke up, Mannix had forgotten his conversation with Gordon Waggoner.

Some weeks later, in Hollywood, it was violently recalled to him by headlines shouting Waggoner's death.

The writer's body had been found in his Connecticut cottage, seated at his desk, one hand resting on the keys of his typewriter, the other apparently in the very act of moving the spacer arm.