The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (80 page)

Captain Corrigan! The police!

She was on her knees. A hand got hold of her. It got her under the jaw from behind, a hand like a steel vice. It yanked her completely from the ground, a swooping arc that almost made her swoon. She saw the bright blaze of sunlight rushing toward her, felt her fierce propulsion across the rug. Then she knew – he was going to use her for a shield!

She was at the casement. He was behind her. She could feel the rigid strength of his body, the sharp pressure of his hip. His breath panted hoarsely in her hair. His left arm was clamped like a bar across her neck, both her wrists pinioned beneath it.

Outside were faces. They were picked out vivid against the green lawn, the brilliant sunshine. Captain Corrigan, his bullet head forward, his eyes like two slits of a knife, his hard jaw working. The policemen, the sun flashing from their shields, their guns half extended. The hawklike face of De Saules, his black spear point of beard jabbing up and down with irregular motions. All were staring at the face behind her, their faces etched alike with stunned, stark blankness.

They were looking into the face of the murderer – the face she could not see!

Then his coat sleeve brushed by her body as he raised his arm to fire. She couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t move her wrists. All she could do was turn over the compact in her hand. She couldn’t aim it. But her hand was jammed almost against his jaw. She got the hole in the metal cover around just as his arm swung down to shoot.

She squeezed the compact for all she was worth. The jet of ammonia shot like a cascade into his face. The contraction of his body threw her headfirst against the wall. But before she spun into blackness, before the rush through the window reached that floundering, gagging form, she caught one glimpse of his face – the too florid, too blue-eyed, too handsome face of Gawdy!

Captain Corrigan was beside her. She was sitting on the sofa. The rush, tumult and furor had all gone out, now, out of the room and out of the house, taking the gold-coated bulk of Gawdy with it. Out of her mind, too – she was once more clear and collected, her shako hat straight on her head, her face freshened, and except for the ache in her head, could even look back on things with a certain perspective.

Captain Corrigan’s head was lowered. He was leafing through a telephone book. He jabbed his thumb at a name.

“You’re right! There it is! A dentist! Dr Gawdy! Now why the devil didn’t I look the guy up? Is that all you did to find it?”

“That’s all.” Sandra put her slim forefinger beside his thumb. “There it was in the book – George Gawdy, D.D.S., Suite 405–406, Mohican Building. He was Mr Delaunay’s dentist – for how long I don’t know, but probably after he married Marceline.”

Corrigan had dropped the book and was staring at a bright object on the sofa flanked by two circular gold prongs. “An old-fashioned denture – a one-tooth removable bridge!” He turned it over. “And there, there’s the hole in it where it was filled with the pulverized crystals of oxalic acid!”

“Yes, and through the same hole the acid got out.” Sandra could not look at it without repulsion. “It’s a duplicate, made by the dental laboratory man Dow, to be slipped into Mr Delaunay’s mouth in place of the one he had. Under the guise of having it repaired, Gawdy got hold of it and had the hollow duplicate made.”

Corrigan began a curse, checked himself. “All Gawdy did was fill it with the pulverized crystals, and plug it with a little soluble cement, so the poison would come out when the cement did!”

“Of course. And that moment happened to be when Mr Delaunay got so angry over reading Dow’s warning note. He ground his teeth and dislodged the plug – and the acid poured into his mouth.”

Corrigan stared at her. His eyes went over her trim head, her vivid young cheeks, her wide brown eyes, in a kind of mystified stupefaction.

“How the devil did you ever happen to pick out Gawdy?”

“
You
helped me, Captain Corrigan.” Sandra’s brown eyes flashed a smile. “It was yesterday morning, in your office, when you said of Dow: ‘Why help his confederate on one hand, harm him on the other?’ Only because he
had
to. Women’s minds make strange quirks, Captain Corrigan, and that made mine flash back to when Dow, in the welfare office, had given me the note. It made me see what I had entirely overlooked – that Dow
palmed
the note he gave me. He
hid
it in his hand. Why? Why not hand me the note openly? It could only have been because of the presence of someone he didn’t want to see it – and the only other person there was Gawdy. That made it” – she gestured – “oh, so plain, it was just like a bombshell! So then I went and looked Gawdy up in the phone book, and there he was – a dentist. That almost proved it, at least to me. Of course the poison had to be something to do with his teeth! It was the only way it
could
get into his mouth! So you see, at the bottom of the crazy way a woman’s mind works,
you
really supplied the answer.”

Corrigan took his hat off. He almost blushed.

“There’s precious little credit in this for me. Go on. I’m listening. My hat’s off to you. I’ve got my mouth open.”

Sandra said with a gesture of both hands: “There
wasn’t
anything else. I had a wild idea there might be a dental chart of Mr Delaunay’s in Gawdy’s office. I went up to the Mohican Building – and found Dow selling the bridge to Marceline. Of course I didn’t know it was a bridge, but I knew it was something that looked like a tooth.”

A shadow crossed her face. “Maybe what kept me from thinking of Gawdy so long was the fact that he brought the baby up to my office. That was pure coincidence. He was coming up to see that Dow delivered the bamboo tube to me without any hitch, and finding the baby gave him a good excuse to come in.” She shook her head. “I can see what Dow’s whole aim was all through, to make the affair plainly a murder, so he could blackmail Gawdy’s secret bride. But I still don’t know
why
, Captain Corrigan, they sent the acid to the Chinese maid.”

Corrigan grunted. “You were still unconscious when Dow gasped that part out to us with what must have been his last gallon of breath. The maid was the one that overheard Gawdy talking to the old man, examining his bridge, and suggesting that he come up to the office and have it repaired.”

“So that’s it!” Sandra gave a breath of relief. “I’m so glad she’s cleared; I had a feeling she was honest all through.”

Corrigan gave his knee a vicious cut with his hat. “No wonder the M.E. or the autopsy didn’t find anything wrong with the old man’s mouth! When the M.E. first looked into it, the duplicate bridge was there; when the autopsy was conducted, his honest old original bridge was there!”

“Of course. And all Dow cut the tongue out for was to get at the poisoned bridge, remove it, and replace the original harmless one; and of course
then
there was not the slightest thing wrong with the old man’s mouth.”

Corrigan’s hard eyes flicked over the broken remnants of the goldfish bowl. “The young lady Marceline can consider herself damned lucky she only got a flesh wound. Gawdy was in here to clean up. He was going to get her and Dow and everyone he figured knew a solitary thing about it.”

Sandra’s eyes blazed. “And after what Marceline went through for him, did for him, out of pure, unadulterated love for him! She begged De Saules to reverse his testimony – probably at the cost of saying she herself was implicated – and De Saules, out of family loyalty and because he really was gone on her, agreed.” She broke off suddenly. She didn’t tell how De Saules had come up, tried to stop her with cycloprophane. Let bygones be bygones. She had a feeling the whole answer to Marceline’s shattered life lay in De Saules.

“By George! I wish I was ten years younger!” Captain Corrigan was staring at her with his widest-open look. He got up and stood with his blunt hands on his hips. “Think of it, a girl like you, smart as they make ’em, pretty as a little dream, running around loose!” His thundering voice broke off with a grin. “How come no man has appropriated you?”

“One has.” The smile in Sandra’s eyes was like the deepest velvet in the world. She picked up her bag. “I’m on the way to see him now, Captain Corrigan. He’s not very big, but he’s gone through a lot on my account. He’s waiting for me over at the clinic.”

I
’ve been a city cop for 32 years now, and during that time I’ve heard of and been involved in some of the weirdest, most audacious crimes imaginable – on and off public record. But as far as I’m concerned, the murder of an attorney named Adam Chillingham is
the
damnedest case in my experience, if not in the entire annals of crime.

You think I’m exaggerating? Well, listen to the way it was.

My partner Jack Sherrard and I were in the Detective Squad-room one morning last summer when this call came in from a man named Charles Hearn. He said he was Adam Chillingham’s law clerk, and that his employer had just been shot to death; he also said he had the killer trapped in the lawyer’s private office.

It seemed like a fairly routine case at that point. Sherrard and I drove out to the Dawes Building, a skyscraper in a new business development on the city’s south side, and rode the elevator up to Chillingham’s suite of offices on the sixteenth floor. Hearn, and a woman named Clarisse Tower, who told us she had been the dead man’s secretary, were waiting in the anteroom with two uniformed patrolmen who had arrived minutes earlier.

According to Hearn, a man named George Dillon had made a 10:30 appointment with Chillingham, had kept it punctually, and had been escorted by the attorney into the private office at that exact time. At 10:40 Hearn thought he heard a muffled explosion from inside the office, but he couldn’t be sure because the walls were partially soundproofed.

Hearn got up from his desk in the anteroom and knocked on the door and there was no response; then he tried the knob and found that the door was locked from the inside. Miss Tower confirmed all this, although she said she hadn’t heard any sound; her desk was farther away from the office door than was Hearn’s.

A couple of minutes later the door had opened and George Dillon had looked out and calmly said that Chillingham had been murdered. He had not tried to leave the office after the announcement; instead, he’d seated himself in a chair near the desk and lighted a cigarette. Hearn satisfied himself that his employer was dead, made a hasty exit, but had the presence of mind to lock the door from the outside by the simple expediency of transferring the key from the inside to the outside – thus sealing Dillon in the office with the body. After which Hearn put in his call to Headquarters.

So Sherrard and I drew our guns, unlocked the door, and burst into the private office. This George Dillon was sitting in the chair across the desk, very casual, both his hands up in plain sight. He gave us a relieved look and said he was glad the police had arrived so quickly.

I went over and looked at the body, which was sprawled on the floor behind the desk; a pair of French windows were open in the wall just beyond, letting in a warm summer breeze. Chillingham had been shot once in the right side of the neck, with what appeared by the size of the wound to have been a small-caliber bullet; there was no exit wound, and there were no powder burns.

I straightened up, glanced around the office, and saw that the only door was the one which we had just come through. There was no balcony or ledge outside the open windows – just a sheer drop of 16 stories to a parklike, well-landscaped lawn which stretched away for several hundred yards. The nearest building was a hundred yards distant, angled well to the right. Its roof was about on a level with Chillingham’s office, it being a lower structure than the Dawes Building; not much of the roof was visible unless you peered out and around.

Sherrard and I then questioned George Dillon – and he claimed he hadn’t killed Chillingham. He said the attorney had been standing at the open windows, leaning out a little, and that all of a sudden he had cried out and fallen down with the bullet in his neck. Dillon said he’d taken a look out the windows, hadn’t seen anything, checked that Chillingham was dead, then unlocked the door and summoned Hearn and Miss Tower.

When the coroner and the lab crew finally got there, and the doc had made his preliminary examination, I asked him about the wound. He confirmed my earlier guess – a small-caliber bullet, probably a .22 or .25. He couldn’t be absolutely sure, of course, until he took out the slug at the post-mortem.

I talked things over with Sherrard and we both agreed that it was pretty much improbable for somebody with a .22 or .25 caliber weapon to have shot Chillingham from the roof of the nearest building; a small caliber like that just doesn’t have a range of a hundred yards and the angle was almost too sharp. There was nowhere else the shot could have come from – except from inside the office. And that left us with George Dillon, whose story was obviously false and who just as obviously had killed the attorney while the two of them were locked inside this office.