The Union Club Mysteries (5 page)

Baranov sighed. "I wouldn't want to imply that I have not been adequately successful in my relationship with the fair sex, but I must admit that there is usually an exertion of charm required. It's becoming almost more trouble than it's worth."

The august confines of the Union Club were not often the sounding board of amatory reminiscences, I imagine, and I wasn't sure I wanted Baranov's.-I said, "It needn't be trouble. With some people, the exertion of charm is second nature." I preened a little.

Jennings, however, said in a very snide way, "I've seen you at work and watched the women scatter. I'd try something else, if I were you."

And from the depths of the armchair, from which I could have sworn there had come the faint suspiration of placid snoring, Griswold's voice sounded. "I knew a man once who was irresistible to women. No question of charm at all. Just by existing, he found them gathering about."

"Lucky devil," said Baranov.

"It depends on your definition of luck," said Griswold. "One of the women in question killed him—"

I won't mention his name [said Griswold] or the names of the women involved. The incident made a medium-sized splash several decades ago, but it is now forgotten and might as well remain so. No need to revive the unpleasant past for survivors and descendants.

I was called in on the case by the police, by the commissioner, in fact, who was a close friend of mine and who knew my facility for seeing to the heart of a matter, where lesser men would fail.

"Griswold," he said, "there are four women involved and any one of them could have been the murderess. Every one of them had the motive, means and opportunity, and it's just a matter of picking out the one among them who did it."

"The police can do that, can't they, if they dig around sufficiently? They have so limited a number of suspects."

The commissioner said, "Yes, but it will take time and manpower, something it will be difficult to spare at the moment. If you will simply interview each of the women, I'm sure you will be able to spot the guilty party at once."

I was always glad to help out the police, so I agreed to devote a day to it—something not lightly to be granted for I was a busy man in those days.

I can differentiate the four women for you easily, for one had black hair, one brown, one red, and one blond. They were apparently not the only women in his life, but they were the four who had each visited him in the course of the afternoon and early evening of the fatal day. Each of them had been more or less firmly put to one side and dismissed, for Irresistible had found a new woman and was, temporarily at least, abandoning the competition. Naturally, each of the four was considerably upset.

One of the four was sufficiently disturbed to return in the late evening in order to reason or plead with him. Apparently, she had found him adamant in his refusal, so she snatched up a kitchen knife, which was lying about the apartment, and sheathed it very neatly in his chest. She retained sufficient presence of mind to wipe the handle, then left. That, at least, was the reconstruction of the crime.

Fingerprints meant nothing elsewhere in the apartment: all four had been there. There were witnesses to the fact that a woman had returned in the late evening, but the particular woman simply could not be identified. It was dark, and there had been merely a casual glimpse. None of the four had an adequate alibi for the period in question. All were upset and enraged over their dismissal, and any of the four could have snatched up the knife. The fifth woman, the new one in his life, came forward at once. She had no motive and she
did
have an alibi. She was simply not a suspect.

I interviewed all four women and found each to be astonished at the existence of the other three and that astonishment could not have been faked to a skilled investigator such as myself. I couldn't help feeling a great respect for Irresistible's ability to keep each one of his many women believing she was the only one.

Black-hair was firm on the irresistibility of the murdered man. "There was something about him," she said.

"Exactly what?" I asked.

"I'm not sure I can say."

"Extremely good-looking?" (I knew he wasn't. I had seen photographs.)

"No. Quite ordinary."

"Beautiful voice?"

"Not particularly."

"Educated? Cultured? Witty?"

"Who cares about that?"

"Good in bed?"

"Reasonably. I was attracted before I got to that."

"But you don't know exactly what it was that made him attractive."

"I can't say."

All four agreed on that. No one could put her finger on what it was that made him irresistible, but they all agreed he was.

I asked Red-hair if he used some particularly fetching aftershave lotion.

She said, "He didn't use any scent at all. Scentless soap. Scentless deodorant. That's something I liked about him, because I can't abide strong perfumes, either on my men or on myself."

That was one thing the four women had in common. They did not tend to choke you under a heavy pall of fragrant chemicals.

Brown-hair was the only one who showed sorrow. She kept sniffing and her eyes were red. She said she didn't think any of them could have done it.

"Weren't you annoyed at his callous behavior?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, but only when I was away from him. Out of his presence, I could get pretty angry and furious." She blew her nose. "But when I was with him, that all melted away. All I knew was that I wanted him and wanted to be with him. There was just something about him. I'm sure the others felt the same way."

Just something about him. That was all I could get out of any of them.

Blond-hair seemed the most rattle-pated, the most willing to talk.

"How did you meet the man?" I said.

She said, "It was at a party. No one introduced us. I saw him off in the corner and I paid no attention. He was perfectly ordinary-looking and he didn't exactly catch my eye. But then I passed him and I couldn't help but notice something attractive about him. I just stopped and said, 'Hello.' He looked up and smiled and said, 'How are you?' and that's how we met."

"Something about the smile?" I asked. "A certain roguish charm?"

"N-no," she said. "Ordinary smile. We talked for a while. I don't remember about what."

"But you remember it was a fascinating conversation? Brilliant even?"

"N-no. I don't remember it at all. It must have been just ordinary. Still, he took me to his apartment and it was just wonderful being with him."

"Skillful at sex?"

"Not bad. I've had better. But it was just wonderful being with him."

She agreed with Brown-hair that in the actual presence of Irresistible she would not have been able to hurt him no matter what he did. All four agreed on that.

There was the possibility that the women were right. Perhaps not one of them had done it; perhaps it had been a male burglar. Presumably Irresistible did not exert his fascination on males. A telephone call to the commissioner quashed that. No signs of forcible entry existed and nothing had been taken. Besides, the person seen coming to his apartment late at night had been a woman. Two witnesses agreed on that very firmly.

What was the nature of Irresistible's fascination? Somehow I felt that if I could but discover that, I would be able to solve the mystery.

I won't deny that I even played with the thought of magic.

Did Irresistible have some magic charm that turned the trick? Did he cast a spell on his victims, not in the figurative sense, but in the literal one?

I doubted that. After all, one of his victims had turned on him and killed him. If he were using a spell of some sort, surely he was sufficiently skillful not to have it fail him at a crucial moment. No, there had to be some
natural
ability he had, and
it
had failed him at the crucial moment. What had the ability been and how had it failed?

I made one more round of the women by telephone. I asked, "Did you ever speak to him on the telephone?"

They had.

"Did the conversation give you a warm feeling of love?"

Each one of them thought hard, then decided the telephone conversations were not particularly important.

"Did you like being held by him?"

Ecstatically.

"Even in the dark?"

Red-hair said emphatically, "It was better in the dark. I could concentrate on him more."

The others agreed.

Finally, I decided I had all I needed. I managed to get the answer to the commissioner before midnight. It had taken me one working day and I was right, of course—

Jennings was closest to Griswold and managed to tramp on his foot. "Don't go to sleep," he said. "What was the secret of his fascination?"

"Ouch," said Griswold, puffing out his white mustache and glaring. "Surely you can't be puzzled. If you're not going to call in the supernatural and talk of spells and love philters, then it's a matter of the senses. There are only three long-distance senses: sight, hearing and smell. It's clear that Irresistible was ordinary-looking and ordinary-sounding. Any one of the women could look at him from a distance or speak to him on the phone and be unaffected. It required a closer approach and that meant smell." I said, "He didn't use scent. You said so." "Exactly. But there are natural scents. The odor of clean perspiration can be aphrodisiac. Compounds have been located in traces from clean male perspiration that females find attractive. They have the odor of sandalwood, I believe. Undoubtedly, much of the attraction between the sexes is the result of these subtle chemical messages, but in our society, with its emphasis on heavy artificial scents and perfumes of all kinds, the natural scents are buried. Irresistible did not use such scents and perfumes. His natural odor was, I imagine, pronounced, and those women who likewise did not use scents and perfumes, and whose sense of smell was therefore sensitive, found him attractive. And they did so, in our smell-insensitive age, without even knowing why. That had to be it." Baranov said, "Yes, but then who killed him?" "That was self-evident. I told you that Brown-hair was the only one showing sorrow. She was sniffing and had red eyes. That may have been sorrow, but these things are also the symptoms of a cold in the nose. Undoubtedly, she could not have borne to hurt him, as she said; but with a cold, her sense of smell was temporarily gone. Temporarily, she was immune to Irresistible. Temporarily, there was nothing to stop her from knifing him—and she did."

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The mood at the Union Club was one of isolation that night as the four of us sat in the library. It was fairly late and we had it to ourselves.

Jennings must have felt that sense of removal from the rest of the world, for he said dreamily, "If we just stayed here, I wonder if anyone would ever come looking for us."

"Our wives would miss us after a week or two," I said encouragingly. "The dragnet would be thrown out."

"Listen," said Baranov. "You can't rely on dragnets. Back in 1930, a certain Judge Crater stepped out onto the streets of New York and was never seen again. In fifty years, not a clue."

"Nowadays," I said, "with social security numbers, credit cards and computers, it's not that easy to disappear."

"Yes?" said Baranov. "How about James Hoffa?"

"I mean, deliberately," I said. "While still alive."

From the depth of his armchair, Griswold stirred and rumbled slowly to life. "In some way," he said, "it's easier to disappear now, I suppose. With today's increasingly heterogeneous society, its increasingly self-centered people, who's to care if one person, more or less, slips quietly through the mechanical motions of minimal social involvement? I knew a man once the Department was aching to find who simply wasn't there."

Jennings said quickly, "What Department?" but Griswold never answers questions like that. *
      
*
      
*

I wonder [said Griswold] if you ever give thought to the careful putting together of small bricks of evidence into a careful edifice that isolates the foreign agent and neutralizes him. He doesn't have to be taken into custody and shot at sunrise. We have to know who and where he or she is. After that, he is no longer a danger. In fact, he becomes a positive help to us, particularly if the agent doesn't know he is known, for then we can see to it that he gets false information. He becomes
our
conduit and not theirs.

But it's not easy; or, at least, not always easy. There was one foreign agent who flickered always just beyond our focus of vision. Some of us called him Out-of-Focus.

And yet, little by little, we narrowed the search until we were convinced his center of operations was in a particular run-down building. We had his office located, in other words.

With infinite caution, we tried to track him down further without startling him into a change of base, which would mean having to redo all the weary work. We found threads of his existence at the local food stores, for instance, at the newsstands, at the post office, but we could never get a clear description or positive evidence that he was our man.

He remained Out-of-Focus.

We located the name he was using. It was William Smith and that gave us an idea.

Suppose a lawyer were looking for a William Smith who was a legatee for a sizable sum of money. In that case, neighbors would be delighted to help. If someone you know is likely to get a windfall, you
want
to help if only because that might induce gratitude and bring about the possibility of a loan. Smith himself might instinctively stand still for one moment if the possibility of money dangled before him, and even though he would know he was not the legatee, he might not question the search.

A real lawyer, amply briefed by ourselves, moved in to face William Smith—and he wasn't there. He hadn't been seen for days and no one had any information. Only the superintendent of the small building seemed curious. After all, there was the question of the next month's rent, one might suppose.

The disappearance, though frustrating—he always seemed one step ahead of us—at least gave us a chance to institute a legitimate police search. Nothing dramatic: just a missing person's case. A local detective, rather bored, asked to see the apartment. The super let him in.

Two rooms, a kitchenette, a toilet. That was it. And it told us nothing useful about the occupant, except that he might have been a writer—and the super told us that much.

The days passed and no trace of William Smith could be picked up. He was no longer merely Out-of-Focus, he was clean gone, and we all had the rotten feeling he would be forever gone, like Judge Crater, and that he would be more dangerous than ever until we managed to get on the track again.

Then the boss did what he should have done in the first place.

He sent me to look about the apartment.

I was always good at presenting a rather bumbling appearance, even in my younger days. A useful thing, too, because it sets people off their guard. I was sure the super would talk the more freely for feeling sorry for me when I looked about the apartment helplessly.

He made no move to leave after he let me in, and of course I did not ask him to leave. He said, "Still looking for him, huh?"

"Yeah," I said. "I've got to fill out a report."

"His family must be plenty worried. You know he got a legacy or something, and I guess they want the money even if they don't want him."

I said, "I suppose," and kept on looking around.

One room was a library, not a big one, either the room or the library. The books were mostly reference and science books, so I suppose Smith could be considered a science writer—he had to have some cover. They weren't brand-new; some of them looked used. There was also one upholstered couch, one wooden rocking chair, and one end table in the room. That was all except for the bookcases.

The other room also had several bookcases, including one that contained an Encyclopedia Britannica. It had a large desk, an upholstered armchair, several filing cabinets, an electric typewriter on a typewriting stand with a small swivel chair in front of it, a globe, and the minor paraphernalia of the writer's trade, such as reams of paper; also pens, paper clips, carbon paper, paperweights, envelopes, stamps and so on.

He was a very neat fellow. Everything was in the bookcases or in the filing cabinets or in the desk drawers or on top of the desk. Except for the items of furniture I've mentioned, there was nothing on the floor. Nor were there photographs of any kind and the walls were bare of anything framed.

There had been no useful fingerprints.

I said to the super, "You didn't take anything out, did you?" After all, he had a key.

"Who, me? With the police around? You crazy?"

I said, "You sure you can't describe the guy?"

"You guys asked me a million times. I tried, but he ain't much to look at. You know—just like a million other people."

I grunted. A successful agent has to look like a million other people or he's useless. They had taken the super to the local police station and had him look at endless pictures to locate someone who looked
like
William Smith and he ended by picking six pictures, and not one of the six looked anything like the other five. Smith remained Out-of-Focus.

There were two closets in the workroom. Clothes, of course. Nothing unusual.

I wandered into the bathroom. The usual toiletries, more or less used.

In the kitchenette, a sparse collection of comestibles in jars and cans. Some cutlery and pans and a can opener. None of it looked very used.

The super shrugged and said, "I suppose he ate out mostly. That's what I told the other guys." "But you don't know where?"

He shrugged again, "I mind my own business. In this neighborhood, you got to."

"The guys at the station say you claim you talked to him sometimes."

"Well, you know, like when I come to collect the rent, or fix the shower when it leaks. Like that."

"What kind of stuff does he write."

"I don't know. Nothing / read, I can tell you that." He sniggered.

I said, "I don't see any books around with his name on them."

He said, "He said once he wrote for the magazines a lot. Maybe he don't write books. I don't think he used his own name, either. I think he said that once."

"What magazines did he write for?"

"I don't know."

"What name did he use?"

"I don't know that either. He never told me and I didn't ask. No business of mine."

"His typing ever bother the neighbors?"

"Nobody ain't never complained. Listen, in this house you could beat up on your old lady at three in the morning and set her to screaming like a banshee, and no one would complain."

"Did
you
ever hear the typing?"

"You mean in my apartment? Nah. I'm two floors down."

"I mean, in the hall?"

"Sure. Once in a while. Very light. An old building like this got good walls."

"Ever see him type?"

"Sure. I'd come to fix something and I'd hear the typewriter going, tap, tap. Like I said, lightly. He'd let me in and then he'd sit down again, and go back to typing. Probably didn't make much money out of it or he wouldn't live here." He sniggered again.

I grunted and left. There were three other neighbors on the floor. None could describe the missing man; all insisted they knew nothing about him. One thought she could hear the typing sometimes, but she never paid any attention. "We keep ourselves
to
ourselves, mister," she said.

They surely did. There was no use pursuing the case any further.

For one thing, we didn't have to. Smith was now clearly in focus. Without his knowing it, we knew where he was and who he was and from that point on Smith was useless to the opposition and very useful to us— until such time as the opposition realized his cover had been broken. At that time we took him neatly into custody before they could arrange a fatal accident for him.

But if you don't mind, I'll go freshen my drink.

Griswold made as though to rise, but Jennings pulled his own chair in front of Griswold's and said, "You'll simply have to die of thirst unless you tell us first where and who he was."

Griswold drew his white eyebrows together in an annoyed frown. "You mean it isn't obvious? —There was
no
William Smith. He was a decoy designed to deflect the Department's attention if they ever got too close, and it almost worked. Thanks to one forgotten detail, however, it was clear to me that no one ever used that apartment for writing of any kind, and since the super claimed he had actually seen Smith typing, the conclusion was that it was the super himself who was maintaining the deception and that he was our man. That's all. Simplicity itself."

"No, it isn't," said Baranov. "How could you tell the apartment was never used for writing?"

"It lacked the essential. You can write without a library and without reference books. You can write without a desk. You can write without a typewriter. You don't even have to have ordinary paper. You can write on the back of envelopes or on shopping bags or in the margins of newspapers.

"But, gentlemen, any writer will tell you that there is one object that no writer can possibly do without, and that object was not in the apartment. I told you every- thing that was in the apartment and I didn't mention that object."

"But what was it?" I demanded.

Griswold's white mustache bristled. "A wastepaper basket! How can a professional writer do without that?"

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