Crime at Christmas (15 page)

Yet Sonia
felt no repulsion—only pity. It was Christmas morning, and he was dead, while
her own portion was life triumphant. Closing her eyes, she whispered a prayer
of supplication for his warped soul.

Presently,
as she grew calmer, her mind began to work on the problem of his presence. His
motive seemed obvious. Not knowing that she had changed her plan, he had
concealed himself in the Gallery, in order to poach her story.

'He was in
the Hall of Horrors at First,' she thought, remembering the opened door. 'When
he came out he hid at this end. We never saw each other, because of the
waxworks between us; but we heard each other.'

She
realized that the sounds which had terrified her had not all been due to imagination,
while it was her agency which had converted the room into a whispering gallery
of strange murmurs and voices. The clue to the cause of death was revealed by
his wrist-watch, which had smashed when he fell. Its hands had stopped at three
minutes to three, proving that the flash and explosion of the thunderbolt had
been too much for his diseased heart—already overstrained by superstitious
fears.

Sonia
shuddered at a mental vision of his face, distraught with terror and pulped by
raw primal impulses, after a night spent in a madman's world of phantasy.

She turned
to look at the waxworks. At last she understood what they seemed to say.

'But for Us, you should have met—at dawn.'

'Your share
shall be acknowledged, I promise you,' she said, as she opened her notebook.

Eight
o'clock. The Christmas bells are ringing and it is wonderful just to be alive.
I'm through the night, and none the worse for the experience, although I
cracked badly after three o'clock. A colleague who, unknown to me, was also
concealed in the Gallery has met with a tragic fate, caused, I am sure, by the
force of suggestion. Although his death is due to heart-failure, the
superstitious will certainly claim it is another victory for the Waxworks.

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M
URDER
and Christmas are usually poles apart. But this Yuletide Senator
Brooks U. Banner had the crazy killing at Falconridge dumped into his
over-sized elastic stocking.

At the
Cobleskill Orphanage, he stood among the re-painted toys like a clean-shaven
Kris Kringle. He was telling the kids how he'd begun his career as a parentless
tyke—just as they—with a loaf of Bohemian rye under one arm and six bits in his
patched jeans. He followed that revelation with a fruity true crime story about
a lonely hearts blonde who killed six mail-order husbands and how he'd helped
the police to catch her. The two old maids who ran the orphanage paused to
listen and were scandalized, but the kids loved him. He was six feet three
inches tall and weighed 280 pounds, and he looked so quaint in his greasy black
string tie, dusty frock-coat, baggy grey britches, and the huge storm rubbers
with the red ridged soles.

Presenting
the toys, he made little comic speeches and ruffled up the kids' hair. While
this was going on a young man came in and stood in the bare, draughty dining
hall with its shrivelled brown holly wreaths. He was sallow-skinned and slight,
with a faint moustache and large lustrous eyes.

He waited
impatiently until Banner was done, then he approached.

'Senator,
my name is Verl Griffon. I'm a reporter for my father who owns the local paper,
The Griffon.'

Banner
beamed. 'And you wanna interview me!' He stabbed a fresh corona cigar in his
mouth. 'Yass, yass! Wal, my lad, if you'd come in a li'l earlier, you'd've
heard me telling the young-timers that—'

'No, this
isn't merely an interview, Senator.' Verl's luminous eyes zigzagged nervously.
'Where can I see you privately?'

Frowning,
Banner led the way into a gloomy office that had a cold radiator and a
two-dimensional red-cardboard Christmas bell on the window. They looked
dubiously at the rickety ladder-backed chairs and remained standing.

Verl chewed
his knuckles. 'Senator, I've read a lot about the way you handle things. Things
like murders. And I was at the trial of Jack Horner in New York.'

Banner
grunted from his top pants-button. 'Izzat so? Then you saw how I made that
poisoner holler uncle.'

'Indeed I
did. Now I need your help. You've heard of Caspar Woolfolk, the famous pianist,
haven't you?'

Banner
grinned. 'Lad, when it comes to music, I lissen to a jook-box every Saturday
night.'

Verl
plunged on regardless. 'Early this morning Woolfolk was murdered!'

'No!'

'And a
woman I know very well says she killed him—but the facts are all against it!'
His eyes, peering into the middle distance, were stunned with bewilderment.

Banner
shifted ponderously. 'Tell it to me from A to Izzard. Pin the donkey on the
tail.'

Verl talked
rapidly, gravely. 'Woolfolk owned Falconridge, a manor outside town. On the
grounds is a little octagonal house he called the Music Box. He kept his piano
and music library there. This morning I found him in there dead. He was killed
and no one knows how the murderer could have done it. . .You see, I went to the
manor after breakfast to wish everybody a happy holiday. Ora met me at the
door. She had the jitters.'

'Who's
Ora?'

'Ora
Spires. That's the woman I referred to. She's governess to little Beryl,
Woolfolk's ten-year-old daughter. Woolfolk was a widower. Ora, as I said,
greeted me with a look of panic. All she could tell me was that something
terrible must have happened to Woolfolk inside the Music Box. She hadn't dared
go look for herself . . . It snowed during the night. There's over an inch of
it on the ground. The snow on the lawns hadn't been disturbed, save where
Woolfolk had walked out in it toward the Music Box. I could see by the single
line of clear-cut footprints that Woolfolk hadn't come back. I walked alongside
his tracks. The door opened to my touch. This morning was so gloomy that I
switched on the light. Woolfolk was at the grand piano, sitting on the bench,
the upper part of his body lying across the music. He was stone cold dead—shot
through the centre of the forehead.'

Cold as the
room was, Banner could see a sheen of sweat on Verl's puckered forehead.

'Remembering
that I'd seen only Woolfolk's tracks,' continued Verl, 'the First thought that
struck me was:
If
he's been murdered, the murderer is still here!
I searched the place. There was no
one else there. Even the weapon that'd killed Woolfolk was missing—proving
beyond a doubt that it wasn't suicide. How can a thing like that be. It stopped
snowing around midnight. Wool-folk walked out there after that time. Then
somebody killed him. And whoever it was got away
without leaving a trace anywhere in the
snow!'

'How far
from the main house is the Music Box?'

'A good
hundred yards.'

'A
sharpshooter might've plugged Woolfolk through an open window while standing a
hundred yards or more away.'

'No,' said
Verl. 'The doors and windows were closed. Woolfolk was shot at close range. The
murderer stood on the other side of the piano.'

Ruminating,
Banner finally said: 'Wal, sir. You can take your pick of three possible
answers.'

'Three!
said Verl with a bounce of surprise.

Banner held
up a thick blunt thumb. 'One. The murderer went out there
before
it'd stopped snowing. The snow that
fell after he walked through it covered up his tracks. When Woolfolk came
later, he killed Woolfolk and managed to conceal himself so cleverly in the
Music Box that you failed to see him.'

Verl looked
annoyed—and disappointed. 'That's out of the question. No one was there, I tell
you.'

Banner,
undismayed, stuck up his forefinger. 'Two. Both the murderer
and
Woolfolk went out there before it'd
stopped snowing.
Both
their
tracks were covered up by the falling snow. After killing Woolfolk, the
murderer put on Woolfolk's shoes and walked backwards toward the main house.'

Verl shook
his head sourly. 'Woolfolk was wearing his own shoes when I found him. The
police, who came later, went over all that. There's absolutely no trickery
about the footprints. They were made by a man walking forward. Made by
Woolfolk. That's certain!'

Banner
lifted his middle finger. He stared at it thoughtfully and with hesitation.
'Three. Again, the murderer got out there before Woolfolk did—'

He paused
so long that Verl said: 'And how did he get back?'

'He
knows a way of crossing a hundred yards of snow
without leaving a mark on
it!'

Verl's
mouth dropped open. He snapped it shut again. 'Ora Spires,' he said, jittery,
'has part of an answer. She thinks she killed Woolfolk. She keeps saying that.'
He paused. 'But she doesn't know how she got out there and back.'

Quizzically
Banner raised his black furry eyebrows. 'Right now,' he said, reaching for the
doorknob, 'I'm so fulla curiosity that Ora has more lure for me than a sarong
gal.'

Verl took a
step toward the held-open door and then he said: 'Something else, Senator. She
walks in her sleep.'

The great
Spanish shawl that covered the whole top of the grand piano in the Music Box
was clotted with blood. Woolfolk's body had been removed. Banner walked behind
the piano bench. On the piano-rack was the sheet music for Bellini's
La Somnambula.

'Was this
electric lamp tipped over when you found him?' asked Banner.

Verl
nodded.

Ten paces
beyond the piano stood a grandfather's clock. The wall shelves were stuffed
with music albums.

Verl said:
'Doesn't that music on the piano strike you as being particularly significant,
Senator?
La
Somnambula.
The
Sleep Walker!'

'Uh-huh.'
Banner bobbed his grizzled mop of hair.

Verl
rattled on as if he couldn't restrain himself. 'Woolfolk was a funny one.
Peculiar. His talk wasn't all music. He was full of weird theories about the
power of suggestion, mind over matter, that sort of thing. He sometimes
mentioned a lot of grotesque characters and objects, like: Abbé Faria, Carl
Saxtus's zinc button, Baron du Potet's magic mirror, and Father Hell's magnet.
He thought all that esoteric knowledge would help him to rule women. But I
don't think it helped very much. Women,' he added regretfully, 'know intuitively
how to get the best of men.'

Banner
didn't answer. He lumbered to both windows. He opened each. Thirty feet to the
east of the small house stood a pole with insulated cross-arms. Nowhere was the
snow on the ground disturbed. There was no snow on either of the window-sills.
The over-hanging eaves had sheltered them. He looked up at the eaves.

Verl said
in a tired voice: 'The snow on the roof hasn't been disturbed either.

Banner
closed the windows and they both trudged across the white lawn to the manor
house.

Ora Spires
was a thirty-one-year-old spinster. She wore horn-rimmed eyeglasses and her
hair was drawn back from a worried brow and knotted into a tight black bun. Her
slack dress left you guessing about her figure. Her mouth had a pinched-in look
as if she were trying to cork up all her feelings with her lips. Yet with some
attention to her features she wouldn't have been half bad looking. Banner
wondered if she deliberately made herself unattractive or if she didn't know
any better.

'The police
have gone,' she said in a cracked whisper to Verl. 'They've taken him to Hostetler's.'
She looked at Verl as if he had just come in to have her try on the glass
slipper.

Verl said
to Banner: 'Ora means Woolfolk's body. Hostetler is the town undertaker. . .Ora,
you haven't told the police what you told—'

'Oh no,'
she said.

Banner got
impatient. 'I'm Senator Banner. Verl thinks I can help you.'

'Oh, yes,'
she said quickly. 'I voted for you once.'

'Mighty
fine. Tickled to meetcha.' He pumped her limp hand. 'Come sit down. We'll iron
this out.'

When they
sat down in the parlour she said fretfully: 'This morning I thought I'd dreamed
I'd killed Mr Woolfolk, but the whole nightmare has turned out to be real.'

Banner was
deep in the waffle-back armchair. 'Tell me everything.'

Her eyes
were cloudy behind the glasses. She would tell him everything. Banner was the
kind of man you told your troubles to. 'I've lived in Cobleskill all my life.
My parents are dead and my sister Caroline helped bring me up. She's four years
older than I am. About three years ago I came to work for Mr Woolfolk taking
care of his little daughter. Have you told him much about Beryl, Verl?'

Verl
shuffled his feet on the bird-of-paradise pattern rug. 'Only just mentioned
her.'

Ora smiled
sadly. 'Beryl's ten now, she's very hard to manage.'

'That's
putting it mildly,' groaned Verl.

'But I
stuck it out, Senator. Mr Woolfolk was always going away on concert tours,
leaving me alone with Beryl.' She was thatching her long, white, sensitive
fingers nervously. 'I keep a diary. It's locked up secretly in my bureau drawer
and I wear the key around my neck. One night, about two weeks ago, I took it
out of the drawer to make my day's entry. I was stunned to see that the last
words I had written were:
I hate Mr Woolfolk!
She stiffened. 'I never remember writing those words!'

'Clever
forgery?' suggested Banner.

She shook
her head. 'How could it be? It was positively my handwriting. Besides, how
could the forger have gotten to where I hide my diary? The lock on the bureau
drawer wasn't forced. . .All that night I lay sleepless thinking about it. I
realized there were a lot of things I didn't like about Mr Woolfolk, things
that could make me hate him. Things that had never entered my conscious mind
before.'

'What were
they?' said Banner when she paused to draw a shuddery breath.