Crime at Christmas (17 page)

Banner
followed him in.

Three of
the room's four walls were banked with heavy books.

Verl waved
his hand at them. 'Abnormal psychology—every last one of them.' He handled a
volume. 'Most of these subjects are old familiars with me. I majored in psych
at Holy Cross.'

Banner ran
his eye over the titles: Paranoia. Mania. Melancholy. Hallucination.
Hypochondria. Sadism. Masochism. Lycanthropy.

There was a
volume lying closed on a square table. Banner leafed through it and stopped at
a chapter headed
Schizophrenia.
There
was a marginal note in a fine masculine hand:
There's no doubt she has a split
personality.

Banner
snapped the book shut. To whom had Woolfolk referred? Ora? Beryl? Caroline? Or
someone else?

Banner
trotted across the library and laid the book on a victrola top. 'What kinda gun
did the police find hanging down the chimney?'

'I told
you. The old horse pistol. A single loader.'

'When the
police searched the house, they didn't find another gun?'

'Another
one? No. Why should they? It was the horse pistol that killed Woolfolk.'

Without
answering, Banner galumphed across the carpet and out of the library. He went
into the dining room. Verl followed.

The
Christmas fir was there. The gifts underneath its tinselled boughs were undisturbed.
Beryl, the little brat, had hung some of her soiled underwear on the tree.
Caroline was nowhere in sight.

Banner
plumped down on his well-padded knees and sorted out all the packages meant
for Woolfolk. He ripped open the smaller ones like a ghoulish vandal. It wasn't
until he reached the fifth package. When he tore it open a small black automatic
fell out and clattered on the parquet floor.

'The
devil!' cried Verl. 'How'd that get there?'

Banner's
head shot around, his eyes probing. 'You've seen it before?'

'Yes. It's
Woolfolk's.'

'Tell Ora
and Caroline to come to the library.'

'But,
Senator, what's the gun doing there?'

'That's
where Ora hid it and that's the one place the police neglected to look.'

'Ora!'

'Find her
and Caroline! Skeedaddle!'

Verl ran
upstairs.

Banner
stuck a pencil into the pistol-barrel and picked it up. He pranced into the
library and looked thoughtfully at the victrola. Then he opened the records
cabinet and hunted. Finally he held up a record to the dull light from the
window. He chuckled. The label said:
Selections from La Somnambula. Pianist, Caspar Woolfolk.

He heard
the other three coming.

'Ora,' he
said to her in his bullfrog voice as she came faltering in, 'Your story didn't
fuse. If you'd walked out to the li'l house on the lawn in your sleep, you'd've
left tracks in the snow. And when you told me how you killed Woolfolk you used
the word
shots.'

'I did,'
she said frantically. 'I kept shooting over and over. I don't know how many
times.'

'Woolfolk
was shot only once. He was killed with a single loader. You can't fire the
horse pistol more than once without jamming in another round.'

Ora stared.
'You mean
I
didn't shoot—'

Banner held
up the black automatic. 'This's the gun you shot at him with.'

'Then I
killed him after all,' she cried in bewildered despair.

Banner
chuckled. 'With
blanks!'

'Blanks!'
exploded Verl. 'What kind of games were they playing last night?'

'Mighty
deep ones,' said Banner seriously. 'Woolfolk was hipped on psychology. What
started him off we'll go into later. Woolfolk tried an ignoble experiment on
Ora. Would she—hypnotized—be compelled to commit murder!'

'Hypnotism!'
Verl snapped his fingers with elation.

'Sure,'
said Banner. 'Woolfolk babbled about the magic mirror, Carl Saxtus's zinc
button, and Father Hell's magnet. It's all hypnotism!'

'I was
hypnotized?' said Ora dully. 'Oh no. No. Mr Woolfolk never hypnotized me. He
couldn't do that against my will. Nobody can.'

'You walk
in your sleep, duck,' said Banner. 'Somnambulism's the nearest thing to a
hypnotic trance. Woolfolk would meet you and gently suggest—'

'He saw
me—he saw me in my night clothes!' She was mortified. This was worse than being
accused of murder.

Banner
grinned and continued: 'Bug doctors call it post-hypnotic suggestion. You tell
a person to do something the next day and to forget they've done it.'

'That's why
she didn't remember being with me in town yesterday afternoon,' said Verl.

' Yass. At
his suggestion, Ora, you put notations in your diary. He was experimenting
with you, as I said. He was conditioning your mind for a pseudo murder. He
wanted to see how far a gentle-natured woman, like yourself, would go. And he'd
selected himself as the victim. Finally Woolfolk was ready for the experiment.
He told you to come where you could hear him playing.'

'I remember
that,' she said.

Caroline
Spires, in the background, was drinking it all in greedily, not making a sound.

Banner
said: 'Last night, Ora you woke up about 3.30, under post-hypnotic compulsion.
The little black automatic, loaded with blanks, had been laid on your night
table by your bed by Woolfolk himself. You couldn't help but see it when you
woke. You took the gun in your hand and started downstairs. You could hear
Woolfolk's arrangement of
La Somnambula.
But the music wasn't coming from outside the house. It came from right
here in the library. Woolfolk had considered the cold and the snow and your
scanty nightdress. So he duplicated the Music Box here in the library. All he
needed was piano music and a piano. He built up this square table with books
and threw the large Spanish shawl over all of it. You
thought
it was the piano, cuz the shawl
always covered the piano. The music you heard was from one of Woolfolk's own
recordings being played on the victrola.' He jabbed a dynamic forefinger at it.
'He turned it off when he heard you coming. He rose up, then goaded you till
you fired the harmless automatic at him. That's how you
murdered
Woolfolk.'

She sobbed
with relief.

'But
somebody
did
kill Woolfolk in the Music Box!'
cried Verl.

'I'm coming
to that. After Ora fled back to her room, he put the record and books
away—probably with mixed emotions over what'd just occurred—and threw the
Spanish shawl over his arm. He went to the door. It was nearly four o'clock.
It'd stopped snowing some time before. Carrying the shawl, he walked across
the snow to the Music Box, leaving the only tracks.'

The others
were breathlessly silent.

'The
murderer was waiting in the little house—had been waiting there for hours. . .'

'Ah,' said
Verl. It was as soft as a prayer.

Caroline
cleared her throat raspingly. 'How did the murderer know that Caspar was going
out there at all?'

'Cuz,' said
Banner, 'the murderer overheard Woolfolk telling Ora
to come where he would be playing.
And where else would that be but
the Music Box where the piano is?' There was a light dawning in Verl's eyes,
but Banner went on evenly: 'Woolfolk came in and arranged the shawl and sheet
music on the piano, putting everything back in its proper place, y'see. The
murderer was hiding behind the grandfather's clock, the horse pistol cocked,
the fingers that held it stiff from waiting. As Woolfolk sat down on the bench
to run his fingers over the keys, the murderer stepped out into view and fired.
Woolfolk, a bullet in his skull, fell forward onto the piano.'

'My God,'
breathed Ora, her hand fluttering at her white throat.

Verl was
excited. 'But now you've got the murderer trapped out there!'

'For the
moment. To walk back across the snow would leave distinctive, incriminating
footprints. There had to be another way.' Banner looked into Verl's luminous
eyes. 'You told me the answer at the orphanage, in your first recital of your
discovery of the crime. There's only one way out.'

'
I?
' said Verl incredulously. '
I
know?'

Banner
nodded grimly. 'You said that when you came into the little house the day was
so gloomy that you had to switch on the light. Later I also called attention to
the tipped-over table lamp. That means
electricity!'

'No, I
can't—' puzzled Verl.

'And
electricity means
wires!'

'Oh,' said
Verl, like a deflated balloon.

'The
insulated wire runs at a long slant up from under the eaves to the cross-armed
pole thirty feet away. You can reach the wire from one of the windows. It ain't
slippy. It hasn't been cold enough for ice. More poles carry the wire across
the snow to the trampled road, where all footprints're lost.' Banner shrugged.
'That's all there is to know.'

Caroline
whispered: 'Then the murderer is someone who would have no trouble climbing.
Like a little monkey.'

'Yass,'
said Banner gloomily. 'Someone who can climb things like radio aerials. That
should've given you an idea. A tomboy—'

Ora had her
hands up to her mouth in shocked horror.

Someone
screamed in the hall and dashed in furiously to spit and tear at Banner.

'He was
going to send me away!' Beryl screeched at him. 'I heard him tell Caroline! He
wanted to marry her and send me away! And he liked Ora even better than me!'

Ora sat
horrified listening to a child's confession of murder.

Later a
psychiatrist said to Banner: 'So Woolfolk took up psychology to study his own
child's case. His layman's diagnosis was correct. She is schizophrenic.'

Another
psychiatrist interrupted: 'I think, in this particular case, that dementia
praecox is the more precise term.'

Banner
waggled his big speckled hand at both of them and grunted: 'Gentlemen, she was
just plain nuts.'

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