The Collection (119 page)

Otto was lying very still now.

Rex Parker burst in the door, a glass in one hand and a
bottle in the other. “The ammonia. One teaspoonful in--- Oh! Too late?”

Charlie Lightfoot stood up slowly. He saw me and his eyes
widened.

“Bill, you look as though--- Good Lord! I remember now I
heard that door closing. Did you go out in the yard?”

I nodded and leaned back against the door behind me. Reaction
had left me weak as a kitten.

“He left the garage door open,” I told them. “We saw that from
the roof. I closed it.”

“You didn't get bit?”

“No.” I saw a bottle of whiskey on the table and crossed
unsteadily toward it to pour myself a drink. But my hand shook and Charlie took
the bottle from me. He poured a stiff shot and handed it to me.

He said, “You got guts, Wunderly.”

I shook my head. “Other way around. Too damn afraid of
snakes to have slept if I'd known there were a lot of them around loose.”

I felt better when I'd downed the shot.

Charlie Lightfoot said, “I'll have to go out there and count
noses, as soon as I get my puttees back on.”

Parker said, “Are you sure it isn't too---”

“I'll be safe enough, Rex. Get me a flashlight or a lantern,
though.”

Fillmore's voice sounded wobbly. “We'll have to take care of
Otto's body like we took care of Elsie's. Wunderly, will you tell Andressen to
come help me?”

“Sure. Is he in his room?”

Fillmore nodded. “Listen. That's his cello.”

I listened and realized now, as one can realize and remember
afterwards, that I had heard it all along---from the moment Annabel and I had
come through the doorway passage from the roof.

I asked, “Shall I look up Dr. Lecky, too?”

“He went over to his house,” Fillmore said. “I'll call him
on the house phone. It's still working, isn't it, Rex?”

Parker nodded. “Sure. But look, Mr. Fillmore, better tell
Lecky not to try to come over here. There may be rattlers loose around outside,
even if the door did get shut before most of them got out.”

Charlie Lightfoot put down the whiskey bottle. “Hell, yes.
Tell him within half an hour I'll know how many are at large, if any. And
Fillmore, how about your wife and daughter? Is there any chance either of them
would go out of the house tonight? If so, you better warn them.”

“I'll do that, Charlie. They're both in for the night. But
I'll phone and make sure.”

I went to the living room first, told Annabel what had happened
and told her I was going up to get Andressen.

She said, “I'm going upstairs, too. I think I'll turn in.”

“Excellent idea,” I told her.

I left Annabel at the turn of the corridor, with a kiss that
made my lips tingle and my head spin.

“Be sure,” I whispered, “that you lock and bolt your door
tonight. And don't ask me why. I don't know.”

Andressen was playing Rimsky-Korsakoff's
Cog D'Or.
A
pagan hymn to the sun that seemed a strange choice for an astronomer.

My knock broke off the eerie melody. The bow was still in
his hand when he opened the door.

“Otto Schley is dead, Eric,” I told him. “Fillmore wants
your help.”

Without asking any questions, he tossed the bow down on the
bed and flicked off the light switch.

“About Mr. Hill and Paul Bailey,” I asked. “Do you know
where they are?”

“Bailey's probably asleep. He had a spell of the jitters, so
Darius and I gave him a sedative---and we made it strong. Darius is probably in
his room.”

He hurried downstairs, and I went on along the corridor to
Darius Hill's room and knocked on the door.

He called out, “Come in, Wunderly.”

A Toast to Fear

I closed the door behind me, and asked curiously, “How did
you know who it was?” Hill's chuckle shook his huge body. He snapped shut the
book he had been reading and put it down on the floor beside his morris chair.
Then he looked up at me.

“Simple, my dear Wunderly. I heard your voice and that of
Eric. One of you goes downstairs, the other comes here. It would hardly be
Eric; he dislikes me cordially. Besides, he has been in his room playing that
miserable descendant of the huntsman's bow. So I take it that you came to tell
him, and then me, about the second murder.”

I stared at him, quite likely with my mouth agape.

Darius Hill's eyes twinkled. “Come, surely you can see how I
know that. My ears are excellent, I assure you. I heard that scream---even over
the wail of the violincello. It was a man's voice. I'm not sure, but I'd say it
was Otto Schley. Was it?”

I nodded.

“And it came from the approximate direction of the garage.
There are rattlesnakes in the garage. Or there were.”

“There are,” I said. “Probably fewer of them.” I wished I
knew that. “But why did you say it was murder?” I asked him. “Loose
rattlesnakes are no respecters of persons.”

“Under the circumstances, Wunderly, do
you
think it
was an accident?”

“Under what circumstances?”

Darius Hill sighed. “You are being deliberately obtuse, my
young friend. It is beyond probability that two accidental deaths should occur
so closely spaced, among a group of seventeen people living in non-hazardous
circumstances.”

“Sixteen people,” I corrected.

“No, seventeen. I see you made a tabulation but that it was
made after Elsie's death so you didn't count her. But if you figure it that
way, you'll have to deduct one for Otto and call it fifteen. There are now
fifteen living, two dead.”

“If you heard that scream, why didn't you go downstairs? Or
did you?”

“I did not. There were able bodied men down there to do anything
that needed doing. More able-bodied, I might say, than I. I preferred to sit
here in quiet thought, knowing that sooner or later someone would come to tell
me what happened. As you have done.”

The man puzzled me. Professing an interest in crime, he
could sit placidly in his room while murders were being done, lacking the
curiosity to investigate at first hand.

He pursed his lips. “You countered my question with another,
so I'll ask it again. Do you think Schley's death was accidental?”

I answered honestly. “I don't know what to think. There
hasn't been time to think. Things happened so---”

His dry chuckle interrupted me. “Does not that answer your
question as to why I stayed in this room? You rushed downstairs and have been
rushing about ever since, without time to think. I sat here quietly and
thought. There was nothing I could learn downstairs that I cannot learn now,
from you. Have a drink and tell all.”

I grinned, and reached for the bottle and glass. The more I
saw of Darius Hill, the less I knew whether I liked him or not. I believed that
I could like him well enough if I took him in sufficiently small doses.

“Shall I pour one for you?” I asked him.

“You may. An excellent precaution, Wunderly.”

“Precaution?” I asked. “I don't understand.”

“Did I underestimate you? Too bad. I thought you suspected
the possibility of my having poisoned the whiskey in your absence. It is quite
possible---as far as you know---that I am the murderer. And that you are the
next victim.”

He picked up the glass I handed to him and held it to the
light. “Caution, in a situation like this, is the essence of survival. Will you
trade glasses with me, Wunderly?”

I looked at him closely to see whether or not he was
serious. He was.

He said, “You turned to the bureau to pour this. Your back
was toward me. It is possible--- You see what I mean?”

Yes, he was dead serious. And, staring at his face, I saw
something else that I had not suspected until now. The man was frightened.
Desperately frightened.

And, suddenly, I realized what was wrong with Darius Hill.

I brought a clean glass and the whiskey bottle from the
bureau and handed it to him. I said, “I'll drink both the ones I poured, if I
may. And you may pour yourself a double one to match these two.”

Gravely, Darius Hill filled the glass from the bottle.

“A toast,” I said and clinked my glass to his. “To
necrophobia.”

Glass half upraised to his lips, he stared at me. He said,
“Now I
am
afraid of you. You're clever. You're the first one that's
guessed.”

I hadn't been clever, really. It was obvious, when one put
the facts together. Darius Hill's refusal to go near the scene of a crime,
despite his specialization in the study of murder---in theory.

Necrophobia; fear of death, fear of the dead. The very depth
of that fear would make murder---on paper---a subject of morbid and abnormal
fascination for him.

To some extent, his phobia accounted for his garrulity; he
talked incessantly to cover fear. And he made himself deliberately eccentric in
other directions so that the underlying cause of his true eccentricity would be
concealed from his colleagues.

We drank. Darius Hill, very subdued for the first time since
I'd met him, suggested another. But the double one had been enough for me. I
declined, and left him.

In the corridor I heard the bolt of his door slide noisily
home into its socket.

I headed for my own room but heard footsteps coming up the
stairs. It was Charlie coming down the hallway toward me. His face look gaunt
and terrible. What would have been pallor in a white man made his face a
grayish tan.

He saw me and held out his right hand, palm upward. Something
lay in it, something I could not identify at first. Then, as he came closer, I
saw that it was the rattle from a rattlesnake's tail.

He smiled mirthlessly. “Bill,” he said, “Lord help the
astronomers on a night like this. Somebody's got a rattlesnake that won't give
warning before it strikes. Better take your bed apart tonight before you get into
it.”

“Come in and talk a while,” I suggested, opening my door.

Charlie Lightfoot shook his head. “Be glad to talk, but
let's
ko
up on the roof. I need
fresh air. I feel as though I'd been pulled through a keyhole.”

“Sure,” I said, “but first shall we---”

“Have a drink?” he finished for me. “We shall not. Or
rather, I shall not. That's what's wrong with me at the moment, Bill. Sobering
up.”

We were climbing the steps to the roof now. Charlie opened I
lie door at the top and said, “This breeze feels good. May blow the alky fumes
out of my brain. Look at that dome in the moonlight, will you? Looks like a
blasted mosque. Well, why not? An observatory is a sort of mosque on the cosmic
scale, where the devotees worship Betelgeuse and Antares, burning parsecs for
incense and chanting litanies from an ephemeris.”

“Sure you're sober?” I asked him.

“I've got to be sober; that's what's wrong. I was two-thirds
pie-eyed when Otto--- Say, thanks for closing that garage door. You kept most
of them in. I didn't dare take time to go out, because of Otto.”

I asked, “Was it murder, Charlie? Or could the box have come
apart accidentally if Otto moved it?”

“Those boxes were nailed shut, Bill. Someone took the four
nails out of the lid of one of them, with a nail-puller. Then the box was stood
on end leaning against the door, with the lid on the under side and the weight
of the box holding the lid on. Otto must have heard it fall when he went in but
must not have guessed what it was.”

“How many of the snakes did you find?”

“You kept seventeen of them in the garage when you slammed
the door. I got two more in the grass near the door. That leaves eleven that
got away, and I'll have to hunt for them as soon as it's light. That's why I've
got to sober up. And, dammit, sobering up from the point I'd reached does
things to you that a hangover can't touch.”

I said, “Well, at last there's definite proof of murder,
anyway. Do you think the trap was set for Otto Schley, or could it have been
for someone else? Is he the only one who would normally have gone to the
garage?”

Charlie nodded. “Yes. He always makes a round of the buildings
before he turns in. Nobody else would be likely to, at night.”

“You know everybody around here pretty well,” I said. “Tell
me something about--- Well, about Lecky.”

“Brilliant astronomer, but rather narrow-minded and intolerant.”

“That's bad for Paul Bailey,” I said. “I mean, now that the
cat's out of the bag about his affair with Elsie. You think Lecky will fire
him?”

“Oh, no. Lecky will overlook that. He doesn't expect his
assistants to be saints. I meant that he's intolerant of people who disagree
with him on astronomical matters. Tell him you think there isn't sufficient
proof of the period-luminosity law for Cepheid variables---and you'd better duck.
And he's touchy as hell about personal remarks. Very little sense of humor.”

“He and Fillmore get along all right?”

“Fairly well. Fillmore's a solar system man, and Lecky
doesn't know there's anything closer than a parsec away. They ignore each
other's work. Fillmore's always grousing because he doesn't get much time with
the scope.”

I strolled over to the parapet and leaned my elbows on it,
looking down into the shadow of the building on the ground below. Somewhere
down there, eleven rattlesnakes were at large. Eleven? Or was it ten? Had the
murderer brought the silent one, the de-rattled one, into the building with
him?

And if so, for whom?

“For you, maybe,” said Charlie.

Startled, I turned to look at him.

He was grinning. “Simple, my dear Wunderly---as my friend
Darius Hill would say. I could almost hear you taking a mental census of
rattlesnakes when you looked down there. And the next thing you'd wonder about
was obvious. No, I haven't a detective complex like Darius has. How do you like
Darius, by the way?”