The Collection (121 page)

“I did, on my way down from the roof. You groaned as I was
going by the door. I thought it was Paul groaning but I came in.”

Fillmore asked, “What was the yell that brought us all running?
I heard it downstairs.”

Charlie grunted. “That was Paul. He must've been having a
nightmare. When I shook him he let out a yowl like a steam engine before he
woke up.”

Bailey said, “I thought---

“Hell, I don't know
what
I thought. I don't remember
yelling---but if Charlie says I did, I guess I did.”

“Lecky,” said Darius Hill. “We'll have to let Lecky know.”

“He can't get over here before dawn,” Fillmore pointed out,
“unless he wants to run the gauntlet of rattlesnakes. We'd just wake him up.”

Charlie said, “Darius is right. Something else has happened.
We ought to let Lecky know. What time is it?”

“Four-thirty,” Hill said.

“Then it'll be light in less than an hour. I'll go find
those other snakes. But if I don't find them all right away, I'll escort Lecky
over here---beat trail for him. I can take Fergus too, if he wants to get back
home.”

Darius Hill had walked over to the window and looked out.
“There's a light over at Lecky's house. I'm going to phone now. Let's all go
downstairs to the living room.”

We went down in more or less of a group, Darius going ahead.
He went into the room where the house telephone was, and the rest of us herded
into the living room. All of us were quiet and subdued; none seemed able or
willing to offer much comment on the situation we were in.

Darius would probably have been verbose enough, if he'd been
there, but Darius wasn't there. He was taking an unconscionably long time at
the telephone. For some reason, it worried me.

I strolled to the door of the hall without attracting
attention and went down the hall and into the room which Darius had entered.

He was at the phone, listening, and I could see from the
whiteness of his face that something was wrong.

“. . . .Yes, Mrs. Lecky,” he said. Then a
long pause. “You're
sure
you don't want one of us to come over right
away? I know it's almost dawn but---”

He talked a minute longer, then put down the phone and
looked at me.

He said, slowly, “Lecky's dead, Wunderly. Good old Lecky.
She found him at his desk just now with a knife in his back.”

Then suddenly the words were tumbling out of him so fast
that they were hardly coherent. “Good Lord! I thought I knew something about
criminology and detection. What a damn fool I was! This is my fault, Wunderly,
for pretending to be so damn smart about something.

“My fault. That book. I don't know who's doing these murders---I
can't even guess---but he got the idea out of that damned book of mine. Just to
be clever, I started something that---”

I said, “But it isn't your fault, Hill. What you wrote in
that book is true, in a way.”

“I'm going to burn that manuscript, Wunderly. What business
has a fat old fool like me to give advice that---that gets people killed?
Somebody's committing murder by the book---and the worst of it is that
the
book's right.
That's why I should never have written
it. . . .”

There wasn't any use arguing with him.

“When was Lecky killed?” I asked.

“Just now. Less than fifteen minutes ago. While you were
unconscious upstairs, probably.”

“The hell,” I said. “How do you know it was
then?
You
said his wife just found him.”

“She was talking to him fifteen minutes before. He was in
his study typing. She'd been in bed but waked up. She told him to come on to
bed and he answered.

“Then just now---fifteen minutes after that---she heard the
phone ring . . . my call. And it wasn't answered, so she came
downstairs and---found him dead.”

“Lord,” I said, “and she had wits enough to answer the phone
right away and give you the details without getting hysterical?”

“You haven't met Mrs. Lecky, or you'd understand. Damn! One
of us ought to go over there, though. It's almost light enough. Charlie could
put his leggings on and---”

“Wait!” I said. “I've got---”

I thought it over a second and the more I thought about it
the better it looked. It might work.

“Darius,” I said, “look, if whoever killed Lecky is among
the group in the living room---and it
must
be one of them---then he just
got back into this building five or ten minutes ago.”

“Of course. But how---?”

“Murderers aren't any braver than anyone else. He wouldn't
have crossed an area where there were rattlesnakes loose without taking precautions.
See what I mean? Whoever went over there and back would have put on puttees or
leggings under his trousers.”

“I---I suppose he would. And---you think he wouldn't have
had a chance to take them off again?”

“I doubt it,” I told him. “He must have been just getting
into the building when Paul Bailey let out that yell. And everybody converged
on Bailey's room. He'd have to go along to avoid suspicion; he'd be the last
one to want to give himself away by being late getting there!

“And since then, he certainly hasn't had a chance to be
alone.”

Darius' eyes gleamed. He said, “Wunderly, it's a chance! A
good chance.”

He grabbed my arm, but I held back.

“Wait,” I said, “this has got to be your idea---not mine.”

“Why?”

“Your position here, your seniority. Your work. Look some
people may figure as you did just now---blame that book of yours for a share of
what happened. But
if you
solve the murders, you'll be exonerated. The
credit for that idea doesn't mean anything to me. I'd rather you took it.”

He stared at me hopefully but almost unbelievingly. “You
mean, knowing I'm a bag of wind, you'd---”

“You're not,” I said. “You're one of the best astronomers
living. And it was that phobia of yours---not your fault---that led you to
write what you did. I agree you should never have it published. But in writing
it---you stuck your neck out, as far as your colleagues are concerned. It
means everything to you to solve the murders. It means nothing to me.”

His hand gripped my upper arm and squeezed hard. “I---I
don't know how to thank---”

“Don't try,” I said. “Let's go.”

We went into the other room and I walked over and stood
beside Annabel while Hill announced the death of the director. He told them,
quite simply, quite unemotionally, what had happened.

And then while they were still shocked by the news, he
sprang the suggestion that each man in the group immediately prove he was not
wearing protection of any sort on his lower legs.

“I'll lead off,” he said.

He lifted the cuffs of his trousers up as high as the bottom
of the lounging robe he was wearing over them, exposing neatly-clocked black
socks.

Paul Bailey chuckled nervously. He had seated himself
cross-legged in the morris chair, and his rather short pajama trousers were
already twisted halfway up the calves of his bare legs. He said, “I believe I
can join the white sheep without even moving.”

The Last Battle

None of us quite knew what had happened, at first. The sound
of a shot, unexpected in the confined space of a room, can be paralyzing as
well as deafening.

We heard the thud of the falling body before any of
us---unless it was Darius---knew who had been shot. For Darius was the only one
who had been facing Fergus Fillmore, who had been standing at the back of the
group in a corner of the room.

Charlie Lightfoot and I were the first ones to reach him.
The revolver---a small pearl-handled one---was still in his right hand, and the
shot had been fired with its muzzle pressed to his temple.

Charlie's gesture of feeling for the beat of Fillmore's
heart was perfunctory. He said wonderingly, “I suppose this means that
he---
But in heaven's name,
why?”

I nodded toward Fillmore's ankles, exposed where his fall
had hiked up the cuffs of his trouser-legs above the tops of his high shoes.
Under the trousers a pair of heavy leggings were laced on.

“Mine,” said Charlie.

Hill said, “Isn't---isn't that the corner of an envelope
sticking just past the lapel of his coat?”

Surprised, I looked up at Darius Hill. He was standing very
rigidly, his hands clenched. But he was looking at the corpse; he had, to that
extent at least, overcome his necrophobia.

Charlie took the envelope from Fillmore's inside coat
pocket. It was addressed to Darius.

And Hill, his face pale and waxen, but his voice steady,
read to us the letter it contained:

“Dear Darius: Are you really a criminologist, or are you a
monumental bluff? I have a hunch it's hot air, my dear Darius, but if you ever
read this letter, I apologize. It will mean that you were more clever than
I---or perhaps I should say you are more clever than the book you wrote. To
meet that contingency, I carry a pistol---for a purpose you have already
discovered. It would be quite absurd for a man of my position to stand trial
for murder. You will understand that.

“I am writing this at the desk in the hallway. As soon as I
finish writing, I shall join you for coffee and a sandwich in the kitchen. Then
I shall carry out the third step in the program which has been forced upon me
by the necessity of keeping my neck out of a noose.

“I remembered your book, Darius, as soon as I discovered,
early this evening, that Elsie was dead. She walked into Paul Bailey's room
early this evening while I was searching that room to get back the letter which
Paul had held as a threat over my head---”

Darius Hill looked up from the letter and said to Bailey,
“What letter is that, Paul?”

The bewilderment on Bailey's face seemed genuine enough.

Then, suddenly,
“That
letter! Good grief, he thought
I still had it. Why, I'd destroyed it months ago.”

“What
was
it?”

“One Fergus wrote me about ten months ago, while he was
trying to get me to take the job here. He talked too freely---or rather---wrote
too freely, in that letter.”

“What do you mean, Paul?” Darius demanded.

“He criticized Dr. Lecky---pretty viciously. And said some
things Lecky would never have forgiven, if he'd ever seen the letter. And he
took some swipes at the regents in Los Angeles, too. From what I've learned
since about how touchy Lecky was, I have a hunch that letter would have cost Fillmore
his job---if either Lecky or the regents had ever seen it. But I didn't keep
it. I threw it away before I packed my stuff to come here.”

“But you threatened Fillmore with it, later?”

Bailey shifted uneasily in his chair. “Well---not exactly,
no. But when Zoe broke our engagement---and it
was
Zoe who broke
it---Fillmore had the crust to tell me that unless I managed to patch things up
between Zoe and me, he'd see that I lost my job. We had some words and I told
him his own job wasn't any too secure if Lecky and the regents knew what he'd
written about them. I didn't threaten him with the letter but he may have got
the impression I still had it.”

Darius turned back to the letter and resumed reading:

“I happened to be to the left of the door, and Elsie walked
in without seeing me. But in a moment, I knew, she would turn. I acted
involuntarily, although I swear my intention was merely to stun her so I could
leave the room without being identified.

“I was standing beside the bureau and I picked up the first
convenient object---a hairbrush. I struck with the back of it.

“Then I found---as I caught her and lowered her to the floor
so there would be no sound of a fall---that I was a murderer. A man after your
own heart, Darius.

“And it was then that I recalled those lessons in your book,
about how to get away with murder. Recalled them after I was already,
inadvertently, a murderer. And some of the things in your manuscript make
sense, Darius. As you say, a killer of several suffers no worse penalty than a
killer of one.

“I forced myself, very deliberately, to sit down for a few
minutes and think out a course of action. First, an alibi. I could not prove I
was elsewhere when Elsie was killed but I could make her seem to be killed when
I was elsewhere---playing bridge.

“A DeWar flask was the answer to that. I went downstairs,
found Bailey and set him a task with the blink-mike which would keep him busy
for an hour. Then I went to the lab and liquefied some air, taking it upstairs
in the flask.

“Extreme cold applied to the leg joints of the body froze
them, and I propped the corpse erect in a corner. By the time the flesh thawed
and she fell, I was playing bridge downstairs with several of you. Was that not
simple, Darius? Is this news to you, or had you solved the method?

“Even the coroner's examination of the body will not show
what happened, because I'll see to it there is a leak in the tubing of the
makeshift refrigerator we rigged up to preserve the body.”

Rex Parker's voice cut in. “I'd better check that right
away, Mr. Hill.”

Hill nodded and read on, as Parker left the room. “But Otto
Schley saw me leaving Bailey's room. It meant nothing to him then and he
mentioned it to no one. But he will be a source of danger if the police ferret
out---or you ferret out---the fact that Elsie's death did not occur during the
bridge game but at about the time Otto saw me.

“So I remembered your book, Darius. And my method of dealing
with Otto needs no explaining.

“A fortunate accident added to the confusion. I refer to the
rattlesnake with the missing rattle---or the rattle from the missing
rattlesnake. I had nothing to do with that. Wunderly says he slammed the door
on a snake, and it is probable that the closing of the door knocked off or
pinched off the rattle.”