The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (52 page)

“But poor Mrs Flagstone,” I continued, “must have seen him in the hallway. She has her safety chain on, maybe asks him what he’s doing. So he bursts into her room and strangles her with the climbing rope. The rope was red-right, Herb?”

Herb grinned. “Naturally. How did you know that?”

“I guessed. Then Glenn ditches the pliers in the closet, makes a half-assed attempt to stage Mrs Flagstone’s death like a drowning, and leaves with the rope. I bet the security tapes will concur.”

“What if he isn’t seen carrying the rope?”

No problem. I was on a roll.

“Then he either ditched it in a hall, or wrapped it around his waist under his shirt before leaving.”

“I’m gonna go check the tapes,” Johnson said, hurrying out.

“I’m going to call my mother,” Patel said, hurrying out.

Herb got on the phone to get a warrant, and Mortimer Hughes dropped to his hands and knees and began to search the carpeting, ostensibly for red fibers – even though that wasn’t his job.

I was feeling pretty smug, something I rarely associated with my line of work, when I noticed Officer Coursey staring at me. His face was projecting such unabashed admiration that I almost blushed.

“Lieutenant – that was just . . . amazing.”

“Simple detective work. You could have figured it out if you thought about it.”

“I never would have figured that out.” He glanced at his shoes, then back at me, and then he turned and left.

Herb pocketed his cell and offered me a sly grin.

“We can swing by the DA’s office, pick up the warrant in an hour. Tell me, Jack. How’d you put it all together?”

“Actually, you gave me the idea. You said the only way the killer could have gotten out of the room was by slipping under the door. In a way, that’s what he did.”

Herb clapped his hand on my shoulder.

“Nice job, Lieutenant. Don’t get a big head. You wanna come over for supper tonight? Bernice is making pot roast. I’ll let you invite Mr Patel.”

“He’d have to call his mother first. Speaking of mothers . . .”

I glanced at the body of Janet Hellerman, and again felt the emotional punch. The Caller ID in the kitchen gave me the number for Janet’s mom. It took some time to tell the whole story, and she cried through most of it. By the end, she was crying so much that she couldn’t talk anymore.

I gave her my home number so she could call me later.

The lab team finally arrived, headed by a Detective named Perkins. Soon both apartments were swarming with tech heads – vacuuming fibers, taking samples, spraying chemicals, shining ALS, snapping pictures and shooting video.

I filled in Detective Perkins on what went down, and left him in charge of the scene.

Then Herb and I went off to get the warrant.

M
y name is Jeff Winsor and I’d like to say straight off and for the record that I don’t believe in ghosts. I never have believed in them. I never will. And I can’t think of one good reason why I should.

The whole notion of restless, prowling spirits strikes me as a waste of time. Even in the afterlife there must be better things to do than wander around moaning and wailing, frightening poor mortals out of a good night’s sleep. Messages from the recently departed are an even sillier idea. Let’s face it, most people say far too much in one lifetime to have anything worthwhile left over for broadcasting from The Great Beyond. And as for things that go bump in the night, all I can say is that they never bump into me.

I figure it’s over when it’s over. You total up a life’s credits and debits, rise quietly from the table, and cash in your chips. Maybe there’s an after-life. Maybe there isn’t. But either way, there are no such things as ghosts.

Now what I
do
believe in is the scarcity of good apartments in New York City. The kind of elegant, spacious apartments you find in those old but beautifully maintained buildings surrounding Gramercy Park. The kind of apartment I finally got to move into when Admiral Miles Penny tripped on the carpet and fractured his skull.

I’d like to be more sympathetic, but I never met the man. From everything I’ve heard, he’d led a long, full, if somewhat tempestuous life. Not to mention all the trouble he caused me
after
he died. But up until I moved in, the only connection between us was that I got his apartment. I’m not even going to go into what I had to do to get it or how much the rent is. Let’s just say that wretched excess pretty well covers it all.

I moved into the place on October first, a week to the day after they moved Penny out to a less spacious but far more permanent address. I wanted to concentrate on unpacking, but I had an assignment due. I decided the cardboard carton obstacle course would have to wait for a while.

As it turned out, both projects got sidetracked. Because that was the day the first postcard arrived.

It was jammed in the apartment door mail slot along with some catalogues from a shoe company, a bookseller, and one of those Vermont cheese and smoked ham places. It was an old postcard, yellowed at the edges, with a view of a few ragged palms and a seedy looking pink stucco hotel. All that was on one side. The following brief message was on the other.

Nothing unsettling there, nothing ghostly. Right? Just a chess-by-mail crony of Penny’s who hadn’t yet heard of his demise. That’s what I thought too. The incongruity of it didn’t hit me until later that afternoon when I was hard at work at my easel.

The adaptation that Charles had referred to was
Cold Moon.
It was a blockbuster novel that had recently been made into a TV movie. It was the recently part that bothered me. The film had had its world premiere just five days ago. So how in the world could Miles Penny have an opinion about a movie televised after his death? I felt something like a chill along my spine. Inside my head a tiny voice started humming the theme from
The Twilight Zone.
Was the late admiral carrying on a correspondence from beyond the grave? Was heaven a seedy resort hotel? And was I, Jeff Winsor, nonbeliever in ghosts, being haunted, indirectly, by means of the US mail?

A ringing phone cut short my crazed speculations. For a wild moment I thought it might be Admiral Penny trying to reach me
direct.
But as it turned out it was the earthy, and earthly, voice of Karen Hunter, the lady in my life.

“You sound a little flustered,” she said after the usual preliminaries. “Anything wrong?”

I told her about the postcard. I heard a suppressed giggle, but at least she didn’t laugh out loud.

“There has to be a rational explanation,” Karen insisted. “You should try to contact this Charles guy who sent the card. Is there a return address? What about the postmark?”

I looked at the card again. “There’s no return address and the postmark’s too blurred to be legible.”

“Well,” Karen sighed, “that’s all I can think of. You’ve roused my curiosity about Admiral Penny, though. I remember you told me he died of a fall. Is there any possibility of foul play?” Her rich, contralto voice gave the last two words a lot of dramatic emphasis.

“Give me a break,” I said. “The authorities pronounced it accidental death. He was going to get his mail when he tripped on the little rug in front of the door, fell, and fractured his skull. The realtor told me Penny was in his eighties. The bones get thin and brittle at that age. Any kind of bad fall can be fatal. There’s no way it could be murder. The door was locked and bolted from the inside. They had a locksmith take the whole door off just to get into the apartment.”

“He died on the way to get his mail,” Karen said thoughtfully. “Doesn’t that strike you as a strange coincidence? And now he’s sending you messages, messages that come to the exact spot where the crime occurred.”

“What crime?” I practically shouted. “Penny’s death was accidental. And he isn’t sending
me
any messages. He’s writing to some guy named Charlie who’s sending his replies here. What the hell am I talking about? Penny isn’t writing anyone. Penny is dead.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. “Forget about the locked door,” Karen said finally. “It doesn’t prove anything. People are always getting murdered behind locked doors in mysteries. All of this,” she said solemnly, “can only mean one thing.”

“What?” I demanded irritably.

“That Admiral Penny was murdered. His restless spirit is calling upon you to bring his killer to justice. The poor man won’t be able to rest in peace until you’ve solved this murder.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I shouted.

“See you tonight at eight,” Karen cheerfully ignored me. “You’d better get busy on this. Painting book jacket illustrations for mysteries is one thing. Actually
solving
one might not be so easy.”

Before I could get another word in, she hung up on me. I replaced the receiver and swore for a while. Karen’s a terrific lady with more than her share of intelligence, beauty, and charm. The only thing she has too much of is imagination. She not only believed that there was a murder and a ghost involved in this. She really did expect me to solve the mystery. And I knew I’d never hear the end of it if I didn’t at least go through the motions.

Slightly dazed by my sudden elevation to amateur sleuth, I threaded my way through the cardboard-box jungle and went back to work. I make a comfortable living painting dust jacket illustrations for mystery and suspense books. I did all kinds of commercial art up until a few years ago when the cover I painted for
Death Is My Interior Decorator
won all the big awards in the field. Now I specialize in the crime stuff, which is fine with me because I like to read mysteries, too.

I’d barely gotten back into the painting when the doorbell rang. If this was the late admiral calling in person, I wasn’t even going to bother unpacking. The apartment was nice but not
that
nice. As it turned out, it was only Tom Banks, the doorman.

“Getting settled in?” he asked with a friendly smile. A tall, broad-shouldered man in his early sixties, he has one of those open, expressive faces, the kind that seem readymade for smiles and laughter. I figured him for one of those rare people, a man who actually enjoys his work.

“Settled in,” I answered. “I’ll be lucky if I get everything unpacked before the two year lease is up.”

Banks laughed and handed me a stack of mail. More catalogues, from the look of it, and perched on top of them, you guessed it . . . a neat little pile of postcards. “I’ve been holding them downstairs,” he explained. “Drayton, the postman, asked me to. He didn’t want the moving or cleaning people tampering with the mail.”

Better them than me, I thought.

“Very conscientious,” I said aloud. “I’ve never been in an apartment building before where they deliver the mail right to your door.”

“That’s Drayton,” Banks nodded. “Very dedicated to the job, he is. Never taken a sick day in twenty years. The perfect postman, I call him. He told me just the other day that he was being considered for mail carrier of the year.”

“How about that.” Just my luck. If he’d been a little less zealous, I might not have ever seen the damned postcard.

“Do the rugs look okay?” Banks asked. “They spent all afternoon on them. I guess they got all the blood out of that one,” he added, peering down at the faded two by three Oriental I was standing on. It was the very same rug on which the admiral’s sea legs had a fatal loss of footing.

“They look fine to me. When’s the relative due?”

“Well now,” Banks was suddenly evasive. “A couple of weeks, I guess. Shouldn’t be more than a month or so.” He spread his hands in a gesture of futility. “There’s nothing I can do, Mr Winsor.”

“I’m not blaming you,” I reassured him. Part of the deal for my getting the apartment was that I kept the admiral’s stuff there until his only living relative arrived from some distant port of call. Apparently there was no more storage space in the basement of the building. I’d managed to cram most of his furniture and personal stuff into the spare bedroom. But there was no way I could get all the rugs in there, too. As a compromise the management had agreed to have the rugs cleaned before I moved in.

After wishing me well with the unpacking, Banks returned to his post in the lobby. I should have gone back to work myself, but I looked at the postcards instead. There were four of them in the pile of mail Banks had brought up, each with the same view of the rundown hotel. They were all from his friend Charles, with a chess move at the end of each message. Two of them seemed normal enough, but the other two carried obvious replies and comments to events that had taken place
after
Admiral Penny’s death.