The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (57 page)

“Dr Klax suggested that—” I began.

“Dr Klax is nuts,” said Arronds, sounding furious. He pointed a finger the size of a sausage at my face. “Guy’s a paranoid fruitcake. Thinks everyone is out to steal his ideas.”

Five minutes of questioning Arronds further convinced me that, if he had invented a unique method of murder, it was the first thing he’d ever discovered in his life. He was strictly a bottle washer with a degree in biology. More to the point, he genuinely seemed to have liked Schneider. I mentally crossed him off my list of suspects, which left me zero for three.

“You want to interview the professors in the east wing next?” asked Rackham when I was finished with Arronds.

“Sure, why not,” I replied. I had a feeling this was going to be a long day – a very long day.

I arrived home around nine that night. Penelope was sitting in the TV room, watching a rerun of
Law and Order.
She took one look at the sour expression on my face and ordered me to the kitchen. “Julian made shrimp for dinner. There should be some leftovers in the refrigerator. Eat and drink, then report.”

It took me nearly two hours to describe my day. During the entire recital, Penelope only interrupted once. “Bats? Did you actually
see
bats?”

“Flying over the rooftop when I left,” I assured her. “Little ones, but definitely not birds. Bats.”

Penelope nodded then settled back and let me drone away. I did my usual fine job of imitating a video recorder, describing in great detail everything I had seen, heard, and smelled the entire time I had been away. By the time I finished, she was having difficulty covering her yawns.

“I know, it’s not very exciting stuff,” I said, “but if anyone committed a crime in that place, I’ve no idea how.”

“That’s because you’ve forgotten your Sherlock Holmes,” said Penelope, rising from behind the desk. “I’m going to bed. I suggest you do the same. Tomorrow, we’ll need to be at our best for the seance.”

“Seance? We’re having a seance?”

“Of course,” said Penelope. “What better way to identify a murderer?”

What Penelope Peters wants, Penelope Peters gets. Especially when she’s working for the government and they’re anxious for results. Wearing a black tuxedo and feeling pretty much the idiot, I answered the doorbell the next evening at 8 p.m. Standing on the steps were Captain Rackham, Mary Winfree, Otto Klax, and Marvin Arronds. Backing them up were two Marines. Our guests had arrived.

As instructed, I ushered them into the parlor, which Julian and I had earlier arranged per the boss’s instructions. A small round table sat in the middle of the room covered by a black cloth. In the center of the table was a crystal ball I had rented earlier in the day from a Manhattan theater props store. Six wood chairs circled the table. I arranged everyone exactly as Penelope wished. First came Mary Winfree, then Rackham, then Otto Klax, then me, then Marvin Arronds. The blank chair was for my boss.

Penelope entered in a swirl of black silk. She looked very much the gypsy fortune-teller with her hair up in a knot and several strings of costume jewelry around her neck. “Thank you for attending tonight’s service,” she said, nodding to everyone. “Would you please be seated.”

“This is nonsense,” said Klax, “pure nonsense,” but he sat down. No one else said anything, though they all looked puzzled.

“Now, please form a circle by holding hands,” commanded Penelope. “That includes you, Dr Klax.”

“This is a waste of time,” said Klax, pulling his hands out of his coat pockets and linking his cold fingers with Rackham’s on one side and mine on the other. “I should be back at my lab, working.”

“Working?” said Penelope. “Or planning another murder?”

“What are you babbling about?” said Klax, trying to wrench his hands free. Not that he could. Which had been the point of this entire charade, making sure Klax couldn’t use the miniature control unit the Marine guards later found in his left pocket.

“I never touched Schneider,” declared Klax. “I was in my lab all night.”

“Yes, you were,” said Penelope. “Safe and secure in your laboratory while your MEMS robots, programmed by you, climbed up through the cracks in the concrete walls and killed Professor Schneider.”

“Say what?” I was so surprised I almost let go of Klax’s cold fingers. Almost.

“MEMS robots are so small they can fit into spaces only a few thousandths of an inch wide,” said Penelope. “If artificially intelligent, they can be programmed to assemble themselves into bigger machines once they reach a specific destination. For example, they can go through small cracks between a wall and ceiling, then assemble into a larger flying robot. They can be programmed to seek and attack a specific target: in this case, Dr Schneider. Klax’s devices carried a payload of hydrogen cyanide with them and loaded it into the stinger of a mechanical mosquito.”

“Cyanide gas kills people almost instantly,” I said, Penelope’s words starting to sink in. “The results mimic a heart attack, and all traces dissolve into the body within hours. But how could a mosquito deliver enough gas to kill Schneider?”

“It was all a matter of waiting for the proper moment,” said Penelope. “Klax knew that sometime during the night Schneider would lift one of the monkeys out of its cage. With both his hands occupied, the professor couldn’t stop the attack that killed him.”

“The mechanical mosquito—”

“– flew into Dr Schneider’s nose and squirted the hydrogen cyanide into his nasal passage,” said Penelope, finishing my thought. “A small dose inhaled at such close range would kill in seconds.”

“But why?” said Mary Winfree, her questions directed at Klax, not us. “Why on earth would you want to kill Carl?”

Klax rose from the table, and towering six foot six, and having wrenched his hands free, lifted both fists in the air. “How can you even
ask
that question, Mary? I did all the work. He won all the awards. He got the money, the fame, the glory. And because of all that, he got
you.”

“Me?” she said. “What do I have to do with this?”

“He lusted after
you
, and
I
couldn’t allow it,” said Klax, a very strange note creeping into his voice. “I wanted you, and you never even looked my way, Mary. My robot spies heard him talking to you on the phone last week. Trying to seduce you. Take you on another trip. That’s when I decided he had to die. He couldn’t have the awards that were supposed to be mine, the money and honors that were supposed to be mine, and now
you
, too! I just couldn’t allow it!”

“You,” said Mary Winfree, “are a very sick and misguided man. You’re crazy, Klax!”

And so it was jealousy, after all, that killed Dr Schneider. Not a monkey. Not a bat. And to my surprise, something deadly was able to penetrate the fortress called The Slab. Where nothing goes in and nothing comes out, murder took place.

The Marines found a fistful of tiny machines in Klax’s right pocket, a miniature control device in the other. Proof positive that he had used such micro-machines for murder and a grim reminder that Penelope’s subterfuge had saved anyone else from being killed.

“I had Captain Rackham bring the two of you with Klax tonight so he wouldn’t guess we specifically suspected him,” explained Penelope to Arronds and Winfree, once the Marines had left with their prisoner. “I also thought, since you were Dr Schneider’s friends, you would want to help capture his murderer.”

“An amazing deduction,” said Arronds. “How did you figure out it was Klax?”

“She asked Sherlock Holmes,” I answered.

I
was beginning to think that Lieutenant Ader had finally run out of bizarre cases. He hadn’t bothered me for almost six months, or since that “Circle in the Dust” affair.

But I should have known better; it was just a breathing spell. His jurisdiction, mainly the city of Arden, isn’t likely to be free of skulduggery for long. Not that I minded too much; in fact, I like playing detective. For that matter, who doesn’t?

This was something of a switch, however; because instead of asking me to help solve a murder, it was more a matter of unsolving one first, you might say.

I’m used to being called on by Ader. As the only reasonably well qualified expert in forensic medicine in these parts – I’m chief pathologist at Pasteur Hospital, serving the whole county – I do work for a number of communities in the area. You see they don’t trust their local coroners, since most of them are political hacks long out of practice. So whenever they need a dependable autopsy, especially the kind their man would just as soon not handle – say somebody buried a month – they send for Dr Joel Hoffman: me.

Last Tuesday I was happily preparing a slide of some muscle section; it had a bunch of the finest roundworm parasites that you’ll ever see. Oddly enough, it occurred to me that these organisms, so loathsome to the laymen, were not only gracefully proportioned, and miracles of design, but never killed each other through greed or hate, and would never, never build a hydrogen bomb to destroy the world.

Well, think of the Devil-in this case, murder – and he’s sure to appear. Into the lab came Lieutenant Ader with a young girl in tow. Him I’ve seen before, but never in such company, so being a man first and a pathologist second, I looked at her. A small girl, dark, and just a bit plump. What my racy old man used to call a “plump partridge.” She had been crying a lot; it didn’t need eight years of medical study to tell that. As for Ader, he was half angry, and half ashamed.

“This is my niece, Dana,” he said gruffly. “You’ve heard me mention her occasionally.”

I smiled. She fixed her enormous, smoky grey eyes on me, and said: “You’re the only one who can help us. Everything adds up all wrong. Larry couldn’t have done it, and yet there’s nobody else who went out there.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Back off a few paragraphs, and start over again.”

“Larry’s her fiance,” Ader explained. “I’m holding him on a first degree murder charge.”

I must have looked surprised, because he reddened slightly, and snapped, “I had to, but she thinks he’s innocent. Why, I don’t know. I’ve told her about your work before, and now she expects you to perform a grade A miracle to order. In other words, Dana’s picked you to smash my nice open-and-shut case to little pieces.”

“Thanks a lot, both of you,” I said sardonically. “But I only do wonders on Wednesday and Friday; this is Tuesday, remember.”

“That’s all right; you can solve the whole case tomorrow,” the lieutenant said, giving his niece a rather sickly grin. It was a noble attempt to cheer her up, and of course a complete failure, as such things always are.

“Look,” he added, obviously on a hot spot, and not enjoying it, “I’ve got the boy cold; the evidence is overwhelming. You’ll see what I mean in a minute. But Dana here isn’t convinced, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t see Larry bludgeoning an old man to death for money, myself. He’s pretty hot-tempered, but gets over it fast. I don’t think he goes in for physical violence, anyhow. Still . . .” He broke off, and I could almost read his mind. When you’ve met enough murderers, one thing soon becomes as clear as distilled water: there’s simply no way to tell a potential killer in advance of the crime.

“Why are you so sure he didn’t do it?” I asked Dana.

Her round little chin rose stubbornly; I liked her for that. I hate the passive, blonde, doughy kind of girl.

“I know he couldn’t kill anybody,” she said, “especially an old man lying on the sand. He might punch another fellow his own age, if they were both on their feet, but that’s all. Do you think I could love a murderer, and be ready to marry him?”

I looked at Ader, and both our faces must have become wooden at the same time, because she gave a little cry of pure exasperation.

“Ooh! All you men know is evidence. I know Larry!”

The lieutenant is married, and so knows about women. Even so, this line of reasoning, being so feminine, made him wince. But the answer was about what I expected. So I merely remarked: “Suppose you give me the main facts, and then we’ll fight about who’s guilty.”

“Right.” Ader seemed relieved. He was always at his best with evidence rather than theories or emotions. I imagine that Dana, in cahoots with his very warm-hearted wife, Grace, had been needling him for hours. Not that he’s unsympathetic. I’ve known cops who wouldn’t mess with a case that was all sewed up to please their wives, children, or grandparents. He was doing it for a mere niece.

“First,” Ader said, “the victim is Colonel McCabe, a retired Army Officer, sixty-two years old. Yesterday morning, quite early, he went down to his private beach, as usual, accompanied by his dog. After a brief paddling in the shallows, he dozed on a blanket, and while he was dozing somebody came up to him, carrying a walking stick, and calmly smashed his skull with the heavy knob. It seems beyond a doubt that the killer must have been Larry Channing, the colonel’s nephew, a boy of twenty-four, who lives in the same house.”