The Wrong Way Down (10 page)

“No,” said Nordhall stonily, “I won't.”

“If you did, I should reply that an old lady like Miss Paxton would never take up that fashion again, any more than she'd wear other youthful accessories of her own youth—even if they came into style for the moment. To her a good golf cape couldn't go out of fashion.”

“Kids wear those woollen scarfs now.”

“She wouldn't take up a kid fashion.”

“You seem to know,” said Nordhall, whose face wore an obstinate expression not far removed from boredom.

“I know why a woollen scarf was wrapped round her head. But it's foolish for me to give you the thing like this; naturally you want facts first—I'll give you some of those.”

Long before Gamadge had arrived at the bullet which Harold had dug out of the woodwork, or had handed it across the desk, Nordhall was also leaning forward with his elbows on the blotter. When Gamadge handed him he bullet he looked at it, rolled it in his fingers, and put it away. Then he went on making scrawls on a yellow pad, glancing up from them to Gamadge, looking down at them again. When Gamadge had finished the story he sat back, tore up his scrawls, and threw them into the waste basket as though he were throwing away something he had once valued but no longer had any use for; perhaps the last vestiges of his reason.

He said: “Never heard anything like it. No sense to it.”

“Not much on the face of it.”

“You telephone the Vance girl, she decides you're coming about the picture; three hours later Miss Paxton is dead. It's a murder that got by the police and two doctors working independently, and somebody took a lot of trouble over it; but why was it committed, with you loose and perhaps talking about Miss Paxton and this picture to a dozen people? What's the use of killing you, or trying to? There's always a chance of a slip-up on a killing, and sure enough this one didn't come off, though it must have looked to them like a sure thing.

“I can't understand why they went ahead with the Paxton murder—why the killer went ahead with it. But since they did, the killer wasn't Vance.”

“You mean she didn't know it was going to be done tonight?”

“Or done at all. That fits in with the way she acted when you were leaving. Suppose they dropped in a little before ten o'clock, told her Miss Paxton was dead. She'd tell them then about the appointment with you. The only chance they had was to let you go in peace, and hope for the best; hope the Paxton murder would pass for an accident after all. But they'd never—you'd think they'd never kill
you
; unless—” Nordhall's hand went suddenly to the telephone—“unless they meant to clear out.”

“Harold's down there now at the corner, where he can see both entrances—there must be two. Any of them could have left by an alley before Harold ever got upstairs and told me what had happened. It was always too late to catch the ones that meant to go, Nordhall.”

“I'll send a relief down anyway, send two. We'll be going down ourselves. Gamadge—what is this picture racket, anyway?”

“I haven't thought it was a picture racket since I heard that Miss Paxton was dead. I think now that the picture was velvet on the side, and bad luck for the murderer. If the picture hadn't been taken, I don't believe that Miss Paxton would ever have mentioned Miss Vance's name to me. Miss Vance was on her mind because she used to deal in magic, and the change in the picture looked rather like magic to Miss Paxton. If I'd never heard of the picture, or of Miss Vance, I might have accepted the murder as an accident myself—golf cape and knitted scarf and all; I mightn't even have noticed all that corroborative detail.”

“Corroborating what?” asked Nordhall patiently.

“Lawson Ashbury left Miss Paxton a life annuity—three thousand a year.”

Nordhall, relief and the beginnings of comprehension in his eye, took a cigarette out of a pack and lighted it.

“The capital ought to be something like a hundred thousand dollars,” said Gamadge. “And in these circumstances the capital usually reverts to the residuary legatee when the beneficiary dies. We don't know yet, but I'm pretty sure that's the way of it in this case.”

Nordhall exhaled smoke gently.

“From what Miss Paxton said,” continued Gamadge, “I understood that Lawson Ashbury left his estate in thirds; a third to establish Miss Paxton's trust, a third to his son, a third to his church. Miss Paxton didn't speak of any other beneficiary who was to inherit in case of her death; she left me with the distinct impression that if it hadn't been for her, James Ashbury would have had everything that didn't go to the church.”

Nordhall drummed on the desk with the fingers of both hands; his cigarette hung from the corner of his lower lip. Then he took it out and said heavily: “The department's sold on Mr. James Ashbury. It was a person-to-person call, and I don't think there was any mistake about its being Ashbury himself. All that detail. I'll call him; but—we'll have to go a little easy on it. It sounds almost as funny this way.” He looked at Gamadge.

“Yes, funny.”

“Send a gunman to do the job? Let all these other people in on it? You think they were in on it, whatever it is.”

“They had some understanding.”

“Perhaps—I wonder who else is interested? Ashbury has a wife and a son and daughter, you say.”

“Yes. I'm beginning to think I met the son and the daughter this evening.”

“I'll be—you mean Higgs and Simpson?”

“False names.”

“You thought so right away, and the Vance girl called Simpson Jim. I suppose”—Nordhall looked hopeful—“the Spiker woman couldn't be Mrs. Ashbury?”

“Hardly.” Gamadge smiled.

“I'll get those men posted, anyway.” Nordhall talked into the telephone. Then he pushed it away from him and eyed Gamadge humorously. “Now you might as well go ahead and tell me all about the Paxton murder.”

“You're ready for that now, are you?”

“Go right ahead. She would have worn her golf cape, she wouldn't have worn a knitted scarf. What's the rest of it?”

“I
ASSURE YOU,”
said Gamadge, “that this murder was meant to be the perfect crime, and that it was in fact an almost perfect crime. It was never cooked up on the spur of the moment, in desperation, because I had appeared on the scene and requested an audience with Miss Iris Vance. I agree with you that Miss Vance is therefore out of it, except as accessory after the fact. If she had known anything about it—known that it was arranged for tonight, I mean—she would have stopped it. She would either have got in touch with the murderer or murderers, or failing that, she would have gone up there at the proper time, and waited there to call the thing off.

“But the murderer—we'll suppose that there was actually one, no matter how many accessories before the fact there may have been—the murderer had no doubt that the crime would succeed. There is very little chance, as we agreed, that taken by itself it could have failed. The back-ground—those two front doors—made the peculiarity of the alleged accident seem almost normal, by being so peculiar in itself. The psychology of the thing was convincing, doubly so after the police had had details from Mr. James Ashbury. The injury which caused death passed the scrutiny of two doctors; Miss Paxton might have been killed in that way by a ten-foot fall to the pavement.”

Nordhall confirmed all this with a melancholy nod.

“But as with all competent pieces of work,” continued Gamadge, “the clearer and simpler the results, the more complicated and delicate the process of creation. This was an extremely difficult murder to plan and carry out. We all know how hard it is to make murder look like accident, particularly when death results from a fall. Such falls are suspect; but a fall is the only convincing kind of accident which can happen to an old lady in a city house.

“The murderer can't count on the fall itself to cause death; people survive ten-foot drops, falls downstairs, unless there happens to be a fatal injury to the head or spine. The fall must be simulated.

“Why not indoors, where the lower flight ends in a mosaic pavement? Safer, you would think, to keep the whole thing indoors, and eliminate those few seconds of risky work on the street? No. The murderer preferred that risk. A fall downstairs is broken by the stairs themselves, a medical examiner might find a dozen clues to suggest that the crushed head or the broken spine couldn't have resulted from it. Our murderer didn't dare chance it.”

“I wouldn't chance it myself,” said Nordhall.

“The murder was committed indoors. But it had to be committed where blood could be washed away—there mustn't be any blood found indoors, not even the faintest trace of blood. Our murderer knows all about modern police techniques and laboratories. There's a mosaic pavement on the basement floor, modern and smooth as glass.”

Nordhall said: “There ought to be some tiled bathrooms.”

“An evening caller wouldn't have many valid excuses for inviting Miss Paxton up two flights of stairs and into a bathroom. Much simpler to commit the murder on arrival—just inside the front door. Now we come to the golf cape and the knitted scarf.”

“You told me about those. I give you those.”

“I haven't told you nearly all about them. This murderer never missed the significance of the golf cape, or brought along a purple woollen scarf for fun. The golf cape simply wouldn't do.”

“Why not?”

“It wouldn't protect Miss Paxton's body from the bruises she ought to have sustained from falling off a balcony.”

“On her head?”

“Might have sustained; from the iron railing, from the ledge, from the pavement after the head was crushed and the body fell sideways. Old people bruise easily. Miss Paxton had no bruises because she didn't fall; I am sure that the medical examiner will tell you that she has no bruises because she was wearing a thick coat.”

Nordhall said crossly: “They'll do a complete autopsy now. She won't go up to Buckley's yet awhile.”

“So we arrive at the famous scarf, which I have already assured you that Miss Paxton didn't own. The murderer brought it along. Why?”

“Go ahead and save me the trouble.”

“You know why now as well as I do. There must have been an effusion of blood; the medical examiner mustn't be forced to ask himself why there wasn't more blood on the pavement. He mustn't ask himself why there wasn't pavement dust in the wound, or why there was indoor dust on it. He mustn't ask himself anything.”

“If that scarf was tied around her head as soon as the blow was struck there wouldn't be so much blood to get rid of indoors, either.”

“All right for the scarf. The old railing, rusted out already, gets a final loosening. The leaf of the old front door is left open. The body is brought out and laid on the pavement.”

“Yes, but who got into the house to find out about the loose railing and the mosaic floor and all the rest of it? Vance never did all that planning on Sunday afternoon.”

“And if she didn't, who else got in to do it? And how? Well…who'd have an old latchkey?”

“James Ashbury. He could have passed it along, or it might have fallen into other hands without his knowing it. I suppose anybody could have wandered around up there day or night without Miss Paxton knowing it; any time except those two hours in the afternoon when the Keate woman was on the premises.”

“The Keate woman's deaf.”

“That makes it perfect. And tonight Miss Paxton had letters ready for mailing; one of them was picked up and put in her coat pocket, and it certainly made the picture look right.” Nordhall paused to smile. “Miss Vance had a letter ready for mailing too, so you say. Looks as though the murder plan was in her mind, even if she didn't know when it was coming off. Well, nothing left for the party to do now but to flatten the railing, leave a door open, place the body outside, and walk off. I wouldn't say the whole job took more than fifteen minutes, would you? Wash-up and all. That makes the doctors right.”

“And cuts down the time the body lay in the street to a minute or two—the time it took for the murderer to walk to the corner.”

“Big risk, those last few minutes.”

“A short one—and the murderer had a good view up and down.”

“Still, that rail was flat and that door open while the killer was still in the house with the dead body and couldn't see out.”

“Who looks up in New York at night, on a dark, quiet, empty stretch like that? There was a half-moon, and there were clouds; but nobody in New York looks at the moon, nobody but me. Not at the most magnificent Hunter's moon I ever saw in the sky. You tell somebody to look up, and they think you're crazy.”

“All right, the murderer took the risk and got away with it. Now tell me,” said Nordhall, his eye on Gamadge and his mouth widening into a smile, “about that other thing the murderer brought along besides the woollen scarf. Wrapped up in it perhaps, and then wrapped up in newspapers the way you brought the picture into Vance's flat. The blunt instrument.”