Murder Impossible Read online

  She was wearing a black plastic raincoat and Russian boots. Her folded, dripping transparent umbrella was squeezed in her pale hand. Later when Senator Banner was investigating the murder, he described her as having a fascinating frame and head full of brown follow-me-lad curls. Her eyes, as long as an Egyptian queen's, darted with fright.

  Borden Argyll was waiting for her in their usual nook. He was an anemic artist with tortoise shell glasses and a scrubbed face. But he was young. That was all that mattered to Linda.

  When she saw him she went to pieces emotionally. He raised his arms too slowly as she rushed into them and she caught him full on the narrow chest, almost knocking him backward into the T'ang Dynasty vase.

  'I killed him!' she sobbed. 'I'm rid of him. Borden! I did! I did!'

  He jerked his head around to see if anybody was within earshot. There was no one else there at all. At that moment he was as near to panic as he had ever been in his life.

  It had all started eight months ago when Linda married DeWitt Carewe. The marriage was the culmination of a hasty romance that began in the woods four months before. It had been a gusty day when they'd met. The earth and the sky had the same unnatural, lurid glow. And Linda, out for a Sunday stroll, was lost. A man appeared suddenly on the path. The wild wind in the trees seemed to shout and try to tell her things to warn her.

  The man showed her the way back to the bus line. As they walked, they talked. Linda became intrigued by DeWitt Carewe. There was not too great a difference between their ages. He looked about forty and she was twenty-three. And he had money. In finance he led Wall Street by the nose. Where others failed he begot riches. He had inhuman drive.

  She married him.

  There were whisperings about Carewe. Whisperings about his connection with unspeakable things that went on behind certain locked doors in Washington Square. Things that had to do with werewolves and vampirism. Some people even went so far as to say that Linda had married Lucifer himself.

  During the last three months Linda had repeatedly and incautiously fled to someone 'more human'—Borden Argyll. She had been introduced to Argyll by Carewe himself. Argyll, a laborious workman with the brush, had been using Carewe as a subject in one of his art series called Studies in the Supernormal. Aside from going with another man's wife, smoking a calabash, and matching pennies, Argyll had few vices.

  Now in that dim, dreary gallery he tried to console Linda. Bit by bit, she told him about the noon meal and the five grains of arsenic in the milk and how she had hurried out of the house after she'd seen him drink it. She couldn't witness his death agony.

  'He was a monster,' muttered Argyll. 'I realize that now.' The tattoo of the rain on the stained glass window blurred their voices. 'But, sweetheart, what shall we do? The police will find—' The tortured look on her face at the mention of police made him hesitate.

  Neither of them wanted to think about the police. And they clung to each other quivering with doubt and apprehension in the long shadowy gallery.

  Someone was walking toward them. Walking with a slow tantalizing deliberate tread. They both turned their heads in that direction to see who was coming.

  Out of the streaming grey light leered a triangular face. A full lipped mouth was drawn back exposing sharp animal teeth in a cruel grin.

  Linda made a sound as if she'd been struck.

  Argyll gasped, 'Carewe!'

  'My dear sweet wife'—the voice sounded sepulchral—'murdered me this noon. Do you believe in ghosts, Argyll?'

  Argyll was lead coloured. But he stood his ground. 'No, damn you! You're alive!'

  'Follow me and see—if you dare!' came the taunt.

  The apparition wheeled and went back rapidly the way he had come.

  Linda stared dazedly at Argyll. 'Then I didn't—'

  He reached for her hand. 'No, you didn't poison him. Come on. We'll follow him.'

  'Oh no, Borden. No. He's up to something terrible. You don't know him as I do.'

  They started off blindly, trailing Carewe to the first elbow of the deserted gallery. As they turned the corner, they saw the flitting form mingling with the shadows a good distance ahead.

  The whole building was deadly still save for their footsteps, their quick breathing, and the steady rain.

  The man ahead had whisked around the next corner. They heard his footsteps break into a sharp run. They heard the opening and closing of a glass door.

  On the wall near them a small sign with gilt lettering and an arrow said: Administrative Offices.

  Argyll drew cautiously to the turn around which Carewe had vanished. Linda panted at his collar. They halted.

  Now they could see down the next wide hall and across it as far as the first office door, which was marked: Trustees. It was diagonally fifteen feet from the corner where they stood. The closed door was, except for its wooden frame, sheer plate glass. They could look clearly into the room.

  They saw a lighted floor lamp set to the left and rear. Standing beside the lamp, grinning out at them, was Carewe. They saw him reach out his arm and yank the lamp chain. The room and the hall became one vast shadow.

  Argyll fumbled for a box of wooden matches and struck one. He took a step toward the Trustees' office door.

  Linda caught him restrainingly by the arm. 'No, Borden! Don't go in!'

  'Please, Linda!' he snapped, nerves ragged. 'Let's get this nonsense over with.'

  She let go. Like a will o' the wisp, he crossed the space in a half dozen steps. The doorknob rattled loosely in his fingers and he swung the door open. 'Don't come in, Linda,' he warned her over his shoulder.

  The same match in his hand was still burning when he groped for the lamp chain. His hand brushed against the bulb. It was warm. He found the chain and jerked it. Flinging away the twisted black match stump, he swung around. His arms were upraised, half protectingly.

  He saw Linda standing squarely in the office doorway. He saw— nobody else!

  Carewe had vanished with the turning out of the light!

  Then Linda's rasping intake of breath made the short hairs at the nape of Argyll's neck bristle. He peered around the edge of a maple desk to where she was pointing.

  A girl's body was spilled there. Her skull had been crushed with one blow of the silver statuette that was lying by her. The statuette was an Inca alpaca and its long neck made an ideal handle.

  You could almost hear the thump of their hearts in the still room. Argyll recognized whose body it was. 'Phyllis Remington!'

  'Your model!'

  He touched the girl's hand. It was warm and limp. She had just been killed.

  Linda hear a movement in the hall behind her. She made one terrified leap to Argyll's side.

  In the doorway appeared a rolypoly little man with a baldish head and gleaming eyeglasses on a wide black ribbon. He wore striped pants and what Senator Banner called a come-to-prayer coat. As he stood there poised, his legs bent backward at the knees like sabres. He was George Honeywell, founder and director of the Galleries. His wrinkled forehead proclaimed that he was a worrier. And his chief worry was for more money for the upkeep of the Galleries.

  He tittered. 'Mrs. Carewe! Whatever has happened to you? You're as pale as a—'

  'My husband!' she blurted, on the verge of hysteria. 'He's mad! He was just in here! He killed Phyllis!'

  'Good Lord, no!' Honeywell's jaw fell slack as he hastened to their side at the desk. He looked down, then away, biting his trembling Up. 'What a loss. She was such a beautiful girl. A trifle tempestuous perhaps, but— Where is Carewe?'

  'He disappeared,' said Argyll. 'I know it sounds incredible but he vanished into thin air before I could get in. Maybe you've seen him?'

  'Me?' said Honeywell. 'Lord, no. I've been in the other office across the hall ever since coming back from a Judo lesson. Nobody came my way.'

  They looked around the square room. There were no windows. It was airconditioned. The door was the only opening.

  Argyll's eyes rose to t
he nearly lifesize painting hanging flush with the back wall. It was one of his own recent works. It was a vividly realistic subject called Werewolf and Victim. In the shaggy face of the pawing werewolf, with its prominent incisors and lancet canines, no one could fail to recognize DeWitt Carewe.

  Argyll had used Carewe and Phyllis Remington as his models.

  Honeywell shook himself like a wet poodle. 'Wait for me in the Seventeenth Century Gallery while I phone the police,' he said. 'We've got to stick together.'

  It was hours after the discovery of the murder. Linda and Honeywell huddled outside the phone booth in the drugstore while Argyll, inside, dialed.

  Argyll, half listening to the buzz in the receiver, was saying to them, 'While Senator Banner was sitting for the oil I made of him during his last political campaign, he talked a blue streak about impossible murders. He must have cited at least four cases he's solved where a person left a room unseen through a watched door. The answer to each one was a simple magic trick. There was nothing supernatural about it.'

  Linda said tremulously, 'DeWitt is capable of anything evil. Anything.'

  Argyll spoke into the phone. 'Ninety-one Morningside Drive? I want to speak to Senator Banner. Is he home?'

  The switchboard girl said, 'No, he isn't, sir. Have you tried the Sphinx Club? He's probably playing bezique there, or pulling rabbits out of hats. This's one of his nights.'

  Argyll called the Sphinx Club on Fifth Avenue. The desk clerk said 'He hasn't been in tonight, sir. He may be banging away at clay geese at the shooting gallery on Broadway and 42nd Street. That's one of his hangouts.'

  Argyll called the shooting gallery. A beery voice said, 'The Senator? He looked in while passin' and said somethin' about goin' to a bowling alley.' The voice broke off while someone in the background did some coaching. Then the beery voice resumed. 'Beg poddin! You'll catch him at Shell's Billiard Parlor playin' snooker.'

  United States Senator Brooks U. Banner could not have been more at home in Shell's Billiard Parlor if they had built the place around him. Cue in hand, he was bending his girth over a pool table, studying the layout of the balls. The cuffs of his peppermint striped shirt were folded up and his red Hercules suspenders made a blazing crisscross on a back as wide as a cement walk.

  He was playing a thin, dark, nervous man with eyes like a blacksnake's. The dark man agitatedly chalked a cue, watching Banner.

  Argyll, rain dripping off his hat brim, led Linda and Honeywell through the smokiness and chatter of the pool room. Some of the men whistled approval at Linda and that made Banner abandon the game for a moment to turn around for a looksee.

  Linda got the full impact of his blue watered steel eyes. He knew that to her he looked like a slovenly archangel who enjoyed consorting with blackguards. He was a King Kong in size with a mop of grizzled hair and black lead eyebrows. His string tie looked greasy, as if it had trailed in his soup. And it had.

  Banner's eyes stabbed away from her and at the others. 'Borden Argyll!' He held out a palm the size of a welcome mat. 'Howzit, paint slubber? How're all the paintings?'

  Argyll shook hands and introduced his companions. 'We came to see you, Senator,' he said hesitantly, 'about the murder.'

  Banner shuffled with interest, like a performing bear. 'What murder?'

  Linda started to say, 'The ghost in the gallery—'

  'Jumping hoptoads! That one! I read the headlines. That's all I looked at. Wait'll I finish off this game.'

  Briskly calling his shots, he pocketed one red ball, then a pool ball. His dark opponent stopped chalking his cue. Banner pocketed another red ball, another pool ball. The dark man, disgruntled, put his cue back in the rack. He couldn't bear to look at the table as the last ball rolled out of sight.

  Banner wet his big thumb and counted his winnings, a sheaf of red seal U.S. notes. Then he struggled into his antique frock coat and grinned.

  'He doesn't know I'm an international pool shark. We'll all go to the Sphinx Club. You're my guests. I want to feed the elephant meaning, yours truly. Then we'll talk about the murder.'

  Banner, waving at everybody, selected a table in the centre of the dining room. He ordered one of his favourite rare Spencer steaks and a scuttle of black coffee. 'Make the dessert a rhubarb meringue pie.'

  The others said they had already dined at the rotisserie. But they ordered drinks. Banner attacked his feast as if it were Fido's dinner; he cut the whole steak into small chunks, salted his string beans, stuccoed a whole potato with butter, and buried everything under a volcanic eruption of gravy.

  Argyll cleared his throat. 'We three have been together ever since we discovered the murder.'

  Banner lifted a plastered fork to his mouth. 'Sail into this easier, lad. I'm gonna be quiz master in a game of cross questions and crooked answers. First off, in what order did you people go into the Galleries?'

  Honeywell said, 'McPherson, the man at the front door, tells us that I was the first one in this afternoon, then came Phyllis Remington, the dead girl, then Carewe, then Argyll, and lastly Mrs. Carewe.'

  Linda clutched Argyll's arm. 'DeWitt knew about our meetings!' She seemed as if she were just finding that out.

  'We didn't try to hide it very well,' said Argyll.

  Banner kept his eyes on Linda. 'You don't ask like a native New Yorker, kitten. Where'd you hail from?'

  'Pawtucket, Rhode Island.'

  'What'd you do before you married Carewe?'

  'I was a dancing teacher.'

  Banner brightened. 'Can you do the Paris cancan?' She looked at him frosty faced. Banner crowed. 'If you can, don't be bashful about 'fessing up.'

  'This is neither the time nor the place for anything like that,' she said heatedly. T want to tell you what kind of man my husband was—is . . . Oh, I don't know. Have I killed him or not?' she ended in a whimper.

  'He's not dead,' said Argyll stiffly. 'We saw and heard him.'

  'All right,' she said, trying to convince herself. 'He's not dead. But he might easily be. I don't know—it's all so puzzling, so mysterious.' She paused and shuddered in the warm comfortable dining room. 'Borden, how old would you say DeWitt is?'

  'About forty,' said Argyll without hesitation.

  'He looks forty,' she whispered. 'But he has an old Bible with a metal clasp. He always kept the clasp locked. I'd never seen him open it. He told me to keep my hands off it. The other day I broke the clasp. His birth date is on the flyleaf. He's fifty-nine years old!'

  The clatter of dishes seemed far away. Centuries away. The Dark Ages yawned again for an instant and they seemed to hear a thin, tortured cry of 'Witchcraft!'

  Argyll put his hand on Linda's for a moment to calm her. Then he drained his whisky glass to steady himself. Honeywell sat rooted there, fascinated. Banner covered a burp with his serviette to his lips.

  She went on, 'I'll never forget the first day of our married life when I stepped into his vast studio apartment. It has crimson curtains and black drapes and brass ceremonial gongs. The place always reeks of incense. It doesn't seem real. It doesn't seem as if these things could happen in New York. That very same night he asked me if I would go with him to a celebration of the Black Mass.

  'I was stunned. He said, "Phyllis will be there. She'll act as assistant—my scarlet robed acolyte." His animal teeth seemed to grow longer as he grinned at me. I tore away from him and locked myself in my room. He called through the door that if I wanted him I would merely have to draw a pentagram—a five sided figure—in chalk on the black oak floor and he would reappear . . . And then there were other things, like the books about werewolves in his library. And the lampshade of human skin. Today'—her words stumbled—'I wanted to finish with him. I made a meal for him and put five grains of arsenic in his milk. I saw him take it. But he didn't die! He's— he's the devil.'

  Banner thoughtfully sipped his coffee with the spoon standing in the cup and almost poking him in the eye. Another of his Bannerisms. He said, 'Three grains would kill an adult. Whe
re'd you get the arsenic? By soaking flypaper?'

  'No, no. I found it in his medicine cabinet.'

  'Mebbe it wasn't arsenic'

  'It was, Senator. My friend has rats in her basement. I tried it on them. They died.'

  Honeywell stirred and spoke with a frog in his throat. 'Only Beelzebub could vanish the way he did.'

  'I wanna hear about that,' said Banner.

  Argyll told the story up to the time he started for the blackened glass door with the match flickering in his hand.

  'Now whoa right there!' Banner halted him. 'Could Carewe have flown the coop in the instant of complete darkness before you struck the match?'

  'No' said Argyll positively. 'Those glass doors make a noise when you open and close them. Aside from that, the doorknob rattles when you turn it. He had no time to do it silently and we never heard a sound.'

  'All right. So he was still in the room as you barged in.'

  Argyll said, 'I touched the light bulb. It was warm.'

  'The light had just been turned out. Did he wriggle out of the door before you lighted the floor lamp again?'

  Linda said, 'I was in the doorway. He couldn't have got out without crowding me. Besides, I could see the whole room vaguely. There was illumination from Borden's match.'

  'No other exits but the door?'

  'None,' said Honeywell, chiming in.

  'No place in the room to hide?'

  Argyll shook his head.

  Banner frowned at all three of them in turn. 'Against which wall is the lamp?'

  'To the left and rear as you go into the office.'

  'And that's the only wall, or portion of wall, that you can see when you stand at the turn of the corridor?'

  'Yes,' said Honeywell.

  'Can you solve it?' asked Linda impatiently.

  'Can you?' countered Banner.

  She said no in a little voice.

  Banner said, 'I'm just another Boobus Americanus. What you people have done is handed me a lemon on a tray . . . Forget about Carewe for a minute. I'm keen on models. Has anyone got a good word for Phyllis?'

  Honeywell looked sideways at Linda. 'Mrs Carewe,' he said embarrassedly, 'there are unpleasant things that I'm aware of that have to come out now. I happen to know that Phyllis and Carewe were in love before he married you.'