“Go on, Doc. Beat it,” Gavigan said. “The Great Merlini has his hands full of upside-down footprints, and I don’t want my tame expert on impossibilities to take on too many at once.”
“Impossibilities,” Merlini said, treating the word reverently. “Corpse in a hotel at 43rd and Third, nude, and you don’t know how he got there. I want to hear more. Cause of death? Doors and windows locked?”
“Damn your eyes, Hesse. See what you’ve done. Merlini, haven’t we got enough on the fire now? You supply some of the answers to this mess, and I’ll let you play with that hotel case as a reward. It’s not murder, but it has a locked room.”
“Oh, it does, does it? I thought I smelled one. Now you have said too much. I can’t resist locked rooms. I want to hear about it at once, or I won’t tell you who killed Linda.”
The Inspector scowled at him steadily for a moment. “Oh. You know that, do you?”
Merlini’s noncommittal smile was the same exasperating sphinxlike one he used when you asked him how he produced lighted cigarettes from the air.
“Bluff,” Gavigan snapped. “All right. I’ll see you. Let’s have that paper you’ve got, Hesse.”
The doctor produced a Tribune from his coat pocket and dropped it over the stair rail. Grimm caught it and brought it to Gavigan, who opened it out before Merlini on the table.
“Page one,” he said. “Human interest story for the day.”
Merlini cast a hungry eye over the headlines. “Where?” he asked, “I don’t see it.”
“There.” The Inspector placed a broad forefinger above an unlikely-looking one-column head: NEW YORK TOO MUCH FOR TOPEKA TEACHER—
Yesterday morning the continental bus deposited Miss Amanda Connors on 42nd Street, fresh from Topeka, Kansas, thrilled with anticipatory excitement and perhaps just a wee bit frightened at the glittering prospect of her first visit to Baghdad-on-the-Subway.
A glorious week of sightseeing stretched before her. Radio City, Chinatown, The Music Hall, The Empire State Building, Grant’s Tomb, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum, Wall Street, perhaps a passing glance at the Stork Club or even a rear table at the Hollywood Restaurant. But Fate was feeling skittish this morning and New York’s welcome was too much, much too much like that of the Baghdad of old where anything might happen. In New York, Amanda found, it does happen!
All the billboards scattered across Jersey had spoken very well of the Hotel McKinley, “Just a step from the Great White Way.” The desk clerk may have smiled inwardly at Amanda’s neatly rolled umbrella and the nervous, excited way she placed her prim signature in the hotel register, but he didn’t show it. He was awfully polite for a New Yorker, Amanda thought. She didn’t know that he hails from Menosha, Wisconsin. He said, “Boy, show Miss Connors to Room 2113.”
The boy, Tony Antoneri of 48976 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, did. He unlocked the door and swung it wide. He waited for Amanda to step in, but something was very wrong with Amanda’s knees. They wouldn’t work. New York was just like the covers on True Crime Stories Magazine.
Miss Connors spent the next four hours at the 43rd Street Police Station in deep conversation with the Law. They weren’t all as polite as the desk clerk had been.
At four o’clock she presented her return half of the round-trip ticket she had bought in Topeka and boarded the bus again. She is now somewhere in Ohio.
Police are still trying to identify the body of the nude man that was lying on the floor of Room 2113. Trying, for that matter, to discover how he got into the room at all. He certainly never registered there.
There were no clothes in the room, no luggage — nothing but the customary furniture and the body. The doors and windows were locked.
Hotel officials said that the last previous occupant of the room had checked out the preceding day, Wednesday. The room had been cleaned shortly after by a maid who had not noticed any nude body.
The man was five feet eight inches tall, weighed about 185 pounds, had brown hair, brown eyes, an appendix scar.
Medical Examiner Hesse said that death was probably due to heart disease but directed that an autopsy be performed.
So sorry, Amanda.
“No wonder you were annoyed when I phoned you this morning, Inspector,” Merlini said, looking up. “With that on your mind.” He called to Hesse. “Sure about that heart disease?”
“No. I was misquoted as usual. I said, ‘It could be a lot of things, including heart disease.’ Considering the absence of any evidence of foul play, that seemed a likely possibility. The only external symptom of any importance was a red mottling on the body due to subcutaneous bleeding. The autopsy—”
Gail’s voice came suddenly from the corner where he had been sitting, nearly forgotten. “Wow! You’d better get that report, Doctor, because if your man found any hemorrhages in the spinal cord, myocardial degeneration, or blebs in the brain substance, he’s probably bothered as hell. And if he did, then I think we can help him.”
Hesse blinked at him in a startled manner. “I’m afraid not, Doctor,” he said. “This man wasn’t the type at all. Too heavy, flabby muscles, evidence of alcoholism, no identification tag. He’d never have been hired as a sand-hog.”
Gail smiled. “Your description fits nicely.”
Inspector Gavigan spluttered. “What are you two gibbering about?”
“Caisson disease, Inspector. Compressed-air illness. The bends.” Gail turned to Hesse. “Of course he’s not the type. That’s just it. He wouldn’t be hired as a compressed-air worker because he’d be too likely to get the bends. But mightn’t that be just why he did get them?”
Merlini pointed a forefinger at Gail and said flatly, “You’ve got other reasons for that hunch.”
Gail nodded and started to speak, but Merlini forestalled him. “I thought so. Inspector, if you don’t have Hesse phone for that report this instant I’ll have apoplexy, fainting fits, glanders, and volcanic eruptions. Because if the verdict is caisson disease—”
“It’ll look damned fishy!” exclaimed Gavigan. “Go get it, Doc. And hurry!”
“Fishy?” Merlini said simply. “I should think so. It will mean that we’ve found Floyd!”
Chapter Seventeen:
EIGHTEEN FATHOMS DEEP
It was the bends, all right. Hesse’s office had found that out, and the Assistant Medical Examiner who had done the post mortem was standing on his ear, not believing it.
It was Floyd, too. Arnold verified the appendicitis scar and supplied Gavigan with another print of the snapshot Leach had taken into town that morning.
“It’s him all right.” The Inspector grunted, scowling at the print darkly. “Malloy didn’t tumble when he saw the other print because he didn’t see the body yesterday. He was out after a guy who stole two king cobras from the zoo.”
“This is what I get for neglecting my daily paper,” Merlini said, helping himself to another sandwich from the tray Mrs. Henderson brought. “Cobras? Interesting too.”
“Yeah. Sure. Only that wasn’t Floyd. Malloy found the guy and put him in a cage at Bellevue. He was a Harlem witch doctor. Tend to your knitting, will you? Maybe you can figure out what happened to Floyd’s mustache.”