“What happened to—”
“You heard me.” Gavigan pointed to the photo. “The body had no mustache. But Arnold says Floyd was wearing one as usual when he left here Wednesday night. Why’d he shave it off?”
The picture was a candid shot of a heavy-set, rather flabby man holding a tall drink in his hand. He had his mouth open and was making an unsteady-looking gesture. Arnold’s lighting was nice, but his model was no movie actor. He had permanent-looking morning-after circles under his eyes, sleek black hair combed straight back, a pudgy, flat-ended nose, and a small mustache, carefully pointed at the ends.
Merlini said, “That newspaper description what put you on, Gail?”
“Yes. And with the symptoms what they were—”
“Any idea what Floyd, or anyone, would be doing high and dry on the 21st floor of a midtown hotel — dead of the bends, of all things?”
“The bends don’t bother me so much. They might not have hit him for several hours. I don’t get this lack of clothes and the locked room. A wrong room at that.”
Gavigan said, “Instead of the usual murder victim in a locked room with the question—How’d the murderer get out? — we’ve got a body, dead from natural causes, and the question—How’d he get in, and how’d his clothes get out? The desk clerk, the elevator boy, and the floor clerk on 21 say they never saw him before — that might be on account of the missing mustache. But they’d certainly have noticed if he was running around the place without any clothes.”
“Natural causes?” Merlini asked. “Just how natural a death is the bends. Doctor?”
“It’s not exactly ordinary, if that’s what you mean; but it couldn’t very well be homicide, either. Accidental death is what the verdict would read.”
“What makes you so sure it couldn’t be murder?”
Gail smiled in a professionally superior way. “Compressed air as a murder device mid be original and clever — in fiction. Couple of ways it might be done — but in actual practice they’d both be damned impractical.”
“Unless, being an inventive cuss, as I suspect he is, our murderer overcame the disadvantages. What are they?”
“Well, method number one would consist in popping your victim into a compression chamber, building up an atmospheric pressure of something over two atmospheres, and then suddenly allowing it to drop back to normal. Difficulty there is that a cylindrical steel chamber large enough to hold a man and fitted with the usual battery of pumps or compressed air tanks is not only an expensive but an unwieldy murder weapon. The disposal of the weapon would be even more of a headache than the disposal of the body.”
“What happens when you build up the air pressure and release it too suddenly?”
“It carbonates the blood, literally turns the victim into a human soda-water bottle! “Most of the 78 percent of nitrogen in the air is ordinarily exhaled, but, under pressure, much of it passes into solution in the bloodstream and is deposited in the various fatty tissues, nerve tissues, and joint liquids throughout the body. If the external pressure is reduced gradually, the lungs have time to filter the gas out again; but if the drop is too rapid, the nitrogen returns to a gaseous state wherever it happens to be at the time and forms bubbles in the bloodstream and tissues. Same as when you take the cap off a soda-water bottle. The bubbles rupture blood vessels, tear the tissues, and shatter the nerves, and you’ve got a nice case of either sand hog’s itch, the staggers, the chokes, or the bends.”
“The itch, the staggers, and the chokes,” Merlini said, “are all as descriptive as anything. Why the bends?”
“When the bubbles are so bad that you can’t hold your arms and legs straight because of the pain, you’ve got the bends. It’s one of the more exquisite forms of torture.”
“How soon would death occur?”
“That would depend on the amount of pressure, the length of time one was exposed to it, and the time taken getting out from under it. If a bubble or a cluster of bubbles formed an embolus blocking blood to parts of the brain or heart, death might occur in a couple of minutes. Otherwise, it might be anything from that on up to several days, usually one to 24 hours.”
“Any cure, once you have it?”
“Sure. Recompression. Get back into the compression chamber and back under the original pressure. Then reduce it slowly enough so that the gases can escape normally through the lungs.”
“You said two murder methods,” Gavigan put in. “What’s the other?”
“Same principle, but without the chamber.” Gail lighted a cigarette and gestured with it. “But you couldn’t use it on just anyone. Your victim would have to be a diver and you’d have to be the man at the pumps. Impractical on two counts, you see. The air you send down has another purpose besides giving the diver something to breathe. With the usual rubber diving dress the air has to be compressed enough so that it equals the pressure of the surrounding water at whatever depth the diver’s in. At 100 feet, for instance, there’s a total of nearly 50 tons of water pressing on the surface of his body; and he needs 44 pounds pressure per square inch to keep from being flattened. If you pulled him up too quickly, you’d get the same result as with the compression chamber. The usual procedure is to bring the diver up slowly, with stops of various durations at different depths — stage decompression. But as a murder device, the simpler thing to do would be to give him ‘a squeeze.’ There’s a nice murder method no one’s used. Death by implosion.”
“You’re bubbling over with murder methods,” Gavigan punned, unconsciously. “What’s that one?”
“An implosion is just the opposite of an explosion. Can’t you imagine what all those tons of water pressure would do to you if the man on topside at the pumps suddenly let your air pressure go? The water literally pushes you right up into your helmet. They take you out with a spoon. Divers have facetiously referred to the results of a squeeze as ‘strawberry jam.’ ”
Merlini spoke suddenly: “Can the floor clerk on 21 see the door of 2113 from where she sits?”
“What?” Gavigan turned to him. “Oh, no. It’s around a turn in the corridor, but she’s smack in front of the elevators. It’s the only way in except for the service elevator. The fire door only opens out. She swears she never set eyes on him before. Barring a duplicate key, which isn’t likely because the locks were all changed recently, there’s no way he could have got into that room except up the fire escape and in through the window. The chambermaid left that open an inch or two for ventilation. But she’s positive she locked the door — they’ve had some room thefts there recently, and the staff is all lock conscious. Anyway, both door and window were locked when that bellhop took the schoolteacher up.”
“Yale lock?”
“Yes. Locks behind you as you go out, but you couldn’t get in without a key of some sort; there were no picklock scratches inside the lock. And even if he’d rented the room very recently and had a duplicate key cut — well, there wasn’t any key with him in the room. And he couldn’t have been airing himself on the fire escape and then crawled back into the wrong room because the soles of his feet were perfectly clean, There’s not a damned bit of evidence to show he didn’t simply materialize in that empty room, nude and dead.”
“Any fingerprints?”
“Not a smell of one, not even Floyd’s. Everything nice and tidy the way the maid left it, except for a corpse where it shouldn’t be.”