Thorp looked startled, but not as startled as the rest of us; I guess he’d seen it coming. “What are you talking about?” he demanded, his voice harsh.
“There are records, you know, Mr. Thorp,” Steele said, walking toward him. “The phone company must have a record of your call. And the person you called—” Steele held his hand above Thorp’s head as though drawing forth thoughts “—the young lady you called... Miss Epworth.”
Thorp brushed aside Steele’s hand. “What is this? An accusation based on a damned mind-reading act? I don’t have to put up with this. I called Ginny. Of course I called Ginny. Why shouldn’t I?”
“From what phone?” Steele asked softly.
“What do you mean? How do I know what phone? I don’t remember what phone.”
“And the key, Mr. Thorp; how will you explain the key?”
“You mean to this room? I don’t have a key to this room.”
“But you know where it is, because you put it there,” Steele said. “And I’m going to take you to it.”
“You must be crazy,” Thorp said, backing away.
“You’re going to take my hand,” Steele said, “and then I’m going to take you to the key — wherever it is.”
We all watched, hypnotized, as Steele took hold of Thorp’s wrist. “Come,” he said, “let’s go find that key. All you have to do is think about where it is, and I’ll lead you to it.” He pulled Thorp across the room, very much against Thorp’s will. “And you can’t help thinking about it, can you? That little brass key that nobody knew you had. Just lock the door behind you and hide the key and no one could ever prove you were in the room.”
Steele literally pulled Thorp out of the room as he kept up the patter. We all followed behind at a respectful distance. Of course, now I knew what he was doing. It was very impressive on stage, and even more so now when it was being used to trap a murderer. “Just come along,” Steele said, pulling Thorp by the wrist. “Which way? Where would you have put it? Over here?” He went to the left, toward the furniture department. “No, I think not.” He turned to the right again, with Thorp behind him, still in his firm grasp. “Down here, I think. Surely not too far away, wouldn’t want to get caught with it. Paused here to think, did you? Now down here? Ahof course!” He stopped before a glass display case full of wallets and other leather goods. “Somewhere in here.”
“This is ridiculous!” Thorp shouted, but there was panic in his voice. “What does it prove if there is a key in this case? You probably put it there yourself, Steele.”
Steele smiled. “Do you really think that /would need a key to enter the Stamp Room, or any other room?”
Lillian came forward and slid the lock off the door to the case. Steele then opened the door with one hand, the other still firmly wrapped around Thorp’s right wrist. “Where now?” he said, his hand running along the top of the various leather items. “I think... ah, yes!” He pulled a key holder from one of the trays. There were two keys in it for display, one brass and the other silver. “One of these,” he said positively. He lifted the brass one by the ring. “This.”
Lieutenant Garrett pushed forward. “Let me see that.”
“Here you are, Lieutenant. Handle it gently. I think you’ll find Mr. Thorp’s fingerprints on it.”
“What if it is my key?” Thorp’s voice was higher and louder than he’d intended. “That doesn’t prove anything!”
“Speaking of keys,” Steele said to Garrett, “I suggest you examine the burglar-alarm key — which no one but Mr. Thorp uses, by his own admission — carefully under a microscope. You’ll no doubt find traces of blood at the tip, even though Mr. Thorp scrubbed it bright before putting it in this case.”
Of course! I thought. Thorp must have had the key in his possession when Schneider confronted him in the Stamp Room; this was the weapon, with its wide blunt tip, that he had in his fear driven into Schneider’s throat.
Thorp realized, too, that he was trapped; that Garrett had all the evidence he needed now. His gaze dropped and he sagged in Steele’s grasp. Lieutenant Garrett read him his rights, and he was handcuffed and taken away with no fuss at all.
Everyone was talking at once, looking at Steele as if he were some kind of wizard. When Garrett got them calmed down, he asked the question in all their minds: “All right, Steele, how the hell did you do that business with the key? You really didn’t have it spotted beforehand?”
“I had no idea where it was until Thorp ‘told’ me,” Steele answered. “It’s a technique called Muscle Reading. They were doing it in the Middle Ages.”
“Probably getting burned as witches too,” Garrett said. “How does it work?”
“There are several books on it,” I told him. “Professor Otto Dirk’s is probably the best. Published in 1937. Four hundred pages. I have a copy, if you’d care to see it sometime. The technique involves reading a person’s subconscious reactions by keeping a tight grip on a muscle, usually in the arm.”
“It works so good that you can pull the person?”
“It works better when you pull the subject. Something about his pulling away harder in the direction he doesn’t want you to go.”
“You live and learn,” Garrett said. “But listen, Steele, there are a couple of other things that need clearing up. For one, how did you know Thorp had made a telephone call from the Stamp Room?”
“Simple deduction, Lieutenant. He’d gone in there; he had to be doing something. What does the room offer, really, except privacy? The only lines to the switchboard open at night are those in the executive offices and the Stamp Room. You’ve seen the cubicle Thorp had to work in. A phone call was the only logical conclusion. He had no way of knowing that Mrs. Lorde’s suspicions were directed at Schneider and not at him. With his burden of guilt, he saw accusing fingers in every gesture.”
“I suppose so,” Garrett said. “Which reminds me, I’ve got to dispatch someone to pick up Thorp’s girlfriend, this Ginny Epworth; she’s obviously an accessory to his embezzlement. But before I do that, suppose you give me another logical deduction: what happened to the missing stamp? Who stole it?”
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. Despite my pose, I am not omniscient. Perhaps Thorp took it. Perhaps poor Schneider took it, for some reason we might never know. Perhaps some unknown individual took it; after all, no one has examined it closely for weeks, according to Mr. McCarthy. I doubt if it has anything to do with the murder, in any case. And I imagine it will turn up eventually.”
Garrett sighed. “All right, Steele. You’ve been a great help, I admit it. You deserve a publicity break, so I’ll see to it you get most of the credit for solving Schneider’s murder. It’s the least I can do.”
Steele smiled — and so, of course, did I.
Two hours later — it must have been almost dawn — Steele and Ardis and I were sitting in the kitchen of his Victorian house in the Berkeley hills. I had escorted Lillian Royce to her San Francisco apartment, and then I had come across the bay to ask Steele some questions before going home myself.
My first question was: “How did you do it?”
His eyes, deceptively mild, raised from a mug of steaming coffee to meet mine over the table. “How did I do what?”
“The Hayes Two-and-a-Half-Cent Vermilion, damn it.”
“Oh. Ardis—”
She tossed him one of the two rolled-up posters she had brought home with her from Lorde’s — the two that had been behind the coffin inside the front window. Steele unrolled it, and his fingernail then scraped lightly at an upper corner, the mottled yellowish-red (vermilion) background to the gaudy drawing of himself. A small rectangle of paper came free, and when I leaned close I saw that two thin corner mounts of transparent plastic, the type used to mount photographs in albums, were affixed to the poster. The rectangle was a picture of President Rutherford B. Hayes.