He looked once more through the peephole; the two women were still talking together outside. Which only served to cement a decision already made. He was, first and foremost, a connoisseur: he simply had to know if Hume had another bottle of the Margaux.
Norman located the wine cellar without difficulty. It was off the kitchen, with access through a door and down a short flight of steps. It was also adequate, he noticed in a distracted way as he descended — a smallish single room, walled and floored in concrete, containing several storage bins filled with at least two hundred bottles of wine.
But no, not just wine; remarkably fine wine. Reds from Châteaux Lafite, Haut-Brion, Lascombes, Cos D ’Estournel, Mouton-D’Amailhacq, La Tâche, Romanée Saint-Vivant; whites from the Bommes and Barsac communes of France, from the Rhine Hessen of Germany, from Alsace and Italy and the Napa Valley of California. Norman resisted the impulse to stop and more closely examine each of the labels. He had no time to search out anything except the Margaux 1900.
He found two different Chateau Margaux clarets in the last row of bins, but neither of them was the 1900 vintage. Then, when he was about to abandon hope, he knelt in front of the final section of bins and there they were, a pair of dusty bottles whose labels matched that on the spoiled bottle upstairs.
Norman expelled a breath and removed one of them with care. Should he take the second as well? Yes: if he left it here there was no telling into whose unappreciative hands it might fall. There would doubtless be a paper sack in the kitchen in which to carry both. He withdrew the second bottle, straightened, and started to the stairs.
The door at the top was closed. Blinking, Norman paused. He could not recall having shut the door; in fact he was quite certain he had left it standing wide open. He frowned, went up the steps, set the two living Margaux 1900s down carefully at his feet, and rotated the knob.
It was locked.
It took a moment of futile shaking and rattling before he realized that the top of the door was outfitted with one of those silent pneumatic door closers. He stared at it in disbelief. Only an idiot would put such a device on the door to a wine cellar! But that was, of course, what Hume had been. For whatever incredible reason he had had the thing installed — and it seemed obvious now that he carried on his person the key to the door latch.
There was no other way out of the cellar, no second door and no window; Norman determined that with a single sweep of his gaze. And the door looked to be fashioned of heavy solid wood, which made the task of forcing it or battering it down an insurmountable one.
He was trapped.
The irony was as bitter as the taste of the dead Margaux: trapped in Roger Hume’s wine cellar with the man’s murdered corpse in the living room upstairs. He had been a fool to come down here, a fool to have listened to the connoisseur in him. He could have been on his way home to his penthouse by now. Instead, here he was, locked away awaiting the eventual arrival of the police...
As he had done earlier, Norman made an effort to gather his wits. Perhaps all was not lost, despite the circumstances. He could claim to have been visiting Hume when two burly masked men entered the house; and he could claim that these men had locked him in the cellar and taken Hume away to an unknown fate. Yes, that was plausible. After all, he was a respected and influential man. Why shouldn’t he be believed?
Norman began to feel a bit better. There remained the problem of survival until Hume’s body was found; but as long as that did not take more than a week — an unlikely prospect — the problem was not really a serious one. He was surrounded by scores of bottles of vintage wine, and there was a certain amount of nourishment to be had from the product of the vintner’s art. At least enough to keep him alive and in passable health.
Meanwhile, he would have to find ways to keep himself and his mind occupied. He could begin, he thought, by examining and making a mental catalogue of Hume’s collection of vintages and varieties.
He turned from the door and surveyed the cellar again. And for the first time, something struck him as vaguely odd about it. He had not noticed it before in his haste and purpose, but now that he was locked in here with nothing to distract him—
A faint sound reached his ears and made him scowl. He could not quite identify it or its source at first; he descended the stairs again and stood at the bottom, listening. It seemed to be coming from both sides of the cellar. Norman moved to his left — and when the sound became clear the hackles rose on the back of his neck.
What it was was a soft hissing.
Roger Hume’s body was discovered three days later by his twice-weekly cleaning lady. But when the police arrived at her summons, it was not Hume’s death which interested them quite so much as that of the second man, whose corpse was found during a routine search of the premises.
This second “victim” lay on the floor of the wine cellar, amid a rather astonishing carnage of broken wine bottles and spilled wine. His wallet identified him as Norman Tolliver, whose name and standing were recognized by the cleaning lady, if not by the homicide detectives. The assistant medical examiner determined probable cause of death to be an apoplectic seizure, a fact which only added to the consternation of the police. Why was Tolliver locked inside Roger Hume’s wine cellar? Why had he evidently smashed dozens of bottles of expensive wine? Why was he dead of natural causes and Hume dead of foul play?
They were, in a word, baffled.
One other puzzling aspect came to their attention. A plain clothes officer noticed the faint hissing sound and verified it as forced air coming through a pair of wall ducts; he mentioned this to his lieutenant, saying that it seemed odd for a wine cellar to have heater vents like the rest of the rooms in the house. Neither detective bothered to pursue the matter, however. It struck them as unrelated to the deaths of the two men.
But it was, of course, the exact opposite: it was the key to everything. Along with several facts of which they were not yet aware: Norman’s passion for wine and his high blood pressure, Roger Hume’s ignorance in the finer arts and his hypersensitivity to cold — and the tragic effect on certain wines caused by exposure to temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
No wonder Norman, poor fellow, suffered an apoplectic seizure. Can there be any greater horror for the true connoisseur than to find himself trapped in a cellar full of rare, aged, and irreplaceable wines that have been stupidly turned to vinegar?
Mrs. Rakubian
Three days after she murdered him with a hatchet and put his body down the dry well, Mrs. Rakubian’s husband showed up alive and kicking on the front porch.
It was a hot day and Mrs. Rakubian had been in the kitchen mixing some lemonade. She mixed it tart, real tart, because Charlie always liked it sweet and made her put too much sugar in it. That was one of the reasons she’d killed him — one of three or four hundred. It wasn’t the one that made her pick up the hatchet, though. That one was him blowing his nose on the front of his bib overalls. When he done that again, even after she warned him, she went and got the hatchet and give him half a dozen licks and that was that. Except for fetching the wheelbarrow and carting him off to the dry well, but that was one chore she hadn’t minded at all.