“What do you want me to do, smile. Miss Bligh? This man never hung himself up there. He was murdered.”
Frankie flinched as though he’d been hit. The girl’s face paled.
“I could see that, the minute I stepped into the room!” Lindsey snapped. “Either you people are still groggy from your jam-session, or you’re trying to cover up something — and not being very good at it either!”
Frankie Bligh’s cheeks were hollowing and filling like a fish out of water. He gave a stricken yell at his sister. “Now see what you’ve done! Now see what you’ve done! I told you it wasn’t going to look good for me!” He turned and bolted out the door.
“Grab that young fellow, Dyer!” the dick shouted remorselessly after him. “Hang onto him!”
A blue-sleeved arm shot out, fastened itself to Frankie’s shoulder, twirled him around like a top.
Lindsey walked leisurely out to the two of them. “What’d you do it for, kid?” he asked gruffly.
The terrified Frankie’s eyelids fluttered a couple of times, then he sagged limp as a dishcloth into the cop’s arms.
Lindsey had all the surviving members of Dusty Detwiller and his Sandmen ushered back into the jam-pot again about an hour later.
Frankie Bligh hadn’t been booked for the murder yet and was still with them in a bad state of semi-collapse, his wrists manacled together. Armstrong had been sobered up by now, chiefly by heroic methods that had nothing to do with letting nature take its course. Kershaw, the missing member of the original sextet, had been located by an alarm and brought in from the bar where he had gone in all seriousness to brace up on a lethal mixture compounded of paprika, tomato juice and rye.
“Now, if you people still want to do your chore tonight at the Troc,” Lindsey warned them, “you’ll cooperate with me in this. You’re not getting out of here until I’ve had this reconstructed to suit me.”
And as Detwiller commenced to say something, he cut him off with a curt: “If you try getting in touch with a mouthpiece, we’ll simply adjourn someplace else where he can’t find you right away.”
“You can’t do this to us!” Dusty fumed.
“No, but I’m doing it”
Billie looked at him hopefully. If he put them all through their paces like this together, instead of just concentrating on Frankie and grilling him alone, maybe it meant he wasn’t altogether convinced of her brother’s guilt yet. But then she glanced at the cuffs on his wrists and her hopes died again.
Lindsey had two other dicks working with him now, but they must have been third-graders. Mostly, she noticed, they just did the errands. Thatcher’s body had been taken down, of course, and removed to the morgue, after both he and the room had been photographed.
An ominous loop still remained in the heavy, insulated wiring where his neck had been. A stepladder against the wall showed how he had been disengaged without bringing the wire down from the ceiling, simply by expanding the loop a little and pulling his head through it. That loop, Billie recalled, had always been there, ever since they’d begun using the room — a long oval hanging down between two of the pipes, just clear of the tops of their heads, to take up slack in the wire. Otherwise the heavy hundred-watt bulb in which the cord ended on the other side of the pipe would have hung down too low toward the floor, been smashed a dozen times over in the course of their high-jinks.
“Let’s talk about this (contrivance a little,” Lindsey said drily, “before we start getting down to cases. Did a licensed electrician put up such a botched job for a light-extension?”
Several of them shook their heads. “I didn’t think so,” Lindsey concluded.
“Hoff, the janitor, rigged that up for us,” Dusty explained. “You see, there was no wiring for light at all in here when we rented this part of the basement. He tapped the nearest wire, which is outside in the passageway there, clamped on an outlet on the wall by it. Then he had to bore a hole up there over the top of the door to pass the wire through to us on this side. He got hold of a long length of wire, ran it through, put a plug on one end and a socket for a light-bulb on the other.
“To save himself the trouble of having to clamp it up against the ceiling, he just threaded it over the tops of those two pipes and let them do the work. But he’s a dope. When he got all through, the wire was long enough to lay the bulb on the floor, like an egg. So instead of taking his pliers and cutting it and taping it together again, he just took this big loop he had between the two pipes that supported it, taking up the slack and lifting the bulb about to where it should go. Then to make sure it would stay that way, he made a big knot in the wire just, on the outside of the last pipe, too thick to go through the slit between pipe and ceiling.”
“Clear enough,” Lindsey complimented him. “In other words that knot held it fast on the outside of the two pipes. But on the inside, toward the door and basement passage, it formed a perfect pulley arrangement. That loop could be drawn tight or relaxed at will by someone standing outside the door there, simply by pulling the plug out of the outlet — thereby plunging this room into darkness — taking a good grip on the wire, and pulling it taut out through that hole above the door. And if someone’s head happened to get caught in that loop as it contracted, and he couldn’t extricate it again quickly enough, it’d he just too bad. He’d probably corkscrew the loop as he thrashed around, until his neck broke. A perfect case of garrotting. That’s how it was done.”
“But he was held fast up there between the two pipes, as high as he could go, when I woke up and saw him,” Billie said. “How could he stay up there like that, unless the murderer kept pulling the cord taut out there in the passage, held onto it for hours? And there was no one out there when I—”
“No, he wouldn’t have to do that. He only had to hold it long enough to get a good thick knot bunched in it just past that bunghole over the door, to keep it from slipping through again with the weight of Thatcher’s body. You may have missed seeing that second knot, but I didn’t. It’s out there big as life right now.”
“Well then, that lets Frankie out, without going any further!” she said decisively. “Thatcher may not have been a heavyweight, but my brother hasn’t got enough strength in his arms to hold a cord tight so a man’s full weight is kept clear of the floor, and at the same time tie a knot into it.”
“That doesn’t let your brother or anyone else out,” Lindsey let her know firmly. “The pipes acted somewhat on the principle of pulleys, took a lot of the direct strain out of it. And another thing, marihuana like any other narcotic can lend a man abnormal strength temporarily. Overstimulation. We’ve got the method now. That points equally at any one of you, except you yourself, Miss Bligh. We’ve got the motive. And that points only at you, so far, Bligh. No one else had one. All we’ve got to learn now is who had the opportunity. Two out of three rings the bell as far as I’m concerned,” he concluded ominously.
He turned to Frankie. “Now, according to your own admission made to me before you supposedly knew it was a murder that was involved and not just suicide, you were the last one to leave here, except your sister and the dead man. I suppose you want to retract that now.” He didn’t wait to hear whether he did or not. “I don’t need your own testimony on that point. I can get it by elimination, from your fellow-bandsmen. Now tell me who was the first to get up and go out of here?”