“So,” I said dizzily, “am I. You checked all the others — Wolff, Dunning, Phillips, Galt, Kay?”
“I did. Results negative all around.”
“Then unless Leonard’s lying when he swears no one shinnied down out of that window, there must be still another way out of that room!”
“It looks like it,” Merlini said unhappily. “Either that or there are ghosts and Wolff collects the ten grand. That’s why I couldn’t tell them I had escaped by the window. The moment we checked Leonard’s prints and cleared him, his evidence that no one left by the window throws my vanishing explanation out of court and closes that room up again as tight as a coffin. I figured that Dudley might sleep better if he didn’t know that. And I need time to dope out another exit before I have to admit that the one I used doesn’t fill the bill.”
“You might have managed it,” I objected, “so that we didn’t have to spend the night camping out in the wild wet woods with pneumonia lurking behind every tree.”
“Concentrate on our problem then. Emulate the lamas of Tibet who sit naked in the icy snows of the Himalayas and warm themselves by the power of thought alone.”
“It won’t work. When I think of what may happen in that house, I get cold chills. I wish I knew where those guns are.”
“Oh,” Merlini said, “that reminds me. Take this. It might come in handy.”
He made a William S. Hart gesture, brought out a revolver in each hand, and gave one to me.
“At this rate,” I said, “it won’t be long before the Wolff gun room resembles Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.”
“I didn’t take these from the gun room. Yours is the one Mrs. Wolff had, the one you dropped out the window when Leonard grabbed you. I salvaged it in passing. And this other is Dudley’s. As soon as the house has settled down for the night, we’re going back in. I thought it might be safer to burglarize a house whose owner is unarmed, so I picked his pocket before we left.”
I released the barrel latch of Anne’s gun and broke it open. The six chambers all held dead soldiers. “I can’t bring down any ghosts with this,” I protested. “You would give me the unloaded one.”
“Mine’s going to be unloaded too,” he replied, ejecting the cartridges. “Then, if we’re apprehended, we won’t have to take the rap for anything more than second-degree burglary. It may save us as much as fifteen years apiece in Sing Sing. Unless, of course, they get you for life on account of prior convictions.”
“They will some day, if I continue to associate with you. What are we going to look for in the house beside another exit from the bedroom?”
“We’re going to investigate Bluebeard’s study.”
The lights in the house went out after a while, all but the one in Wolff’s room. After a half-hour’s cold, uncomfortable wait, during which I decided that burglary wasn’t my calling, Merlini said, “If we wait until he douses that light we may be here all night. In his state of mind he doesn’t like the dark. He may not even try to sleep. We’ll have to chance it.”
We had seen Leonard make the rounds several times at fifteen-minute intervals. We waited until just after he had finished a tour of inspection and then approached the house.
“Up the trellis again,” Merlini said. “I left the window unlatched. I’ll go first and put the hex on the evil eye. You follow along pronto. I don’t want to use the flash any more than necessary.”
Merlini went up and in without accident. I followed. When I reached the sill, he turned his light again on the depression in the window frame where the photoelectric cell kept its vigil. We proceeded from there without using the light at all.
If the dark hall beyond the bedroom had been black before, it was Stygian now. We felt our way slowly and cautiously toward the study door.
Merlini flicked the light on for a brief moment, keeping the lens covered with his fingers so that only a few dim rays came through. He examined the lock.
“This may take a while,” he whispered. “It’s a Yale-type pin tumbler.” He turned the torch off and gave it to me. “Find the chair Dunning used. Unscrew that ceiling light again so we’ll have time for a getaway if Wolff catches wise. But go easy with that light.”
“Okay, Butch, but woik fast. I got a noivous temperament.”
I put the ceiling light out of commission and then felt my way back along the wall to the door where Merlini was making small mouselike noises with his lockpick.
“Give me a spot of light,” he whispered. “Okay, that’s enough. One of these pins keeps slipping on me.”
I had seen him do this sort of thing often enough to have some idea of the technique employed. He had inserted a tension tool in the lower part of the keyway and was applying a turning pressure on the lock cylinder. Then, with a slender curved pick made from a hacksaw blade, he was probing delicately and patiently raising one pin after another in an attempt to get them all into line, an operation that the irregular edge of a key does in one motion. It was a ticklish business under any conditions. Attempted in total darkness in a house illegally entered, it was also nerve-racking. I began to understand why so many thieves become narcotic addicts.
After ten or a dozen of the longest minutes I’ve ever experienced, I finally heard the metallic click which meant that the lock cylinder had turned and the bolt moved over. Merlini gave a low whistle of relief. Simultaneously, from somewhere belowstairs, came the furtive, cautious tread of footsteps!
I felt Merlini’s hand grip my arm. We stood for a long moment, motionless and silent. Then the sounds died away. I started to speak, but Merlini’s hand tightened on my arm and we waited again, endlessly. At last his whisper, so close beside my ear that I felt his breath, said, “Flash, please.”
I pushed it toward him.
“Stand pat,” he added. “If anything happens jump for the bedroom.”
He moved off toward the stairs. And I waited for another eternity in a dark void that was as lonesome as the outer reaches of interstellar space. Almost anyone, even the ghost who had appeared and vanished earlier along this same hallway, would have been welcome company.
I had just decided, impatiently, to end the interminable waiting and go in search of Merlini when I heard the sound of footsteps again.
They came, this time, from the back stairs at the hall’s far end beyond the main staircase. Then, in the arched opening of the door at their top, I saw the moving flicker of a flashlight. Its gleam gave me a momentary glimpse of Merlini’s dark figure standing motionless at the head of the main stairs. His return was impossible. He had no time. I saw him dodge quickly, down into the shadows toward the front hall.
I took a half-step toward Mrs. Wolff’s room, then stopped. That was useless. If I tried to take a powder out the window, the alarm would set the whole house on its ear. Merlini had the flashlight!
My indecision held me too long. Now even my chance of reaching the bedroom had vanished. The man on the stairs was too near. In another second his head would clear the top step, his light would find me—
I flattened instinctively back against the door, felt it move inward, and, almost without thinking, stepped backward into the study. I groped for the doorknob, twisted it so that the bolt would make no noise, and pushed the door gently home. Wolff’s orders being what they were I was safer from discovery here than in the bedroom.