“The ghost?” Merlini looked at me as though I were one.
“Yes. And for a frail, half-transparent, ectoplasmic wraith, he packs a hefty wallop.”
“Now look,” Flint growled in an I’ve-had-enough-of-this-nonsense tone of voice, “start at the beginning and give me one thing at a time. And without ghosts.”
“All right. I don’t think it’s a spook anyway. It’s a homicidal maniac. Merlini and I—” I stopped short and threw Merlini a quick questioning glance. I didn’t know how much he had told Flint about our burglarous entry into the house.
He saw my difficulty. “I’ve confessed all, Ross,” he said. “You do the same.”
That was a lot easier said than done. But I let Flint have it, the whole story, from the moment I backed in through the study door until Merlini and the sergeant had fished me out of the water. Flint refrained from interrupting, but I could see his questions accumulating by the dozen as I talked. When I had finished, he looked at Merlini.
“Well, you wanted to hear his story. You’ve heard it. Are you still insisting that he’s in the clear?”
“Afraid so,” Merlini said. “You see I’ve known him long enough to know that if he were the murderer, he’d have cooked up a better yarn than that one.
I growled. “That is certainly a lulu of a left-handed character reference!”
Flint said, “He is going to have to cook up a better yarn than that one.”
“Hadn’t you better check this one first?” Merlini asked. “It shouldn’t be hard. Mrs. Wolff’s evidence ought to tell us—”
I jumped. “Did you say Mrs. Wolff? Do you mean that she’s alive — that she wasn’t—”
“Yeah,” Flint said. “And maybe you’d like to make some changes in that movie scenario of yours before she blows it apart?”
I ignored him. “Merlini, tell me—”
“Anne Wolff wasn’t shot,” he explained. “She fainted. We brought her around, but the lieutenant hasn’t questioned her yet. Doctor Haggard says she’s suffering from nervous exhaustion.”
“Both bullets in Wolff?”
“Yes. One got him in the chest, the other, apparently fired after he fell, in the back. The angle of the shots indicates that the murderer was standing between him and the window. A third bullet hole in the wall above and to the left of the fireplace was apparently fired from near the door.”
“A third? But there were only two shots.”
“I know. I only heard two myself. But there was a bullet in the wall just the same. Twenty-five caliber like the ones in Wolff.”
“Now that,” I said, “is interesting. And has the lieutenant here noticed that the gun his man Friday found on me was a .38?”
“And so what?” Flint wanted to know. “Maybe you’re a two-gun man. I’ve got another version of what happened in that study. And no ghosts. You tell me what’s wrong with it. Nobody dumped you out the window. There wasn’t anybody there to do it. You were still there when Mrs. Wolff came in. And you were there when her husband arrived. Wolff had told you to stay out of the house more than once. Now, in the middle of the night, he finds you back again, in a room he’d ordered everyone to stay out of. And with his wife. That would make anybody boil over. And Dudley Wolff — well, if I tried real hard, maybe I could imagine how he’d act. We gave him a summons for double parking once and it’s a wonder the station is still standing.
“He socked you. That accounts for the bump on your head. And then you saw some red yourself and let him have it. You had plenty of reason for wanting him out of the way. You head for the door, intending to take it on the lam through the bedroom across the hall and down the trellis. But you didn’t make it. Someone in the hall outside began pounding on the study door. You were trapped. You knew that if you were found in that room you were sunk.”
I looked at Merlini. “Is he making this up as he goes along, or did he read it in Astounding Detective Tales?”
But Flint wasn’t finished. “You also realized that if you could pull a little high-class vanishing act of your own, it would leave Mrs. Wolff in a lovely jam. I think you figured that diving out a second-story window on a cold February night into ice-cold water was so much like a Grade B movie serial no one would believe it. You tossed out the andiron and light cord to make the story you’ve just told look good, and then did your high dive.” He paused briefly. “But you made one bad mistake. Maybe you know now what it was?”
I shook my head. “No. I wouldn’t even try to guess. What?”
“You forgot to leave the gun you shot Wolff with in Mrs. Wolff’s hand. As soon as it’s low tide and I fish it up off the bottom—”
“Wow!” I cried, sitting up. “Came the dawn! So that’s it! That’s why you detour all the way around Robin Hood’s barn and take a running jump at me! That’s why Anne gets a clean bill of health. There wasn’t any gun in the room!”
“Right,” Flint nodded. “No gun — and no ghost!”
I turned to Merlini. “Twenty-five caliber. Sounds like the mysteriously missing vest-pocket gun.”
“Yes,” he said. “It does.”
“But a gun as small as that one—”
Flint shook his head. “What do you think I’ve been doing all this time? We took that room apart. If there was a rod there ten times as small we’d have found it.”
Merlini underscored that. “They did a very thorough job, Ross. I watched it. They found a few things that may or may not be clues. One of the two study keys was on a ring in Wolff’s pocket, the other was lying on the floor behind the desk. The cord of the desk phone appears to have been cut at some time or other and later repaired in a makeshift way. There were some small broken pieces of glass on the floor near the door which, fitted together, form a glass disc an inch and a half in diameter. There were four thumbtack holes on the top of the bookcases just to the left of the door. And, on the floor near Wolff, there were three un-fired .25 caliber cartridges and two empty shells that will probably match the bullets in the body. But there was no sign of any gun.”
“Mrs. Wolff? They searched her just as thoroughly?”
Merlini grinned and nodded. “He did. He could hardly wait to put the handcuffs on her. All he needed was the gun. When he didn’t find it, he naturally started wondering about you.”
“But,” I insisted again, “such a small gun—”
The lieutenant glared at me. “I had two men with her every damn minute until I could get a woman in to frisk her. We don’t have any lady cops. I got a female doctor. She put Mrs. Wolff to bed, and I had a look at the nightdress and robe she’d been wearing. She couldn’t have smuggled a pin out of that study. And nobody else could have copped it because nobody except my men ever got a foot inside that door. The gun left that room the same way you did — out the window. And, if you try to tell me now that Mrs. Wolff must have tossed it out, you’ll have to explain why you just said that the window was closed and that no one came near it from the time you heard the shots until I put my head out. That was a mistake too, wasn’t it?”
I groaned. “The guy who cracked that honesty is the best policy was a dope. My story happens to be the truth even if I am stuck with it. I still insist that nothing or nobody came out that window. If the gun’s not in the room now, then it must have left the same way my murderous friend with the beard did — by the door.”
The looks on both Merlini’s and Flint’s faces said very plainly that I’d gone and put my foot in it again.
“Okay, Merlini,” Flint said. “You tell him.”
Merlini took a cigarette from a package and scowled at it. I knew, since he didn’t take the trouble to produce it from thin air already lighted, that he was worried. Then he did as Flint suggested. He told me. It was plenty.