“Sure, you can see him,” Flint said. “But it won’t help you any. He’s dead.”
It took Scotty a minute or so to absorb this. Flint didn’t help him any by adding, “He was murdered. Now stop stalling and talk. When did you see this — this ghost?”
Scotty’s mind was still trying to grasp the meaning in Flint’s words. His response was the automatic one of a sleepwalker. “Wednesday,” he said mechanically. “Wednesday night.”
From there on he bogged down after every few words. Flint, pumping the story out of him piece by piece, found, eventually, that the man had not only seen a ghost; it had chased him!
“I didna argue aboot it,” Scotty said. “I went awa’ at once.”
This was an understatement. More questioning disclosed that his departure had been so complete that he hadn’t stopped to look back once this side of Rye.
“Ma father,” he explained with a sudden rush of words and a thickening of his burr, “was once a caretaker of a haunted castle near Inverness. They found him floatin’ in the moat ae mornin’ wi’ his neck broke.”
Flint didn’t fancy the introduction of any additional spooks. “Yeah,” he growled skeptically, “I’ll bet the spirits that chased him came out of a bottle, too.”
“Na!” the Scotsman protested. “Tha’s just the trouble. I hae na hae a drap since Sonday. When a mon is cold sober and sees a dead mon comin’ after him—”
“Dead man?” Flint cut in. “Why are you so sure he was dead? You’d seen him before then? You knew him?”
Scotty’s protest was frantic. “Na. Na! I never saw him before at a’. And I dinna want to see him again. I want to get awa’ from here.” He half turned as if to leave, but one of his guards clamped a hand on his arm.
Flint stepped forward. His face was inches from Scotty’s. “If you didn’t know who he was, if you never saw him before, what made you so sure he was dead? You must have had some reason for thinking—”
Scotty may have been scared, but he still had his wits about him. He saw an out there and took it quickly. “A’richt, then he wasna dead. I made a mistake.”
Flint glared at him for a moment. “You’re making another now.” He glanced at his watch. “How long have you been snooping around outside this place?”
“I got here just now.” Scotty jerked a thumb at the detective on his left. “I went straight tae the boathouse and then this mon—”
“Five o’clock in the morning,” Flint cut in. “That’s a damned funny time of day for a man that’s scared of something he’s not even sure is a ghost.”
“Ma new job starts at nine. I ha tae get back to Stamford. If I don’t—”
Flint turned disgustedly to Lovejoy. “Get him out of here and make him talk. I don’t care how, but do it. Find out where he’s been every minute of the time he’s been gone and start checking back. And send Haggard up here.
Lovejoy, with Scotty and his escorts, left. When the door had closed behind them, Merlini said, “The plot thickens. His yarn sounds thin. One gets you ten that there is more in his ghost story than meets the eye.”
Flint’s expression was on the sour side. “Or,” he said glumly, “a lot less.”
Merlini began counting on his fingers. “Wolff, Mrs. Wolff, Kathryn, Dunning, Phillips, Ross, and myself—” Merlini’s left thumb unexpectedly came off in his right hand. He regarded it with surprise but no alarm, then calmly replaced it, waggled it experimentally once or twice, and went on, “—and myself have all, at one time or another, seen the apparition in the presence of corroborating witnesses. Scotty, though uncorroborated, says he saw it. Leonard has a bump on his head to show that he felt it. Galt has a portrait study. You surely aren’t going to deny there’s no fire behind a dense and billowing cloud of smoke like that, are you?”
“No,” Flint said grudgingly, “maybe not. But it doesn’t have to be hell-fire. That photo’s a fake. Any kid with a box camera and a back number of the Photographer’s Home Companion could cook it up. The broken chinaware, the spilled ink, the pictures falling off the walls, the mess in the library, the torn book illustration and the dagger — they don’t mean a thing. Nobody saw ’em happen. Anybody could have done ’em. The great vanishing act in Mrs. Wolff’s bedroom is just a matter of a flashlight on the burglar alarm and taking it on the lam down the trellis. You’ve proved that yourself.”
“And Leonard?” Merlini asked, lifting one eyebrow. “Then he’s lying when he says that no one, not even a ghost, left by that window?”
“Either that or he’s it himself.”
A playing card appeared mysteriously in Merlini’s fingers. He tried and succeeded in balancing his whisky glass on its edge. “You dismiss Leonard far too offhandedly. If he’s lying, he’s covering someone. Why should he do that for whoever bopped him on the head earlier? Or, it his injury was self-inflicted, if he is the ghost, and he fits the description none too well, then how did he shuck the dark overcoat, whiskers, necessary make-up et cetera so quickly? Is he a lightning-change artist? And what did he do with the disguise? An overcoat’s not an easy article to hide, not in the few seconds he had. It’s not in the shrubbery down below that window. I looked when I did my climb down the trellis. Leonard is definitely a problem.”
“Yes,” Flint agreed. “The answers he gives about his past are altogether too damned hazy and he strikes me as being smarter than a chauffeur should be. I’ll know more when I finish checking back on him. I’ve got a hunch the answers may be interesting.”
“Speaking of interesting answers,” Merlini said, “were you able to reach Wolff’s lawyers and find out about his will?”
Flint nodded, “Kathryn Wolff and Mrs. Wolff each get half. Doctor Haggard and Galt each get twenty-five grand for research. Dunning gets five thousand; Phillips and Douglass, two apiece.”
“And Leonard?”
Flint shook his head. “He doesn’t even get an honorable mention.”
Merlini stopped juggling his drink and drank it. “If he’s the ghost, his motive seems a bit obscure.” Merlini scaled the playing card he held to the floor near Flint’s feet. He snapped his fingers. The card jumped up and flew back into his hand. “One item was missing from the poltergeist phenomena you just listed as proving nothing, Lieutenant. What about the flower vase that up and smashed itself on the floor while Miss Wolff and Phillips were watching it? You heard about that, didn’t you?”
“Thread,” Flint answered at once. “Same like you used on that card just now.”
Merlini held out the card and his hands for inspection. “Take a look. Miss Wolff thought of that too. And she looked. She didn’t find any either. What’s more, the windows were all tightly closed, and Kay had just entered by one door, Phillips by the other. If there were threads, coming in through keyholes or such, they’d have snagged them. No, I don’t think it was thread.”
“Okay,” Flint growled, “but will you stop trying to prove it was an invisible man?”
“But if he’s not invisible,” I asked, not trying to provoke Flint, but merely wanting an answer, “how the hell did he get out of that study?”
I spoke out of turn. Flint had an answer — one that I liked even less. “Your word,” he snapped, “is all I’ve got that says he was ever in the study. And when Haggard—” He stopped abruptly and started toward the door. “I wonder where the devil—”
The door opened just as he reached it. Lovejoy and the doctor were there. The latter puffed nervously at a cigarette.
“You wanted to see me?” he asked.
“Yes. Come in. Lovejoy, get Tucker. I want him too.”
Haggard stepped in and waited.