I saw Sergeant Lovejoy whispering in the lieutenant’s ear and nodding in ray direction. I knew what that meant.
“Time,” I said, “is something I’m not going to have nearly enough of. Are you still betting that there’ll be evidences of poison?”
Merlini hesitated. Flint’s voice came across the room. “Ross Harte. Come here!”
“Quick,” I said. “I’ve got to know.” Merlini shook his head. “I’m afraid that the medical examiner won’t find a single solitary trace.”
“Then you think it was accident after all?”
Flint’s voice came again. “Lovejoy, go get him!” The order was superfluous. The sergeant, apparently fearing that I might vanish again, was already bearing down upon me with decks cleared for action. “What,” Merlini asked, “have you done now?”
“I opened my mouth and put my foot in it.”
“Good,” he said. “Keep it there until I get one or two things attended to.” He turned and ducked quickly out through the door.
“Hey,” I said, “wait! I’m the one who needs rear-guard support.” But he was gone and Lovejoy had me by the arm.
“The lieutenant was speaking to you,” he growled.
“Yes. I heard him, but he didn’t say please.”
Lovejoy didn’t seem to know the word either. “Come on,” he said. “Pick up your feet.”
“Take him in the library, Sergeant,” Flint ordered. “And Ryan, you get Merlini. I want him in there too.” Lovejoy took me in, closed the door firmly, and proceeded to watch me as though I were the crown jewels. In the few minutes’ grace I had before Flint arrived I tried to think of some delaying action. I knew that Lovejoy had reported hearing me say that I knew who the murderer was, but I wasn’t as eager to confide in the lieutenant as I had been before that flower vase had dropped a nice fresh puzzle in my lap. Somehow I was going to have to stall him off, at least until Merlini appeared. I tried throwing a fast one in under his guard before he could open fire.
“Is this,” I asked, as soon as he came in, “where I get fitted for the handcuffs?”
“It might be,” he said flatly. “Are you confessing?”
“No, not yet. I’ve just turned up an alibi.”
“For what?”
“That flower vase out there. I was miles from it when it fell. You were a lot nearer yourself. You can’t hang that on me.”
“Don’t be too sure. Lovejoy says he heard you saying you know who the murderer is. Stop stalling and let’s have it.”
I shook my head. “I’ve changed my mind. I spoke hastily. I don’t know who the murderer is.”
The look Flint gave me was frostbitten. Without turning his head, he said, “Okay, Sergeant, take him in. He’s turned up something, or thinks he has. But if he thinks he’s going to save it for an exclusive press release, he’s got another think coming.”
Lovejoy moved toward me just as Ryan opened the door and stepped in. He had a worried look on his face, and he was alone.
Flint sounded a bit worried too. “Where’s Merlini? If you tell me he’s disappeared—”
Ryan shook his head. “No. He’s out in the kitchen. He says he wants you to come out there. I thought I’d better humor him.”
“You what?”
“Well, you see, he’s lighting cigarettes and throwing them all over the room. I think he’s gone nuts. I think you’d better come—”
Flint swore and started out. Lovejoy asked, “What do I book Harte on?”
“Withholding material evidence. No, wait. Bring him out here first. You may have to take them both in.”
Ryan’s description of what was happening in the kitchen was not exaggerated. Phillips stood just inside the door frowning uneasily as he watched Merlini light a fresh cigarette, take a few quick puffs on it, and then throw it with considerable force against the side of the refrigerator. It bounced off and rolled across the linoleum trailing sparks.
“But why so much, Phillips?” Merlini said as he stopped, picked the cigarette up, looked at it closely, and added it to a neatly aligned row of several others that lay in a dish on the table.
“Mr. Wolff was exceptionally fond of it, sir,” Phillips replied. “He ate it several times a day. Large portions.”
Merlini scratched a match and was applying it to still another cigarette when Flint asked, “What did Wolff eat so much of, and what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Merlini looked around. “Oh hello.” He held the new cigarette out in front of him, opened his fingers, and let it fall to the floor. He picked it up and did it again. Phillips looked as though he were glad to see us. I didn’t blame him.
Then Merlini answered both of Flint’s questions at once. “Dudley Wolff was an ice-cream addict. And I’m gathering experimental data for a learned dissertation on the inflammable characteristics of cigarette tobacco. You’ll be interested.”
“So far I’m not,” Flint objected. “What are you getting at?”
Merlini looked at the butler. “Thank you, Phillips. That will be all.” He waited until Phillips had gone out. Then he said, “My researches tend to indicate that your medical examiner is going to be considerably annoyed when all his laborious toxicological tests turn up an answer of zero.” He added the cigarette he held to those in the dish.
Flint was annoyed too. “Then you admit now that the smash was an accident?”
“I didn’t say that. I said that he wasn’t poisoned.”
“But you admitted there wasn’t anything wrong with that car. You even had the heater pulled apart. You didn’t find a damned thing. It has to be one or the other.”
“It is. And we did find something. The cigarette stub on the car floor.”
“All right. So what?” Flint took an envelope from his pocket, lilted the flap, and carefully rolled a cigarette out onto the porcelain table top. It was two thirds the length of a fresh one and there was a black tip of burned carbon at its end.
“Don’t you see anything queer about it?” Merlini asked.
Flint scowled at it. “It’s the brand Leonard uses, and it’s probably the one Dunning was smoking when he was knocked out. It fell to the car floor. But I don’t see—”
Merlini turned to me. “Ross?”
I looked at the cigarettes he had been experimenting with in the dish. There were seven of varying lengths. Smoke still curled upward from six of them. Except for that, they seemed no different from the one Flint had produced.
“I give up,” I said. “The floor’s yours.” Then, half afraid that he might go mysterious on us and hold out whatever it was that he had, I decided to jar it loose. “And stop acting like a quiz program. We’re rushed. The lieutenant’s waiting to hear me blow this case apart.”
“He’s waiting to hear what?”
“The solution. I’ve got it wrapped up, or I will have as soon as you prove Smith was murdered. If you can do that—”
“You know who shot Wolff?”
“Yes.”
“And how Smith vanished without benefit of trap doors?”
“That too.”
Merlini gave me a long penetrating look. “Congratulations,” he said, not sounding at all as if he meant it. “That’s fine. But you don’t know what’s wrong with this cigarette?”
“No. You can contribute that. Give.”
My confidence seemed to upset him a bit. He hesitated a moment, then said, “All right.”
He bent above the cigarette as though about to demonstrate some subtle and sensational point. Flint and I leaned over too. And Merlini crossed us up with one of his Bernard Shaw prefaces.
“Some critics of murder,” he said, “mistakenly suppose that undetectability is the sole criterion of the perfect crime. They give the highest award to the simple bash on the head of the first passer-by in the nearest dark alley. But many an unimaginative criminal moron has accomplished murder of that sort and successfully evaded detection. Far from being the perfect crime, it is a primitive, uncivilized, utterly inartistic procedure. The real connoisseur of murder demands artistry and imagination.”