I stopped. My jaw must have dropped a foot. The one thing in the world I least expected happened. Merlini made a sudden wild dash for the kitchen door, pushed it open, and disappeared!
Flint and Lovejoy stared too for a split second, then jumped after him. Flint had his gun out by the time he reached the door. Outside, another door slammed.
Then Flint’s voice came back. “Put your hands up!”
When I got to the doorway I saw Merlini in the small dark hallway outside rattling the knob of a door that opened into the main hall. Flint’s gun centered on him, but he paid no attention to it.
“Eavesdropper,” he said. “Man I think. He jumped through here and turned the key in the lock.”
Flint hesitated. Then he tried the door.
“Go around through the dining-room,” Merlini suggested. “And point that gun in some other direction. Ross wasn’t talking about me. Hurry!”
But the lieutenant was still skeptical. “Watch him.” he told Lovejoy as he turned, pushed past me into the kitchen, and disappeared through another door.
I followed him through the butler’s pantry, the dining room, and into the hall. Mrs. Wolff, Doctor Haggard, Galt, and Tucker were still in the living-room, but the others had scattered.
The fingerprint expert bent above a paper on which he had neatly arranged the fragments of the flower vase.
“Tucker,” Flint growled. “Get those others back in here. And keep ’em here. Harte, you wait in the library.”
He came in a few moments later with Merlini and the sergeant.
“All right,” he said brusquely, “out with it. Who have we been overlooking? And why?”
The lieutenant’s mood was far from being as receptive as I could have wished. But there was no help for that now. I crossed my fingers, hoped that I’d get the support I needed from Merlini, and let fly.
“We’ve been overlooking the most likely suspect because all along she’s been altogether too obvious.”
“She?”
“Yes. Mrs. Wolff.”
Chapter Eighteen:
Four Questions
I kept my eyes on Merlini as I spoke, curious to know what his reaction would be. It was a complete waste of time. A comment on the possible state of tomorrow’s weather would have brought better results. His face wore the same faintly surprised but thoroughly enigmatic look that it always does when he breaks an egg into the hat you’ve just loaned him and then shakes out an omelette or a couple of ducks.
Flint’s reaction was more pronounced. “Too obvious, hell! For one thing that dry ice wouldn’t have been put in the car very long before Smith made his break. She’s just about the only person who couldn’t have planted it. Haggard had her dosed with Luminal. He had a devil of a time waking her when we went in to question—”
“That’s what you think,” I said. “And I wonder if we couldn’t have the objections after you hear the story? Or would you rather read it in the papers?”
“Okay. Go ahead, but it’s going to have to improve as you go along.”
I gave it to him fast. “Item one: Mrs. Wolff used to be a medium. That’s how Wolff met her. That’s how she knew someone like Smith. Item two: Dudley Wolff was a dictator who had an uncomfortable habit of ordering people around. Mrs. Wolff, who is far too good-looking and too much Dudley’s junior to have married him for anything but his money, caught herself a millionaire and then discovered it wasn’t nearly as much fun as she thought. She wanted to cut loose, but she knew if she tried it by any of the usual means, the resultant and characteristic Dudley Wolff explosion would leave her without a nickel. Item three: The weak spots in Wolff’s armor plate were his abnormal fear of death and his necessity just now for avoiding any adverse publicity. With Smith’s aid she struck at both and put on the burial-alive act that had Dudley believing he’d killed a man. She supplied Smith with the negatives he flashed in front of Wolff, and the phony FBI identification was red herring so Dudley wouldn’t suspect their source. That was—”
“Just a minute,” Flint cut in. “Smith is Zareh Bey?”
“Sure. The Morro Castle death list doesn’t mean a thing. Anybody that turned up missing went on it automatically. Zareh Bey escaped, didn’t deny the report, and changed his name. I don’t know why. He may have been in a jam. Perhaps there were bill collectors on his tail. He hadn’t paid his income tax. There could be all sorts of reasons. The important thing is that he and Mrs. Wolff got together again and went to work on Wolff. And, somewhere along the line she decided that an accomplice can’t ever be fully trusted not to spill the beans. Maybe she knew that Smith was that kind of a guy, that as long as he lived the blackmail might boomerang. So she double-crossed him right at the start.
“She was either supposed to dig him up herself, or she pretended to arrange to have it done. Instead, she left him there. But Smith’s good luck when Scotty got curious and dug into the grave was her bad luck. Her attempted murder backfired with a loud and sickening thud. Smith knew what had happened, and was, understandably, good and mad. He ducked out at first, figuring that as soon as Scotty reported his find and Wolff examined the grave, the game would be up. But nothing happened. Wolff went off to Miami together with his wife. There was no explosion. Scotty had been scared and unwilling to admit poking his nose into something not his business.
“So Smith got busy. He began by scaring Scotty off completely to insure his silence. Then he enticed the Wolffs back with the poltergeist phenomena that he knew Dudley couldn’t resist investigating. When they arrived yesterday morning, he gave them both a lovely sock between the eyes by showing himself at the head of the stairs. He was a professional showman and he staged it nicely — a gradually accelerating build-up and then a smash first-act curtain.
“Dudley was jarred good and proper. He believed in ghosts and he thought he was seeing one of the man he had killed. The shock Mrs. Wolff got was even worse. She fainted, you remember. She knew it was no ghost. She knew that Smith had somehow managed to escape his grave and return in the flesh with blood in his eye. He vanished that first time by scooting through her bedroom, out the window, and down the trellis, outwitting the burglar alarm with the Merlini patented flashlight method.
“Then, sometime yesterday, he contacted Mrs. Wolff secretly, told her that he was going ahead with the blackmail scheme as originally planned except for one thing — from now on she’d take her orders from him. He could crack the whip because all he had to do if she didn’t behave was step out of his ghost role and give Wolff an earful.
“It’s a lovely situation. Neither of the two conspirators trust each other for a split second. They both realize that the other is quite capable of applying a double cross at the first chance. But they have to stick together or get stuck separately. Smith, however, is just a little too confident that he has Mrs. Wolff securely under his thumb. He doesn’t see that his neck is sticking out farther than a giraffe’s. He doesn’t realize that a man who is already thought to be dead and buried, killed by someone else, is a made-to-order murder victim! But Mrs. Wolff did.”
Flint was sitting up now and taking notice, Merlini’s poker face was still operating with its accustomed efficiency, but he didn’t look bored. Sergeant Lovejoy’s eyes were round.
“She played along with him for the moment,” I went on. “She clicked Galt’s camera shutter pre-exposing the film, put his flashlight and the photoflood bulb in the upper hall out of commission, and let Smith, when he came in through her window, into the study with the key she’d taken from Wolff’s key ring. He waited there for his cue to appear for the spirit photo that was to clinch his ghostly status in Wolff’s mind. And then, just when he appeared, there was a hitch. Mrs. Wolff discovered that Leonard was wandering around just below her window. Smith’s usual vanishing technique wouldn’t work. When he streaked back along the hall, she met him at her door, whispered, ‘Nix. Leonard’s outside.’ And there was only one place for him to go — the study. He vanished from the bedroom by the simple device of never going into it!”