“I see. And then, after committing the perfect crime, I call your attention to the cigarette and prove that what I’d tried so hard to make look like accident was murder. That seems a bit odd.”
Flint shook his head. “I thought you’d give me that. You’re a magician. You couldn’t resist the temptation to let everyone know that the accident was a perfect, undetectable crime — a clever trick. That was why we had to listen to that damned smug lecture of yours in which you said the criminal was a genius. You were tossing bouquets at yourself. You thought it was more misdirection. You figured that if you blew the gaff on the accident, I’d never suspect you could be the murderer. But you laid it on too thick. That’s partly why you gave me the burial-alive story too, that and the fact that you had to dish up something to explain the missing body and all the evidence that indicated that Smith was still alive.
“And what’s more, if you really had phoned Miss Wolff just now, if she and not yourself were the murderer, she’d have been here by now. What made you think that she’d—
Flint stopped as suddenly as if someone had clapped a hand over his mouth. His head jerked around. The knob on the study door was turning.
Merlini’s tense whisper said, “The phone call did work after all! Make sure you get the person who comes—”
The door pushed open. Flint watched but the gun in his hand still covered Merlini. Then his jaw dropped.
Lovejoy was the one who acted. He lunged forward, grabbed the wrist of the person who stood in the doorway, and twisted it savagely.
The blue-steel automatic in Kay’s hand fell to the floor.
Chapter Twenty:
The Last Solution
I turned to Merlini. “You and your sleight of hand,” I roared. “Now look what you’ve done!” I started toward Kay. “Why did you come to this room just now? Why—”
Flint grabbed my arm. He roared even louder. “You pipe down! I’ll do the questioning. Well, Miss Wolff?”
She nodded at the window which Leonard had left partly open and which no one had thought to close. “My room is the next one over. I heard voices in here, Merlini’s and yours. I thought I heard Merlini accusing me—” She looked at him with round eyes, still not quite believing it.
“I apologize, Kay,” Merlini said quickly. “I’m sorry. Don’t believe everything you hear. Is that gun of yours loaded?”
She shook her head. “No. I took it from the gun room as I came upstairs. When the police arrest the wrong person and then go away leaving us with a murderer — well, I felt safer—”
Lovejoy, who had picked the gun up and examined it, said, “She’s right. It’s empty.”
“And that,” Merlini said, “lets her out, Lieutenant. The murderer wouldn’t arrive bent on killing Smith with an unloaded gun.”
“She wouldn’t have come here to meet Smith anyway,” I put in. “She knew he was dead. I told her.”
Flint turned to Merlini. “You’re not still trying to make me believe that you called anyone on that phone?”
“I am. I did call someone. But not Miss Wolff. The case against her won’t stand a good close look. Ross did not see her go out the window. I was only talking fast, trying to keep you quiet until the person I did phone should arrive. But now, with this door wide open and our voices broadcasting the fact that we’re here, the trap is a washout. And I am, apparently, going to have to do some even faster talking to get out from under the case you’ve built up against me.”
He stopped. His head jerked around toward the door.
The burglar alarm was ringing once again and from outside the house, as it had once before that morning, came the quick starting roar of a car.
“Lieutenant,” Merlini said, “there goes your murderer.”
For a moment Flint hung fire. Then, as the pistol shots cracked out, he roared, “Lovejoy! No one leaves this room. Watch them!” And he was gone.
Merlini looked at Lovejoy. “You’d better get out an alarm, Sergeant. And quickly. Flint is going to have trouble. The police cars are all parked down the drive. By the time he reaches one—”
The sergeant made a startled grab for the phone.
I looked at Merlini. “Your sleight of hand slipped a bit, didn’t it?”
“It wobbled some,” he admitted. “But the trap did work. The murderer heard our voices just now when Kay came in. Having had no news of Smith’s death, having seen the fingerprint on the flower vase indicate that he had returned, and having received my phone call, it looked as though Smith were here and that we had got him — alive, kicking, and ready to talk. It looked as if there was nothing to do but get out fast.”
Kay said, “Merlini, who are you talking about? If someone doesn’t tell me something soon, I’ll—”
Merlini looked at me. “Ross, you tell her.”
“Tell her what? Haggard, Galt, Dunning, Phillips, Scotty — if you can show me how a single one of them could possibly have been in this room when Wolff was shot—”
Sergeant Lovejoy’s voice, angry and baffled, roared at us across the phone. “Dammit, do you know who took it on the lam in that car or don’t you? I don’t know who to tell them to stop!”
“You should,” Merlini answered. “Ross told you some time ago. Mrs. Wolff.”
Lovejoy stared at him uncertainly. “If this is more of your sleight of hand—”
“No, Sergeant. Cross my heart and hope to die. That’s the last solution. There are no more.”
“It was the first one too,” I growled. “And you had to pretend it was wrong so you could step into the spotlight and finish things off with a lot of pretty fireworks. It seems to me that just for once you might let someone else—”
“But, Ross,” he objected. “I didn’t say you were wrong. I merely asked you some questions. Luckily you didn’t have the answers, lost confidence, and began to doubt—”
“Luckily?”
“Yes. If I had agreed with you, if we had convinced the lieutenant and he had made an arrest, then he could never have made it stick. He wouldn’t have had enough concrete evidence to put in his eye, or in the district attorney’s. And he would have discovered that even the nicely built castle of deductive reasoning he did have was built on sand.”
“But if she is the only possible person who could have been in this study when Wolff was shot—”
“That’s the trouble. From Flint’s point of view she isn’t. The whole train of reasoning that proves she must have shot Wolff is based directly on your testimony that no one had left by and no gun had been thrown from the window, and on my testimony that no one had left by the door. Accept those statements as fact and the only solution to the problem of the vanishing gun must be just what you said — that she swallowed it. But neither of us had the least bit of corroboration. When the attorney for the defense got through pointing out that I get my living by deception, that you had a motive as big as all outdoors, and that we were both guilty of burglarous entry the jury would begin having reasonable doubts by the dozen.
“The moment our statements are doubted the whole locked-room situation collapses. Mrs. Wolff is not the only possible suspect. There’s a case against you — you shot him and dropped out the window; there’s a case against Kay — she shot him and did the same; there’s a case against me, the best of the lot — I shot him and left by the door. I knew that in order to escape that predicament we’d have to turn up some evidence against Mrs. Wolff that a jury could really get its teeth into. And then, before there was a chance, you turned my hair gray by popping out with the correct answer way too soon.”
“And so you popped your trick questions,” I said unhappily. “Flint is right. Never trust a magician. That question about the flower vase had nothing to do with the case at all. You’re the colored man in that woodpile. You added that bit of embroidery in order to convince Mrs. Wolff that Smith was back again. And then you insisted I had no case until I had explained it. Was that fair?”