“It was necessary. I had to give you something to worry about until I could set and bait my trap. But it wasn’t so unfair. Flint gave you the answer before the pay-off, you know. And, for good measure, I gave you one of the other answers as well. When I threw Kay to the wolves I told you that you had made a mistake in assuming that Smith shoved you out the window. I told you that the murderer did it, thinking that she was getting rid of Smith’s body.
“But I couldn’t very well explain when the trap gun was fired or where Smith went to after leaving the study. I was trying to cook up a case against Kay, and both those answers point directly at Mrs. Wolff.”
“I give up,” I said. “When was the trap gun fired?”
“You give up too easily. You heard it fired. We all did.”
Kay objected. “But, Merlini, the only shots we heard were the ones Anne fired in her bedroom.”
Merlini nodded. “And how many did you hear?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t count them. There were a lot.”
I tried to remember. “We heard two shots, then three, and she opened her door and backed out into the hall still blazing away. She fired twice more. I’ll be damned!”
“Seven shots,” Merlini said. “Yet her gun held six and there were only six bullet holes in the walls of her bedroom. I’m afraid I didn’t realize that until a bit late myself, not until Lovejoy found the trap gun and we knew it had been fired. When I tried to figure out when that could have happened, I began counting shots and bullet holes. Then, a moment later the medical examiner phoned and reported a powder burn on Smith’s face. That tore it. It he was the one who had gone into the study and tripped the trap gun, Mrs. Wolff couldn’t have been shooting at him in the bedroom as she said. She was shooting at nothing and her barrage not only misdirected our attention from the study, as you said, but also covered the sound of the trap gun as well.”
“But,” Kay objected, “I don’t see why Smith went into the study at all. That was a dead end. Why didn’t he go through Anne’s room and out the window?”
“That’s what he intended to do,” I said. “But she sidetracked him into the study where the trap gun was. When he ducked after posing for the picture, she met him at her door, whispered that Leonard was outside and—”
“Wait, Ross,” Merlini said, shaking his head. “Flint didn’t like that whispering. Neither do I. There’s a much simpler method. All she had to do was lock her door. Smith does the only thing he can do — he jumps for the study. As soon as she hears the report of the trap gun she blazes away with her own gun, backs out of her room into the hall, and comes to a stop directly against the study door. She was making sure that the door had closed and locked behind Smith.
“Later, she did what I pretended to Flint that Kay had done. She went to the study to get rid of the body. But, since Dudley was still awake in his room next door, she didn’t dare show a light that might shine out on the water and be seen from his window. Nor was there any moonlight to show her, when she pulled the body up onto the window sill, that she was making a slight mistake in identity. And Ross, do you remember that when you got your head up above water you saw that the study light had been turned on? And remember who I told you had turned it on?”
I nodded glumly. “Yes. I do now. Dudley Wolff. He had the damned bad luck to walk in on a murderer just as she was getting rid of what she thought was her victim’s body. That’s why she shot him.”
“And then,” Merlini went on, “before she could get out and back to her own room, before she could even do what Flint accused me of — get outside the study door, lock it, and begin pounding on it as though she had just arrived — before she could make a move, I was there at the door doing some pounding of my own! Why that didn’t turn her hair white I don’t know. She had dropped straight from frying pan into a roaring red-hot blaze of fire. She stood there in a locked room, her husband’s body at her feet, and a gun in her hand.
“Anyone’s first instinctive reaction, even in as hopeless a situation as that, would be to rid themselves somehow of that gun. She couldn’t put it in Wolff’s hand and give out a suicide story. Even if he hadn’t been shot twice and in the wrong places, his fear of death made his suicide highly unlikely. Throwing it out the window was nearly as bad. That would be the first place the police, not finding it in the room would look. The vest-pocket gun which she had taken from the collection for the reason Ross gave, that it was small enough for a woman to carry unnoticed on her person, was still far too large to carry unnoticed out of any such situation as this. The voices in the hall outside told her that the police had already arrived. The search she would get would be thorough enough to uncover any gun no matter how small.
“But I doubt that Anne Wolff, in the moments during which I tried frantically to pick the lock on that door, even needed to think through and discard those possibilities. Another and much better one would have occurred to her almost at once. One of the standard methods of producing the spirit lights that had been her special mediumistic forte is the use of a vial of oil in which phosphorus has been dissolved. When the solution is uncapped and exposed to air in the dark it glows with a pale-yellow light. Mrs. Wolff concealed this evidence of fraud by using the subtle but common magician’s principle of deception known as the ‘unlikely means.’ She had practiced an ability to accomplish an action which the ordinary investigator would never suspect simply because it is so unlikely that it never occurs to him. She concealed her spirit-light vial in the same way Jeanne Veiller, Mrs. Duncan, and other mediums hid their ectoplasm. The gun was no larger. She removed the unfired cartridges and swallowed it.
“Then, because this created an apparently impossible situation, similar to those given us by the ghost who had already twice vanished inexplicably, the obvious line to follow was to pretend that he had done it again. The police might not swallow any such theory as that, but the gun’s absence and the prevalence of ghost stories they’d get from all sides would at least confuse the investigation and delay her arrest long enough for her to get an opportunity to cut and run for it. So she dropped the key she had taken from her husband’s ring behind the desk where she later said someone or something had been hiding. Then she lay down, kept her fingers crossed, and played possum.”
“And then,” I said, “I’ll bet she really did pass out. When you pulled me out of the water, she was face to face with the paralyzing fact that the man who cannot die was still living up to his reputation!”
Merlini nodded. “It must have been discouraging to say the least. She realized that the trap gun had missed, that she had disposed of the wrong body, that Smith was still alive and well-aware that she had tried a second time to kill him. And to top that off, her attempt to mislead the police by throwing suspicion on a dead man would boomerang disastrously the moment they found him still alive and heard his—”
“Just a minute,” I interrupted. “Still alive, but, as you proved so thoroughly, invisible. Now disprove it.”
“Why? He was invisible. He left the study just as you said. He went across into the bedroom and discovered that his flashlight wouldn’t work. I pointed out that he could not leave by the window, the door to the hall, or the door to the bathroom. But is it my fault that you forgot that there is another door in that room?”
“Another door?”
“Yes. The closet door. It’s not exactly a way out of the room, but it is a place to hide — the only place. When Mrs. Wolff was carried in, searched, and put to bed, there was no particular reason for anyone to go poking around behind the dresses in that closet. The police were naturally concentrating on the study, the missing gun, and your very suspicious presence in the water below the window. It wasn’t until nearly three hours later, when you told us your story and Tucker found fingerprints to back you up, that we found out that the ghost had been in the study. It was a bit late then. In the meantime Doctor Haggard had given Mrs. Wolff the sleeping tablets which she promptly coughed up along with the gun as soon as he had gone out. Then — well, what else would happen once she was alone?”