“Smith,” Kay answered in an awed voice. “He came out. He may even have found her with the gun in her hands!”
“Go on. And then—”
“Then,” I said, “it’s stalemate. He’s got her cold on two charges of attempted murder and one successful one. But if she can escape conviction, he can blackmail her for the lion’s share of what she’ll get under Wolff’s will. Or he could if he wasn’t trapped there in her room. The moment he’s found, he’s going to have to talk fast and confess to attempted blackmail and assault in order to pin the murder rap on her before she tries to pin it on him.”
Merlini nodded. “The only possible chance of escaping that many-horned dilemma is for him to get out of that room and clear of the house. Mrs. Wolff, who has tried so hard all along to kill Smith, now has no choice but to help him escape. They wait until the upper hallway is clear for a moment, a long and nerve-racking wait because that doesn’t happen until just before dawn when Flint’s men have finished their examination of the study. Then Mrs. Wolff slips out and goes after a flashlight. It may be a bit awkward if she’s spotted, since Haggard’s sedative is supposed to have put her out of action, but it’s their only chance. Smith can’t try to leave by that route because if anyone gets the smallest glimpse of him the fat really would be in the fire.
“I can imagine that Smith, knowing all too well by now that he can’t trust her out of his sight, doesn’t like this procedure one little bit. But he has no choice and, not being able to see just how she can double-cross him without putting her own neck in a noose, he underestimates her once again. During that three-hour wait she has figured out a way. She knows that even if he escapes, it still leaves her holding the bag. She can expect him to bleed her of every cent of the inheritance she’ll get and she has no guarantee at all that even then he may not some day turn her in as revenge for the twice she’s tried to kill him. When she goes down the hall she puts plan number three for the elimination of the phoenixlike Mr. Smith into action. She makes for the kitchen, picks up the dry ice, and goes down through the basement to the garage.”
“Wait,” I broke in. “Her experience as a medium made the vanishing-gun trick possible, but what about the dry ice? Why would she think of a stunt like that?”
“Same reason, Ross. The cold breezes that sometimes waft themselves through a séance room are not the ghostly emanations from the Beyond the medium pretends, but result much more prosaically from a concealed blowing mechanism and dry ice, which is exactly the setup she used this time. She knew that in the small space of a closed car the ghostly breezes would be deadly ones. The printed warnings on a dry-ice container are enough to indicate that. She could have put the ice in her own car, given Smith the keys, and said later that she had left them in the car. But, since that’s just what Kay had done, it was simpler and more misleading to use her car instead. She planted the murder gun there too, partly as a means of getting it out of the house and partly so that suspicion would fall and this time remain on what, she hoped would at last be a dead Mr. Smith. That would close the case.
“Then she took Kay’s flash and returned to her room either by the way she had left, or now that she had a light, more probably by the more direct and less risky trellis route. She threw a scare into Smith by reporting that the estate was overrun with police and convinced him that, since it’s daylight, his best chance of running the gantlet is to make a quick break for it in the car. It was good advice as far as it went, and Smith’s one thought by then was to get as far away as fast as possible. When Dunning nearly caught him at it in the garage, that only hastened his flight.”
“Okay, Mastermind,” I growled, still annoyed at the way he had crossed me up, “that answers everything except the one about the escaped lunatic and the speed of the river under his rowboat.[5] But if you had it figured out as neatly as all that you could have talked Flint into agreeing—”
Merlini shook his head. “I’m not so sure, Ross. He might have asked me question number five, the one I didn’t ask you because I don’t have the answer. And if he didn’t ask it, she would have.”
“Question number five?”
“Yes. Mrs. Wolff tried to get Smith with the trap gun, she shot her husband, and she succeeded finally in getting Smith with the dry ice. Her motive each time was desperation. She was trying frantically to save her own neck. But what about that first time when she tried to kill Smith by leaving him in the grave? We haven’t got a motive for that.”
“What’s wrong with the one I gave you? She couldn’t trust him not to turn around later and blackmail her?”
“If she couldn’t trust him, why use him as an accomplice at all? She had more sense—”
“Who else could she use? Shallow-breathing burial-alive experts don’t grow on every bush.”
“All right. That brings up question number six. Why did she have to try to blackmail her husband in that very unusual manner? You talked very glibly and fast to the effect that it wasn’t much fun being married to Dudley. You said that if she tried to cut loose by any of the usual means he’d blow up in his customary manner and see to it that she didn’t get away with any cash. That’s weak. I don’t like it. She’s clever enough to have thought of some way that didn’t include murder. Yet she didn’t. Why not? We know all her motives except the most important one — the original one that set the whole train of fireworks off.”
Lieutenant Flint’s voice came suddenly from the doorway. “I hope we get it, but our chances aren’t good.”
“She got away?” asked Merlini.
“No. We got her. Tucker was bright enough to have Ryan stick with the cars when they parked them down the drive, just in case. When he heard the shots and I heard the getaway car coming he swung one of the police cars out across the drive. She came around a curve and smacked into it head on. Doctor Haggard says she won’t be answering any questions for some time, if then.”
Flint got the answer though. He brought it backstage a week later, just before the first performance of Merlini’s Hocus-Pocus Revue which was opening on schedule, courtesy of an angel named Kathryn Wolff.
“Here’s the motive you wanted,” he said, laying out on Merlini’s dressing-room table a large scrapbook, a newspaper clipping, and a telegram.
The latter read: Man answering Zareh Bey description operated religious cult racket here until three months ago under name Zorah the Mystic. Wanted on charges of using the mails to defraud. — Capt. J. J. O’Connor, Los Angeles Police Department.
“That’s what he’s been up to since he died on the Morro Castle,” Flint said. “When the going got rough he ducked out and came East. He was staying in a cheap hotel over on Tenth Avenue. When we searched his room we found this.”
The lieutenant picked up the newspaper clipping which I recognized as part of one of the picture layouts in the series of articles I had written about Wolff. It was a shot of Mr. and Mrs. Wolff at the annual banquet of the National Association of Chemical Trades and Industries. Dudley, who had just been elected president, was beaming. Mrs. Wolff, caught off guard by the photographer, was plainly bored stiff.
5
The answer, in which Ross doesn’t seem greatly interested somehow, is three miles per hour. Since the current hinders the rower when he goes upstream just as much as it later aids him going downstream, its effect on the boat cancels out and does not need to be considered. Therefore, if he rows ten minutes away from the hat, it also takes him ten minutes to row back down to it. Total rowing time: twenty minutes during which the current has carried the hat one mile — a speed of three miles per hour.
— Merlini