“You said the moonlight was rather dim, did you not?”
“Yeah, the moon was low, kind of, and — let’s see, was it a half moon?”
“Third quarter,” said Mr. Smith. “And the men who crossed that field didn’t have to come closer than a hundred yards or more until they were lost in the shadow of the barn.”
The sheriff took off his hat and swabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. He said, “Sure, I ain’t saying you could recognize anybody that far, but you could see— Hey, why’d you say the men who crossed that field? You mean, you think—”
“Exactly,” cut in Mr. Smith, just a bit smugly. “One man could not have crossed that field last night without being noticed, but two men could. It seems quite absurd, I will admit, but by process of elimination, it must have been what happened.”
Sheriff Osburne stared blankly.
“The two men,” said Mr. Smith, “are named Wade and Wheeler. They live in the city, and you’ll have no difficulty finding them because Walter Perry knows where they live. I think you’ll have no difficulty proving that they did it, once you know the facts. For one thing, I think you’ll find that they probably rented the… ah… wherewithal. I doubt if they have their own left, after all these years off the stage.”
“Wheeler and Wade? I believe Walter mentioned those names, but—”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Smith. “They knew the setup here.
And they knew that if Walter inherited Whistler and Company, they’d get the money they had coming, and so they came here last night and killed Mr. Carlos Perry. They crossed that field last night right under the eyes of your city detectives.”
“I’m crazy, or you are,” declared Sheriff Osburne.
“How?”
Mr. Smith smiled gently.
He said, “On my way up through the house just now, I verified a wild guess. I phoned a friend of mine who has been a theatrical agent for a great many years. He remembered Wade and Wheeler quite well. And it’s the only answer.
Possibly because of dim moonlight, distance, and the ignorance of city-bred men who would think nothing of seeing a horse in a field at night when the horse should be in the barn. Who wouldn’t, in fact, even see a horse, to remember it.”
“You mean Wade and Wheeler—”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Smith, this time with definite smugness in his voice. “Wade and Wheeler, in vaudeville, were the front and back ends, respectively, of a comedy horse.”
Satan One-and-a-Half
MAYBE YOU you know how it is, when a man seeks solitude to do some creative work. As soon as he gets solitude, he finds it gives him the willies to be alone. Back in the middle of everything, he thought, “If I could only get away from everybody I know, I could get something done.” But let him get away-and see what happens.
I know; I’d had solitude for almost a week, and it was giving me the screaming meamies. I’d written hardly a note of the piano concerto I intended composing. I had the opening few bars, but they sounded suspiciously like Gershwin.
Here I was in a cottage out at the edge of town, and that cottage had seemed like what the doctor ordered when I rented it. I’d given my address to none of my pals, and so there were no parties, no jam sessions, no distractions.
That is, no distractions except loneliness. I was finding that loneliness is worse than all other distractions combined.
All I did was sit there at the piano with a pencil stuck behind my ear, wishing the doorbell would ring. Anybody.
Anything. I wished I’d had a telephone put in and had given my friends the number. I wished the cottage would turn out to be haunted. Even that would be better.
The doorbell rang.
I jumped up from the piano and practically ran to answer it.
And there wasn’t anybody there. I could see that without opening the door, because the door is mostly glass. Unless someone had rung the bell and then run like hell to get out of sight.
I opened the door and saw the cat. I didn’t pay any particular attention to it though. Instead, I stuck my head out and looked both ways. There wasn’t anybody in sight except the man across the street mowing his lawn.
I turned to go back to the piano, and the doorbell rang again.
This time I wasn’t more than a yard from the door. I swung around, opened it wide, and stepped outside.
There wasn’t anybody there, and the nearest hiding place— around the corner of the house — was too far away for anybody to have got there without my seeing him. Unless the cat.
I looked down for the cat and at first I thought it, too, had disappeared. But then I saw it again, walking with graceful dignity along the hallway, inside the house, toward the living room. It was paying no more attention to me than I had paid to it the first time I’d looked out the door.
I turned around again and looked up and down the street, and at the trees on my lawn, at the house next door on the north, and at the house next door on the south. Each of those houses was a good fifty yards from mine and no one could conceivably have rung my bell and run to either of them.
Even leaving out the question of why anyone should have done such a childish stunt, nobody could have.
I went back in the house, and there was the cat curled up sound asleep in the Morris chair in the living room. He was a big, black cat, a cat with character. Somehow, even asleep, he seemed to have a rakish look about him.
I said, “Hey,” and he opened big yellowish-green eyes and looked at me. There wasn’t any surprise or fear in those handsome eyes; only a touch of injured dignity. I said, “Who rang that doorbell?” Naturally, he didn’t answer.
So I said, “Want something to eat, maybe?” And don’t ask me why he answered that one when he wouldn’t answer the others. My tone of voice, perhaps. He said, “Miaourr…” and stood up in the chair.
I said, “All right, come on,” and went out into the kitchen to explore the refrigerator. There was most of a bottle of milk, but somehow my guest didn’t look like a cat who drank much milk. But luckily there was plenty of ground meat, because hamburgers are my favorite food when I do my own cooking.
I put some hamburger in a bowl and some water in another bowl and put them both on the floor under the sink.
He was busily working on the hamburger when I went back into the front hallway to look at the doorbell.
The bell was right over the front door, and it was the only bell in the house. I couldn’t have mistaken a telephone bell because I didn’t have a phone, and there was a knocker instead of a bell on the back door. I didn’t know where the battery or the transformer that ran the bell was located, and there wasn’t any way of tracing the wiring without tearing down the walls.
The push button outside the door was four feet up from the step. A cat, even one smart enough to stand on its hind legs, couldn’t have reached it. Of course, a cat could have jumped for the button, but that would have caused a sharp, short ring. Both times, the doorbell had rung longer than that.
Nobody could have rung it from the outside and got away without my seeing him. And, granting that the bell could be short-circuited from somewhere inside the house, that didn’t get me an answer. The cottage was so small and so quiet that it would have been impossible for a window or a door to have opened without my hearing it.
I went outside again and looked around, and this time I got an idea. This was an ideal opportunity for me to get acquainted with the girl next door — an opportunity I’d been waiting for since I’d first seen her a few days ago.