Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

“The human brain works too slowly, Jerry, even when it works straight… it works too slowly.”

William Krohn (b. 1945) has the distinction of being the youngest writer represented in this collection. Youngest, that is, at the time he wrote the following story: he was eighteen when he submitted it to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine where it appeared a little over a year later. Krohn had read his first detective novel a couple of years earlier: John Dickson’s Carr’s masterpiece of the impossible The Three Coffins, and he was hooked. Needless to say the following story is heavily influenced by Carr, but you might as well learn from the best. Krohn wrote a second similar story which was rejected as too complex, and he moved on to other fields. He has since become a noted film critic and an expert on the work of Alfred Hitchcock, including the study Hitchcock at Work (2003). He is also Director of Creative Services for the Commercial Film Division of New Galaxy Enterprises and the editor of the online webzine RocketsAway. The following is where it all started.

The policeman was thinking about magic.

It was a strange thought for a policeman to have, but even his superiors might have forgiven him on an evening like this. It was late August, and a velvet-dark midsummer night had descended on the streets of the city. On this particular street, with its big comfortable homes and airy lawns turning from green to black in the smoky twilight, the darkness seemed to sing with a kind of summer magic that even a policeman can feel.

But Lieutenant-Detective Jerry Doran was thinking of another kind of magic – the kind which involves playing cards and white rabbits, bouquets of flowers that burst from nowhere and beautiful ladies who vanish at the wave of a silver wand. This kind of magic had somehow got loose from the safe confines of the stage and was causing Lieutenant Doran a severe occupational headache; and now he was ringing the doorbell of the one man who might help him – a man who did not believe in magic at all.

“Sometimes I think,” said Richard Sheilan as he ushered his guest into the living room, “that it takes a murder to make you come visiting. Your soul is Machiavellian, Jerry. You should have been a politician.”

“I should have been an astronaut,” Doran said feelingly, “or a short-order cook. Anything but a policeman.”

“Tch-tch,” said Sheilan. He stepped over to the liquor cabinet and extracted a bottle and two glasses. “Those were sympathetic noises,” he explained, “the kind I reserve for my un-retired friends. But I take it from what you said over the phone that you want more than commiseration.” He handed Doran a glass. “What is it this time, Jerry? Murder, of course.”

It had been a number of years since Sheilan had retired from police work and moved into his new home. He seemed quite at ease here in this large cream-colored room, as he hunched a little in his monstrous black armchair.

Sheilan was a very big man – not tall and wiry like Doran – but built on a huge scale. He stood well over six feet, on disproportionately long legs; he was big-boned and slender, with ropy-veined wrists and impressively broad shoulders. He had a ruddy complexion and what might be called ruddy hair – red-tinted where it had not already silvered with age. For all his quietness of manner he cut an imposing figure, and small people with loud voices rarely felt comfortable in his presence. He was quiet now, and the hazel eyes watched his friend’s face attentively.

“It’s murder,” Doran affirmed. “I’m surprised you haven’t read about it in the papers. It’s been getting front-page coverage ever since it broke this morning.”

“I don’t read the papers,” Sheilan said simply. “What sort of case do you mean?”

“A screwy one. The kind,” Doran said with a trace of malice, “that we save for our un-retired friends.” Sheilan snorted as Doran went on, “Mr Charles Kimball was killed early this morning in a downtown hotel. During the few seconds that the murder must have taken place, he was alone in an elevator car where no living soul could have come near him. And yet he was murdered.”

Sheilan sighed. “You’ve hooked me, Jerry,” he said. “Now I suggest that you begin at the beginning, omit the melodrama, and tell a straight story.” Doran looked belligerent. “Suppose you begin with the victim – Mr Kimball.”

“All right,” said Doran. “Mr Charles Kimball. What do you think Mr Charles Kimball was?”

Sheilan shut his eyes. “A sorcerer,” he intoned. “A student of occult mysteries who tampered with forces beyond his control-”

“Bingo!” said Doran. “Got it the first guess. Charles Kimball was a professional magician, a stage illusionist – and a damn good one, from what I hear.”

Settling back in his chair, the policeman began to tell the story…

Standing in the arctic glare of the blue spotlight, draped like a statue in the black robes of his profession, the magician looked for all the world like the lanky personification of some ancient plague. The skin of his hands was the color of snow, and a madman’s shock of white hair, tied with a thin ribbon, crowned his skull; his mouth was like a black sore.

Earlier in the evening the stage had been crowded with gaudy apparatus – coffin-like boxes for sawing a woman in half and cabinets for making her vanish like a puff of smoke. Now the magician stood alone under the spotlight. With a creative gesture of his cupped hands he produced a single white dove which perched for a moment on his arm and then flew away. Then another appeared, and another and another – until it seemed as if there were a hundred of them fluttering around the weirdly lit stage.

The magician was billed as Dr Satanus; he was, of course, none other than Mr Charles Kimball, an entertainer whose checkered career had embraced everything from tightrope acrobatics to cardsharping, from juggling to escape artistry. Somewhere along the line he had married a chorus girl named Margaret Linden and incorporated her into the act as his assistant. Now, after more hard work and disappointment than he cared to remember, Charles Kimball was at the peak of his career.

Backstage, the Dr Satanus troupe was getting ready to go home – home tonight being three scattered rooms in the Hotel Bowman, a second-rate theatrical establishment just off Broadway. Leo Gurney, a wiry little man with a head of curly black hair and a monkey-ugly face, was leaning against a pile of flats and tinkering with an obscure bit of machinery; in addition to his duties as stage manager, Gurney was Kimball’s right-hand man, the mechanical genius who designed and built all the illusions in the show.

There was also Dave Hooker, promotion manager and Jack-of-all-trades – presently off somewhere picking up coffee and sandwiches for a late-night snack. And, of course, there was Margaret Kimball, a still-young woman with a face and figure which could only be described in metaphors of fruit, flowers, and heavenly beings. Still dressed in her Satanic red costume, she stood in the wings and watched the finish of the dove illusion. The curtain came down to a good round of applause, and Charles Kimball swept past, gleamingly spectral in his stage trappings.

It had been a routine performance. However, one thing happened a little later that was out of the ordinary. A few minutes after the curtain dropped, Dave Hooker reappeared, a fair-haired, innocuous young man with an armful of paper bags from some nearby diner, which he quickly distributed. With one bag left over, he went to the door of Kimball’s dressing room, rapped once, and stuck in his head.