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

“He never went into detail about it. He just asked me to buy the door at the auction.”

I thanked him and hung up. Sheriff Lens asked, “Did you learn anything?”

“He doesn’t want the door now that Wagner’s dead. He said we should keep it and auction it off again.”

“I’ll tell Vera.”

“Where’s the door now?”

“Still over at the town hall. In the mayor’s office, I think.”

“Let’s go have another look at it,” I suggested.

We walked across the square to the town hall. Mayor Bensmith hadn’t yet returned from lunch, but his secretary Rita showed us the door leaning against his office wall. “We’re waiting for shipping instructions,” she informed us.

“He doesn’t want it,” I told her. “We’ll auction it again.”

I moved over to examine the door more closely and asked Rita, “Do you have a pair of tweezers?”

“I think so.” She went back to her desk and returned with them.

“What are you after, Doc?” Sheriff Lens wanted to know.

“I’m not sure, but I know Wagner wanted this door, and his statement to you at the time of the fire wasn’t completely accurate.”

“How’s that?”

“He said Fritz Heck died inside the front door, trying to get it open. But look at this door. The scorching is on the outside, while the inside is unmarked by flames. This door had to be open at the time of the fire, and if that was the case how could Heck have been trapped there by the fire and smoke? He could have simply run outside.”

“I never thought of that,” the sheriff admitted.

I took a penknife from my pocket. “I wish we’d had a more complete autopsy report.”

“In those days-”

“I know.” I concentrated on one of the wormholes Annabel had noticed earlier, enlarging it a bit with my knife. Then I went to work with the tweezers. After a moment I extracted what I was seeking.

“What is it, Doc?”

“Buckshot. Annabel thought they were wormholes, but I noticed the other side was unmarked. These were worms that went in but didn’t come out. Notice the unusual pattern they formed.” I pointed out a half-dozen small holes toward the sides and top of the door.

“A buckshot pattern would be more circular,” he argued.

“Not if something or someone had been in its way. Don’t you see, Sheriff? Fritz Heck was standing by this open door when someone fired a shotgun at him. I know they probably had one on the premises because I found an old shotgun shell in the dirt there. The missing pellets from the pattern are in Heck’s body, and judging by the close grouping of these other pellets that shotgun blast was probably enough to kill him.”

“Rusty Wagner was the only one in the house at the time.”

“Exactly,” I told him. “We’ll never know now what happened, but Wagner told you they’d been chatting about a girl they met. Maybe they argued about her, maybe Wagner picked up the shotgun that every farmhouse had in those days and tried to drive Heck from the Cloister. Maybe it went off accidentally by the front door.”

“Then he started the fire deliberately?”

I nodded. “To cover the crime. He probably made a special point of burning the body, to cover up the wounds from the shotgun pellets. When he got too close and burned his own face it added verisimilitude to his story.”

“Any coroner today would have found those shotgun pellets.”

“Probably. He certainly would have spotted the absence of smoke in the lungs, a sure sign that Heck was already dead when the fire started.”

Sheriff Lens sighed. “With Wagner dead there’s not much point in exhuming the body now.”

“None whatsoever.”

“I only wish you’d been around here a year earlier, Doc, and I wouldn’t have missed all this. It was a perfect crime.”

I shook my head. “No, Sheriff. The perfect crime was the murder of Rusty Wagner in front of this building last Tuesday. And there’s not a thing we can do about it.”

As it happened, Annabel and I were dining at Max’s Steakhouse, our favorite restaurant, a few nights later when I spotted Milt Stern drinking at the bar. “Excuse me for a few minutes,” I told her. “I’m going to talk to him.”

“Sam! You said you wouldn’t.”

But I got up anyway and went over to him. “Got a few minutes, Milt?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“I just want to chat. Over in that empty booth would be best.”

He glanced toward Annabel at our table. “You shouldn’t leave her alone.”

“This won’t take long.”

He followed me to the booth and slid in the other side. “So what’s this all about?”

“Rusty Wagner.”

“God, I feel terrible about that! It’s as if I’d murdered him.”

“You did.”

He moistened his lips and gave a half laugh. “Well, not really. The gun had a blank cartridge in it.”

“What was it that made you move here, Milt? Did you know your brother had been murdered that day up at the Cloister?”

“He wasn’t-”

“Yes he was, Milt. I saw the snapshot of the two of you and even then I noticed the resemblance. Ten years ago you left Hartford and moved here, changing your name from the German Heck to its English meaning, stern. You suspected all along that Wagner had killed your brother. Perhaps he hinted at trouble between them in one of his letters. Once here you settled down and married. Somewhere along the line you saw the Cloister door that Felix Pond had rescued from the place, and recognized those little ‘wormholes’ for what they were. When you heard that Wagner would be coming here to take part in a war-bond drive, the idea came to you.”

“What idea?”

“You would suggest to Pond that he donate that old door for the war-bond auction. Then, when the mayor was discussing a clever way to bring Wagner on stage, you volunteered to dress in a Nazi costume and fire a blank pistol at him. You knew, of course, that he’d had rheumatic fever twice as a child. Perhaps your brother mentioned it or you read it in a movie fan magazine. Such a medical history almost certainly would have left him with a weak heart, probably the reason for his draft deferral.”

“He knew in advance I was going to fire a blank pistol at him,” Milt Stern said. “That wouldn’t have caused a heart attack.”

“Perhaps not alone. But when he came onto that stage what he saw was the friend he’d killed twenty-two years ago, aged a bit but still recognizable, standing in front of that same door and pointing a gun at him. In the instant the gun went off, his weak heart failed.”

“Do you really expect anyone to believe that?”

“No,” I admitted. “Certainly not a jury.”

Milt Stern smiled at me. “Then why are you telling me this? Who else have you told?”

“Sheriff Lens knows, and the mayor soon will know. They can’t bring any charge against you, but it might be better if you left Northmont, moved back to Hartford.”

He studied my face for a long time. “Don’t you understand it’s something I had to do? Whether he lived or died was out of my hands.”

“Whether you stay or go is out of my hands, too,” I told him.

“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll take your advice.”

I left the booth and went back to join Annabel. I’d done all that I could.

Susan Holt awoke with a start, wondering why her bed felt so hard. Then memory flooded back in a blinding instant of terror and she knew she was in a jail cell, accused of murder. She opened her eyes and saw a woman in the next holding cell staring at her through the bars. “You’re awake,” the woman said.

“What? Yes. Yes, I’m awake. What time is it, please?”