Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

Richard A. Lupoff (b.1935) first established his reputation as a writer of uncategorizable science fiction and fantasy, influenced by but clearly not imitating the early pulp adventure writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Doc Smith. However, no one reading One Million Centuries (1967) or Into the Aether ( 1974 ) would regard the stories as looking backward, and others, like Sword of the Demon (1978) and Lovercraft’s Book (1985) establish their own niches. More recently Lupoff has turned to writing crime novels featuring San Franciscan insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey. The first was The Comic Book Killer (1988). The following story features a new detective, Abel Chase, and hopefully will be the first of a series.

The great Bosendorfer piano responded eagerly to Abel Chase’s practised hands, its crashing notes echoing from the high, raftered ceiling of the music room. Beyond the tall, westward-facing windows, the January night was dark and wind-swept. The warm lights of the college town of Berkeley sparkled below, and beyond the black face of the bay the more garish illumination of San Francisco shimmered seductively.

The sweet tones of the Guarnarius violin bowed by Chase’s confidante and associate, Claire Delacroix, dashed intricately among the piano chords. Clad in shimmering silver, Claire offered a dramatic contrast to Chase’s drab appearance. Her platinum hair, worn in the soft style of an earlier age, cascaded across the gracefully rounded shoulders that emerged from her silvery, bias-cut gown. A single diamond, suspended from a delicate silver chain, glittered in the hollow of her throat. Her deep-set eyes, a blue so dark as at times to appear almost purple, shone with a rare intelligence.

Abel Chase’s hair was as dark as Claire’s was pale, save for the patches of snow which appeared at the temples. Chase wore a neatly-trimmed black moustache in which only a few light-coloured hairs were interspersed. He was clad in a pale, soft-collared shirt and a tie striped with the colours of his alma mater , a silken dressing gown and the trousers of his customary midnight blue suit. His expression was saturnine.

“Enough, Delacroix.” He ceased to play, and she lowered her bow and instrument. “Stravinsky has outdone himself,” Chase allowed. “A few corrections and suggestions, notably to the second eclogue , and his manuscript will be ready for return. His cantilène and gigue are most affecting, while the dithyrambe is a delight. After his more ambitious orchestral pieces of recent years, it is fascinating to see him working on so small a canvas.”

Chase had risen from the piano bench and taken two long strides toward the window when the room’s freshly restored silence was shattered by the shrilling of a telephone bell. Chase whirled and started toward the machine, but his associate had lifted the delicate French-styled instrument from its cradle. She murmured into it, paused, then added a few words and held the instrument silently toward her companion.

“Yes.” He held the instrument, his eyes glittering with interest. He raised his free hand and brushed a fingertip along the edge of his moustache. After a time he murmured, “Definitely dead? Very well. Yes, you were right to re-seal the room. I shall come over shortly. Now, quickly, the address.” He continued to hold the telephone handset to his ear, listening and nodding, then grunted and returned it to its cradle.

“Delacroix, I am going to the city. Please fetch your wrap, I shall need you to drive me to the dock. And perhaps you would care to assist me. In that case, I urge you to dress warmly, as a light snowfall has been falling for several hours – a most unusual event for San Francisco.” Without waiting for a response he strode to his own room, hung his dressing gown carefully in a cedar-lined closet and donned his suit coat.

Claire Delacroix awaited him in the flagstone-floored foyer. She had slipped into a sable jacket and carried an elegant purse woven of silvery metal links so fine as to suggest cloth. Chase removed an overcoat from a rack beside the door, slipped into its warm confines, and lifted hat and walking stick from their places.

Shortly a powerful Hispano-Suiza snaked its way through the winding, darkened roads of the Berkeley hills, Claire Delacroix behind the wheel, Abel Chase seated beside her, a lap robe warming him against the wintry chill.

“I suppose you’d like to know what this is about,” Chase offered.

“Only as much as you wish to tell me,” Claire Delacroix replied.

“That was Captain Baxter on the telephone,” Chase told her.

“I knew as much. I recognized his gruff voice, for all that Baxter dislikes to speak to women.”

“You misjudge him, Delacroix. That’s merely his manner. He has a wife and five daughters to whom he is devoted.”

“You may be right. Perhaps he has his fill of women at home. I suppose he’s got another juicy murder for you, Abel.”

Chase’s moustache twitched when Claire Delacroix called him by his familiar name. He was well aware that it would have been futile to ask her to address him by his given name, Akhenaton, and Claire Delacroix knew him far too intimately to refer to him as Doctor Chase. Still, “Abel” was a name few men were permitted to use in conversation with him, and no woman save for Claire Delacroix.

“The man is distraught. He seems to think that a vampire has struck in San Francisco, draining the blood of a victim and leaving him for dead.”

Claire Delacroix laughed, the silvery sound snatched away on the wind. “And will the victim then rise and walk, a new recruit to the army of the undead?”

“You scoff,” Chase commented.

“I do.”

There was a momentary pause, then Chase said, “As do I. Baxter is at the site. He has studied the circumstances of the crime and concluded that it is impossible, by any normal means. Therefore and ipso facto , the solution must be supernatural,”

“You of course disagree.”

“Indeed. The very term supernatural contradicts itself. The natural universe encompasses all objects and events. If a thing has occurred, it is necessarily not supernatural. If it is supernatural, it cannot occur.”

“Then we are confronted with an impossible crime,” Claire Delacroix stated.

Abel Chase shook his head in annoyance. “Again, Delacroix, a contradiction in terms. That which is impossible cannot happen. That which happens is therefore, by definition, possible. No,” he snorted, “this crime is neither supernatural nor impossible, no matter that it may seem to be either – or both. I intend to unravel this tangled skein. Remain at my side if you will, and be instructed!”

The dark, winding road had debouched by now into the town’s downtown district. On a Saturday night during the academic year warmly clad undergraduates stood in line to purchase tickets for talkies. The young intellectuals in their cosmopolitanism chose among the sensuality of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel , the collaborative work of the geniuses Dali and Buñuel in L’Age d’Or , the polemics of the Ukrainian Dovzhenko’s Zemlya , and the simmering rage of Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar.

Young celebrants gestured and exclaimed at the unusual sight of snowflakes falling from the January sky. Their sportier (or wealthier) brethren cruised the streets in Bearcats and Auburns. The Depression might have spread fear and want throughout the land, but the college set remained bent on the pursuit of loud jazz and illicit booze.

Claire Delacroix powered the big, closed car down the sloping avenue that led to the city’s waterfront, where Abel Chase’s power boat rode at dock, lifting and falling with each swell of the bay’s cold, brackish water.