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

“Perhaps the painting has flown out the window,” Paula contributed.

I squinted around at the wall outside the window. There was a hook set in the concrete facing to the right of the window, presumably for the window washers, but no painting dangled from it. A four-inch ledge ran below the window, extending a foot or so past it on either side. There was no painting secured to the ledge.

I surveyed the kitchen and the butler’s pantry, areas in which few Czeppskis ever set foot, according to Maria, who was putting various cheeses on a platter when I intruded. The Czeppskis were entertaining that evening, and the concierge was expected to send up food, kitchen staff and waiters momentarily. The plates were stacked in the kitchen, and the silver, freshly shined, much of it sporting what I assumed was the Czeppski crest, was lined up on a table in the butler’s pantry. The two rooms were, as far as I could tell, devoid of religious artwork.

I thanked the various Czeppskis for their co-operation and told them someone would be in touch, and rang for the elevator. On the way down, I tried pushing various buttons to see what would happen. Nothing happened until I pushed the stop button, and then the elevator jerked to a stop and a loud alarm went off. Two lobby men and a police detective awaited me on the ground floor when I arrived.

“I don’t know what possessed me,” I said, stepping out of the elevator. “I just had an irresistible impulse to see what would happen if I pressed that button.”

“Don’t say anything else until I read you your rights,” the detective said. “This time we’ve got you cold!” His name was Gibson, and we’d worked together on a few cases here and there in the past.

“I confess all,” I told him. “I was led astray by evil companions in my youth. Hello, Gibson. You going up to see the graf?”

“Oddly enough I’ve been waiting down here for you,” Gibson said. “I didn’t want to involve the department in whatever horrible falsehoods you were telling the Czeppskis.”

Seeing that I neither needed help nor required restraining, the two lobby men returned to their stations. Gibson and I walked over to a couch set in an alcove in the lobby next to the building office. “You have something for me?” I asked. Contrary to the usual notion, public and private detectives actually tend to work fairly closely together when the opportunity presents. They get paid for apprehending the bad guys and we for retrieving the loot, and everybody’s happy – as long as we on the private side remember who has the badge.

“Actually I called your office and Wohlstein told me where to find you,” Gibson said. “There’s something I’d like you to take a look at. A little sort of locked room mystery, just the sort of thing you like. Actually it’s right across the street, which is what you call a coincidence.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” I told him, “and just because I’ve been lucky a couple of times -”

Gibson snorted. “Lucky! Listen, if I had your kind of luck I’d be police commissioner. Not that I’d want the job, it’s too political. What about the Marsden case? What about the Gallico job? Who but you would have thought he hid the pearls in the butter?”

I sighed. “Okay, let’s take a look,” I said. “But don’t be disappointed if I don’t come up with anything.

“I don’t expect miracles,” he said, but he lied.

The building Gibson took me to was the one across Brass Street that obscured the view from the Czeppskis’ window of things westerly. A uniformed officer in the lobby let us in, and we took the ancient elevator up to the ninth floor. “The rental office says the place was rented furnished to a guy named Pedersen about three months ago,” Gibson said over his shoulder, leading the way down the corridor. There were eight doors fronting the corridor, by which I deduced that there were eight apartments on the floor. The door to 8-C was open and the crime scene forensic crew was busy inside. An assistant medical examiner was kneeling by the supine body of a white male who looked to be in his forties. The corpse had a couple of holes in his chest. At first glance from ten feet away I would have said he was shot; there wasn’t enough blood evident for stab wounds. But snap opinions like that are dangerous, there are too many variables. If the poor guy had been stabbed by an ice pick to the heart, for example, there probably would have been no blood at all.

“It’s a one bedroom,” Gibson told me. “Nothing special. Looks like all the furniture came with the apartment. Pedersen, if that’s who he is, didn’t have much of his own. Only some clothing.”

“If that’s who he is?”

“No identification on the body. We’re having the rental agency send over the woman who handled the rental to see if she can identify him.”

I nodded. “So what’s the mystery?”

Gibson gave a half-nod toward the corpse. “The deceased was seen to enter the building shortly after ten last night. At ten seventeen the nine-one-one operator got the call that three shots had been heard from this apartment. When the first officers arrived at – “ Gibson flipped open his notepad “- ten twenty-two, there was a crowd of people gathered around the door. Two of them had been in the hall when the shots were heard. Nobody came out that door. They pounded on the door and yelled for a while, but they very wisely decided not to break in. After all, as far as they knew there was someone with a gun inside.” Gibson paused and looked up from his notepad.

“Let me guess,” I said. “When the cops broke in there was nobody inside but the recently deceased.”

“You’ve got it in one,” Gibson said. “It was locked and bolted from the inside. They had to kick the door down to break in.” He gestured at the door, which was splintered and off its hinges, showing the effects of violent entry.

“No other exit?”

“None.”

“Windows?”

“In the living room, a picture window that doesn’t open flanked by two of those louvre-type windows that open like Venetian blinds and you’d have to be a cat to get in or out. In the bedroom, a sash window that’s locked from the inside and enough dust around it so’s it hasn’t been opened any time recently.”

“Secret passages or trap doors?”

“You’re kidding.”

“Did you look?”

“Yeah, we looked. If we don’t come up with something better, we’ll probably send a squad down to take the place apart, but I’m damn sure it’ll be a waste of time. I think what we got here is the invisible man. You know – like the Shadow. The guy possesses the power to walk out of rooms without nobody seeing him.”

I raised one eyebrow, a gesture I’ve been trying to perfect since high school. “Life is a glorious cycle of song!” I said. “Two impossible crimes on the same day.”

“It’s why you private dicks get the big money,” Gibson said. “I hear what with overtime and everything you must be clearing pretty close to minimum wage.”

“Yeah. And I hear the police department isn’t political any more.”

He shook his head sadly and I shook my head sadly and I stuck my hands in my pockets and started into the room.

“Wait a second,” Gibson said. “We got to put on booties before we go in.” He had someone toss him a couple of pair of the white cotton tie-ons that you’re supposed to wear over your shoes to make sure you don’t track anything into a crime scene, and we put them on. “Keep your hands in your pockets,” he told me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

I walked slowly around the living room, trying to keep out of the way of the crime scene people, and stared at things. I had no idea what I was looking for. The walls of the living room were landlord green up to waist level, and covered with a fading rose-pattern wallpaper above. There was a beige couch and matching stuffed chair that looked as though they had come into the world during the Eisenhower presidency, a low coffee table well decorated with cigarette burns, and a pair of lamps on end tables that only Southern California landlords don’t find funny. A television table sans television set sat across the room from the couch. A floor lamp, one of the sort that was a steel rod with a shaded bulb at one end and four claw feet at the other, was lying on the floor by the window. I peered into the bedroom, which contained a bed and a dresser, and one of those sliding-door closets that stood open and empty.