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

“Green and I were together,” Slot said.

“I wouldn’t trust Green too far, either,” Sergeant Jonas said.

Lieutenant Mingo had finished his examination of the suite. Now he broke in on the hysterical owners of the rubies.

“Here it is, Captain. Safe was torched – an easy job. All windows are locked inside. A caterpillar couldn’t have come up or down those walls outside anyway. The torch is still here. We searched all the guards, nothing on them. The Burns men on the doors never left their posts.”

Gazzo turned to the Burns man who had remained at the front door of the suite the whole time.

“No one came out?”

“No, sir,” the Burns man said. “I never budged. The guy at the elevators never moved, and no one came out except Green, Kelly, and the other guards.”

“In other words,” Gazzo said. “No one went in, no one came out. Only – we’ve got a dead man and we don’t have five rubies worth a quarter of a million in real cold money.”

In the room everyone looked at everyone else. The Moomers and McNamara were ready to cry like babies.

It was an hour later, and Gazzo and Mingo had been over and over the situation fifty times with Slot-Machine Kelly and Ed Green. The morgue wagon had come, and the white-suited attendants were packing the body in its final basket.

“The Burns boys from my shift want to go home,” Green said. “We’ve searched every part of them except their appendix.”

“OK,” Gazzo said. “But you’d better check them through that scanner downstairs, just in case.”

“That’s some machine,” Lieutenant Mingo said admiringly. “You just dab the rubies with a little radioactive material, and the scanner spots them forty feet away.”

“It also spots radium watch dials and false teeth,” Gazzo pointed out. “Let’s get back to our little puzzle, OK? First, how did anyone get into the room?”

Everyone looked blank. Slot-Machine rubbed the stump of his missing arm. It was an old habit he had when he was thinking.

“It’s impossible,” Slot-Machine said, “so there has to be an answer. Look at the odds. It’s a million to one against the guy being invisible. It’s two million to one against him having wings. It’s a couple of hundred to one against that guard having shot himself.”

“Very funny, Kelly,” Gazzo said.

“Wait,” Slot-Machine said. “I’m serious. We got to rule out science fiction, weird tales, and magic. So how did he get into the room past all of Green’s guards? Be simple. There’s only one way – he was already in the room.”

“Kelly’s shootin’ the vein again,” Jonas said.

Even the morgue attendants turned to look at Slot-Machine. They had the body by head and feet, and they paused with it in mid-air, their mouths open. Gazzo looked disgusted. But Ed Green and Lieutenant Mingo did not.

“He’s right,” Ed Green said. “We never searched, never thought of it.”

“It’s not an uncommon MO,” Lieutenant Mingo agreed. “Now that I think of it, the suite is full of closets piled with junk. It wouldn’t have been hard as long as the guy knew the guards didn’t search.’

Captain Gazzo morosely watched the morgue attendants close their basket and carry it out. The captain did not seem very pleased about the whole matter.

“Which means the joint was cased,” Gazzo said. “OK, it figures. Our ghost has to be a pro. He got in by hiding here for about five hours. Now, how did he get out?”

“Yeah,” Sergeant Jonas said. “You guys didn’t search the place because a snake couldn’t have sneaked out of this suite.”

“You had twelve guards around and in the suite, damn it,” Gazzo said. “Twelve! A worm couldn’t have crawled out!”

Slot-Machine seemed to be watching something very interesting in the centre of the far wall. His one good hand was busily rubbing away at the stump of his left arm. Now he began to talk without taking his eyes away from the blank wall.

“Let’s talk it out,” Slot said. “He didn’t fly out, he didn’t crawl out, he didn’t dig out, he…”

“Trap door?” Sergeant Jonas said.

Lieutenant Mingo shook his head.

“First thing I checked. The floors are solid. Checked the rooms below, too,” Mingo added.

“Secret doors in the walls?” Gazzo suggested.

“Hell, Captain,” Ed Green said, “we know a little about our work. We went over the walls with a microscope.”

Slot rubbed his stump and nodded. “Keep it up; we’re ruling out. Look, the guy was a pro; he was in the room; he had to have his plan to get out. It had to be workable. It had to be simple.”

“Maybe he’s still inside the room,” Green said.

“Negative,” Mingo replied. “I combed the place.”

“What do we have?” Slot-Machine said. “He’s in here, and there are eleven guards outside and one inside with him. He shoots the guard, torches the safe, and… Hold on! That’s not right. He burned that safe fast, but not fast enough to do it between the time of the shots and all of us busting in.

“So he must have torched the safe first – then shot the guard and set off the alarm! He couldn’t have torched the safe with the guard still awake, so it follows that he must have knocked the guard out. But why did he kill the guard later? He knew the shots would bring us running. He must have wanted the shots to bring us in just when it happened. Why did he pull the job at the exact moment when there were twelve guards instead of six? He timed it for the shift change.”

There was a long silence in the room. Sergeant Jonas looked blank. Ed Green was obviously trying to think. Mingo shook his head. Only Gazzo seemed to see what Slot-Machine was seeing on the blank wall.

“No one came out,” Gazzo said softly. “There was no way out. Only a killer got out with five rubies. So, like Kelly says, we rule out magic, and somehow a guy walked out.”

Gazzo turned to the Burns guard who had been on the main door.

“Do you know all the guards who work with you?” Gazzo asked.

“Sure, Captain,” the Burns man said. “Well, I mean, I know most of them to look at. I know the boys in my shift, and-”

“Yeah,” Gazzo cut him short. “There it is. So damned simple. He just walked out in the confusion. Right, Kelly? He was probably behind the front door waiting. He probably even helped search the suite with all of you. He was just…”

“Wearing a Burns uniform,” Slot-Machine said. “He simply mingled in with us. That’s why he timed it for two shifts to be here. He mingled with us, and walked out through the front door.”

The swearing in the room would have done credit to a Foreign Legion barrack. Everyone began to move at once. Mingo called in to alert the Safe and Loft Squad to start watching all fences in the city. Ed Green went to check with the guard on the elevator. Jonas called downstairs to the single exit door. Gazzo just swore. Ed Green came back.

“Burns man on the elevator says he did see a Burns man go for the stairs,” Green said. “God, he was lucky! How could he know we wouldn’t search him? I mean, we searched all the guards mighty quick. He couldn’t be sure he could get away so fast. He took a hell of a risk.”

Sergeant Jonas hung up the telephone in anger.

“Green’s shift of Burns men passed out twenty minutes ago,” Jonas said, “and they were all clean. That scanner didn’t find anything on them.”

“How many men?” Gazzo said.

“Six,” Jonas said.

Gazzo cursed. “He’s out!”

“But the rubies aren’t,” Green said. “He must have stashed them somewhere inside. That means he plans to come back for them.”

Slot-Machine shook his head. “I don’t know. He planned this mighty careful. We could have searched him right here in the room like Green says.”