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

“All right, genius,” Gazzo said. “You’ve figured how he got into the suite and how he got out. Now tell us how he plans to get the stones out if he didn’t stash them. No one’s gone out of this hotel since it happened except through that front door where the scanner is.”

“He just had to know about the scanner,” Slot-Machine said. “This was a foolproof plan. So he must have figured a way around that scanner.”

“Great,” Gazzo said. “Only, no one got out of here without being checked.”

Slot-Machine stood up suddenly.

“One person did! Gazzo, come on!”

Slot-Machine led them all from the suite in a fast dash for the first elevator.

The night was dark on the city. The streets were bare and cold in the night. Traffic moved in small tight groups down Sixth Avenue as the lights changed. The late night revellers staggered their weary way home. In the all-night delicatessens the clerks yawned behind their counters.

In Gazzo’s unmarked car the five sat alert and waiting. Gazzo swore softly, and Ed Green smoked hard on his cigarette. Slot-Machine leaned forward tensely and watched the car-exit below the towering glass and steel of the North American Hotel. Suddenly Slot leaned over and touched Jonas, who was behind the wheel.

The morgue wagon came out from under the hotel and turned left down Sixth Avenue. Jonas eased the car away from the curb and followed the morgue wagon.

They drove down Sixth Avenue, turned across town toward the west, and the morgue wagon moved steadily on its way a half a block away. The silent procession turned again on Ninth Avenue and continued on downtown toward the morgue.

Suddenly, as the morgue wagon slowed at a traffic light, the back door of the wagon opened. A man jumped out. The man hit the pavement, stumbled, and then began to run fast toward the west.

The man wore the uniform of a Burns guard.

The morgue wagon continued on its grim journey. Jonas swung the police car in a squealing turn and gunned the motor down the side street. The running man was forty feet ahead. Jonas roared after him. The man heard the motor, looked back, and then dashed toward a fence. In a flash he was over the fence, and gone.

Slot-Machine and Gazzo were out of the police car before Jonas had brought it to a halt. Mingo and Green were close behind them. Slot-Machine was the first of the three over the fence with a powerful pull of his single arm.

The man in the Burns uniform was scrambling over a second fence just ahead.

The chase went on down the rows of back yards and fences in the silent darkness of the night. At each fence Slot-Machine gained on the uniformed runner. As he went over the last fence before a looming dark building ended the row of back yards, the uniformed man turned and shot.

Slot-Machine ducked but didn’t stop. He went over the last fence in a mad leap and dive. Another shot hit just below him, and wood splinters cut his cheek. In the next second, Slot-Machine was on the uniformed man who was trying frantically to get off one more shot.

The man in uniform never made it. Slot-Machine drove him back against the brick wall of the building with the force of his rush. His pivoting body slammed into the wall, his gun went flying, and he came off the wall like a rebounding cue ball on a lively pool table.

Slot’s one good hand caught the uniformed man across the throat. He collapsed with a single choking squawk like the dying gurgle of a beheaded chicken.

By the time Gazzo, Green, and Mingo had caught up with Slot and his victim, Slot was holding the rubies in his hand. In the beam of light from Mingo’s flashlight, the deep red stones shone like wet blood.

Slot-Machine handed the pistol to Gazzo.

“This’ll be the murder weapon,” he said. “It’s a regulation Burns pistol; he was a meticulous type.”

Mingo was bending over the supine man, who had not even begun to wake up. The lieutenant looked up at Gazzo and shook his head.

“No one I recognize,” Mingo said. “Chances are, he’s not a known jewel thief.”

“That figures,” Slot said. “I think you’ll find his name is Julius Honder, a legitimate jewel merchant.”

“Why Honder?” Ed Green said.

“He had to have cased the job,” Slot said. “He knew we’d all go running into the suite. Remember that woman? The one who thought the alarm was a waiter’s button? She was Honder’s secretary. I expect we’ll find her waiting at Honder’s office for the boss to bring home the loot.”

From the dark, Sergeant Jonas came up. The Homicide sergeant looked down at the sleeping killer and thief.

“So he made another change,” Jonas said, “and played one of the morgue boys?”

Slot-Machine shook his head.

“Too risky,” Slot-Machine said. “Gazzo said no one had gotten out of the building through the front door. You don’t take a stiff out the front way, right? He knew that. The stiff went out through the basement. What tipped me was what I said myself- why did he kill the guard after he’d opened the safe and got the stones? To get us into the room, I said.

“Only the alarm alone would have done that. There had to be another reason. All at once it came to me. He killed the guard just to have a way of hiding the stones on the body and getting them out!”

They all looked down at the uniformed man who was just beginning to groan as he came awake. There was a certain admiration in the eyes of the police.

“He knew we wouldn’t search the dead man until you got him to the morgue,” Slot-Machine said. “So he had to get the stones from the body before it reached the slab. It was quite simple. He just hid in the wagon. Who would think to look for him there?”

Later, in the tavern where Joe Harris was working, Ed Green leaned on the bar beside Slot-Machine Kelly and bought Slot a fourth expensive Irish whisky. Green was still admiring Slot.

“You just got to think logical,” Slot-Machine explained. “Figure the odds. Miracles are out, so there has to be a simple explanation. The more complicated it looks in real life, the simpler it has to be when you figure it out.”

“You make it sound easy,” Green said. “Have another shot.”

“Twist his arm,” Joe said as he poured. “The thinker. So it turned out it was Julius Honder, right?”

“Yeah,” Slot said as he tasted his Irish whisky happily. “He needed cash. Too bad he needed a corpse. He’ll fry crisp as bacon.”

Clayton Rawson ( 1906-71 ) was one of the masters of the impossible crime story. He was by profession a stage magician, or more properly an illusionist, and he subsequently wrote a series of novels and short stories featuring The Great Merlini as the magician expert called in by the police to solve the latest unusual crime. The first book , Death from a Top Hat ( 1938 ), which dealt with a series of crimes involving magicians, was filmed as Miracles for Sale ( 1939 ) and established Rawson with a second career as an author and editor. Rawson and John Dickson Carr used to love setting each other challenges for stories. The following story arose when Carr challenged Rawson to write a story in which someone walks into a telephone booth and vanishes. See if you can work out how it’s done.

The lettering in neat gilt script on the door read: Miracles For Sale , and beneath it was the familiar rabbit-from-a-hat trademark. Inside, behind the glass showcase counter, in which was displayed as unlikely an assortment of objects as could be got together in one spot, stood The Great Merlini.

He was wrapping up half a dozen billiard balls, several bouquets of feather flowers, a dove pan, a Talking Skull, and a dozen decks of cards for a customer who snapped his fingers and nonchalantly produced the needed number of five-dollar bills from thin air. Merlini rang up the sale, took half a carrot from the cash drawer, and gave it to the large white rabbit who watched proceedings with a pink sceptical eye from the top of a nearby escape trunk. Then he turned to me.