Бретт Холлидей - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 2, July 1973

“It isn’t?” Corcoran said.

“No, it isn’t,” Di Lucca told him patiently. “We also got a dying message, and that’s authentic enough but not the way my partner here seems to think. What he thinks, Simon Warren was trying to name his killer directly; but that’s not what he was trying to do at all.”

“It isn’t?” Corcoran said.

“No, it isn’t,” Di Lucca told him patiently. He glanced over at the butler. “We’ll take the dying message first. Mr. Prentiss, how did Simon Warren say those last words of his — ‘pick up sticks’?”

Prentiss was puzzled. “How did he say them, sir?”

“Well, what I mean, did he say them just like that: ‘Pick up sticks’? Or did he say: ‘Pick... up... sticks’, with a pause between any of the words?”

Prentiss worried his lower lip. “I believe he said the words without a pause, sir.”

“Except maybe at the end?”

“At the end?”

“Like this: ‘Pick up sticks...’, with his voice sort of trailing off.”

“Why, yes, now that I think of it.”

“So maybe ‘pick up sticks’ wasn’t all he was trying to say. Maybe there were some other words, a sentence, and he died before he could get the rest of it out.”

Charon, Finney, and Miss Hughes were leaning forward now, listening intently. Finney asked, “What other words could he have wanted to say?”

“That’s not too difficult to figure out, when you look at the way he’s lying there on the floor. That position has bothered me for some time, something about it.”

“What?” Corcoran said. “I don’t see anything unusual.”

“Well, look at his right arm,” Di Lucca said. “You see the way it’s outflung? Now that’s not an unnatural position for a dead man, but if you want to think about it another way, it could also be that he’s pointing at something, right?”

Everyone stared at the dead man, and at the outflung right arm, and at what it could be pointing at.

“The fireplace,” Dillon, the lab man, said.

“Not exactly, Joe. Something on the hearth.”

“The stack of cordwood?”

“Where the cordwood was before your boys moved it. Right?”

“Sticks!” Corcoran exploded. “Sticks!”

Di Lucca gave him a tolerant look. “That’s it, Corcoran. What Simon Warren was trying to say was: ‘Pick up sticks of cordwood’.”

Dillon said, “But there’s nothing there, Rennie, you can see that. I moved the stack myself when we vacuumed the hearth.”

“There’s something there, all right. The murder weapon, among other tilings. But it’s pretty carefully concealed and you wouldn’t have expected anything like it in the first place. Besides, you can’t see it unless you get down close to it.”

Di Luca moved around the body and stepped onto the hearth and knelt at the spot where the cordwood had been originally. His fingers probed at the cracks between several of them, where earlier he had found wedged a tiny bit of evidence that even the vacuuming had failed to dislodge. Then he tugged lightly, activating a spring — and four bricks, fastened together on their underside by a hinged metal plate to form a kind of door, swung upward. There was now a squarish opening in the hearth.

Corcoran moved quickly next to Di Lucca, and peered into the open space. “A floor safe,” he said wonderingly. “The door to a floor safe.”

Di Lucca looked at the wide-eyed quartet on the sofa. He said, “Mr. Prentiss, you told me you didn’t know where your employer kept his ready cash and his valuables — and maybe his gun.”

“No, sir, I didn’t know. I had no idea there was a safe in the fireplace hearth. I’m quite amazed.”

“What about the rest of you?”

They shook their heads.

“Well, that’s a pretty clever hiding place for a safe, all right,” Di Lucca went on; “the kind of place a man who knew a lot about antiques and antique methods would choose — and also the kind of place a man who didn’t trust most members of his household would choose. But it wasn’t quite clever enough. What happened here is fairly obvious now: The murderer learned of the safe somehow, and got ahold of the keys to open it; it’s one of those key-lock types. He came in here this morning to riffle it, and Mr. Warren also came in for some reason we’ll find out later and caught the killer with the safe open. The murderer panicked and shot Warren with Warren’s gun, which was and no doubt still is inside the safe.”

“But the locked room,” Corcoran said. “How did the killer get out and lock the doors from the inside?”

“Like I said before,” Di Lucca told him, “this isn’t any locked-room mystery. It didn’t figure to be one from the beginning. For one thing, Simon Warren was shot twice and the gun was nowhere to be found; that obviously rules out suicide. So what’s the point in making a locked-room mystery out of it, from the killer’s standpoint? Murder is murder, and he was sure to be one of the suspects in the investigation. If he had set out to commit murder in a locked room, he’d shoot Warren once, put the gun in the dead man’s hand, and let suicide be the natural verdict. No, what this was, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, an improvisation, and not a particularly brilliant or original one at that.”

“Rennie, you still haven’t explained the locked room.”

“It’s simple,” Di Lucca said. “What the killer did, he shot Warren in his panic, and then realized the shots would bring the others down almost immediately. He couldn’t rush out of the library for fear of being seen, so he did the next best thing to prevent immediate discovery: he ran over and locked the doors.

“Now he had bought himself a few seconds of time. So he came back to the safe, dropped the gun inside, closed the door, lowered the bricks, and put the cordwood back in place in a hurry.

“Later, he could come back, he thought, and remove the gun and the valuables. Well, by this time Prentiss was banging on the doors, and all the murderer did was to go over there and get behind them. Prentiss broke the doors open, and ran to the body; his full attention was on Simon Warren, and so was that of the others who rushed in shortly afterward. Warren had seen the killer put the gun back into the safe — maybe without wiping off his fingerprints; but dying as he was, he apparently didn’t see where the murderer had gone. As a result, he tried to tell Prentiss where the safe and the gun were.

“As for the murderer, he waited behind the door half until everybody else was in the library, and then came out last, as if he too had come running downstairs. Which means that there’s only one person who could be guilty, and that’s the last person into the library. And just to clinch it: The killer told me the sound of the shots was like cannons going off, but a small caliber gun triggered inside this room wouldn’t make that much noise, especially to someone supposedly in bed on the second floor rear. And finally, I found wedged into the door bricks a tiny broken fingernail point, a red-lacquered fingernail — Corcoran!”

The rookie managed to close his mouth long enough to grab and hang onto the bitterly struggling Becky Hughes before she could get out through the library doors.

In light of the evidence against her, Miss Hughes confessed to the murder of Simon Warren, substantiating everything Di Lucca had postulated. She also revealed that she had discovered she was not, after all, included in Warren’s will; that, combined with the old man’s stinginess, had decided her to commit theft and then to disappear to another part of the country. She had learned of the safe by spying on Warren, and had pilfered the keys to open it from his room that very morning.

But Warren had awakened as she was leaving, had followed her covertly downstairs, and had caught her at the open safe. He threatened her with police action as well as expulsion from the house, and the threat had been responsible for her panic and for the shooting. As Everett Finney said, she was not nearly as dumb as he had pretended to be but she was every bit as ignorant.