Katherine Brooks - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 106, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 648 & 649, October 1995

“You do?”

“I’ll tell you at the hospital.”

Fletcher was awake, swathed in plastic tubes that ran to his arms and disappeared beneath the bedclothes. Another tube delivered oxygen to help him breathe. Leopold wondered if one of the bullets had nicked a lung. “How are you feeling, Fletcher?”

“Real dopey. Not much pain, though. Carol was in just before you two.”

Leopold nodded. They’d spoken to his wife on the way in. She was his strength, and always had been. “Did you see who shot you?” Leopold asked.

“No. Just a dark figure at the door. I thought it was Rosen.” He turned his head slightly. “Connie, what’s happening with the squad?”

“Don’t you worry. The commissioner got Captain Leopold to lend us a hand till you’re back on your feet.”

Fletcher nodded just a speck. “You’ll do it, Captain. You’ll get the one who shot me.”

“We’ll get him, Connie and the rest of the squad. Rest easy now.” He could see the nurse looming in the doorway.

Outside, down the hallway in the waiting room, Leopold said a few comforting words to Carol Fletcher. “He’ll be out in no time, and back on the job.”

She gave a weak smile. “Our son is flying in from California. He’ll be here tonight.”

“I’ll be back then.”

“Will you have the one who shot him?”

“Yes,” Leopold promised.

Back in the car with Connie, he said, “Tell me about the locked room.”

“It was so obvious we didn’t see it. The killer shot her but she didn’t die immediately. He left, and she held the handkerchief over her wound, struggling to the door to lock it in case he returned. Then she got back to her desk, tried to write a message, and died.”

He took her hand and held it, smiling like a father to his daughter. “Connie, you’ll make a great detective someday, but not yet. If it happened that way, why didn’t she pick up the phone on her desk and call for help?”

“But — but there’s no other explanation!”

“There is one. Rachel Dean told us herself, with her dying message — ICON. Think about it.”

“I’ve been thinking about it! I don’t see—”

“Give me your weapon, Connie.”

“What?”

“The Glock you carry in your holster. Give it to me.”

“What for?”

“It has to be tested by ballistics. You killed Rachel Dean, Connie, with your wild shot last night. It was Rachel who murdered Vladimir Petrov for those icons, Rachel who shot Fletcher when he caught her planting one in Rosen’s apartment, Rachel who drove back to her office, dying, and started to write a confession. ICON — I confess that I killed Vladimir Petrov .”

By the time ballistics had confirmed Leopold’s explanation that evening, he’d gone over it all with Connie. “I’ll tell Fletcher tomorrow, but I want you to hear it from me first. You see, in a case full of icons we all leaped to the wrong conclusion. But it suddenly occurred to me that Rachel Dean couldn’t have been writing icon, because she didn’t spell it that way. On the copy of the appraisal she gave me, she used the alternate spelling, ikon. She was trying to write a longer word or sentence. I immediately thought of I confess and started looking for confirmation. Was there any? Yes, in the soft cloth used to wrap the icons. Rachel claimed she’d only seen the one recovered from Petrov’s trunk, and that she’d wrapped it in that cloth herself to protect it. But when we found the second icon, hidden in Rosen’s closet, it was wrapped in the identical soft cloth. It had obviously been in Rachel’s possession and she’d lied about not seeing it.”

“She was willing to sacrifice that valuable icon?”

“She still had two others, worth a fortune overseas, and I’m sure she left the least valuable one. Petrov must have mentioned once that an ex-con was working on the tiling crew and she decided he’d be the perfect fall guy for the murder. She crossed over from the adjoining property yesterday without being seen, met Petrov, and shot him. If anyone had seen her, she would simply have postponed the crime. She had the other three icons in her possession for appraisal, and must have known Petrov hadn’t told his wife where they were.”

“When I shot her—”

“She’d just planted the angel icon in Rosen’s closet. Leaving the apartment after midnight, she suddenly saw you and Fletcher. She shot him, but your return shot in the dark hit her in the chest. She escaped back to her car, holding a handkerchief to the wound. It must not have seemed too bad at first. She drove to the gallery to patch herself up, then sat in her locked office for two hours feeling her life drain away from the internal bleeding. She couldn’t call for help without revealing herself as Fletcher’s assailant. Finally, in her last moment of life, she picked up her pencil and started to write a confession.”

It had been a long day. Connie looked at him and said, “It’s good to have you back, Captain, even for a little while.”

© 1995 by Michael Gilbert

Named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 1986, Michael Gilbert has been a prominent figure in the world of crime fiction for more than forty years. His range in the genre is extraordinary. He can create with equal dependability a police procedural, a pure whodunit, a thriller, or a spy story. Often his stories meld elements of these various subgenres to create something uniquely his own.

Clive Brocklehurst and his wife no longer shared a bed, but they shared everything else in their lives and had done so for more than thirty happy years. It was only after Laura’s second, and more serious, attack of asthma that Clive had retreated to the dressing room.

On that morning in early October Laura had been lying awake for some minutes when she heard her husband getting out of bed and leaving the dressing room by the far door. Her sleepy mind registered two things. First, that it was unusually early for him to be stirring. Being the senior partner in the firm of Brocklehurst and Garigan, Accountants of London Wall, he normally got up for a leisurely breakfast at eight o’clock and was rarely out of the house before nine.

The second thought was that he had left his room so quickly that he could not have had time to do more than throw on his clothes. Usually he was a careful and meticulous dresser. Then she heard the front door of the house opening and shutting softly. Some minutes passed. Where could he be going? She remembered that on one occasion, when she had forgotten to replenish her asthma medicine, he had slipped out to the chemist in the village, who lived over his shop, and had extracted a new bottle from him. That was the sort of thing he did for her.

Then she heard the car starting up.

After listening for a few minutes she got out of bed, put on dressing gown and slippers, went downstairs and out into the garden.

The car seemed to have been running for a long time. As she approached she could hear the engine thudding away. When she tried to open the garage door she found that it was not only shut, but seemed to have been bolted on the inside. She wasted a few minutes clawing at it. Then turned, ran back to the house and grabbed the telephone.

The local policeman — there was only one in the village — had been out most of the night before watching for poachers, but the panic in her voice ultimately stirred him into action.

“Come quickly, please.”

“Sounds as if the door’s jammed. If it is, I’ll have to bring tools to break it down.”