McBain, Ed - Killer's Wedge

He had turned to run, and she'd yelled, "Stop or I'll shoot!" and he'd stopped and turned to face her, but now he wondered whether or not he'd done the right thing. Miscolo was not a coward. He was a trained policeman who happened to be a desk jockey, but he'd learned to shoot at the academy and he wished now his gun was in his hand instead of in one of the filing cabinet drawers in the Clerical Office. The woman standing at the railing had the look of a crazy bitch on her face. Miscolo had seen that look before, and so he thought he'd been wise to stop when she yelled at him, and yet there were a lot of other men in that room and Jesus how long had she been here and was she going to shoot up the whole damn joint?

He stood in indecision for a moment longer.

He had a wife and a grown son who was in the Air Force. He did not want his wife to become a cop's widow, he did not want her making up beds in precincts, but, Jesus, that bitch had a crazy look on her face, suppose she shot everyone, suppose she went berserk?

He turned and started to run down the corridor.

Virginia Dodge took careful aim and fired.

She fired only once.

The bullet entered Miscolo's back just a little to the left of his spinal column. It spun him around in a complete circle and then slammed him up against the door to the Men's Room. He clung to the door for an instant and then slowly slid to the floor.

The bottle of nitroglycerin on the desk did not explode.

There was, of course, no such thing as a locked-door murder mystery.

Steve Carella knew that with the instincts of an inveterate murder mystery reader and a true cop.

And yet here he was investigating a suicide which had taken place in a windowless room and-4o make matters worse-the victim appeared to have hanged himself after locking the door from the inside. It had taken three strong men to snap that lock before they could enter the room. At least, that's what they had told him yesterday when he'd first investigated the case, and that's what they were telling him again today.

Maybe it is a suicide, Carella thought. The police department treats all suicides exactly like homicides, but that is only a formality.

And maybe this is truly a suicide, what the hell, why should I always go around suspecting the worst of people?

The trouble is these sons of his all look as if they are capable of tripping a blind woman and cutting out her heart. And the old man left a fortune to be divided among them. And was it not possible that one of those sons-or maybe even all of them acting in concert-had decided to put the blocks to the old man and get that loot quick? According to the old man's lawyer, whom Carella had interrogated yesterday, the old man had left $750,000 in cash to be divided among "his beloved sons upon his jj death." That was a lot of scratch. Not to mention the whole of Scott Industries, Inc." and various other holdings throughout the country. Murders had certainly been committed for less.

But, of course, this was a suicide.

Why didn't he simply wrap it up as such?

He was supposed to meet Teddy at the precinct at seven-hey, I'm going to have a baby, how about that?-and he certainly wouldn't get there in time if he hung around this creepy old mansion and tried to make a homicide out of an obvious suicide. Oh, was he going to wine and dine her tonight!

Tonight, she'd be a queen, anything she wanted he would get for her.

Jesus, I love her, he thought.

So let's wrap the damn thing up and meet her on time, what say? What time is it anyway? He glanced at his watch. 5:45.

Well, he still had a little time so he might just as well do a thorough job. Even if it didn't smell like suicide ... oh, smell, smell, what the hell determines the smell of a case? Still, this one didn't smell like suicide.

The musty old mansion was an anomaly for the 87th Precinct. Built in the 1890's, it clung to the shoreline of the River Harb like a Charles Addams creation, hung with dark shutters, shrouded with a slate roof, its gables giving the house strange and shadowy angles. Not three miles from the Hamilton Bridge, it nonetheless gave the feeling of being three centuries removed from it. Time had somehow bypassed this eerie house squatting on the river's edge, its rusted iron fence erecting a barrier against society. The Scott Mansion. He could still remember taking the call yesterday.

"This is Roger... at the Scott Mansion.

Mr. Scott has hanged himself."

Roger, of course, had been the butler, and so Carella immediately discounted him as a suspect. The butler never did it. Besides, he seemed more broken up over the old man's death than anyone else in the house. The old man, in any case, had not been a pretty sight to see. Obese in life, the coloration of death by strangulation had not enhanced his appearance at all.

They had led Carella to the storage room which the old man had converted into a private study, away from the larger study downstairs. The three sons-Alan, Mark, and David-had backed away from the door as Carella approached it, as if the horror of that room and its contents was still terrifyingly fresh in their minds. The door jamb had been splintered. Pieces of splintered wood still rested on the floor outside the door. A crowbar was lying against the corridor wall.

The door opened outwards into the corridor. It opened easily when Carella tried it, but he saw instantly that the inside lock, a simple slip bolt, had been ripped from the door jamb when the door was forced. It hung from a single screw as he entered the room.

The old man lay in a crumpled fat ball at the opposite end of the room. The rope was still around his neck even though the sons had cut him down the moment they'd entered the room.

"We had to cut him down," Alan explained.

"To get in. We used a crowbar to break the lock, but even then we had trouble getting the door open. You see, Father had tied one end of the rope to the doorknob before.." before he hanged himself. Then he threw the rope over that beam in the ceiling and... well, after we forced the lock, we still had his weight to contend with, his weight pulling the door closed. We opened it a wedge with the crowbar, and then cut the rope before we could get in."

"Who cut the rope?" Carella asked.

"I did," Alan said.

"How'd you know the rope was there?"

"When we got the door open a crack, we could see the ... the old man hanging. I stuck my arm into the opening and used a jackknife on the rope."

"I see," Carella had said.

Now, standing in the room where the hanging had taken place, he really tried to see. The old man, of course, had been carted away by the meat wagon yesterday-but everything else in the room was exactly as it had been then.

The room was windowless.

Nor were there any secret panels or passageways leading to it. He had made a thorough check yesterday. The walls floor, and ceiling were as solid as Boulder Dam, ~.~onstructed in a time when houses were built to last forever.

All right, the only way into this room is through that door, Carella told himself.

And the door was locked.

From the inside.

So it's suicide.

The old man had, indeed, tied one end of the rope to the doorknob, thrown the length of rope over the ceiling beam, and then climbed onto a stool fastened the rope to his neck, and jumped. His neck had not been broken. He had died of slow strangulation.

And surely his weight had helped to hold that door closed against the efforts of his three sons to open it. But his weight alone would not have resisted the combined pull of three brawny men. Carella had checked that with the laboratory yesterday. Sam Grossman, in charge of the lab, had worked it out mathematically, fulcrum and lever, weights and balances. Had the door not been locked, the brothers could have successfully pulled it open even with the old man's weight banging at the end of the rope attached to the doorknob.