McBain, Ed - Killer's Wedge

Oh, the cheek, I've been hit harder before, the cheek doesn't matter. But what she did to Miscolo, and what she did to that Puerto Rican girl, and what she did to Meyer, these are things I cannot excuse, rationally or emotionally. These are pains inflicted on humans who have never done a blessed solitary thing to the non-human called Virginia Dodge. They were simply here and, being here, she used them, she somehow reduced them to meaningless ciphers.

And this is why I hate.

I hate because I... I and every other man in this room have allowed her to reduce humans to ciphers. She has robbed them of humanity, and by allowing her to rob one man of humanity, by allowing her to strip a single human being of all his godly dignity, I have allowed her to reduce all men to a pile of rubbish.

So here I am, Virginia Dodge.

Cotton Hawes is my name, and I am a one-hundred-percent white Protestant American raised by God-fearing parents who instilled in me a sense of right and wrong, and who taught me that women are to be treated with courtesy and chivalry and you have turned me into a jungle animal ready to kill you, hating you for what you've done, ready to kill you.

The liquid in that bottle is not nitroglycerin.

This is what I believe, Virginia Dodge.

Or at least, this is what I am on the road to believing. I do not yet fully believe it.

I'm working on it, Virginia. I'm wororking on it damn hard.

I don't have to work on the hatred. The hatred is there, and it's building all the time and God help you, Virginia Dodge, when I'm convinced, when I've convinced myself that your bottle of nitroglycerin is a big phony.

God help you, Virginia, because I'll kill you.

The answer came to him all at once.

Sometimes it comes that way.

He had left Alan Scott in the old mansion, had walked through the stillness of a house gone silent with death, into the huge entry hall with its cut-glass chandelier and its ornate mirror. He had taken his hat from the marble-topped table set in front of the mirror, wondering why he'd worn the hat, he very rarely wore a hat, and then realizing that he had not worn a hat yesterday, and then further realizing that the power of the rich is an intimidating one.

We mustn't be intolerant, he thought. We mustn't blame the very rich for never having experienced the sheer ecstasy of poverty.

Smiling grimly, he had faced the mirror, set his hat on his head, and then opened the huge oak door leading outside. Darkness covered the property. A single light burned at the far end of the walk. There was the smell of wood-smoke on the air.

He had started down the path, thinking of October, and woodsmoke, and burning leaves, and musing about this bit of Exurbia in the center of the city. How nice to be exurban, how nice to burn leaves. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the garage. A figure was silhouetted there against the star-filled sky, a giant of a man, one of the brothers, no doubt, the smoke from the small fire trailing up past his huge body. One of the magnificent Scotts burning leaves, you'd think a job like that would be left to Roger, or the caretaker, no caretaker for the Scott estate? Tch, tch, no caretaker to burn the .

It came to him then.

Woodsmoke.

Wood.

And one of the brothers burning his own fire.

Wood. Wood! For Christ's sake, wood, of course, of course!

He turned suddenly and started back up the path to the garage.

How do you lock a door? he thought, and his thoughts mushroomed onto his face until he was grinning like an absolute idiot.

How do you lock it from the outside and let it seem it's been locked from the inside?

To begin with, you rip the slip bolt from the doorjamb, so that when the door is finally forced open, it looks as if the lock was snapped in the process. That's the first thing you do, and by Christ, that explains all the marks on the inside of the room, how the hell could the crowbar have got that far inside, why weren't you thinking, Carella, you moron?

So first you snap the lock.

You have already strangled the old man, and he is lying on the floor while you work on the slip bolt, carefully prying it loose so that it hangs from one screw, so that it will look very realistically snapped when the door is later forced.

Then you put a rope around the old man's neck, and you toss one end of it over the beam in the ceiling, and you pull him up so that he's several feet off the ground. He's a heavy man, but so are you, and you're working with extra adrenalin shooting through your body, and all you have to do is get him off the floor several feet. And then you back away toward the door and tie the rope around the doorknob.

The old man is dangling free at the other end of the room.

You shove on the door now. This isn't too difficult. It only has to open wide enough to permit you to slip out of the room. And now you're out, and the old man's weight pulls the door shut again. The slip bolt, on the inside, is dangling lodse from one screw.

And you are in the corridor, and the problem now is how to give the appearance of the door being locked so that you and your brothers can tug on it to no avail.

And how do you solve the problem?

By using one of the oldest mechanical devices known to mankind.

And who?

It had to be, it couldn't be anyone else but the first person to try the door after the crowbar was used on it, the first person to step close enough to "Who's there?" the voice said.

"Mark Scott?" Carella said.

"Yes? Who's that?"

"Me. Carella."

Mark stepped closer to the small fire. The smoke drifted up past his face. The flames, dwindling now, threw a flickering light onto his large features.

"I thought you'd gone long ago," he said.

He heici a rake in his hands, and he poked at the embers with it now so that the fire leaped up in renewed life, tinting his face with a yellow glow.

"No, I'm still here."

"What do you want?" Mark said.

"You," Carella said simply.

"I don't understand."

"I'm taking you with me, Mark," Carella said.

"What for?"

"For the murder of your father."

"Don't be ridiculous," Mark said.

"I'm being very sensible," Carella said.

"Did you burn it?"

"Burn what? What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the way you locked that door from the outside."

"There's no outside lock on that door," Mark said calmly.

"What you used was just as effective as a lock. And the more a person tugged against it, the more effective it became, the tighter it locked that door."

"What are you talking about?" Mark said.

"I'm talking about a wedge," Carella said, "a simple triangle of wood. A wedge..

"I don't know what you mean," Mark said.

"You know what I mean, damnit. A wedge, a simple triangular piece of wood which you kicked under the door narrow end first. Any outward pressure on the door only pulled it toward the wide end of the triangle, tightening it."

"You're crazy," Mark said.

"We had to use a crowbar on that door. It was locked from the inside. It..

"It was held closed by your wooden wedge which, incidentally, put a dent in the weatherstripping under the door. The crowbar only splintered a lot of wood which fell to the floor. Then you stepped up to the door. You, Mark. You stepped up to it and fumbled with the doorknob and-in the process-kicked out the wedge so that the door, for all intents and purposes, was now unlocked. And then, of course, you and your brothers were able to pull it open, despite your father's weight hanging against ..

"This is ridiculous," Mark said.

"Where'd you..

"I saw Roger sweeping up the debris in the hallway. The splintered wood, and your wedge. A good camouflage, that splintered wood. That's what you're burning now, isn't it? The wood? And the wedge?"