Росс Макдональд - The Dark Tunnel

“Yes, and so was Helen Madden. It fits in. Come up to the office, will you? I think I can show you how it was done.”

He stopped straining at the conversation like a whippet on a leash and came along quietly to Alec’s office. Nothing had been changed in it since I saw it last the night before, except that the telephone-receiver had been replaced and the window closed.

I opened the bottom pane wide, swinging it out to a horizontal position. Then I lifted the dumbbell shaped receiver-transmitter from the telephone on the shelf beside the window, and hooked the receiver end over the inner edge of the sash so that it hung there precariously.

“What are you doing?” Gordon asked, with a resurgence of impatience in his voice.

“I’m reconstructing a delayed-action murder. The principle is much the same as that of my own hanging-party. It’s the principle of the booby-trap, which is arranged in such a way that the victim destroys himself by his own efforts. It’s a clever idea but Schneider made the mistake of applying it twice. The repetition of a phenomenon leads to generalization.”

I deliberately adopted the dry and impersonal manner of a lecturer, partly because it was the easiest way to talk about Alec’s death, partly because Gordon had been too condescending in the morning. He took it very well:

“I think you’re right. I had the same idea but I couldn’t make it fit the circumstances. As a matter of fact, I found out from Schneider’s housekeeper this morning that Peter had been trained in the German army as a booby-trap expert.”

“Did you find out anything else?”

“Nothing important, except that Peter almost never came home because he got on badly with his father. The old woman’s either completely ignorant and innocent, or devilishly clever. Go on with your reconstruction, Branch.”

I took the chain of the wall-lamp beside the window, which was still sticky at the end, and fastened it to the inside corner of the open pane with the piece of adhesive which was still there.

“That’s all,” I said. “I’m not sure of all of this but I’m sure of most of it: Peter drove the Esch woman down to the hotel, where she registered about eleven. Meanwhile, Alec found his evidence against Dr. Schneider and hid it in the Dictionary office. On the way home, Peter spotted Alec’s car in front of McKinley and followed him in here – he must have had one of his father’s keys. Alec heard somebody in the building and phoned me, but before he could finish, Peter surprised and overpowered him. He gave Alec a shot of sodium pentothal or some other quick-acting drug to put him to sleep. Then he phoned Ruth at the hotel, because he needed help. She must have come up here by taxi in a hurry.

“They carried Alec up here, opened this window wide, and laid him out flat on it. Then they called up an accomplice on Alec’s telephone, and hung the receiver on the window like this. They didn’t leave anything to chance. The accomplice kept on saying, ‘Get up,’ or something of the sort over the telephone–”

“That’s right,” Gordon said. “I talked to the operator. The exact words she heard were, ‘Get up, old man, get up!’”

I went on: “That was the unintelligible voice Helen Madden heard through the door. When Alec came to, he heard the insistent voice telling him to get up. He didn’t know where he was, his mind was dazed and confused by the drug, and he said, ‘I don’t feel like it, but I will if I have to.’ Helen heard him. He sat up, the window partly closed under his weight, and he fell to the pavement. The person on the other end of the wire hung up.”

“Why do you assume an accomplice, Branch? The principle of scientific parsimony–”

“There must have been one,” I cut in brashly. “Peter did no telephoning after he got home. When Ruth got back to the hotel, she had a phone-call waiting for her to establish the time of her alibi, and she couldn’t have done it. They couldn’t have called Alec anyway: an unconscious man can’t answer the telephone.”

Gordon didn’t look tired any longer. There were tiny candle-flames of excitement in his black eyes. He said:

“Ruth Esch called herself at the hotel before she left this office. Then she wiped the receiver – or more likely she wore gloves – and hung it on the window and rushed down in a taxi to take the call at the other end. Certainly, it helped to establish her alibi, but it meant as well that she could sit down in her room and listen to his every movement over the telephone. She could persuade him to get up and make sure that he died. Perhaps she heard him cry out as he fell, perhaps the fall of the receiver when the window closed was all she waited for.”

I had a clear, ugly vision of the woman sitting in a chair in her hotel room listening to a man die by telephone, with bright concentration in her green eyes.

“Look,” Gordon said, stealing my thunder. “When the window closed under Judd’s weight, the receiver would be knocked off.”

He closed the pane to an angle of thirty degrees with the vertical, and the receiver was knocked off by the bottom sash of the upper pane. He caught it as it fell. “The sound of the jar and the fall would be enough for her. If Judd had somehow got back into the room, he’d have tried to phone the police and she’d have heard him.”

When Gordon closed the window, the chain attached to the upper corner jerked the wall-lamp on and broke loose from the adhesive tape.

“That explains the light going on,” I said. “They couldn’t leave the light on when they left him on the window for fear he’d be seen from outside. They unscrewed the bulb on the corner for the same reason. They arranged for the light to go on when he fell, because a fall from a lighted room would look more like suicide.”

“A suicide in the dark is a rare thing,” Gordon said. “That Nazi pair is well informed – not that I ever thought the democracies had a corner on intelligence. The light was one of the things that puzzled me, and the window was another. I didn’t think he could have been lying on the window, I didn’t think it would bear a man’s weight.”

“These windows are heavy glass,” I said, “and the sashes are steel. The Buildings men sit on them when they clean the upper panes. I just tried lying on one of them at the hospital about an hour ago.” I didn’t go into the details. “It worked all right.”

Gordon surprised me by holding out his hand. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “Frankly, I thought you were a bit of a damn nuisance this morning. I don’t think so now.”

“I have my uses,” I said. “I made a good guinea pig for Schneider to experiment with and give himself away. But he still has to be caught.”

“He still has to be caught,” Gordon agreed. “The woman has disappeared completely, but Peter has been traced as far as the Bomber Plant. I’m on my way there now.”

“Take me along.”

The sullen shadow passed over Gordon’s face and drew down the corners of his mouth. For five seconds he said nothing.

Then he said, “Let’s go.”

I PICKED UP A trench coat I had hanging in my office and we went down to the President’s office on the first floor. Gordon went in to report to Galloway and I remembered that I had no money in my pockets and went down the hall to the Business Office to cash a check.

On the way out I met Helen Madden in the hall. She was walking slowly and meticulously like a woman learning to walk again after a long illness. She was very well groomed, as if she had had nothing else to do all night. She came up to me and put a kid-gloved hand on my arm and said:

“I’m sorry, Bob. I thought I was doing the right thing but I made a mistake.”