An interior wall had apparently been removed here, so that the vestibule and the former living room had become one oddly-shaped receptionist’s office. It was appropriately furnished, including paintings that might have been views of the forests and lakes of Visaria but that looked to me like the forests and lakes of northern Michigan. A small rack of tourist literature near the entrance had an indefinably scraggy and hopeless air about it, as though even the Visarians could think of no sensible reason for anyone to visit their country.
Several people were now in this room. Two of them were Staples and Bray, several others appeared also to have some sort of official connection with today’s event, and the last two were a weepy-eyed heavyset girl sitting at the receptionist’s desk and a truculent-looking bruiser hulking on one of the vinyl sofas. He reminded me for some reason of this morning’s funeral, probably because he seemed ethnic in much the same way. If Laura’s husband had grown up big enough to play professional football he might have looked a lot like this fellow.
Staples, seeing me arrive, came over and said, quietly, “I won’t introduce you. We’ll just take a little walk through and I’ll describe the situation.”
“Right.”
“You see the girl sitting at the desk?”
“The receptionist?”
“Right. She came back from lunch at one o’clock this afternoon. So did the guard.”
“The blocking back on the sofa?”
“That’s the one. Visaria has its own political problems, just like everybody else. His job is to sit out here and make sure there aren’t any incidents.”
“No wonder he doesn’t look happy.”
“The point is,” Staples said, “both of those characters were in this room from one o’clock until after the body was found. Neither of them left for a second, not to go to the John, not for anything. They both swear to it.”
“Could they be in cahoots with one another?”
“Look at them,” Staples suggested.
I looked at them. Judging from appearances — generally a good way to judge, by the way — between them they might just be able to figure out how to open a box of corn flakes. “Okay,” I said.
“Now let’s go to the scene of the crime.”
Staples led the way. We had to walk through the little cluster of people near the inner door, and it turned out that at least two of them were Visarian. Or anyway foreign, since they were speaking together in some language that seemed to consist principally of the letter “k,” spoken with varying degrees of emphasis. One of these two intercepted Staples on his way by, saying, “You are making progress?”
“We are making progress,” Staples told him. They smiled at one another, and Staples moved on, me following. I too smiled at the Visarian, and he smiled back.
Staples paused at the door. “As you see, it had to be broken in.”
“Locked from the inside, eh?”
“Locked and bolted. The door fit snugly. There’s no way to throw that bolt except from this side.”
I studied the door, the wrenched wood, the hardware. I said, “And I assume the only fingerprints on the bolt belonged to the dead man.”
“Of course.”
“This is a pretty elaborate setup,” I said. “What’s it all about?”
“There’d been threats on this fellow’s life,” Staples said. “Some political thing at home. So he spent his working hours in this room with the door locked on the inside. If anyone wanted to see him, the receptionist would buzz, tell him who was waiting, and he’d come over and unlock the door.”
“All right.” I looked hesitantly into this inner room. “The body still here?”
“No, it was taken away. He’d been strangled with wire, sitting there at his desk.”
My adam’s apple gave a little twinge. “Charming,” I said, and roved around the room a bit.
It was almost identical with the room outside; same ceiling, same paneled walls, same spongy carpeted floor. A little money had been spent on the desk, but the other furnishings were still bottom-of-the-line from some office furniture discount house. There was, however, a paper shredder in one corner, to show that this was a serious diplomatic operation.
A pair of tall windows at the back had a clear close view of a brick wall. Heavy iron bars masked both windows on the outside. I said, “I assume those bars have been checked.”
“Just as solid as they look,” Staples assured me.
A door behind the desk led to a small bathroom done in the same minimal style as everything else. This would be the corner of the house directly behind the staircase. The one window in the bathroom was also guarded by iron bars, and was in any event too small to crawl through. I noticed two dirt smudges on the vinyl tile floor, but nothing else in here of interest.
When I returned to the office, Bray had come in looking glum and harassed. “I hope you feel brilliant,” he told me.
“Not yet,” I admitted.
Staples said to Bray, “Give the man time.”
“All he wants,” Bray said. To me he said, “By the way, in that Templeton case, the woman that went off the terrace, it looks as though you and Fred were right.”
“Oh, really?”
Bray shrugged. “We never came up with anything,” he said. “I resisted the idea, but I guess it really was suicide after all.”
So George had gotten away with it. Good for him. I said, “They can’t all be murders, can they?”
“I suppose not,” Bray said.
Staples said, “But this one definitely is. Let me tell you the situation, Carey. The chief of mission, Ivor Kaklov, lived here in the building, up on the top floor. The receptionist and the guard also live here. They spent an ordinary morning, Kaklov in this office and the other two outside, and at twelve Kaklov came out and they went upstairs for lunch.”
I said, “Locking the office behind them?”
“No,” Staples said. “It was only kept locked when Kaklov was in it.”
“How about the front door?”
Bray said, “That was locked, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the kind you can open by slipping a credit card down between the door and the jamb.”
I said, “So the killer came into the building while everybody was at lunch, and hid in here. In the bathroom, in fact.”
Staples said, “Ah, good man. You saw those smudges on the bathroom floor.”
“Of course,” I said. “We have sloppy weather outside. Even if the killer took a cab he wouldn’t get out right at this address, so he did some walking and he tracked dirty snow in with him. It melted while he waited for Kaklov to finish lunch.”
Bray said, “That part we can work out for ourselves. We know how the killer got in, and what he did after he got here. The question is, how in hell did he get out again?”
I nodded. “That’s the question, all right. I wonder what the answer is.”
Nobody told me. So I turned away again, wandering around the room, looking at this and that. There was a certain atmosphere of disarrangement in the area of the desk, which was only to be expected, but otherwise the place retained its neat anonymity.
Well, not quite. The paper shredder was out about three feet from the wall, standing alone and awkward into the room like a volunteer robot. It didn’t look as though it belonged there, so I went over to check, and from the indentations in the carpet I could see that the machine usually stood against the wall. It had been moved out here, by some person for some reason.