I took them around to the shed and showed them the body through the window. Jeronczyk asked me questions and I answered them; I also gave him some references, including Eberhardt. He was not particularly impressed. But neither was he hostile or suspicious. Just a wary cop investigating an evident case of homicide.
So I got sent back to my car, which was fine with me, while he and the others set about jimmying one of the shed’s windows. A lot of empty time passed. I keep an overnight bag in the trunk, in the event I get caught out of town unexpectedly, and inside the bag I keep a couple of pulp magazines. I got one of them out and tried to read a story by John K. Butler, but my mind was elsewhere. I kept having mental flashes of Meeker’s body inside that shed, twisted into a stiffened posture with his head opened up and bloody. And I kept thinking about the two names, Colodny’s and Cybil Wade’s, presumably written by Meeker on the map of Arizona.
A second sheriff’s car showed up after a while, this one containing a couple of plainclothesmen and a guy carrying a doctor’s satchel. The younger of the cops was outfitted with a field lab kit and a camera. All three of them went to where one of the deputies had been stationed by the house, and were shown around to the rear. Ten minutes later the older plainclothesman came back alone and made straight for my car and me inside it.
He was about my age and had a notch out of his right ear, as if somebody had taken a bite from it; his name was Loomis. And he was so polite it made me wonder if he was putting on an act: he called me sir every second sentence, and apologized twice for the inconvenience of having to detain me. But he also copied down all the information from my investigator’s license as well as the names and addresses and telephone numbers of my references, and made me tell twice how and why I happened to come here today and find Meeker’s body.
We were just finishing up round two when a country ambulance pulled into the drive. Loomis thanked me again for my cooperation, touched his hat like John Wayne in a Three Mesquiteers movie from the thirties-you had to see it to believe it-and went over to conduct the two attendants around to the shed. That left me alone again. I got out of the car and walked around it a couple of times, dog-fashion, and then got back in and looked at the truss and the you-too-can-be-a-detective ads in the back of the pulp.
Another twenty minutes crept off into history. At the end of which Loomis and Jeronczyk reappeared and headed my way again. Behind them the ambulance attendants, with the doctor or coroner’s assistant alongside, came slogging into view carrying Meeker’s sheet-covered body on a stretcher. I got out of the car one more time and stood with Loomis and Jeronczyk, watching the attendants load the body inside the ambulance.
Jeronczyk said, “Well, that’s that.”
Loomis nodded and looked at me. “You’re free to leave now, sir. We’d appreciate it, though, if you’d stop by the office in Rio Vista and sign a statement. It’s necessary in cases of accidental death.”
“Accidental death?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you sure it was an accident?”
“Reasonably sure,” Jeronczyk said. “He was up on that stepladder, fussing with one of the wall hooks, and he either slipped or the ladder gave way under him. He had the ax in his hand, or maybe it was lying on the floor; either way, he fell on it, and it split his head wide open. Happens once in a while, that kind of thing. Just a freak accident.”
“Then how come he had the door locked?”
Loomis said, “Sir?”
“Why would a man go into a small shed like that, on his own property, and lock the door before he climbs up on a stepladder? It doesn’t make sense.”
Jeronczyk shrugged. “People do strange things sometimes. Have strange quirks. Maybe he was paranoid about security.”
“The door to his studio was unlocked,” I said. “That’s how I was able to get in to use the telephone.”
“You seem to think he met with foul play,” Loomis said mildly. “Why is that?”
“I told you before, he was mixed up in a killing in San Francisco over the weekend. It’s a funny coincidence he should get himself killed in a freak accident two days later.”
“You say he was ‘mixed up’ in this San Francisco murder. If that’s so, why didn’t the police detain him?”
“I explained that, too: they’ve arrested somebody else.”
“But you don’t believe this other person is guilty.”
“No, I don’t.”
“And yet you have no evidence of any wrongdoing against Mr. Meeker. Speculations only. Isn’t that true, sir?”
“It is unless you found something among Meeker’s papers to connect him to the extortion matter.”
“We didn’t,” Loomis said. “We found nothing at all incriminating among his papers.”
“Besides,” Jeronczyk said, “there’s no way he could have been murdered inside that shed. The door was locked from the inside and both windows were stuck fast. It took us five minutes to jimmy one of them open so we could get in ourselves.”
“There are all sorts of locked-room gimmicks,” I said.
He gave me a skeptical look. “Such as?”
“I don’t know offhand. I’m not John Dickson Carr.”
“Who’s John Dickson Carr?”
“All right, look, here’s one way. That shed is pretty small; suppose the walls aren’t fully anchored to the ground or the floor; suppose there’s a way you can tilt the whole thing off its foundation-against a couple of heavy braces, say, to keep it from toppling over. One man could kill another inside, walk out through the door, tilt the shed, crawl back inside under the tilted end, lock the door, crawl out again, and then push the shed back into an upright position around the body.”
Neither Loomis nor Jeronczyk said anything. They were looking at me now as if they suspected I might not be playing with a full deck.
“Sure it’s farfetched,” I said, “and I don’t believe it happened that way. But it’s the kind of thing I mean by a locked-room gimmick-something that could be done to make murder seem impossible.”
“Nothing like that happened here,” Loomis said. His voice was patient and his eyes said that he really didn’t mind standing around and humoring a half-wit private detective from San Francisco. “That shed is solid all the way around and top to bottom. Nobody could tilt one end of it except maybe with a crane.”
“I never doubted that. Look, it was only an example-”
“There wasn’t any gimmicking done,” Jeronczyk said. “The door was locked from the inside and the key was in the lock. You saw that yourself through the window, right? And there were two clear latent prints on the key, both of which be longed to the deceased. Now what does that tell you?”
“That he handled the key at one time or another,” I said, “but not necessarily that he was the one who locked the shed door. The killer could have worn gloves, couldn’t he?”
Loomis sighed. Patiently. “How would this killer of yours have gotten out of the shed?”
“Maybe he wasn’t in the shed when he locked the door.”
“You mean he was already outside?”
“Yes.”
“And how did he lock the door on the inside?”
“Maybe he used a couple of pieces of twine. It’s an old trick: You tie the cord around the key, using slip knots, and run the two lengths under the bottom of the door; then you close the door and manipulate the twine to turn the key in the lock. When you’re through all you have to do is jerk hard to loosen the slip knots and then pull the cord out under the door.”
“Interesting idea,” Jeronczyk said, as if he thought it wasn’t.
“There’s a broken piece of fishing twine near the shed door, in the grass. I noticed it; you must have too.”
“We noticed it, yes, sir,” Loomis said.
“The killer could have used it the way I described and dropped it there afterward.”