“I wasn’t listening to Craig after this. Sheriff Carter had made a sudden pounce on another picture in the group and was comparing them with the lens, the smoke from his cigarette curling up one side of his face unheeded.
“Okay, Red,” I told him, “you owe me a dinner for that one. I’ve got to get busy.” I rang off.
The sheriff straightened up, took the corn-shuck butt from his mouth and dropped it deliberately in the cuspidor. He laid the magnifying glass away in the drawer and gathered up the pictures carefully into their envelope. His face was grim but the lines of uncertainty between his eyes had smoothed out. “I’ve got him, Chet.”
“You know who did it?”
“Yep. He’s a pretty fancy dodger and we’ve made a couple of bum casts and nearly got our rope on the wrong critter. But I’ve got him hog-tied and ready for the iron quicker than you can say ‘scat.’ ”
“You want me to bring Sibbons back for another talk?”
“Sibbons? Hell’s fire, son, he’s one of the mavericks that come near leading us clean off the trail. No. We’ll want to hang onto him as a witness but he’s not the killer.”
I still couldn’t realize what new element had entered the case to make the sheriff so positive. “You don’t mean that woman who got bashful at the last minute?”
Carter pulled his hat down a little further over his eyes. Then he reached back and flipped his short-barreled .45 from its leather pocket holster on his hip. He swung out the cylinder, checking the load, and returned it. “No. She was never in it at all.”
I followed him out of the office, knowing the old man had his own way of breaking a case, and was content to let him handle it in spite of my curiosity. When we got in the car all he said was, “Back to the Parker-Kern. And this is definitely the last time.”
Arriving at the hotel Carter and I made our way through the gala dinner-dance through to the manager’s office. He was in his usual evening conference with the house staff but on seeing us enter the anteroom he excused himself and came out at once.
“I’d like to talk to your housekeeper,” the sheriff announced quietly.
“She’ll be in her room at this hour, but I can have her down in a few minutes.”
“Don’t bother. I think I can find out what I need over the house phone.”
The old man wedged himself into one of the booths and spoke for perhaps two minutes. When he came out he nodded to me and we caught an elevator.
At the door of the murder room Carter knocked; it was opened by Deputy Joe Todd. Behind him I saw a straight chair tilted against the wall, looking strangely out of place in the lush setting. Beside it on the floor was a tray containing the dishes from Todd’s dinner and a large pot of coffee. “Nobody’s tried to get in, Sheriff,” Todd whispered. “Nothing’s been touched, either.”
“Fine, Joe. Let’s get your chair and the tray out in the hall. I want the room just the way it was. Durkin in his room there?”
“Unless he went out quietly. You want him?”
“Yes — to tell us about one thing in the arrangement of the room.”
Durkin seemed to have recovered entirely from the shock of sudden death striking so close to him. He was freshly shaved and wearing a dinner jacket. “I understand you’ve caught the murderer, Sheriff, and that congratulations are in order. I was sorry to hear that it was young Sibbons — he seemed like a decent kid. What on earth could have been his motive in bludgeoning the old man?”
“The motive for the killing is clear enough to me,” Carter said, drawing out the envelope of photographs. “What I’m interested in right now is neither why or how Trumbull was killed. I want to know where he was killed.”
Durkin frowned and looked at me but I simply shrugged and waited for Sheriff Ike to tell us more.
“You mean he was killed somewhere else and brought back here into the bedroom?” Joe Todd exploded.
“I didn’t say that. But this is a good-sized room. Tell me this, Mr. Durkin; that armchair where Trumbull was sitting when you found him — was that always in the same location? Ever since Trumbull moved into the room?”
Durkin frowned. “Now that you mention it, Sheriff, I seem to recall that it was somewhere else, but Trumbull wasn’t the kind of man to let anything stand in the way of his comfort. He’d have moved the bed into the middle of the floor if it suited him better that way.”
“I see. How long would you say the armchair has been over there?”
“Several days at least.”
The old peace officer nodded as if satisfied.
I found my own attention fastening on the armchair with its sinister dark splotches. Where the dead man’s body had rested was marked with a chalk outline on the upholstery, and two chalk ovals on the fleur-de-lis pattern of the rug showed where his feet had touched the floor.
“The thing that bothered me from the beginning,” Ike Carter mused, as if thinking out loud, “was why in thunder a man like Trumbull didn’t get the wind up when he saw the killer heading for him with a loose lamp. Any other sort of bludgeon might not be suspicious but the killer had to pick up that lamp, jerk out the plug, rip off the shade, up-end it and swing it at Trumbull’s head. Bellhops don’t come into a room at 6 in the morning and start monkeying with the lamps. Here, Joe — you go in and unlock the connecting door between this room and Mr. Durkin’s. I want to get another angle of view on this room.”
Joe went out the corridor door and reentered through the connecting door, the sheriff meanwhile having slipped off the catch from our side. Through the open door I could see the neighboring room, exactly like the one in which we stood.
“Now, then,” the sheriff continued, “let’s try to reconstruct this business. If I were to stand here, in this doorway, and Trumbull was sitting with his back to me — if that armchair was just reversed — I could hit him with a lamp or anything else. If I could get the lamp.”
Joe Todd was looking more and more bewildered. Durkin was blank and I must confess that I was still in the dark.
“However crazy that may sound I think it’s just the way the thing was done. I think Trumbull was sitting over here—”
“But the bloodstains!” I interrupted. “Look at that pool of blood. There’s not a drop over there where you’re standing!”
“That’s right, Chet. But look at these photographs.” He handed them to me. “Red Craig’s ‘before and after’ joke turned out to be the truth. These rooms are furnished alike and to specification. The housekeeper told me that just now. Look at the rug patterns in those two photos. All the flowers in one rug — the undisturbed room — point toward the windows. But the ones in here point back toward the door. Trumbull was moved after he died. But the killer moved the whole works — rug, chair, and body. He couldn’t quite get away with it because the legs of the bed are in the way and he didn’t have time. So he left the rug scrounged up that way and upset everything else in the room to keep it company. Whoever killed Trumbull stood in this doorway, where I’m standing now.”
Durkin snorted. “Obviously you are implying, Sheriff, that while I was talking on long distance, I calmly allowed someone to pass through my room and murder the man next door!”
Ike Carter leaned back against the door jamb. “You might. And then again you might be in it even deeper. You know what I think happened? I think Trumbull’s telephone was upset after he was killed. I think the killer took that long bureau scarf there and took a hitch around the base of the telephone with it — the end of it is creased like it had been tied around something. That way the killer could stand in your room, pick up your phone and start talking and, by giving the scarf a yank, upset the telephone in here.”
Durkin’s face had turned an ashy gray. “It’s insane! It’s the most idiotic thing I ever heard of! You said yourself that the — the person who did it would have to pick up the lamp first and Trumbull would have seen him and tried to defend himself. If you think I did it, what about the lamp?”