Carol turned her head sharply aside.
“I’m sorry,” Burgess murmured.
She turned back again. “It’s part of the story. We should know it.”
“Then and only then he went out and called me. And when he came back he stayed down at the street door, and was careful to engage the cop on the beat in conversation the whole time he was waiting for me, to establish that he’d remained down there in full sight, if it became necessary.”
“Did you get what it was right away?” Henderson asked.
“I examined the body down at the Morgue later that night, after I’d sent him home, and I saw the little red nick across each shin the thread had made. I saw the traces of dust on the back of his neck too. I figured what it was then. It was just a matter of building it up from those two points. It would have been hard to get him on it, though. It might have been done. I preferred to wait and get him for the main thing. I couldn’t have got him for the main thing on the strength of that blind man incident, that was a cinch. And I didn’t want to grab him prematurely only to see him get away again. Once I had him, I wanted to hang onto him. So I kept my mouth closed and went on paying out rope.”
“And the thing about that reefer smoker you say he had nothing to do with?”
“In spite of the discrepancy of razors, that was only what it seemed. Cliff Milburn slashed his own throat in a fit of drug-induced depression and fear. The safety blade must have been a discard berthed under the shelf paper either by a former tenant or by some friend of his who came in and used his bathroom to shave in. A behaviorist would be interested. Even when it came to suicide, he instinctively avoided using his own implement for anything other than what it was intended for. That’s a trait common to all of us; that’s why we get sore when our wives sharpen pencils with them.”
Carol murmured softly, “I’ll never be able to go near one again, after that night.”
“But the death of Mrs. Douglas was his doing?” Henderson questioned interestedly.
“That was even more adroit than the other one. A long strip or runner of carpeting ran across the highly polished floor surface, in her place, from the foyer step-down, at one end, to directly under the French windows, at the other. What first put the idea into his head was that he skidded slightly himself, on the quite dangerous flooring, a little earlier in the proceedings, and she had laughed at him. Eye-measurement did the rest, while he was talking to her. The straight line sweep of the rug, of course, was almost an invitation. He marked an invisible X on it to show where she must stand in order to have the greater part of her length go outside the window when she was overbalanced, and carefully retained its exact location in his mind from then on. Which is not the easy feat it sounds, when you are engaged in moving about yourself and talking with someone, and can only give it part of your attention.
“This isn’t a hypothetical reconstruction on my part, I have all this from him at first hand, in black and white. From that point on, there was a sort of minuet of death danced by the two of them, during which he delicately maneuvered her into just the right position. When he had completed writing out the check he stood up with it and returned toward the window, as if to have the fresh air hasten its drying. Then he shifted until he was precisely to one side of the position he wanted her to take, but off the rug. Then he drew her on from where she had remained by seeming to offer her the check. Passively extending it toward her, but without moving his own feet, so that she had to come forward for it. It’s the same principle they use in bull fighting. The bull follows the cape away from the fighter’s body. She followed the check up to one side of his body. When she had fallen into the exact spot he wanted her to, he relaxed his fingers and let the check pass to her.
“Her attention was taken up in scanning it, and for a moment or two, she stood motionless. He quickly moved away from her, strode the whole length of the room, as if taking an abrupt departure then and there. Then when he’d reached the far end of it, and was on the step clear of it, he turned to look back at her and called ‘Good-by!’ That brought her head up from the check, that caused her to turn toward him — and at the same time present her full back to the window. She was now in the exact position it was necessary for her to be. For if she’d gone out frontwards or sidewards she might have been able to cling to the window frame and arrest herself. Backwards it was an impossibility, the human arm-socket doesn’t work that way.
“He dipped down, flung up the rug at full arm’s length overhead, let it drop again; that was all he had to do. She went out like a puff of wind. She didn’t even have time to scream, he says. He must have caught her on the out-breath. She was already gone by the time her flown-off shoe ticked back again to the floor.”
Carol crinkled up the corners of her eyes, “Those things are worse than the ones with knife or gun, there’s so much more treachery involved in them!”
“Yes, but much harder to prove to a jury. He didn’t lay a hand on her, he killed her from twenty or twenty-two feet away. The clue was still in the rug itself, of course. I saw it the minute I got in there. The ripples were at his end. Where she had stood it was smooth, only just shifted further back along the floor. If it had been an honest skid or misstep, it would have been the other way around. The pleats would have been at her end, where her feet kicked the rug back on itself. His end would have been flat and undisturbed, the agitation couldn’t possibly have transferred itself that far over.
“There was a cigarette left burning there, as if by her. That was to make it seem that the fall had occurred just previous to our arrival, whereas he had telephoned me some fifteen minutes before. Or if I wanted to disregard that, he had been continuously in my company for fully eight to ten minutes before, counting from the time I met him in front of the fire station.
“It didn’t fool me for a moment, but the mechanics of how he’d done it gave me three full days’ work before I could figure it out satisfactorily. The ash stand had an orifice in its center through which ashes were meant to drop, all the way down through the long stem into the hollow base which was meant for that purpose. There was supposed to be a trap, but he jammed that so it would stay open. He simply took three ordinary size cigarettes, removed a little tobacco from the mouth end of the two foremost ones, and telescoped them together to form one triple the usual length but retaining the trademark of a small size cigarette at the far end, in case there should be enough left to investigate. Then he lit it, left it spearing the top of the stand in a long inclined plane, one end down into the open stem and resting against it. A cigarette left burning like that in a slanted position, and over an opening, will seldom go out, even when it’s not fanned by the breath as in smoking. The slow ember simply worked its way back from cigarette to cigarette without a break. As the first two were consumed, they dropped off down the stem without leaving a trace. The third, which was resting wholly on the tilted perimeter of the smoke stand, remained in place to the end, forming just what he wanted it to, a perfect one-cigarette butt by the time we got there.
“This alibi, however, handicapped him in another way. It would have been better if he’d skipped it. It limited how far away he could go on the fool’s errand she was supposed to have sent him; he had to be sure of getting back soon enough for it to be of any use to him. He had to pick some place in the immediate vicinity, and he had to pick some place that would at sight be identifiable as a complete hoax, so there would be no excuse for the two of us to linger around investigating or asking questions. Hence the fire-house gag. One look was enough, and we beat it back again to her place.