“Maybe you haven’t, but I have!” Regina guffawed. “Give me the key so I can unlock the door.”
“My professional conscience would never rest easy if I let a patient leave without completing treatment.” He closed in on her.
“The hell with your professional conscience!” Regina giggled. “Give me that key, you rapist!”
“Now, my dear, this is going to hurt me more than it is you!” He had her by the shoulders now.
As if reacting to the pressure on her shoulders, Regina sank to her knees. Surprised at this seeming compliance, and mistaking the reason for it, Dr. Enright presented his genitals to her. He waited expectantly.
Regina didn’t keep him waiting long. She reached out and grasped his erect penis firmly. With her other hand she grabbed his ankle. Then she shifted her weight—-just the way she’d been taught in her judo class.
Yelling blue murder, Dr. Enright found himself in the air. His slight weight was spread across Regina’s shoulders. Tilting him so that he was upside down, maintaining the grips of both of her hands, Regina whirled him like a top. The contents of his pockets came tumbling out and scattered over the floor.
Regina tossed him aside in a heap. She bent over and picked up his keyring from the floor. She unlocked the door. “Ta-ta,” she said, still laughing merrily as the door closed behind her.
Seeing Regina appear in the outer office, the receptionist turned to an aging dowager who was waiting. “Doctor will see you now,” she told her.
“Or vice versa,” Regina guffawed, startling them both. She was thinking that Dr. Enright was probably too stunned to replace his swollen manhood in his trousers before the dowager entered.
Regina left then, and found a phone booth. She called Angus MacTeague. “I want you to send one of ATOMICS’ lab technicians up to my place,” she told him, giggling.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” She laughed again.
“What kind of technician?”
“I’m not sure. . . . Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! . . .”
“Is somebody tickling you?”
“Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! . . . Of course not! . . . Hee- hee! . . .”
“What do you want the technician for?”
Regina told him, chortling.
“All right. I have just the man. . . . And Regina, whatever it is you’re smoking, send me a kilo.” Mac-Teague hung up.
Regina took a cab home. About an hour after she got there, the lab technician arrived. By then she had her hilarity under control. She told him what she wanted and he set about his work with brisk professionalism. It didn’t take him long. “I’ll have to go back to the lab and check this out,” he told her. “You’ll have a report first thing in the morning.” Regina thanked him, saw him out, and went straight to bed. It had been an exhausting day, and she slept like the proverbial log.
It was morning when the messenger delivering the lab report woke her with the doorbell. She read it with her first cup of coffee. Sipping at a second cup, she called MacTcague again. Overcoming his protests, she got him to agree to come straight down to her apartment.
When MacTcague arrived, he wasn’t alone. Calvin Cabot was with him. He had been in MacTeague’s office when Regina called. The purpose of his visit had been to fulfill the threat he’d made to Regina to have her taken off the case. MacTcague, hoping Regina might really have stumbled onto something that would change Cabot’s mind, had persuaded the banker to come along with him.
“Laughing Girl, this had better be good,” Mac-Teague told Regina out of earshot of Cabot.
“Don’t worry. It is,” she whispered back.
Cabot was openly hostile. Regina wasted no time trying to mollify him. She got right down to the evidence.
“The ATOMICS technician went over the edge of the front door to my apartment, and the door’s frame, with a high-powered magnifying glass,” she began.
“Magnifying glass indeed!” Cabot snorted. “I’m not paying ATOMICS so this girl can play Sherlock Holmes!”
“Give her a chance, Mr. Cabot,” MacTeague said soothingly.
“His examination revealed miniscule traces of a foreign substance clinging to the door-edge and the frame at a point just above where the lock is set into the door,” Regina continued. “The way it’s positioned, there’s a tiny space, little bigger than a pinhole, between door and frame when the door is closed. The substance found in this space was taken back to the lab and analyzed. The report identifies it as a kind of compressed fuzz which could only have been left behind by the abrading of dental floss.”
“Get to the point!” Cabot was irritable. “What’s all this supposed to prove?”
“Just this,” Regina told him evenly. “The reason I was arrested for Faith Venable’s murder in the first place was that I was the only one in the apartment when the police arrived. And the door was locked from the inside.”
“I don’t understand why they let you go,” Cabot told her bluntly. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re still the major suspect.”
“They let her go because it was proved to them that she couldn’t have committed the murder,” MacTeague interjected.
“The thing nobody could figure out,” Regina went on, “including the police, was how the murderer could have committed the crime, let himself out of the apartment, and locked the door from the inside.”
“Unless you were the killer,” Cabot persisted nastily.
“But I wasn’t.” Regina kept her cool. “Still, even I couldn’t imagine how the murderer did it. Until yesterday, when I came up against a lock very similar to the one on my front door. The only difference was that that one had a keyhole set into the knob. But the principle is the same. I saw how it could be locked from a distance without touching it.”
“From the outside?” MacTeague asked.
“No,” Regina admitted. “That one was locked that way from the inside. But it can be locked from the outside, and my door was.”
“How?” Cabot asked sarcastically. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”
“I shan’t. Come with me to the door and I’ll show you how.”
MacTeague and the reluctant Cabot followed her to the front door. Regina produced a long piece of dental floss. Using a slipknot, she tied it to the upper part of the oblong knob by which the lock was turned. She set the knob in a vertical position. “It’s off the latch now,” she told them. “If you close the door, it can still be opened from the outside.”
MacTeague, trailed by Cabot, put it to the test. They went out into the hall and closed the door behind them. MacTeague opened it easily by turning the outside doorknob. They re-entered. MacTeague nodded to Regina.
Now she ran the dental floss carefully around the door-edge. She stepped out into the hall, motioning them to come with her. She closed the door and pulled the dental floss. Then she reeled it in and, holding both ends in her hand, she invited them to try the door. First MacTeague did, and then Cabot. The door was locked.
Regina opened it with a key. She re-tied the dental floss to the knob of the lock, set it at the vertical -- open—position once again, and invited them to watch the results from the inside. Then she exited, closing the door behind her.
Inside, the two men saw the dental floss pulled taut. The oblong knob snapped to a horizontal—locked-— position, the slipknot came out with the sudden yank, and the dental floss was pulled through between the door and the frame. A moment later, using her key, Regina rejoined them. “And that,” she announced proudly, “is how it was made to look as if the murder took place in a locked apartment.”
“But why would the killer go to all that trouble?” MacTeague wondered.
“Because he wanted it to look like I was the guilty one.” Regina had thought it all out. “I don’t think it was that he had anything against me particularly,” she said. “It was just that if the police had an open-and-shut case with only one suspect, he’d be home free.”