Banner nodded. “It’s not your fault, Red.” He glared around. “What kinda gun this time? D’you know?”
McKitrick answered: “The medical examiner thinks it’s a.38.”
Banner snorted. “An American gun! This’s striking closer to home.”
Odell said: “There’s something else I’ve got to tell you, Senator. It might help you. I confess it doesn’t mean a thing to me. In the park today Gertie slipped this into my hand. She acted mighty secretive about it.” He gave Banner the paper with the circles drawn on it.
“Whatzit mean?” snapped Banner.
“Circles within circles. Wheels within wheels. You tell me, Senator.”
Banner looked at it front and back and held it up to the light to see if there were any pinpricks in it. Then, without saying anything, he crumpled it up and shoved it into his marsupial pocket. Plainly he could not make head or tail of it, but he wasn’t going to say so.
Though they stayed there till dawn they found no other clue to point to Gertrude’s murderer.
McKitrick woke up to find his phone ringing insistently and Banner on the other end of the wire.
“You never sleep, do you?” snorted McKitrick.
“Hardly ever, Mac. We ain’t got time for that now. It’s after breakfast. Come to the Legation and bring that small arms expert with you.”
“Captain Cozzens?”
“Yaas. Him. I’ve figgered out what everything means.”
“What put you on it?”
“Those circles.”
“Suppose you quit being so damned mysterious, Banner, and-”
“Get cracking to the Legation,” interrupted Banner. He hung up.
Banner was sitting in a leather chair, comfortably waiting for them to arrive. He bobbed his big grizzled head at McKitrick and Cozzens. His grizzled mane looked like a fright wig this morning, as if he had been trying to comb it with an eggbeater.
“Gennelmen,” he said, “this won’t take too much of your precious time. Lemme get on with it. First off, you will swear that there ain’t any Tokarev pistols hidden in that private office.”
“Of course not,” responded McKitrick a little testily. His face bore the results of a very hasty shave. There was a nick on his chin. “There isn’t as much as a needle hidden in there that we don’t know of.”
“And you can search me and find out I’m not packing a Russian pop-gun.”
“We’ll take your word for it, Senator,” said McKitrick shortly.
“We get on together,” chuckled Banner. He got up with a heave and a vast grunt. “You two sit here on the lounge, the way you were the other day with Odell, Cap’n.” He watched them sharply as they followed his suggestion. “I’m going in there.” He entered the private office, where Gosling and Gertrude had been killed, leaving the intervening door open. He was out of sight from the two watchers for about five minutes, then he reappeared and stood in the doorway, filling the frame with his bulk, his hands deep in the bulging frockcoat pockets. “Nothing up my sleeve, mates,” he announced.
They both stared at him, not knowing what to expect. Then both of them leaped to their feet.
Three loud shots had crashed out in the empty office behind Banner’s back!
Banner did not even take his hands out of his pockets. “And there you have it,” he said.
“But, great Godfrey!” yipped McKitrick, pushing past Banner to see who else was hidden in the private office. “Who fired that pistol?”
“It was a Tokarev automatic!” said Cozzens. “I’ll swear to that!”
“But there isn’t anyone here but you!” McKitrick glared helplessly around the room.
“Neverthless-” began Banner. “But let it keep awhile. There’re more important things like searches and seizures to be made.”
“Confound you, Banner!” said McKitrick, but he was in good humor about it.
“You can begin by arresting-”
The search was fruitless until Banner suggested that what they were after might be on microfilm and if they could not find microfilm in all the obvious places, it might be hidden in the electric light sockets.
That was where they found it.
They had all the proof they needed to arrest their man for espionage and murder.
And Carroll Lockyear, the export-import man, almost pulled his King Tut beard out by the roots when they confronted him.
McKitrick and the Assistant Secretary of State made impressive members of Banner’s small audience. Banner was prancing back and forth, gnawing a long stogie, as if he were holding a press conference. But he had not let the reporters in yet. They were all ganged up outside in the hall, waiting.
The Assistant Secretary of State fingered his chin reflectively. “The riddle of the sealed envelope-”
“Yaas, yaas!” Banner chuckled. “It’s simple when you know the sorta thimble – rigging that went on behind the scenes. I said in the beginning that I thought the murder was too damned impossible cuz one person alone couldn’t’ve accomplished it. Lockyear is the murderer and spy, all right, but he had forced poor Gertie to help him. Y’see, he was a Commie agent and Gertie told us that her crippled mother and her father are still stranded in East Germany. You can now see how easy it was for him to get her to agree to his scheme. He could tell her he’d get ’em outta East Germany if she played ball. If she still didn’t agree, he could easily threaten to turn the old folks over to the untender mercies of the MVD agents.”
He paused a moment before going on. “Gosling was getting onto Lockyear’s trail. Some time before the murder, Lockyear used a standard tape recorder. Lockyear let the tape run silently for three minutes, then he fired his Tokarev pistol three times near the recorder. He now had a tape recording of three minutes of dead silence, followed by three quickly fired shots. He handed that roll of tape over to Gertie for her to put in Gosling’s private office where he could get his hands on it later on. When he went into Gosling’s office to commit the murder that morning he had in his briefcase the Tokarev pistol with silencer on it, and also in the briefcase was a large manila mailing envelope that was a duplicate of the one to be delivered to Gertie’s desk by the messenger service. The gun that was delivered to Gertie by the special messenger route was probably a toy pistol, so that if the envelope were opened prematurely the whole thing could be laughed off as a practical joke.
“It was all timed to the split second. Lockyear stalled with Gosling till almost 11:30, talking business, then swiftly he pulled the silenced automatic outta the briefcase and shot Gosling in the chest three times with it before his victim could blink or cry out. Naturally the shots were not heard outside the room with the door closed. He whipped out the prepared envelope, snatched the silencer off the pistol – barrel, and shoved the pistol, still smoking, into the envelope, sealing it immediately. Next he set the prepared reel of tape on the recorder alongside Gosling’s desk – there’s one in every office and you’ve noticed that Gosling’s office had all the modern equipment – and then picked up the envelope and briefcase. It was now, according to his watch, 11:27. He flipped the tape recorder switch to on. Three minutes of dead silence, remember, then three shots. He put his arm around both the envelope and the briefcase so that the briefcase would entirely conceal the envelope to anyone waiting in the lounge. He came out of the private office and walked to Gertie’s desk on which the second envelope with the toy gun in it was lying, waiting to be delivered at 11:30 sharp. He put his briefcase down on her desk, so that it covered both envelopes. After getting Gertie to jot down his phony appointment for next Tuesday, Lockyear picked up his briefcase again – together with the envelope that had been lying on Gertie’s desk! In its place he left the one with the real murder weapon in it. He carried the other envelope out with him, still concealed behind his briefcase, and nobody was aware of the switch. So the gun that had just been used to commit the murder was now waiting for Gertie to carry it back in. She had been forced into it. She knew Gosling was already dead. She had to play out her part. She pretended to talk to Gosling on the interphone to give the illusion that Gosling was still alive after Lockyear left. Then she started to go into the private office, looked at her watch, knew the three minutes were almost up, then carried the sealed envelope in.”