“Sure,” Sherrard said. “But then what? We still didn’t find anything – not a single thing – that could have been used as part of a homemade zip.”
I suggested we go back and make another search, and so we drove once more to the Dawes Building. We re-combed Chillingham’s private office – we’d had a police seal on it to make sure nothing could be disturbed – and we re-combed the surrounding area. We didn’t find so much as an iron filing. Then we went to the city jail and had another talk with George Dillon.
When I told him our zipgun theory, I thought I saw a light flicker in his eyes; but it was the briefest of reactions, and I couldn’t be sure. We told him it was highly unlikely a zipgun using a.22 caliber bullet could kill anybody from a distance of a hundred yards, and he said he couldn’t help that, he didn’t know anything about such a weapon. Further questioning got us nowhere.
And the following day we were forced to release him, with a warning not to leave the city.
But Sherrard and I continued to work doggedly on the case; it was one of those cases that preys on your mind constantly, keeps you from sleeping well at night, because you know there has to be an answer and you just can’t figure out what it is. We ran checks into Chillingham’s records and found that he had made some large private investments a year ago, right after the Dillon will had been probated. And as George Dillon had claimed, there was no Association for Medical Research; it was a dummy charity, apparently set up by Chillingham for the explicit purpose of stealing old man Dillon’s $350,000. But there was no definite proof of this, not enough to have convinced Chillingham of theft in a court of law; he’d covered himself pretty neatly.
As an intelligent man, George Dillon had no doubt realized that a public exposure of Chillingham would have resulted in nothing more than adverse publicity and the slim possibility of disbarment – hardly sufficient punishment in Dillon’s eyes. So he had decided on what to him was a morally justifiable homicide. From the law’s point of view, however, it was nonetheless Murder One.
But the law still had no idea what he’d done with the weapon, and therefore, as in the case of Chillingham’s theft, the law had no proof of guilt.
As I said, though, we had our teeth into this one and we weren’t about to let go. So we paid another call on Dillon, this time at the hotel where he was staying, and asked him some questions about his background. There was nothing more immediate we could investigate, and we thought that maybe there was an angle in his past which would give us a clue toward solving the riddle.
He told us, readily enough, some of what he’d done during the 15 years since he’d left home, and it was a typical drifter’s life: lobster packer in Maine, ranch hand in Montana, oil worker in Texas, road construction in South America. But there was a gap of about four years which he sort of skimmed over without saying anything specific. I jumped on that and asked him some direct questions, but he wouldn’t talk about it.
His reluctance made Sherrard and me more than a little curious; we both had that cop’s feeling it was important, that maybe it was the key we needed to unlock the mystery. Unobtrusively we had the department photographer take some pictures of Dillon; then we sent them out, along with a request for information as to his whereabouts during the four blank years, to various law enforcement agencies in Florida – where he’d admitted to being just prior to the gap, working as a deckhand on a Key West charter-fishing boat.
Time dragged on, and nothing turned up, and we were reluctantly forced by sheer volume of other work to abandon the Chillingham case; officially, it was now buried in the Unsolved File. Then, three months later, we had a wire from the Chief of Police of a town not far from Fort Lauderdale. It said they had tentatively identified George Dillon from the pictures we’d sent and were forwarding by airmail special delivery something which might conceivably prove the nature of Dillon’s activities during at least part of the specified period.
Sherrard and I fidgeted around waiting for the special delivery to arrive, and when it finally came I happened to be the only one of us in the Squadroom. I tore the envelope open and what was inside was a multicolored and well-aged poster, with a picture of a man who was undeniably George Dillon depicted on it. I looked at the picture and read what was written on the poster at least a dozen times.
It told me a lot of things all right, that poster did. It told me exactly what Dillon had done with the homemade zipgun he had used to kill Adam Chillingham – an answer that was at once fantastic and yet so simple you’d never even consider it. And it told me there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it now, that we couldn’t touch him, that George Dillon actually had committed a perfect murder.
I was brooding over this when Jack Sherrard returned to the Squadroom. He said, “Why so glum, Walt?”
“The special delivery from Florida finally showed up,” I said, and watched instant excitement animate his face. Then I saw some of it fade while I told him what I’d been brooding about, finishing with, “We simply can’t arrest him now, Jack. There’s no evidence, it doesn’t exist any more; we can’t prove a thing. And maybe it’s just as well in one respect, since I kind of liked Dillon and would have hated to see him convicted for killing a crook like Chillingham. Anyway, we’ll be able to sleep nights now.”
“Damn it, Walt, will you tell me what you’re talking about!”
“All right. Remember when we got the ballistics report and we talked over how easy it would be for Dillon to have made a zipgun? And how he could make the whole thing out of a dozen or so small component parts, so that afterward he could break it down again into those small parts?”
“Sure, sure. But I still don’t care if Dillon used a hundred components, we didn’t find a single one of them. Not one. So what, if that’s part of the answer, did he do with them? There’s not even a connecting bathroom where he could have flushed them down. What did he do with the damned zipgun?”
I sighed and slid the poster – the old carnival sideshow poster – around on my desk so he could see Dillon’s picture and read the words printed below it: STEAK AND POTATOES AND APPLE PIE IS OUR DISH; NUTS, BOLTS, PIECES OF WOOD, BITS OF METAL IS HIS! YOU HAVE TO SEE IT TO BELIEVE IT: THE AMAZING MR GEORGE, THE MAN WITH THE CAST-IRON STOMACH.
Sherrard’s head jerked up and he stared at me open-mouthed.
“That’s right,” I said wearily. “He ate it.”
Slaughterhouse by Barry Longyear
Barry Longyear (b. 1942) is best known for his science fiction, and his early work, which included the now classic short story “Enemy Mine” (1979), filmed in 1985, won him a clutch of awards. Other books include Manifest Destiny (1980), Circus World (1981), Sea of Glass (1987) and Naked Came the Robot (1988). It may come as a surprise to many to find that he also wrote this one mystery story early in his career, which is not only an impossible mystery but almost a perfect one.
Killing Martha Griever was the only thing Nathan Griever had ever really done well, and he had done that very well indeed. The sole heir, Nathan had netted nearly twenty-three million dollars after taxes. Of course, his inheritance made him the number-one suspect, especially after it was learned that Nathan had only known his wife a scant few months before her unfortunate passing.
A clever fellow, Nathan had seen no way to divert suspicion from himself. Therefore, he did the next best thing – he made sure no one could prove he did it. The game had dragged on for a while, but the final score was L.A.P.D. nothing, Nathan Griever multimillionaire.