Penelope entered in a swirl of black silk. She looked very much the gypsy fortune-teller with her hair up in a knot and several strings of costume jewelry around her neck. “Thank you for attending tonight’s service,” she said, nodding to everyone. “Would you please be seated.”
“This is nonsense,” said Klax, “pure nonsense,” but he sat down. No one else said anything, though they all looked puzzled.
“Now, please form a circle by holding hands,” commanded Penelope. “That includes you, Dr Klax.”
“This is a waste of time,” said Klax, pulling his hands out of his coat pockets and linking his cold fingers with Rackham’s on one side and mine on the other. “I should be back at my lab, working.”
“Working?” said Penelope. “Or planning another murder?”
“What are you babbling about?” said Klax, trying to wrench his hands free. Not that he could. Which had been the point of this entire charade, making sure Klax couldn’t use the miniature control unit the Marine guards later found in his left pocket.
“I never touched Schneider,” declared Klax. “I was in my lab all night.”
“Yes, you were,” said Penelope. “Safe and secure in your laboratory while your MEMS robots, programmed by you, climbed up through the cracks in the concrete walls and killed Professor Schneider.”
“Say what?” I was so surprised I almost let go of Klax’s cold fingers. Almost.
“MEMS robots are so small they can fit into spaces only a few thousandths of an inch wide,” said Penelope. “If artificially intelligent, they can be programmed to assemble themselves into bigger machines once they reach a specific destination. For example, they can go through small cracks between a wall and ceiling, then assemble into a larger flying robot. They can be programmed to seek and attack a specific target: in this case, Dr Schneider. Klax’s devices carried a payload of hydrogen cyanide with them and loaded it into the stinger of a mechanical mosquito.”
“Cyanide gas kills people almost instantly,” I said, Penelope’s words starting to sink in. “The results mimic a heart attack, and all traces dissolve into the body within hours. But how could a mosquito deliver enough gas to kill Schneider?”
“It was all a matter of waiting for the proper moment,” said Penelope. “Klax knew that sometime during the night Schneider would lift one of the monkeys out of its cage. With both his hands occupied, the professor couldn’t stop the attack that killed him.”
“The mechanical mosquito-”
“- flew into Dr Schneider’s nose and squirted the hydrogen cyanide into his nasal passage,” said Penelope, finishing my thought. “A small dose inhaled at such close range would kill in seconds.”
“But why?” said Mary Winfree, her questions directed at Klax, not us. “Why on earth would you want to kill Carl?”
Klax rose from the table, and towering six foot six, and having wrenched his hands free, lifted both fists in the air. “How can you even ask that question, Mary? I did all the work. He won all the awards. He got the money, the fame, the glory. And because of all that, he got you.”
“Me?” she said. “What do I have to do with this?”
“He lusted after you, and I couldn’t allow it,” said Klax, a very strange note creeping into his voice. “I wanted you, and you never even looked my way, Mary. My robot spies heard him talking to you on the phone last week. Trying to seduce you. Take you on another trip. That’s when I decided he had to die. He couldn’t have the awards that were supposed to be mine, the money and honors that were supposed to be mine, and now you, too! I just couldn’t allow it!”
“You,” said Mary Winfree, “are a very sick and misguided man. You’re crazy, Klax!”
And so it was jealousy, after all, that killed Dr Schneider. Not a monkey. Not a bat. And to my surprise, something deadly was able to penetrate the fortress called The Slab. Where nothing goes in and nothing comes out, murder took place.
The Marines found a fistful of tiny machines in Klax’s right pocket, a miniature control device in the other. Proof positive that he had used such micro-machines for murder and a grim reminder that Penelope’s subterfuge had saved anyone else from being killed.
“I had Captain Rackham bring the two of you with Klax tonight so he wouldn’t guess we specifically suspected him,” explained Penelope to Arronds and Winfree, once the Marines had left with their prisoner. “I also thought, since you were Dr Schneider’s friends, you would want to help capture his murderer.”
“An amazing deduction,” said Arronds. “How did you figure out it was Klax?”
“She asked Sherlock Holmes,” I answered.
No Killer Has Wings by Arthur Porges
Arthur Porges (1915-2006) was another of those writers who wrote prodigiously for the magazines but had very few works preserved between hard covers. You will, though, find a slim volume of his Sherlock Holmes parodies, featuring Stately Homes, in Three Porges Parodies and a Pastiche (1988), whilst The Mirror and Other Strange Reflections (2002) is a collection of his weird fiction. Porges wrote scores of ingenious impossible crime stories and a volume of those is long overdue. Here’s just one example.
I was beginning to think that Lieutenant Ader had finally run out of bizarre cases. He hadn’t bothered me for almost six months, or since that “Circle in the Dust” affair.
But I should have known better; it was just a breathing spell. His jurisdiction, mainly the city of Arden, isn’t likely to be free of skulduggery for long. Not that I minded too much; in fact, I like playing detective. For that matter, who doesn’t?
This was something of a switch, however; because instead of asking me to help solve a murder, it was more a matter of unsolving one first, you might say.
I’m used to being called on by Ader. As the only reasonably well qualified expert in forensic medicine in these parts – I’m chief pathologist at Pasteur Hospital, serving the whole county – I do work for a number of communities in the area. You see they don’t trust their local coroners, since most of them are political hacks long out of practice. So whenever they need a dependable autopsy, especially the kind their man would just as soon not handle – say somebody buried a month – they send for Dr Joel Hoffman: me.
Last Tuesday I was happily preparing a slide of some muscle section; it had a bunch of the finest roundworm parasites that you’ll ever see. Oddly enough, it occurred to me that these organisms, so loathsome to the laymen, were not only gracefully proportioned, and miracles of design, but never killed each other through greed or hate, and would never, never build a hydrogen bomb to destroy the world.
Well, think of the Devil-in this case, murder – and he’s sure to appear. Into the lab came Lieutenant Ader with a young girl in tow. Him I’ve seen before, but never in such company, so being a man first and a pathologist second, I looked at her. A small girl, dark, and just a bit plump. What my racy old man used to call a “plump partridge.” She had been crying a lot; it didn’t need eight years of medical study to tell that. As for Ader, he was half angry, and half ashamed.
“This is my niece, Dana,” he said gruffly. “You’ve heard me mention her occasionally.”