“How do you know the murderer is impulsive?”
In the flickering candlelight her eyebrows raised. “I thought it was obvious. Adrian Thorpe was killed because he knew who murdered Agatha Chambers, of course. Possibly he even witnessed the crime. Both murders have all the earmarks of sudden impulse, rather than long planning. I guessed he would immediately attempt to kill me, so I conveniently left both my apartment door and the outside door unlocked for him.” Parenthetically she added, “I am using the masculine pronoun only for convenience, you understand. The two women are still suspects.”
“How did you manage to survive all those bullets?”
Again she smiled a trifle smugly. “I built a dummy of pillows in my bed, built another bed on the bathroom floor and locked myself in.”
“My God!” I said. “And he fired all those shots at the dummy?”
In the dim light from the candle flames she looked thoughtful. “No. Our killer is a little smarter than I anticipated. Apparently he... or she... discovered the dummy, realized it was a trap of some kind, and tried to shoot off the bathroom lock. Fortunately it was bolted as well as locked, because I think the shots managed to wreck the lock.”
I looked at her in a sort of outraged awe. “And just what do you think you’ve accomplished by almost getting killed?”
Sedalia wagged her head reproachfully. “You have no imagination at all, Hank. Not one of our suspects lives less than a twenty-minute taxi ride from here, providing a taxi can be found at all this time of night. We now proceed to phone each of our five suspects, which should require no more than five or six minutes, and Presto, the one not home is it!”
Chapter Three
Drink and Be Merry...
Taking one of the candleholders from my hand, Sedalia walked majestically through her front room and out into the hall. After setting the candle on the telephone stand, she consulted the phone book, placed the receiver to her ear and reached a finger toward the dial. Then she frowned, moved her finger to the rest instead and clicked the bar up and down.
Lowering my candle slightly, I peered at the floor. “Your killer has been smarter than you anticipated a second time,” I remarked dryly. “The cord’s cut.”
Some of Sedalia’s smug assurance faded. “Quick! Downstairs to the lobby booths! We’ll both start phoning and still make it.”
Rapidly she moved down the hall to the front door. I waited where I was, knowing what she would find because I had heard the key turn as the intruder went out.
“It’s locked!” she called, a note of urgency appearing in her voice.
Turning, she cupped her hand in front of the candle flame to keep it from blowing out and raced back to her apartment door. She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, reappeared again a moment later.
“The back door, too! And the key’s gone.” She stared at me, suppressed rage in her expression. Then her eyes widened. “Your kit! Get it fast and get one of these doors open.”
I shook my head. “Sorry. You may recall I installed those locks myself as a special precaution against murderers because of your peculiar affinity for getting them mad at you. I can get them open, but it will take me the best part of an hour.”
“Take the hinges off!”
I shook my head again. “They are center-hung. You can’t get at them from either side unless the door is open. And the doors are three inches of solid oak. It would even take too long to chop through with a fire axe, which we don’t possess anyway. I thought of everything when I made those doors safe.”
“Everything but this!” she yelled at me. I have never seen Sedalia so frustrated.
“It wasn’t I who left the doors unlocked,” I reminded her. “And has it occurred to you the killer may be sitting right outside the front door waiting for you to get it open and barge out? I don’t know what you’re going to do, Sedalia, but I’m going to throw the inside bolts on both doors, see if I can fix the lights, and go back to bed. I’ll open the doors in the morning.”
For a long time Sedalia simply glared at me. Then her sense of humor suddenly came to her rescue and she burst out with a roar of laughter. She was still chuckling when she walked into her bedroom and slammed the door.
It took me some time to track down the trouble with the lights. After replacing a fuse in the box over the kitchen door only to have it promptly blow, I began checking light sockets. Finally I discovered the killer had inserted a penny in one of the lamp sockets in the hall. I removed it, replaced the fuse a second time and went back to bed.
I slept until eight, prepared breakfast and served it to Sedalia in bed, then went to work on the locks. By nine-thirty I had both doors open, had called the phone company from the downstairs lobby and had received a promise the phone would be fixed by noon.
At ten Inspector Stephen Home arrived.
“What’s wrong with your phone?” was the first thing he asked.
“Sedalia underestimated a murderer,” I told him, and explained what had happened.
The inspector frowned. “That explains all the phone calls I got at home this morning. Got me out of bed. Supposed to be off on Sundays, you know.”
Striding into Sedalia’s front room, he stared at her, the frown still marring the normal placidity of his face. Sedalia looked up with an expression of supreme innocence and offered him a drink.
“At ten in the morning?” he asked. “Sedalia, what put such a crazy idea in your head?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Crazy? If it weren’t for Hank’s silly locks, it would have worked, and then you’d think I was brilliant.”
“Still think you’re brilliant,” he said shortly. “Always did. But you can’t go setting yourself up like a target. And you’ve got to stop using Henry as a burglar. With his record, they’d send him up for life if he ever got caught.”
“Oh posh! I’d take the rap for him.”
The inspector shook his head wearily. There was a time when he would have given Sedalia a tart lecture on lawbreaking being just as wrong when your motives were pure as it was when you indulged in it for personal gain, but that time was as far in the past as my ability to be surprised. As a policeman he could never condone some of Sedalia’s unorthodox methods, but as a realist he knew the only way he could change her was to throw her in jail. If he was ever tempted to that length, he never showed it, but his restraint may well have stemmed from practical considerations as much as sentiment. Without overpowering evidence, it would have been difficult to jail a woman who called the governor, the mayor, the police commissioner and nearly every judge in the state by his first name.
Changing the subject, Home said all five suspects had phoned him that morning after getting nothing but busy signals from Sedalia’s phone. Irene Chambers, Monica Madigan and Gerald Rawlins had been merely curious as to what the notes meant, which of course the inspector was unable to tell them, but Alvin Christopher had been angry, and Jerome Straight wanted to sue Sedalia.
“Couldn’t simply have had Henry drop them in the mail boxes, I suppose?” he concluded.
“I wanted them to see the notes last night,” Sedalia said, as though that excused everything. “On what grounds does Straight think he can sue me?”
“Couldn’t quite make out. Defamation of character, maybe. Called him a murderer, didn’t you?”
Sedalia shook her head? “I simply informed a number of people a murderer was invited to call at the pm today. The cards made no mention of who the murderer was. Incidently, Steve, you’ll be here at three too, won’t you?”