The Oxford Book of American Det (76 page)

I saw Doran move forward silently, closing in.

“And Paul Kendrick,” Merlini went on, “is the only one of you who has an alibi that does not depend on the sealed room. That leaves the most sceptical one of the three—

the man whose testimony would by far carry the greatest weight.

“It leaves you, Dr. Garrett. The man who is so certain that there are no ghosts is the man who conjured one up!”

Merlini played the scene down; he knew that the content of what he said was dramatic enough. But Garrett’s voice was even calmer. He shook his head slowly.

“I am afraid that I can’t agree. You have no reason to assume that it must be one of us and no one else. But I would like to hear how you think I or anyone else could have walked out of this room leaving it sealed as it was found.”

“That,” Merlini said, “is the simplest answer of all. You walked out, but you didn’t leave the room sealed. You see, it was not found that way!” I felt as if I were suddenly floating in space.

“But look—“ I began.

Merlini ignored me. “The vanishing murderer was a trick. But magic is not, as most people believe, only a matter of gimmicks and trapdoors and mirrors. Its real secret lies deeper than a mere deception of the senses; the magician uses a far more important, more basic weapon—the psychological deception of the mind. Don’t believe everything you see is excellent advice; but there’s a better rule: don’t believe everything you think.”

“Are you trying to tell me,” I said incredulously, “that this room wasn’t sealed at all?

That I just thought it was?”

Merlini kept watching Garrett. “Yes. It’s as simple as that. And there was no visual deception at all. It was, like PK, entirely mental. You saw things exactly as they were, but you didn’t realise that the visual appearance could be interpreted two ways. Let me ask you a question. When you break into a room the door of which has been sealed with paper tape on the inside, do you find yourself still in a sealed room?”

“No,” I said, “of course not. The paper has been torn.”

“And if you break into a room that had been sealed but from which
someone has
already gone out,
tearing the seals—what then?”

“The paper,” I said, “is still torn. The appearance is—“

“—exactly the same!”
Merlini finished.

He let that soak in a moment, then continued. “When you saw the taped window, and then the torn paper on the door, you made a false assumption—you jumped naturally, but much too quickly, to a wrong conclusion. We all did. We assumed that it was you who had torn the paper when you broke in. Actually, it was Dr. Garrett who tore the paper—when he went out!”

Garrett’s voice was a shade less steady now. “You forget that Andrew Drake phoned me—“

Merlini shook his head. “I’m afraid we only have your own statement for that. You overturned the phone and placed Drake’s body near it. Then you walked out, returned to your office where you got rid of the knife—probably a surgical instrument which you couldn’t leave behind because it might have been traced to you.” Doran, hearing this, whispered a rapid order to the detective stationed at the door.

“Then,” Merlini continued, “you came back immediately to ring the front-door bell.

You said Drake had called you, partly because it was good misdirection; it made it appear that you were elsewhere when he died. But equally important, it gave you the excuse you needed to break in and find the body without delay—
before Rosa Rhys
should regain consciousness and see that the room was no longer sealed!”
I hated to do it. Merlini was so pleased with the neat way he was tying up all the loose ends. But I had to.

“Merlini,” I said. “I’m afraid there is one little thing you don’t know. When I smashed the door open, I heard the paper tape tear!”

I have seldom seen the Great Merlini surprised, but that did it. He couldn’t have looked more astonished if lightning had struck him.

“You—you
what?”

Elinor Drake said, “I heard it, too.”

Garrett added, “And I.”

It stopped Merlini cold for a moment, but only a moment.

“Then that’s more misdirection. It has to be.” He hesitated, then suddenly looked at Doran. “Lieutenant, get the doctor’s overcoat, will you?” Garrett spoke to the inspector. “This is nonsense. What possible reason could I have for—“

“Your motive was a curious one, doctor,” Merlini said. “One that few murderers—“ Merlini stopped as he took the overcoat Doran brought in and removed from its pocket the copy of the AMA Journal I had noticed there earlier. He started to open it, then lifted an eyebrow at something he saw on the contents listing.

“I see,” he said, and then read: “
A Survey of the Uses of Radioactive Traces in Cancer
Research
by Walter M. Garrett, M.D. So that’s your special interest?” The magician turned to Elinor Drake. “Who was to head the $15-million foundation for cancer research, Miss Drake?”

The girl didn’t need to reply, The answer was in her eyes as she stared at Garrett.

Merlini went on. “You were hidden behind the screen in the corner, doctor. And Rosa Rhys, in spite of all the precautions, successfully produced the apports. You saw the effect that had on Drake, knew Rosa had won, and that Drake was thoroughly hooked.

And the thought of seeing all that money wasted on psychical research when it could be put to so much better use in really important medical research made you boil. Any medical man would hate to see that happen, and most of the rest of us, too.

“But we don’t all have the coldly rational, scientific attitude you do, and we wouldn’t all have realised so quickly that there was one very simple but drastic way to prevent it—murder. You are much too rational. You believe that one man’s life is less important than the good his death might bring, and you believed that sufficiently to act upon it. The knife was there, all too handy, in your little black case. And so—Drake died. Am I right, doctor?”

Doran didn’t like this as a motive. “He’s still a killer,” he objected. “And he tried to frame Rosa, didn’t he?”

Merlini said, “Do you want to answer that, doctor?” Garrett hesitated, then glanced at the magazine Merlini still held. His voice was tired.

“You are also much too rational.” He turned to Doran. “Rosa Rhys was a cheap fraud who capitalised on superstition. The world would be a much better place without such people.”

“And what about your getting that job as the head of the medical foundation?” Doran was still unconvinced. “I don’t suppose that had anything to do with your reasons for killing Drake?”

The doctor made no answer. And I couldn’t tell if it was because Doran was right or because he knew that Doran would not believe him.

He turned to Merlini instead. “The fact still remains that the cancer foundation has been made possible. The only difference is that now two men rather than one pay with their lives.”

“A completely rational attitude,” Merlini said, “does have its advantages if it allows you to contemplate your own death with so little emotion.” Gavigan wasn’t as cynical about Garrett’s motives as Doran, but his police training objected. “He took the law into his own hands. If everyone did that, we’d all have to go armed for self-protection. Merlini, why did Ross think he heard paper tearing when he opened that door?”

“He did hear it,” Merlini said. Then he turned to me. “Dr. Garrett stood behind you and Miss Drake when you broke in the door, didn’t he?” I nodded. “Yes.”

Merlini opened the medical journal and riffled through it. Half a dozen loose pages, their serrated edges showing where they had been torn in half, fluttered to the floor.

Merlini said, “You would have made an excellent magician, doctor. Your deception was not visual, it was auditory.”

“That,” Gavigan said, “tears it.”

Later I had one further question to ask Merlini.

“You didn’t explain how Houdini got out of that Scottish jail, nor how it helped you solve the enigma of the unsealed door.”

Merlini lifted an empty hand, plucked a lighted cigarette from thin air and puffed at it, grinning.

“Houdini made the same false assumption. When he leaned exhaustedly against the cell door, completely baffled by his failure to overcome the lock, the door suddenly swung open and he fell into the corridor. The old Scot, you see, hadn’t locked it at all!” T. S. STRIBLING (1881-1965)

Although some of the work of southern author T(homas) S(igismund) Stribling might be called local-colour writing, the mainstream novels of this Pulitzer Prize winner are given substance by the author’s stance against racism and his talent for satire. Stribling was the product of Clifton, Tennessee, a small town where he lived for much of his life, and later another small town, Florence, Alabama. Typical of well-educated Southerners of his era, he became a teacher and a lawyer, and still found time to write.

In his writing, he experimented with various forms, from a trilogy about life in the South to adventure stories set in exotic climes, such as Venezuela. Despite his 1933

Pulitzer for
The Store,
today he is best remembered for the detective stories in which he introduced the psychological sleuth Dr. Henry Poggioli.

Stribling’s stories of detection focus on the workings of the human mind as explained by Poggioli, an Ohio State University professor who specialises in psychology and criminology. The professor’s solutions of crimes depend less on interpreting physical clues and more on understanding human behaviour.

Stribling published the first series of Poggioli stories in the pulp magazine
Adventure
in 1925 and 1926. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who became so weary of Sherlock Holmes that he killed him off, only to bring him back again, Stribling tired of his character and used Poggioli’s spectacular death as the climax of the ‘final’ tale. But Stribling bowed to popular demand, revived the character, and began a second series in 1929 that took him through the early 1930’s. A third, and final, series featured the professor’s activities from the end of World War II until 1957.

A Daylight Adventure
is a good example of Stribling’s important contribution to the detective form. In it, psychology is at the centre of the ‘ratiocination’ with which the sleuth solves crimes. Stribling’s contribution was broader than that, however. He develops the mildly adversarial relationship between the sleuth and the narrator. And the sardonic wit that Stribling uses to illuminate rural southern society makes him an early exemplar of the detective novelist as regional writer and humorist.

A Daylight Adventure

The following notes concerning Mrs. Cordy Cancy were not made at the time of her alleged murder of her husband, James Cancy. Worse than that, they were not taken even at the time of her trial, but seven or eight months later at the perfectly hopeless date when Sheriff Matheny of Lanesburg, Tennessee, was in the act of removing his prisoner from the county jail to the state penitentiary in Nashville.

Such a lapse of time naturally gave neither Professor Henry Poggioli nor the writer opportunity to develop those clues, fingerprints, bullet wounds, and psychological analyses which usually enliven the story of any crime.

Our misfortune was that we motored into Lanesburg only a few minutes before Sheriff Matheny was due to motor out of the village with his prisoner. And even then we knew nothing whatever of the affair. We simply had stopped for lunch at the Monarch cafe in Courthouse Square, and we had to wait a few minutes to get stools at the counter. Finally, two men vacated their places. As Poggioli sat down, he found a copy of an old local newspaper stuck between the paper-napkin case and a ketchup bottle.

He unfolded it and began reading. As he became absorbed almost at once in its contents, I was sure he had found a murder story, because that is about all the professor ever reads.

I myself take no interest in murders. I have always personally considered them deplorable rather than entertaining. The fact that I make my living writing accounts of Professor Poggioli’s criminological investigations, I consider simply as an occupational hazard and hardship.

The square outside of our cafe was crowded with people and filled with movement and noise. In the midst of this general racket I heard the voice of some revivalist preacher booming out through a loudspeaker, asking the Lord to save Sister Cordy Cancy from a sinner’s doom, and then he added the rather unconventional phrase that Sister Cordy was not the ‘right’ sinner but was an innocent woman, or nearly so.

That of course was faintly puzzling—why a minister should broadcast such a remark about one of his penitents. Usually the Tennessee hill preacher makes his converts out to be very bad persons indeed, and strongly in need of grace, which I suppose most of us really are. Now to hear one woman mentioned in a prayer as ‘nearly innocent’ was a sharp break from the usual.

I suppose Poggioli also caught the name subconsciously, for he looked up suddenly and asked me if the name ‘Cancy’ had been called.

I told him yes, and repeated what I had just heard over the megaphone.

The criminologist made some sort of silent calculation, then said,

“Evidently Mrs. Cancy has had her baby and the sheriff is starting with her to the penitentiary in Nashville.”

I inquired into the matter. Poggioli tapped his paper. “Just been reading a stenographic account of the woman’s trial which took place here in Lanesburg a little over seven months ago. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but she was pregnant at the time, so the judge ruled that she should remain here in Lanesburg jail until the baby was born and then be transferred to the state penitentiary in Nashville. So I suppose by this noise that the baby has arrived and the mother is on her way to prison.” Just as my companion explained this the preacher’s voice boomed out, “Oh, Lord, do something to save Sister Cordy! Sheriff Matheny’s fixin’ to start with her to Nashville.

Work a miracle, Oh, Lord, and convince him she is innocent. You kain’t desert her, Lord, when she put all her faith an’ trust in You. She done a small crime as You well know, but done it with a pyure heart and for Yore sake. So come down in Yore power an’ stop the sheriff and save an innocent woman from an unjust sentence. Amen.” Then in an aside which was still audible over the megaphone, “Sheriff Matheny, give us five minutes more. He’s bound to send Sister Cordy aid in the next five minutes.” Now I myself am a Tennessean, and I knew how natural it was for a hill-country revivalist to want some special favour from the Lord, and to want it at once; but I had never before heard one ask the rescue of a prisoner on her way to Nashville. I turned to Poggioli and said, “The minister admits the woman has committed some smaller crime. What was that?”