Footprints on the Ceiling Read online

  Gavigan looked up at him surprised. “Fast work, Doc. How’d you do that?”

  “Stomach pump, enema, emetic. I just mentioned them and she began to wake up. Thought that would do it. She didn’t swallow any sleeping tablets. That was an act for Malloy. Some symptoms you can’t fake. Hunter’s watching her.”

  “Good. See her in a minute.” Gavigan turned back to Gail, slapped his now empty pockets in a practiced manner, looked for a moment at the innocent-appearing collection of keys, change, handkerchief, pencil, pen, billfold, letters, and clinical thermometer on the table, and said, “Okay.”

  As Gail began to refill his pockets, Gavigan added, “You fancy yourself as a detective, is that it?”

  Before he had time to answer, Merlini came from the darkroom and captured our attention with what he carried. He had two pint-sized chemist’s bottles and a drinking glass half filled with what, under other circumstances, I would have dismissed as water. There was a saucer lying across its top, bottom up. Of the bottles, one was clear glass with a label bearing in heavy red letters the word: POISON, and, in a smaller size the symbol NaCy and the two words, Sodium Cyanide. The glass of the other bottle was a brownish color and, though half-filled with a heavy crystalline substance, had no label at all.

  “Someone around here has been doing some amateur detecting,” Merlini said. He put the glass down on the ping-pong table and turned it slowly. On one side we saw a dark smudge of whorls and lines that was a fingerprint. On the opposite side there were four more, arranged vertically down the glass. The cyanide bottle, too, showed prints, many of them. The other bottle had none.

  “Thumb and four fingers,” Merlini said indicating the glass. “Smallish. Probably a woman’s.”

  Gavigan put his nose down close. “The powdered graphite.”

  “Yes. Our amateur sleuth, whoever he is, used it as an impromptu homemade fingerprint powder and with success. Had you noticed that there was a vacuum water carafe in Linda’s room and no glass?”

  “Of course,” Gavigan retorted, “I’m not blind.” He turned to Dr. Hesse. “Can you test this for cyanide at once?”

  Hesse came forward, nodding. “You’re lucky this time. Knowing it was cyanide, I brought the reagents for the Prussian Blue test with me. Would you have my bag brought down, Captain?” He lifted the glass carefully, thumb on the top edge, forefinger on tile bottom, and took it into the darkroom.

  Malloy jerked an upward thumb at Quinn; and, as the latter started up, Gavigan called, “Send Brady down here too, and bring Arnold. I’m going to—”

  “Just a minute!” It was Gail’s voice, sharp, insistent. “Before you get him, I’ve got something to say.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s about motive.” Dr. Gail returned the Inspector’s stare coolly, but his finger tapped nervously on his cigarette, sending flakes of ash to the floor. “Linda was a selfish, pigheaded spinster fury. As a psychiatric study she was a honey; as a person to live with or around I imagine she was holy hell. She also controlled the lion’s share of a fortune which one or two other persons might naturally feel they should have shared. There’s plenty of motive there, and yet—”

  “And yet what?” Gavigan’s voice was sub-zero.

  Gail frowned at his cigarette, dropped it on the floor and stepped on it. “There’s a better motive than those,” he said somberly, “a much better motive. If anyone ever had a good and sufficient reason for murder—” He threw a quick look at Merlini. “You asked me about Arnold’s face. I’ll tell you now.”

  “I thought you knew,” Gavigan said.

  “Yes. But I couldn’t say so until I was sure it had something to do with Linda’s death. Arnold wears make-up all the time, not only on his face, but even on the backs of his hands. There’s a proprietary make-up on the market called Coverfault, which may be what he uses. It’s designed for hiding small discolorations and blemishes of the skin, but Arnold uses it over his whole visible skin surface. I saw him without it once—though he doesn’t know that. I caught him in swimming early one morning—in trunks alone.”

  “Well?” Gavigan growled impatiently.

  “His body is blue.”

  “Blue!” The Inspector didn’t care for the idea at all. His quick eyes scrutinized Gail’s face suspiciously.

  I began to think the Doctor might have something there. His theory would explain the dirty streaks I had glimpsed on Arnold’s face the night before—streaks the rain had made in his make-up.

  “So that’s it!” Merlini said with some surprise. “Moor’s skin, Doctor?”

  “Yes. Argyria. How did you know?”

  “I’ve known a few Blue Men. But isn’t Arnold a bit young? I thought they’d mostly died off by now.”

  Gail nodded. “They have. That’s just it. How do you suppose he comes to have it?”

  Gavigan wanted attention. He slapped his hand flat on the table. “Wait a minute! Go on, Quinn, get Brady and Hesse’s bag.” He eyed Merlini and Gail belligerently. “Now, what are you two talking about? Will someone please exp—”

  Merlini obliged. “The Blue Men I knew, Inspector, were circus freaks. Forty years or so ago the medical profession prescribed silver nitrate for stomach ulcers. I don’t know if it cured them, but the medicos were startled when some of their patients started to turn blue—especially when the patients stayed that way—permanently. There wasn’t any cure. Some of them went into side shows. And one that I knew—billed as The Great What-Is-It From Mars—used to dose himself with the stuff to increase the color. He figured as long as he was blue and no hope for it, he might as well be good and blue, and try for a raise in pay.”

  “But—” Gavigan began to object.

  “The same thing,” Gail said, adding to Merlini’s information, “happened in the early 19th century and again around 1850, when silver salts were prescribed for epilepsy and tabes. It created a whole generation of blue men and women. It’s a slaty, dark, bluish-gray discoloration caused by the tendency of the silver salt to deposit itself in finely divided metallic form in the skin. Silver, of course, turns dark on exposure to light—the reason for its photographic use. And the pigmentation of the skin appears first in the parts exposed to light and particularly the conjunctivae and mucus membranes. You’ve noticed that Arnold barely opens his mouth when he speaks? That’s because the inside of his mouth and his tongue are blue. Even his internal organs—”

  “But—” Gavigan got his objection on record this time—“silver nitrate is poisonous taken internally.”

  “Sure,” Gail agreed, “it’s a violent corrosive poison if given in a sufficient dose, but that’s 30 grains or more. Minute quantities are neither toxic nor appreciably injurious to the general health. But, when given over an extended period of time, they produce the intense discoloration that Arnold tries to conceal.”

  “And you said you were hunting for cyanide when I walked in on you in the darkroom. What were you doing with the silver-nitrate bottle?”

  “You mean the bottle with the silver-nitrate label, Inspector. With this bee buzzing in my bonnet, I decided to check up. I discovered that Arnold’s silver-nitrate bottle contains salts all right, salts that look superficially like AgN03 but not silver salts. Merely common sodium chloride—in the rock salt form. It’s not only not silver nitrate, but one of its antidotes.”

  Gail turned and picked up the brown bottle that had no label. He removed the glass stopper and tilted perhaps a teaspoonful of the crystals the bottle contained out onto the table. He took one smallish one and touched it lightly to his tongue.

  “Bitter, metallic taste,” he said. “That’s silver nitrate.”

  Brady came in with Quinn. Gavigan addressed the former, “Finish with that letter?”

  Brady nodded. “Couple of faint smudges on the note paper and lots of good ones on the envelope. Postal clerks and mailmen probably. But if you think the letter prints might not be Floyd’s I’ll shoot it to the lab. I can’t bring out a lot of detail with the
powder but the silver nitrate bath might do it.”

  “Now that,” Merlini commented smilingly, “is what I call a useful chemical to have on hand. Regular little Jim Dandy jack-of-all-trades. Sail right in, Brady. The silver nitrate’s there in front of you.”

  “Well,” Brady said, “it’s not as simple as that. I’d need—”

  “I’ll take care of the letter, Brady,” Gavigan broke in. “No hurry about that just now. I want you to go through this darkroom with particular attention to the poison bottles you’ll find there.” Gavigan turned again to Gail. “I don’t get it. Photographers that use it don’t all turn blue, and Arnold certainly wouldn’t be dosing himself with it.”

  “No,” Gail said with deliberation, “but doesn’t it look as if he might have hidden his silver nitrate, substituting rock salt in its place, in order to escape being dosed with it?”

  Merlini picked some of the crystals from the table between thumb and finger and examined them closely. “You mean Linda?” he asked.

  Gail said, “I’d like to make my position clear. I wasn’t Arnold’s doctor. The fact that he has argyria interested and puzzled me, but it wasn’t my business exactly. He said as much once when I tried to mention the subject. It wasn’t until last night, when we found Linda, that I started to put two and two together. I couldn’t mention it before, because it was only a wild and libelous speculation. But the fact that he keeps his silver nitrate under lock and key with a harmless decoy salt in its place—well, it begins to look as if I had something.”

  “Yes,” Gavigan agreed slowly, “it looks as if Arnold had tumbled to the fact that he was being dosed and had taken secret precautions to avoid it. But why would Linda—this makes her crazier than you thought, doesn’t it?”

  “It means she was more dangerous than I thought, yes. And her reasons are obvious. Jealousy is a natural agoraphobic state of mind. In Linda’s case it concerned Arnold and Floyd—but particularly Arnold. He is—or was—an actor and a good one. Linda has always wanted to be one—you may have noticed the books in her room and the theatrical make-up table. Her acting ambitions were, because of her phobia, quite impossible of fulfillment. She couldn’t stand seeing Arnold free to go where he liked, independent of her and successful on the stage. She found out about the effects of silver nitrate somehow and she simply fed it to him—taking it from his own darkroom. He wouldn’t notice the taste because of the very small amounts. She might as well have given him her phobia; it had the same effect. Like her, he disliked to go out, though for a physical rather than mental reason.”

  Gavigan frowned at the brown bottle and the scattered crystals on the table. “Opportunity, means, and motive!” he said. “Get him, Malloy. This case is all washed up.”

  Malloy hurried up the stairs. His stride was purposeful and determined.

  Merlini’s voice came from the corner of the room. “You know, Inspector, I think we’ve got a break at last.”

  “Yes,” Gavigan agreed, “Arnold’s out on the end of a long, long limb.”

  “Arnold? Oh, yes. But I don’t mean that.”

  We all swung around on him together. He was seated at the desk behind the typewriter. He had removed the ribbon from the machine and was holding it, a spool in each hand, close under the desk lamp. He was squinting at it with fascination; and, without looking up, he said:

  “Ross, there’s another ribbon or two in this upper left hand drawer. Put one in this machine and take dictation.”

  He got up then to make room for me; and I acted quickly, following instructions.

  Gavigan said, “That a new ribbon?”

  “Yes,” Merlini said. “Let me have that magnifying glass of yours. There are a couple of feet here in the center that carry only a single layer of impressions. They’re crowded but quite distinct. The rest, on each side has been gone over twice. Your men at the lab should be able to untangle those with photographic enlargements, but I think I can decipher the single impressions now. Ready, Ross?”

  I nodded, and with the ribbon close to the light he began reading, slowly and with frequent pauses, but with certainty. He read, not words, but single letters: “i-l-l—i—m—t-h-g—i—e-e-h-capital t-colon-a-d—”

  “No spaces?” I interrupted.

  “They wouldn’t show,” he said. “The ribbon doesn’t travel when the space bar is struck. We’ll have to put those in ourselves, later.”

  He continued spelling out the message, and my enthusiasm waned rapidly. I didn’t see that we were getting much in the way of sense, and then, as the letters suddenly became numerals, we got even less. The Inspector and the Doctor when I had finished, were both leaning over my shoulder and looking at this:

  It reminded me of the mathematician’s assertion that a monkey at a typewriter could, if given a sufficiently great number of millions of years, eventually turn out, by pure chance and according to the laws of probability, all the books in the British Museum. This batch of characters looked to me like the monkey’s work on an off day.

  Gavigan glanced at Merlini and said, “Well?”

  “Looks a bit cryptic, doesn’t it?” Merlini replied.

  “You might insert spaces before each capital letter,” Gail suggested, “except that ‘Lrae’ doesn’t look very promising.”

  Gavigan scowled at it a moment longer, then remarked impatiently, “You can have it, Merlini. You like puzzles. And you’ll probably decode it and come up with a six-way substitution cipher, an international spy ring, and stolen naval secrets. While you’re doing that, I’ll finish off Arnold.”

  The Inspector didn’t appear to think highly of the message, if that’s what it was. I wasn’t sure that I did myself; it didn’t even look like a worth-while finger exercise. If it meant anything at all, it would appear to be a combination code and cipher, though Gavigan seemed to consider that as too romantic for serious consideration. I eyed Merlini, trying to fathom what he thought. He seemed more hopeful, because, after a moment, a smile suddenly grew on his face and he leaned above me.

  “Ross,” he began, “if you’ll just—”

  But the stairway door opened; and Arnold hurried down, followed by Malloy. Gavigan moved quickly to stand before the bottles on the table, hiding them with his body.

  Chapter Fifteen:

  THE PERFECT CRIME

  INSPECTOR GAVIGAN WAITED UNTIL Arnold had stopped before him. Then he went straight to the point. “Who’s your doctor?”

  “Doctor?” The apprehension in Arnold’s voice was plain. “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Never mind that. Who is he?”

  Arnold balked. “Look here, Inspector. I see no reason—”

  Gavigan, without warning, exploded. “I’ve got plenty of reason and you damn well know it!” he roared. “Answer my question. You and a lot of other people around here answer as nice as you please to all the unimportant questions. As soon as I throw out one that means something, you stall and start lying. I’m going to have some answers, and I’m starting with you! What is your doctor’s name and address?”

  “Sorry, Inspector. I don’t have one. I’m never sick.”

  “Arnold,” Merlini put in earnestly, “you’re making a mistake, you know. A bad one. And, Inspector, you forgot to tell him at this point that he can refuse to answer until he’s seen his lawyer.”

  Gavigan paid no attention to Merlini’s comments. “Let me see your hand, please,” he ordered.

  “Fingerprints?” Arnold asked, without moving.

  “No.” Gavigan reached out, grasped his arm between elbow and wrist and swung it up. Arnold made no protest, but his face was grim. Gavigan pretended an interest in the palm. Suddenly he turned the hand over and shot back the cuff.

  “You don’t use the make-up on your arms?”

  The flesh color of the hand stopped short just above the wrist. His arm beyond that point was the dark, blue-gray, slate color that Gail had described.

  “No,” Arnold answered feebly.

  “Face
pretty bad?”

  “Yes. What of it?” I caught the quick, brief glance he sent in Gail’s direction.

  “It might have something to do with this case.” Gavigan, watching Arnold narrowly, took one step to the left, exposing the two bottles on the table behind him.

  Arnold saw them; I was sure of that. But he gave no outward sign.

  The Inspector’s hand fussed idly with the stopper of the cyanide bottle, twisting it back and forth. His eyes remained on Arnold’s face. “Yesterday afternoon,” he said gravely, “when Linda Skelton was poisoned, you were one of three persons on this island and the only one with Miss Skelton in this house. You had the opportunity. The sodium cyanide in your darkroom was not in its usual place, but locked up. You had the means.” He paused, glanced at the bottles under his hand for the first time, and went on remorselessly. “Your silver nitrate was found in the same locked cupboard, in an unlabeled bottle. The silver-nitrate bottle is filled with rock salt. The discoloration of your skin is due to silver nitrate. You had opportunity, means, and motive.”

  “I see.” Arnold returned Gavigan’s stare steadily. “Why, if I killed Linda, would I carry her body over to the old house where I knew she’d never have gone herself? And then fix it to look like suicide? Or do I impress you as a half-wit?”

  “On the contrary. You’re altogether too clever. That’s your alibi. But it won’t wash. Not with me.”

  “You’re charging me then?”

  “I’ll give you a chance to talk first. Got anything to say?”

  Arnold considered that; then, all at once his tense, careful attitude wilted visibly. “Yes,” he said hopelessly, “I do. You know a lot. But not enough. And you’ve got it wrong.”

  He turned and took a step toward the darkroom door. Gavigan moved quickly to intercept him.

  “It’s all right, Inspector. I’m not after the poisons.”

  Gavigan went with him just the same. Arnold brought back a towel and the jar of cold cream. He placed them on the ping-pong table and unscrewed the jar’s top. He began applying the cream to his face. He said nothing and the rest of us were silent, watching.