Footprints on the Ceiling Page 18

  “Go on, Doc. Beat it,” Gavigan said. “The Great Merlini has his hands full of upside-down footprints, and I don’t want my tame expert on impossibilities to take on too many at once.”

  “Impossibilities,” Merlini said, treating the word reverently. “Corpse in a hotel at 43rd and Third, nude, and you don’t know how he got there. I want to hear more. Cause of death? Doors and windows locked?”

  “Damn your eyes, Hesse. See what you’ve done. Merlini, haven’t we got enough on the fire now? You supply some of the answers to this mess, and I’ll let you play with that hotel case as a reward. It’s not murder, but it has a locked room.”

  “Oh, it does, does it? I thought I smelled one. Now you have said too much. I can’t resist locked rooms. I want to hear about it at once, or I won’t tell you who killed Linda.”

  The Inspector scowled at him steadily for a moment. “Oh. You know that, do you?”

  Merlini’s noncommittal smile was the same exasperating sphinxlike one he used when you asked him how he produced lighted cigarettes from the air.

  “Bluff,” Gavigan snapped. “All right. I’ll see you. Let’s have that paper you’ve got, Hesse.”

  The doctor produced a Tribune from his coat pocket and dropped it over the stair rail. Grimm caught it and brought it to Gavigan, who opened it out before Merlini on the table.

  “Page one,” he said. “Human interest story for the day.”

  Merlini cast a hungry eye over the headlines. “Where?” he asked, “I don’t see it.”

  “There.” The Inspector placed a broad forefinger above an unlikely-looking one-column head: NEW YORK TOO MUCH FOR TOPEKA TEACHER—

  Yesterday morning the continental bus deposited Miss Amanda Connors on 42nd Street, fresh from Topeka, Kansas, thrilled with anticipatory excitement and perhaps just a wee bit frightened at the glittering prospect of her first visit to Baghdad-on-the-Subway.

  A glorious week of sightseeing stretched before her. Radio City, Chinatown, The Music Hall, The Empire State Building, Grant’s Tomb, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum, Wall Street, perhaps a passing glance at the Stork Club or even a rear table at the Hollywood Restaurant. But Fate was feeling skittish this morning and New York’s welcome was too much, much too much like that of the Baghdad of old where anything might happen. In New York, Amanda found, it does happen!

  All the billboards scattered across Jersey had spoken very well of the Hotel McKinley, “Just a step from the Great White Way.” The desk clerk may have smiled inwardly at Amanda’s neatly rolled umbrella and the nervous, excited way she placed her prim signature in the hotel register, but he didn’t show it. He was awfully polite for a New Yorker, Amanda thought. She didn’t know that he hails from Menosha, Wisconsin. He said, “Boy, show Miss Connors to Room 2113.”

  The boy, Tony Antoneri of 48976 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, did. He unlocked the door and swung it wide. He waited for Amanda to step in, but something was very wrong with Amanda’s knees. They wouldn’t work. New York was just like the covers on True Crime Stories Magazine.

  Miss Connors spent the next four hours at the 43rd Street Police Station in deep conversation with the Law. They weren’t all as polite as the desk clerk had been.

  At four o’clock she presented her return half of the round-trip ticket she had bought in Topeka and boarded the bus again. She is now somewhere in Ohio.

  Police are still trying to identify the body of the nude man that was lying on the floor of Room 2113. Trying, for that matter, to discover how he got into the room at all. He certainly never registered there.

  There were no clothes in the room, no luggage—nothing but the customary furniture and the body. The doors and windows were locked.

  Hotel officials said that the last previous occupant of the room had checked out the preceding day, Wednesday. The room had been cleaned shortly after by a maid who had not noticed any nude body.

  The man was five feet eight inches tall, weighed about 185 pounds, had brown hair, brown eyes, an appendix scar.

  Medical Examiner Hesse said that death was probably due to heart disease but directed that an autopsy be performed.

  So sorry, Amanda.

  “No wonder you were annoyed when I phoned you this morning, Inspector,” Merlini said, looking up. “With that on your mind.” He called to Hesse. “Sure about that heart disease?”

  “No. I was misquoted as usual. I said, ‘It could be a lot of things, including heart disease.’ Considering the absence of any evidence of foul play, that seemed a likely possibility. The only external symptom of any importance was a red mottling on the body due to subcutaneous bleeding. The autopsy—”

  Gail’s voice came suddenly from the corner where he had been sitting, nearly forgotten. “Wow! You’d better get that report, Doctor, because if your man found any hemorrhages in the spinal cord, myocardial degeneration, or blebs in the brain substance, he’s probably bothered as hell. And if he did, then I think we can help him.”

  Hesse blinked at him in a startled manner. “I’m afraid not, Doctor,” he said. “This man wasn’t the type at all. Too heavy, flabby muscles, evidence of alcoholism, no identification tag. He’d never have been hired as a sand-hog.”

  Gail smiled. “Your description fits nicely.”

  Inspector Gavigan spluttered. “What are you two gibbering about?”

  “Caisson disease, Inspector. Compressed-air illness. The bends.” Gail turned to Hesse. “Of course he’s not the type. That’s just it. He wouldn’t be hired as a compressed-air worker because he’d be too likely to get the bends. But mightn’t that be just why he did get them?”

  Merlini pointed a forefinger at Gail and said flatly, “You’ve got other reasons for that hunch.”

  Gail nodded and started to speak, but Merlini forestalled him. “I thought so. Inspector, if you don’t have Hesse phone for that report this instant I’ll have apoplexy, fainting fits, glanders, and volcanic eruptions. Because if the verdict is caisson disease—”

  “It’ll look damned fishy!” exclaimed Gavigan. “Go get it, Doc. And hurry!”

  “Fishy?” Merlini said simply. “I should think so. It will mean that we’ve found Floyd!”

  Chapter Seventeen:

  EIGHTEEN FATHOMS DEEP

  IT WAS THE BENDS, all right. Hesse’s office had found that out, and the Assistant Medical Examiner who had done the post mortem was standing on his ear, not believing it.

  It was Floyd, too. Arnold verified the appendicitis scar and supplied Gavigan with another print of the snapshot Leach had taken into town that morning.

  “It’s him all right.” The Inspector grunted, scowling at the print darkly. “Malloy didn’t tumble when he saw the other print because he didn’t see the body yesterday. He was out after a guy who stole two king cobras from the zoo.”

  “This is what I get for neglecting my daily paper,” Merlini said, helping himself to another sandwich from the tray Mrs. Henderson brought. “Cobras? Interesting too.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Only that wasn’t Floyd. Malloy found the guy and put him in a cage at Bellevue. He was a Harlem witch doctor. Tend to your knitting, will you? Maybe you can figure out what happened to Floyd’s mustache.”

  “What happened to—”

  “You heard me.” Gavigan pointed to the photo. “The body had no mustache. But Arnold says Floyd was wearing one as usual when he left here Wednesday night. Why’d he shave it off?”

  The picture was a candid shot of a heavy-set, rather flabby man holding a tall drink in his hand. He had his mouth open and was making an unsteady-looking gesture. Arnold’s lighting was nice, but his model was no movie actor. He had permanent-looking morning-after circles under his eyes, sleek black hair combed straight back, a pudgy, flat-ended nose, and a small mustache, carefully pointed at the ends.

  Merlini said, “That newspaper description what put you on, Gail?”

  “Yes. And with the symptoms what they were—”

  �
��Any idea what Floyd, or anyone, would be doing high and dry on the 21st floor of a midtown hotel—dead of the bends, of all things?”

  “The bends don’t bother me so much. They might not have hit him for several hours. I don’t get this lack of clothes and the locked room. A wrong room at that.”

  Gavigan said, “Instead of the usual murder victim in a locked room with the question—How’d the murderer get out?—we’ve got a body, dead from natural causes, and the question—How’d he get in, and how’d his clothes get out? The desk clerk, the elevator boy, and the floor clerk on 21 say they never saw him before—that might be on account of the missing mustache. But they’d certainly have noticed if he was running around the place without any clothes.”

  “Natural causes?” Merlini asked. “Just how natural a death is the bends. Doctor?”

  “It’s not exactly ordinary, if that’s what you mean; but it couldn’t very well be homicide, either. Accidental death is what the verdict would read.”

  “What makes you so sure it couldn’t be murder?”

  Gail smiled in a professionally superior way. “Compressed air as a murder device mid be original and clever—in fiction. Couple of ways it might be done—but in actual practice they’d both be damned impractical.”

  “Unless, being an inventive cuss, as I suspect he is, our murderer overcame the disadvantages. What are they?”

  “Well, method number one would consist in popping your victim into a compression chamber, building up an atmospheric pressure of something over two atmospheres, and then suddenly allowing it to drop back to normal. Difficulty there is that a cylindrical steel chamber large enough to hold a man and fitted with the usual battery of pumps or compressed air tanks is not only an expensive but an unwieldy murder weapon. The disposal of the weapon would be even more of a headache than the disposal of the body.”

  “What happens when you build up the air pressure and release it too suddenly?”

  “It carbonates the blood, literally turns the victim into a human soda-water bottle! “Most of the 78 percent of nitrogen in the air is ordinarily exhaled, but, under pressure, much of it passes into solution in the bloodstream and is deposited in the various fatty tissues, nerve tissues, and joint liquids throughout the body. If the external pressure is reduced gradually, the lungs have time to filter the gas out again; but if the drop is too rapid, the nitrogen returns to a gaseous state wherever it happens to be at the time and forms bubbles in the bloodstream and tissues. Same as when you take the cap off a soda-water bottle. The bubbles rupture blood vessels, tear the tissues, and shatter the nerves, and you’ve got a nice case of either sand hog’s itch, the staggers, the chokes, or the bends.”

  “The itch, the staggers, and the chokes,” Merlini said, “are all as descriptive as anything. Why the bends?”

  “When the bubbles are so bad that you can’t hold your arms and legs straight because of the pain, you’ve got the bends. It’s one of the more exquisite forms of torture.”

  “How soon would death occur?”

  “That would depend on the amount of pressure, the length of time one was exposed to it, and the time taken getting out from under it. If a bubble or a cluster of bubbles formed an embolus blocking blood to parts of the brain or heart, death might occur in a couple of minutes. Otherwise, it might be anything from that on up to several days, usually one to 24 hours.”

  “Any cure, once you have it?”

  “Sure. Recompression. Get back into the compression chamber and back under the original pressure. Then reduce it slowly enough so that the gases can escape normally through the lungs.”

  “You said two murder methods,” Gavigan put in. “What’s the other?”

  “Same principle, but without the chamber.” Gail lighted a cigarette and gestured with it. “But you couldn’t use it on just anyone. Your victim would have to be a diver and you’d have to be the man at the pumps. Impractical on two counts, you see. The air you send down has another purpose besides giving the diver something to breathe. With the usual rubber diving dress the air has to be compressed enough so that it equals the pressure of the surrounding water at whatever depth the diver’s in. At 100 feet, for instance, there’s a total of nearly 50 tons of water pressing on the surface of his body; and he needs 44 pounds pressure per square inch to keep from being flattened. If you pulled him up too quickly, you’d get the same result as with the compression chamber. The usual procedure is to bring the diver up slowly, with stops of various durations at different depths—stage decompression. But as a murder device, the simpler thing to do would be to give him ‘a squeeze.’ There’s a nice murder method no one’s used. Death by implosion.”

  “You’re bubbling over with murder methods,” Gavigan punned, unconsciously. “What’s that one?”

  “An implosion is just the opposite of an explosion. Can’t you imagine what all those tons of water pressure would do to you if the man on topside at the pumps suddenly let your air pressure go? The water literally pushes you right up into your helmet. They take you out with a spoon. Divers have facetiously referred to the results of a squeeze as ‘strawberry jam.’ ”

  Merlini spoke suddenly: “Can the floor clerk on 21 see the door of 2113 from where she sits?”

  “What?” Gavigan turned to him. “Oh, no. It’s around a turn in the corridor, but she’s smack in front of the elevators. It’s the only way in except for the service elevator. The fire door only opens out. She swears she never set eyes on him before. Barring a duplicate key, which isn’t likely because the locks were all changed recently, there’s no way he could have got into that room except up the fire escape and in through the window. The chambermaid left that open an inch or two for ventilation. But she’s positive she locked the door—they’ve had some room thefts there recently, and the staff is all lock conscious. Anyway, both door and window were locked when that bellhop took the schoolteacher up.”

  “Yale lock?”

  “Yes. Locks behind you as you go out, but you couldn’t get in without a key of some sort; there were no picklock scratches inside the lock. And even if he’d rented the room very recently and had a duplicate key cut—well, there wasn’t any key with him in the room. And he couldn’t have been airing himself on the fire escape and then crawled back into the wrong room because the soles of his feet were perfectly clean, There’s not a damned bit of evidence to show he didn’t simply materialize in that empty room, nude and dead.”

  “Any fingerprints?”

  “Not a smell of one, not even Floyd’s. Everything nice and tidy the way the maid left it, except for a corpse where it shouldn’t be.”

  “The situation is certainly contrary,” Merlini said. “We’ve been plagued with disappearing men all morning, and now it’s a horse on the other foot. A production trick, instead of a vanishing trick. The mystery is not how the murderer escaped, but where did the corpse come from?”

  “Yeah. And if it’s a trick you’ve got listed in your catalogue, I’ll buy it. I want to know—”

  “His feet were clean. That’s your clue. If he was dressed when he came into that room, then his clothes melted or something. I don’t like that. Reminds me of the Great Ceeley and the beautiful, but not so bright, wench he hired in London for a lightning-change illusion. Will Goldston made her a trick three-in-one costume that consisted of a British army uniform, a Belgian uniform—this was in ’15 during the early days of the war—and Britannia’s dress. They fitted skin-tight and one on top of the other, each costume with a concealed cord that ended in a differently shaped button, which, when pulled, caused its particular costume to collapse, instantly revealing the one next underneath. The button on the Britannia outfit was to enable her to shuck that quickly in her dressing-room after the act. But on opening night when Ceeley fired the gun—her cue to pull the first button—she brought the house down. She pulled all three buttons at once! Instead of a lightning change it was a lightning strip-tease! And not so very tantalizing either.”

  Gav
igan cut in brusquely “Save your reminiscences for your memoirs. What do you mean, the clean feet are the clue?”

  “They suggest that if he was undressed when he entered that room, he didn’t walk in. Were his hands clean too?”

  “Yeah. So he didn’t walk on his hands.”

  “And must have been carried in. While, if he was dressed when he entered, someone must have removed his clothes. In either case I give you Mr. X again.”

  “Uh-huh,” Gavigan muttered, pacing the floor irritably. “Somebody carried him in via the fire escape, dropped him on the floor, closed the window, locked it, and walked out the door, letting it lock behind him. Somebody the hotel help paid no attention to because he was familiar to ’em—because he has a room there.”

  “And a room off that same fire escape. Have you checked on rooms 2013 and 2213 and so on?”

  “There should be a report on my desk now. I had that done as a matter of routine. Phone headquarters, Malloy, and see if Murphy uncovered anything.”

  Merlini spread the deck of cards out along his arm, balancing them from wrist to shoulder. His arm dropped suddenly, pulled in, and then shot out with lightning-like rapidity. His hand scooped at the cards, gathering them neatly from mid-air as they fell. “Glad you like the solution, Inspector. In case you haven’t noticed, it clears up another thing or two also. Now that we know it’s Floyd, we know why the body was nude.”

  “We do?”

  “Of course. You saw Floyd’s clothes upstairs. Marquis is his tailor; and the suits are all custom made, imported fabrics and the like. Ripping out labels and laundry marks wouldn’t have prevented identification. You’d only have had to query half a dozen of the swankiest tailors, and you’d have got the corpse’s name with a complete set of his measurements in no time. The person who carried that body in there realized that. So he simply took away the clothes altogether. I like the direct way he solves a problem like that. And he gets another orchid because he also realized that, if a photo of the corpse should make the papers, some of Floyd’s friends or relatives might recognize him. So he simply undressed him a bit more. He shaved off the mustache.”