Footprints on the Ceiling Read online

  Merlini breathed a soft, sudden “Damn!” and jerked the door wide. He pointed at Linda’s door, his voice still low.

  “In there, Colonel,” he commanded. “At the window. If anyone shows on that sun deck, yell out.”

  I followed him at a swift, silent double-quick down the carpeted stairs. The library was dark. Merlini’s flash clicked, made one hasty circuit of the room, and snapped off.

  “Those French windows,” he said. “He went out that way. Take a look.” I heard him snatch at the phone and begin dialing.

  I reached the window, pulled it open, and stood part way out, seeing nothing in the black.

  “Operator, give me Bronx 6-3824 and hurry it; police speaking.…Someone replaced that missing length of wire, Ross. I rather expected that. And he may try to make way with it again so…Hello. You, Gavigan? Merlini speaking. Listen hard. And get it all the first time. Ross Harte and myself are sitting right smack in the middle of as pretty a murder investigation as you ever saw. And we need help. How we need help!…No, it’s not a gag. Shut up and listen. We’re on Skelton Island in the East River with all the boats scuttled and the phone disconnected until a minute ago. And it may go out again any moment. We’ve turned up one murder, a spot of arson, some grand suspects—one of them planning to fly out at dawn. Canada, he said. Your cue—hello!”

  He clicked the phone. “Hello!” I heard him hang up. “Line’s dead again. Out with you.”

  His light shot out and we plunged through the window,” racing for the sun-deck stairs.

  A dark, thin line of black slithered down past my face, and I tripped, the phone wire tangling about my feet. Merlini passed me as I dropped, caught myself on extended hands, and sprang up almost without pause.

  When my head came above the upper level, he was running down the stretch of empty sun deck toward the place where it curved out of sight around the corner. He hurdled a deck chair, stopped sharply at the corner, and put his head around, his light moving. Then he hurried back to where I stood before the window of Linda’s room. It was open. Inside there was only blackness and silence.

  The bright finger of his light reached in, touched the sheeted body in the chair, and the flat, still body of Colonel Watrous on the floor. He lay face down, heels toward the window. The light glistened on the bright, shattered bits of his glasses in the carpet and on a wet, red stain behind his right ear.

  We crossed the sill. Merlini knelt by the body and pulled it over onto its back.

  “Bathroom, Ross! Water!” His light indicated a door.

  Water spilled from the glass as I ran back. Merlini held Watrous in a half-sitting position, one arm around his shoulders. The man’s head hung back loosely, chin toward the ceiling, mouth open. But I saw his eyelids flicker.

  A new voice from the window said coldly, “What the hell are you—?”

  Lamb stood there, staring in. Then he lifted one leg and put it across the sill. Except for his coat, he was fully dressed.

  The Colonel moaned slightly as the water hit him, and spluttered into the glass as Merlini tilted it before his lips. Then, dazedly, he sat straight; and one hand fumbled at his head. His face without the pince-nez seemed oddly nude and his eyes watered.

  “You’ll feel better in a minute, Colonel,” Merlini said. “Someone gave you a nasty sock, but I don’t think it broke anything.” He switched on a small bedside light and brought a first-aid box from the bathroom. He applied cotton and antiseptic to Watrous’s head. I opened a can of adhesive and ripped off a piece.

  Lamb said, “What happened?”

  The Colonel looked at Merlini. “Who—Did you see him?”

  “No. Didn’t you?”

  “No.” The Colonel’s voice was shaky. “Window open when I came in. Couldn’t see all of sun deck without putting head out. Gun poked out around edge of window. Voice, man’s voice, whispered, ‘Quiet! Stand up! Turn around!’ I did. I heard him come in. Then something hit me. That’s all I—my glasses—where—?” His fingers touched the broken pieces on the floor.

  “Your window open on the sun deck, Lamb?” I asked.

  “Yes. Sat smack in front of it smoking a cigar. Couldn’t sleep: Heard you running like hell. Saw flashlight. Thought I’d better come see.”

  “Your room’s around the corner, at the back?” Merlini asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No one come your way and drop off the sun deck?”

  “He disappeared damn quick,” I said. “He must have been up here working at that wire when we came out. What other windows open off the sun deck?”

  Lamb answered, “Watrous’s, Rappourt’s. Around back near mine. But Arnold’s is the next one over.” He turned back to the window and looked out. “Wonder why he hasn’t heard this?”

  “Whoever it was,” Merlini stated, “could have gone on through this room and into any of the others on the other side of the house. Down and out the front door for that matter. There aren’t any alibis. Headache, Colonel?”

  Watrous had pulled himself shakily to his feet and stood, one hand holding tightly to the back of a chair. “Yes,” he said.

  “Get him to his room, Ross. Give him these.” Merlini handed me two capsules.

  Watrous said, “No, I’m all right. We’ll have to look around. Must find out—”

  “Well take care of it, Colonel. You sleep it off. Go on. You’re no good without your glasses anyway.”

  He protested a bit more. “I’ve some others. I—” Then he wavered a bit. “All right,” he said, giving in.

  I took him to his room and put him to bed.

  When I got back, Merlini stood in the hall before the closed door of Linda’s room, arguing in a low whisper with Lamb.

  “You get into your room,” he said, “and stay there. I’ll handle this. No use waking the others. It’s too late. We wouldn’t learn a thing.” Merlini put his hand on the knob of Floyd’s door.

  “I don’t like this at all,” Lamb growled. He looked at us both suspiciously. “How the hell do I know—?” Then he shrugged his heavy shoulders and walked quickly along the hail to his room at the end.

  Merlini waited until the door had closed after him. Then: “Quick, back in there.” His head jerked toward Linda’s door.

  I slid in and he followed, pulling the door to, softly.

  “No lights,” he said, “and pull that shade.”

  As I did so, he locked the door to the hall. Then his flash blinked on, and I saw him take an automatic from his pocket, look at it interestedly for a brief moment, and re-pocket it.

  “We’d better get at that burglary I mentioned, before something else happens.” He crossed the room.

  “Where did you get that gun?”

  “It’s Lamb’s.” He lifted a framed Bakst costume sketch from the wall and disclosed the black, square and shiny dial of a small wall safe.

  “What tuition do you charge for a course of pickpocket lessons? I’d like to sign up. It makes detecting so simple.”

  “I’m not giving one this semester,” he said. “Here, hold this light for me. I’ll demonstrate the ABC’s of safe cracking.”

  From his vest pocket he took what I thought, at first, was a watch, until I noticed that its face carried only a single sensitive hand that quivered as he held it.

  “Harry Houdini gave me this little gadget,” he said. “It’s the only one there is—which is just as well.”

  On one edge of the dial where the winder of a watch would be, was a small cup-shaped projection. He held this against the face of the safe and moved it about, turning the safe’s dial with his other hand. Finally he held it on one spot and then turned the lock dial slowly, watching the small hand that wavered and, now and again, jumped slightly. When this happened, he twisted the dial in the opposite direction.

  “What do you expect to find in there?” I asked.

  “Loot, of course. Maybe a motive. I don’t know. There.”

  He pulled at the door, and it swung out. He took the flashlight
and directed it at the safe’s interior. His arm reached in and brought out three school slates like the one we had seen before. Handing them to me, he explored again, fishing out a checkbook and a letter-size leather case.

  He ran quickly through the check stubs. “Nothing much there,” he said. “A $100 check to Rappourt marked Contribution Psychical Society, but the rest all innocent enough.”

  He opened the leather case and removed a crisp legal document. I saw the printed words on the face: The Last Will and Testament of—and the typewritten name, Linda May Skelton.

  As he looked quickly through the document, I started to examine the slates. Chalked on the first was a scraggly uncertain outline of Skelton Island and, in the corner, a somewhat florid signature that I made out as Capt. Pole.

  Halfway through the small, scratchy handwriting of the message that covered the second slate, Bow at 108 feet beam 112 four feet silt two tar—, I stopped suddenly and put the slate down. I took Merlini by the arm and drew him hastily toward the window. “See that?” I asked.

  Toward the left, along the shore, and back a bit from the water we could see the lighted square of a window. And it blinked irregularly, but purposefully, on and off—Dots and dashes!

  “So, someone does know Morse code after all,” Merlini said softly. “Ross, why weren’t you a boy scout?”

  “Didn’t know what I was missing,” I said. “Sorry. I’ll join up tomorrow. That’s Doc Gail’s place isn’t it? Do we pay him a call?”

  “Thought you were sleepy?” he chuckled. “Yes, I think we do.”

  Chapter Nine:

  SORCERER’S APPRENTICES

  THE DOCTOR’S COTTAGE WAS a small summer affair close by the shore, perhaps 100 yards from the larger house. The lighted window, as we drew near, still blinked monotonously, sending its cryptic message out across the water. During the lighted intervals, now, we could see Dr. Gail. Wearing a dark blue dressing gown and slippers, he stood by the light switch with his right hand on the button. His left held a sheet of note paper that he watched carefully.

  Merlini’s knuckles rapped sharply against the door. The dots and dashes stopped abruptly, leaving the room in darkness.

  After a short silence, the Doctor’s voice called out: “Who is it?”

  “Man from the light company,” answered Merlini. “Noticed you were having trouble.”

  The light came on, footsteps crossed the room, and the Doctor smiled at us from the open door. “Come in. You gave me a start for a moment. Thought perhaps it might be the murderer.”

  Merlini marched in, past him.

  “Maybe it is,” he replied.

  Dr. Gail blinked a bit at that. “I’ll take a chance. You’re company at any rate. I rent this place from Miss Skelton and come out here week-ends mainly for solitude. Somehow that doesn’t seem to be what I want tonight.”

  Merlini indicated the paper the Doctor still held in his hand. “May I see that, please?”

  “What? Oh, of course.” He handed it over, looked at us both for a moment through narrowed eyes, and then grinned widely. “Mysterious signals in the night arouse suspicion because no one admitted knowing Morse code. Investigators investigate.” He nodded at the paper. “I hope that clears me?”

  I looked over Merlini’s shoulder. On the paper, printed in pencil and widely spaced were the letters: SOS SEND POLICE SKELTON ISLAND HURRY. Each letter had beneath it a combination of dots and dashes, the first few like this:

  “I don’t know the code,” Gail continued, “but after I’d returned here it suddenly occurred to me that the encyclopedia should have it. It does.” He pointed at a volume of the Britannica that lay open on the table. “And since the visibility has cleared somewhat in the last hour—you can make out the lights on shore now—I thought it was just possible someone might catch on. And we could do with the police, you know.”

  “I see,” Merlini said pleasantly. “Sure this is what you were sending?”

  “Yes, at least, that’s what I hope I was sending. Though God knows what a professional telegrapher would think of it. And I was getting awfully bored. Perhaps one of you would like to have a go at it?”

  “It won’t be necessary,” Merlini explained casually. “We managed to phone in.”

  “Phone? How?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

  “The person who cut the line kindly repaired it for us. Is that coffee I smell?”

  “The person—Who was it?”

  “He didn’t wait for us to thank him.” Merlini turned his back, dismissing the subject, and glanced interestedly about at the books which overflowed the room.

  “Oh.” Gail sent a sharp look at his back. “I see. Yes, it’s coffee. It’ll be right out.” He disappeared into the kitchen.

  The living-room was a pleasant, cheerful place with an open fireplace, deep, comfortable armchairs, and a sufficient number of ash trays scattered about. Two bookcases were filled to capacity and beyond. There were books on the tables, in the chairs, and stacked in crooked towers in the corners. The larger share of them were technical works on psychology and related subjects, though here and there I glimpsed others that indicated a wide and catholic taste. One lower bookcase shelf held a whole row of brightly jacketed detective stories.

  Merlini removed a stack of psychology journals from one of the chairs and sat down. As he lighted a cigarette, his eyes, above the match flame, slid sideways and looked down at something on a small end table beside his chair. Dropping his match into an ash tray, he glanced up thoughtfully at the kitchen door, his slightly tilted smile showing across his mouth.

  The Doctor entered carrying a tray that held coffee, cups, cream, and sugar. As he placed them on the center table, I came forward from the bookshelves and circled Merlini’s chair, a surreptitious eye cast downward. Two letters lay there bearing similar inscriptions, both addressed to Mr. Gordon Williams, c/o G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2 West 45th Street, New York City. In each case the name and address had been crossed out and a new one written in ink alongside: Dr. William Gail, 56 East 65th Street, New York City.

  I took my coffee black. Merlini lay in his chair, his long legs protruding an unheard-of distance. Dr. Gail poured silently and with a slightly grim air.

  Merlini took his cup and held it cradled in his hands, warming them. “There’s one point that must be settled at once. You, Doctor, said tonight that Miss Skelton would never have gone up to that house alive and under her own power. You sounded pretty positive. Are we to understand that there could have been no exceptions at all?”

  Gail struck a match with his thumbnail, applied it to his cigarette, and then pitched it into the fireplace. “Know much about agoraphobia?”

  Merlini shook his head. “Never heard of it until tonight.”

  “All right. We’ll start from scratch. The word means ‘fear of assembly.’ A more exact term, in Linda’s instance, would be topophobia, fear of place. It’s an anxiety hysteria that springs from some childhood experience which gave her a terrific, disruptive emotional shock, and has played merry hell with her neural patterns almost ever since. For the patient, the fear is a mysterious thing with no apparent reason. The causative experience, long forgotten, remains buried in the subconscious mind while its emotional effect, seizures of uncontrollable terror, bursts from time to time into the consciousness.”

  Dr. Gail leaned back in his chair and fished a book from the shelves behind him. “Leonard, its most articulate victim, described it in The Locomotive God far better than I can.” He thumbed quickly through the pages, found a passage, and read, “ ‘At times this emotional effect remains merely a diffused state of terror, in intensity running the whole scale from vague anxiety to intensest feeling of impending death; and the agonized mind stands balked of any explanation whatever.…my phobic seizures at their worst approach any limits of terror that the human mind is capable of in the actual presence of death in its most horrible forms.’ ” Gail looked up. “That gives you a rough idea.”

  “Yes, quite
,” Merlini said seriously. “What would have happened had Miss Skelton been taken forcibly beyond her given limit?”

  “A number of things. The outward symptoms might be one or more of the following: palpitation of the heart, shivering, vomiting, exaggerated flushing of the face, dry mouth, cold and clammy sweating, accelerated intestinal and urinary action, hysterical fainting, unconsciousness, and even catalepsy. In Linda’s case I should fully expect a collapse from nervous exhaustion, quite possibly resulting in complete insanity or simple death from pure fright.”

  “That,” I interposed with a sudden technical interest, “sounds like a novel murder method for a detective story. Murderer, forcing agoraphobe out of bounds, frightens her to death. Then moves body back again. Medical examiner diagnoses heart failure, It’s neat and simple, and the cops would have a pretty time trying to prove murder.”

  Gail smiled, “Yes. That’s all right—for fiction, There’s an even better agoraphobe plot though. Use the phobia as a motive. The murderer has it. Within his prescribed area he has a job. Someone who dislikes him tries to get him fired. See the situation? His livelihood depends on the position; if he loses it he can’t hop on a train like anyone else and go look for one somewhere else. He’s irrevocably sunk. He kills his enemy as a simple matter of self-preservation. And if you can devise a long-distance murder, so that the victim meets death out beyond the boundary which the murderer cannot cross—you’ve given him a neat alibi.”

  “And the other agoraphobe variation,” Merlini said slowly, “is the one we’ve got. Any ideas about that, Doctor?”

  The latter carefully ground out his cigarette in an ash tray. Then, seeing my cup empty, he indicated the coffee pot and said, “Help yourself, Harte.” He lighted another cigarette before he replied in a careful voice, “Yes, I have.”

  Merlini said nothing, waiting. The Doctor went on.

  “I can’t tell you who poisoned Linda, but—well, if I were you I wouldn’t eliminate everyone who knew she was an agoraphobe, just because her body was in the wrong place. Not right off the bat, anyhow.”