The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths Page 3

  “What do you mean?”

  “We want you to write a confession,” Henry said. “Admit to what the two of you did to Letty. You must tell the world everything. And don’t try blaming it all on Joel Dyson here, alias Ellis Hurt. You’re the brains behind the partnership, aren’t you, Sophia? Or should I call you Maria Mancini?”

  “Words written under duress,” she said with a dismissive gesture. “They are worthless in a court of law.”

  Her voice was curiously flat, as if her mind was elsewhere.

  “Watch her!” Winnie shouted.

  At that moment, Maria Mancini sprang forward. Her sharp fingers became talons clawing at Henry’s eyes. As he fell back, she leaped upon him, trying to wrench the revolver from his hand.

  “Let him go, or I’ll shoot,” Winnie hissed.

  “You won’t dare,” Maria spat. “You’ll hit him, not me.”

  She was strong and sinewy, and Henry fought to keep hold of his gun. Winnie jumped forward.

  In the confines of the bedroom, the noise of the shot seemed deafening.

  Maria screamed in horror. In the struggle, her lover had been shot in the chest. Blood oozed over his shirt. Henry seized hold of her wrist, only for the gun to fire again.

  The second bullet hit the side of Maria’s head at point-blank range.

  ***

  Winnie sobbed as Henry checked the blackmailers’ pulses and found no sign of life. He laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “You must keep calm. There’s work to be done.”

  Still wearing the steward’s uniform he’d bought in London, he strode out into the corridor and headed for the laundry room. It was in darkness, as he’d expected. Hinting that he planned a surreptitious liaison with a fellow passenger, he’d given the steward a lavish tip to make himself scarce.

  The wicker basket he’d spotted the previous day stood in an alcove. He lifted the lid to make sure it was still empty before dragging it back to Winnie’s suite. She was drying her tears.

  “Give me a sheet to keep the blood off the basket,” he said.

  “What…what will you do?”

  He pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket. “I’m taking these bodies back where they belong.”

  “You can’t throw them overboard!”

  “I could, but I won’t. Tidy up and make a bundle of the bloodstained bedclothes. Chuck it over the side of the ship while I shift the corpses. Thankfully their cabin is only down one flight of stairs and pretty much underneath us. But I’ll need two journeys. This wretched basket isn’t big enough for both of them.”

  ***

  “Are you sure people won’t suspect?” Winnie was breathless. The past hour had been a frenzy.

  “There’s a sporting chance,” Henry said. “If we hold our nerve.”

  “But the angle of the second shot…”

  “Is consistent with a self-inflicted wound,” he said. “Just about. When their steward finally opens the cabin, he’ll discover a macabre tableau. What happened will be obvious. A violent quarrel got out of hand, these Latin women are tempestuous types.”

  “People have seen me in his company,” she said.

  “Hence the quarrel.”

  “They’ve also seen you talking to her. If the authorities ask the right questions…”

  “We have answers.” Henry clasped her hand. “After you left the lounge with him, I noticed her following. There was a confrontation in the passageway. Raised voices. You made your excuses and left them to it. Meanwhile, I did my best to cheer you up and refused to let you out of my sight. A perfect alibi.”

  “Only if they take our word for it.”

  “Who can contradict us? Thank your lucky stars for good old British reserve. The only two people on board who thought of us as Miss Wyvern and Mr. Breen, rather than Henry and his pal Winnie, will never utter another word.”

  A thought struck her. “What if someone heard the shots?”

  “There’s no better-built ship than the Queen Mary on the seven seas, remember. The stateroom walls are solid, and I’m your next-door neighbor. Everyone else on A Deck is still waltzing the night away. The band is loud, and if anyone did hear shots, they might easily suppose they came from our friends’ cabin. It’s almost exactly below us, don’t forget.”

  “Whatever the ship’s officers may think, the police…”

  “Are likely to take the easy way out,” he interrupted. “Legal jurisdiction on the high seas is as clear as sea mist. Or so I recall from my tedious year in chambers.”

  “You’re sure everyone will believe…?”

  “That, just like Letty’s death, it’s a tragedy rather than a mystery?” He gave a dark smile. “People believe what they want to believe. Just as Mancini and Dyson were only too happy to believe in Cynthia Wyvern and the mischief-making Irishman.”

  She remained quiet for a few moments. “Am I stupid to believe that you intended them to die all along?”

  “You could never be stupid, my dear.” He paused. “Blackmail was their sport. They reveled in it.”

  “You planned all this, didn’t you?” she murmured. “You love playing for high stakes, whether you’re burgling or…that’s why you took an impression of his cabin key before I put it back in his door, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t worry. Ten minutes ago I threw my copy of the key into the waves.”

  “You never meant to use it simply to snoop around for evidence of their crimes.”

  “Call it poetic justice,” he said softly. “The authorities will realize it’s impossible that anyone else was involved. A plain case of murder and suicide. Maria shot her faithless lover and then turned the gun on herself. Their bodies were found inside a locked cabin. And to prove it, the key is lying on the floor for all to see.”

  It’s Not What You Know

  O’NEIL DE NOUX

  The rookie guarding the front door yawns as I open my coat to show him the gold star-and-crescent detective’s badge clipped to my belt. He tells me, “The body’s inside,” as if I thought the body would be outside.

  Four people are inside the art gallery when I step in—another rookie I don’t know, a heavy-set man with a bad toupee, a thin man with coal-black hair, and an eager-looking cop with reddish-brown hair done up in a bun. Her, I’ve seen around headquarters. The Revenant Gallery, sandwiched between two antique shops along the 600 block of Royal Street, occupies a typical three-story New Orleans Creole townhouse with arched doorways, a black lace balcony, and fourteen-foot ceilings. The place smells of furniture polish.

  The eager-looking cop comes up, extending her hand. “Hi, I’m Sally Gallagher.”

  I shake her hand. Her palm’s damp. I resist the urge to wipe it on my suit pants. “LaStanza. Homicide,” I tell her. “Anything new going on in your life?”

  “Pardon?” She’s taller than me, around five-nine.

  I lean closer. “Somebody musta died, or you wouldn’t have called me.”

  “Oh.” Sally recovers. “Two victims went to Charity but didn’t make it.”

  I look over at the bad-toupee guy and the guy with the coal-black hair. Both glare at me with distrustful eyes.

  “Then where’d they end up?” I ask Sally.

  “Pardon?”

  “You say that a lot, don’t you?” I look into her wide green eyes, a couple shades darker than mine. “If our victims didn’t make it to Charity Hospital, where’d they end up?”

  “Oh, no. They made it to Charity, but they died.”

  I keep my face expressionless, as if I’m serious. She shrugs again. Still hasn’t figured I’m messing with her. Pulling my notepad and pen from the pocket of my navy blue suit jacket, I jot down the date and time—Friday, September 13, 1985. 10:45 p.m.

  “Tell me what happened,” I say without looking up.

  “I think it was poison. In the punch. It smells funny.”

  I look over at the small table she’s pointing to—marble, with a crystal punch bowl and several crystal glasses on it, one with the same red liquid inside as in the bowl. I move to the table. A couple dozen ice cubes float in the punch.

  “Probably cyanide,” Sally adds. “It smells funny, like almonds. Smell it.” She leans over and takes a sniff.

  “Cyanide fumes are deadly,” I tell her. “It’s what they use in gas chambers.”

  Sally blanches and I run my hand over my moustache to hide my grin. Okay, I’m messing with her. I need something to keep me jazzed. Almost made it through a long night until this call came in. Should’ve picked up some coffee-and-chicory on the way.

  “The fumes have to be a lot stronger than a simple sniff,” I tell her, but she doesn’t look reassured. “So, who died?”

  She takes a step away from the lethal punch and flips through her notepad.

  “Jane Hayes, white female, twenty-four. She was the ex-girlfriend of the skinny man over there. Also dead is Ned Brossard. He was an artist.”

  I point my chin at the civilians. “What’s their names?”

  “The heavy one is the gallery owner, Mal Banky. The skinny one, Jane Hayes’s ex, is another artist, Pency Andover.”

  I look back at Sally. “Mal and Pency?”

  She nods.

  “Mal and Pency,” I call out as I move toward the civilians.

  I hear Sally following me. Mal, the fat guy in the bad toupee, puts his little fists on his waist and sticks his chin out. Pency, with the coal-black hair, steps forward and points to Mal. “He did it.” Pency has a deep New England accent. “He made the punch and didn’t drink any.”

  Mal bounces on his toes, screams, then begins slapping Pency, who slaps back. Sally breaks them up, and I ask her to move Mal to the front of the gallery.

  I keep coal-black-haired Pency with me. He straightens his gray turtleneck and tugs up his black pants before folding his arms, making sure I see the gold Rolex watch on his left wrist. I reach to my right side and readjust the canvas holster holding my stainless steel .357 magnum Smith and Wesson model 66.

  Looking into his narrow hazel eyes, I ask where he’s from.

  “Arlington. Suburb of Boston,” he pronounces it ““baston,”” with a soft a.

  “I’ve been to Arlington.”

  “Really.”

  “Not yours.”

  “Arlington, Virginia?” He looks confused.

  “No, Arlington, Texas. Suburb of Dallas. Bet it’s bigger than your Arlington.”

  He’s really confused now, so I say, “I understand one of the victims was your girlfriend.”

  “Ex-girlfriend.” He lets out a long sigh, his face sad now. “I drank punch too.” He points toward the punch bowl. “That’s my glass next to it. Check the fingerprints.”

  Check the fingerprints? I give him a deadpan look.

  “Check the video camera,” he adds, pointing to the ceiling. “I drank the punch. Shouldn’t I go to the hospital, too?”

  “If you’d swallowed cyanide, you’d be dead.”

  He tilts his head to the side like a puppy does when it hears a strange noise.

  “Tell me what happened tonight.”

  He does, his voice deepening as he explains that the party was for his friend and fellow artist Ned Brossard, because of his success in New York and Chicago. Mal had put together the after-hours gathering of friends.

  I watch his eyes as I ask, “Did you know your ex-girlfriend was coming?”

  “Nope.” He stares right back at me.

  “Okay to let in the crime lab?” the rookie cop guarding the door calls out to me in a bored voice.

  I wave an okay and watch as Howard Coyle lumbers in with his silver camera case and black crime scene processing kit. Tall and bespectacled, Howie has some hair left around his ears and a mole the size of Rhode Island on his right cheek.

  I point to the punch bowl and ask if he has a test for poison.

  “Just cyanide and strychnine.”

  “Good. Check for both.”

  He puts his cases down and digs into the black one, pulling out a test tube. Carefully, Howie uses an eye-dropper to deposit three drops of punch into the test tube. He swirls it, and the clear liquid inside remains clear.

  “Not strychnine.”

  He pulls out another test tube and puts three drops of punch into it. The clear liquid inside turns bright green.

  “Whoa. Cyanide.” Howie does a little dance. “That’s good detective work.”

  I wave Sally over. “She gets credit. She sniffed it.”

  Howie shakes his head and tells Sally she shouldn’t do that. She’s paler than before.

  “I need you to dust the bowl and the cups.” I point to the half-filled cup. “Especially that one. And collect the punch as well.”

  “No shit.”

  Leaving Sally with Pency, I go over to Mal and get his story, which is essentially the same as Pency’s. He’s still angry, grinding his teeth as he leers at Pency.

  “Did Pency know his old girlfriend was coming?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  I point to the video camera and ask where’s the tape. He tells me it’s in back and I can view it on the little TV in his office. I head there. As I sit in Mal’s tan recliner—he has a recliner in his kitchen-office—and watch the beginning of the surveillance tape, Sally peeks in and asks if she can watch. “The rookie’s keeping Mal and Pency apart.”

  “Got any popcorn?”

  She freezes until I get up and lean against the chair’s arm, pointing to the other arm. She goes over and leans against the far arm of the recliner. I fast-forward the black-and-white videotape until I see Mal come out of the kitchen-office with the punch bowl in his hands. He carefully places it on the marble table, making sure not to spill any punch.

  A dark-haired woman comes into the picture.

  “That’s Jane Hayes,” Sally tells me. “The dead ex-girlfriend.”

  Jane is in a tight-fitting minidress and killer high heels. She wears her hair like Morticia from the Addams Family, parted down the center, down to her hips. A good-looking woman, even on grainy film.

  Ol’ Pency enters from the kitchen-office. He carries a tray with the punch bowl’s matching cups. Mal passes him on his way back into the kitchen-office. Pency says something to Jane, who turns away, giving him the cold shoulder.

  She walks toward the front of the gallery, and Pency stares at her until another man enters the gallery. Tall and blond, he wears a baggy, pirate-looking puffy shirt with the collar open to the waist.

  “That’s Ned Brossard,” Sally tells me. “The other victim.”

  No. Really?

  Jane and Ned kiss each other flush on the mouth, a nice long kiss. Pency backs away, passing Mal again as the gallery owner hurries out to greet Brossard. Cheek kissing now, and hugging.

  “Your family hug a lot?” I ask Sally.

  “Uh, yeah. Does yours?”

  “Naw. We’re pretty antisocial. Being Sicilian and all.”

  She looks like she believes everything I’m saying, so I’m trying to think of something even more outrageous when I notice Pency again on the video. He comes out of the kitchen-office with a large plastic bowl. He dumps it into the punch, and I see it’s ice.

  He dips a cup into the punch and takes a sip. Standing there, holding his cup, he watches the three others laugh and talk. Placing his half-filled cup next to the punch bowl, Pency leaves as the others approach the punch. He goes back into the kitchen-office with the plastic bowl, which, I glance around the kitchen area of the office and see, is over in the sink now.

  The three talk next to the punch bowl, Mal doing most of the talking, flapping his chubby little arms around. The conversation goes on a while, at least five minutes, but Pency doesn’t come back in.

  “When do they die?” I ask Sally.

  “I don’t know,” she answers seriously.

  Jane picks up a cup and dips it into the punch, passing it to Ned. She dips another and passes it to Mal, who tries to wave it away, but reluctantly takes it. They stand around for a minute, just holding the cups, until Jane dips a third cup in, raises it in a toast, and the men raise theirs. Jane and Ned take a drink, but Mal doesn’t.

  Just as Mal puts his drink down on the table, Jane and Ned hit the floor, both flat on their backs. Mal bounces twice and jumps down next to Ned. He shakes him and shakes Jane, but they don’t stir. He shouts something to Pency as he steps back in. Pency runs back into the kitchen-office while Mal tries to perform CPR, first on Ned, then on Jane. Pency rushes back in and shoves Mal off Jane, then takes over with Jane. They continue until the EMTs arrive, but the victims don’t stir.

  We see EMTs enter the picture as Mal and Pency crawl away to catch their breath. The EMTs have as much success, but don’t give up, hauling Jane and Ned away on gurneys. The two rookie patrolmen come into view now, and I watch as no one goes near the bowl until Sally is there.

  “Anyone go near the bowl after you got here?”

  “Only me.”

  We continue watching the film until Sally leans over the punch and takes a deep sniff.

  “You haven’t gotten a headache, have you?” I ask her.

  “No.” She’s pale again.

  “Then you should be alright.”

  “What do you mean should?”

  I finally lose it, and tell her I’m kidding. She doesn’t believe that either, and wrings her hands. Then she asks the most obvious question.

  “If Pency drank the punch too, why didn’t he die? I didn’t see anyone drop anything into the punch after he drank some.”

  “And the cups were lying upside down,” I point out, rubbing my fingers down across my moustache, which I seem to do when I’m nervous or thinking hard.

  “Is there an antidote you can take before ingesting cyanide?”

  Not a bad question, but I tell her there’s no antidote to cyanide. Then it hits me. I jump up and pull open the nearest drawer. I find a big spoon in the second drawer, grab a different plastic bowl, and run back out into the gallery. I carefully scoop out what’s left of the ice and put it in the plastic bowl.