Quests of Simon Ark (28 page)

I followed him down a dimly lit corridor to a tiny office that had been given over to him for the evening. To my surprise a young woman sat patiently waiting for him—Marie, the maid.

She stood, startled, as I entered behind Simon, but he immediately calmed her. “You may speak freely in front of my friend. You have nothing to fear from either of us.”

She nodded, and I noticed that she was clutching a wrinkled brown paper bag. “I had to see you, Mr. Ark,” she said. “I heard you speaking with Miss Slumber yesterday, before—the death.” She lifted her dark eyes to his. “It was the second death, you know.”

“I know.”

“Both brothers. Madam’s former husband and now his. brother.”

“What have you brought me?” Simon asked.

“I found this in Madam’s bedroom drawer.” She thrust the bag into Simon’s hands and sat back as if glad to be rid of it. “I thought of telling the police but decided to bring it to you instead.”

He opened it carefully and extracted two identical stuffed manikins. The faces had been given crude male features and bits of hair. The clothing seemed fashioned from authentic pieces. They were named—one carried a slip of paper on its back with
LYLE
printed on it.
ERIC
was pinned to the back of the other. The Lyle puppet had a tiny sliver of glass embedded in its throat. The Eric puppet had a small pin sticking out of its left arm.

“My God, Simon!” I gasped. “Does such voodoo nonsense still go on?”

“It appears so,” Simon murmured, examining the dolls with care. “Witches have always used puppets, for love charms and for harming enemies.”

“Then this proves it—Maud Slumber is a witch!”

“Do not jump to hasty conclusions, my friend.” He turned back to the French girl, asking, “When did you find these, Marie?”

“Earlier today, when I was cleaning.”

“In a drawer, you said?”

“Yes.”

“A drawer Miss Slumber often uses?”

She hesitated. “No. More likely one she would hide something in.”

“Does she know you have taken these?”

“No—unless she looked for them while I was gone.”

Simon nodded. “Tell me one thing. Did you know Eric Caser?”

Marie shook her head. “I never met him. I knew Lyle. He got me the job with Miss Slumber before he died. But I never knew his brother.”

“Does Miss Slumber have a great many visitors to her apartment?”

“No. She hasn’t got any friends. She told me they are all dead.”

Simon returned the dolls to the paper bag. “I want you to return these,” he instructed. “Put them back exactly as you found them.”

“But—Aren’t you going to tell the police?”

“Not quite yet.”

She took the bag somewhat reluctantly and we saw her to the door.

Simon stared after her in the darkness, watching as she walked across the parking lot toward a waiting car. When she was almost up to it, the car’s headlights went on. “Come,” he said suddenly, “she’s not alone.”

“What if she isn’t?”

“Remember Greg Hopkins telling us, Maud didn’t approve of a man she was seeing? I want to know who he is.”

We reached the car just as it was pulling away. The glow from an overhead streetlight fell across the windshield and I could see Marie’s startled face staring at us from the passenger seat. Behind the wheel sat Vic Tannet, the security guard.

We followed them back downtown in my car.

“It might not mean anything,” I argued.

“Perhaps not,” Simon agreed.

“So why are we following them back to Maud Slumber’s apartment?”

“Because I want to make certain the dolls are returned intact.”

We let ourselves be announced once more and accompanied Marie up to the apartment. Vic Tannet vanished with his car without speaking to us. “Don’t you trust me?” Marie asked in the elevator. “Didn’t you think I’d bring them back?”

“We can create a diversion,” Simon explained, “while you return them to the drawer in which you found them.”

But the diversion was not to be of our making. We walked in upon a scene of Maud Slumber, along with her attorney Greg Hopkins and Dr. Langstrom, sipping champagne from fluted Swedish glasses. “You’re just in time to join the celebration,” she said. “The more the merrier.”

“What are we celebrating?” Simon asked, accepting a glass of champagne as Marie doffed her coat and disappeared into the bedroom.

“My wedding! Dr. Langstrom and I were married a week ago. I wanted to keep it secret but he’s convinced me it’s time to make it public.”

We offered our somewhat startled congratulations while Dr. Langstrom beamed and shook hands. “You gentlemen work with Greg here?” he asked, obviously uncertain as to our function.

“They’re advisers,” Hopkins answered quickly.

“This has been the greatest week of my life,” Langstrom said. “Dear Maud is the woman I need beside me. I’m glad she’s agreed not to keep it a secret any longer.”

Marie reappeared from the bedroom and Maud instructed her to open another bottle of champagne. “Mr. Hopkins has an empty glass, dear.”

“No, no,” the lawyer insisted. “I really must be going.”

Simon and I decided to depart at the same time and Maud walked us to the door. “Dear Greg, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner but you understand, don’t you? We can take care of any legal technicalities next week.”

“There shouldn’t be any, unless you wish to change your will.”

“We’ll talk about it,” she said, patting his shoulder. “Oh, and can you be here tomorrow morning? That detective, Banto, is coming at eleven and I’d feel better about seeing him if you were present.”

“Sure,” he answered agreeably. “I’ll be glad to.” He marked the time down in his date book.

She turned to Simon and said, “At my age, if only a woman could marry her doctor
and
lawyer life would be so much easier.”

Simon laughed, then paused at the door with a question. “Did anyone know about your marriage? Marie, for instance?”

She shook her head. “No one. No one at all.”

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Hopkins told her.

In the elevator I remarked, “There was certainly no talk of witchcraft tonight.”

Simon Ark smiled slightly. “Perhaps she used a love charm on Dr. Langstrom. Witches sometimes tie two puppets together with red ribbon to cast a spell over a desired love object.”

“Puppets?” Hopkins asked.

“She had two hidden in her bedroom drawer,” I told him. “Marie found them and brought them to Simon. They were labeled with the names of Lyle and Eric and pierced with glass and a pin.”

“My God!”

“God was not the intended recipient of her prayers in this case,” Simon said drily.

“But—if that’s true, you’re saying she caused the death of the Caser brothers. You’re saying you have proof her hexes really work.”

“Not at all.” We’d reached the lobby and walked out past the security guard. It wasn’t Vic Tannet. He was nowhere in sight. “What I’m saying is only that someone made those dolls, and that that same someone caused Eric Caser’s death in this revolving door.”

“Who else could it be but Maud?”

“Who else?” Simon repeated. “Marie, for one. Have you ever considered the possibility that Marie might be the real witch of Park Avenue?”

We talked far into the night, seated in a conveniently isolated booth at a bar near Grand Central Station. We’d walked there from Maud Slumber’s and had felt the need to continue the conversation for a time.

“What do you mean,” Greg Hopkins asked, “when you say that the person who made those puppets caused Eric Caser’s death? What about Lyle Caser?”

“Lyle’s death could have been an accident,” Simon explained. “But Eric was certainly murdered. He was injected with poison in his left arm, the same arm that was pierced with a pin on the doll meant to represent him. Since the autopsy results have not been made public, there are only two possibilities to explain this. Either we believe in witchcraft or we believe that Eric’s murderer made those dolls. Because a third person would not have known how Eric died.”

“How could anyone have killed Eric with both of you watching?” the lawyer wanted to know.

Simon Ark, drinking an unaccustomed glass of imported beer, leaned back. “Let us examine a purely hypothetical possibility. Maud Slumber imagines herself to be a witch, but in truth she has no powers. Lyle Caser, anxious to spy on his former wife,
and
possibly her relationship with Dr. Langstrom, plants Marie in the apartment as a maid. Marie in time takes up with the daytime security guard and they develop a scheme to fleece the old woman out of her money.”

“That would be unlikely,” Hopkins protested. “I keep a very careful eye on her finances.”

“Let me finish, please. I told you this was hypothetical.

“Lyle is killed in an accident, but his brother Eric comes along and somehow learns of Marie and Vic’s scheme. He threatens to tell the old lady and they have to kill him—but in such a way that it’ll be linked to Lyle’s death and Maud’s claims of witchcraft. They make the dolls and Marie plants them in the apartment. She told us Maud never has visitors, so who would have done it? Then Vic lies in wait for Eric in the building lobby. He jams the revolving door with a small metal wedge and somehow manages to inject the poison into him as he struggles to free him. Eric doesn’t know Vic, but in his dying moment he realizes who must be behind the plot and he scrawls Marie’s name on the glass. Vic wipes it off as soon as he has the chance.”

“But how could he inject Eric?” I wanted to know. “The door was always between them. You implied before that Eric wasn’t killed until later.”

“No,” Simon admitted. “He was dead before we freed him from the door.”

“Then how was Eric poisoned?”

“We can work that out later,” Greg Hopkins said. “I like most of it—it makes sense. And when no one found the dolls where Marie had planted them, she pretended to find them herself and bring them to you, Simon. It all hangs together.”

“All you have to do is prove it,” I commented.

We fell silent for a bit, thinking about that.

It was late when we finished talking and I phoned my wife Shelly to tell her I’d be staying in town overnight, taking the spare bed in Simon’s temporary room at the university.

Which was how I happened to be with him at breakfast in the morning when Sergeant Banto showed up. “You fellows live together or something?” he asked, settling down at our table in the dining hall.

“I missed the last train to Westchester,” I explained. “Simon put me up overnight.”

“What’s on your mind?” Simon asked Banto. “I thought you were seeing Maud Slumber this morning.”

“I am, at eleven. But I thought I’d see you first.” He reached into his pocket and took out a small plastic device of a sort I’d never seen before. “Any idea what this thing is?”

Simon took it and turned it over in his hands. It was round and flat, a couple of inches in diameter, with a hollow channel running along one side. There was a small spring in the channel and I could see a little lever that latched the spring and held it in place. “Look,” I showed him, “when the spring is latched a certain amount of pressure on the side plate will release it. Whatever’s put in this channel would be propelled forward about an inch.”

“Where did you find this?” Simon asked Banto.

“In Eric Caser’s room. He had an apartment in Greenwich Village. There was nothing else of interest, but this intrigued me because I don’t know what it is.”

“I saw one once before, years ago,” Simon said. “Remember, my friend, when we investigated the killings at the army base in the desert back in the 1950s? They were still doing research into nerve gas then and working on possible defensive measures. That was always the problem—how do you protect yourself against a gas that kills within seconds, before you have time to put on a protective mask?”

“This thing protects against gas?” Banto asked, unbelieving.

Simon nodded. “It was tested but never issued to the troops. The threat of nerve gas simply faded away. The idea was that an antidote had been developed. Work on it was begun during World War II. All that was needed was an instant manner of injection during possible exposure. A tiny hypodermic needle was fitted into this channel and loaded with one shot of the nerve-gas antidote. The disc was worn taped to the arm or leg. Pressure on this side-simply by squeezing the arm against the body—was enough to release the spring and inject the needle into the skin. It took only a second and that was fast enough to counteract the nerve gas.”

“Eric Caser wasn’t killed with nerve gas,” Banto said.

“No, but this little device has solved the case for us.”

“How’s that?”

“Do you want proof of the killer’s identity, Sergeant? Do you want to make a capture red-handed?”

Banto laughed. “Why not?”

“Then tell Maud Slumber you’re going down to search Caser’s apartment later this afternoon. Make up some excuse why you haven’t been there before this. Tell her you’re looking for some clue as to how he died.”

“All right. I can do that.”

“Say nothing else. Just tell her you’re going down after lunch. Meanwhile, give us the address and we’ll watch the place till you get there.”

“I’ve got detectives who can do that.”

“What’s the address?”

Banto told us. “All right,” he said, “here’s the key. Put this gadget back in one of the drawers for me and then get out. My men will cover it from there. If you’re right, she’ll try to get to it before I do my search, is that right?”

“Something like that,” Simon admitted.

“Go to it.”

We took a taxi down to the Village, arriving at the apartment on Bleecker Street just a few minutes after eleven. “I’m surprised he trusted us,” I remarked to Simon.

“He didn’t. He radioed ahead. There’s a detective in that doorway watching us. He had nothing to lose by going along with my idea, but that doesn’t mean he trusts us.”

I unlocked the apartment door and we entered the silent, plainly furnished room. There was a desk and a few books, mainly in French, with a sofa that converted to a bed at night. It was the apartment of someone on the move, a rest stop along a journey. Simon slipped the plastic device into a dresser drawer, making no attempt to hide it.