Until You Are Dead (34 page)

Lamb slumped against a showcase, realization of the act he'd committed hitting him in waves of impact.
But it had to be that way,
Lamb told himself,
it had to!
and Lamb was also aware of the inevitability of the next thing he must do. His hand steady, he pointed the revolver barrel at his head like a steel finger of guilt. He squeezed the trigger.

L
amb and Orion were on page one and made much more interesting reading than the item on page nine:

"The Globe
wishes to apologize for the misprint in yesterday's horoscope column. The error was due to an unfortunate mistake in our printing department, and precautions have been taken to safeguard against such mistakes in the future.
The Globe
assures the followers of the daily horoscope column that it will not happen again."

I
t was Sheriff Sam Ladester on the line. Semloh hadn't seen him in years, since the glass eye affair.

"Bain Semloh?" repeated the laconic, mid-western voice. "It is, Sheriff Ladester. It's good to talk to you."

"Maybe you won't think so when you hear what all I want," Ladester said. "I need a favor."

"I owe you a few," Semloh said warmly. "Let's see, your re-election's coming up soon, isn't it?"

"I hope. And that's part of why I need your help. I heard you were in the city for the Curious Crime Convention Conference. Thought I'd call you at your hotel to sorta bail me out."

"Trouble in Graham County?" Ladester was the chief law enforcement officer of a small county some distance from the city, the sort of place where an ill-tempered dog would likely be public enemy number one.

"Trouble is right," Ladester drawled. "Has to do with our most famous citizen, Brighton Rank."

"The widely read gossip columnist, eh? I heard he had a home out in the woods. What's happened?"

"He was shot in the back of the head earlier this morning."

Semloh's lazy, almost lizard-like eyes blinked once. He was interested. "Dead?"

"Deader'n a hollered out tree stump."

"That's dead," Semloh said.

"It'd sure help me in a lot of ways if I came up with
something before the big city boys take over the case," LadeSter said.

"By 'something,' I take it you mean the murderer," Semloh said.

"That'd be nice."

"I'll be there."

It was quite a house. Bain Semloh had driven for over an hour and a half to reach it. Bleak and impressive, it loomed atop the rise before him, against the climbing-to-noonday sun. There were other large houses half-concealed behind tall trees, owned by wealthy individuals who chose to escape the crime and clamor of the city. Brighton Rank had spent a considerable fortune to have the home built to his own tastes, and Semloh wondered if its darkly ornate ugliness represented its creator's personality.

He maneuvered his rented sub-compact up the long curving driveway lined with poplars and braked before the tall front door. There were three other cars in the circular drive, one of them a dusty tan sedan with a gold sheriff's seal on its side. Without hesitation Semloh climbed from the tiny car, strode up the wide concrete steps and rang the bell.

The door was answered after a pause by a slender man in early forties, wearing a neat mustache and a rumpled gray suit.

"My name is Bain Semloh. Sheriff Ladester is expecting me."

"Phillip Rank," the man said by way of introduction. "Come right in, Mr. Semloh." He stepped aside as Semloh entered a large entry foyer.

"You are a relative?" Semloh asked as he followed the slender, slightly stoop-shouldered man down a hall lined with oil paintings.

"I'm Brighton's brother."

Suddenly they turned a corner and were in a large comfortable looking room with overstuffed furniture and a high, dark-beamed ceiling. Sheriff Ladester was pacing behind a long beige sofa, and on the sofa, seated perfectly still as wax figures, were two men and a fading but still attractive blonde woman. The trio on the sofa stared expectantly at Semloh, as did a standing, matronly gray-haired woman with a gigantic bosom and red-rimmed eyes.

"Hello, Bain! Been a long time." Ladester almost ran over to shake Semloh's plump hand. The three figures on the sofa were suddenly struck with animation and rose. "You've met Phillip Rank," Ladester said.

Semloh nodded, and the sheriff turned to the others in the room.

"This is Elda Rank, Brighton's wife. On the left Ward Rank, another brother, and on the right Simon Crane, Brighton Rank's secretary. Behind them is Mrs. Drael, a neighbor from across the street."

Ward Rank looked something like his brother Phillip, lean, gaunt-featured, with a wide, flaring nose and thin lips. No mustache, though. Simon Crane was a short man, almost as short as Semloh's five six, only he weighed a good deal less than Semloh, wore high-heeled boots to add a few inches, and there was a compact muscularity to him beneath his well cut suit. Standing, Elda Rank was much more impressive than she'd been sitting down. She was what connoisseurs of blondes described as statuesque.

"The famous detective," Ward Rank said with a hint of cynicism. "At least that's what the good sheriff here tells us. No doubt he could use some of your super-logical deduction."

Semloh didn't like the man's pale eyes. A vicious sparkle in them.

"Some small fame is attached to me," Semloh said with a smile. "Professionally useful, at times."

"Mr. Semloh doesn't exactly use super-logic, either," Ladester said.

"In whatever form, your help will be appreciated," Phillip Rank said, though he looked vaguely apprehensive. "We'd all like to see the murderer of my brother caught."

"If all of you would like to see that happen," Semloh said, "I assume you believe an outsider committed the crime."

"Why of course!"

"It's possible," Sheriff Ladester said. "That's part of the problem."

"Suppose you show me the problem," Semloh suggested.

Ladester led Semloh from the room, down the hall to a sweeping staircase and up to the second floor.

"Quite an impressive house," Semloh said, "though a bit baroque."

"Five bathrooms," Ladester remarked lazily. "Who in the hell'd want five bathrooms?"

"I suppose you'd need them if all the bedrooms were 'ccupied," Semloh said.

"Six bedrooms on this floor, and Rank's office, and a library." Ladester led Semloh through a spacious hall with a parquet wood floor to a closed, dark stained door. He pushed the door open and let Semloh step inside.

It was a neat workman-like office. Filing cabinets along one wall, a large bookcase, electric typewriter on a stand. Slumped over the desk facing what appeared to be a French window was Brighton Rank, a neat round bluish hole near the crown of his balding skull. In the finger of Rank's right hand was a pencil, the note paper beneath the hand was blank but for a short S-shaped scrawl. On the carpet near the filing cabinets lay a small caliber chromed pistol. "Don't appear to be any prints on the gun," Ladester said. "Wiped cleaner'n a eye-tooth."

"Clean," Semloh said. "Everything the way it was found?"

"So I'm told. I didn't touch anything."

"Those French doors?"

"Unlocked," Ladester said. "And they go out to a small porch with steps running to the garden below. The killer could have entered and left that way."

"Any sign of that happening?"

"Nope. No sign it didn't happen, either. Ground's hard from a month's drought."

"What are their respective stories?" Semloh asked, pointing with a pudgy finger at the floor to represent the people below. "None of them seem particularly grieved by Rank's death."

"None of them are, I guess," Ladester said. "Rank had the reputation of being a one way S.O.B."

"Who heard the shot?"

"All of them. And Mrs. Drae, who rang the front doorbell a few seconds after the hot, claimed she caught a glimpse of a stiff-legged ma' running between the trees along the drive."

Semloh raised his almost nonexistent brows. "Stiff-legged?"

"She said he was sort of lurching along. She had an appointment with Rank
 
to try to talk him into giving to some charity or other, and he says she was thinking about that and didn't pay too much attention."

"Where do the members of the household say they were when they heard the shot?"

"Mrs. Rank was in the kitchen preparing a late breakfast; Phillip Rank claims he was in the bath near his bedroom downstairs shaving; Ward Rank was reading a book in the room we left downstairs; and Simon Crane was in his downstairs office typing some of Rank's dictation for next week's column. Nothing particularly interesting in that column, incidentally."

"Then everyone was downstairs."

Ladester nodded. "Or say they were. The house is plenty big enough for any of them to have shot Rank, run downstairs and pretend to come from somewhere on the ground floor to the foot of the stairs. They all say when the shot was fired they hurried upstairs to Rank's office. Confusion all over the place. The door was open, and they barged in and found him dead. Then Mrs. Drael rang the bell and asked who the limping man was. She had an appointment to see Rank at ten o'clock, so apparently the killer didn't."

Semloh walked about casually, examining the corpse and everything else in the room with seemingly passive interest. Then he motioned to Sheriff Ladester that they could go back downstairs.

As Semloh and the sheriff reentered the ground floor room, Ward Rank looked up at them with distaste. He was languidly smoking a cigarette in a long pearl holder. Semloh instinctively disliked cigarette holders and people who held them.

"Solved?" Ward Rank inquired.

"Almost," Semloh said. He noticed that Phillip Rank was staring at him, his hands in the pockets of his rumpled trousers as he rocked back and forth nervously on his heels. Elda Rank seemed the most composed person in the room. She was seated next to Simon Crane, who was slumped with what appeared to be absolute despondency in the corner of the large sofa.

"Have you finished with things, Sheriff?" Mrs. Drael asked from where she stood near the window. "I mean is it all right for me to leave, to go home now?"

Ward Rank looked aghast. "You mean you'd walk out in the middle of the act?"

"Why don't you shut up!" Simon Crane said with surprising viciousness from the sofa. "Don't you realize your own brother's been killed?"

"Past tense," Ward Rank observed. "Nothing to be done about it now."

"Do you have any ideas?" Elda asked Semloh.

He noticed for the first time that her gray eyes were large and strangely enchanting, and there did seem to be a muted sorrow in their depths.

"Deduce, super sleuth," Ward Rank said.

Simon Crane glared at him.

"Mr. Semloh has his own methods," Sheriff Ladester said firmly. "Give him time."

"Oh, I think the facts are becoming murkier," Semloh said and began to pace absently as he talked. "We will use what I call my process of illogicality. There are very few clues, and in all likelihood the murderer was an intruder in If that is true we will probably never learn his identity anyway, so let's discard that possibility and work on the theory that a member of the household is guilty."

"Preposterous!" Ward Rank said, clamping his cigarette holder between his teeth.

Semloh shrugged. "You all have motive: Mr. Rank's money in the instance of his wife. The same motive plus sibling rivalry in the instance of his brothers. As for Simon Crane, he might well be in a position to take over Mr. Rank's column himself. It's done that way I understand, the protégé-secretary filling the breech."

"I don't deny it," Simon Crane said. "I intend to attempt just that."

"What you call your 'process of illogicality'," Ward Rank said disgustedly, "is exactly that. Illogical!"

"Of course," Semloh said. "When a premeditating murderer plans his crime, he anticipates that his pursuers will use logic. Thus he attempts to throw them off the track by arranging circumstances that logically point away from him. He expects logical chains of deduction. Therefore for the sake of this exercise we will assume that what is logical is untrue."

"For instance?" Simon Crane asked interestedly.

Semloh's lips curved up, his mustache down. "Mr. Rank was found dead at his desk, killed apparently as he was beginning to write something. So we will assume he was killed somewhere else."

"Ridiculous!" Ward Rank snorted.

Semloh's smile widened. "Possibly. But who knows where it might lead? We strike what the murderer has fabricated, here and here; and here it crumbles. And the truth is revealed."