The Straw Hat Murders, page 10
“Taking up my paper bag again, I went up the fire-escape steps. Around and on up, to the point where only an iron ladder, affixed to the building like a scab, provided further progress. Putting my bag—its free outer end, I mean—into my teeth like a dog, I went on up that ladder just as I had done 20 years before, that day I’d gone to Number 633 after receiving Aert deGelder’s phoned message. Here, up on the roof itself, I could see about me fairly well—thanks to the tinge in the sky—but couldn’t be seen, of that I was sure. The catwalk, railed on both sides, was there in position, as I’d ordered, and earlier that day had noted, but I took occasion, just the same, to do the thing that the killer—’Human Frog’ as I’ll term him—invariably did. That is, I put a few stones from the gravel roof into the bag containing the straw hat, and tossed the whole lightly over the 7-foot gap. Where it fell with many feet to spare.
“Now I walked majestically across the catwalk, mighty, mighty glad that I wasn’t jumping the gap—under pink-tinged skies! Once across, I resumed my play as Mr. Killer, more faithful to actuality—fully faithful, I was certain.
“For I went straight to the roof trap, up front at the opposite edge, and raised it off its supporting structure—slid it fractionally off enough so that I would be able to enter—and to slide it back on again, over my head. Retrieving my paper bag, I took out the straw hat, dumped out the stones, tore the bag up one side, held it up to the wind which always rages in Chicago at third-story level—and lo, it filled out like a balloon—I let go of it, and I do believe that particular bag came down somewhere, an hour later, either in Chicago’s Rogers park to the north or South Chicago to the south. It did not matter.
“Now moving back to the partly open roof trap, I placed the straw hat brim lightly in my teeth, as it would be held if I were a dog, and proceeded thereafter—at least, for some successive moments or so—to hold it thusly, as would a dog hold a ball. This gave me full opportunity to insinuate myself down into the open trap, find the rungs on the wall inside with my feet, lower myself further, reach up and slide the trap back upon the rectangular support therefor. For it was not going to be necessary for me to exit that way—any more than it ever had been for the killer.
“Down I went into Stygian blackness, till of course my feet touched the well-padded brown carpeting that covered that whole top floor. Transferring my teeth-held straw hat to my now freed left hand, and feeling about upon the wall for the switches at the base of the rungs—or, if you prefer, at the head of the stairway from below—for both points were identical—I found the conventional one marking the room-light, and turned it on. A comfortable light blazed down now from that neon fixture in the ceiling by which I could take general survey of the place—light which nobody outside could see, remember, or time, or anything—because of the place being bricked up as to all apertures.
“I did not even try to leave my point of vantage there at the top of the stairway. I could see all and everything I wished, where I was. Across the floor, northward—straight and directly over—stood the grand piano, ready and waiting for its player—the chap who would tonight play ‘victim’—the music, a ponderous-looking work that looked like it would take some time to play it through, laid out on the rack. Yes, I did no more than take initial survey, then, extinguishing the lighting, and remaining just about where I stood, I turned about and went slowly down the stairway the underside of which was to be my place of ‘concealment’ till my ‘victim’ came.
“Rounding the stairway’s bottom, going along its matchboard-finished outer side that made of its underside a sort of closet, or repository for junk, or anything else, including even brooms or mops, I turned in and under. Kicked at a light wooden box which had been tossed in there, and which I upended in the darkness and sat down upon. Not having now, for what would be a considerable time yet, according to the glowing and identifiable hands of my watch, to sit on dusty floor, nor scootch on my heels. So here I sat, waiting, wondering, wondering, waiting, my idiotic rubber dagger inside my belt, the equally idiotic pink straw hat safe in my possession where I would not ever have to grope out for it when my ‘murder moment’ should come; no, not even atop my knees, where, with one accidental motion, I might send it scuttering and bounding and rolling on its very rim back into the blackness, and turn the whole re-play into a comedy of errors by having to search on hands and knees for the very pivot of the re-play—no, I held on to this idiotic feature for dear life, its brim clutched in my left hand, the outer fingers of my right hand, spanning the crown, clenched upon the crown itself, thus doubly insuring that, at critical moment that very night, the straw hat which, by formula, had to be always left at the murder site, would be as ready and available as was the ‘dagger’ which I could feel pressed against my midriff by my belt; yes, Guy, ready I was, in all accoutermental details, for whenever the proper sounds outside would tell me the ‘moment’ was there to arise with my accouterments, practical or imbecilic as you want to call them, and to ascend ‘murderward’!
“Timing in general was excellent—on both our parts. I had given myself enough time to more than do operations not really too familiar to me. He, on the other hand, got there a little early—as could always happen in the real thing—the victim could be early, could arrive at his usual time, could be late. He came a bit early. Thus, my wait in the darkness under the stairway was not many minutes.
“I could hear him, from my place way up there, unlocking the alley door downstairs. Turning on the light above the inner door. Closing the door. Shooting the big bolt. Turning on the stairlights. Turning off the doorlight. So I interpreted the various wall-switch clicks which came up to me through that eerie, deserted building, aided of course by a momentary lessening of the gloom under the stairway where I was, by small ceiling lights above it coming into being.
“Now I could hear him coming up. Whistling gaily and merrily. A true musician, at heart! And one happy as all get-out, too, to be earning $25 as easily as he was, this evening. I soon heard his footfalls on the stairway directly above my head. Gave him brief ‘peep peep’—yes, a short whistle!—as had been earlier arranged, to let him know that I had come—and that he would not have to do what he’d done all over again later; and he gave me back the same ‘peep peep’ to show me he’d gotten my signal. Good cooperator the chap was, in every way!
“Now I could hear him, above my head, reach out and turn on the big neon ceiling light that brought the music-studio into full being. Then I heard him—detected it naturally, too, by the lessened light available to me under the stairway—turning off the now-useless stairway lights, which I myself, ‘fleeing’ later, would turn on to light myself down to the alley door. No longer was I in complete Stygian blackness now, however—light from that now brilliantly lighted studio, coming down the stairway opening above, gave a bit of diffused light below, which reflecting from the further wall outside of my ‘hiding place’ came back into my nidus, and at least put me somewhat back into the world again. Where I could see—and would later better see—what I was going to do. Listening now—as had the killer himself—I could not even really hear Churunian walk about up there. Because of the carpeting—and its padding, below itself. But I did hear sounds—chiefly interruptions of his musical whistle—that indicated he was depositing, on the clothes rack at the streetside front of the floor, his hat, his jacket, his tie, rolling up his sleeves, so that he too might ‘die’ just as had his predecessor of two decades back, Elftherios Paleogus.
“I could not hear him cross to the piano bench, because, again, of the padded, carpeted floor. Not even did the floor above me shake—so well constructed was that old building. Nor could I hear him draw out the piano bench. Nor adjust it. For identical reasons. But I sure could hear the great melodious triumphant jubilant chord he struck, musicianlike, to assure himself the piano was all there and a yard wide!—all the strings in it—everything in it musically ‘hitting on all fours’. It held about itself, that one triumphal chord, the air of one who ‘knew his onions’, as they say, on the keyboard.
“Now I could hear him play! For the music that sprang almost instantly forth in the great room above, and poured riverlike—or at least a stream of it!—down the stairway above me, setting up echoes on the very floor where I myself was, was such a—a jamboree—a—a fandango—of dancing, leaping, at times thundering musical notes, springing magically into majestic chords—then, by some microscopical instantaneous stretch of melody, into new and quite different chords, that—really, Guy, I don’t know how to describe such things. I am not even musical, as such things go. I don’t know whether he was playing an opera or some grand life-work of some master—I never did know—I could only tell from his very keywork that he felt the joy of what he was playing—the sadness of it, too—the—the—the élan!—the majesty—the very staccato trippery of his playing, here and there, showed that his whole ten fingertips must have been virtually little lambs, gamboling, playing hop, skip and jump—dancing the light fantastic, upon a green consisting of monotonous oblongs that formed a keyboard and—oh, Guy, I’m sure you get what I’m trying to say and can’t?—can’t because I can’t describe music of that nature, nor—well, all I can say, Guy, is that he was certainly, certainly the man for me to have hired—for this strange experiment!
“Well, now it was time for me to ‘strike’. I rose from my upended box, came out from under the stairway, rounded its matchboard side, and ascended it slowly toward the more and still more plentiful light coming down from above. Even had the stairs beneath me creaked—as I’d anticipated they might do, because of my particular ‘stealthy’ ascent—he would never, could never, have heard me. He was off in a world of musical harmony—and spewing forth combinations of notes that, hitting the walls, reverberated back to me on each step, to become—there I go again, Guy, trying to describe—the undescribable.
“I was at the top of the stairway now. Turned about, toward him. Yes, he sat across the room, his upper body thrust forward on the piano bench, in white silk shirt as had been the Greek youth who in the long ago had gotten his disposition in identical circumstances such as these. The vehemence of the music emanating from my ‘victim’s’ energetic playing showed that he was nowhere near the end of his piece. So I started across the intervening space, as had the killer always. Oddly, I was impeded—psychologically, I mean—by the straw hat I’d had to bring along, to follow the outré ‘formula’ the killer had always followed. I didn’t know whether to discard it as I would be ‘striking’ with my right hand—or to hold on to it, at that point, for later complete tossing somewhere, anywhere—or to try then to thrust it, as it had been thrust in the last case, between my ‘victim’s’ forward-fallen torso and his thigh, or to—Yes, I was psychologically impeded, as it were—feeling downright foolish, almost—as I advanced across the floor like a cat, a 29-cent straw hat hooked into the fingers of my left hand, my thumb down its rim and inside, my fingers down its crown, outside, clutching it thus firmly so that it would not slip away and transform the whole affair, at critical moment, into a ludicrous fiasco!
“Thus, across the floor I crept. With footsteps which, even had there been but bare and creaking floor under my feet, would never, never have been heard by him, so immersed was he—or apparently so—in the composition he was playing. No shadow from me fell athwart his music, for the reason that the neon light, far above us both, was out of line with me. And—but do you know what happened then and there, Guy?”
“I haven’t the least, remote idea,” said the man from Africa. “You undoubtedly completed your trip to his rear—drew out your rubber dagger—playfully brought it down on his ‘unsuspecting’ back so that it bent clear around in a ludicrous arc—then tossed the straw hat, with an airy-fairy gesture, to the piano top, or on the floor somewhere, else even thrust it purposefully between your ‘victim’s’ now forward-bent torso and his thighs, and—”
“No, Guy, I never got to that particular stage of my operations. I never got more than halfway across that floor! For, holding the straw hat in my free left hand which was not to be subsequently utilized, pending disposition of the hat, in due course, in one or the other of the ways I have described, I was conscious, suddenly, that the hat was ‘sizzling’—oh, not with heat, no!—was ‘sizzling’, so to speak, in that it was vibrating—yes, vibrating as though a thousand flies were trapped somehow within the hollow of its crown—were buzzing—were beating themselves against the inner face of the crown, and the inner circular side of it. All this due, let me say, to the music filling the room. Which itself, you know, was vibration—in air. It even came back to me, at this instant, though somewhat vaguely, that even while I had sat down there earlier in that understairs hideaway on the upended box, holding the hat in my left hand, and tapping nervously on its crown with the finger of my right, that it had started, even ’way down there, to vibrate ever so gently—yes, coincident with the commencement of the piano-playing upstairs—but I had not given any attention to it. But up here, where the sound was filling the room, it was something hardly to be ignored. Subsequently, Guy, I was destined to investigate this curious phenomenon more intently. In books on physics. In particular, one by a scientist who had done considerable research just in sound alone—one, Professor Quindry Annister Redfern—whose work really explained it by—”
“Oh, Quindry Annister Redfern? Yes, I know of the work. From having it, at home in Kenya. You see, I teach a class of Negro youths in Africa elementary physics—have at least had once to refer to Redfern’s book, but only where I had to get something out of some of the tables in it—like the velocity of sound in air and in water, and—yes, I am familiar with his work and name to that limited extent. And—please pardon me.”
“Well, I was destined, as I say, to later investigate more fully the phenomenon I was experiencing. In various works, but Redfern’s in particular. And it seems, Guy—and perhaps in teaching purely elementary physics to those youths in Africa, you don’t go quite this far—well it seems that any half-closed chamber, like, say, the cylindrical chamber of even the interior of a straw hat, has a basic period of vibration for any air or gas within it—that it will even take up, intensify, any air-vibrations taking place in its vicinity—musical tones, in short—that, in brief, it resonates, as the term is, to certain tones—pitches, yes, those being frequencies of air vibration—combinations of pitches—even multiples and divisors thereof!—the while a congeries of pitches—yes, all kinds of pitches—yes, musical notes—are setting the air in vibration about its open end. And there it was, Guy! The cylindrical interior of that straw hat was resonating—vibrating, if you like that less scientific term better—’buzzing’, if you’ll accept my crude description of the feeling encountered by my fingertips lying against the crown top—was doing all this to the fusillade of musical notes pouring out into that room. And—
“I was completely arrested by it—arrested, yes, by what I had paid little or no attention to, in milder form, earlier, down in the understairs hideout, when I encountered it in fainter, almost tenuous form—was arrested by it because, somehow, it struck me, then and there, that it might be part—of some picture. A picture not, however, yet, I’ll confess, fully adumbrated within me. A picture—
“Thrusting the rubber dagger, which I’d already drawn out, back into my trousers belt, I brought the hat around in front of me, and holding it with my left hand by its rim, its open side outwards from me, I put all the fingertips of my now freed right hand on the crown. Got the ‘buzzing’ or vibration going on it, ever so clear and unmistakably, by use of all of my fingertips. Now, experimenting a bit, I brought it around back again to my left side, then, never removing my fingers from the crown top, I swung the hat in a wide arc from my left clear about me to my right. And Guy, as it passed the direct line between me—or, say it—and the piano, it ‘buzzed’—vibrated!—as though not a million flies were futilely zooming around in it, but as though a million tiny grasshoppers were hopping about in it! Yes, it showed objectively, in this one clear-cut manifestation, that not only was music being played in its vicinity—but it showed, thus operated, the exact source of the music by its position where it gained maximum vibrating intensity.
“And then and there, Guy, it fell on me. Really fell on me—like the proverbial ton of bricks. The man—the man who brought these straw hats to the crimes he committed up there had no way on God’s green earth to know just when music was being played—and the player’s attention, consequently, full upon his keyboard, or his notes, or both. Much less did the killer in those 5 cases, who could not ever risk a misfire with his one powerful stab or shot—much less did the killer have any way to determine, ever unerringly—to fully cognize, yes—his exact direction from top of stairway to source of music—yes, piano!—to make unerring catlike progress toward it.
“In short, Guy, the man who brought those straw hats up there was blind—and deaf! Yes, both blind and deaf. And—”
“Don’t tell me,” said the man from Africa, leaning forward in his chair, his mouth falling partly open, “that the Straw Hat Murders were done by the mendicant up the street who always presumably received a $20 goldpiece after each and every one? And deposited it in his bank? And—”
