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Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/2286757-AN-IMPOSSIBLE-MURDER
Rated: 13+ · Fiction · Mystery · #2286757
Just another locked room mystery? 3,695 words

The headline read: “Albert Whitmore, age 62, and his 59-year-old wife Evelyn, were found dead on Tuesday morning when their housekeeper, Helene Browne, discovered their murdered and mutilated bodies on her regularly scheduled cleaning day.”

The article went on: “Whitmore, multi-billionaire manufacturer of the Whitmore Stove, stainless steel barbecue grills, promoted as So Safe A Child Could Use Them, appeared regularly in television commercials and on billboards advertising his products over the past thirty years. His wife was also well-known as a charity organizer and fundraiser, particularly for rescued dogs. Their murders caused a sensation in the higher levels of society over which they reigned.

“Both had been shot through the heart and left sitting side-by-side on the cream-colored suede sofa in the TV room of their three-level home in the Hamptons, Long Island.”

*
**

Dr. Hugh Mills, a forensic scientist with the New York Police Department, was very young, only 30 years old and still impressionable. Looking no more than 18, he had a candid, guileless face that often opened doors for him, but he hated looking so young and defenseless. After five years on the job, he thought of himself as cynical and immune to shock, but he hadn’t known what real shock was until he was called in to collect evidence on the Whitmore case and evaluate it. As a member of the forensics team, he photographed the crime scene and collected trace evidence.

The Whitmores died in a room without windows, a room that was locked from the inside. Mills noted in a later interview that it seemed to be “pure Agatha Christie.” He went on to note that when it’s real, when you stand looking down at two elderly people, hands folded quietly in their laps but with a hole in their chests, “you realize you’re at the center of a profound mystery, and there isn’t the same quaint air of puzzle about it.”

Soon after the maid had called in the emergency, Lt. Eugene Tyler, the detective running the case, walked around the room, shrugging. He stopped in front of Mills and his colleagues and threw them a questioning look, but Mills said that it was hard to know where to begin.

“The deaths themselves are quite open-and-shut,” Dr. Mills noted. “The mutilation almost seems tentative, as if the killer was angry, but hesitated to inflict the stab wounds.”

In his report, Lt. Tyler stated the first thing he remembered upon entering was the smell in the room. The door had been open maybe an hour by the time he got there, but the smell was still rich in the air, not powerful or overpowering or anything like that, but something distinctive, a part of the atmosphere. He found out later it was the smell of a scented Dutch cigar. There were no cigars or cigar butts in the room, and it was known that the Whitmores never smoked. They actively disliked tobacco, and never allowed anyone to use it in their home.

But Mills knew within minutes that this murder would be something spectacular, something on the symphonic scale of crime, the kind he hadn’t believed existed. In parallel with the police, he began setting up his own investigation, running it alongside his routine duties as a member of the forensic team.

Assembling the basic facts of the case from witness statements, and from snippets of talk among the members of the police investigation team, Mills learned that the door to the room where the Whitmores were found had been forced open by a police officer after the maid, Lillian Waxman, called to him and his partner as they drove past in their squad car. The officers later reported that Lillian was nervous, and appeared to be on the verge of tears. She explained that her employers had gone into the TV room at 11 the night before, and Mrs. Whitmore told her she could go to bed. She tidied up the kitchen and retired at about 11:20. When she got up at 7, she prepared a light breakfast for them as usual, and at 7:30 pressed the bell-push in the kitchen that would let them know their eggs, toast and coffee were waiting for them in the dining room. That was how they liked it, they would go in there and help themselves. She said she usually didn’t see either of them until the afternoon at the earliest. She said that suited her, as they were both kind of snappish people until late afternoon, when they’d had a cocktail.

At 8:45, Lillian realized the Whitmores still hadn’t come down to breakfast. She panicked. Her first thought was that something had gone wrong with the bell-push in the kitchen. Although the Whitmores habitually rose early, they relied on the maid to wake them. She believed it was wholly likely that the bell hadn’t worked, and the couple had slept on.

“I’d no idea what to do for the best. They didn’t like me coming to the bedroom door. Mrs. Whitmore told me it made her feel invaded. I was always to use the intercom if I wanted her during the day or evening, or the bell to wake them. That was all. No visits in person. But when I tried the phone I got no answer. I could hear it ringing in the bedroom, and it would have wakened them because it was louder than the bell from the kitchen.”

She finally mustered the courage to go upstairs and knock on the bedroom door. She knocked three times, rather hard the third time. When there was still no response, she became seriously worried. She opened the door and looked in. There was no one in the room and the bed was still made up.

Lillian went downstairs and saw the TV room door was shut, which wasn’t normal. They always left it open because the air got stale if it was left shut up overnight. She tried the door and it was locked, but she heard the TV. She banged on the door but got no reply.

She went upstairs again and saw that they had not undressed the night before. She panicked, banged on the TV room door again, and then went to the hall, wondering if she should call the police. She saw the police car coming down the road and went to flag it down.

Inspection of the door was made by Dr. Mills and a technician who specialized in locks and safes. The brass key was still in the lock, on the inside where Lillian said it always was. Mills removed it carefully and took several photos, only because he had this rule that he must leave no stone unturned.

The forensic team went through the room thoroughly, taking fibers, dusting for prints, collecting and bagging any debris. The bodies were removed to the Medical Examiner’s mortuary and autopsies were begun. Dr. Mills went along to watch, and ten minutes into the autopsy on Albert Whitmore, the pathologist noted that “This is freaking crazy.”

The ME pointed into the open abdomen and said, “A direct bullet wound to the heart. Powder burns and muzzle bruising on the site of entrance. The heart is torn open at the left ventricle. That adds up to an efficient piece of homicide with a firearm, as such things go. Only there’s no bullet.”

Opening the body of Evelyn, they found the same thing. Dr. Mills decided to test everything he could get his hands on.
He called the path lab and asked if he could collect tissue samples, which they agreed to. He went to the morgue and excised what he needed, sending several portions of tissue to the metallurgy lab and several to the histology lab, filling out requests. When he spoke to Lt. Tyler, he learned that the detective had discovered nothing more about the case, and had no views or theories that would stand up to scrutiny.

When Dr. Mills told him there were no bullets in the bodies, he nodded as if that was another point confirmed on which he had an opinion.

*
**

Lt. Tyler told Dr. Mills he thought this was a game some bastard was playing; it was more like a travesty, a stage play, and he felt it had all been engineered to annoy the police, who he said had better things to do than hang around trying to solve puzzles. Mills thought it was more like someone trying to prove how clever he was, and he saw it as a challenge. He was going to get to the bottom of it himself, and crack the case.

Mills turned his attention to the maid. While she was answering routine questions at the station, Mills went back to the house, to her room, and began a methodical search. He didn’t really suspect her of anything, she was the only person left alive in the household, so it made sense to him to know all he could about her. Later, he was accused of using an amoral approach by one of his superiors, but since he was investigating a double murder, he thought if he didn’t find anything significant, something incriminating or at least suspicious, no one besides himself would need to know he’d violated the maid’s privacy, so no harm would be done.

But he did find something. Underneath the “demure order” of her room, the chaste tidiness, he found three small suitcases with false bottoms, all packed with hundred-dollar bills, more than a thousand of them. There was also a box in one of the false cavities; inside it was a pair of forceps with the gripper jaws on the ends turned over at right angles, a blue canister with some kind of liquid inside, and a partly burned cigar.

Two pairs of shoes had heels that swiveled aside to reveal cavities, and inside there was a lot of jewelry. Even her coin purse had a false pocket, inside of which were three photos. The first was of the maid and a young man, both dressed in cowboy suits and holding revolvers.

The second was a shot of the same young man in a wheelchair, and the third showed Lillian sitting by a hospital bed in which the young man was propped up, looking desperately ill. Mills photographed everything and put it all back, and completed his search in the bathroom, where he found a Smith and Wesson revolver, wrapped in plastic, in the space behind the washbasin.

Lt. Tyler wasn’t reachable, but his superior produced such a hostile reaction to Mills’ call that he decided against telling the man anything. Instead, he went back to the Dept. of Forensic Investigation and checked the results of the tissue tests performed by the metallurgy and histology labs.

He went to look for Tyler and found one of his team, Sergeant Carver, whom he asked to keep an eye on the maid, believing she had reason to skip. He said that before she skipped, she would brazen her way through the whole investigation and then vanish without a spot of suspicion attaching to her. But why take the risk?

The sergeant thought Mills was hallucinating because of the problem Mills had at the time—“I looked like a juvenile, a witless juvenile at that, and people found it hard to believe I could locate my own ass with a torch and a map.”

The sergeant told Mills that Lillian had been cleared of suspicion at a very early stage. Her answers to questions all checked out, and her background details were confirmed on a fax sent by the police in her home town. Her room had been carefully searched and found to be above suspicion.

“All in all,” Sergeant Carver told Mills, “the maid was probably the cleanest, most law-abiding citizen I’ve met in a month.”

The sergeant reflected the captain’s dislike of scientists, who believed that forensic workers were nothing better than bumbling auxiliaries, hamstrung with too many theories and starved of common sense. Mills suddenly felt too disheartened by the sergeant’s condescending, pitying sneer, and decided to forget the warnings. If Lillian skipped, she skipped. He would wait for the sensible Lt. Tyler and tell him what he knew.

***


It was another ten hours before Tyler showed up at Mills’ office, tired, unshaven and short-tempered. He agreed with the sergeant, the maid wasn’t a candidate for suspicion, and he would take some convincing to change his mind.

Mills was patient. He got Tyler a beer, sat him down and took out a folder full of papers. He told about the search he had done in the maid’s room, and showed him the photos. The wind went right out of Tyler’s sails.

“My men checked that room; they performed a thorough professional search!” He felt like finding them and shooting them.

Tyler left without seeing the rest of the evidence Mills had collected, and arrested Lillian, impounding the evidence Mills had showed him. He called Mills into the station at 4 a.m., and Mills explained the remaining evidence.

“First,” he said, “I told him about the locked door to the TV room; I had studied the key, as had my colleague who specialized in locks and keys, and we both noticed that on the end of the brass shaft, there were small, fresh abrasion marks. Later, when I found the forceps with the right-angled jaws, I could see flecks of brass glinting in the perforations at the tips. My associate told me it was an old device, used at one time by burglars. When a room was locked from the inside, the forceps were pushed through the keyhole from the outside of the door; they gripped the end of the key, which could then be turned by applying simple leverage to the handles of the forceps.

“But instead of using the forceps to open the door, Lillian had used them to lock it from outside, thus making it look as if it had been locked on the inside.”

“What was she doing it for,” Tyler asked, “and what about the murders, and the fact there were no bullets in the bodies?” He suddenly needed to know everything at once.

Mills explained that Lillian, for reasons yet to be discovered, had decided to kill the Whitmores. She had two lines of attack, and she had probably preferred the less violent one, though she couldn’t be too sure it would work.

First, she had opened the humidifier (air conditioning vents) into the TV room and filled it with the substance from the blue canister (the substance was trichlorethylene, an industrial solvent which is also a powerful anesthetic).

“It probably knocked them out quite fast,” Mills said, “but the chances of it killing them, even in an unventilated room, were slight. She would have needed a much bigger vaporizer. Samples of brain tissues showed a slight concentration of the chemical, but not enough to kill an adult.

“So after a while, when she checked on the Whitmores, she would have realized they were simply asleep and likely to wake up in a worse mood than usual unless she did something else. So Plan B was put into operation. Vanishing bullets.”

Tyler said he had heard of ice being used as bullets, which melted and left no trace, but he had been told by many experts that such devices would only work in one or two cases out of ten.

“When he said vanishing bullets, I had no idea what he meant,” Mills explained. “But then he showed me. He had made one. It was the usual shell case without the powder charge inside, packed on top of the detonator. But instead of a lead bullet, there was a small chunk of pork spare rib. So help me. He had cut it to shape and it was really compact and hard.”

Mills explained that the meat bullet, with its bony component, would easily penetrate a human chest if it was fired at close quarters, and it would do much the same internal damage as a dumdum bullet. By the time it had ploughed through the heart, it would be fragmented and indistinguishable from the fat, rib muscle and connective tissue it had torn apart. He said that tissue samples checked in the histology lab had confirmed it—there was pork and pork-rib tissue present in the chest wounds in both victims.

After sitting for a while in wonderment, Tyler asked, “What was the cigar smoke all about?”

“To cover the smell of the trichlorethyline, I think,” Mills said.

“But why did she go to all that elaborate trouble?” Tyler asked, but Mills, trying not to sound too smug, said, “That’s the little bit you have to find out.”

Tyler interviewed Lillian the next morning, and when she was confronted with the weight of evidence, she put up no resistance.

“I always said I’d admit everything, if I had to,” she told him. “I didn’t think I’d have to, though. You have to agree that was pretty clever stuff I did.”

“Not clever enough,” Tyler said, “and far too elaborate.”

She nodded. “It wasn’t meant to go the way it did. What I had there were a few alternatives, and I just ended up using more of them than I should have.”

“Why did you kill your employers?” Tyler asked.

“Because they killed my brother.”

“Is he the young man in the photos?”

Philip Hansen had been 23, a nice fellow in lots of ways, a fine mechanic, a champion shot, amateur escapologist. “A barbecue gas tank blew up in his face. A Whitmore barbecue tank. It didn’t kill him straight away. He looked set to recover, but there was nerve damage. He got some kind of galloping sclerosis of the spine and brain stem. Died a miserable death.”

Her family sued the Whitmore organization, who spent more on lawyers than it would have cost to compensate three Philips for the harm done, and for their money they got a not-guilty verdict.

“So you decided to get even.”

“I decided to do a lot of things Philip and I talked about when we were kids. He was a fan of Houdini—I mean a real fan. It was nearly an obsession with him. He learned all the stunts. Could get out of a straitjacket in two minutes, out of a milk churn full of water in three. He invented things. He invented the beef bullets—that’s what they were at the start, bits of beef with shards of bone mixed in.”

Dr. Mills had told Tyler that the meat bullet idea was devised by a Mafia Consigliere in Salerno in the 1950’s, but he said nothing.

Lillian said she did all that stuff partly to demonstrate that she could, and partly to honor her brother. But she got confused. She intended to kill them but hadn’t worked out a straight-line plan. She kind of banked on the chemical working, but at the same time she didn’t trust it completely.

Her uncle had worked in a degreasing plant, and called the stuff trilene. He had seen a man keel over and die when he inhaled the vapor from the hot vats; he had also used it to gas an old dog in 1954. He’d kept a box of the canisters when he was kicked out of the job—it was good for cleaning grease out of clothes, but the maid wasn’t sure it would still work as a poison after all that time. So she brought along one of Philip’s guns, just in case. She also brought along his forceps, another Houdini idea.

She said she originally intended to get a job in one of Whitmore’s factories, but heard there was an opening on his household staff. So she got some fake ID references put together, applied for the job, and got it. Tyler asked about the money in the suitcases, which she said Philip had made. The money came from the safe in the study. She said it was a pushover, an old English John Tann four-corner bent-banded safe, with a German Hirschfeld combination lock. Philip showed her how to open one of those when she was 16. Whitmore had so much tucked away in there, he never even missed it when she took some out every week for five weeks. He just kept putting more in.

Tyler asked about the cigar, and the maid said although it did help cover up the smell of the trilene, it was really meant to incriminate Harold Lewis, the asshole she talked to at Personnel, who treated her like something stuck to the heel of his shoe.

She said she hadn’t known what she was doing at the end, she just tried everything, even the silly locked door thing, out of respect for Philip and in hopes she would get away with it.

“So, to sum it all up, you shot the Whitmores in cold blood while they were unconscious on the couch.”

“No, it wasn’t like that.”

“Pardon me?”

“They kicked up all kinds of shit about the smell two minutes after I started the humidifier with the chemical in it. So they had breathed some, but they were really conscious when I walked in there and shot them. It wasn’t horrible. They just dropped their heads and died, a lot more peacefully than poor Philip.”

The case against the maid did not endure as far as a trial. Because of a technical inaccuracy in the presentation of the prosecution’s case – four dates were misaligned, so they were wrongly applied to separate incidents cited in the indictment – the judge declared the case invalid, and the maid went free.

Outside the courthouse, she told Tyler that she was happy with the way things had turned out. “It could have gone differently,” she told him, “I could have had the money and the jewels, but the way it stands, I’m sure Philip feels better now.”

“And that’s all that matters?” Tyler said.

“Absolutely, Lieutenant. He sees us both, and he’s smiling.”





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