Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Annual, No. 3, 1973

“Yes. It wasn’t in the wall safe. As you can see, he hurriedly rummaged about in this room, lifting cushions, knocking over the lamp, we think looking for a place to hide the photo. Then he leaped out the window.”

“Caught?”

“Hurt himself when he landed and couldn’t run fast enough. Shot dead by the police just outside the gate. And he didn’t have the photo on his body, nor was it on the grounds.”

“Hays was a smart blackmailer,” Bratten said. He squinted at Paul. “You left the room as it was?”

Paul nodded. “I know your peculiar way of working. But the photo must be in this room. We looked everywhere, but we didn’t disturb anything, put everything back exactly the way we found it.”

“Ah, that’s good,” Bratten said, either of the Scotch or of the Eastmont’s actions. “Another drink, if you please.” He handed the empty glass up to Cutherbert, who was the only one standing.

“Really,” Cuthbert said, grabbing the glass. “If I had my way we wouldn’t have confided this to you.”

“We never did hit it off, did we?” Bratten laughed. “That’s probably because you have too much education. Ruins a man sometimes. Restricts his thinking.”

Cuthbert reluctantly gave Bratten his fresh drink. “You should be an expert on ruination.”

“Touch. That means touche in English.” Bratten leaned back and ran his tongue over his lips. “This puts me in mind of another case. One about ten years ago. There was this locked room type murder—”

“What on earth does a locked room murder have to do with this case?” Cuthbert interrupted in agitation.

“Everything, you over-educated idiot. Everything.”

Paul motioned for Cuthbert to be silent, and Bratten continued.

“Like they say,” Bratten said, “there’s a parallel here.” He took a sip of Scotch and nonchalantly hung one leg over an arm of his chair. “There were these four brothers, rich, well bred — like Cuthbert here, only with savvy. They’d made their pile on some cheap real estate development out west. The point is, the business was set up so one of the brothers controlled most of the money, and they didn’t get along too well to start off with.”

He raised his glass and made a mock bow to Cuthbert. “In language you’d understand, it was a classic sibling rivalry intensified by economic inequality. What it all meant was that if this one brother was dead, the other three would profit a hell of a lot. And lo and behold, this one brother did somehow get dead. That’s when I was called into the case by a friend of mine, a local sheriff in Illinois.

“Seems one of the brothers had bought a big old house up in a remote wooded area, and six months later the four of them met up there for a business conference or something. The three surviving brothers’ story was simply that their brother had gone into this room, locked the door, and never came out. Naturally not, lying in the middle of the floor with a knife in his chest.”

“I fail to see any parallel whatever so far,” Cuthbert said.

“Patience, punk. The thing of it was, this room was locked from the inside with a sliding bolt and a key still in the keyhole. The one window that opened was locked and there wasn’t a mark on the sill. It was summer, and the ground was hard, but I don’t think we would have found anything outside anyway.”

“Secret panel, no doubt,” Cuthbert said.

“Nope. It did happen to be a paneled room, though. We went over that room from wall to wall, ceiling to floor. There was no way out but the door or the window. And to make the thing really confusing, the knife was wiped Clean of prints, and there was nothing nearby the dying man could have used to do that, even if he’d been crazy enough to want to for some reason. There was no sign of a struggle, or of any blood other than what had soaked into the rug around the body.

“Without question the corpse was lying where it fell. On the seat of a chair was an open book, and on an end table was a half empty cup of coffee with the dead man’s prints on it. But there was one other thing in the room that caught my attention.”

“Well, get it over with and get to the business at hand,” Cuthbert said, trying to conceal his interest. “Who was it and how was it done?”

“Another drink,” Bratten said, handing up his glass. “Now here was the situation: Dead man in a locked room, three suspects with good motives who were in the same house at the time of the murder, and a knife without prints. The coroner’s inquest could come to no conclusion but suicide unless the way the murderer left the room was explained. Without that explanation, no jury could convict.”

Bratten paused to take a long puff of Scotch. “The authorities thought they were licked, and my sheriff friend and I were walking around the outside of the house, talking about how hopeless things were, when I found it.”

“The solution?” Cuthbert asked.

“No. A nail. And a shiny one.”

“Good Lord,” Cuthbert said.

“You ignoramus,” Bratten sneered. “Doesn’t that suggest something to you?”

“It suggests somebody dropped a nail,” Cuthbert said furiously.