Too Many Murders(2)
Suddenly, his hands already grabbing at the brick, he stopped a moment to contemplate the magnitude of his coup, the triumph he couldn’t confide to anyone else as long as he wanted to blackmail Motor Mouth. Did he want to continue the blackmail? After all, he didn’t need the money; it was simply his choice of weapon. What he reveled in was the knowledge that he, Evan Pugh, a mere nineteen-year-old Chubb sophomore, had the power to torment another human being to the point of extreme mental torture. Oh, it was sweet! Of course he’d go on blackmailing Motor Mouth!
His movement resumed, he took hold of the plastic-wrapped packet. When it didn’t budge he yanked at it sharply, an impatient jerk that saw it come away, drop downward to his hips. His hands followed, unwilling to give up their prize.
In the same instant there was a loud sound incorporating both a roar and a swish. As the terrible pain invaded his upper arms and chest, Evan genuinely thought he had been bitten by a Tyrannosaurus rex. He dropped the brick of money and clutched at whatever was engulfing him, his fingers closing on cold steel fixed in his flesh—not one, but a whole row of daggers, deep in his flesh, down past the bone.
The shock had been too sudden for a scream, but now he began to scream shrilly, hoarsely, wondering why his mouth was full of foam, but screaming, screaming, screaming…
The noise percolated out of the closet into the room, but there was no one present to hear it. That it didn’t penetrate into the corridor was due to the architect, very much aware of soundproofing, and endowed besides with a bounteous budget. The Parsons wished something really first class if they had to part with a Rodin and some Henry Moores. Those couldn’t possibly be housed in or near rubbish.
It took Evan Pugh two hours to die, his lifeblood leaking away, his legs refusing to work, his breathing one distressed gasp after another. His only consolation as consciousness left him was that the police would find the money and Motor Mouth’s letter, still in his pocket.
* * *
“I don’t believe it!” Captain Carmine Delmonico exclaimed. “And the day isn’t even over yet. What time is it, for God’s sake?”
“Getting on for six thirty,” came Patrick O’Donnell’s voice from inside the closet. “As you well know.”
Carmine stepped through the door, with its spring now disconnected, and into a surreal scene that looked as if it had been posed for Major Minor’s waxworks horror museum. Patsy had put two small klieg lights in the closet to replace the gloom of the Dean’s twenty-five-watt bulb, and every part of the interior was ablaze. The body took his eye first, hanging limply from the low ceiling, its upper arms and chest cruelly gripped in the jaws of something akin to a great white shark’s business end, but made of rusting steel.
“Jesus!” he breathed, carefully walking around as much of the body as he could. “Patsy, have you ever seen anything like this! And what the hell is it?”
“A king-sized bear trap, I think,” said Patsy.
“A bear trap? In Connecticut? Except maybe for somewhere up in Canada or hillbilly country, there hasn’t been a bear this side of the Rockies in a hundred years.” He peered closely at the youth’s upper chest, where the teeth had sunk in clear to the metal giving rise to them. “Though I guess,” he added like an afterthought, “there might be a few people with one of these tucked away in a forgotten corner of a barn.”
He stood back while Patrick finished his examination, then the two men looked at each other.
“I’m going to have to take the whole thing,” Patrick said. “I don’t dare pry him loose inside this closet—that thing must have a spring capable of taking a hand clean off if it gets away on us halfway through being forced open. This ceiling is much lower than the room’s, but there’s got to be a beam. What fun!”
“It’s not screwed down, it’s bolted,” Carmine said, “so a beam there must be. Chain saw time? Collapse of building?” He saw the plastic-wrapped packet and bent to inspect it. “Hmm … Curiouser and curiouser, Patsy. Unless the interior is blank paper, this is a lot of money. Bait for the greedy. The kid saw it, made a grab for it, and literally sprung the trap.”
Having ascertained that, Carmine’s eyes took in the rest of the closet, which would have been a dream come true to a student, he reflected. Fifteen feet long, three feet wide, one end a bank of built-in drawers, next to them a series of open shelves, and the rest of the space given over to the storage of boxes, unwanted junk, the usual student impedimenta. The bear trap had been fixed over clear floor, not hard; the owner of the closet was neat and tidy.