Cue For Murder полностью

“You gave me my first chance to apply psychology to the detection of criminals. Now I’m supposed to be applying it to the detection of spies and saboteurs. But I ought to be with some medical unit. I’m under forty-four, I have no wife or children, and I’ve been in the Medical Reserve Corps ever since the last war. I went straight from Johns Hopkins to a casualty clearing station, and it was through shell-shock cases that I first became interested in psychiatry.”

“Don’t worry, doc,” said Foyle dryly. “They’ll call you up quick enough if they need you. They probably think that anybody who speaks German like a native and reads a crooked mind like a book is more useful doing what you’re doing now. . . . Funny thing happened to me the other day. I was walking down Whitehall Street sort of fast, the way I always walk when I’m thinking, and a recruiting sergeant sees me and comes rushing up to me with a big smile. Then suddenly he stops and his smile goes out like a light and he shakes his head and turns away. When he first saw me he thought I might do because I’m still thin and wiry and can move fast; but when he got close enough to see my gray hair and the lines in my face he wasn’t interested any more. I suppose I should’ve been glad in a way, but I wasn’t. I felt the way I did the first time a truck driver called me ‘pop’ instead of ‘buddy.’”

War talk brought the morning paper to Basil’s mind, and that in turn reminded him of the canary.

“Yeah, it was sort of funny,” admitted Foyle. “I got a report on it from the precinct this morning. I thought it might be a publicity stunt.”

“For whom?”

“Wanda Morley. Her new show opens at the Royalty in a day or so, and the knife-grinder’s shop is right next door. But her press agent swears he doesn’t know a thing about it, and her name hasn’t been mentioned in connection with it. If there were any tie-up it would’ve come out by this time.”

“Is there anything of value in the shop?”

Foyle laughed. “You should see it! Nothing but a grindstone and a lot of rusty old knives and scissors.”

“Has Lazarus any enemies who might do a thing like that just to annoy him?”

“He says not. If people wanted to annoy him wouldn’t they have stolen something? Or injured the bird? It was perfectly all right—just out of its cage flying around the room when Lazarus came to his shop to work yesterday morning. Then he noticed the door of the cage standing open and the broken latch at the window. Those were the only signs that anyone had been there.”

“But why?” persisted Basil.

“That’s your headache, doc. My job is to catch the guys who do wrong—not to worry about why they do it! Maybe you can tell me why they always push forward at a fire when we tell them to stand back?” The Inspector weighed his next words. “I wish it hadn’t been a knife-grinding shop.”

Basil’s interest quickened as if someone had supplied one of the missing vowels to his anagram. “So that’s it?”

“Looks that way. We made quite sure nothing had been stolen. That can mean only one thing: “Somebody wanted to sharpen a knife—without witnesses.”

“Murder?”

“Sure. With malice prepense. But there’s nothing we can do about it. No fingerprints. No clues. . . .”

Outside in Centre Street, the east wind struck through Basil’s spring overcoat with a sudden, keen thrust. Somebody wanted to sharpen a knife. . . . In his mind’s eye, he saw the dark, faceless figure in the gray, dreamy light just before dawn sliding a moistened thumb along a blade secretly sharpened to a slicing edge. There would be the low humming of a grindstone and a spray of cold blue sparks; but no one would be likely to see or hear anything at that hour in a little shack in an obscure alley running through the theatrical district. Why such stealth unless the purpose were murder in its most inhumane form—with the premeditation of a surgeon and the callous blood-letting of a butcher? That was sound enough as police logic, but . . .

With an almost audible click, new facts and old fell into juxtaposition. His anagram had become less intelligible than ever. If this were murder in its most in humane form, why free the canary?

Like most modern psychiatrists, Basil Willing believed that no human being can ever perform any act without a motive, conscious or unconscious. The unmotivated act was a myth like the unicorn or the sea serpent. Even slips and blunders had their roots in the needs of the emotional nature. He had used his knowledge of that fact to solve his first murder case. But what was the motive here? What feeling had informed the hand that unlatched the door of the canary’s cage yesterday morning?

However pitiful a winged creature in a cage may be, a murderer planning to use a knife against a fellow human being is hardly in the mood for pity. . . .

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