two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and four hundred thousand. It is left outright to a daughter by a former marriage, who has not been living at home for some months; she left to live her own life, or something.”
“Alibi?”
“None whatever, which is sometimes the best alibi of all, as you well know. Crafty criminals always have one; the innocent rarely do. Where were you last Wednesday evening?”
“Home, reading—I think,” admitted Rook. “But I can’t prove it.”
“Exactly. But I promised you the fill-in. Yesterday morning about nine o’clock the part-time housekeeper couldn’t get into McFarley’s apartment to straighten it up. She smelled that something was wrong—she knew that he was home because she’d already seen his Cadillac parked outside on the boulevard. She called the janitor handy man, who’d also noticed the car with an all-night parking ticket under the windshield wiper. The building—which McFarley owned, by the way—had its own basement garage and McFarley always kept his car there when he came in for the night.”
“So he wasn’t in for the night!”
“Or else he had something else on his mind, and didn’t care about tickets. The housekeeper and the handy man broke in the door—and they found him on the floor of the living room, like this!”
Parkman took a photograph from the folder on his desk, and silently held it out. Howie Rook took it, looked, and gasped. “Is this a gag?”
“I only wish it was, Howie. I hate these bizarre things. The reporters and the true-crime writers always go to town on them.”
“The boys are only trying to make a living,” Rook defensively reminded him.
“We’ve kept this part of it from the papers, at least so far. But it will have to break sooner or later. Yet these things just don’t happen!”
“Not every day,” murmured Howie Rook. The photograph, enlarged from a Rolleiflex flash close-up taken straight down at the subject, was brutally, crisply clear. It showed a heavyish man in black tie and dinner jacket lying supine on the rug; there was a tiny, blackened hole in the starched shirt front and a trickle of what must have been blood. But Rook was at the moment not interested in the wound, because the dead man wore a tousled fright-wig and beneath it his face was completely unrecognizable; it was daubed from forehead to collar with thick white grease paint overlaid with the foolish frozen dark grin, the bulbous rubber nose, and the ridiculous arched eyebrows of the hooligan, the circus clown! It was the traditional face of all clowns since circuses began!
“You mean that’s McFarley?” Howie Rook was mildly incredulous. “But why?”
Parkman shrugged. “Okay, you like puzzles so well, you got yourself one. The man seems to have died by gunshot in his apartment sometime around eleven o’clock Wednesday evening, which was night before last. The wound is compatible with suicide according to the coroner’s physician. The windows were all closed and locked except one, presumably left slightly open for the convenience of the cat. There’s a six-inch ledge or cornice or whatever you want to call it that absolutely nobody but a cat or a human fly could have traversed; the apartment is on the top floor with a five-story drop to a cement driveway. No chance for much of any shenanigans; anybody driving by on that busy boulevard would have seen anything unusual that was going on outside that window. There’s a narrow transom over the hall door—it’s a real old-fashioned place—but it only opens up to ten or eleven inches and nothing but a monkey could have wormed itself in or out. Doors, front and rear, locked and bolted on the inside!”
Howie Rook pricked up his ears. “Locked-room mysteries are usually for fiction and the pen of John Dickson Carr. But I could show you clippings—”
“I’m sure you could,” cut in Chief Parkman hastily. “The gun was lying there right beside the body; it’s one of those nasty