style="font-size:15px;"> “Merak,” he acknowledged with a slight inclination of his head. He made no attempt to shake hands or motion me to a chair.
“I gather you want to see me,” I said. “You got something on your mind?”
He brushed a hand over his black, slicked-back hair. He seemed even more nervous than I was and that was a bad sign.
“I understand Mister Galecci hired you to do a job for him,” he said smoothly. “Do you mind telling me what it is?”
“I’d sure like to tell you,” I said. “But client confidentiality, you know. All of that is between Mister Galecci and me.”
“No; it’s between you and me now.” His voice seemed to snap little sparks. “Things may have changed. At the moment, we’re trying to find out if anything has happened to Mister Galecci. Now, I’m asking you again. What is it you’ve to do for him?”
I had the funny feeling in my bones that something really drastic had happened to my client and I wasn’t sure just how much Rizzio was prepared to tell me. At the moment, he was calling the shots. There seemed nothing to do but go with the flow and hope to pick up some information on the way.
Shrugging, I said, “Okay. He had this idea that somebody no longer wanted him in this world. He’d no idea who it was, which is why he hired me to poke around a little and see what I could come up with.”
“And have you come up with anything?”
“Not much so far. A man like him makes a lot of enemies on the way to the top. It’s a case of narrowing down any suspects. A process of elimination.”
He seemed to be turning that over in his mind, studying me closely to see if I might be holding anything back from him.
Then he shrugged and seemed to reach a decision. Jerking his head, he said, “You’d better come with me.”
I followed him out of the room, wondering what was coming next. Through another large room and then he took me down a flight of stairs and here there were plenty of people milling around, and a whole hive of activity. There was also a sharp smell in the air which I didn’t recognize until I’d taken in everything that was going on.
Set in the far wall was a massive steel door, exactly the kind you’d find in a bank vault. A guy was crouched over an oxy-acetylene torch and was using it to burn through the six-inch thick steel around the lock. Several others were crowded round him,
“Just what the hell’s going on?” I asked Rizzio. I didn’t really expect any answer but he gave one.
“That’s Galecci’s private vault. It’s where he keeps most of his cash and also his collection of antique clocks,” he explained. “That’s another hobby of his, like the paintings.”
From the way he said it, I gathered Rizzio didn’t think much of either of these pastimes.
He went on, “He goes in there every night at precisely eleven-fifteen and comes out again a couple of hours later. Everything precisely on the dot. But this time he hasn’t.”
“You reckon he’s still in there?”
“That’s right.”
“How do you know he hasn’t come out sometime ago and locked the place up again?”
“Because there’s no sign of him anywhere in the buildings. If he’d gone out, I’d have known about it.”
“So you figure something’s happened to him. Doesn’t anyone else have the combination?”
Rizzio stared at me as if I’d just uttered something blasphemous. “No one else has it. That’s why we had to call in this guy to burn a way through.”
The guy with the torch suddenly snapped it off and stepped back. “We’re through, Mister Rizzio,” he said.
“Good. Everybody stay right where they are,” Rizzio ordered. He turned to a small, white-haired man. “I want you to come in with me, doctor,” he said.
“And you as well, Merak.”
Grabbing the handle of the door, Rizzio pulled hard. Nothing happened for a few seconds, then the door swung open on well-oiled hinges. I followed him and the doctor inside, blinking in the harsh glare of the overhead strip lights.
The vault was bigger than I’d anticipated, and the first thing I noticed were the clocks of all sizes and shapes ranged around the walls. There must have been hundreds of them.
The second thing was the table near the middle of the room with the solitary chair and its occupant. I knew right away it was Galecci and that he would no longer be needing my services. The handle of a knife protruded from between his shoulder blades, and he was very dead.
I said nothing while the doctor examined him. But my mind was suddenly whirring inside my head like an overloaded engine. What I was seeing here didn’t make any sense.
Rizzio moved towards the body and put one hand out towards the knife, then jerked his head around as I stopped him. “Don’t touch that. The police will want to dust it for fingerprints and you don’t want yours all over it.”
There was a large metal box on the table directly in front of the body. Even from where I stood, I reckoned it contained a few hundred thousand dollars. Obviously whoever had killed him, robbery wasn’t the motive.
But right at that moment, motive was the last thing on my mind. It was how the murder had been committed that I couldn’t figure out.
Rizzio had been absolutely certain that Galecci came here alone around eleven-fifteen and left some two hours later, regular as clockwork. Even if someone had been waiting for him with a knife inside the vault, where was the killer now? Galecci would have locked the door immediately he was inside and I’d seen enough to know it would need the combination to open again from the inside.
There were certainly no places I could see where the killer might hide.
No windows through which he could have gone. The only exit was through that massive door, and he certainly hadn’t gone out that way.
Maybe it was a good thing that Galecci had been the one to hire me. I certainly didn’t want to have to investigate this particular murder. It just didn’t seem possible that anyone could have done it, inside a locked vault with only one way in and out, and only the dead man knowing the combination.
Rizzio waited impatiently until the doctor had finished his examination, then asked, “Any idea when he died?”
“As near as I can put it, somewhere around midnight. Certainly not much later.”
“But how?” For once, Rizzio seemed at a loss for words.
“You tell me,” muttered the doctor. I had to hand it to the little guy, he didn’t let Rizzio scare him. “I’m just telling you the obvious. Someone stuck that knife in his back around midnight. Death was virtually instantaneous. Now the rest is up to the police. If they want me to make a statement, I will. But don’t ask me how anybody got in and out of this place in order to kill him.”
Rizzio
