Page 192 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

I lifted my head proudly. “That, Lieutenant, was a riddle
confounding us all. It almost looked like a so-called sealed room
murder. But everyone had been looking at the building from ground
level. I ordered an overflight by police helicopter, and it confirmed
my suspicions: the roof has a hatch cover. It connects with the false
ceiling over the bathtub. The plumbing requires a standpipe and the
water pipes came into the bathroom from above. So the building
contractor must have used that rooftop access to the crawl space to
finish the work required to make the unit habitable per the building
code. The owner had forgotten about it. Once I realized the
possibility of gaining entry through it, I found some related clues:
one, an extension ladder abandoned about a hundred yards down the
alley behind the garage; two, signs that the hatch had recently been
removed and replaced; and three, smudges in the bathtub containing
particles of roofing asphalt.”
“Good work, Sergeant Donat. Did you establish parameters of
height, weight or girth for a person getting in and out through that
portal?”
I was ready for that one, too. “Yes. Unfortunately, anyone with a
bit of agility could accomplish the feat. The trick was to do it quietly,
so the killer must have been wearing soft-soled shoes of some sort. I
went on another shoe-hunt right away.”
“Any luck?”
“No, but it had to be done. The Simulians by now were getting
very nervous about the intrusions of the law into their private lives
and shoe racks. But they could not leave town, their normal reaction
to intensified police scrutiny.”
“And this murder was covered in detail again by the print and
broadcast media?”
“No way to prevent it, even had I justification for muzzling the
press. You missed a lot of excitement, Lieutenant.”
I knew that was not the kind of excitement she craved—how did I
know? Because she didn’t like any kind of excitement. Her mission in
life was to explain any unexplained phenomenon she encountered,
and in that process of analysis and categorization suck out everything
that smacked of human emotion. Me, bitter? Why would anyone
think that?

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