"Charlie Chan - 7402 - The SIlent Corpse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chan Charlie)

THE SILENT CORPSE
by Robert Hart Davis

CHARLIE CHAN MYSTERY MAGAZINE, February 1974.

The hurricane struck the island suddenly, trapping the guests and Charlie Chan on Burdon Point - but greater than the fury of the storm was the terror when it was learned Lionel Burdon had been murdered!


I

THE HANDSOME, white haired man had fallen asleep at his handsome mahogany desk in the book lined study of his handsome home. His right elbow rested on the wide arm of his chair and his torso slanted that way. Although his killer entered silently, the slight click of the door closing half-roused the man from his after-dinner slumber.
His killer smiled down into the sleep-ridded eyes and said, "Let me make you more comfortable, Lionel."
"Thanks," Lionel Burdon mumbled. "Can't imagine why I'm so sleepy."
"You're tired," the killer told him. "You're not a young man any more. Here - let me..."
As a left hand straightened the slumberer's torso, the right put a Smith and Wesson revolver against his right temple and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the discharge was shockingly loud in the room, but the killer remained untroubled by the possibility of discovery, knowing there was no one within earshot beyond the room's thick, book-sheathed walls with its massive wooden door securely closed.
Lionel Burdon's head was a sickening sight. A torrent of blood poured from the hole in his right temple, blood mixed with bits of flesh, bone and greyish white brain matter. The ugliness of this achievement failed to disturb the killer who was troubled by a quite different concern. This was the credibility of Lionel Burdon's suicide among those who had known him well. It was not a large worry, however - for everyone would have to accept the fact of Burdon's self destruction.
The killer had planned everything to perfection.
The pistol placed carefully on the rich red carpet, the fact that the pistol belonged to the corpse, the matching of bullet and barrel, even the recent indications of powder marks on the victim's right hand should the authorities choose to apply a paraffin test - all added up to evidence impossible to controvert.
The killer left the room silently, conscious of a difficult job well done...


II

ALTHOUGH the white spired brick chapel was less than five hundred yards from the main house, the small funeral party covered the distance in chauffeur driven limousines. Charlie Chan ordinarily would have preferred to walk but the mounting fury of the hurricane made footing it out of the question.
The services had been brief and simple, after the Unitarian fashion, and the coffin had been mercifully covered. Even with a mortician's napkin draped over the wound, a man who has blown out his brains with a thirty-eight calibre pistol is not a reassuring sight.
Dr. Smith, the Burdon family physician, shared the soft upholstery of the Continental with the Honolulu Chief of Detectives. He said, "The chapel always makes me feel that I am in New England instead of on the island of Hawaii."
Chan said, "Either in New England or Hollywood. It reminds me very much of Forest Lawn."
Dr. Smith, watching the windswept and rain-lashed cypresses that lined the winding drive bend low before the rising storm, said nervously, "I have four cases waiting in Hilo."
Chan, who had known the eminent Chinese-American physician for many years, wondered a little at the nervousness. Dr. Li Mok Smith had always impressed him as a man of almost preternatural calm. Perhaps, he thought, it was the hurricane. Low atmospheric pressures, which invariably accompany such a storm, affect most people one way or another.
He said, "Li, if we're to be marooned on Burdon Point, we could be in quarters much less comfortable."
Chan, himself, had a full docket awaiting him on the island of Oahu. As the big car pulled slowly under the porte cochere of the main house, he wished that he, too, were back in his own bailiwick, but Chan was quite willing to accept the inevitable.
Curiosity gnawed at him, curiosity both personal and professional, and he was inclined to welcome a prolongation of his visit to Burdon Point as an opportunity to seek and perhaps find answers to the questions plaguing him.
Ordinarily, when a man like Lionel Burdon died, the acknowledged leader of one of the half dozen great families in any state, a man of great distinction and even greater power and reputation, his funeral would have been that of at least a petty prince, with the governor himself in attendance. It was because Burdon had committed suicide that Chan was there instead.
There had been much inter-island telephoning once the date of the funeral was set. While the Burdon family, or its surviving clan-chiefs, felt that a representative of the executive should be present, it also felt that the presence of too high-level an official would bring the inevitable and unwanted newspaper and television reporters and camera crews in his wake.
Ultimately, Honolulu Detective Inspector Charlie Chan had been tapped for the chore. He was not only sufficiently distinguished but was noted for his discretion and his ability to render himself invisible to the media representatives when such invisibility was desired. He had been known long and favorably to the deceased, having attained the status of valued friend after managing to restore safely to her home the kidnapped Lenore Burdon not merely unharmed but without payment of ransom.
The hurricane, watched by trackers for two weeks as it approached the islands, was also a factor. While the funeral had been timed well ahead of the predicted arrival of the tropical storm on Hawaii's west coast, there was always the possibility that it would get there ahead of schedule - which had, in fact, happened.
Charlie Chan had thus flown from Oahu early that morning, arriving barely in time to attend the services. Now, with both wind and water rising at a furious pitch, it appeared that his stay on Burdon Point, along with that of other guests, would be prolonged.
"...without a toothbrush," he remarked in an aside to Dr. Smith as they were ushered into the entry hall of the main house by an immense and solemn faced Negro butler resplendent in gold-frogged blue broadcloth livery.
Although, at the time of Lenore Burdon's kidnapping, Chan had been in two of the Burdon mansions on Oahu, he was unprepared for the truly baronial scale on which Burdon Point was conceived and maintained.
As with the chapel, New England was very much present in the mahogany topped double railing of the gracefully curved banisters, in the white wall paneling and in the dour primitive ancestral portraits of earlier Burdons who glowered tight lipped and probably toothless out of their plain gilt oval frames.
In a deceptively simple living room off the entrance hall, where biscuits and a superb claret punch were being served, Chan stuck close to Dr. Smith, which was not difficult since they were the only non-family persons present. There had been no chance for private conversation between the two quasi-officials before the ceremony at the chapel.
In the course of his long career as a police detective in Honolulu, Chan had viewed and investigated at least a thousand suicides, most of them easily understandable. As a rule, he had learned, men and women destroyed themselves violently when facing incurable diseases, when driven insane, when confronted with unendurable prospects of failure in business or even in love, or when hopelessly hooked on narcotics habits they could no longer manage to support.
There were other, more obscure causes for suicide, and these, too, were comprehensible. However, there were a few whose motivation for self murder had remained stubbornly beyond the bounds of any applicable logic. To Chan, Lionel Burdon's suicide was among these. In his quietly unassertive way, Lionel Burdon was, to all outward evidence, one of the most vitally alive human beings, one of the most interested and interesting men, Chan had ever met.
Yet, Burdon had pressed a revolver muzzle against his right temple and blown out his brains. Chan had talked to his opposite number at Hilo by telephone about it before leaving his Honolulu office to drive to the airport.
According to that official, the evidence of suicide was incontrovertible. The position of the body, the angle of bullet entry, the powder burns in the skin surrounding the wound - all spelled self destruction. Paraffin tests had even detected the presence of powder markings on the gun hand itself.
Still, Chan found it hard to accept. Hence, his cornering of Dr. Smith, who had been Lionel Burdon's personal physician on Hawaii.
"Li," he said, "have you any idea why?"
The physician shrugged and shook his head, then said, "Charlie, it beats me. Of all the men I've ever known..." he let it hang.