Pop and Lock

This week’s new flash fiction is Locked Room Noir.

Pop and Lock

Thormsgard fancied himself the intellectual of the homicide unit. The reader. You’d think he’d get enough of death and destruction on his day job but what he read most was crime. Murder. Cop stories. And not the crap they sell in airport snack shops. The good stuff. Classics. Chandler. Hammett.

He stood in a cramped hallway in front of a small non-descript apartment door. By appearances just another case but inside he was churning. Giddy with excitement.

The murder itself was a creature of our times. A pandemic hangover really. The dead man apparently a slave to habit. He’d rigged his desktop to dial in automatically to the office’s weekly 8:00 a.m. Zoom call. Only this Monday his colleagues were shocked to find him seated at his desk a pallid grey corpse, bulbous eyes staring blindly ahead when his machine logged him on. Their shock only grew and any appetite for their assorted scones and flagels dissipated when almost immediately he toppled forward to show a thick leather knife handle protruding from the middle of his back.

While Thormsgard drove across town to the scene his team had been able to gather a lot of information from the victim's phone and credit card records. They’d been able to interview a few neighbors and workmates as well.

There was no super in the building. The landlord had spare keys but was out of town. No signs of forced entry. Based on quick research there appeared to be no real family or close friends who might have a key. No recent social guests or scheduled repairman visits. Thormsgard jiggled the doorknob and pushed. Nothing. Locked. Tight as a drum. From the inside. No room under the door to lock it from the outside and slide the key back under. Hence his glee. After years of reading stories about the phenomenon, and years of solving cases bereft of it, he finally had come across it. A unicorn. His quest. His grail. The locked room mystery.

No apparent ingress or egress for the killer. The knife in the back ruled out suicide or natural causes. Was the vic killed elsewhere and moved into the apartment using his own key? Couldn’t know yet if anything was missing from the apartment. Could the stiff have answered the door and been overpowered? Maybe. But by whom? He hadn’t ordered anything recently, apparently. Preliminarily sounded like he was a recluse, the type of guy neighbors thought might not answer an unexpected ring. Had someone entered with permission and remained behind hidden, stowed away to strike later? Had someone followed him in? No real hiding spots on the landing for lurkers. The detective’s head swam with the delicious possibilities. All the time-honored tropes and stereotypes of the genre. Hidden passageway? Time released weapon launcher? Could the dead man have rigged up the knife to the back of his chair and impaled himself? Think of the theories! The possibilities. The more outlandish and improbable the better. Truly a case worthy of the great Poirot. The great Thormsgard.

The anxious copper was waiting outside the closed door for a very important member of the team. Profiler, you say? Pathologist? Splatter expert? Nope. Not even close. Try locksmith.

How else to get into the death room? Step one of the process. Where Thormsgard could start to flex his Holmesian wits on this most challenging of cases. This unsolvable puzzle.

Up the stairs came a spindly older gent in a form-fitting “Gary’s Lock and Key” tee shirt. He couldn’t have been less than 70 but looked like he could have ascended the steps on his hands. Thormsgard sucked in his gut.

“Thanks for coming out,” he exhaled.

“Give me one second to try something,” said the wiry craftsman, setting down his toolbox. He lowered his shoulder to the heavy looking steel door and gave a firm but gentle push. Voila. Open it sprung.

“You’d be surprised how often that happens. It’s the first thing a smart crook will try.”

The detective deflated right there in front of him. “So no locked room murder?”

“Well, no locked room at least.”

“So not the perfect crime?”

“I guess not.”

“This changes everything.” It dawned on Thormsgard his white whale had just submerged and swam away. “So really anyone could have strolled in and killed him?”

“Well, I’m not one to tell you your business, that’s for you to figure out, but I guess that sounds about right. I’ll bill you.”

Even in a moment of gutted defeat Thormsgard’s thoughts, as always, returned to matters literary. “Now there’s a surprise ending for you. Worthy of the Rue Morgue.” Citing perhaps the godfather of the locked door genre and one of the most renowned twists in all of fiction.

Gary took a beat and looked up from hoisting his kit. “I reckon it’s more O. Henry than Poe,” he drawled to the open-mouthed detective. Proving that while Thormsgard knew everything there was to know about books, or at least thought that to be the case, clearly he’d never learned not to judge one by its cover.