The Bell Tolls at Midnight

The still night was broken by the muttering of a silent oath by a Derringer .45. A body slumped to the floor with an agonizing groan. The doctor was dead, murdered by an intruder that absconded through the open window. Within moments, police arrived on the scene.

"What's all this here, then?" exclaimed Sergeant Jerome, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. He was winded and sweaty from hauling his massive frame up four flights of stairs. Four beat cops surveyed the crime scene and mined it for clues. A court reporter snapped photos for the morning edition. The body, a well-respected doctor of bloodology, lay grotesquely prostrate over a model of the human uterus. Sergeant Jerome let out a low whistle and said, "Mom is going to be absolutely distraught." The sergeant and the doctor were brothers. I forgot to mention that before.

Before long, world famous Detective Robinson arrived and took in the all too familiar scene before him. "I see a death like this every day," he muttered, "and it never gets any easier." He nervously flipped a playing card between his index and middle finger as he looked about the room. Right next to the corpse, he saw an overturned curio box, ornately carved and well varnished. Detective Robinson picked it up and examined it carefully. It was empty, but he was sure it was a clue.

Robinson pressed a small button on the bottom of the box, revealing a false bottom. Underneath a small panel of wood, the detective discovered a will and a silver ring with an emerald inlay. He removed the ring and examined it in the sunlight. It glinted off every facet, giving the gem an unearthly glow.

"I know who the killer is," announced Detective Robinson, "and it is someone in this room." By this time, there were a dozen people in the room, including the doctor's wife, his butler, a man from whom he purchased groceries every weekend. Each of them had reason to kill the doctor, a point which I neglected to reveal earlier. Also, his brother, Sergeant Jerome, walked with a distinct limp and always kept his right hand in his front pants pocket. The suspects looked at each other nervously, then one stepped forward, gun drawn. "You'll never catch me alive, copper!" he screamed, and leapt out the window and ran down the street. Detective Robinson was crestfallen. The man who fled was his son, who he thought had died in a fire ten years earlier but who had contacted him that very morning for the first time since the tragedy. A grandfather clock in the doctor's mansion began to strike the hour. "The bell tolls at midnight," sighed Detective Robinson, and he crushed the doctor's wife to his mouth for a breathy kiss. This was going to be one of those cases.