The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse Read Online Free PDF

nodded in obvious misery, and we were right back where we had started. Murder is not an easy subject to broach, and I realized that I needed to take it easy on this boy. He was, after all, not much older than me. “Where’s the corpse?” I asked.
    He flinched, then brushed past me into the hall. The WC on this landing had a hand-printed note pinned to the door: OUT OF ORDER! NO ENTRY! which seemed excessive for a busted loo.
    Standing well back, Plaxton mimed that I was to open the door. I held my breath and turned the knob.
    The room was dim, lighted only by a small stained-glass window, whose diamond-shaped panes of violet and yellow gave to the scene a curious carnival air. Directly under the window was a bathtub, and in it was what I took at first to be a statue. “Is this a joke?” I asked. But the look on Plaxton’s face, and the way he covered his mouth with his hand—not to hide a mischievous grin, but to keep from vomiting—gave me my answer.
    The thing in the tub was not a statue, but a man—a
dead
man, and a naked one at that. Save for his face, he seemed to have been carved out of copper.
    “I’m sorry,” Plaxton whispered, averting his eyes. “This is probably no place for a girl.”
    “Girl be blowed!” I snapped. “I’m here as a brain, not as a female.”
    Plaxton actually took a step backward.
    “Who is this?” I asked, still scarcely able to believe my eyes.
    “Mr. Denning,” he replied. “The housemaster.”
    I opened my mental notebook and began recording the scene.
    The deceased reclined in the tub, as if—except for one remarkable detail—he had dozed off during a long, comfortable soak. Several inches from the top of the tub was a regular ring of blue scum, and at the foot, a cracked rubber stopper was still jammed into the drain hole. Whatever liquid had filled the tub had leaked out, and the porcelain was now completely dry.
    I touched a finger to the residue and sniffed it.
Copper sulfate: CuSO
4 .
Unmistakable.
    A look round the back of the tub showed me what I was already half expecting to see: an automobile battery. One of its lugs (the positive) was connected to a black rubber wire, its farther end bared and coiled in the bottom of the tub like a sleeping snake. The other lug (the negative) was connected to a similar length of wire, terminating in a large crocodile clip, which was clamped firmly to the corpse’s nose.
    The chemical and electrical action had electroplated the man. Electrodeposition, to be precise.
    Although I knew it was useless, I felt with two fingers for a carotid pulse, but there was none. Mr. Denning was decidedly defunct.
    “Give me a hand,” I said, seizing the shoulder and pulling the body away from the back of the porcelain. It crackled, and a few chips fell into the bottom of the dry tub. A glance at the expanse of flesh, plated as it was with copper, told me that there were no bullet holes or knife wounds.
    Plaxton hadn’t moved a muscle.
    “Is he dead?” he asked, almost blubbering, his lower lip trembling terribly. I could have made any number of witty retorts, but something told me to control myself.
    “Yes,” I said, and left it at that.
    “I thought so,” Plaxton said. “That’s why I wrote you.” Which seemed an odd thing to say until you considered that the boy was still in some degree of shock.
    “But why me?” I asked. “Why write instead of telephoning? For that matter, why didn’t you call the police?”
    Plaxton went even pastier, if possible. “They’d think I killed him. I needed someone who could prove I didn’t. That’s why I wrote to you.”
    “And did you? Kill him, I mean?”
    “Of course I didn’t!” Plaxton hissed, getting a bit of color in his cheeks at last.
    “Then who did?”
    “I don’t know. That’s why I sent for you.”
    Plaxton was beginning to sound like a broken phonograph record. I took one long, last, lingering look at the body in the bathtub.
    “Can we talk in your room?” I asked.