The Door Between (22 page)

And Mr. Ellery Queen followed, sighing.

Terry was just putting his arms around Eva on Friday morning and kissing her dimple when Mrs Rabinowitz, the elderly woman who came in every day to clean his Second Avenue apartment and fix his meals, woke him up.

“Huh? What?” grumbled Terry, sitting up in bed.

“It’s a telephone,” said Mrs Rabinowitz, firmly shaking his brown shoulder. “Get up, you loafer! Ain’t you ashamed of yourself, sleeping
nakkid
?”

“All right, all right. Scram, Gwendolyn,” growled Terry, beginning to throw his covers off.

Mrs Rabinowitz screamed, then giggled, then retreated in haste. Terry got into his robe and cursed. People ought to have their heads knocked off for telephoning at seven o”clock in the morning! But when he picked up the receiver he stopped frowning quickly and grew very quiet indeed.

“Oh, it’s you. Wait a minute.” He ran over to close the living-room door. “All right. What’s the bad news?”

“You may take your hair down now, Terry,” said Ellery. “They’ve found her.”

“Uh, huh,” said Terry. Then after a while he said: “What do you mean?”

“Now, look here,” said Ellery. “I haven’t got up at six-thirty just to parry your evasions, my fine fellow. You know as well as I. They’ve found Esther Leith MacClure, and if you’re interested as I think you are, you’ll get into your pants pronto.”

“Philadelphia?”

“So you do know! Yes. The flash came late last night.”

Terry stared at the telephone. “What else?”

“That’s all we know so far. Dad’s sending Sergeant Velie down there by the ten o”clock train. I thought we might trot down there ourselves – a little earlier.”

“What for?”

“You never know. Are you with me?”

“Does Eva know?”

“Not yet. Nor Dr. MacClure. I thought we might get the doctor off quietly and take him with us.”

“Where’ll I meet you?”

“At the MacClure apartment. A half-hour?”

“Make it twenty minutes.”

Terry jumped for the shower. He did not bother to shave. He was dressed and at the door in eight minutes. But he stopped with a thoughtful frown, went back to his bedroom, took a .38 automatic out of his dresser drawer, slipped it into his coat pocket, chucked Mrs Rabinowitz under her third chin, and left running.

Dr. MacClure was just about to drink his tomato juice when the house ’phone rang. He put the glass down untouched.

Venetia called: “It’s fo’ you, Dr. John. Some man Queen. He’s downstairs.”

The doctor jumped to the telephone. As he listened, his face went slowly gray. “Yes.” He nodded several times. “No, she’s still asleep. I’ll be down in a minute.”

He went to the door of Eva’s bedroom and listened. But Eva was not asleep; she was sobbing. The doctor knocked, and the sobbing stopped.

“Come in,” said Eva in a muffled voice.

The doctor went in and found Eva in bed with her back turned to the door. “I’ve got to go out for a while, honey. The foundation … What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” said Eva. “I just didn’t s-sleep very well.”

“Dick?”

She did not reply; he saw her shoulders heave. As he bent over to kiss her he thought grimly of young Dr. Scott and of his complete silence and absence the evening before. Dr. MacClure thought he knew why young Dr. Scott had not called. And he thought it was not inconceivable that young Dr. Scott would never call again. Young Dr. Scott had found the pace just a little too hot for him. He had wanted a
fiancée
not a victim of circumstances; a wife, not a potential headline.

The doctor fondled Eva’s tumbled hair. He saw on her writing-table the diamond ring, lying on a sealed envelope. . . .

He left a vague message for Inspector Queen, should he call, with Venetia, and took the elevator down to the lobby. The three men did not shake hands, did not speak. Terry had a taxicab waiting and they all got in, the driver saying: “Was that Penn Station?”

They missed the eight o”clock by ten minutes and had to wait another fifty for the next train. They dawdled away the interval by having breakfast in the terminal restaurant. There was no conversation. The doctor ate stolidly, without looking up from his plate.

On the train Dr. MacClure sat looking out the window. Ellery leaned back beside him and closed his eyes. And Terry Ring, in front of them, divided his time between three morning newspapers and the smoking car behind.

At ten forty-five, as the train pulled out of the North Philadelphia station, Terry Ring reached for his hat and said: “Come on.” The doctor rose, Ellery opened his eyes, and they went single-file to the platform. At the West Philadelphia station they disembarked and made for the Broad Street shuttle, which was waiting. But as they were about to enter Ellery stopped.

“Where has she been staying, Terry?”

Terry said reluctantly: “West Philly.”

Dr. MacClure’s lids came down. “You knew!”

“Sure, Doc. I knew all the time,” said Terry in a low voice. “But what the hell? What could I do?”

After that, Dr. MacClure kept glancing at the brown man – while they went down into the street, while they got into a taxicab, while Terry gave the driver an address.

“Why go there first?” demanded Terry, leaning back.

“There’s plenty of time,” muttered Ellery.

The cab pulled up before a black-red brick house in a narrow, meandering, dilapidated street. A sign outside said:
Rooms
. They got out and, as Dr. MacClure stared hungrily up at the cheaply curtained windows, Ellery said to the chauffeur: “Wait.” They then mounted the high, dowdy stoop.

An old woman with wispy gray hair and a disagreeable expression opened the door. “I declare respectable people haven’t any rights any more! Well, come in and get over with it.”

Panting, she led them upstairs to a tan-varnished door very like four others on the floor. She opened it with a long steel key and stood back, hands on her drooping hips. “They told me,” she said venomously, “to keep it just the way it was – why,
I
don’t know. There it is. I lost a good chance to rent it yesterday, too!”

It was a dingy, dirty chamber with a bed whose spring sagged in the middle and a dresser with one leg broken, so that the thing leaned forward tiredly. The bed was unmade, its blankets tumbled about. A pair of black pumps lay on the floor, one of them with a grotesquely built-up heel and sole; there was a gray woollen dress over the bony rocking-chair, a pair of silk stockings, a slip.

Dr. MacClure went to the dresser and fingered a bottle of ink and a pen which lay there; then he turned around and looked at the bed, at the rocker, at the shoes, at the gilt-bracketed gas-jet over the bed, at the torn streaked blind on the window.

“The detective just stepped out for a minute,” said the old woman less truculently, struck by the silence. “If you want to wait –”

“I think not,” said Ellery abruptly. “Come, Doctor. We can’t learn anything here.”

He had to take the doctor’s arm and lead him like a blind man.

The taxicab took them to Police Headquarters and, after a half-hour of annoying and fruitless inquiry, they finally found the official Ellery was seeking.

“We want to see Esther Leith MacClure,” said Ellery.

“Who are you?” The official, a broad-nosed individual with blackening teeth, inspected them suspiciously in turn.

Ellery handed him a card.

“One of you Sergeant Velie of the New York police?”

“No, but it’s perfectly all right. I’m Queen’s son –”

“I don’t care if you’re Queen himself! I got my orders not to give any information to anyone but this Velie. He’s coming down with a man from the Missing Persons Bureau.”

“I know, but we’ve come from New York just to find out –”

“No information,” said the broad-nosed man shortly. “I got my orders.”

“Look,” said Terry. “I know Jimmie O”Dell down here. I’ll look him up, Queen, and we’ll find out –”

”Say, I remember you,” said the man, starting. “You’re the private dick from New York. Well, it won’t do you any good, see? O”Dell’s got his orders, too.”

Dr. MacClure said stiffly: “For God’s sake, let’s get out of here. This haggling over –”

“But surely we can see her,” protested Ellery. “This is a case of identification. This man is Dr. John MacClure, of New York. He’s the only one who can make a positive identification.”

The man scratched his head. “Well, I guess you can see her, all right. They didn’t say anything about that.”

He took up his pen and scratched out a pass to the Philadelphia city morgue.

They stood around the stone slab in the mortuary, silent. The attendant lounged by indifferently. Dr. MacClure, that man of death, did not seem affected by the sight of death. Ellery could see that the swollen, bluish features, the rigid neck muscles, the distended nostrils were invisible to the big man. It was the regularity of feature he was seeing, the long blonde lashes, the still-beautiful hair, the curve of cheek, the tiny ears. He looked and looked, with a marvelling expression on his gaunt face, as if a miracle had happened and he was witnessing a resurrection.

“Doctor,” said Ellery gently. “Is that Esther MacClure?”

“Yes. Yes. That’s my darling.”

Terry turned aside, and Ellery coughed. The big man had said the last words in a murmur that Ellery knew he did not realize was audible. It was disturbing to Ellery’s sense of decorum. Not indecent, exactly, but too – well, naked. He realized suddenly that he had never really seen the man before.

He caught Terry’s embarrassed eye and gestured with his head towards the distant door.

To Ellery’s amazement, when they emerged from the iron gates into the lower-level waiting-room at the Pennsylvania Station, there was Eva sitting on a bench and staring at the clock, which stood at two. From the fact that she was not waiting at the gate Ellery knew that she was not seeing the clock at all. They had to go up to her and shake her.

“Oh, dear,” she said, and sat there with folded hands.

Dr. MacClure kissed her, sat down beside her, took one of her black-gloved hands. Neither of the younger men said anything; but Terry winced and lit a cigaret. She was dressed in black – a black suit, a black hat, black gloves.

She knew.

“Inspector Queen told me,” she said simply. The area about her eyes, although powdered, was puffy.

“She’s dead, Eva,” said the doctor. “Dead.”

“I know, daddy. You poor, poor thing.”

Ellery strolled over to the nearby news-stand and said to a spruce little gray old man: “What’s the idea?”

“You didn’t think,” said Inspector Queen calmly, “that you were going to get away with anything? I’ve had the MacClure girl and Terry trailed since Monday. I knew you were going to Philly this morning before you even got on the train.”

Ellery flushed. “We didn’t find out anything, if that’s any balm to your dignity.”

“I knew that, too. Come over here.”

Ellery followed his father in a helpless, angry mood. He disliked mysteries. He had always disliked mysteries; they annoyed his sense of intellectual balance. That was why he had always been so interested in the solution of crimes … There were too many mysteries now altogether. Instead of simplifying, everything had massed up. Little things were clear: That Dr. MacClure had expected to find Esther Leith MacClure alive and that a last secret hope had died in him with the news of her death. And that Terry Ring had expected nothing but what they had found – that Esther Leith MacClure had died by her own hand. He had known of her suicide all along. And Ellery could even invent a reason for Terry’s long silence. But that was not enough. Not enough …

“We can talk sensibly for a change,” said the Inspector, pausing at the bench. “Now that the truth’s out.”

“The awful truth, eh?” smiled Dr. MacClure; and it was an awful smile.

“I’m sorry, Doctor. This must be a pretty bad blow to you.” The old man seated himself and took a pinch of snuff. “Did you make a positive identification this morning?”

“It’s Esther. I haven’t seen her for seventeen years, but it’s Esther. I’d know her – under any conditions.”

“I didn’t think there was much doubt about it. Hello, Terry! You see, the Philadelphia police couldn’t identify the body at first. When she was found dead Monday night of cyanide poisoning –”

“Monday
night
,” repeated Eva in a faint voice.

“– there wasn’t a direct clue to her identity. She had given the landlady a false name and address. They tried to locate someone who knew her under that name and at that address, but they found out right away both were phony. She’d given a local street – Philadelphia – and there wasn’t even a street by that name.”

“How late Monday night?” frowned Ellery. “That blasted bureaucrat in Philadelphia wouldn’t give me any information at all.”

“After midnight. The landlady’d got suspicious or something – I haven’t any details myself. Well, when the New York description went out – fair, blonde, around forty-seven, five feet seven or eight inches tall, weight between one-thirty and one-forty, and with a crippled right leg – they finally checked their morgue records and tied up our description with the rooming-house suicide. Notified us late last night.” The Inspector sighed. “I’ve got my man Velie down there now to get the original of her suicide note.”

“Suicide note!” exclaimed Dr. MacClure.

Ellery stiffened. “What suicide note?”

“They found a note crumpled in her hand under the bedclothes.”

“She wrote a
note
?” muttered Terry incredulously. No one heard him but Ellery.

Inspector Queen stroked his mustache with embarrassment. “Look here, Miss MacClure, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I know what this is going to mean to you.” Eva turned slowly. “Every bad thing has something good about it. The good thing – for you – is that the Leith murder is solved.”

Dr. MacClure jumped up from the bench. “The Leith murder –”

“Sorry, Doctor. In this note she left before committing suicide, Esther MacClure confessed to the murder of her sister.”

“I don’t believe it!” cried Eva.

He took a folded sheet from his pocket and spread it flat. “They dictated the note to me over the ’phone last night. Would you like to read it?”