Greek Coffin Mystery (30 page)

She sighed uncertainly. “Perhaps I’m wrong … I didn’t know that Mrs. Vreeland had told you anything that night, you see; I learned about
that
only after my husband’s death, and then it was from the newspapers.”

“One last question, Mrs. Sloane. Did Mr. Sloane ever tell you that he had a brother?”

She shook her head. “He never so much as suggested it. In fact, he was always reticent about his family. He had told me about his father and mother—they seemed nice enough people in a middle-class sort of way—but never about a brother. I was always under the impression that he had been an only child, and that he was the last of his family.”

Ellery picked up his hat and stick, said: “Be patient, Mrs. Sloane, and above all say nothing about these things to any one,” smiled and quickly left the room.

From Weekes downstairs Ellery received a bit of news which momentarily staggered him.

Dr. Wardes was gone.

Ellery gnawed at his leash. This looked like something! But Weekes was a barren source of information. It seemed that, with the publicity following the solution of the Grimshaw case, Dr. Wardes had retired into his hard British shell, beginning to cast about for escape from this brilliantly illuminated household. The police ban having been lifted with the suicide of Sloane, he had commandeered his luggage, hastily taken leave of his hostess—who was, it appeared, in no mood for the proprieties—expressed his regrets and departed with dispatch for regions unknown. He had left on Friday last, and Weekes was certain no one in the house knew where he had gone.

“And Miss Joan Brett, too—” Weekes added.

Ellery paled. “What about Miss Joan Brett? Has she gone, too? For heaven’s sake, man, find your tongue!”

Weekes found it. “No, sir, no indeed, she hasn’t gone yet, but I venture to say, sir, that she’s
going
to go, if you get my meaning, sir. She—”

“Weekes,” said Ellery savagely, “speak English. What’s up?”

“Miss Brett is preparing to leave, sir,” said Weekes with a polite little cough. “Her employment, it’s terminated, so to speak. And Mrs. Sloane—” he looked pained—“Mrs. Sloane, she informed Miss Brett that her services would not be required any longer. So—”

“Where is she now?”

“In her room upstairs, sir. Packing, I believe. First door to your right from the head of the stairs. …”

But Ellery was off like the wind, coat tails flying. He took the steps three at a time. As he reached the upper landing, however, he halted in his tracks. There were voices; and, unless his ears deceived him, one of the voices emanated from the larynx of Miss Joan Brett. So, unabashed, he stood still, stick clutched in his hand, head cocked a little toward the right … and was rewarded with hearing a man’s voice, thickened with what is popularly known as passion, cry: “Joan! Dearest! I love—”

“Tippling,” came Joan’s voice, frigidly—not the voice of a young woman listening to a gentleman’s avowal of undying affection.

“No! Joan, don’t make a joke of it. I’m deadly serious. I love you, love you, darling. Really, I—”

There were certain noises indicative of scuffle. Presumably the owner of the masculine voice was pressing his suit physically. A little outraged gasp, quite distinct, then a sharp
smack!
at which even Ellery, outside the range of Miss Brett’s vigorous arm, winced.

Silence. The two combatants, Ellery felt certain, were now staring at each other with hostility, perhaps circling each other in that feline manner which human beings adopt under the surge of the choleric passions. He listened placidly and grinned when he heard the man murmur: “You shouldn’t have done that, Joan. I didn’t mean to frighten you—”

“Frighten me? Heavens! I assure you I wasn’t the least bit frightened,” came Joan’s voice, dripping with amused hauteur.

“Well, damn it all!” cried the man with exasperation, “is that a way to receive a fellow’s proposal of marriage? By—”

Another gasp. “How
dare
you swear at me, you—you oaf!” cried Joan. “I should horsewhip you. Oh, I’ve never been so humiliated in my life. Leave my room at once!”

Ellery shrank against his wall. A bitter strangled roar of rage, the violent sound of a door being torn open, a slam which shook the house—and Ellery peeped around the corner in time to see a wildly gesticulating Mr. Alan Cheney thunder up the corridor, fists clenched and head jerking up and down. …

When Mr. Alan Cheney had disappeared into his own room, agitating the old house for the second time with the vehemence with which he shut his door, Mr. Ellery Queen complacently adjusted his necktie and without hesitation went to the door of Miss Joan Brett’s room. He raised his stick and knocked, gently. Silence. He knocked again. He heard then a most unmannerly sniffle, a choked sob and Joan’s voice: “Don’t you
dare
come in here again, you—you—you …”

Ellery said: “It’s Ellery Queen, Miss Brett,” in the most unruffled voice in the world, as if a maiden’s sobs were fitting reply to a visitor’s knock. The sniffles ceased instantly. Ellery waited with patience. Then a very small voice: “Do come in, Mr. Queen. The—the door is open,” and he pushed the door in and entered.

Miss Joan Brett, he found, was standing by her bed, a white-knuckled little hand grasping a damp handkerchief, two geometrically round dabs of color in her cheeks. About the pleasant room, on the floor, chairs, the bed itself, were strewn feminine garments of various descriptions. Two portmanteaus lay open on chairs, and a small steamer-trunk yawned on the floor. On the dressing-table, Ellery noticed without seeming to do so a framed photograph—lying face down, as if it had hastily been upset.

Now Ellery was—when he wanted to be—a most diplomatic young man. The occasion seemed to call for finesse and a conversational myopia. Whereupon he smiled in a rather vacuous fashion and said: “What was that you said when I first knocked, Miss Brett? I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch it.”

“Oh!”—a very small
oh
it was, too. Joan indicated a chair and sat down herself in another. “It—I often talk to myself. Silly habit, isn’t it?”

“Not at all,” said Ellery heartily, sitting down. “Not at all. Some of our best people are addicted to the habit. It’s supposed to mean that the egoconversationalist has money in the bank. Have you money in the bank, Miss Brett?”

She smiled weakly at that. “Not so
very
much, and besides I’m having it transferred, you know. …” The color had left her cheeks, and she sighed a little. “I’m leaving the United States, Mr. Queen.”

“So Weekes told me. We shall be desolated, Miss Brett.”

“La!” She laughed aloud. “You speak like a Frenchman, Mr. Queen.” She reached to the bed and snared her purse. “This box of mine—my luggage … How depressing sea-journeys are.” Her hand emerged, from the purse with a sheaf of steamship tickets. “Is this a professional call? I’m really leaving, Mr. Queen. Here are the visible evidences of my intention to take passage. You’re not going to tell me that I mayn’t go?”

“I? Horrors, no! And do you want to go, Miss Brett?”

“At the moment,” she said, with a savage champing of her small teeth, “I want to go very much indeed.”

Ellery became obtuse. “I see. This business of murders and suicides—naturally depressing. … Well, I shan’t keep you a moment. The object of my visit is the very opposite of sinister.” He regarded her gravely. “As you know, the case is closed. Nevertheless, there are a few points, obscure and probably unimportant, which my tenacious mind persists in worrying. … Miss Brett, just what was your mission that night when Pepper saw you prowling about the study downstairs?”

She weighed him quietly with her cool blue eyes. “You weren’t impressed with my explanation, then … Have a cigaret, Mr. Queen.” He refused, and she touched a match to one for herself with steady fingers. “Very well, sir—
Absconding Secretary Tells All,
as your tabloids would have it. I shall confess, and I daresay you’re in for a whopping big surprise, Mr. Queen.”

“I haven’t the remotest doubt about
that.”

“Prepare yourself.” She took a deep breath, and the smoke dribbled out of her lovely mouth like punctuation marks as she talked. “You see before you, Mr. Queen, a lady-sleuth.”

“No!”

“Mais out.
I am an employee of the Victoria Museum of London—not the Yard, sir, no, not that. That would be too much. Merely the Museum, Mr. Queen.”

“Well, I’ll be drawn, quartered, eviscerated and boiled in oil,” murmured Ellery. “You speak in riddles. The Victoria Museum, eh? My dear, this is such news as detectives dream of. Elucidate.”

Joan tapped ashes from her cigaret. “The story is quite melodramatic. While I applied to Georg Khalkis for employment, I was a paid investigator for the Victoria Museum. I was operating along a trail which led to Khalkis—a confused bit of information which seemed to indicate that he was mixed up, probably as the receiver, in the theft of a painting from the Museum—”

The grin faded from Ellery’s lips. “A painting by whom, Miss Brett?”

She shrugged. “A mere detail. It was valuable enough—a genuine Leonardo Da Vinci—a masterpiece discovered not long ago by one of the Museum’s field-workers—a detail from some fresco or other on which Leonardo worked in Florence during the first decade of the sixteenth century. This seems to have been an oils canvas Leonardo executed after the original fresco project was abandoned: ‘Detail from the Battle of the Standard,’ it’s catalogued. …”

“Such luck,” murmured Ellery “Go on, Miss Brett. You have my passionate attention. In what way was Khalkis involved?”

She sighed. “Except that we thought he might have been the receiver, as I said, it wasn’t very clear. More of a ‘hunch’, as you Americans persist in saying, than the result of definite information. But let me begin in the proper place.

“My recommendations to Khalkis were genuine enough—Sir Arthur Ewing, who gave me the character, is quite the legitimate toff—one of the directors of the Victoria as well as a famous London art-dealer; he naturally was in the secret, and the character was the least of it. I have done investigatory work of this nature for the Museum before, but never in this country; chiefly on the Continent. The directors demanded absolute secrecy—I was to work under cover, you see, trace the painting and attempt to locate it. Meanwhile, the theft was kept from public knowledge by a series of ‘restoration’ announcements.”

“I begin to see.”

“You have keen eyesight then, Mr. Queen,” said Joan severely.
“Will
you allow me to proceed with my story, or
won’t
you? … All the time I spent in this house as Mr. Khalkis’ secretary, I endeavored to find a clew to the whereabouts of the Leonardo; but I have never been able to find the tiniest lead to it, either from his papers or conversation. I was really becoming discouraged, despite the fact that our information seemed authentic.

“Which brings me to Mr. Albert Grimshaw. Now the painting had originally been stolen by one of the Museum attendants, a man who called himself Graham and whose real name we later discovered was Albert Grimshaw. The first hope, the first tangible indication that I was on the scent came when the man Grimshaw presented himself at the front door on the evening of September thirtieth. I saw at once, from descriptions with which I was provided, that this man was the thieving Graham who had disappeared from England without a trace and who had never been found in the five years which had elapsed from the time of the theft.”

“Oh, excellent!”

“Quite. I endeavored to listen at the study door, but I could hear nothing of his conversation with Mr. Khalkis. Nor did I learn anything the next evening, when Grimshaw appeared with the unknown man—the man whose face I could not see. To complicate matters—” her face darkened—“Mr. Alan Cheney chose that moment to lurch into the house in a disgustingly bibulous condition, and by the time I had attended to
him
the two men had gone. But of one thing I was certain—that somewhere between Grimshaw and Khalkis lay the secret of the Leonardo’s hiding-place.”

“I take it, then, that your search in the study was inspired by a hope that there might be some new record among Khalkis’ effects—a new clew to the painting’s whereabouts?”

“Exactly. But that search, like the others, was unsuccessful. You see, from time to time I had personally ransacked the house, the shop, and the galleries; and I was certain that the Leonardo was not concealed anywhere, about the Khalkis premises. On the other hand, this unknown who accompanied Grimshaw appeared to me to be some one interested—the secrecy, Mr. Khalkis’ nervous manner—interested, as I say, in the painting. I’m positive that this unknown is a vital clew to the fate of the Leonardo.”

“And you were never able to discover the identity of this man?”

She smashed her cigaret flat in an ashtray. “No.” Then she regarded Ellery suspiciously. “Why—do
you
know who he is?”

Ellery did not reply. His eyes were abstracted. “And now a feeble question, Miss Brett … Why, if matters came to a head so dramatically, are you returning to your bailiwick?”

“For the very good reason that the case has become too unwieldy for me.” She rummaged in her purse and produced a letter bearing a London postmark. She handed it to Ellery, and he read it without comment; it was on the stationery of the Victoria Museum and was signed by the Director. “You see, I have kept London informed of my progress—or rather, my lack of progress. This note is in reply to my last report concerning the unknown man. You can see for yourself that we are at an
impasse.
The Museum writes that since the original inquiry by cable from Inspector Queen some time ago a considerable correspondence has sprung up—I suppose you know that—between the Director and the New York police. Of course, at first they didn’t know whether to answer or not, as it would have meant relating the whole story.

“This letter authorizes me, as you can see, to confide in the New York police and use my own discretion about future activity.” She sighed. “My own discretion dictates the distinct conviction that the case is now beyond my humble capacities; I was about to call on the Inspector, relate my story, and then return to London.”