Greek Coffin Mystery (38 page)

The Inspector began to bluster, saw something steely in Ellery’s eye, blinked and said: “Oh, very well!” turning to his telephone to call Sampson’s office.

Sergeant Velie stalked out. Ellery rose with an unexpected burst of energy and followed the man-mountain out. He caught up with Velie in the corridor outside, grasped his hard arm, and began to speak very, very earnestly—almost in cajoling tones.

It was notable that Sergeant Velie’s normally frigid features were suddenly possessed of animation—an animation characterized by a growing disturbance as Ellery whispered urgently. The good sergeant shifted from one foot to the other. He floundered about in a morass of indecision. He shook his head. He bit his big lips. He scratched his stubbly jaw. He looked pained and wracked by conflicting emotions.

Finally, unable to resist Ellery’s blandishments, he sighed unhappily, growled, “All right, Mr. Queen, but if anything goes flooey it’ll mean my stripes,” and walked away as if he were very glad indeed to escape this tenacious flea on the hide of his duty.

C
AUTIOUSLY, IN FURTIVE PAIRS
, they converged that night under cover of a moonless sky on the Knox house. By the stroke of nine o’clock—all of them having slipped through the servants’ quarters off the side street—they were assembled in Knox’s den: the two Queens, District Attorney Sampson, Pepper, Joan Brett, and Knox himself. Black shades had been drawn; not a chink of light was visible from the outside of the mansion. They were all subdued, on edge, holding themselves in check.

All, that is to say, save Ellery, who, comporting himself with the gravity and decorum that the occasion seemed to warrant, nevertheless contrived to give the impression that
he
wasn’t worried over the outcome of this portentous evening—no indeed!

There was nervous talk. “Got the package, Mr. Knox?” The Inspector’s mustache hung limply in tattered wisps.

Knox produced from a drawer of his desk a small bundle wrapped in brown paper. “Just dummy stuff. Paper cut to bill size.” His voice was even, but there was strain beneath those tight features.

“For heaven’s sake,” burst out the District Attorney, after a fog-hung silence, “what are we waiting for? Mr. Knox, you’d better get started. We’ll follow you. The place is surrounded already and he can’t get—”

“I daresay,” drawled Ellery, “that the necessity for visiting the Check Room of the Times Building to-night no longer exists.”

This was another dramatic moment—just such a moment as Ellery had seized upon weeks before with smugness in giving out his Khalkis solution. But if he was apprehensive that again he faced ridicule, it did not show in his face. He was smiling quite pleasantly, as if all the tumultuous preparations, the police cars parked in the vicinity of Times Square, the gathering of the clans, were a matter for mild amusement.

The Inspector jerked his little body six inches higher. “What do you mean by this, Ellery? We’re wasting time, Or is this another of your fancy tricks?”

The smile left Ellery’s face. He looked at them, standing and weighing him with their bewildered eyes. The smile left, and something sharp took its place. “Very well,” he said grimly. “I’ll explain. Do you know why it would be futile—in fact, ridiculous—for us to go downtown?”

“Ridiculous!” snarled the District Attorney. “Why?”

“Because, Sampson, it would be wasted effort. Because, Sampson, your man won’t be there. Because, Sampson, we’ve been neatly tricked!”

Joan Brett gasped. The others gaped.

“Mr. Knox,” said Ellery, turning to the banker, “will you please ring for your butler?”

Knox complied; his forehead was corrugated into stony lines. The tall thin old man appeared at once. “Yes, Mr. Knox?”

But it was Ellery who replied, sharply: “Krafft, are you familiar with the burglar-alarm system in this house?”

“Yes, sir …”

“Inspect it at once.”

Krafft hesitated, Knox gestured curtly, and the butler went out. No one said a word until he hurried in again, his composure gone, eyes bulging. “It’s been tampered with—it doesn’t work, sir! And it was all right yesterday, sir!”

“What!” cried Knox.

Ellery said coolly: “Just as I expected. That’s all, Krafft. … Mr. Knox, I think I can prove to you and to my doubting colleagues the precise extent to which we have been outwitted. I do think, Mr. Knox, that you had better take a look at that painting of yours.”

Something stirred within Knox. A spark shot out of his hard grey eyes. He showed fear, and on the heels of fear an instantaneous decision. Without a word he sprang forward and dashed out of the room. Ellery followed quickly and the others streamed after.

Knox led the way to a large, long, quiet room on an upper floor—a gallery hung with rich old paintings draped in dark velvets. … No one had eyes at this moment for things esthetic. Ellery himself was on Knox’s heels as he hurried down the gallery to a far corner. He stopped suddenly at a panel in the wall, fumbled with a wooden curlicue. … A large section of the apparently solid wall slid without sound to one side, disclosing a black aperture. Knox thrust his hand in, grunted, peered wildly into the darkness of the interior. …

“It’s gone!” he cried, his face ashen. “It’s been stolen!”

“Precisely,” said Ellery in a matter-of-fact voice. “A clever ruse, quite worthy of the genius of Grimshaw’s wraithlike partner.”

CHALLENGE

To
THE READER

It gives me more personal pleasure than I can say to inject at this point in the story of The Greek Coffin Mystery my customary challenge to the wits of the reader.

Pleasure, I should explain, because the problems of this mystery provided me with perhaps the knottiest tangle I have ever tried my hand at unsnarling. It is a joy—a very real joy to one who is constantly beset by the jeers of paying customers: “Is that a puzzler?” they demand. “Heavens, I solved it right off!”—it is a joy to say to such as these: “Now, my masters, you may solve to your hearts’ content. You’ll be properly fooled nevertheless!”

Perhaps I am oversanguine. At any rate the thing is done, and, ungentle reader, you now have in your possession all the facts pertinent to the only correct solution of the trinitarian problem: the identity of the individual who strangled Albert Grimshaw, shot Gilbert Sloane to death, and stole James Knox’s painting.

I say with all good will and a fierce humility:
Garde à vous
, and a pox on headache!

—
ELLERY QUEEN

A
ND ELLERY SAID: “YOU’RE
positive, Mr. Knox, that the painting has been stolen? You placed it in this panel yourself?”

The color had crept back into the banker’s face; he nodded with a slight effort. “Last time I looked at it was a week ago. It was there. No one else knew. No one. Had the panel built in long ago.”

“What I want to know,” said the Inspector, “is how this thing stacks up. When was the painting stolen? How did the thief get in, and how did he know where the painting was, if what Mr. Knox says is true?”

“The painting wasn’t stolen to-night—that’s a cinch,” said the District Attorney softly. “Why then isn’t the burglar-alarm operating?”

“And it was working yesterday, Krafft said, and probably the day before,” put in Pepper.

Knox shrugged. Ellery said: “Everything will be explained. Please come back with me to Mr. Knox’s den, all of you.”

He seemed very sure of his ground, and they followed him in meek silence.

Back in the patent-leather room, Ellery set to work with cheerful briskness. First he shut the door, asking Pepper to stand by and see that there were no interruptions; then he went without hesitation to a large grille set low in one wall of the den, near the floor. He tinkered with this for a moment, succeeded in removing the grille, laid it on the floor, and thrust his hand into the aperture beyond. They craned; there was a huge-coiled radiator inside. Ellery ran his fingers rapidly over the individual coils, like a harpist strumming his strings. “Please observe,” he said with a smile, although obviously they could observe nothing of the sort, “that while seven of the eight coils are burning hot, this one—” his hand came to rest on the last coil—“this one is stone cold.” He bent over again and manipulated some contrivance at the bottom of the cold coil. In a moment he had unscrewed a disguised cap, and he stood up with the tall heavy coil in his hand. “Comes off, you see,” he explained affably. “Clever plumbing, Mr. Knox,” and upended the coil. On the bottom there was a barely visible metal thread. Ellery twisted vigorously, the bottom began to move, and to their astonishment screwed off completely, providing a glimpse of an asbestos-lined interior. Ellery placed the cap on a chair, raised the coil, and shook it with energy. His hand was ready … as a roll of old stained canvas slipped out of the tube.

“What is it?” whispered the Inspector.

Ellery with a flirt of his wrist flipped the roll. It unfurled.

It was a painting—a massive, turbulent scene in rich oils, a battle-scene centering on a struggling group of fierce medieval warriors fighting for possession of a standard, a proud rich flag.

“Believe it or not,” said Ellery, draping the canvas over Knox’s desk, “you are now gazing upon a million dollars’ worth of paint, canvas, and genius. In other words, this is the elusive Leonardo.”

“Nonsense!” said some one sharply, and Ellery swung on his heel to confront James Knox, who was standing rigidly a few feet off, staring at the painting with a mouth-line of marble.

“Indeed? I found this
chef-d’oeuvre,
Mr. Knox, while I took the unpardonable liberty of snooping about your house this afternoon. You said this was stolen from you? Then how do you account for the fact that it is hidden in your own den when it is presumably in the possession of a thief?”

“I said ‘nonsense’ and I meant ‘nonsense.’” Knox laughed shortly. “I see I didn’t credit you with enough intelligence, Queen. But you’re still wrong. What I said was true. The Leonardo has been stolen. I thought I could conceal the fact that I had
two
of them—”

“Two?” gasped the District Attorney.

“Yes.” Knox sighed. “I thought I’d put something over. What you see here is the second one—I’ve had it a long time. It’s the work of either Lorenzo di Credi or a pupil of his, my expert isn’t certain—at any rate, not a Leonardo. Lorenzo imitated Leonardo perfectly, and presumably Lorenzo’s pupils followed their master’s style. The thing must have been copied from the original Leonardo after the ill-fated mural fresco in 1503 in Florence. Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. The—”

“Don’t want any lecture on art, Mr. Knox,” growled the Inspector. “What we want to know—”

“Your expert thinks, then,” said Ellery smoothly, “that after the fresco project was abandoned by Leonardo—the central group was painted, as I remember from my Fine Arts, but when the heat was applied the colors ran and the paint scaled off—that this oils was done by some contemporary who copied Leonardo’s own oils painting of the central group?”

“Yes. Anyway, this second painting is worth a mere fraction of the original Leonardo. Naturally. When I bought the original from Khalkis—yes, I admit I bought the real one and knew it all the time—I already owned this contemporary copy. I didn’t say anything about it, because I figured … well, if I was forced eventually to return the painting to the Victoria Museum, I’d give back this valueless copy with the story that that was the one I’d purchased from Khalkis—”

Sampson’s eyes glittered. “We’ve got plenty of witnesses this time, Knox. How about the original?”

Knox said stubbornly: “That’s stolen. I hid it in the depository behind the panel in my gallery. For God’s sake, you don’t think—The thief evidently didn’t know anything about this copy, which I’ve always kept hidden in the dummy radiator-coil. He stole the original, I tell you! How he did it, I don’t know, but he did. I know it was crooked of me to intend to palm off the copy on the Museum and retain the original secretly, but—”

The District Attorney drew Ellery, the Inspector and Pepper aside and they conversed in whispers. Ellery listened gravely, said something reassuring, and they returned to Knox, who was standing in miserable solitude by the color-splashed canvas on the desk. As for Joan Brett, she was pressed up against one of the patent-leather walls, wide-eyed, motionless, breathing in gusts that stirred her breast.

“Well, sir,” said Ellery, “there seems to be a slight difference of opinion here. The District Attorney and Inspector Queen feel that—under the circumstances, you understand—they cannot accept your unsubstantiated word that this is a copy of the Leonardo rather than the Leonardo itself. None of us here qualifies as a connoisseur, and I believe expert opinion is called for. May I—?”

He did not wait for Knox’s slow nod, but stepped to the telephone, called a number, spoke briefly with some one, and then hung up. “I have called upon Toby Johns, perhaps the most celebrated art-critic in the East, Mr. Knox. You know him?”

“Met him,” said Knox shortly.

“He will be here very soon, Mr. Knox. Until then, it will be necessary to compose our souls in patience.”

Toby Johns was a dumpy little old man with brilliant eyes, impeccable attire and a serenely assured air. He was admitted by Krafft, who was sent away at once; and Ellery, who had a speaking acquaintance with him, introduced him to the others. Johns was especially jovial with Knox. Then, as he stood waiting for some one to explain, his eyes focused sharply on the painting on the desk.

Ellery anticipated the instant question. “This is a serious matter, Mr. Johns,” he began quietly, “and please forgive me if I ask that nothing said in this room to-night goes any further.” Johns nodded, as if he had heard such requests before. “Very well, sir.” Ellery tossed his head in the direction of the painting. “Can you fix the authorship of that canvas, Mr. Johns?”

They waited in palpable silence as the expert beamed, adjusted a ribboned glass to one eye, and stepped over to the desk. He spread the canvas carefully on the floor, flat, examined it; then instructed Ellery and Pepper to hold it taut in the air while he turned the soft rays of several lamps on it. Nobody said anything, and Johns worked without comment. Nor did the expression on his fat little face change. He went over every inch of the painting with painful attention, seeming to be particularly interested in the faces of the figures grouped nearest the standard. …