Greek Coffin Mystery (42 page)

He permitted his torch to flash for the merest space—and instantly other dark shadows converged on the spot, moving with caution. A hushed colloquy between Velie and another man, who from his voice was Detective Piggott. All exits, it appeared, were covered. … The party, at a signal from the sergeant, crept forward to the source of the tiny light. They stood still. Velie drew a deep breath, motioned Piggott and another detective—Johnson, it was, from his slight figure—to his side, roared:
“Now!”
and the three men, Velie’s iron shoulders in the center, crashed against the door, splintered it like matchwood, and lunged into the room beyond. Ellery and the Inspector plunged through precipitately; they spread out, uncovered now brilliant flashlights which swept the room, catching something, all trapping in that infinitesimal moment the frozen figure—their quarry—in the center of the dusty unfurnished room—a figure who had been studying in the rays of a small torch two identical canvases spread out on the floor. …

For that same moment there was silence; and then, so suddenly that it might never have existed, the spell shivered. From the chest of the muffled figure came a snarl, a whimper, a choked cry that was animal; it twisted about like a panther, a white hand flashed toward a coat-pocket, and there appeared out of nowhere a bluish automatic. And a very private sort of hell broke loose.

It broke loose as the dark figure fixed a feline glare on the tall form of Ellery Queen, singling him out with a magical directness from among the clustered bodies in the doorway. Very quickly a finger tightened upon the trigger of the automatic and squeezed; and in the same breath there came the coughing roar of many police resolvers. And Sergeant Velie, his face a furious mask in its steely whiteness, hurled himself forward with the speed of an express train on the dark figure. … It crumpled to the floor, grotesquely like a form composed of
papier-maché.

Ellery Queen, with a soft groan of surprise, opened his eyes wide and toppled to his father’s frozen feet.

Ten minutes later the torches illuminated a scene as still as its predecessor had been frenzied. The solid figure of Dr. Duncan Frost was crouched over a recumbent Ellery, who was lying on a litter of detectives’ overcoats on the dirty floor. Inspector Queen, as white as a drifting cloud, as cold and hard and brittle as porcelain, stood over the physician with eyes fixed immovably on Ellery’s bloodless face. No one said a word, not even the men who surrounded the crazily shapeless figure of Ellery’s assailant on the floor in the center of the room.

Dr. Frost twitched his head. “Poor shot. He’ll be quite all right. A slight flesh-wound in the shoulder. There, he’s coming to now.”

The Inspector sighed windily. Ellery’s eyes fluttered open, a spasm of pain contracted them, and his hand groped for his left shoulder. It met a bandage. The Inspector squatted beside him. “Ellery, old son—you’re all right, you feel all right?”

Ellery contrived to smile. He shook himself and struggled to his feet, assisted by gentle hands. “Phew!” he said, wincing. “Hello, Doctor. When did you arrive?”

He looked about, and his gaze coagulated on the thick cluster of silent detectives. He lurched toward them, and Sergeant Velie moved aside with a childish, muttering apology. Ellery clutched Velie’s shoulder with his right hand, leaned heavily, stared down at the body on the floor. There was no triumph in his eyes, but a vast moodiness which blended well with the flashlights, the dust, the grim men, and the grey-black shadows.

“Dead?” he asked, wetting his lips.

“Four slugs through his guts,” grunted Velie. “Dead as he’ll ever be.”

Ellery nodded; his eyes shifted and focused on the two stretches of painted old canvas, lying very humbly in the dust where some one had tossed them. “Well,” he said with a wry humorless grin, “at least we’ve got
them”
and looked down at the dead man again. “A bad break, a very bad break for you, Mister. Like Napoleon, you won every fight but the last.”

He studied the dead open eyes for a moment, shivered a little, and turned to find the Inspector at his side; a little old man who watched him with haggard eyes.

Ellery smiled feebly. “Well, dad, we can let poor old Knox go now. He’s been the willing victim, and he’s served his purpose. … Here’s your case lying harmlessly in the dust of Knox’s floor. The lone wolf of the whole affair—blackmailer, thief, murderer. …”

They stared down together at the dead man. The dead man on the floor looking back at them quite as if he could see—indeed there was the indelible imprint of a daring and malicious grin on those snarling features—was Assistant District Attorney Pepper.

“T
HERE’S NO EARTHLY REASON
, Mr. Cheney,” said Ellery, “why you shouldn’t be treated to a proper explanation—you, of course, and—” But the bell rang then, and Ellery stopped as Djuna ran to the door. Miss Joan Brett appeared at the door of the living-room.

Miss Joan Brett seemed as astonished to see Mr. Alan Cheney as Mr. Alan Cheney was to see Miss Joan Brett. Alan rose and gripped the tortured walnut of the Queens’ excellent Windsor chair; and Joan clutched the jamb as if she suddenly needed something to lean on.

This was, thought Ellery Queen as he rose from the sofa on which he had been lying, his left shoulder swathed in bandages—this was the proper ending. … He was a little pale, and for the first time in weeks wore an expression of serenity. The trio who rose with him—a strangely abashed father; a District Attorney from whose eyes the horrified amazement of the previous night had not yet fled; a wan and plucky nabob, Mr. James J. Knox, none the worse, it appeared, for his brief incarceration—these gentlemen bowed deeply and received no answering smile from the young lady in the doorway, who seemed mesmerized by the equally frozen young man hanging on to his chair.

Then her blue eyes wavered, and they sought the smiling ones of Ellery. “I thought … You asked me—”

Ellery went to her side, took her arm possessively, and piloted her to a deep chair into which she sank with a faltering embarrassment. “You thought—I asked you to … What, Miss Brett?”

She caught sight of his left shoulder. “You’ve been hurt!” she cried.

“To which,” said Ellery, “I reply in the accepted words of the shiny hero, ‘A mere nothing. A scratch.’ Sit down, Mr. Cheney!”

Mr. Cheney sat down.

“Come on!” said Sampson impatiently. “I don’t know about the others, but you certainly owe
me
an explanation, Ellery.”

Ellery draped himself over his sofa again and managed with one hand to light a cigaret. “Now we’re comfy,” he said. He caught the eye of James Knox, and they both smiled at some secret jest. “Explanation. … Of course.”

Ellery began to speak. And while his words crackled through the next half-hour like an accompaniment of popping corn, Alan and Joan sat with folded hands and did not once look at each other.

“The fourth solution—there were four, you know,” began Ellery: “the Khalkis solution, in which Mr. Pepper led me about by the nose; the Sloane solution, which we might term a deadlock between Pepper and me, since I didn’t once believe in it although I couldn’t support my disbelief until Suiza came along with his story; the Knox solution, in which I led Mr. Pepper about by the nose—so far a tie, you will observe; and the Pepper solution, which was the proper one—the fourth, I say, and final solution which has amazed all of you but actually is as plain as the good strong sunlight which poor old Pepper will never see again. …” He was silent for a moment. “Certainly the revelation of an apparently reputable young man, an Assistant District Attorney, as the prime mover in a series of crimes engineered with profound imagination and supreme insouciance must be confounding if you don’t know how and why he did it. Yet Mr. Pepper was snared by my old and remorseless ally, Logic, the
logos
of the Greeks and the bane, I trust, of many plotters to come.”

Ellery flicked his ashes all over young Djuna’s spotless rug. “Now, I confess that until the events which centered on Mr. Knox’s broad acreage on the Drive—the blackmail letters and the theft of the painting—until these events I had not the slightest inkling of where the guilt lay. In other words, had Pepper stopped with the murder of Sloane, he should have gone free. But, in this as in other less celebrated crimes, the criminal fell victim to his own cupidity. And he wove with his own fingers the web in which he was finally ensnared.

“Consequently, since the series of events in the Knox house on the Drive was the salient one, let me begin there. You will recall that yesterday morning I summed up the major qualifications of the murderer; and it is necessary to repeat those qualifications now. One: he had to be able to plant the clews against Khalkis and Sloane. Two: he had to be the writer of the blackmail letters. Three: he had to be in the Knox house in order to type the second blackmail letter.”

Ellery smiled. “Now, this last qualification, as I expanded it yesterday morning, was misleading—deliberately so for reasons which will be evident later. My astute sire pointed out privately to me just where I was ‘wrong’ after that charming little pseudo-explanation I gave at Police Headquarters. For I purposely chose, from the phrase: ‘in the Knox house,’ to mean a
member
of the Knox household, whereas obviously ‘in the Knox house’ is a much more comprehensive term. For ‘in the Knox house’ means
any one,
whether of the Knox household or not. In other words, the typist of the second letter did not necessarily have to be one of the regular occupants of the house; he might merely have been an outsider who gained access to the Knox house. Please bear this in mind.

“We begin, therefore, from this thesis: that the second letter, from the surrounding circumstances, must have been written by some one who was in the house at the time of writing; and this some one was the murderer. But my intelligent sire pointed, out that this wasn’t necessarily true, either; why, he asked, couldn’t the writer of the note have been an
accomplice
of the murderer, who was hired by the murderer perhaps to write the letter while the murderer himself stayed away from the Knox house? This would mean, of course, that the murderer couldn’t gain legitimate access to the Knox house, or else he would type the letter himself. … That was a subtle question, and a perfectly proper one—which I deliberately avoided taking up yesterday morning because it didn’t suit my purpose, which was to trap Pepper.

“Very well! If we can prove now that the murderer
couldn’t
have had an accomplice in the Knox house, it would mean that the murderer himself typed the second letter and was in Mr. Knox’s den when he did so.

“To prove, however, that there was no accomplice in the case, we first have to establish the innocence of Mr. Knox himself, otherwise the logical problem is insoluble.”

Ellery expelled cigaret-smoke lazily. “Mr. Knox’s innocence is most simply established. Is this a surprise to you? Yet it is ridiculously apparent. It is established by means of a fact in the possession of only three people in the world: Mr. Knox, Miss Brett, and myself. Consequently, Pepper—as you will see—being ignorant of this essential fact, made his first slip in the chain of plots and counterplots.

“The fact is this: during the period when Gilbert Sloane was considered generally the murderer, Mr. Knox
voluntarily
—mark that—informed me, in Miss Brett’s presence, that on the night he and Grimshaw visited Khalkis, Khalkis had borrowed a thousand-dollar bill from him—Knox—to give to Grimshaw as a sort of advance blackmail payment; that he, Knox, had seen Grimshaw tuck this bill, folded, into the back of his watch-case, and that Grimshaw had left the house with this bill still in his watch. Mr. Knox and I went at once to Headquarters and found the bill still there—the very same bill, because I checked up at once and discovered that it had been issued, as Mr. Knox had said, to him on the day he had mentioned. Now, the very fact that this thousand-dollar bill was traceable to Mr. Knox, which he knew better than any one, meant that
if Mr. Knox had killed Grimshaw, he would have used every means in his power to keep that bill from falling into the hands of the police.
Certainly it would have been simple for him, had he strangled Grimshaw, to have removed the bill from Grimshaw’s watch then and there, since he knew that Grimshaw had it, and precisely where. Even had he been connected with the murderer in a remoter capacity—as an accomplice—he would have seen to it that the bill was removed from the watch-case, since the watch was in the possession of the murderer for quite some time.

“But the bill was still in that watch when we looked into its case at Police Headquarters! Now, if Mr. Knox had been the murderer, why hadn’t he removed the bill, as I said a moment ago? In fact, why had he, aside from not having removed the bill, actually come to me of his own free will and told me that the bill was there—when I, in common with the other representatives of the law, did not even dream of the bill’s existence? You see, his action was so wholly at variance with what he would have done had he been the murderer or the accomplice that I was compelled to say at that time: ‘Well, no matter where the guilt lies, it certainly isn’t in the direction of James Knox.’”

“Thank God for that,” said Knox huskily.

“But observe,” continued Ellery, “where this conclusion, which at the time meant so little to me, being a negative finding, led. For only the murderer, or his possible accomplice if there was one, could have written the blackmail letters—since they had been typed on the halves of the promissory note. Since Mr. Knox was not the murderer or accomplice, he couldn’t have typed the letters, despite the fact that they were written on his own distinctive machine, as I pointed out yesterday by the pound-sign deductions. Therefore—and this was rather startling—the person who typed the second letter used Mr. Knox’s machine deliberately! But for what purpose? Only so that, by leaving the clew of the mistyped 3 and the suggestion of the pound-symbol—which naturally now had been left on purpose—only that by so doing, I say, a trail would be left to Mr. Knox’s machine and it would therefore appear that Mr. Knox wrote the letter and was the murderer. Another frame-up, then—the third, the first two of which had been unsuccessfully directed against Georg Khalkis and Gilbert Sloane.”