Greek Coffin Mystery (44 page)

Knox grunted; he seemed too pained to speak.

“In any event,” Ellery went on blandly, “the only source of revenue left to Pepper was eventually to steal the Leonardo from Mr. Knox; he felt sure Mr. Knox had the Leonardo, not the copy. But to do this he had to have a clear field; the police were everywhere, looking for the murderer.

“Which brings us to the Sloane affair. Why did Pepper choose Sloane as the second straw-man? We have facts and inferences enough to answer that question now. Indeed, I touched on it some time ago to you, dad—remember that night?” The old man nodded in silence. “For if Sloane saw Pepper in the graveyard and knew now that here was the murderer of Grimshaw, Sloane possessed knowledge of Pepper’s guilt. But how could Pepper have known that Sloane knew? Well, Sloane had seen Pepper take the will out of the coffin; even if he didn’t actually see it he could infer it later from the fact that the will and box were gone when the coffin was opened at the disinterment. Sloane wanted that will destroyed; he must have gone to Pepper, accused him of murder, and demanded the will as the price of silence. Pepper, faced with the terrible menace to his own safety, must have bargained with Sloane: he would keep the will as a weapon to insure Sloane’s silence. But inwardly he would plan to be rid of Sloane, the only living witness against him.

“So Pepper arranged the ‘suicide’ of Sloane to make it appear that Sloane had been the murderer of Grimshaw. Sloane fitted all the motives nicely; and with the burnt will in the basement, the basement key in Sloane’s room, and Grimshaw’s watch in Sloane’s wall-safe, Pepper laid a beautiful trail of evidence against his victim. Incidentally, dad, your man Ritter was not at fault for having ‘missed’ seeing the will-fragment in the furnace of the empty Knox house. Because when Ritter searched, the scrap wasn’t there! Pepper burnt the will later, carefully leaving the Khalkis handwritten name of Albert Grimshaw unsinged, and put the ashes and the scrap in the furnace some time after Ritter’s little investigation. … As for Sloane’s revolver being used for the killing of Sloane, undoubtedly Pepper secured it from the Sloane rooms in the Khalkis house at the time he planted the key in the humidor.

“So he had to kill Sloane to keep him from talking. At the same time he knew the police would ask: ‘Why did Sloane commit suicide?’ The obvious reason would be that Sloane knew he was to be arrested on the basis of the clews which had been found. Pepper asked himself: How could Sloane know this, presumably, in a police explanation? Well, he might be warned. All this, you understand, is Pepper’s probable reasoning. How leave a trace to the presumable fact that Sloane had been warned? Ah, the simplicity of it! Which brings us to the mysterious telephone call which we established had emanated from the Khalkis house the evening of Sloane’s ‘suicide.’

“Do you remember that?—the basis on which we believed Sloane had been tipped off of our intentions? And remember that Pepper, in our presence, began to dial Woodruff on the telephone to make an appointment for the purpose of authenticating the burnt will-fragment? Pepper remarked, as he hung up after a moment, that the line was busy; a moment later he dialed again and this time actually spoke to Woodruff’s valet. Well, the first time he merely dialed the number of the Khalkis Galleries! Knowing the call could be traced, it was perfect for his plans; when Sloane answered, Pepper merely disconnected by replacing his receiver without saying a word. Sloane must have been a much puzzled man. But this was enough to establish a call from the house to the Galleries; and particularly clever since it was done under our very eyes, the dial-instrument permitting him to connect with the Galleries without asking for the number aloud. Another little psychological confirmation of Pepper’s guilt, then, since no one, particularly those who had most reason to warn Sloane, would admit having put in the call.

“Pepper immediately got out of the Khalkis house, presumably to hunt up Woodruff and substantiate the will-scrap. But before going to Woodruff’s he stopped in at the Galleries—Sloane probably admitted him—and killed Sloane, merely rearranging a few details to make the thing look like suicide. The incident of the closed door which ultimately exploded the Sloane-suicide plot was not an error on Pepper’s part; he didn’t know that the bullet had gone clear through Sloane’s head and out the open doorway; Sloane fell on the side of his face from which the bullet had emerged, and naturally Pepper did not handle Sloane’s body more than was necessary, if he handled it at all. No sound came from the bullet’s striking in the main room outside, because it hit a thick rug on the wall. And so, a victim of circumstances, Pepper did the logical thing when he left—almost the instinctive thing for a murderer to do: he closed the door. And thereby inadvertently upset his own applecart.

“For almost two weeks the Sloane theory was accepted—the murderer seemingly had seen the jig was up and had committed suicide. Pepper felt that he now had a clear field for the theft of the painting from Mr. Knox; his plan must have been, now that the police had their murderer nicely filed away, to steal the painting from Mr. Knox in such a way as to make it appear, not that Mr. Knox was the murderer, but that he had stolen the Leonardo from himself in order not to have to return it to the Museum. But when Suiza came forward and gave evidence which pricked the Sloane-suicide theory, and this fact was made public, Pepper knew that the police still sought a murderer. Why not make Mr. Knox out to be not only the thief, of his own painting but the Grimshaw-Sloane murderer as well? Where Pepper’s plan went awry—and not through any fault of his—was that he had every reason to believe Mr. Knox a theoretical possibility as the murderer. That would have been so—although the business of motive was a hard nut to crack—had Mr. Knox not come to me with his story of the thousand-dollar bill at a time when I had no reason to repeat the story even to my father—since in that period the Sloane theory was the accepted one. So Pepper went blithely ahead framing Mr. Knox for the murders and the theft, not knowing that at last I had him cornered—although I didn’t know it was he at the time. The moment Mr. Knox was framed with the second letter, however, I, knowing him to be innocent, spotted the second letter as a frame-up and deduced, as I’ve already shown, that Pepper himself was the culprit.”

“Here, son,” growled the Inspector, speaking for the first time. “Have a drink. Your throat is dry. How’s the shoulder?”

“Middling. … Now you can see why that first blackmail letter
had
to be written from the outside, and furthermore how the answer points again to Pepper. Pepper could not gain legitimate access to Mr. Knox’s house for a period long enough to discover where the painting was hidden and to write the second letter; but by sending the first letter he got himself posted in the house as an investigator. Please remember that this was at his
own
suggestion to you, Sampson; another little gram on the scales of Pepper’s guilt.

“Sending the second letter from Mr. Knox’s own typewriter was the penultimate step in Pepper’s frame-up. The ultimate step, of course, was the theft of the painting itself. During the period when he was posted in the house, Pepper searched for it. He had no inkling, naturally, of the existence of two paintings. He found the sliding panel in the gallery-wall, stole the painting, smuggled it out of the house, and secreted it in the empty Knox house on Fifty-fourth Street—an ingenious hiding-place! Then he proceeded to send the second blackmail letter. From his standpoint the plot was complete—all he had to do now was to sit back righteously as one of Mr. Sampson’s alert guardians of the law, help pin the guilt on Mr. Knox as writer of the letter if perchance I failed to catch the significance of the pound-sign; and eventually, after everything had blown over, to cash in on the painting either through a not-too-scrupulous collector or a ‘fence.’”

“How about that burglar-alarm business?” asked James Knox. “Just what was the idea?”

“Oh, that! You see, after he himself stole the painting,” replied Ellery, “and then wrote the letter, he tampered with your burglar-alarm system. He expected that we would go to the rendezvous in the Times Building, and then come back empty-handed. We should then have realized, he planned, that we had been tricked, that the purpose of the letter was to lure us away from the house
while the fainting was being stolen.
Now, that was to be the obvious explanation; but when we should have pinned the guilt to you, Mr. Knox, we would have said: ‘See! Knox tampered with his own burglar-alarm to make us
think
the painting was stolen to-night by an outsider. When actually it was never stolen at all.’ A complex plan which requires assiduous concentration for complete comprehension. But it illustrates the remarkably subtle quality of Pepper’s thinking processes.”

“That’s all clear enough, I think,” said the District Attorney suddenly; he had been following the course of Ellery’s explanation like a terrier. “But what I want to know is about that business of the two paintings—why you arrested Mr. Knox here—all of that.”

For the first time a grin spread over Knox’s rugged features; and Ellery laughed aloud. “We were continually reminding Mr. Knox to be ‘a good sport’; how good a sport he turned out is the answer to your question, Sampson. I should have told you that the entire rigmarole about the ‘legend’ of two authentically old paintings being differentiated only by a distinction in flesh-tints—all pure bombast and melodrama. On the afternoon of the arrival of the second blackmail letter, I knew everything by deduction—Pepper’s plot, his guilt, his intent. But I was in a peculiar position: I had no shred of evidence with which you might convict him if he were immediately accused and arrested; and furthermore that precious painting was in his possession somewhere. If we exposed him, the painting would probably never be found; and it was my duty to see that the Leonardo was restored to its rightful owners, the Victoria Museum. On the other hand, if I could trap Pepper into such a position that he would be caught red-handed
with the stolen Leonardo,
his mere possession of it would serve as evidence for conviction, and would, moreover, secure the painting!”

“Do you mean to say that that stuff about the flesh-tints and all that was made up?” demanded Sampson.

“Yes, Sampson—my own private little plot, in which I played with Mr. Pepper as he had played with me. I took Mr. Knox into my confidence, told him everything—how and by whom he was being framed. He then told me that after he had bought the original Leonardo from Khalkis, he had had a copy made, confessing that his intention had been to return this copy to the Museum if the police pressure became too strong, with the story that this was the one he had bought from Khalkis. It would of course in this event be recognized at once by experts as a rank copy—but Mr. Knox’s story would be unassailable and he would probably go scot-free. In other words, whereas Mr. Knox had the copy in the dummy radiator-coil, the original was in the panel, and Pepper had stolen that original. But this gave me an idea—an idea which was to utilize a little truth and a great deal of romancing.”

Ellery’s eyes danced at the recollection. “I told Mr. Knox that I was going to arrest him—purely for Pepper’s benefit—accuse him, outline the case against him, do all the things necessary to convince Pepper that his frame-up against Mr. Knox had been completely successful. Now, if I do say so, Mr. Knox reacted splendidly; he wanted his little revenge on Pepper anyway for attempting to involve him; he wanted to compensate for his own originally illicit intention to palm off a copy on the Museum; so he agreed to play the victim for me. We called in Toby Johns—this was all Friday afternoon—and together concocted a story which I felt sure would force Pepper’s hand. A dictaphone record of this entire conversation, by the way, in which all the details of the fabricated plot were discussed openly, was made in the event we failed to make Pepper snatch the bait … just to provide evidence that the Knox arrest was not intended seriously, but was part of a greater plot to trap the real murderer.

“Now, look at the position Pepper was in when he heard the expert’s beautifully phrased cock-and-bull story, interspersed with resounding historical references and contemporary Italian art-names, about the ‘legend’ of the ‘fine distinction’ between the two paintings—all of it, naturally, pure bilgewater. There has never been more than one old oils of this precise subject—and that is the Leonardo original; there never was a legend; there never was a ‘contemporary’ copy—Mr. Knox’s was a modern daub made in New York and recognizable as such by any one familiar with art: all this was my own contribution to the fascinating little counterplot. … Now Pepper learned from Johns’ dignified lips that the only way he could determine which was the Leonardo and which the ‘contemporary copy’ was by actually placing the two side by side! Pepper must have said to himself what I wanted him to say: ‘Well, I have no way of knowing which one I own; the real one or the copy. I can’t take Knox’s word for anything. So I’ll have to put the two of them together—fast, because the one we have here, which will probably be kept in the D.A.’s files, won’t be here long.’ He would think that if he did put them together and, after determining which was the Leonardo, returned the copy to the files, he was in no danger—not even the expert himself, by his own admission, could tell which was which if they weren’t together!

“It was really a stroke of genius,” murmured Ellery, “and I congratulate myself upon it. What—no applause? … Naturally, if we had been dealing with a man of art, an esthete, a painter, or even a dilettante, I should never have risked John’s telling this ridiculous story; but Pepper, I knew, was the veriest layman, and he had no reason but to swallow the story whole, particularly since everything else seemed genuine—Knox’s arrest, imprisonment, the blazoned newspaper stories, the notification of Scotland Yard—oh, precious! I knew that neither you, Sampson, nor you, dad, would see through the fish-story, because, with all respect for your individual capacities as man-hunters, you know as little about art as Djuna here. The only one of whom I had reason to be fearful was Miss Brett—and I had told her that afternoon enough about the plot so that she showed the proper surprise and horror when Mr. Knox was ‘arrested.’ Incidentally, I must congratulate myself on still another score—my acting; wasn’t I the deceptive little devil, though?” Ellery grinned. “I see my talent isn’t appreciated. … At any rate, with nothing to lose and apparently everything to gain, Pepper just couldn’t resist placing those two paintings side by side for a bare five minutes’ comparison. … Precisely as I foresaw.