Queens Full (18 page)

“What's the matter now?” Carroll chattered. “What's happened?”

“I'm afraid the absolute worst.” Ellery's voice was deeply troubled. “The Hunt house is closed down, Carroll. I'm sorry. Felicia Hunt seems to have disappeared.”

That was a bad time for John Carroll. Ellery and West had to do some hard, fast talking to keep him from going to pieces altogether. They talked and talked through the brightening gloom and the tinny sounds of the prison coming to life.

“Hopeless. It's hopeless,” Carroll kept muttering.

“No,” Ellery said. “Nothing is hopeless. It only looks that way, Carroll. The Fancy Dan who weaves an elaborate shroud for somebody else usually winds up occupying it himself. The clever boys trip over their own cleverness. There's a complex pattern here, and it's getting more tangled by the hour. That's good, Carroll. It's not hopeless at all.”

But Carroll only shook his head.

West was striding about the cell. “On the other hand, Queen, let's face the facts. John's lost his alibi. The only thing that could surely save him.”

“Temporarily.”

“We've got to get that alibi back!”

“I agree. Stop running around in circles, West, you're making me nervous.” West stopped in his tracks. “Thank you. For both of us. The obvious step is to find that woman.

“Of course.” West looked helpless. “But where do I start? Will you help, Queen?”

Ellery smiled. “I've been hoping you'd ask me that. I'll be glad to, if Carroll wants me.”

The man on the bunk roused himself. “Want you? Right now I'd take the devil himself! The question is, What can you do?”

“This and that Here, have a smoke.” Ellery jabbed a cigaret between Carroll's swollen lips. “West, you look beat. How about going home and getting some sleep? Oh, and give my father a ring at home, will you? Tell him about this Felicia Hunt development and ask him for me to hop right to it.”

When West had gone, Ellery seated himself on the bunk. For a moment he watched Carroll smoke. Then he said, “Carroll.”

“What?”

“Carroll, stop feeling sorry for yourself and listen to me. First, let's try to track down that business of the missing alibi statement. Go back to the time when you approached Felicia to sign it Where did the meeting take place? When? Give me every fact you can remember, and then dig for some you've left out.”

He listened closely. When Carroll was finished, Ellery nodded.

“It's about as I figured. After the Hunt woman signed the statement and Rudin notarized her signature and left, you left with the envelope in your briefcase and instead of going on home returned to your office. You never once, you say, let go of the briefcase. In the office you placed the envelope in your safe without checking its contents, locked the safe, and adjusted the dial to a new combination word. And on the three or four subsequent occasions when you checked on the envelope, you claim nobody could have removed the statement from it while you had the safe open, or discovered the new combinations you kept setting.

“When the envelope did finally leave the safe, the only hands not your own to touch it were mine, last night. And I'll vouch for the fact that the statement couldn't have been stolen from me or lost from the envelope on the way over here.” Ellery tapped the manila envelope still in Carroll's slack hand. “So this was empty when I took it from the safe. Carroll, it's been empty for months. It was empty before you ever put it in the safe.”

Carroll looked at it, dazed.

“Only one conclusion is possible.” Ellery lit another cigaret for him, and one for himself. “The only time the envelope was not actually in your physical possession, or in the safe, or in my hands, was for a couple of minutes in the Hunt house the night Felicia signed the statement. You say that, after she signed and Rudin notarized her signature, you slipped the statement into the envelope and the envelope into your briefcase, that you then took Rudin downstairs to pay him off and see him out. During that couple of minutes the briefcase with its contents were out of your sight and control. Therefore that's when the great disappearance took place. And since Mrs. Hunt was the only one in the room with the briefcase …”

“
Felicia?
”

“Nobody else. Why should she have swiped the statement she had just signed, Carroll? Any idea?”

“She double-crossed me, damn her,” Carroll said in a thick voice. “And now she's ducked out to avoid having to tell the story under oath!”

“We'll get her to duck right back in if we have to extradite her from Little America.” Ellery rose and squeezed Carroll's shoulder. “Hang on, Johnny.”

Felicia Hunt's whereabouts remained a mystery for as long as it took Ellery to go from the Tombs to Police Headquarters. His father had just come into the office and the old man was elbow-deep in reports.

“Yes, West phoned me,” the Inspector said without looking up. “If he'd hung on, I'd have been able to tell him in three minutes where Felicia Hunt is. Blast it all, where's that Grierson affidavit?”

Ellery waited patiently for the crisis to pass.

“Well?” he said at last. “I'm cliff-hanging.”

“What? Oh!” Inspector Queen leaned back. “All I did was phone Smallhauser at the D.A.'s office. It seems a couple of days before Carroll's trial started—last Saturday morning—Hunt's widow showed up at the D.A.'s all tricked out in that ghastly mourning she wears, with her doctor in tow. The doctor told Smallhauser Mrs. Hunt was in a dangerously nervous state and couldn't face the ordeal of the trial. He wanted her to get away from the city. Seems she'd bought a cottage up in northern Westchester this summer and a few days up there by herself were just what the M.D. ordered, and was it all right with the D.A.? Well, Smallhauser didn't like it, but he figured that with the cottage having a phone he could always get her back to town in a couple of hours. So he said okay, and she gave her maid a week off and went up there Saturday afternoon. What's the hassle?”

Ellery told him. His father listened suspiciously.

“So that's what West was being so mysterious about,” he exclaimed. “An alibi! The D.A.'s going to love this.”

“So will Rayfield. He doesn't know about it yet, either.”

The Inspector cocked a sharpening eye. “What's your stake in this pot?”

“The right,” Ellery said piously. “And seeing that it prevails.”

His father grunted and reached for the telephone. When he set it down, he had a Mt. Kisco number scribbled on his pad.

“Here, you call her,” he said. “I'm working the other side of the street. And don't use a city phone for a toll call! You know where to find a booth.”

Ellery was back before his father's desk in forty-five minutes.

“What now?” Inspector Queen said. “I was just on my way to the Bullpen.”

“She doesn't answer.”

“Who doesn't answer?”

“The Hunt lady,” Ellery said. “Remember the case? I've phoned at five-minute intervals for the better part of an hour. Either she's gone into an early hibernation, or she's back in Central America charming the hidalgos.”

“Or she just isn't answering her phone. Look, son, I'm up to my lowers this morning. The case is out of my hands, anyway. Keep calling. She'll answer sooner or later.”

Ellery tried all day, slipping in and out of the courtroom every half hour. At a little past three the assistant district attorney rested his case, and on the request of the defense, Judge Holloway adjourned the trial until the next morning.

Ellery managed to be looking elsewhere when John Carroll was taken from the courtroom. Carroll walked as if his knees were about to give way. But as the room cleared, Ellery caught Tully West's eye. West, who was stooping over Helena Carroll in distress, nodded and after a moment came over.

“What about Felicia? She'll testify, won't she?” West sounded urgent.

Ellery glanced over at the reporters surrounding the portly figure of Rayfield. Some were glancing back, noses in the wind.

“We can't talk here, West. Can you get away?”

“I'll have to take Helena home first.” West was braced, as if for a blow. “Where?”

“My father's office as soon as you can make it.”

“What about Rayfield?”

“Better not say anything to him those newsmen can overhear. We can get in touch with him tonight.”

It was nearly five o'clock before the tall lawyer hurried into the Inspector's office. He looked haunted.

“Sorry, Helena went to pieces on me. I had to tell her all about John's alibi. Now she's more confused than ever. Damn it, why didn't John trust her in the first place?” West wiped his face. He said slowly, “And now I suppose you'll tell me Felicia refuses to co-operate.”

“I almost wish that were it.” Ellery was looking harried himself. “West, I've been phoning since eight-thirty this morning. I tried again only ten minutes ago. Mrs. Hunt doesn't answer.”

“She isn't there?”

“Maybe.” Inspector Queen was looking annoyed. “Ellery, why the devil won't you ask the help of the State Police? We could have a report on her in an hour.”

“No.” Ellery got up. “West, do you have your car?”

“I cabbed down.”

Ellery glanced at his father. The old man threw up his hands and stamped out.

“I ought to have my head examined! Velie, get me a car.”

They drove out of the city on Saw Mill River Parkway, Sergeant Velie at the wheel and Inspector Queen in the suicide seat nursing his grouch. Behind them, from opposite windows, Ellery and West studied the scenery. They were studying it long after darkness fell.

The sergeant turned the unmarked squad car off the Parkway near Mt. Kisco.

“Pull up at that gas station.” They were the first words the Inspector had uttered since leaving the city.

“Stony Ride Road?” the attendant said. “That's up between here and Bedford Hills. Dirt job that goes way off to hell and gone. Who you looking for?”

“The Hunt place.”

“Hunt? Never heard.”

Ellery stuck his head out. “How about Santos?”

“Santos. Yeah, dame of that name bought the old Meeker place this summer. You follow along here about a mile and a half …”

“Using her maiden name,” West said as they drove away. “Meredith would have loved that.”

The Queens said nothing.

Stony Ride Road climbed and twisted and swooped back, jolting their teeth. The darkness was impressive. They saw only two houses in three miles. A mile beyond the second, they found Felicia Hunt's cottage. Sergeant Velie very nearly drove past it; its windows were as black as the night itself.

Velie swung the car between two mossy pillars into a crushed-stone driveway.

“No, Velie, stop here and shine your brights dead on the house.” The Inspector sounded troubled.

“She's gone,” West growled. “She's gone or she never came here at all! What am I going to tell John?”

Ellery borrowed the sergeant's flash and got out. The Inspector put his small hand on Tully West's arm.

“No, Mr. West, we'll wait here.” Trouble was in his look, too.

It was a verdigrised fieldstone cottage with rusty wood trim and a darkly shingled roof, cuddled against wild woods. Ellery played his flash on the door. They saw him extend his foot and toe the door, and they saw it swing back.

He went into the house, flash first. A moment later the hall lit up.

He was in the house exactly two minutes.

At the sight of his face Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie jumped from the car and ran past him and into the cottage.

Ellery said, “You can tell John to forget his alibi, West She's in there dead.”

Felicia Hunt was lying on the bedroom floor face down, which was unfortunate, for the back of her head had been crushed. The bloody shards of the heavy stoneware vase that had crushed it strewed the floor around her. In the debris were some stiff chrysanthemums, looking like big dead insects. One of them had fallen on her open right palm.

West swallowed and retreated rapidly to the hall.

She had been dressed in a rainbow-striped frock of some iridescent material when death caught her. Jewels glittered on her hands and arms and neck. There were pomponed scuffs on her feet, her legs were bare, and the dead lips and cheeks and eyes showed no trace of make-up.

“She's been dead at least four days, maybe five,” Inspector Queen said. “What do you make of it, Velie?”

“Nearer four,” the big sergeant said. “Last Sunday some time, Inspector.” He glanced with longing at the tightly closed windows.

“Better not, Velie.”

The two men rose. They had touched nothing but the body, and that with profound care.

Ellery stood watching them morosely.

“Find anything, son?”

“No. That rain the other night wiped out any tire tracks or footprints that might have been left. Some spoiling food in the refrigerator, and her car is nicely in the garage behind the house. No sign of robbery.” Ellery added suddenly, “Doesn't something about her strike you as queer?”

“Yeah,” Sergeant Velie said. “That posy in her hand ought to be a lily.”

“Spare us, Velie! What, Ellery?”

“The way she's dressed.”

They stared down at her. Tully West came back to the doorway, still swallowing.

The sergeant said, “Looks like she was expecting somebody, the way she's all dolled up.”

“That's just what it doesn't look like,” Inspector Queen snapped. “A woman as formally brought up as this one, who's expecting somebody, puts on shoes and stockings, Velie—doesn't go around barelegged and wearing bedroom slippers. She hadn't even made up her face or polished her nails. She was expecting nobody. What about the way she's dressed, Ellery?”