The Dragon’s Teeth (27 page)

“Do you really, need me?” muttered De Carlos. “I'd prefer—”

“Another drink, Mr. De Carlos?” asked Mr. Queen, glancing at him; and De Carlos reached quickly for the bottle again. “Now the first point, the fountain-pen, was the least decisive of the three … a leading, or build-up, point. And yet it was in this point that the discrepancy lay.”

“What discrepancy?” howled Beau.

“Why, the fact that those peculiar markings on the cap of the pen could only have been made by
teeth.
Of course, you saw that, Beau? Those arced patterns of dents? Those deep nicks in the hard rubber composition? It was obvious that the markings were impressed into the cap by some one who was in the habit of
chewing on the end of his fountain-pen.”

“Why, sure,” said Beau. “So what?”

“The man who used the pen that day in our office was presumably the owner of the pen, and the owner of the pen was unquestionably in the habit of chewing on it. And yet the man who used the pen that day, the man who called himself Cadmus Cole, didn't have a tooth in his mouth!

“And that was the discrepancy, for I asked myself, not once but dozens of times, and finally wound up by ignoring the question:
How can a toothless man make teeth-marks on the cap of a fountain-pen?”

CAPTAIN Angus poured another drink for himself; but at the sight of De Carlos's face he suddenly offered the glass to the bald man. De Carlos accepted it and drank with a sort of desperation; and the Captain's cold eyes grew colder.

“But De Carlos wears false teeth,” protested Beau. “Couldn't those marks have been made by false teeth as well as by real teeth?”

“As a matter of fact,” retorted Mr. Queen, “they couldn't have been—not by Mr. De Carlos's false teeth, at any rate.”

“Why not?”

“Skip it. Let's examine, or rather re-examine, the second point: our identification of De Carlos as Cole on the basis of exact facial and physical similarity.”

“But we were wrong. The Captain has identified De Carlos as De Carlos, not as Cole.”

“That's right,” nodded the Captain. “He
is
De Carlos.”

“I
am
De Carlos,” said De Carlos defiantly, glaring about.

“You
are
De Carlos,” said Mr. Queen in a soft tone. “Exactly. But there is still no doubt, Mr. De Carlos, that the man who visited us three months ago looked exactly like you. Consequently, I must revise our former conclusion. We said that since Cole came that day, and since you look exactly like Cole, then you must
be
Cole. Now I say that since you are De Carlos, and since the man who visited us three months ago looked exactly like De Carlos, then the man who visited us three months ago
was
De Carlos!”

“You mean,” boomed Captain Angus, “that De Carlos came here three months ago and posed as Mr. Cole?”

“Precisely.”

“I'll be damned,” gasped Beau.

“Let's rather stick to the point,” murmured Mr. Queen. “That's the revised conclusion, gentlemen, and it's the correct conclusion. It also clears up another point that troubled me.

“The man who introduced himself to us as Cadmus Cole came to hire our services. When I asked him, not unreasonably, what we had been hired for, he refused to say.

“Later we discovered that we had been engaged for the simplest possible task—merely to locate a couple of missing heirs. That only deepened the mystery. Why did Cole originally refuse to tell us what he was hiring us for, when it was merely to find two missing heirs?

“But now,” grinned Mr. Queen, “you grasp the confirmation of my thesis. Cole made a mystery of why he was hiring us
because he didn't know why himself!
But how could Cole not know? Only in one way: if he wasn't Cole, but some one else!”

De Carlos took still another drink with trembling fingers. His cheeks, where the beard had just been shaven, were deathly pale; his cheekbones and nose, however, were bright red.

“So he was a crook after all,” remarked Captain Angus reflectively. “I always suspected it. Sneaky sort. Couldn't look you in the eye.” He roared suddenly at De Carlos: “What did you have up your sleeve that time, you black shark?”

“I think I can guess,” said Mr. Queen gently. “The secret of his Cole impersonation three months ago lies in his character. He can carry out orders admirably. He can execute a plan concocted by some one else with remarkable efficiency. But, like most men who are trained to unquestioning obedience, he came a cropper when he pushed out on his own. Isn't that so, Mr. De Carlos?

“You knew Cole had made out his will, that he was suffering from heart disease. Cole may even have told you that he felt he had only a short time to live and would probably not return from that last West Indian cruise alive. So he sent you into town to deliver his sealed will to Goossens, with orders to stop in at our office as well and engage Ellery Queen for an
unstated
investigation. That worried you, Mr. De Carlos. What investigation? But you were too discreet to ask Cole. You were worried and you didn't ask Cole for the same reason: you had prepared a little scheme of your own. And that scheme necessitated impersonating your employer, didn't it?”

De Carlos burst out: “You know that, but you don't know why! The Captain could tell you—he knew Cole as well as I did. He was a devil, a—a snake, that man!”

“He had his moments,” admitted Captain Angus with a grim nod.

“For years before his death,” said De Carlos hoarsely, “he amused himself with me. He'd tell me he knew why I was sticking to him so faithfully—why I kept living that ghastly living death at sea.” His face was a uniform mauve now, suffused with passion. “He'd say it was because I expected to come into his fortune when he died. And then he'd laugh and say he was going to leave me a lot of money. And then again he'd seem to change his mind and say he wouldn't leave me a cent. He kept me on a hook like that for years, playing me like a fish!”

Mr. Queen glanced inquiringly at Captain Angus, and the Captain nodded. “It's true. I'll give him that.”

“Things got worse between us,” cried De Carlos. “The last few months he played only one tune—that he'd leave me nothing. I guess he liked to see me try to act indifferent about it, the old devil! When he made out his will—it was the very first document of his I knew nothing about. He had Angus write it out for him. He wouldn't let me stay in the cabin. So I didn't even know what the will said.”

“That's so,” said the Captain. “Mr. Cole called me in and dictated his will. I wrote it out in longhand and then, when it was corrected to his satisfaction, he had me type it out. He made me burn the handwritten draft, and he was laughing.”

“I was frantic,” said De Carlos, clasping and unclasping his hands. “I saw all those years, alone with him, taking his orders, knuckling under to him, enduring his bad temper, having to act a part all the time—wasted, all wasted! Because he didn't have me make out the will and even kept me out of the cabin, I was positive he had cut me off without a cent. He even said to me when he handed me the sealed will to take ashore: ‘Don't open it, Edmund. Remember! I've enclosed instructions for the lawyer to examine the seal very carefully—to see if it's been tampered with.' And he laughed that ugly barking laugh of his, as if it were a great joke.”

“Of course that wasn't true about the instructions,” said Mr. Queen. “He was toying with you, trying to make you squirm.”

De Carlos nodded, seizing the bottle. He drank deeply and set the bottle down with a bang. “That was when I made my plan,” he said defiantly. “It wasn't very clear. I was half-crazy.… Who knew Cole personally? I said to myself. Nobody but Angus and I and the crew had seen him for eighteen years. If Cole died at sea and Angus was willing to throw in with me, why, we could buy off the crew and the two of us could come back and say it was
De Carlos
who died and was buried at sea. Because I'd take over the rôle of Cole! Nobody would be the wiser, and Angus and I would divide something like fifty million dollars.”

He stopped short, frightened by Captain Angus's expression. The seaman seized De Carlos by the collar and said in a low voice: “You dirty rascal. Tell these men this is the first I've ever heard of that thieving plan—tell 'em, or I'll make you wish you'd never been born!”

“No, no, I didn't mean to imply—” began De Carlos hurriedly. “Mr. Queen, Mr. Rummell, I assure you … the Captain didn't have the faintest idea of what I had in mind. I hadn't spoken to him about it at all!”

“That's better,” scowled the Captain, and he sat down again and helped himself quietly to another drink.

“I see,” murmured Mr. Queen. “So that's why you impersonated Cole—shaved the gray fringe off your skull, removed your glasses, your dental plate. Made up that way, you corresponded roughly to Cole. Later, when you expected to return, after Cole died at sea, with the story that
De Carlos
had died, you'd pass yourself off as Cole and there would be three people at least prepared to swear in all sincerity that you
were
Cole—the three people you had visited ashore in the guise of Cole: Goossens, Rummell, and myself. Grandiose in conception, Mr. De Carlos, but a little optimistic, wasn't it?”

“I realized that later,” muttered De Carlos with a weak, wry smile. “Anyway, when I got back to the yacht Cole blew up my whole scheme himself without realizing it. He showed me a carbon copy of the will I'd just delivered to Goossens—and I saw that in the will, after all, he'd left me a million dollars. A million! I was so relieved I abandoned my—my plan.”

“But you still weren't out of the woods,” remarked Mr. Queen. “Because Goossens and Rummell and I had seen you bald, toothless, clean-shaven, and without glasses—really quite denuded, Mr. De Carlos—at the time you passed yourself off as Cole. Obviously, in abandoning your plan, you had to plan to present yourself in our society looking entirely different! You had to get yourself a wig—in Cuba, was it?—put back your plate and glasses, and of course it was immediately after Cole told you he had left you a million that you began to grow a beard.”

“Wait a minute.” Beau frowned. “There's one thing I don't get—that handwriting business. This worm
did
write out a check, signing Cole's name to it, and the bank
did
pass it. How come? Even the signature on the will—”

“Ah,” said Mr. Queen, “that was the beautiful part of it—the part that was so slick and pat that upon it we based a wholly erroneous theory. That handwriting business was the crux of your illusion, wasn't it, De Carlos? It made the whole fantastic project possible. Who would dream that the man who visited us was not Cole when we saw him sign Cole's name before our eyes and the check went through the bank without a hitch?

“But Captain Angus has already given us the answer to that.” De Carlos slumped in his seat, drunk and sullen. “Cole's arthritis!
Arthritis deformans
is a crippling disease of the joints for which, once it has fully developed—and it develops very quickly—there's no known cure. It's accompanied by a great deal of pain—”

“Pain?” The Captain made a face. “Mr. Cole used to go near crazy with it. He took from sixty to a hundred and twenty grains of aspirin a day for relief as long as I knew him. I used to tell him he ought to leave the sea, because the damp air only made the pain worse, but I guess he was too sensitive about his crippled hands to go back to a landsman's society.”

Ellery nodded. “And the Captain said his hands were so badly misshapen that he had to be fed—couldn't even handle a knife and fork. Obviously, then, he couldn't
write,
either.

“But if he couldn't write, that was the answer to the handwriting problem. Cole was an immensely wealthy man and, even though he had retired, his far-flung holdings must have necessitated an occasional signature on a legal paper. And of course there was the problem of signing checks. He couldn't carry his fortune about with him in cash. Solution? Good Man Friday, who'd been with him for more than twenty-five years.

“Certainly at the time arthritis struck him—which must have been just before he made his post-War killing in Wall Street—De Carlos had been Cole's trusted lieutenant long enough to serve as a useful pair of hands in place of the hands Cole found useless.

“So he had De Carlos begin signing the name ‘Cadmus Cole' to everything, including checks. To save tedious explanation, and because he was sensitive about his deformity, as Captain Angus has indicated, he wished to keep his condition a secret. He had you open new accounts in different banks, didn't he, De Carlos? So that from the beginning of his monastic existence, his name in your handwriting wasn't questioned!”

“You mean to say,” demanded Captain Angus, “that De Carlos didn't tell you gentlemen that?”

“Overlooked it,” said Beau dryly.

“But I don't see—Why, he signed Cole's will for the old gentleman! He had to, because Mr. Cole couldn't even hold a pen, as Mr. Queen says. After I typed out the will, I signed as witness and took the will to the radio operator's cubby, where Sparks signed, too. Then I brought the will back to Mr. Cole's cabin, and he sent for De Carlos, and De Carlos signed Mr. Cole's name, I suppose, after I left. I noticed while I was there,” the Captain chuckled, “that Mr. Cole didn't let De Carlos see what was in the will. Having his little joke to the last.”

“Just the same,” retorted Beau, “it seems to me for a smart hombre Cole was taking one hell of a chance letting this De Carlos potato sign his checks!”

“Not really,” said Ellery. “I imagine Cole kept a close watch on you, didn't he, De Carlos? Probably supervised the accounts, and then you were at sea practically all the time, where you couldn't get into mischief even if you wanted to.”