The Dragon’s Teeth (30 page)

“I've got the goods, my fran'.”

“Well, well.” Mr. Queen expelled a long, ecstatic breath. “How soon can you be here with the—er—merchandise?”

“I'm downtown. Say fifteen minutes. How's it going?”

“So far, so good.”

“Save the last poke for me. Kerrie all right?”

“Bearing up like a Spartan. Hurry, will you?”

MR. QUEEN hung up and turned again to his audience. There was a rustle among them—the strangest little sound. Not of impatience. Nor of fatigue. Nor yet of relief from, the unnatural silence. Rather it was the rendition of a tension, a physical expression to relieve an intolerable strain.

And one face there was ghastly.

Mr. Queen chose to ignore its damning pallor. He remarked cheerfully: “Let's examine Point B more closely. Who tipped off the police that the marriage was a hoax, thereby driving the last nail into the frame-up of Miss Shawn?

“There were four persons who knew the marriage was a hoax before the tip was sent. And only four.

“One was my partner, Beau Rummell, the ‘bridegroom.' Well, how about Mr. Rummell as a possibility? No, no, he is eliminated on numerous counts. I need mention only one. At the instant the shots were fired Mr. Rummell was stepping out of the elevator on the seventeenth floor of the
Villanoy.
The elevator operator has testified to this. Since a body cannot occupy two different sections of space at the same time, Mr. Rummell obviously couldn't also have been in Room 1726 at that instant. And so he cannot be the person we are looking for.”

Mr. Queen lit a cigaret. “The second person who knew the marriage was a hoax was—myself. I could make out some excellent arguments against the theory that I was Ann Bloomer's accomplice and subsequent murderer, of course—”

“Keep going,” growled District Attorney Sampson.

“Thank you, Mr. Sampson,” murmured Mr. Queen. “A magnificent compliment. By the way, Miss Day—I believe you're Miss Day, although I've never been formally presented—why are you looking so completely miserable?”

Vi jumped visibly, going pale at having every one's attention so abruptly focussed upon her. “I—accused Beau Rummell of … Never mind. Of course, I didn't know—”

“I see.” Mr. Queen smiled. “Mr. Rummell's told me all about that. Very amusing. I hope you'll apologize, Miss Day.”

Kerrie smiled and pressed Vi's hand, and Vi sank back, on the verge of tears.

“I don't want to interrupt,” murmured Kerrie, “but I—thought pretty much the same thing once.”

“Yes, Beau is a secretive individual. Seems tough. Not really, though. I hope
you'll
apologize, too!” Kerrie flushed and lowered her gaze. “I'm sure you will, to Mr. Rummell's complete satisfaction. Now where was I?

“Oh, yes! That makes two of our four possibilities. The remaining pair are Messrs. Goossens and De Carlos, the trustees of the Cole estate. The evening Mr. Rummell and Miss Shawn registered at the
Villanoy
as man and wife, the evening of the murder, Mr. Rummell deserted his ‘wife' almost as soon as they had checked in. Quit her cold, the softie. A gentleman beneath it all, you see. Wouldn't take advantage of an innocent girl—”

“Get on, get on,” snapped the Inspector.

“Your wish is my command. At any rate, driven to the outer world by his conscience, Mr. Rummell thought of how he might occupy his time. He decided to occupy it usefully. He went up to our office and wrote two letters identical in content—one addressed to Mr. Goossens, one addressed to Mr. De Carlos.

“The letters informed these gentlemen, as co-trustees, that the marriage was a hoax, and begged the recipients to keep this intelligence confidential. Beau wrote only because, had he not informed the trustees of the true state of affairs, they would have had to take immediate steps to cut her out of her uncle's will. Being in fact unmarried, Miss Shawn was still entitled to her inheritance.

“My partner sent these two letters by special delivery. It was late at night, so of course the letters must have been delivered early the following morning. By the morning after the crime, then, two people more knew that the marriage had been a hoax—the aforesaid Messrs. Goossens and De Carlos. Theoretically, then, either of you two gentlemen,” and Mr. Queen addressed himself with a smile to the two trustees, “could have sent the anonymous tip to die police.”

“I didn't!” cried De Carlos.

“Nor I,” said Goossens.

“Wait a minute,” barked the Inspector. “You've mentioned four, Ellery. There are really five. You're forgetting this phony Justice of the Peace who performed the fake marriage ceremony. He certainly knew!”

“Now, dad,” said Mr. Queen sadly. “Must you steal my thunder?”

“Five!”

“Four.” Mr. Queen shook his head. “I said four, and I still say four. Acrobatic mathematics, really.”

“Rummell, Goossens, De Carlos, you, and the phony Justice—that makes five!”

“This pains me,” murmured Mr. Queen. “I
must
dissent: four. Because, you see,
I
was the phony Justice.”

He grinned at Kerrie, who stared back with parted lips. The Inspector could only wave his fragile hand feebly.

“Go on,” said Lloyd Goossens, lighting his pipe. “It seems Mr. De Carlos and I are to be eliminated by some logical process. I'm curious to hear how you do it.”

“I don't want to hear!” yelled De Carlos. “I'm getting out of here! I've had enough of this—”

“Not quite enough, Mr. De Carlos.” Ellery eyed him and De Carlos collapsed in his chair in a sort of agony. “And since you're so reluctant to hear, you shall. We must pay special attention to you, Mr. De Carlos. You've caused more trouble in this case, I'm sure, than, you're worth! You've been a confuser of issues, a brilliantly red herring, from the very first. And yet, oddly enough, for all the sleepless nights you've given me, I must confess this case would never have been solved had you not been a factor in it.”

“I must say,” began De Carlos helplessly, “I must say—”

“I'll say it for you, shall I?” Mr. Queen smiled. “You see, you're the man who, in the guise of Cole, brought that blessed, significant, colossal fountain-pen into my life. Did that pen belong to you? Did it?”

“I told you it didn't!” cried De Carlos. “It didn't!”

“Oh, I know it didn't. Not because you say so, however. It can't be your pen because of your teeth, you see.”

“Certainly, certainly,” said De Carlos with eagerness. “As you know—I have false teeth—”

“Nonsense. A man with a plate in his mouth might have made those identifying marks on the pen. But not a man with
your
plate, Mr. De Carlos. You should send your dentist an extra fee; he's really a very bad dentist, for which you should show your gratitude. Because when I examined your plate—remember the incident, Mr. De Carlos? when Mr. Rummell converted you into a human cocktail-shaker and your plate flew out of your mouth?—when I examined it, as I say, I saw that it was a genuine old-timer … one of those hideous plates with inhumanly regular teeth, so regular, so perfectly aligned, that they simply could not have made those deep dents in the pen.

“No, those dents could have been made only by a canine out of line, and longer and more pointed than normal. So I knew the pen wasn't yours.”

De Carlos wiped his face with a handkerchief.

“Now, then, I asked myself, how did Mr. De Carlos get hold of that pen? Well, the reasonably assumptive source would have been Cole, the man De Carlos was impersonating at the time I first saw the pen in his possession.
Was
the pen Cole's?

“It might have been at that time, for all I knew; but Captain Angus scotched that theory last night, and the photographs he produced supported his story: Cadmus Cole didn't have a tooth in his mouth, and moreover never wore a plate.

“So the pen wasn't Cole's. If it wasn't Cole's, and it wasn't yours, Mr. De Carlos, then you must have got hold of it by accident or taken it by mistake, believing it to be yours. A mental leap in the dark—but the gap could be supported by a solid confirmation.

“I knew you were badly myopic. In impersonating Cole three months ago, you had been forced to put aside your spectacles, since Cole didn't wear any. As a result you were badly handicapped: your vision was blurred, you bumped into the door-jamb twice, you squinted and strained—in fine, exhibited every evidence of acute near-sightedness.

“Now a man who could mistake a door-jamb for empty space might easily mistake one fountain-pen for another. So, I reasoned, if you had visited some one just before coming to our office that day, you might have picked up the wrong pen there.
Did
you visit some one else before you appeared in our office that day? Oh, yes, indeed. You told us so yourself. You even told us whom you had visited. You had visited Mr. Goossens, for the purpose of delivering into his hands Cadmus Cole's sealed will.

“Just a moment,” said Mr. Queen swiftly, at the gasp and lightning movement before him, “I'm not finished. Was it Goossens's pen De Carlos left behind in our office? Let's see. If De Carlos took Goossens's pen by mistake, then he probably left his own pen behind in Goossens's office.”

He darted forward and flipped back the attorney's coat. Goossens was so astonished his pipe almost fell out of his mouth. Mr. Queen snatched an ordinary black fountain-pen out of the man's vest-pocket and held it up. There were a few scratches and dents on the cap.

“Still up to your old biting tricks, eh, Goossens?” said Mr. Queen. He turned and held the pen up before De Carlos's nose. “Mr. De Carlos, is this your property?”

De Carlos pointed with a shaking finger at the tiny initials, E D C, on the body of the pen.

“Then I think it high time, Mr. Lloyd Goossens,” said Mr. Queen in a curt voice, whirling about, “that you stopped play-acting and confessed to the murder of Ann Bloomer!”

XXIII.
St. Ellery Slays the Dragon

Inspector Queen and District Attorney Sampson jumped up, and Sergeant Velie moved quickly towards them from the door. But Mr. Queen waved them back.

Goossens stared up at him. Then he shook his head, as if in bewilderment. Finally, he took his pipe out of his mouth and chuckled. “Very amusing, Mr. Queen. A little grisly in its humor, but I'm one man who appreciates a joke.”

But when he saw how those about him were, in a rising horror, pushing their chairs imperceptibly away from his vicinity, he lost his smile and shouted: “You're mad! Do you think you can get away with this?”

“To the bitter end,” said Mr. Queen reflectively. Then he sighed. “Very well, we'll go on.” The Inspector, the Sergeant, and Sampson remained standing, however, their eyes on the attorney.

“Mr. De Carlos! You'll swear, if necessary, that this pen I just removed from Goossens's pocket belongs to you?”

“Yes, yes,” said De Carlos excitedly. “I'll tell you just how it happened. While I was in Goossens's private office delivering Cole's will, I took out my own pen to write a list of ports we expected to stop at during the coming West Indian cruise. I laid the pen down on his desk. When I left, I must have picked up Goossens's pen by mistake, because I recall when I came in that he was writing. Neither of us noticed what I did. When your messenger delivered the other pen to the yacht, I received it; I knew it wasn't mine, and saw what must have happened. But we were sailing and it was too late to do anything about returning it. Later, I forgot the whole incident.”

“And so, I fancy, did Mr. Goossens,” remarked Mr. Queen dryly, leaning against a table and folding his arms on his chest. “Your first mistake, Goossens: not getting rid of De Carlos's pen. A trivial mistake, but then you didn't realize the significance of those teeth-marks on your own pen, or that they tied up with the marks on the pencil of your set which you dropped in Room 1726. And since then, falling into your old nervous habit of chewing on the caps of pens, you've been maltreating De Carlos's pen in the same way.… Let me see your pipe, please.”

He said it so casually, and walked towards Goossens so idly, and took the pipe from the man's mouth
so
very swiftly, that the lawyer was caught unprepared. When he realized the significance of Ellery's action, he sprang to his feet.

But it was too late. Mr. Queen was examining the stem of the pipe intently, and Goossens's arms were pinned immovably back by the iron hands of Sergeant Velie.

“Proof number two,” observed Mr. Queen, nodding with satisfaction. “If you'll compare the end of this pipe-stem with the caps of the fountain-pen and pencil, dad, you'll find all three bear the identical impressions of his teeth. Beau told me that he never saw Goossens without a pipe, and on the few occasions of my own meetings with him, I remarked the same thing. The habitual pipe-smoker is so accustomed to gripping a pipestem with his teeth that even when he isn't smoking his pipe he'll unconsciously try to compensate for the lack by biting on something else. A laboratory examination will prove that Goossens made the same marks on the stem of his pipe as appear on the pen and pencil. Well, Goossens, have you anything to say for publication now?”

AND Goossens said quietly: “It's really all right, Sergeant. You don't have to keep holding on to me as if I were a … criminal.” He laughed at the absurdity of the notion.

Sergeant Velie glanced at Inspector Queen, who nodded. The Sergeant held on to Goossens's wrists with one hand and with the other swiftly searched him. When he was satisfied his prisoner was unarmed, he stepped back.

Goossens shook himself. “Do you believe this nonsense, Inspector Queen? Or you, Mr. Sampson? I hope you both realize what a beautiful suit for slander you're setting up!”

“Not to mention,” drawled Mr. Queen, “one for false arrest. Oh, quite beautiful—”