The Finishing Stroke (3 page)

Sebastian glared. ‘Are you suggesting that I'm incompetent?'

‘No, no,' Muncie said hastily, opening his attaché case. ‘How do you wish the existing will changed, sir?'

‘Retain the bequests to the servants, the employees at Sebastian and Craig as I previously specified, and so forth. But the income from the bulk of my estate – and of my wife's, when the legal folderol is finally cleared up and it comes to me – is to go to my son John.' Sebastian half sat up. ‘You know the son I mean, Muncie?'

‘Of course.' The lawyer was astonished. ‘The child in the nursery in charge of that nurse, and a fine lad he seems to be.' He coughed. ‘Wouldn't it be best to leave all this for another day, sir?'

‘The child in the nursery,' Sebastian muttered. ‘That's right, Muncie, my son John, my only son. Put it down just that way: “My only son comma John.” You understand?'

‘“My only son comma John,”' the lawyer murmured.

‘He is to receive the income until age twenty-five. At twenty-five he inherits the principal. Have you got that?'

‘Yes, Mr. Sebastian.'

If I should die before my son reaches his majority, he is to be placed under the guardianship of my business partner and friend Arthur B. Craig. Craig has already agreed to assume the responsibility. Craig is also to be executor and administrator of the estate, as in the current will. If my son dies before reaching the age of twenty-five, I leave the estate to Craig. That's all, Muncie. Draw it immediately.'

‘I'll have it for your signature tomorrow, Mr. Sebastian.'

‘You'll have it for my signature tonight!' Sebastian sank back, exhausted.

Muncie consulted his watch. ‘I'm not sure … Surely the matter is not so urgent, Mr. Sebastian?' He essayed a laugh. ‘Even if we had the misfortune to lose you at this moment, sir, since your son is your only natural heir he'd inherit anyway –'

Sebastian whispered, ‘I want it down on paper, over my signature, Muncie, just as I gave it to you.' Then he sat up with a shout. ‘Do you understand, damn you?'

The lawyer fled.

Muncie was back with two of his clerks that night. He read the will to John Sebastian in a sharp, offended voice. The publisher listened eagerly, nodding at every phrase. When the lawyer had concluded, the bedridden man seized a pen and wrote his signature with great care on both copies. Then the clerks signed in witness, and the three men turned to go.

‘Thank you, gentlemen,' Sebastian said. ‘Oh, Muncie.'

The lawyer turned back.

‘Forgive me if I've seemed peremptory. You've been most understanding.'

‘Perhaps not, Mr. Sebastian, perhaps not,' the lawyer said, unbending a little. ‘However, it's done. Was there something else?'

‘Yes. A matter I must really take care of … a certain trust fund to be set up … certain legal papers drawn …'

‘Can't that wait until tomorrow, either, sir?' Muncie asked, smiling. ‘I really must advise you to consult a physician before attempting any further exertions.'

‘Perhaps you're right,' the publisher murmured. ‘I'll have Dr. Westcott over in the morning. And that matter I spoke of … very well, Muncie, another day …'

His voice trailed off. The lawyer hesitated, then left.

John Sebastian lay back, content. The murderer was thwarted; there was no mention of him in the will; no one – not Muncie, not Craig, not anyone connected with John Sebastian, publisher and widower – no one but Dr. and Mrs. Hall knew of that murderous little existence, and those two had reason enough to keep their mouths shut …

Sebastian fell asleep.

And in that sleep he died. He was found by the elderly maidservant early the next morning, already in rigor mortis. At the insistence of his friend and business partner, Arthur Benjamin Craig, the coroner's physician performed an autopsy. He found a blood-clot on the brain. Sebastian had suffered internal head injuries in being thrown from the capsizing Pierce Great-Arrow. His refusal to seek medical care after the accident had probably killed him. It was conjectured that his rather odd behaviour during the last five days of his life was a direct result of his injuries.

John Sebastian was buried in the family plot in the Rye cemetery beside the fresh grave of his wife.

When Dr. Cornelius F. Hall read of Sebastian's death, he said to his wife, ‘We may be luckier than we know. That fellow was capable of anything.'

Mrs. Hall shivered and hurried into the room in which Claire Sebastian had died. It was now a nursery.

Dr. Hall made discreet inquiries and ascertained that Sebastian had died before setting up the trust fund he had promised. When the provisions of the will were published, the little doctor read them closely. There was no provision for a second son; indeed, no mention of a second son's existence. Dr. Hall smiled. So far as he could determine, no one alive suspected that John Sebastian's wife had given birth to more than the single male infant in the Sebastian nursery in Rye.

‘Thank God!' the doctor's wife said; and she went about the tasks of her new motherhood with a gaiety that made Dr. Hall hum as he clipclopped along the roads of lower Westchester in his sleigh.

He recorded the births with the town clerk at the Mount Kidron city hall. The doctor was careful to wait until he could bury them among seven others from confinements he had attended in and about Mount Kidron. The town clerk was deaf and half blind; he had entered so many births in his weighty ledger during his forty-five-year tenure of office that their specifications no longer registered in his brain.

‘But we're protected,' Dr. Hall remarked to Mrs. Hall.

‘Against what, Cornelius?' He shrugged. ‘One never knows.'

All this happened the year Ellery Queen was born, and an even quarter century before he agreed to attend the extraordinary Christmas house party in Alderwood, New York.

Book Two

The Roman Hat Mystery
, by Ellery Queen

This ‘Problem in Deduction' introduces two new detectives, the Queens, father and son. One is a genial snuff-addict, the other a philovancish bookworm. They are agreeable enough, if somewhat too coy and too chorus-like in their repartee … In spite of minor defects … this is a competent piece of work for those who like their detective stories straight.

–
Saturday Review of Literature,
Oct. 12, 1929

2 Tuesday, December 24, 1929: Christmas Eve

In Which Ellery Joins a Yuletide House Party in Rural Westchester, and John Sebastian Hints of the Shape of Things to Come

How young Ellery was may be judged by the fact that he took his reviews seriously. The sweet ones puffed him to the point of bloat; the sour positively shrivelled him. The reviews of
The Roman Hat Mystery
had been, on the whole, nourishing. The touch of acidity in the
Saturday Review of Literature
notice, however, infected him deeply. To be accused of mere competence was galling; to be called a ‘philovancish bookworm' etched itself into his soul; to be charged with coyness revolted him. There is an innocence and wonder about a young author's first-born; to call it names is to commit a crime against nature. Ellery writhed.

But all that was past. The book had been published in mid-August; the reviews were all in by mid-October; by mid-December, so far as Ellery was concerned, they might never have been. In those days he had the elastic confidence of youth, which might be stretched but never snapped; and he accepted Arthur B. Craig's invitation for the Christmas to New Year's holiday – tendered well before Thanksgiving – without surprise, as if it were his due as an Established Author. It would have pained him to learn that he had been asked more as a ‘character' than as a literary lion-cub; fortunately, he never learned it.

His only connexion with Craig was John Sebastian, Craig's ward and an acquaintance of Ellery's. Young Sebastian maintained a flat in Greenwich Village, and Ellery had run across him in and about the Village at sundry soirées, literary and artistic. A certain brashness in common had drawn them together. Sebastian was a dilettante poet of great charm and, Ellery suspected, some talent; not quite of F. Scott Fitzgerald's lost generation, he was of the piercing-eyed, lank-haired, Byronic model then fashionable in New York's Bohemia. He always spoke of his wealthy guardian with cynical affection and a tone of amused patronage that the young reserve for their more indulgent elders.

Arthur Benjamin Craig was a printer by trade, an artist in the design and production of fine books who had elevated his craft to the status of a profession. Beyond Craig's relationship with young Sebastian, and the fact that his press printed the prestige books put out by the house of Ellery's publisher, Dan Z. Freeman, Ellery knew nothing about him.

Ellery had accepted Craig's invitation on impulse, but it occurred to him belatedly – just before Christmas – that acceptance would leave his father alone over the holiday. He offered to send his regrets, but Inspector Queen would not hear of filial sacrifice.

‘There's a new lead on the Arnold Rothstein killing that's going to keep me busy over New Year's,' the Inspector had reassured him. ‘You beat it up to Alderwood and have yourself a time, son. Just go easy on the bathtub gin.'

‘From what John's said,' Ellery grinned, ‘it's more likely to be vintage champagne and pedigreed Scotch.'

The Inspector looked sceptical. He was also worried. ‘The papers predict a white Christmas. When are you driving up?'

‘Tuesday afternoon.' ‘There are supposed to be snow flurries Monday and a heavy snow Tuesday. Maybe you'd better take the train.'

‘Old Duesey's never failed me yet.' Ellery's Duesenberg was not the patrician Town Cabriolet of the moment. It was a 1924 open model, bruised and battered by 135,000 miles of hard driving, and he felt an affection for it that he would have lavished on an ancient but still serviceable saddle horse. ‘Besides, Dad, I've bought a set of those new Weed American crosschains. We'll be all right.'

As forecast, a heavy snow began to fall early on the morning of Tuesday, December 24th. By noon, when Ellery set out, the streets were blanketed.

He had had the West 87th Street garage put up the top and the side-curtains, so he was protected from the snow; but not even his old raccoon coat and fur earlaps were proof against the wind, a wicked nor'easter that went through the curtains as if they were made of cheesecloth. By the time he reached the parkway at the Westchester county line he felt as if he were encased, like a Siberian mastodon, in a glacier. He had to pull up at a diner in Mount Kidron, where he surreptitiously laced a mug of coffee with brandy from his silver hip-flask. At Mamaroneck and White Plains he stopped again to irradiate the inner man; by the time he had crossed White Plains and was headed northwest on the road to Alderwood, the flask was empty. He reached the town in a pleasant state of neutrality, half ice, half glow.

Alderwood was forty miles from New York, a heavily treed community of small estates with a population of 6,000, and an immaculate little business district with loops of snowy Christmas lights across the main street and Santa-bedecked shop windows sparkling with frost. The Craig place, he learned, was on the northern fringe of town, and Ellery found it after a dreamy search that involved a mere two excursions up byroads that led nowhere.

It turned out a huge sprawl of a house, of incredible spread, coming to a giant peak – a two-story-and-attic so broad it looked sat upon. Ellery recognized it as a heroic example of the triangular American Shingle architecture of the ‘80's. Two great banks of bow window, one above the other, in the darkly weathered shingles of the side wall facing the road gave the building an astonishingly modern look. The entrance was at right angles to the main road, opening from a large open porch supported by fieldstone pillars. The whole monster was thickly nested in shrubs, an Ancient Mariner of a house with a Galway beard. It rode the crest of a wave of snow-covered lawns.

Perhaps it was the glow in which he sat comfortably piloting the Duesenberg up the baronial drive, but Ellery had the queerest feeling that he was driving in state up to the front door of Elizabethan England. In his misty condition he would not have been surprised to find himself greeted by bewigged footmen in ducal livery and a beruffed host in doublet and hose. He could already see whole-tree Yule logs, rush-strewn stone floors, and wolfish dogs tearing at haunches of venison. And plenty of toddies, of course – steaming varieties, served in pewter tankards.

He began to whistle ‘Greensleeves'.

And when he drew up at the porch, there, waiting for him, were the tall, dark and handsome Figure of John Sebastian and, at Sebastian's side, a mountain of a man, a sort of cross between President Hoover and Henry the Eighth – huge, square-faced and bearded, smoking a bulldog pipe benignly and smiling in welcome.

‘You made it,' young Sebastian cried, springing into the snow to seize Ellery's hand. ‘Don't bother with your car or luggage, Ellery. Arthur, this is Ellery Queen, slayer of dragons and brain extraordinary. His father is a real live police inspector, too.'

‘And a genial snuff-taker, let's not forget that,' Ellery said slurrily. ‘Mr. Craig, I'm honoured, gratified, and glaciated. And crushed,' he added, nursing his right hand. Arthur Craig's grip went with his dimensions, undiscouraged by his sixty-three years. His hair and beard were still thickly blond. The dark eyes in the great head were as lively as his ward's, but they were illuminated by a patience and generosity, Ellery thought, that John's – or Henry the Eighth's, for that matter – lacked.

‘A veritable father-image,' John said solemnly. ‘That grip has kept me in my place since my knickerbocker days.'

‘With dubious results, I'm afraid,' Craig said in a comfortable rumble. ‘Mr. Queen, welcome. I don't know why you should feel honoured and gratified, but the glaciation we can remedy immediately. Felton, take care of Mr. Queen's bag and car.' A muscular houseman in a black suit and bowtie slipped down to the car. ‘The toddies are on the hob.'

And they were served in pewter tankards, too. Nor was Ellery astonished to find himself in a great half-timbered hall of a room, feudal with oak panelling, beamed ceiling, brass-studded settles, a copper-hooded floor-to-ceiling fireplace, with copper and leather and black iron and burning brass everywhere. He went upstairs behind Felton with his friend and an aromatic tankard for company, and he remarked with enthusiasm, ‘Wonderful place for a Christmas holiday, John. I can almost hear Sir Andrew Aguecheek shouting to Sir Toby, “Shall we set about some revels?” '

‘And old Belch yelling back, “What shall we do else? Were we not born under Taurus?” '

‘I'm Gemini myself.'

‘To quote a dreary old bore of a lady you're going to meet shortly – by their stars ye shall know them. Honestly!' Sebastian put an arm about Ellery; he seemed boyishly happy. ‘You ferret, you, I'm glad you could get here. This should be one dilly of a party.'

‘No murders, please.'

‘Curses, I'll have to change the agenda! Here's your billet, Ellery. Anything you want, ring Felton. When you've come unstuck, amble downstairs. There's a little package I want to present to you.'

‘Now? Aren't you being premature?'

‘Present, sonny-boy – as in introduce. The package is named Rusty Brown, whom I can't conceal from you any longer.'

‘Rusty Brown? Sounds like a baseball player.'

‘Heaven forbid. We're very good friends; you know? So hands off, Ellery.
Comprends?
'

‘Do I look like a cad?'

‘Where my emotional responses to Miss Brown are concerned, anything in plus-fours is a cad until proved otherwise.' John Sebastian stuck his head back in. ‘By the way, don't go wandering on your way downstairs. This old manse has thirty or more rooms in various wings, half of them never used. I had more hideouts here when I was a kid than the James boys. If you should get lost in one of them we mightn't find you till Epiphany. Hurry it up, will you?'

Ellery saw John Sebastian's point with the greatest of ease. Rusty Brown had what Elinor Glyn called ‘It', along with generous dashes of chic and spirit. She was a lively package with well- rounded corners, little-girl features, a dimple, flame-coloured hair coiffed in the latest bob, smartly casual clothes and a pair of eye-catching earrings apparently made of welded steel. She looked remarkably like Clara Bow. But her green eyes were direct, and Ellery liked her firm, no-quarter-asked handclasp. She was a talented designer of costume jewellery, textiles, wallpaper and such. No more than twenty-four, her fiancé's age, she had already set up shop on Madison Avenue, and her ‘Rusty Brown Creations' were beginning to be mentioned in
The New Yorker'
s ‘The Talk of the Town' and sought out by Park Avenue.

‘So you're the rising author John's been regaling us with to the point of indigestion,' Rusty Brown said. She had a clear voice, with no nonsense about it, like her eyes. ‘He's even made me read your book.'

‘That's the kind of gambit I've never learned to resist,' Ellery said. ‘Here goes: Did you like it?'

‘I thought it terribly clever.'

‘Do I detect a worm in the fruit?'

‘Well, perhaps too clever.' Rusty showed her innocent dimple. ‘Might I say – precocious?'

‘You have to watch this wench, Ellery,' John said adoringly. ‘She draws blood.'

‘I'm bleeding,' Ellery moaned.

‘It's no crime to be young, Mr. Queen,' Rusty murmured. “The crime is to let it show.'

‘I'm practically a haemophiliac,' Ellery said. ‘And this is the redoubtable Miss Brown's mother?'

Mrs. Brown was Rusty in a Coney Island mirror, with green eyes turned sly, bad teeth, and red hair lapsed into pinkish grey. There was a Medusa-like intensity about her that vibrated almost audibly. Ellery put her down at once as a Cause Woman, or at any rate a fanatic about something. It turned out that she was a devotee of astrology, a devout communicant of the occult and an amateur medium. Her Christian name was Olivette.

‘Your Sign is the Twins, isn't it, Mr. Queen?' Mrs. Brown asked him immediately, with a great deal of breath.

‘Why, yes, Mrs. Brown.'

‘Of course. Gemini governs the intellect, and John says you're
so
intellectual.'

‘Mother is psychic, although a little advance information now and then helps,' Rusty said dryly. ‘Darling, might I have some more toddy?'

‘And this young lady, Mr. Queen,' Arthur Craig said, ‘is my niece Ellen, down from Wellesley for the holidays.' His paw was fondling a long, dainty hand. ‘Ellen, John and The ABC Press are my three reasons for being. I've put my imprint on them all.'

‘And an exquisite edition this one is, Mr. Craig,' Ellery said. ‘You've raised this alluring female, too?'

‘Ellen's father died soon after she was born – he was my only brother. Naturally, Ellen and her mother came to live with me, Marcia being in poor health and unable to raise her baby without help. Then Marcia died, and I had to become Ellen's father
and
mother.'

‘The only mother in captivity with a beard,' Ellen Craig said, tugging at it. ‘Unique in all other ways, too. Are you going to patronize me, Mr. Queen, for not having my diploma yet?'

‘My exclamatory description of you a moment ago was forced out of me by the facts, Miss Craig. When does Wellesley reluctantly let you go?'

‘In June.'

‘I'll be there,' quoth Mr. Queen gallantly.

Ellen laughed. She had quite the nicest laugh – amusement in music, feminine and unaffected. She was a tall girl with a pert cock to her fair head and a delicately angular face under broad temples. Ellery decided quickly that Miss Craig was not all on the surface. There was buried treasure here, and he found himself in a mood for digging.

So when Rusty and John wandered off to act as lookouts for the other expected guests, and Craig permitted himself good-humouredly to be dragged off by Mrs. Brown for a horoscope reading, Ellery said, ‘Do you mind being left in my company, Miss Craig?'

‘I'll tell you a secret, Mr. Queen. I've had a hopeless crush on you ever since I read your book.'