The Siamese Twin Mystery (24 page)

“Legs as high as you can get them.”

Ellery circled the chair and obeyed.

“Firmly now.” The physician bent over the hanging head and grasped the old man’s jaws. He squeezed until the mouth opened, and then he reached in and pulled out the Inspector’s tongue. “There! That’s better. I could shoot him full of adrenalin, or strychnine, or some of that new stuff, alphalobeline, but I don’t think it will be necessary. I think he’ll come round with just a little assistance; he’s been under the influence for some time. Steady! I’m going to try artificial respiration. With an oxygen tank. … Well, I haven’t any handy, so—Steady.”

He bent over the Inspector’s torso and set to work. Ellery watched stormily.

“How long will it take?”

“Depends upon how much he’s inhaled. Ah, that’s good! It won’t be long now, Queen.”

In five minutes a strangled moan came from the old man’s throat. Dr. Holmes worked steadily on. A moment later he stopped and pulled away the face towel. The Inspector’s eyes were opening dazedly, and he was licking his lips as if his mouth were dry.

“All right now,” said Dr. Holmes almost cheerfully, standing up. “He’s out of it. Well, Inspector, how do you feel?”

The first word the Inspector said was: “Lousy.”

Three minutes later he was sitting in the armchair, face buried in his hands. Aside from a mild nausea, he felt no ill effects.

“What gets me,” he muttered brokenly “is how I was tricked. That makes me responsible for that man’s death on two counts. Lord. … Fell for the oldest gag. I stuck my head out, neglecting to douse the light. Naturally I was a perfect target for anyone skulking out in the dark hall. Whoever it was—was waiting for me. Knew that when I came out it could only be because Xavier was conscious and I was going for you, Doctor. So he—or she—or it, or whoever it was pressed a wet cloth over my nose and mouth and held one arm over my throat. Soaked in chloroform, I was so taken off my guard I didn’t even have a chance to make a fight of it. I didn’t go off right away but I got weak—dizzy—felt the gun drop, and then …”

“No sense in looking for the saturated cloth,” said Ellery quietly. “Whoever used it has disposed of it down a drain by this time, I suppose. Is there chloroform in the laboratory, Doctor?”

“Naturally. Lucky you’ve been eating so lightly today, Inspector. On a full stomach—” The young man shook his head and turned to the bed.

The Queens watched without speaking. In the old man’s eyes there was a sick horror. Ellery gripped his shoulder comfortingly.

“Hmm,” murmured Dr. Holmes, eying the mess on the dead man’s chin and the contorted features. “Poison, eh?” He leaned over and sniffed at the partly open mouth. “Yes, indeed.” He looked around, spied the vial on the table, and picked it up.

“I tasted it,” said Ellery wearily. “It’s sour, and it burned my tongue.”

“Good lord!” cried Holmes. “I hope you didn’t take much of it. Why, this is a deadly corrosive poison. Oxalic acid dissolved in water!”

“I was careful. I suppose that comes from the laboratory, too?”

Dr. Holmes grunted assent and turned back to the corpse again. When he straightened up his eyes were thoughtful. “He’s been dead about an hour. Mouth forced open and the oxalic poured down his throat. You can see the marks on his cheeks and jaw where the fingers gripped him. Poor chap! He died in horrible pain.”

“He could have removed that deck of cards from the drawer, I suppose, and torn one of them in two after he was poisoned and his poisoner left?”

“Yes. As for the murderer’s certainty that death would follow, I might point out that oxalic’s always fatal in one hour, sometimes a good deal less. His generally debilitated condition didn’t help.” Dr. Holmes eyed the cards on the floor curiously. “Another—?”

“Another.”

The Inspector rose and stumbled to the bed.

Ellery let himself out of the room and stood still in the corridor outside, taking stock. Someone in this house was lying on a bed of thorns, writhing under the necessity for waiting, waiting. He wondered if he had the temerity to break into each room without noise and flash a strong light suddenly upon the face of each sleeper. But the women … He pursed his lips thoughtfully.

The door opposite the spot where he stood led, he knew, to Ann Forrest’s room. He marveled silently at the apparent fact that the young woman had heard nothing of the attack upon the Inspector, the murderer’s movements and departure, and all the swishing events that had ensued. He hesitated, then crossed quickly and pressed his right ear against the door. He could hear nothing. So he gripped the knob slowly and slowly turned it until it would turn no more. Then he pushed. To his astonishment, the door held. Miss Forrest had locked herself in!

“Now why the devil did she do that?” he thought as he tiptoed down the corridor toward the next door. “Obviously, for protection. From what? The invisible hand of death?” He chuckled to himself. “How dat ol’ debil Night breeds drama! Did she have a presentiment? Did she lock the door from reasons of general caution?
Tsk!
I haven’t paid half enough attention to Miss Forrest.”

The room next to the young woman’s was occupied by the Carreau twins. They, at least, were coerced by no unhealthy fears. The door gave readily to his touch and he stole in and listened. Their rhythmic breathing was reassuring. He stole out again and crossed the hall.

Directly opposite the door to the twins’ room was, the door to the room to which Mrs. Wheary had assigned the gigantic fat gentleman named Smith. Ellery did not hesitate. He went in noiselessly, crept about until his fingers found the light switch on the wall near the door, riveted his eyes upon the spot in the darkness from which came an elephantine snorting, and then snapped the switch. The room sprang into being, revealing the mountainous figure of Smith sprawled on the bed, pajama coat unbuttoned and rolls of pink unhealthy-looking flesh rising and falling with the tempestuous tide of his breathing.

The man’s eyes opened instantly, frightened and yet wary. He flung up his arm more quickly than Ellery would have believed possible in a man of his ponderous size, as if he half expected a blow, a shot, something menacing and lethal.

“It’s Queen,” murmured Ellery, and the big fat arm dropped. Smith’s froggy eyes blinked in the light. “Just an amiable visit, my friend. Been sleeping soundly?”

“Huh?” The man stared stupidly.

“Come, come, rub the sleep out of your eyes and rise from the—ah—groaning pallet of your dreams.” Ellery took in the details of the room; he had never been inside it before. No, there was only one other door, open, as in Xavier’s room; and that led, as he could see, to the usual lavatory.

“What’s the big idea?” croaked Smith, sitting up. “What’s happened?”

“Another comrade has gone to join his Maker,” replied Ellery gravely. “The slaughter, you see, has become epidemic.”

The huge jaw dropped. “S-somebody else been m-m-mur—”

“Friend Xavier.” Ellery put his hand on the doorknob. “Get into a dressing gown and go next door. You’ll find the Inspector and Dr. Holmes there. See you later.”

He ducked out quickly, leaving the fat man to gape after him with tardily dawning horror.

Ellery recrossed the hall, ignoring the door next to Smith’s. That led, he knew, to an unoccupied room. He tried the door of Mrs. Carreau’s chamber. It gave way and, after a moment of indecision, he shrugged and stepped inside.

Immediately he knew he had made a mistake. No rhythmic breathing here; no breathing at all. Odd! Was it possible the gentlewoman from Washington was absent from her bed at three in the morning? But the realization of error flashed over him even as his thoughts eddied about the puzzle of her absence. She was not absent. She was sitting there, sitting at the foot of a chaise longue, holding her breath, her eyes glowing in the faintest of moonlight coming through the windows off the balcony.

His foot kicked against a piece of furniture, and she screamed … a shrill scream that raised the hair at the base of his scalp and sent prickles of ice down his spine.

“Don’t!” he whispered, stepping forward. “Mrs. Carreau! It’s Ellery Queen. For God’s sake, stop that noise.”

She had leaped from the chaise longue. When he found the switch and turned it on, he saw her crouched with her back to the farthest wall, eyes lambent with terror, hands clutching the folds of her negligee to her.

Sanity returned to her eyes. She drew the negligee more closely about her slim figure. “What are you doing in my bedroom, Mr. Queen?” she demanded.

Ellery blushed. “Ah—a very proper question. Can’t say I blame you for screaming. … By the way, what are
you
doing up at this hour of the morning?”

She compressed her lips. “I don’t see, Mr. Queen … It was so stifling, and I couldn’t sleep. But you still haven’t—”

Ellery, feeling like a fool, frowned and turned to the door. “There! I hear the others coming to your rescue. The point is, Mrs. Carreau, I came to tell you—”

“What’s happened? Who screamed?” snapped the Inspector from the doorway. Then he stalked in, glaring from Ellery to Mrs. Carreau. The twins popped their heads in from the communicating door. Dr. Holmes and Miss Forrest, Smith, Mrs. Xavier, Bones, the housekeeper—all in various stages of undress—crowded in the corridor doorway, craning over the Inspector’s shoulder.

Ellery dabbed his damp forehead and grinned weakly. “My fault entirely. I crept into Mrs. Carreau’s room—with the most innocent intentions in the world, I assure you!—and very properly she took fright and let out that appalling feminine blast. I daresay she thought I was attempting to play lusty Tarquinius to her Lucretia.”

The hostile glances directed at him made Ellery blush again, this time in anger.

“Mr. Queen,” said Mrs. Xavier frigidly, “I must say this is the strangest conduct from a supposed gentleman!”

“Now, look here, all of you!” cried Ellery, exasperated. “You simply don’t understand. Good lord! I—”

Miss Forrest said quickly: “Of course. Let’s not be idiotic, Marie. … You’re both dressed, both you and the Inspector, Mr. Queen. What—what’s the matter?”

“Time,” growled the Inspector. “As long as you’re all awake we might’s well tell you. And let’s not, as Miss Forrest says, cover up all the important facts with suspicions of my son’s morals. He’s foolish sometimes, but not
that
foolish. Mr. Queen was coming to tell you, Mrs. Carreau—when you screamed—that there’s been another attack.”

“Attack!”

“That’s the ticket”

“A—a
murder
?”

“Well, he’s mighty dead.”

Their heads moved slowly to changing inquisitorial positions, searching one another’s faces, tallying. …

“Mark,” said Mrs. Xavier thickly.

“Yes, Mark.” The Inspector stared grimly about. “He was poisoned and put out of the way before he could tell what he started out to tell earlier this evening. I won’t mention the little matter of my own part in the affair, although you may be interested to learn that the same scoundrel gave me a dose of chloroform. Yes, Xavier’s gone.”

“Mark’s dead,” repeated Mrs. Xavier in the same thick dull tones, and suddenly burying her face in her hands she began to sob.

Mrs. Carreau, pale and stiff, stalked to the communicating door and put her arms about the shoulders of her sons.

There was no sleep for any of them that night. They all seemed reluctant to return to their bedrooms; and they remained huddled together with the gregarious instinct of frightened animals, starting at every night sound.

With rather savage satisfaction Ellery insisted upon escorting them, one by one, into the dead man’s bedroom for a view of the body. He watched them very closely. But if anyone was acting he could not detect the deception. They were merely a group of badly scared people. Mrs. Wheary fainted during her part of the performance and had to be revived with cold water and smelling salts. The twins, bewildered and very small boys now, were excused from participation in the test.

By the time it was over and the dead lawyer had been removed to share the refrigerator in the laboratory with his brother, an angry dawn was coming up.

The Queens stood in the death room and looked gloomily at the tumbled empty bed.

“Well, son,” said the Inspector with a sigh, “I guess we may as well give up. It’s too much for me.”

“It’s because we’re blind!’ cried Ellery, making a fist. “The evidence is all here. Xavier’s clue. … Oh, hell, it just needs
thinking
over. And my head is spinning.”

“One thing,” said the old gentleman grumpily, “I s’pose we ought to be thankful for. He’s the last. He wasn’t mixed up in the direct motive behind his brother’s kill, I’m sure. He was done in to keep him from spilling who the murderer is. Now how the deuce did he
know
?”

Ellery started out of a brown study. “Yes, I suppose that’s important. How he knew. … By the way, did you ever stop to speculate
why
Xavier framed his sister-in-law in the first place?”

“So much has happened—”

“It’s very simple. With John Xavier dead, Mrs. Xavier inherited. But Mrs. Xavier is the last of her line. No children. If anything happened to her, who’d get the estate?”

“Xavier!” exclaimed the Inspector, staring.

“Exactly. His frame-up was a clever means of getting her out of his way to a sizable fortune without soiling his own hands with blood.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” The Inspector shook his head. “And I thought—”

“What did you think?”

“That there was something between those two.” He frowned. “I couldn’t see anyone but Mark Xavier as the reason why Mrs. Xavier should be willing to take the blame for a crime she knew she didn’t commit. If she thought he did it, and she was desperately in love with him. … But that doesn’t wash with his framing
her
.”

“Such things have happened,” said Ellery dryly. “I shouldn’t discount it merely because it sounds wrong. Passionate women in love with their brother-in-law can generally be counted upon to do unorthodox things. That female’s half cracked, anyway. But I’m not worried about that.” He went to the night table and picked up the torn half of the diamond knave which Xavier had held in his dead hand. “It’s this little jigger that disturbs me. I can understand why Xavier should have thought of leaving a card clue, even though there are pencil and paper in the same drawer from which he took the deck. …”