The Siamese Twin Mystery, page 14
They heard the heavy tread of Smith on the terrace.
Chapter 12. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
It was the most stifling night either man had ever experienced. They tossed side by side for three hours in a hell compounded of sticky darkness and acrid air, and then by mutual consent gave up the effort to woo sleep. Ellery crawled out of bed, groaning, and snapped the light on. He groped for a cigaret, pulled a chair to one of the rear windows, and smoked without savor. The Inspector lay flat on his back, cropped mustache moving up and down in a champing mutter, staring at the ceiling. The bed, their night-clothes, were soaked in perspiration.
At five o’clock, with the black sky lightening, they took turns under the shower. Then they dressed listlessly.
Morning dawned brazenly. Even the first faint streaks were dipped in molten heat. Ellery, at the window, blinked out over the valley.
“It’s worse,” he said gloomily.
“What’s worse?”
“The fire.”
‘Hie old gentleman put his snuffbox away and went quietly to the other window. From the perpendicular edges of the back of Arrow Mountain thick streamers, mile-long lengths of fluttering gray flannel, curved and lifted to the sun. But the smoke was no longer at the base of the Arrow; it had advanced with silent menace so much farther upward that it seemed to both men to be tickling the summit. The valley was almost invisible. They were floating in air—the summit, the house, themselves.
“It’s like Swift’s island in the sky,” muttered Ellery. “Looks bad, eh?”
“Bad enough, son.”
Without another word they went downstairs.
The house was dipped in silence; no one was about. The crisp chill of a mountain morning strove vainly to get at their damp cheeks as they stood on the terrace and gazed moodily at the sky. Ash and cinders rained steadily now; and although from their vantage-point they could see nothing of the world below, the whirling debris of the fire brought up by the winds that incessantly spiraled the mountain told them that the blaze had made alarming progress.
“What the devil are we going to do?” complained the Inspector. “This is getting so damn’ serious I’m afraid to think about it. We’re in one hell of a jam, El.”
Ellery cupped his chin in his hands. “I’ll admit that the death of one human being doesn’t seem cosmically important, under the circumstances. … What the deuce was that?”
They both started up, straining their ears. From somewhere at the east of the house came a series of metallic sounds, muffled and baffling.
“I thought nobody could—” The old gentleman stopped growling. “Come on.”
They hurried down the steps and sped along the gravel drive in the direction of the sounds. Rounding the left side of the house, they stopped short. The drive branched off here and the branch led to a low rambling wooden building, the garage. The two wide doors were open, and from the interior of the garage came the noise. The Inspector darted forward and cautiously peered into the dim interior. He beckoned to Ellery, who tip-toed along the margin of vegetation flanking the gravel and joined his father.
There were four cars in the garage, neatly lined up. One of them was the low-slung Duesenberg belonging to the Queens. The second was a magnificent black limousine with a long hood—unquestionably the property of the late Dr. Xavier. The third was a powerful sedan with foreign lines; it could only have belonged to Mrs. Carreau. The fourth was the battered Buick which had borne the dead weight of Mr. Frank J. Smith of New York City up the steep Arrow Mountain road.
From the rear of Smith’s car came the deafening din of metal upon metal. The author of the din was hidden by the body of the car.
They edged between the Buick and the foreign automobile and pounced forward upon the stooping figure of a man who was wielding a rusty hand-ax on the gasoline tank of the fat man’s car. The metal was already slashed in several places and the rich dark odorous liquid was gushing to the cement floor in streams.
The man uttered a frightened squeal, dropped the ax, and came up fighting. It took the Queens several minutes of rough work to subdue him.
It was old Bones, glaring sullenly as usual.
“What on earth,” panted the Inspector, “do you think you’re doing, you crazy fool?”
His bony shoulders sagged, but he said defiantly: “Taking his gas away from him!”
“Sure,” snarled the Inspector. “We can see that. But why?”
Bones shrugged.
“And why didn’t you drain it off, instead of trying to make scrap iron out of the tank?”
“He couldn’t refill it this way.”
“You’re a rotten Nihilist,” said Ellery sadly. “He could take one of the other cars, you know.”
“I was going to put them out of commission, too.”
They stared. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said the Inspector after a moment. “I believe you would, at that.”
“But it’s so silly,” protested Ellery. “He can’t get away, Bones. Where would he go?”
Bones shrugged again. “It’s safer this way.”
“But why so anxious to impede the departure of Mr. Smith?”
“I don’t like his damn’ fat face,” rasped the old man.
“Now there,” cried Ellery, “is a reason! Look here, my friend; you let us catch you fiddling around these cars again and, by thunder, we’ll—we’ll annihilate you!”
Bones shook himself, lifted his withered lips in a sneer, and shuffled rapidly out of the garage.
The Inspector threw up his hands and followed, leaving Ellery to dip his toe into the gasoline thoughtfully.
* * *
“As long as we’re frying,” growled the Inspector after breakfast, “we may as well fry working as idling. Come along.”
“Working?” echoed Ellery blankly. He was smoking his sixth cigaret of the morning and gazing upon vacancy. He had been frowning for an hour.
“You heard me.”
They left the game-room, where the others were apathetically congregated under the hot breeze of an electric fan, and the Inspector led the way down the hall to the door of Dr. Xavier’s study. He used the skeleton-key from his key-ring and opened the door. The room looked exactly as they had last seen it the day before.
Ellery closed the door and leaned against it. “Now what?”
“I want to look at his papers,” muttered old Queen. “You never can tell.”
“Oh.” Ellery shrugged and went to one of the windows.
The Inspector went through the study with the practised ruthlessness of a lifetime of experience. The cabinet, the desk, the bookcase—he explored each nook and cranny, glancing hastily over memoranda, old letters, a gibberish of medical notations, receipted bills—the usual mess. Ellery contented himself with staring at the trees wavering in the fierce heat outdoors. The room was a furnace and both men were wet to the skin.
“Nothing,” announced the old gentleman glumly. “Nothing but a lot of junk, that is.”
“Junk? Now, that’s something else again. I’m always interested in the scrap-heap of a man’s property.” Ellery strolled to the desk where the Inspector was going through the last drawer.
“It’s a scrap-heap, all right,” grunted the Inspector.
The drawer was full of odds and ends. Stationery supplies, a broken and rusty surgical instrument, a box of checkers, a score or more of pencils of varying size, most of them with broken points; a solitary cufflink with a tiny pearl inset in the center—apparently the sole survivor of a pair; at least a dozen tie-clips and stickpins, most of them tarnished green; shirt-studs of rather bizarre design, an old fraternity pin with two diamond chips missing, two watch-chains, an elaborate silver key, a polished animal-tooth yellow with age, a silver toothpick. … The drawer was the tomb of a man’s accumulated trinkets.
“Gay sort of chap, wasn’t he?” murmured Ellery. “Lord, how can a man amass such a mess of perfectly useless adornments! Come, come, dad, we’re wasting time.”
“I s’pose,” grumbled the Inspector. He slammed the drawer shut, sat annoying his mustache for a moment, and then with a sigh rose.
He locked the door behind them and they trudged down the hall.
“One minute.” The old gentleman suddenly peered into the game-room through the cross-hall door. He withdrew his head at once. “It’s all right; she’s in there.”
“Who’s in there?”
“Mrs. Xavier. Gives us a chance to sneak up to her bedroom for a quiet little look-see.”
“Oh, very well. But I can’t imagine what you hope to find.”
They toiled upstairs, sweltering in the heat. Across the hall from the landing they could see Mrs. Wheary’s broad back bent over the bed in Mrs. Carreau’s room. She neither saw nor heard them. They went quietly into Mrs. Xavier’s room and shut the door.
It was the master bedroom, the largest chamber on the floor. It was predominantly feminine in character—a tribute, as Ellery remarked dryly, to the overpowering personality of its mistress. Very little of Dr. Xavier struck the eye.
“No wonder the poor fellow spent his days and nights in the study. I’ll wager he’s slept many a night away on that battered old couch downstairs!”
“Stop jabbering and keep an ear on the hall,” grunted the Inspector. “Rather not have her catch us in here.”
“You will save a lot of time and perspiration if you tackle that chiffonier. All the other pieces are unquestionably filled with Parisian fripperies of the genus female.”
The massive piece in question was, like the other furniture, of French design. The Inspector went through its compartments and drawers like an aged Raffles.
“Shirts, socks, underwear, the usual junk,” he reported. “And gewgaws. Lord what gewgaws! Whole top drawer crammed full of ‘em. Only these look new, not like those relics downstairs. Who says a medical man can’t be frivolous? Didn’t that poor fool know that stickpins went out of style fifteen years ago?”
“I told you it was a waste of time,” said Ellery irritably. Then a thought struck him. “No rings?”
“Rings?”
“I said rings.”
The Inspector scratched his head. “Now, by ginger, that is queer. You’d think a man with his fondness for trinkets would at least have one ring, wouldn’t you?”
“That was in my mind. I don’t recall any on his hands, do you?” said Ellery with a sharp note in his voice.
“No.”
“Hmm. This business of the rings is the oddest feature of the whole affair. We’d better watch our own or we’ll be losing them one of these fine days. Not that they’re worth anything, but then that’s what some one’s apparently after—rings that aren’t worth anything. Pshaw! It’s nutty. … How about Mrs. Xavier? Do a Jimmy Valentine and go through her jewel-box, will you?”
The Inspector obediently rifled Mrs. Xavier’s dressing-table until he found the box. Both men examined its contents with practised eyes. And although it contained several diamond bracelets and two necklaces and a half-dozen pairs of earrings, all of them clearly expensive, there were no rings at all, not even cheap ones.
The Inspector closed the box thoughtfully and put it back where he had found it. “What’s it mean, El?”
“I wish I knew. It’s queer, deucedly queer. No rhyme nor reason really. …”
A step outside caused them simultaneously to whirl and race noiselessly toward the door. They pressed close to each other behind it, scarcely breathing.
The knob moved a little, and stopped. There was a click as it moved again, and then the door very slowly pushed inward. It stopped half-ajar and they could hear some one’s hoarse breath through the crack. Ellery squinted through it and stiffened.
Mark Xavier was standing with one foot in his sister-in-law’s room and the other in the corridor. He was pale and his body rigid with tension. He stood there that way without stirring for a full minute, as if he were debating whether to go in or go back. How long he would have remained that way Ellery was never to know; for of a sudden he whirled, hastily closed the door, and from the sound of his footsteps made off on a run down the hall.
The Inspector pulled the door open and peered out. Xavier was padding along the carpeted corridor toward the farther end, where his room lay. He fumbled with the knob for a moment, pulled his door open, and vanished.
“Now what did that mean?” murmured Ellery, emerging from Mrs. Xavier’s room and closing the door behind his father. “What scared him, and why did he want to sneak in there at all?”
“Somebody coming,” whispered the Inspector. The two men sped across the hall to their own room. They wheeled and walked leisurely back again, as if they were just going downstairs.
Two neatly brushed young heads appeared from below. It was the twins coming upstairs.
“Ah, boys,” said the Inspector genially. “Going in for a nap?”
“Yes, sir,” said Francis; he seemed startled. “Uh—you been up here long, sir?”
“We thought—” began Julian.
Francis paled; but something must have flashed between him and his brother, for Julian stopped.
“A little while,” smiled Ellery. “Why?”
“Did you see anybody—come up, sir?”
“No. We’ve just come out of our bedroom.”
The boys grinned rather feebly, shuffled their feet for a moment, and then went into their own room.
“Proving,” murmured Ellery as they descended the staircase, “that boys will be boys.”
“What d’ye mean?”
“Oh, it’s most obvious. They saw Xavier make for the upper floor and followed him out of sheer curiosity. He heard them coming up and ran. Did you ever know a normal boy who didn’t love to wallow in mysteries?”
“Hunh,” said the Inspector, compressing his lips. “That may be, but how about Xavier? What devilment was he up to?”
“What devilment was he up to,” said Ellery soberly, “indeed.”
* * *
The house wilted under the noon sun. Everything was hot to the touch and slithery with ash-grime. They lolled about in the comparative coolness of the game-room, too listless to talk or play. Ann Forrest sat at the grand piano and fingered a meaningless tune; her face was moist with perspiration and her fingers were wet upon the keys. Even Smith had been driven from the furnace of the terrace; he sat by himself in a corner near the piano, sucking a cold cigar and blinking his froggy eyes from time to time.
Mrs. Xavier for the first time in over a day awakened to her responsibilities as a hostess. For hours now she had seemed to be emerging from a bad dream; her face was softer and her eyes not so agonized.
She rang for the elderly housekeeper. “Luncheon, Mrs. Wheary.”
Mrs. Wheary was visibly distressed. She wrung her hands and paled. “Oh, but, Mrs. Xavier, I—I can’t serve,” she whispered.
“And why not?” demanded Mrs. Xavier coldly.
“I mean I can’t serve a formal luncheon, Mrs. Xavier,” wailed the old lady. “There—there isn’t really enough variety … enough to eat, you see.”
The tall woman sat up straight. “Why—You mean we’ve run out of provisions?” she said slowly.
The housekeeper was surprised. “But you must have known, Mrs. Xavier!”
She passed her hand over her forehead. “Yes, yes, Mrs. Wheary. Perhaps I—I didn’t notice. I’ve been a little upset. Isn’t there—anything?”
“Just some canned things, Mrs. Xavier—salmon and tuna and sardines; there’s plenty of that; and just a few tins of peas and asparagus and fruit. I’ve baked bread this morning—there’s still a little flour and yeast—but the eggs and butter and potatoes and onions are gone, and the—”
“Please. Make up some sandwiches. Is there any coffee left?”
“Yes, Madam, but no cream.”
“Tea, then.”
Mrs. Wheary flushed and went away.
Mrs. Xavier murmured: “I’m so sorry. We were a little short to begin with, and now that the grocer’s missed the weekly delivery, and the fire—”
“We quite understand,” said Mrs. Carreau with a smile. “This isn’t the usual situation and we shouldn’t stand on the usual ceremony. Don’t distress yourself—”
“We’re all good soldiers, anyway,” said Miss Forrest gaily.
Mrs. Xavier sighed; she did not look directly at the small woman across the room.
“Perhaps if we went on short rations,” began Dr. Holmes hesitantly.
“It looks as if we’ll have to!” cried Miss Forrest, banging out a horrible chord, and then she blushed and fell silent.
No one said anything for a long time.
Then the Inspector said softly: “Look here, folks. We may as well face the facts. We’re in one devil of a fix. Up to now I’d hoped those people down there might do something with the fire.” They were regarding him furtively, striving to mask their alarm. He added in haste: “Oh, they undoubtedly will yet. …”
“Did you see the smoke this morning?” said Mrs. Carreau quietly. “I saw it from my bedroom balcony.”
There was another silence. “At any rate,” said the Inspector hurriedly, “we mustn’t give up. As Dr. Holmes suggests, we’ll have to go on a very strict diet.” He grinned. “That ought to suit the ladies, eh?” They smiled feebly at that. “It’s the sensible thing to do. It’s just a question of holding out as long—I mean, until help comes. Just a question of time, you see.” Ellery, buried in the depths of a big chair, sighed noiselessly. He felt horribly depressed. This slow, slow waiting. … And yet his brain would not give him rest. There was a problem to be solved. The persistent wraith was annoying him again. There was something. …
“It’s very bad, isn’t it, Inspector?” said Mrs. Carreau softly. Her eyes strayed to the twins sitting quietly opposite her, and the queerest pain came into them.
The Inspector made a helpless little gesture. “Yes, it’s—Well, it’s bad enough.”
Ann Forrest’s face was as white as her sports dress. She stared at him and then looked down and clasped her hands to conceal their trembling.
