search and seizure without a warrant—and the presiding judge happened to be a stickler for the fine points. If you’ve got any reason to remember somebody with gratitude, it’s the judge, not Sheriff O’Neill. He felt so bad about your getting off that he ran you out of his county, threatening to string you up himself if ever he caught you horse-thieving again.” Hendrik Brass’s long neck stretched; he ran out his gray tongue and made a hissing noise. Then it all turned to cackles.

  “You’ve been doing a lot of homework, Mr. Queen. There’s more?”

  “Oh, yes,” the Inspector said, turning from Lynn, who was trying not to make a spectacle of herself. Her expression said: There goes my million. “Let’s go to Keith Palmer here. You said that you and Palmer’s mother were very close. You know how close your mother was to this man?” he said to Keith. “She couldn’t stand the sight of him. She queered his act with her best friend, whom he was trying to marry, by proving to the girl that Brass was a skunk who’d left a trail of broken hearts, and that the only reason he was after her was to get his hands on her father’s money. And he has the gall to imply that he and your mother had an affair!”

  “Is that true, Mr. Brass?” Keith asked the old man. “For God’s sake, why would you make up a story like that?”

  “Mr. Queen has the floor,” Hendrik Brass said, unveiling his dentures.

  “Let him answer your questions.”

  “Next case,” the Inspector said, unveiling his dentures. “That’s you, Dr. Thornton. Whose mother is supposed to have hauled him to his feet at a low point in his life, and restored his confidence in himself, I believe he put it. Doctor, your mother had about as much use for this man as Palmer’s did. He tried to get her to marry him, and put on a campaign of harassment that lasted six months—one time she had to call the police to get him out of her hair. She finally shook him when she married your father, and even then your father had to threaten to break his neck if he didn’t leave your mother alone.”

  Dr. Thornton seemed unsurprised. He examined Brass through his heavy glasses as if the old man were a specimen under his microscope.

  Brass was silent this time. He merely waved his gray hand at the Inspector. The crooked smile was still in evidence.

  “Which brings me,” the Inspector said, “to Miss Openshaw—”

  “Stop! I don’t want to hear it!” cried Cornelia Openshaw; she was completely engaged by now, Keith Palmer forgotten. She actually stopped up her ears.

  “Sorry, you’re part of this, Miss Openshaw, and in fairness to the others I can’t leave you out. In your case the finding is negative. Brass claims your parents saved his life when he tried to commit suicide.

  There’s not a record or a recollection on the part of anyone in a position to know that it was true. In view of what we’ve learned about the parents of the others, it makes more sense to assume that, whatever relationship your father and mother had with this man, it left him not with gratitude toward them but with some gripe he’s nursed for a generation.”

  “You can’t prove that,” snapped the spinster. “I for one am ready to believe anything Mr. Brass says.”

  “That’s your problem. Well, Brass? That’s the record. Want to correct it?”

  “So that’s why you’ve been making all those trips to the Old River Inn,” the old man tittered. “Hugo wondered about that, and so did I.”

  “Look, Brass, you’ve been caught dead to rights in at least five whop-pers, and the time’s come for you to start leveling. All these people’s parents are dead, so you can’t take anything out on them. But they left children. If you’re the sort of man who carries over his hates, you hate them. Then why have you invited them here? To make them your heirs, as you claim? After what I’ve dug up about you, nobody in his right mind would believe it. And there’s at least one of these people who didn’t from the start—the one who tried to wallop your brains out. If you ask me, he thought he was beating you to the punch! So what’s this all about, Brass?

  Did you get them here so you could have Hugo dose the lousy food he serves with arsenic? From the samples of his cooking, we wouldn’t be able to taste the difference. Come clean!”

  Old Brass, who had been nestled in the recesses of his big chair at the head of the table, inched forward and up until he was perched on the edge, the whole process recalling a horror movie in which the 3000-year-old mummy suddenly sits up in his sarcophagus.

  “Hugo,” he said briskly, “more coffee.”

  Hugo jerked, shambled forward with the coffeepot, and refilled the old man’s cup. He remained behind the chair, pot aloft, electric cord trailing, so that he looked like a plugged-in robot.

  “Ah.” Brass set the cup deftly down on the saucer. “You were asking me a question, Mr. Queen, and you’ve earned an answer. All that running about between here and the inn, meeting with your hirelings—if that’s what they are—getting their reports and so on—a bunch of incompetents, if you ask me, because they got everything right but the only thing that counts.”

  “What are you talking about?” The Inspector looked startled. “What didn’t they get right?”

  “Why, they dug up the facts,” sniggered Hendrik Brass, “about the wrong Hendrik Brass.”

  The snigger became a laugh that became a spasm that left the old man choking. He was slapping his skeletal shank with the marvelous humor of it all and trying to get his breath at the same time. There was rack-brained silence around the board until he achieved it, and after.

  “What d’ye mean the wrong Hendrik Brass?” Richard Queen roared.

  “Make sense, man. There’s more than one Hendrik Brass—that’s your story? You’ll have to do better than that!”

  “It’s easy enough to check,” Brass gasped; and to the Inspector’s disgust one of the birchbark lids came down over its sightless eye in a wink. “But you’ll find out I’m not lying. There’s been more Hendrik Brasses than you can count. It’s a family tradition.”

  “ What’s a family tradition?”

  “Two traditions. One: The family business has always been inherited by the eldest son. Any other sons take pot-luck. Two: The eldest son is always named Hendrik, after the founder of the Brass fortune. My father had two sons. I was the younger. My elder brother was baptized Hendrik Willem—sometimes the eldest was given a middle name; optional, you might say. But always Hendrik. When I came along I was named Simon.”

  “Then why are you calling yourself Hendrik?”

  “Because Henk is dead—I used to call Hendrik Henk. That left only me, you see. So I had a lawyer apply to the court to change my name legally to Hendrik Simon Brass. It’s been Hendrik Simon ever since.”

  “Hold on! Are you saying that the Hendrik I’ve been talking about, the one who bedeviled the parents of these people, was your older brother?”

  “I am.” The old man grinned his grisly grin. “And a wild one he was, too, in his young days, when Father was still alive and running the business. Almost as wild as I was. Got around the country quite a bit, Hendrik Willem did. But when Father died, Henk came home and settled down.

  Turned out a regular jackass for work, like Father. Work, work, work, that was Henk. Didn’t even take time enough off to get married, though he’d doodled around with women a-plenty in his early days. And one fine day Henk dropped dead from plain overwork, and the business and the money and this property fell into my lap. And here we are. Does that satisfy you, Mr. Queen?”

  The Inspector glared at him. There had been no reason for Polonsky, Angelo, Murphy, Giffin, and Kripps to suspect a different Hendrik Brass; it was the last thing anyone would have thought of. Still . . .

  “You haven’t straightened this out at all, Mr. Brass. It’s crooked as my Aunt Minnie’s arthritis—crookeder! Your brother did all those things?

  But you led us to believe you did. The identical involvements couldn’t apply to both of you, even if you both raised hell as young men. Two near-fatal mistakes by the same doctor, one involving you and one your brother? Two arrests for horse-stealing by the same Wyoming sheriff of the same brothers at different times? And so on? That would be a fairy tale, Brass. Or are you trying to make us believe that the stories you told us about the nice things those folks did were things done to you, but the stuff my friends dug out about the nasty things they did were things done to your brother? The same people? That would be an even taller story!

  “The way I see it, Brass, you personally had no contact at all with the parents of these people here. That being the case, you personally can’t possibly owe them a thing—not gratitude, not even hate. Or are you carrying on a feud in your brother’s name?”

  “That,” old Brass chuckled, “is for you to find out.”

  “Well, I don’t buy such a fairy tale, either. Feuds went out with the Hatfields and the Whatchamacallems. You’ve got some other reason, Brass. Why did you ask these folks to come here? It still gets down to the same thing: What’s this all about?”

  “Yes, that seems to be the six-million-dollar question, doesn’t it, Inspector?” said the old man with gummy enjoyment. “Oh, dear, I let the cat out of the bag, didn’t I? I don’t suppose anybody here but your wife knows. You didn’t know I knew you were a retired police inspector from New York, did you?”

  “No,” said the Inspector with something like respect, “I did not.” Which made them all stare at him, emphatically the Alistairs, who looked as if they had just turned over a rock with the usual unpleasant results.

  “I may be blind,” chortled old Brass, “but there’s nothing wrong with my head, hey? Or with my sources of information? All right, Inspector Queen, you’ve had considerable experience solving mysteries, suppose you solve this one. You find out what this is all about, eh? What say?” And all of a sudden his merriment drained out. He grimaced, and stamped his foot, and yelped, “I’ve had enough fun for one night. Hugo, you barrel of fish guts, my cane!”

  Chapter 5

  WHICH?

  Hendrik Brass’s “sources of information” turned up the next morning, in the singular.

  It happened while Dr. Thornton was attempting to dress the old man’s head in the brassy bedroom. Jessie was there to assist, Richard Queen was there because Jessie was there, and Hugo was there because of Richard’s standing order—humped in a corner not being used for the moment, flawed eyes trained on the bandages swathing the aged skull across the room as if they were about to reveal something rare and wonderful.

  Dr. Thornton said, “Peroxide, please,” and Nurse Queen obliged, and the doctor poured, soaking the old bandage above the wound. He waited while the peroxide bubbled and the caked blood underneath softened, and then gently unwound the bandage, Hendrik Brass lying there after his fit of temper with a mummified expression, sunken eyes shut; at the last deft pull the dressing came away like a charm, the eyes opened, and the old man said suddenly to his ceiling, “You have healing hands, Doctor.”

  “Thank you,” Dr. Thornton said. “ ‘I dressed his wounds; God healed them.’ “

  The ancient imp looked puzzled.

  “What?”

  “Something I read somewhere.”

  “God! I don’t believe in God.”

  The wound was ugly. There was a marked swelling along the puckered line of laceration, tightening the stitches so that the bald skull looked like a football with its laces showing.

  “I don’t think we’ll rebandage,” the doctor said. “Let the air get at it.

  I’ll remove the stitches in a day or two. Right now we’ll clean away the mess. Have you been having any headaches or head pains? Dizziness?

  Faintness?”

  “No.”

  “The God you don’t believe in has been good to you, Mr. Brass.” He and Jessie got busy with the clotted blood around the wound, Richard admiring his wife’s smooth movements; so that he was startled at the sound of Hugo’s voice.

  “The man is here, the man is here!”

  To the Inspector’s ears as he whirled it might as well have been “I smell the blood of an Englishman!”, in so ferocious a bass had Hugo uttered it. And then he saw the man.

  He stood lounging in the doorway, hands in pockets, with a smile that was half jeer, half sneer, and all of it nasty. It was hard to tell exactly what amused him, whether it was Hugo’s mastiff growl, the Inspector’s choreo-graphy, or the wound on Brass’s skull.

  Hugo took a step.

  “Watch it, Shorty,” the man in the doorway said. “I may not be as big as you, but I’m betting I’m a lot quicker on my pins. Not to mention hands.”

  Hugo took another step. The newcomer did not move, either forward or backward. But the Inspector saw him set himself.

  “He doesn’t like me,” the man said. “I don’t think we’ll ever make the scene.”

  “Who are you?” Richard demanded.

  “The name, dad, is Vaughn.” He kept his eyes on Hugo.

  “Who, who?” shrilled old Hendrik from the bed. “Vaughn?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Brass.”

  “Hugo,” the old man said peevishly. “I told you the last time. Stop.” Hugo stopped. The man uncoiled and advanced at a saunter into the bedroom.

  The Inspector was a peaceable citizen, but there was something about the newcomer that made him itch to push the fellow’s face in. For one thing, his very walk was an affront—a cross between a slither and a strut, engineered either to pounce or to strike an attitude, depending on circumstances. For another, his survey of Jessie was a laser performance, penetrating deep; it stripped her quite naked and, worse, discarded her in a sort of regretful contempt; he might just as well have said aloud: Twenty years ago, baby . . . maybe.

  You and I, the Inspector told him silently, were born enemies.

  He took a survey of his own.

  Either Vaughn’s custom pinstripe was made too small for him, or he had grown too broad and thick for it; it revealed rather than covered his body, which looked overmuscled. His hair was stiff and sandy and cropped short. His light gray eyes had diamond-chip glints in them. His nose was flattened in an otherwise angular face; perhaps it was the jaw that made the Inspector think of a cartoon, for it jutted out of his face like a 1925

  cowcatcher. His skin was pitted and unlovely and shrieked of sunlamps.

  The Inspector would not have been surprised to see him produce a racing form and a slice of Lindy’s cheesecake. There was a Bersag-liere-type hat on his head (he’s a sharpshooter, all right, the Inspector thought); he had not bothered to remove it. His shirt was navy blue and his tie was daffodil yellow. The hands were big and scarred. Yet there was intelligence in the spying eyes; or perhaps a primitive wisdom that had been picked up in back rooms and alleys. It was impossible to imagine a decent man liking him or a woman of any sort turning her head away.

  Anyway you looked at him, he was bad news.

  “What happened to your noggin?” Vaughn asked with the passion of a coroner.

  The old man said petulantly, “I will discuss that with you later, Mr.

  Vaughn.”

  “You should have contacted me. That overgrown slob is no security.

  Even a blind man ought to be able to see he’s got nothing between his cauliflowers but air.”

  “You,” Jessie said, “are a boor!”

  “Sure, doll,” Vaughn said, and dismissed her.

  “Please, please,” the old man said. “The rest of you get out.”

  “Hold it.” The Inspector’s mustache was bristling. “My wife, not to mention the others, has a vested interest in what goes on in this house. I want to know who this man is and why you’ve had him come here.”

  “You make like a cop,” Vaughn said before Brass could answer. “Say, I catch. Your name is Queen and you just got tied to Jessie Sherwood—I take it this broad here. Right, dad?”

  “You’re right, sonny, and nobody calls my wife a broad. Nobody!”

  “Pops, you turn me on.” The way the muscular back presented itself to him made the Inspector angry indeed. But Jessie put her hand on his arm.

  “You. With the lip rug. Which one would you be?” The doctor’s red mustache bristled, too. “I’m Dr. Thornton.”

  “Oh, yeah. Okay, you heard Mr. Brass. Out, the lot of you.”

  “I’m not leaving this room till I’ve had my answer,” the Inspector said.

  “Who is this hood, Mr. Brass?”

  “It’s all right, Vaughn,” Hendrik Brass said. “On second thought I want them to know. Why, Inspector, Mr. Vaughn is the private detective I engaged to find your wife and the others. He is also an attorney. He will draw up my will when I’ve made up my mind who gets my money.”

  “Attorney! Which school did you graduate from, Vaughn? Ossining?”

  “Harvard, Yale, Barbers’ College, what’s the big deal? You want to see my degree, dad?”

  “I’d like to see the permit for that gun you’re packing in the shoulder holster.”

  “And I thought this three-hundred-buck custom-built hid the heater. I better change tailors. Don’t fret your old gray head, Inspector. I’ve got a permit. Also, if you’re interested, a New York detective agency license.”

  “They’re letting anything operate in New York these days. All right, Mr. Brass, he’s your one-man Gestapo, and I can’t do anything about that, but I want it understood now that he’d better not try any rough stuff.

  Especially with the women. I know the breed.”

  Vaughn shrugged. “What’s the matter, granddad, aren’t the wedding bells swinging anymore? Look, if it’s like war you want, okay, only I choose my own turf. And just so we understand each other, watch that fat lip. An ex-cop is nothing by me.” He gave the Inspector no time to reply.

  “How long’s this job going to take, Mr. Brass?”

  “As long as it takes.” The old man looked sly. “How long can you be away from your place of business?”

 

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