The Bizarre Murders, page 73
“If you were innocent,” said Moley sternly, “didn’t you realize that by running away you were making it look bad for yourself?”
“I had to get away,” she said desperately. “I was afraid they’d find out. I went right away because if Jorum saw he was dead he’d have raised an alarm and I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the grounds. And then there were those papers.”
Moley scratched his ear, frowning. There was the unmistakable ring of truth in the woman’s voice and story. True, he had an excellent circumstantial case against her, the stenographic report of her story safely made, but…He glanced at Ellery’s face as that lean young man turned away for an instant, and he was startled.
Ellery whirled about, sprang to the woman’s side, grasped her arm. She cried out, shrinking back. “You’ve got to be more explicit!” he said fiercely. “You say that when you first saw Marco on the terrace he was stark naked?”
“Yes,” she quavered.
“Where was his hat?”
“Why, on the table. His cane, too.”
“And the cloak?”
“Cloak?” The woman’s eyes widened with genuine surprise. “I didn’t say his cape was on the table. Or did I? I’m so mixed up—”
Ellery slowly released her arm. There was an agony of hope in his gray eyes. “Oh, it wasn’t on the table,” he said in a strangled voice. “Where was it—on the flagstones of the terrace? But of course. That’s where it must have been when the murderer threw it down to undress him.” His eyes were glassy now, glaring in their concentration on her lips.
She was bewildered. “No. It wasn’t on the terrace at all. I mean—what’s all the fuss about? Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it! I didn’t mean anything! I see you think—” Her voice had risen to a scream again.
“Never mind what I think,” panted Ellery, gripping her arm again. He shook her so violently that she gasped and her head flopped back. “Tell me! Where was it? How did it get there?”
“When I read the note upstairs, in his room,” she muttered, her face grayer than before, “I didn’t want to take the chance of going down to the terrace empty-handed. I wanted an excuse for being there if somebody caught me. I saw his cape lying on the bed; he’d forgotten to take it with him, I guess.” Something hotly fierce flared into Ellery’s face. “I picked it up and took it down with me, to say that he had sent me for it—if somebody should stop me. Nobody did. When I saw he was naked I was—was glad I had it to put over him…”
But Ellery had flung her arm from him and stepped back, drawing a breath from his toes. Moley, the Judge, the stenographer looked at him with puzzled, almost frightened, eyes. He seemed to be swelling, to have filled out suddenly.
He stood very still, gazing over the woman’s head at the blank wall of Moley’s office. Then, very slowly, his fingers dipped into his pocket and came out with a cigaret.
“The cape,” he said, so low they barely heard the words. “Yes, the cape…The missing piece.” He crushed the cigaret in his hand and spun about, eyes shining madly. “By God, gentlemen, I’ve got it!”
CHALLENGE
To the Reader
“IN THE MOUNTAINS OF truth,” quoth Nietzsche, “you never climb in vain.”
No one outside the realm of fairy tales ever scaled a mountain by standing at its foot and wishing himself over its crest. This is a hard world, and in it achievement requires effort. It has always been my feeling that to garner the fullest enjoyment from detective fiction the reader must to some degree endeavor to retrace the detective’s steps. The more painstakingly the trail back is scrutinized, the closer the reader comes to the ultimate truth, and the deeper his enjoyment is apt to be.
For years now I have been challenging my readers to solve my cases by the exercise of close observation, the application of logic to the winnowed facts, and a final correlation of the individual conclusions. I have been encouraged to persist in this practice by the warm testimonials of many correspondents. To those of you who have never tried it, I earnestly recommend that you do. You may run afoul of a snag somewhere along the line, or you may indeed after much thinking get nowhere at all; but it has been the experience of thousands that, successful or not, the effort is amply repaid by the heightened pleasure.
Technically there are no snags. The facts are all here at this point in the story of John Marco’s death. Can you put them together and logically place your finger on the one and only possible murderer?
ELLERY QUEEN.
Chapter Fifteen
OF AN INTERRUPTION
THE DRIVE BACK TO Spanish Cape was accomplished in an electric silence. Mr. Ellery Queen sat hunched in the tonneau of the big car, nursing his lower lip and buried miles deep in thought. Judge Macklin glanced at his frowning face from time to time with curiosity; and Tiller, in the front seat, could not refrain from turning his head at periodic intervals. No one said anything, and the only sound was the rather menacing whine of a rising wind.
Ellery had been impervious to all of Inspector Moley’s frantic questions. The poor Inspector was beside himself with nervous excitement.
“Too soon,” Ellery had said. “I’m sorry if I’ve given you the impression that I had the whole answer to this extraordinary problem. That story Pitts told about Marco’s cape…it points the way. Very definitely. I see now where I was wrong, and where the murderer’s plan went awry; and in this case that’s more than half the battle. But I haven’t thought it out, Inspector. I need time. Time to think.”
They had left Moley in a state of apoplectic frenzy, with an exhausted and bewildered prisoner on his hands. Mrs. Marco, alias Pitts, was formally booked on a charge of attempted blackmail and placed in the county jail. There had been a sad interlude when two young people, their eyes swollen with weeping, had arrived to visit the county morgue and take legal possession of the body of Laura Constable. Detectives and reporters had harried Ellery with questions. But in the midst of pandemonium he maintained unsmiling peace, and at the first opportunity they had slipped out of Poinsett.
It was only when the car swung off the main highway at Harry Stebbins’s establishment and entered the park-road leading to Spanish Cape that the silence was broken.
“Bad storm comin’ up,” remarked the police driver uneasily. “I’ve seen these winds up here before. Look at that sky.”
The trees of the park were in violent agitation, swaying to a steadily increasing gale. They emerged from the parkland and began to traverse the neck of rock from the mainland, and they saw the evening sky. It was the color of smudgy lead and was filled with huge swollen black clouds racing toward them from the heaving horizon. On the neck they took the full force of the wind and the driver wrestled with the wheel to keep the car on the road.
But no one replied, and they reached the shelter of the cliff-walls on the Cape without mishap.
Ellery leaned forward and tapped the driver’s shoulder. “Stop, please. Before you climb to the house.” The car braked to a halt.
“Where on earth—” began the Judge, raising his shaggy brows.
Ellery opened the door and stepped out into the road. His forehead was still wrinkled, but there was a feverish gleam in his eye. “I’ll be up soon. I think I’ve got my canines into this thing properly. On the scene itself…” He shrugged, smiled in adieu, and sauntered down the path leading toward the terrace.
The sky was rapidly darkening. A flash of lightning lit up the path; they saw Ellery reach the head of the terrace stairs and begin the descent.
Judge Macklin sighed. “We may as well go up to the house. It will rain soon, and he’ll come running back in a hurry.”
They drove on up to the house.
Mr. Ellery Queen slowly descended the terrace steps, paused on the gay flags for a moment, and then went to the round table at which John Marco had died and sat down. Buried between sheer walls of stone at a depth of more than forty feet, the terrace was a haven from the worst of the wind; and he relaxed comfortably in the chair, slumping on his spine in his favorite position for reflection, and staring out through the entrance to the Cove at the sea. Within the limits of his vision there was no craft to be seen; the storm had made them scurry for shelter. The sea boiled now in the Cove, raising a constant spume.
It faded before his eyes as he looked at more distant and immaterial things.
The terrace grew darker as he sat there; until finally, aroused by the blackness, he sighed and rose and went to the stairhead and switched on the overhead lamp. The umbrellas were swaying and fluttering. He sat down again and took up paper and pen and dipped the pen in the inkpot and began to write.
A gigantic drop, from the sound it made, plopped on one of the umbrellas. He stopped writing and twisted about. Then, with a speculative look in his eye, he rose and went to the enormous Spanish jar standing to the left of the lowest step and peered around it. After a moment he stepped behind it. Nodding, he came out and repeated the operation with the jar standing at the right of the stairs. Finally he returned to the table, sat down, and with his hair blowing about in the wind resumed his writing.
He wrote for a long time. The drops increased in size, ferocity, and frequency. One spattered on the sheet before him, blotting a word. He wrote more rapidly.
He finished with the first gust of solid rain. Stuffing the sheets in his pocket he jumped up, turned out the light, and hurried up the path toward the stone steps ascending to the plateau on which the house stood. By the time he had reached the shelter of the patio his shoulders were sopping.
The portly butler met him in the main corridor. “Dinner has been kept hot for you, sir. Mrs. Godfrey has ordered—”
“Thank you,” Ellery replied absently, and waved his hand. He hurried toward the alcove where the switchboard stood, dialled a number, and waited with a serene expression.
“Inspector Moley…Ah, Inspector, I thought I’d catch you in…Yes. Quite. In fact, if you’ll come down to Spanish Cape at once I think we can settle this sad business to your satisfaction tonight!”
The insular interior of the living-room glowed with isolated lights. Outside in the patio, on the roofs, rain hissed and roared. A furious wind battered the windows. Even above the splash of the rain they could hear the trumpeting surf as it lashed at the cliffs of the Cape. It was a good night to be indoors and they all glanced gratefully at the blaze in the fireplace.
“We’re all here,” said Ellery in a soft voice, “but Tiller. I especially want Tiller. If you don’t mind, Mr. Godfrey? He’s been the one bright spot in this case and he deserves a reward.”
Walter Godfrey shrugged; he was for the first time dressed in something like a decent costume, as if with the recovery of his wife he had also recovered his sense of social responsibility. He tugged a bell-rope, said something curtly to the butler, and sank back beside Stella Godfrey.
They were all there—the three Godfrey’s, the two Munns, and Earle Cort. Judge Macklin and Inspector Moley, curiously subdued, sat a little away from the others; and it was significant that, although nothing of the sort had been discussed, Moley’s chair was nearest the door. Of the nine the only one who looked happy was young Cort. There was an almost fatuous expression of contentment on his face as he squatted at the knees of Rosa Godfrey; and from the dreamy look in Rosa’s blue eyes it was evident that the shadow of John Marco had lifted from both of them. Munn was smoking a long brown cigar, tearing it with his teeth; and Mrs. Munn was deathly quiet. Stella Godfrey, calm but taut, twisted her handkerchief in her hands; and the little millionaire was watchful. The atmosphere was distinctly oppressive.
“You called for me, sir?” asked Tiller politely, from the door.
“Come in, come in, Tiller,” said Ellery. “Sit down; this is no time to stand on ceremony.” Tiller rather timidly sat down on the very edge of a chair, to the rear, glancing at Godfrey’s face; but the millionaire was gazing at Ellery with a cautious alertness.
Ellery stepped to the fireplace and set his back against it so that his face was in shadow and his figure a black unrelieved mass against the flames. The light fell eerily on their faces. He took the sheaf of papers from his pocket and placed them to one side on a taboret, where he could glance at them. Then he applied a match to a cigaret and began.
“In many ways,” he murmured, “this has been a very sad affair. On more than one occasion this evening I have been prompted to shut my mind to the facts and go away. John Marco was a scoundrel of the deepest dye. Apparently in his case there was no middle ground between mala mens and malus animus. Unquestionably he possessed the criminal mind—unembarrassed by the slightest restraint of conscience. To our circumscribed knowledge alone he endangered the happiness of one woman, planned the ruin of another, blasted the life of a third, and caused the death of a fourth. Undoubtedly his ledger, if we only had entrée to it, shows many similar cases. In a word, a villain who richly deserved extermination. As you said the other day, Mr. Godfrey, whoever killed him was a benefactor of mankind.” He paused, puffing thoughtfully.
Godfrey said in a harsh tone: “Then why don’t you let well enough alone? Apparently you’ve arrived at a conclusion. The man needed killing; the world’s a better place without him. Instead of—”
“Because,” sighed Ellery, “my work is done with symbols, Mr. Godfrey, not with human beings. And I owe a outfit—or almost complete: that is, coat, trousers, shoes, socks, underclothes, shirt, necktie, and whatever may have been in the pockets. The first problem that must be solved, then, is: Why did the murderer undress the dead man and take away his, clothes? That there was a sane, an overwhelmingly sane, reason for this act of apparent insanity I knew; and that the whole solution depended upon its answer I felt instinctively.
“I turned the problem over in my mind until I wore it down to its component fibers. And finally I concluded that there were only five possible theories which would account for the theft of the garments of a murder-victim—any murder-victim, in the most general sense.
“The first.” continued Ellery, after a glance at his notes, “was the possible explanation that the murderer had done it for the contents of the clothes. This was especially important in the light of the existence of certain papers threatening the peace of mind of a number of persons connected with Marco. And, for all we knew, these papers might have been on Marco’s person. But if it were the papers the murderer was after, and they were in the clothes, why hadn’t he taken the papers and left the clothes, intact, behind? For that matter, if it were anything in the clothes, the murderer could have emptied the pockets or torn open linings and secured what he was after without taking the clothes from the body. So that was wrong, obviously.
“The second was an inevitable thought. Inspector Moley will tell you that very often a body is fished out of a river or is found in the woods with the clothes either damaged or missing altogether. In a large percentage of these cases the reason is simple: to conceal the identity of the victim, the destruction or theft of the clothing preventing identification. But this was quite plainly wrong in the case of duty to Inspector Moley, who has been kind enough to let me run wild in his bailiwick. I believe, when all the facts are known, that the murderer of Marco stands an excellent chance of gaining the sympathy of a jury. This was a deliberate crime, but it was a crime which—in a sense, as you imply—had to be done. I choose to close my mind to the human elements and treat it as a problem in mathematics. The fate of the murderer I leave to those who decide such things.”
A pall of hushed tension fell as he picked up the top sheet from the taboret, scanned it briefly in the flickering firelight, and set it down again. “I can’t tell you how confused and baffled I was until this very evening. There was something in the way of a lucid interpretation of the facts. I felt it, I knew it, and yet I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then, too, I had made one very glaring error in my previous calculations. Until the woman Pitts—who you now know is Mrs. Marco—revealed a certain fact, I was literally in a fog. But when she told me that the cape which Marco wore when he was found had been brought down to the terrace by her after Marco’s death—in other words, that the cape had not been on the scene of the crime at all during the murder—I saw daylight very clearly indeed, and the rest was merely a matter of time, application, and correlation.”
“What the devil can the cape have to do with it?” muttered Inspector Moley.
“Everything, Inspector, as you shall see. But now that we know Marco was not in possession of his cape at the time he was murdered, let us start from our knowledge of what he actually did possess. He was wearing a complete suit of clothes, with all the fixings. Now, we know that the murderer undressed Marco and took away the complete Marco; he was Marco, no one ever questioned his identity as Marco, and surely his clothing could not have indicated that he was any one else. There never was and cannot be any question of the identity of the corpse in this case, with or without clothes.
“Conversely, there was always the third possibility that in some way the theft of Marco’s clothes tended to conceal the identity of Marco’s murderer. I see blank looks. By that I mean simply that Marco may have been wearing something—or everything—belonging to his murderer, the discovery of which the murderer felt would be fatal to his own safety. But this, too, was clearly wide of the mark, for our invaluable Tiller—” Tiller folded his hands and looked down modestly, although his tiny ears were cocked like a terrier’s—“testified that the specific garments he laid out for Marco just before Marco redressed Saturday night were Marco’s own. Besides, these were the only garments missing from Marco’s wardrobe. Therefore Marco wore them that night and they could not have belonged to the criminal.”
