Ellery queens double doz.., p.13
Ellery Queen's Double Dozen, page 13
“As you please, Harry.” There was a polite smile at his little joke about the peppercorn. Nothing about preferring to have it on a proper business footing. In a month she sent him a surveyor’s report and specifications. Nothing—not one word about his kindness. Some weeks later, in a pause following discussion of a film, she remarked, “Mrs. Harbutt says that when she came in with the tea tray that day, Uncle was telling you about George III.”
“Quite right! And very glad I was to see her.” So far, his finesse had always succeeded and he tried it again. “I was amused by the way she instructed him to warm up some food she had prepared for the next day.”
“She told the police that somebody—not Uncle John—had warmed up the pie and pretended to eat it.”
There was no follow-up, nor did she expect him to make any answer. He wondered why she would blurt out that sort of thing, like a feather-head, when she was in fact an uncommonly self-possessed woman. He was not afraid of her. All her blurting could be done in the presence of the police without the possibility of their learning anything dangerous.
The climax came in the eighth month—in a theater, of all inappropriate places. The play was a successful light comedy and both responded to it. As the lights were lowered after the second act, she leaned toward him.
“I drove down to the Wey Valley last Saturday. You said there were at least two hundred outworked gravel pits. There is only one. And it’s our gravel pit.”
He sat through the last act, not hearing a word of it. But he did hear her laughing. She was attending to the play and she smiled and applauded when the cast took their curtain calls.
He gave the taximan his own address. As they entered the flat together, he had the impression that she knew what he was about to say.
“Lorna, dear. Will you please tell me whether or not you believe I killed your uncle?”
“I do not believe that you killed Uncle John,” she answered without hesitation. “Wait, please, Harry. I do have the feeling sometimes—like a sort of waking dream—that you might have, even that you did. I hoped the feeling would pass if we went out together—”
“—While you drop in little bits like that bit about the gravel pit? To see how the puppet dances on the string?”
“That’s unworthy of you. It’s—petty.”
“I know it is, but I can’t help it. You’ve known me from childhood but you’re able to believe that I might turn out to be the kind of uncivilized brute we both despise.”
“It’s not as clear-cut as that—it’s a sort of nervous twitch. Doesn’t it count that I want us to be friends?” She was almost pleading. “Can’t we go on as we are?”
“I don’t think so,” he said carefully. “I can never drive out that—waking dream—of yours, because I am an ordinary man, the ordinary mixture of good and evil. Capable, no doubt, of all sorts of abominations, but not very likely to put them into action. But that’s not good enough, is it?”
“I never guessed it would seem to you like that.” She was grave and unhappy. “Do you want us not to meet again?”
Her words suddenly fanned a passionate desire—as if he demanded her body to prove to himself that he had not forfeited his civilization. Now or never.
“Wrong side up, Lorna. I want us to come closer. I want us to cut out haverings and daytime nightmares. You know that I love you and have been waiting for you to give me a chance to say so.” He dropped onto the settee beside her. “Yes? No?. . .You don’t know? In a minute we’ll both know.”
As once before, in an outworked gravel pit, he made a scuffle of it. She remained inert while he engaged himself in the unrewarding business of kissing her. Then she stood up and in that moment he knew that it was fear of her contempt that had stampeded him into the murder. Puppet.
“When you’re not offered what you want, you grab it.” Her voice shut out himself and his misery. “Goodbye, Harry.”
“All right! But we needn’t be stagey. Let me drive you home.” She had turned her back and was already letting herself out of the flat. “Unless you’re afraid of being grabbed and murdered on the way,” he shouted after her.
That certainly was petty, he reflected. All right, so it was petty. And there would be some more pettiness tomorrow. If she thought she would still get Rose Cottage without even saying thank-you, she would find she had pulled the wrong string. He was not a puppet. Rose Cottage was inconsiderable as a property, and as a symbol it symbolized only—puppetry.
Before he went to bed he wrote an order for its demolition.
A man was behaving in an unusual manner with a cottage. A man had behaved in an unusual manner with a bell-rope. There was nothing to connect the two events—nothing except the mind of Detective Inspector Rason.
From the local contractor he heard the whole story of Rose Cottage, and he enjoyed every word of it. He interviewed various local persons including George Dobson, who told him the bicycle story and other things which were already in the dossier—events which he now re-interpreted by pinning them all on the bell-rope.
A week later he reported to Chief Inspector Karslake. “Thaleham case. Remember that bell-rope? What does a sane man want with a bell-rope? He wants it to ring a bell. See what I mean, sir?”
“No,” said Karslake. “Do you?”
“Brendwright never agreed to deal. The old loony got hot about it and Finchmoor wanted to ring the bell hoping it would bring somebody to help cool him down—not knowing that the bell-rope was a dummy. Meaning, they quarreled like hell and in the end Finchmoor lassoed him with the bell-rope.”
“Maybe,” grunted Karslake. “Look—unless you’ve got a witness that Finchmoor did not dine at his club at 8:15 and then go back to his flat and stay there—”
“If I’d got that I’d have pulled him in. I wrote him a nice letter, asking him if he could drop in one day this week and tell me why he’s demolishing Rose Cottage. He’s downstairs now. If I may use your intercom I’ll tell ’em to show him into my room.”
“All right,” Karslake conceded, holding himself in, “but if you bring in any of that bell-rope bilge I shall break up the party.”
When Finchmoor was announced Rason admired his stance. Not the slightest trace of anxiety. Indeed, Harry felt no anxiety. He knew that, by the nature of the case, no new event could rivet the time of death to his movements.
Civilities were exchanged. “Mr. Finchmoor has kindly come along to clear up the mystery of Rose Cottage for us,” said Rason. “It’s not very mysterious,” began Finchmoor. He outlined the facts, beginning with Mrs. Harbutt posting Brendwright’s letter enclosing the check for fifty pounds to start restoration. “When I found Miss Brendwright had lost interest I thought I’d clear the site for a modern house.”
Finchmoor’s self-satisfaction, thought Rason, made it easy to hit him.
“If Brendwright was alive when you left the house—you mustn’t mind my putting it like that, Mr. Finchmoor—why didn’t he write at once to cancel the order and save his fifty quid?” Rason added. “I mean, you tell us he had just made a deal with you which blotted him out from everything except the manor house. Looks as if he didn’t understand what he was doing.”
“He certainly did understand,” asserted Finchmoor. “He was quite clear about his legal position. I had brought all the papers in the case but he only glanced at one letter—he accepted the documents as read.”
“Then try it this way,” persisted Rason. “You expected a bit of an argument. But within a short time you clinched the deal. Weren’t you a bit surprised at your success?”
“I don’t know about that,” smiled Finchmoor. “I certainly expected it to take a bit longer.”
“Then why were you in such a mortal hurry, Mr. Finch moor, to catch that 6:20 train?”
That told Finchmoor there was more in it than Rose Cottage. “I hardly know, after all this time. I suppose it was in my mind that I would have to make a digest of our discussion and link it up with the documents—for my lawyers.”
“You would have missed that train but for George Dobson’s bike—you very nearly missed it with the bike. Dobson says you wobbled all over the road.”
“I hadn’t ridden one since I was a boy—but I did manage it.”
“We know that Mr. Finchmoor caught the 6:20,” put in Karslake.
“We do, sir,” beamed Rason. “We checked it by the time at which he dined at his club, didn’t we? But I’m still worried about all those legal documents, et cetera, which Brendwright did not read.”
“He didn’t need to read them, Mr. Rason,” said Finchmoor patiently. “He accepted my statements—”
“Yes, but I mean what did you do about ’em. When you were wobbling about on Dobson’s bike, were you balancing a big heavy deedbox on the handlebars?”
Good murderers don’t panic. Finchmoor’s boast now helped him to keep up appearances.
“I don’t remember.”
Rason kept up the pressure.
“Dobson remembers that you were carrying nothing. So does Hawkins, the stationmaster, who bundled you into the train. So—when you caught the 6:20, you had left your deedbox in the manor house.” Rason shuffled papers from the dossier, but it was only stage business. “The following morning you returned that deedbox to Safe Deposit—you said so yourself. Now, Mr. Finchmoor, how did you regain possession of your deedbox? Did you return that night in your car—”
Finchmoor was not listening. He was thinking about Lorna—and the color of truth. . .
BORDEN DEAL
Tough Cop
Miss Millie had been his old schoolteacher, ’way back in the tenth grade, and now she had been brutally murdered. . .Mr. John was glad he was a tough cop.
I’m tough enough, though it’s not anything to brag about. It’s part of my job—like being a good typist for a secretary or liking people for a politician. I catch most of the dirty work, not just because I’m tough but because I look tough. That’s part of my natural equipment, too.
It doesn’t bother me. I can look into the mirror every morning and shave that ugly mug of mine—with the underslung jaw and the little eyes and the nose that got broken twice when I tried to do a little boxing in my younger days—without worrying that I’m not Tony Curtis. There’s a lot of satisfaction in knowing that you’re good at the work you do. My face and my big hands and my hulking shoulders are just as much a part of my equipment as the gun on my hip.
I do a lot of the interrogation. So I wasn’t surprised to get a call from the jail asking me to come down and question a suspect in the Miss Millie Burden killing. I was still out at the Burden house, watching the younger fellows go through the routines they learned at the F.B.I. school. The body was already gone by then, and there was really no use in my hanging around there any more.
But I did. I’d known Miss Millie for a long time. A small town like ours, you know everybody. Miss Millie had taught me in the tenth grade at school. She was a little sprite of a woman with a sharp kindly face, one of the toughest teachers in the school, the kind of tough teacher that you either like a lot or you hate the guts of. I’d always liked her. And now she had had her brains knocked out of her head all over her kitchen floor.
She lived alone. It was the big old house the Burdens had always lived in. They were all gone now but Miss Millie. She’d retired from teaching long since, of course, living on her social security and the little bit of Burden money that was still left nobody knew how much or how little it was—and puttering around in her garden all day every day.
I looked around the kitchen one more time after I put down the phone. “They’ve got somebody down at the jail,” I said to the eager bloodhounds.
They stopped hound-dogging and looked up at me, their faces blank and somewhat disappointed because the suspect had been picked up by the old police routine instead of being detected by their new methods.
“Found any fingerprints?” I asked them.
One of them shook his head. “Whoever did the job was careful,” he said. “No prints here but Miss Burden’s.”
I nodded. “I’m going down to the jail,” I said.
I walked through the hall of the big silent house and out onto the porch. I went down the walk to my car and got in. I looked back toward the house, wondering what was going to happen to it now. It was a shame. Some people you expect to die violently—but not Miss Millie. I shook my head and went on. I was at the jail in ten minutes. I walked into the office and looked at the Sheriff and the Chief of Police. They were both big men, but the Chief had a pleasant face, full of smiling. The Sheriff was a grim and impressive man. The Chief had been on the force nearly as long as I had been, and the Sheriff had been in and out of office almost as long. “Have you got him?” I said.
“We haven’t talked to him yet,” the Sheriff said. “We were waiting for you, Mr. John.”
I nodded. “What’s the deal?”
“He was picked up out on the highway, trying to hitchhike out of town,” the Sheriff said. “We got him on a routine sweep as soon as we heard about Miss Millie.”
I nodded again. “It figured to be simple,” I said. “Let’s go look at him.”
The Sheriff picked up his hat. “I’ll check my men,” he said. “No use me hanging around here. You can handle it from here on.”
“Sure,” I said. “See you.”
He bobbed his head and went out. I led the way back to the cells. The kid was sitting on a bunk, staring down at the floor between his feet. He looked up when I stopped in front of the cell door.
“Searched him yet?” I said to the policeman guarding him.
“No, sir, Mr. John,” he said. “The Sheriff shook him down for weapons. But we waited for you.”
I nodded. That was the way I liked it. There’s an art to interrogation. If I was going to do the job, I didn’t want any body messing up the field beforehand.
I opened the cell door. “What’s your name, kid?”
He looked up at me. He was young. He was scared and defiant at the same time. “Billy Roberts,” he said.
I paused, studying him for a moment. His face was dirty but it was the open, friendly kind of face you can like right off the bat. There was nothing to him of the television juvenile delinquent—his hair was cropped close to his head in a crew cut and he didn’t wear any of the television-type clothing. He had on a pair of shabby pants and a fairly new sports shirt. His hair was sandy, with a touch of red in it, and if he ever washed his face you’d probably see freckles there. I thought of Miss Millie. Just the kind of guy she’d bring into her kitchen to feed him a meal.
“Come along,” I said. “And bring that.” I motioned to the battered suitcase resting against the bars on the outside of the cell.
I turned my back and walked along the corridor. I didn’t look back to see if he followed. That was the job of the patrol man. I was already working on the interrogation procedure, you see, and I had to let just enough of my toughness show to make him uncertain about his own stamina.
The Chief came along, too. I led the way to the Interrogation Room. It’s a plain room with a table in the middle where we drink—coffee, usually—but all that had been cleared out for this job. I stopped and turned around.
“Empty your pockets,” I said.
His voice was high, jerky. “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I tell you.”
I kept on looking at him. “Empty your pockets,” I said again in a reasonable voice.
He jerked his hands toward his pockets and began turning them out. There was a small penknife, a book of matches, a package of cigarettes, a wallet, a few coins. That was all.
I picked up the wallet in my big hands and looked inside. There was a dollar in the bill compartment. I began probing the card sections with a thick finger, taking out his driver’s license and photographs, all the junk everybody carries around. Then I hit paydirt. In the last compartment, folded thin, I found some bills. There were a good many of them, mostly fives and tens, with two or three twenties. I guess there was maybe a hundred and fifty dollars all told.
“Where did you get the money?” I said.
His face closed up tight and stubborn. I stood watching him for a moment, holding the bills. They were old bills, worn and crumpled, and they felt gritty under my fingertips. I looked at them closely, then shook them against the table. Tiny white crystals shook off onto the surface. I thought about the sugar bowl in Miss Millie’s kitchen. It had been smashed on the floor, the white sugar spilled out of its brokenness just like her brains had spilled out of her broken head.
“Where did you get the money?” I said. “It’s mine,” he said in his high jerky voice. “Sure,” I said. “But where did you get it?”
“I was working for a circus,” he said. “Up until a week ago. Cosmos Brothers. They were about to fold, so I blew the lot before they started skipping paydays. That’s the money I saved.”
“What did you do?”
“I was an elephant man,” he said. “You know. . .”
“An elephant man with a circus can save that kind of money?”
His face closed up again. He reached for the cigarettes and fumbled one out of the pack. I waited until he had put it into his mouth and had reached for the book of matches.
“Leave the cigarettes alone, kid.” I said.
He looked at me without believing. I took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it into my own. I lit it, slowly, watching his face hungry for the steadying assurance of the tobacco. I puffed the smoke at him.
“Let’s see what’s in the suitcase.”
The Chief and the patrolman watched as the kid lifted the suitcase to the table and opened it. I poked at the jumbled clothing inside—another pair of pants, two shirts, and some under wear. I tumbled it out, dropping it on the floor piece by piece as I went through.
Then I turned my attention to the suitcase itself. In one pocket there was a toothbrush and a razor and a bar of soap wrapped in toilet paper. In the other was a watch. I took it out, looked at it, and laid it on the table.
