Double, Double

Ellery Queen

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

Tuesday, April 4

Ellery had thought he was through with Wrightsville. He had even developed a nostalgia about it, like the man who looks back on his boyhood home through the filtering lens of a sentimental eye. He liked to say that, although he was born in New York City, Wrightsville was his spiritual birthplace—a town of complacent elms, wandering cobbles, and crooked sidestreets nestled in the lap of a farmers’ valley and leaning against the motherly abdomen of one of New England’s most matriarchal mountain ranges. Here it was always forest green or immaculate with snow. Orderly fields to look at, spiced air to breathe, the unfolding satisfaction of the hills. The whole place glittered in his memory like a diamond, or an emerald.

Never a ruby, because the blood color was uncomfortably close to the mark.

The envelope cast a ruby glow.

Ellery examined it again, not touching its contents.

It was a long envelope of flawed slick bluish paper, the correspondence offering of every five-and-ten cent store in America. This one, he felt sure, came from the stationery counter of the High Village Five-and-Dime. A few doors away dozed J. C. Pettigrew, Real Estate, and at the Five-and-Dime’s Upper Whistling side glared Miss Sally’s Tea Roome, where the ladies of Wrightsville’s haut monde forgathered daily to sample Miss Sally’s celebrated caloric specialty, Pineapple Marshmallow Nut Mousse. O Wrightsville! If you sighted due west along Lower Main from the entrance of the Five-and-Dime you could just make out the limy bronze back of Founder Jezreel Wright lording it over the rustcaked horse trough in the center of the Square (which was round) and beyond, on the Square’s western arc, the new marquee of the old Hollis Hotel, in certain of whose rooms could still be found the forthright china receptacles which the management in an earlier generation had provided for the nighttime convenience of its guests. And if you looked across the street, next door to Louie Cahan’s Bijou you saw the cheap white glare of the Kut-Rate Drug Co. Thunder mugs and fluorescence—in focus, this was Wrightsville; and rather peevishly Ellery flipped over the envelope which had photographed his illusion.

There was no return address.

Of course there wouldn’t be. People who addressed an envelope in penciled capitals, deliberately crude, announced their passionate shyness in the act. An anonymous letter. Ellery was tempted to scale it into his April fire.

He slit the envelope with care.

It contained some newspaper clippings held together at their upper lefthand corners by an ordinary steel pin.

There was nothing else in the envelope.

The topmost clipping advertised the masthead of the Wrightsville Record, Wrightsville’s only daily newspaper, and the date: Wednesday, February 1.

Two months old, then. Ellery read the story through.

It reported the death from heart failure of Luke MacCaby, 74, of 551 State Street, High Village.

Ellery did not recall the name, but there was a one-column cut of the dead man’s house and he thought he recognized it.

It was a very large porched, peaked, gabled, and turreted building painted the inescapable Victorian dirty tan; it was fancy with wooden embroidery and stained-glass fanlights and it drooped against the dreary earth on which it had stood for six or seven decades. State Street, which is the northeast spoke leading from the Square’s hub, is the broadest thoroughfare in town, and for several blocks it is stately and beautiful. But farther up it goes seedy. This was the fashionable residential district of Wrightsville around the turn of the century, before the old families moved up to the Hill. Now the down-at-the-heel mansions are populated by the lower middle class; some of them are rooming houses. Porches sag everywhere. Latticework is broken-toothed. Walks are cracked and hairy. The entire district cries out for carpentry and paint.

If the MacCaby house was the one Ellery recalled, it stood on the corner of State and Upper Foaming and it was the largest house and it cried out in the loudest tones of any house in the neighborhood.

MacCaby, said the Record, had been The Town Hermit. He had rarely ventured from the dilapidated premises in which he crept mysteriously about; he had not been seen around the Square or Lower Main, testified High Village tradesmen, for many years. In the old days MacCaby had been thought a miser, gloating over hypothetical piles of gold and diamonds in the gaslit interior of his ancestral hovel; but this rumor, whether made of myth or matter, apparently lacked vitality, for it had faded and died off; and for a long time now The Town Hermit had been considered a pauper subsisting on crusts. This was obviously not true, since he employed a caretaker, or companion, or servant—the story was vague as to the man’s status; but that Luke MacCaby had been in poor circumstances was attested by his physician, the well-known High Village general practitioner Dr. Sebastian Dodd (of whom Ellery had never heard, either). Dr. Dodd, interviewed by the Record, reluctantly confessed that for years he had kept sending the old man bills, until “I realized the poor old codger simply didn’t have enough to live on decently, so I stopped dunning him.” Nevertheless, Dr. Dodd had continued to take medical care of MacCaby to the day of MacCaby’s death. The old man had been suffering from a chronic heart ailment. To relieve his attacks Dr. Dodd had given him certain tablets.

So far as was known, Luke MacCaby was the last of his line; his wife had died in 1909 and they had had no “issue,” according to the Record. He left behind only the questionable memories of his caretaker-companion-servant, Harry Toyfell. Toyfell had cared for MacCaby for fifteen years. He was an old man himself—another of the town characters, it seemed, for he was known as The Town Philosopher. Even better, Toyfell was often seen at Gus Olesen’s Roadside Tavern on Route 16 in the company of Tom Anderson and Nicole Jacquard. At the encounter with Tom Anderson, Ellery warmed; here at last was an old acquaintance, he who was known to Wrightsville not unaffectionately as The Town Drunk and/or The Town Beggar. Nicole Jacquard eluded him for a moment. Unless … By gar! Back in ’40 or ’41 Ellery had been told of a Low Village French Canadian (in Wrightsvillese, “Canuck”) family named Jacquard, the heads of which had specialized in the production of children; hadn’t there been something about “another” set of triplets …? If Nicole Jacquard was that Jacquard, as seemed likely, he was not exactly a model of Low Village deportment. That Jacquard—and Ellery hoped he was motivated by nothing more reprehensible than the necessity of keeping the innumerable little Jacquard mouths filled—had been frankly known as The Town Thief. Ellery felt a positive glow; it was like coming home again.

There was little more to the newspaper story. Toyfell and his queer employer had been known “to fight like a cat and a dog.” Asked why he had remained in the sour ruin for so many years tending a crotchety hermit who (presumably) paid him little or nothing, Toyfell had replied in four profound words: “He liked flowers, too.” Toyfell had green fingers; he had worked miracles in the MacCaby garden, the only vital spot on the premises, with cuttings allegedly raped from North Hill estates as his material. The MacCaby Giant Gladiolus was a seasonal feature of Andy Birobatyan’s Wrightsville Florist Shop on Washington Street.

Now that his employer was dead, Toyfell was asked his “plans.” He replied: “For five years Mr. John Hart’s been pesterin’ me to take over his gardenin’. Guess I’ll do it now.” John Hart—John Spencer Hart—was the millionaire owner of “the old cotton mill” in Low Village, the Record reminded its readers. Knowing Wrightsville, Ellery was not astonished to learn that this was a locutionary tie with the past; no cotton had been milled in the old cotton mill for twenty years. Mr. John Spencer Hart’s millions came from dyes, and over the ugly plant at Washington and Lower Whistling ran the stainless steel legend, WRIGHTSVILLE DYE WORKS.

“So ends another romantic chapter in Wrightsville history. Services for the deceased will be conducted by Dr. Ernest Highmount, assistant pastor of the First Congregational Church on West Livesey Street. Interment will be at East Twin Hill Cemetery, in the MacCaby family plot.”

Requiescat in pace. And Harry Toyfell, may your new gardening job with Millionaire John Spencer Hart add material peace to your philosophy. But why in hell should anyone think I’d be interested?

Ellery glanced at the byline at the head of the clipping.

By Malvina Prentiss.

He shook his head and flipped the clipping back.

A second excerpt from the Wrightsville Record. A later one: Monday, February 13. And this second story was scareheaded. The Record had a sensation by the tail and it was shouting. (Somehow, it did not seem like the Record of Frank Lloyd’s day, or even of Diedrich Van Horn’s. It was blary. Under new publishership, apparently.)

The second clipping followed up the obituary story of February 1. Luke MacCaby, the eccentric old pauper, had been no pauper at all. He had died one of the wealthiest men in Wrightsville!

So there is matter in myth after all.

Secretly, MacCaby had been a full partner in the Wrightsville Dye Works.

Why MacCaby had chosen to remain a silent partner in a multimillion-dollar plant which had mushroomed during the war and had been spreading ever since “will never be known. According to Mr. Hart, Mr. MacCaby insisted that their business relationship be kept a secret without ever revealing his reason. Mr. Hart believes that Mr. MacCaby’s eccentricity,” etc.

It appeared that MacCaby had kept his stock, his dividends, virtually all his assets, in a large safe deposit box in the vaults of the Wrightsville National Bank; even the officers of the bank (said Mr. Wolfert Van Horn, president) had been ignorant of MacCaby’s partnership in the Wrightsville Dye Works. Hart had established a special account in a Connhaven bank; all partnership checks went into this account and MacCaby’s funds came to him—at his request, said Hart—in cash.

Sensation.

The story came out, said the Record, when Otis Holderfield, a local attorney, filed a will for probate with the County Surrogate which, said Holderfield, Mr. MacCaby had had him draw only a few weeks before the old man’s death.

But this was nothing compared with the revelation to come. Luke MacCaby had willed his entire estate to a well-known Wrightsvillian, a worthy man known for his good works; in fact—hold your breath, now—to none other than … Dr. Sebastian Dodd!

Sensation!

Dr. Sebastian Dodd’s fees were still two dollars “at the office,” three on house call. Dr. Sebastian Dodd’s patients were poor farmers, poor Low Villagers, poor High Villagers; he specialized in poverty. He was known to own only two suits and he ran an antediluvian “tin lizzie.” He could not have survived without the occasional Hill patient who, since Dr. Milo Willoughby’s death, came to him instead of to one of “the young men.” Dr. Sebastian Dodd’s waiting room was always full and his checking account always empty. He was so busy being a failure that he had even taken a young associate, Dr. Kenneth Winship, to help him stay poor.

This was the man who had come into an estate worth over four million dollars. The Record waxed ecstatic. Who said Virtue went Unrewarded?

Dr. Sebastian Dodd was flabbergasted. “Why, what can I say? I don’t know what to say. I never had the least idea … he never let on …” At first the elderly physician had insisted feebly that it must be a hoax. Four million dollars! But when Attorney Otis Holderfield cited him clause and codicil, and Mr. John Spencer Hart confirmed it, Dr. Dodd turned sparkly-eyed. He began to speak of the deplorable condition of the Wrightsville General Hospital. Until 1946, Dr. Dodd pointed out, Wrightsville’s only hospital had not even possessed a private pavilion. Its equipment was out-of-date and inadequate and its bed capacity far too small to cope with the medical needs of a community numbering ten thousand souls. “‘When I took over as chief of staff from the late Milo Willoughby in ’48,’ said Dr. Dodd,” said the Record, “‘I promised myself by golly I wouldn’t rest till the Wrightsville General got at least the modern children’s wing we need so awfully bad. Now, through Mr. MacCaby’s generosity, I can endow one.’”

To Harry Toyfell, The Town Hermit had left exactly nothing.

The Town Philosopher came nobly to the support of his reputation when the Record reporter asked him how he felt about having been overlooked in the will of the old man he had served for so long. “‘Thy money perish with thee,’” he said, the Record identifying the source of this wisdom as Acts VIII, 20. “The grave manured by gold grows weeds,” Toyfell had added, quoting himself this time (or the Record was unable to locate the quotation). “Money wouldn’t make me a better man, now would it? In the eyes of the Lord all men are equal. Read your Jesus. Read your Paine.” The Record commented on Toyfell’s Christian character and said there was a deep lesson for all its readers in this humble old man’s stern spirituality. The Record did a little quoting of its own, mentioning the needle’s eye.

No, Harry Toyfell had not suspected MacCaby’s affluence.

The story was bylined: By Malvina Prentiss.

Ellery, frowning, turned to the next-underlying clipping.

This one—it was the last—was dated Monday, February 20. One week later the story had shot up like the Beanstalk. John Spencer Hart had committed suicide.

This time Ellery read with naked devotion.

On learning that he was Luke MacCaby’s sole heir to some four millions of dollars, Dr. Sebastian Dodd had retained Otis Holderfield, the lawyer who had drawn MacCaby’s astonishing will, to watch over his legal interests. Accordingly, Holderfield had presented a letter for his new client’s signature which was addressed to Mr. John Spencer Hart, president of the Wrightsville Dye Works, requesting a preliminary accounting of the plant’s financial status. Dr. Dodd had signed the letter, Attorney Holderfield had mailed it to Mr. Hart by Registered Mail, Return Receipt Requested, the receipt had come back duly signed by addressee; and that night the millionaire had pleaded a grippey feeling, he had handed his wife into the Harts’ town-and-country job, watched her drive off to a housewarming at the Hallam Lucks’—who had just moved from Hill Drive to a magnificent new house on Skytop Road—stepped back into his house, and he had dismissed the four inside servants for the evening. Hart had then gone into his library, locked the door, written a note to his wife, and blown his brains out.

This spectacular effect had obviously rocketed from a cause, which could only have been the slightly dangerous legal letter the late millionaire had just received. (To the Record, faithfully reflecting Wrightsville mores, all “lawyer letters” had a sinister undertone.) But what was the fireworks ingredient? Investigation soon isolated it. Unknown even to his wife, Hart had been gambling and speculating like a madman for years, his acumen apparently having been restricted to the dye business. His personal fortune had been consumed; his interest in the Wrightsville Dye Works was eaten away; he had even gnawed a chunk out of his silent partner’s interest. Hart had teetered on the brink of ruin and prison at the very moment when his new partner’s formal request for an accounting arrived. A well-placed bullet seemed the reasonable solution.

A report from Finegold & Izzard, Certified Public Accountants (108 Upham Block, on the Square), revealed that the Wrightsville Dye Works was still in sound shape despite Hart’s reckless inroads. “‘No cut in personnel is contemplated, no,’ says Dr. Dodd, now sole owner of the dye works,” said the Record, “‘at least at present. As for management, I have had several long talks with George Churchward, who ran the plant under Mr. Hart since early in the war, and I’m convinced Mr. Churchward knows his business. As soon as the legal mess is cleaned up, Churchward becomes vice-president in full charge of plant operations. Meanwhile, he will continue in his present capacity.’” The Record pointed out that George Churchward had long been one of the most up-and-coming young plant managers in the industrial county and that he was 41, married to Angel Asperley Stone, popular daughter of Willis Stone (the well-known High Village mortician), and father of three of Wrightsville’s brightest “sun-suit set,” Charline Willis, 5, Love Asperley, 3, and George, Jr., 16 months. “Congratulations, George Churchward!”

John Spencer Hart was survived by his widow, Ursula Hart (nee Brooks), and their son Carver B., sophomore at Yale. “‘I understand John Hart left very little insurance,’ stated Dr. Sebastian Dodd today to the Record in an exclusive interview, ‘having borrowed the limit against his policies and let others lapse, so that Mrs. Hart and her son are being left practically destitute. I’m writing to her today. As soon as the dye works tangle and the MacCaby will are straightened out, Mrs. Hart will begin receiving a monthly income from the Works and this will continue for the rest of her life. And if young Carver wants a job, there’s one waiting for him.’”

Plans for the MacCaby-Dodd Children’s Wing of the Wrightsville General Hospital were being held up, explained Dr. Dodd in this interview, pending clarification of “the state of the Works,” viewed in the light of the late J. S. Hart’s “unfortunate personal investments.”

A human interest footnote to this latest chapter in what Ellery had already entitled The Adventures of Sebastian Dodd was appended by the Record reporter. Harry Toyfell, who had scarcely had time to take up his duties as head gardener of the Hart estate on North Hill Drive, “now finds himself out of a job for the second time in less than three weeks through the scythe of the Grim Ripper. However, Harry is taking ‘the slings and arrows of fortune’ like the grand old philosopher he is. He has already accepted a new job as gardener for one of Wrightsville’s leading citizens. We refer to none other than Dr. Sebastian Dodd.”

The story was signed: By Malvina Prentiss.

Ellery got up and tossed a fresh briquet into the fire.

But light was called for as well as heat.

Who had sent him the Record clippings? And why?

His first thought had been Emmeline DuPré. Emmeline DuPré was a hatpin of a woman, all length and steel and sting, who dwelt among the gentry at 468 Hill Drive, two doors from the great Wright place, and represented Art and Culture in Wrightsville by giving Dancing and Dramatic Lessons to the gentry’s youth. Miss DuPré had richly earned the sobriquet—in the Wrightsville nomenclature—of The Town Crier; the clapper of her tongue usually struck the tocsin of bad news. But on reflection Ellery decided this was subtler work. Emmeline DuPré dealt in black and white, not sinister gray.

That there was something sinister behind all this Ellery felt in his marrow. But what? Wrightsville knew him in his criminological capacity. But where was the crime? John Spencer Hart had committed a crime, but the criminal himself had solved his mystery. Was there a hidden crime? Did the anonymous clippings-sender suspect, or know, that foul play had occurred? But the editorializing news accounts from the typewriter of Malvina Prentiss gave no hint of any such possibility. Luke MacCaby had apparently died of a heart attack; he had had a long cardiac history and, even if he had not had a long cardiac history, life at 74 is routinely unreliable. As for Hart’s suicide, its motivation was thorough and convincing and the Record story had even observed, passim, that his suicide note to Mrs. Hart had been in his verified handwriting: the widow and son had both identified it at the inquest held by Coroner Grupp, whose scalpel eye no corruption would have escaped.

It was an annoyance.

Finally, Ellery put the envelope and its contents away in his odds-and-ends drawer.

It was probably a belated April Fools’ Day joke.

Still, the little mystery kept yapping at his heels.

Friday, April 7

When the second envelope arrived by special delivery three nights later, Ellery tore it open with shameless eagerness. That the sender was the same required two glances. The size and paper of the envelope, the crudely penciled address, the Wrightsville postmark, the blank reverse were identical.

One clipping from the Record, dated Monday, April 3, floated to his desk.

The Town Drunk had disappeared.

Tom Anderson was no more.

Ellery glared.

Investigation by Chief of Police Dakin had established, “almost to a dead certainty,” that Anderson was dead. His coat and hat had been found early Sunday morning, April 2, at the edge of Little Prudy’s Cliff in The Marshes. (The Marshes, Ellery recalled, was a tangle of sulphurous swamp just outside the eastern boundary of Low Village; it was the bogeyland of Low Village’s young and the breeding place of a superior strain of mosquito.) There was “unmistakable evidence,” said Chief Dakin, “of a tussle at the edge of the cliff,” in the course of which Anderson must have toppled into the quicksand below. The Record pointed out that the quagmire at the foot of Little Prudy’s Cliff was “bottomless” and that any object was immediately sucked beneath the surface. Attempts to drag the bog had been abandoned as hopeless. “Who struggled with Tom Anderson at the edge of Little Prudy’s Cliff?” demanded the Record hotly. “Who hurled him over to his horrible end? This is the question Wrightsville wants answered right away!”

The deceased, concluded the Record, was survived by a daughter, Rima Anderson, 22 years of age.

Byline: By Malvina Prentiss.

Ellery laid the clipping down.

Here was puzzle compounded. What was the connection between The Town Drunk’s murder—if it was murder—and the saga of Sebastian Dodd?

For there was a connection. There must be. In the earliest clipping there was no correlation between Anderson and Luke MacCaby, the central figure of that story. And in the second and third stories Anderson was not even mentioned as background. Suddenly—in story number 4—Anderson again, this time as protagonist. But isolated. No cross-reference to MacCaby, or Hart, or Dr. Dodd, or even to his crony Harry Toyfell.

Yet they were all related, perhaps even Nicole (The Town Thief) Jacquard. They were related by the fact that someone in Wrightsville had related them. Anonymous suspected, or had, inside information. Anonymous had reason to believe that Town Drunk Anderson was pushed to his death. Anonymous knew that Town Drunk Anderson’s murder arose from the events reported in the first three Record stories.

Was that it? Did Anonymous mean to convey that MacCaby and Hart were also murdered? Or one of them?

Then there was Tom Anderson himself. Anderson had clearly been a man of culture and respectability before his fall from sobriety. Even drunk as Chaucer’s ape, lolling on the rotten imitation-stone pedestal of the Low Village World War I Memorial—against a background of smutty red brick factories, stoop-shouldered two-story crackerbox houses, cramped shops with embarrassing pinchbeck fronts like Sidney Gotch’s General Store … in the humped and dingy shadow of the old cotton mill—now the Wrightsville Dye Works!—even then The Town Drunk had aroused regret, not laughter or revulsion. Ellery could have sworn there was no evil in the derelict. If he was dead of violence, the evil lay elsewhere.

And the surprising news that Anderson had had a daughter. Survived by a daughter, Rima Anderson, 22 years of age, period. Bad reporting, Malvina. Was she a drudge in some High Village tourist home? Hired girl on one of the meaner valley farms? Or a regular in a four-bit bawdy house on Barking Street? But the name Rima … It irritated him, because it sounded and looked familiar and it kept just out of reach. And because, unoriented, it still refused to fit into his visual memory of the Wrightsville slums and sinks. It evoked an image of grace, solitude, greenery … But he was certain he had never met anyone in Wrightsville with such a name.

Well, he thought, this isn’t getting me anywhere. At all.

Ellery threw the second envelope into his catchall drawer.

I’ll sleep on it, he said to himself.

Saturday, April 8

As Ellery was setting down his second cup of coffee the next morning his doorbell rang. He opened the door to find a child in the hall. The foyer and hallway were murky and he had to peer. It was evident that the little girl had put on a costume of her mother’s—who must be a character!—and she was pluckily fighting off nervousness.

“Yes?” said Ellery with an encouraging smile.

“Ellery Queen?”

He squinted past her, searching the shadows. The voice had been a woman’s.

“Did you say that?” he asked sharply.

“My name is Rima Anderson. Could you talk to me?”

The next few minutes Ellery devoted to re-stabilization. The world of fiction is made up of heroines, he caught himself philosophizing, industriously contrived by their authors to be all that no woman ever is. Yet here was a girl, in flesh, with blood, who might have stepped out of a book. In fact, as Ellery soon discovered, Rima Anderson had stepped out of a book.

She had a special, unbelievable quality of … consistency. Women are made of skin, hair, muscle, sweat glands, ten thousand things; this girl had the harmony of a figurine. She was of one piece. He kept thinking of Tanagra and terra cotta, and of how breakable she seemed. Yet when she came in her step was soundless. He thought of elves and birds.

When he saw her in the full light there was nothing fragile about her. She was like a miniature fruit at its ripest. A child giving off a womanly disturbance. The child-woman paradox was most emphatic in her eyes. They were as serenely uncluttered, as without guile or guilty knowledge, as the eyes of any little girl; still, under scrutiny, they veiled themselves as no child’s eyes had ever done. The effect was enchanting and fresh, but it carried no conviction. You had to talk yourself into it.

Even her voice. It had a lilt, the music of something formless but significant in nature. The voice of a brook, or a dryad. That’s it, thought Ellery. She’s a nymph who lives in the heart of a tree. And then he remembered who “Rima” was. Rima was the child-woman, the bird-girl of the Venezuelan jungle, in a book he had not read for twenty years.

And here she sat.

But where was old Nuflo, her grandfather? And his dogs Susio and Goloso? One had a right to expect them, and the mora tree, and the hummingbird, and the little silkhaired monkey.

“Is Rima the name you were given when you were born?”

“Rima is the name I was given when I was born.”

By her father. By The Town Drunk. He had named her Rima by benefit of W. H. Hudson and he had made her Rima in fact. To shape a child in the mold of a name is brutal, but poetry. Ellery saw Tom Anderson in a suddenly altered light. Chief Dakin and the Record might still be wrong. Such a man could have poised himself on the edge of Little Prudy’s Cliff and, like Icarus, taken off.

No one in Wrightsville had known this girl well; perhaps she had been a sort of myth to the town, a creature of folklore in the making. The Town Drunk must have hidden her away, protecting the delicate product of his creative energy from the corrosive influences of the community. And Ellery knew without asking that Rima Anderson’s playmates had been birds and small animals, and that her playground had been the natural world in which Wrightsville squats—plain and hill and stream and wood, the wilder woods where hardly anyone ventured. And if her skin had a sheen, and if her hair was waved, and if her lips were as redly soft as young raspberries, it was because Rima had been taught to patronize the cosmeticians of nature, the sun and the wind and the rain. In the world of beauty parlors and cutrate toiletries she walked alone.

The girl wore a house dress of the cheapest cotton, black coarse stockings, flatheeled and papery-looking white “store” shoes, a shrieking bonnet. Everything about her added up to “country store” in some remote rural district; Ellery could recall no shop even in Low Village which carried such outlandish merchandise. She must have walked over to Fidelity, the very poor community west of Wrightsville, or down to Shinn Corners, deep in the southwestern farm country, to get them. Things would be cheaper there, and there would be fewer eyes. Like a bird, she was shy. There was a pallor under her brown skin which told him what contact with New York had done to her. Probably this was her first visit to a big city. Absurdly, he wished he had a finch, or a field mouse, to offer her … and wondered how he could manage to get her back to Wrightsville in some less outrageous costume. It was a problem; and he decided to let inspiration or opportunity solve it.

“How did you happen to come all the way to New York to see me, Miss Anderson?”

She laughed—the unprepared outburst of a bird. “Call me Rima!”

“All right. But why did you laugh, Rima?”

“Nobody’s ever called me Miss Anderson before.” When he repeated his first question, she said, “My father, Thomas Hardy Anderson, used to talk about you.” Thomas Hardy Anderson …

“Tom Anderson?” Ellery asked involuntarily.

“The Town Drunk.” She said it naturally. It was a fact, like the bad reputation of gophers; one stated it and passed on. She has the quick acceptance of all wild things, he thought; a fawn doesn’t question the morals of its father.

“What did he say about me, Rima?”

“Oh, that you were the kind of man who had a compulsion to look for the truth. He told me that if I was ever in trouble and he was gone, I was to come to you. And I’m in trouble.”

“So you’ve come to me.”

“Yes.”

Ellery got up and fiddled with the Venetian blind. When he turned around he said, “I know about his disappearance.”

“I think my father is dead.” It was hard to adjust to her directness. She did not question the source of his information; his knowledge did not surprise her.

“Apparently the Wrightsville police think so, too.”

“Chief Dakin told me that. And a woman from the newspaper. I don’t like her, but I like Chief Dakin.”

“And that’s why you think your father is dead, Rima? Because they’ve told you so?”

“I knew it before they told me.” She was up and over at the window.

“What do you mean, you ‘knew it before’? Do you know something the others don’t?”

“I just know it. If he were alive he’d come back to me, or write. He’s dead.” She kept looking down at 87th Street, with interest, as if the death of her father was of no importance. But again Ellery had to readjust. The rules didn’t apply to her. What seemed curiosity about a New York street was probably caution. The sparrow soars from the pavement crumb to a safe telephone wire, and from there he watches. His watching is mysteriously tied up with his wants.

“People have been known to go away, Rima. Without explanation or warning. Because—let’s say—they’re in trouble.”

“He may have been in trouble, but he would have told me if he had to go away. He’s dead.”

“The struggle on Little Prudy’s Cliff—”

“He was pushed over. He was murdered.”

“Why?”

She fluttered about at that. “I don’t know, Mr. Queen. That’s why I’ve come to you.” Just as suddenly she returned to the sofa, tucked her legs under her, smiled at him. They had turned a corner. Or the sparrow had decided that the man on the pavement was harmless. “May I take off my shoes? They hurt.”

“Please do.”

She took them off, wiggling her toes. “I hate shoes, don’t you?”

“Can’t stand them.”

“Then why don’t you take yours off?”

“Well, I … think I will!” said Ellery, and he removed his shoes.

“I’m going to take off these stockings, too, if you don’t mind. They itch so. Mmmm …” Her legs were honey-colored, beautiful running legs covered with brisk scratches. But the soles of her feet were not at all beautiful; they were covered with a horny integument, like a coating of plastic. She noticed his glance and frowned. “They’re ugly, aren’t they? But I can’t abide shoes.” Ellery could see her flying through the woods. He wondered what she wore in her natural habitat. “At first I thought of talking with his two friends,” Rima went on. “But—”

She makes no transitions, he thought. You follow her flight or you lose her.

“Nick Jacquard? Harry Toyfell?”

“But I don’t like them. Jacquard is no good. And Toyfell makes me …” She grew still.

“Makes you what, Rima?”

“I don’t know … They weren’t good for Daddy. Until a short time ago, they had a bad influence on him.”

“You think Jacquard, or Toyfell, or both, had something to do with what happened to your father?”

“Oh, no. They were really his friends. But I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t like them.”

And it seemed perfectly logical to Ellery at the moment not to question your father’s only close associates about his disappearance on the ground that you disliked them.

He got up and began that hungry patrol of his preserves which in Ellery follows uneasiness. Rima watched him trustfully.

“Tell me all about your father, Rima. Was he originally from Wrightsville? What did he use to do for a living?”

“He was born in Wisconsin somewhere. He never talked about his family. I think he’d had very strict, ignorant parents and they quarreled and he left home in his teens. He wanted to write poetry. He worked his way East and got into Harvard, tutoring to support himself. Some famous Harvard professor told him he’d never be anything but a third-rate poet but that he had the makings of a first-rate teacher. He took graduate courses in education and afterwards got a job teaching English literature at Merrimac University in Connhaven … Hardy wasn’t his real middle name. His real middle name was Hogg. He took Hardy when he enrolled in Harvard.”

Ellery nodded.

“He’d been teaching at Merrimac for eighteen years when he met my mother. She was a graduate student there. By this time he was a full professor and one of the most popular teachers in the university. He was 44, Mother was my age. Neither had ever loved anyone before. They fell in love.”

A bachelor over 40, with a background of family antagonisms and creative frustration, who was forced to sublimate his passion for verbal sound and shape in the teaching of literature, Anderson had poured everything into the first love of his life. Rima’s mother had been a beauty and a poet of promise. “Daddy used to say Mother got more poetry into a grocery list than he’d ever pounded into an ode.” Rima’s mother had come from the Middle West, one of the numerous daughters of a nouveau riche family. Her parents had social plans for her and violently opposed her alliance with a small-salaried college professor “stuck up in the New England woods.” Rima’s mother broke with her family and married her professor.

“They lived on the Merrimac campus and the next year I was born. Daddy named me Rima after the heroine in Green Mansions. When I was 2 he built a little house up in the hills near Connhaven and we moved there, away from everybody. Daddy went in to college every day, mother tended house and me and wrote poems on the backs of envelopes and on grocery sacks, like Emily Dickinson, and I played in the woods. On weekends we’d all three do it. We wore practically no clothes and at night we’d sleep on spruce boughs under blankets and we’d have wonderful times. I think we were the happiest family in the world. When I turned 5, Daddy drove me down to school every day and picked me up again in the afternoons. What I learned I learned from him and Mother and the woods, though … Then, when I was almost 10, Mother took sick and died. Overnight. I don’t know what it was—some rare disease. One day she was with us, the next day she wasn’t.”

Rima sat still.

“I’ll never forget what Daddy said at Mother’s grave, when everybody’d gone away. He hadn’t said a word since her death, just held my hand. ‘This is black wickedness, Rima. There’s no beauty or justice in it,’ he said; and that night, after he put me to bed, he went down to Connhaven and came back very late, drunk.”

Rima’s recollections of those days were of staggering steps, shouts, whisky fumes, wild weeping in the night, and wilder tenderness. Anderson had periods of abstinence, when he would go about pale and silent, his hands trembling; at these times he often reread his wife’s poems to Rima. But the temperate episodes became less and less frequent, and finally they stopped altogether. For the most part Rima was looked after by friends, the wives of faculty members; later, there were threats of legal action if Anderson did not stop drinking or turn the child over to welfare authorities. But Rima herself thwarted all attempts to separate them. “I must have run away from various places a dozen times,” she told Ellery. “Daddy was always kind to me, even when he was very drunk. Nobody could keep me, and after a while nobody tried.” Then the last of a series of painful incidents in class and Professor Anderson was dismissed from the Merrimac faculty.

“That’s when we came to Wrightsville,” Rima said. “Somehow Daddy got an appointment to teach English at Wrightsville High. We lived in Mrs. Wheatley’s rooming house on Upper Purling Street. Mrs. Wheatley looked after me during the day. She’s dead now.”

Tom Anderson’s position on the high school faculty lasted eight months. When Principal Martha E. Coolye caught him with a glass of whisky on his desk during class, he was summarily discharged.

“Five weeks later Mrs. Wheatley put us out for nonpayment of rent. Daddy said, ‘Don’t blame her, Rima. She’s a poor woman and we’re taking up space she could get money for. We’ll find another place to live as soon as I straighten myself out and get a job.’”

Rima’s next recollection was of the shack on the edge of The Marshes. It had been built by some engineers during a survey of The Marshes in one of the periods when public agitation for its drainage threatened to upset Wright County political applecarts. Its roof leaked and its tarpaper covering was all but peeled away. They managed to make it weatherproof and in the intervening years Rima had built an additional room onto it and a new floor from salvaged lumber, and she had grown ivy all over the outer walls. “It’s pretty now,” laughed Rima. “More like a flowerbox than a house.” And the mosquitoes of The Marshes? asked Ellery. “Mosquitoes don’t bite me,” said Rima.

And there they had lived ever since. The land belonged to no one, so far as Rima knew; at least, they had never been molested. In those earlier years repeated attempts were made by the Ladies’ Aid and the town welfare authorities to separate the child from her father, but Rima always broke loose and came back to him. “He needed me. I knew that the day my mother died. He needed somebody who loved him and didn’t condemn him for being drunk all the time. He needed somebody to take his clothes off when he came home, or hold his head when he was more than usually drunk, or read to him, or put him to bed. Where did we get beds, furniture, a stove? I don’t know. Daddy managed to get everything we needed. We didn’t need much.” Finally the attempts to give the girl “a proper home” were abandoned and the Andersons were let alone. “They’ve forgotten all about me!” They had no money beyond the few dollars Tom Anderson earned occasionally doing an odd job and a small sum which arrived monthly, in cash, addressed to “Thomas Hogg Anderson” in care of General Delivery, Wrightsville, bearing the postmark “Racine, Wis.” but no return address. “I think it’s from a brother, or sister, of Daddy’s out there,” said Rima indifferently. “Daddy never talked about it but once that I recall. He said, laughing, ‘I’m the Pariah of the Anderson tribe, darling. Their blood boils from contact with the Untouchable, but they soothe their glossy souls by the payment of a pittance in conscience-money. It’s all for you, baby. I won’t touch a scummy cent of it.’” But he always did. They had made a ritual out of it. Each month her father walked to the post office at Lower Main and the Square, brought back the envelope, Rima opened it with ceremony, she hid the money in a cracker tin on a shelf above the stove while he turned his back; and later Tom Anderson—and the money—would disappear for a day or so. “It went on that way for years. He always insisted that I hide it, and I always did, just to please him. Sometimes he even made me hide it in a different place.” Occasionally, when the need was acute, Rima took a dollar or two from the box before the remittance vanished. But in general she got along very well without money. She raised her own vegetables in a little garden behind the shack, and her father had developed a skill that amounted to art in supplying their household with flour, fowl, fruit, bacon. “You know,” said Rima matter-of-factly, “they called him The Town Beggar just about as often as The Town Drunk. He always resented that. ‘I give them value for consideration,’ he used to say. ‘I amuse them. In the Middle Ages I would have been a jester. I’ve never begged in my life.’” But he had, and she knew it. “It was for me,” she told Ellery. “If it was just for himself, he’d have starved first.” Silently, Ellery doubted this. The hard moral fiber of Tom Anderson had been buried with his wife. The flabby residue sagged to every whim, and most weakly to his craving for forgetfulness.

At times he killed rabbits and other small game in the woods north of The Marshes. Rima never touched them. “They’re my friends,” she laughed. “I couldn’t eat my friends.”

Rima spent her days in the hills and backwoods surrounding Wrightsville. There were sweet wild berries to be plucked, streams to bathe in, injured birds and animals to nurse, hot long-grassed meadows to lie on while her father sat crosslegged by her side lecturing and questioning, book in hand. For the School Board had discovered the uselessness of trying to keep Rima Anderson in a classroom, and there had been talk of a truancy proceeding which would have placed her behind the bars of the County Corrective Home for Girls at Limpscot, upstate. Tom Anderson had roused himself. He stopped drinking for forty-eight hours, Rima mended and brushed his clothes, and then he had marched into town to demand a special Board hearing. At the hearing he pleaded brilliantly his pedagogic qualifications and pledged that he would teach his daughter privately, following the curriculum prescribed by the State Regents. After a confused session the Board voted its assent to this unusual arrangement, on the condition that Rima present herself each semester for examinations in the prescribed high school courses of study, the penalty for failure being punitive Board action.

“We made them eat crow,” gurgled Rima, doubled over. “Daddy never let me get away with anything and I always passed their old exams with high marks.” Rima’s highest marks had come in English literature. “They called him names and sneered at him and said he wasn’t fit to be a father, and a lot of what they said was true, but Daddy never neglected my education and because I loved him and he was a wonderful teacher I learned more than most of the Wrightsville kids. In literature I think I could teach their teachers a thing or two! We had nothing—according to Wrightsville—and if we did have anything they said Daddy pawned it or sold it to get money for liquor. But he never touched our books, no matter how desperate he was, and if you come to Wrightsville, Mr. Queen, I’ll show you a library that will open your eyes.”

And now Tom Anderson was gone. Dead, Rima insisted.

“I want to know what happened to him. How it happened.” Her eyelids came down. “Who did it.” He saw that her hands were in perfect repose. She’s learned an animal discipline, he thought.

“Rima.” Ellery sat down opposite her again. “A few minutes ago, in talking about your father’s two friends—Nick Jacquard and Harry Toyfell—you said they’d exerted a bad influence on him ‘until a short time ago.’ Exactly what did you mean by that? Had he stopped seeing Jacquard and Toyfell? Given them up?”

“He stopped drinking. He gave liquor up.”

Ellery looked at her.

“You think he didn’t. That he couldn’t have. I know he did. In all the years since Mother died he never once tried to give up drinking. Even when he stayed sober for two whole days that time when he had to see the School Board about me, it was for just those two days; he didn’t pretend he was reforming. About a month ago, without any warning, he told me he was through being The Town Drunk. I was surprised and I asked him what had happened. He wouldn’t tell me. ‘Let’s wait and see,’ he said.

“He’d never said anything like that to me before. I suppose that’s why I believed him. At first I thought he just wanted to. But then, as the days and nights passed and he’d come home walking as straight as anybody else and with no whisky on his breath, I knew he was actually doing it. His hands would shake and he’d toss around half the night. There were times when he’d get almost wild and run around the shack as if he were crazy. Once when he thought I was asleep he crawled out of bed and lit a stub of candle and got a bottle of whisky out of a hole in the floor. He put it on the table next to the candle and pulled out the cork and he sat down with his hand on the bottle and looked at it. I could see a big artery jumping under his skin and the sweat was pouring down his face. He sat there that way for fully an hour. Then he put the cork back into the bottle, put the bottle back in the hole in the floor, replaced the floor board, and went to bed again.”

Ellery wondered why she was making such a story up. It couldn’t possibly be true. Not an alcoholic with such a long history of addiction as Tom Anderson. But then he saw the strange clarity of her eyes and he found himself doubting his own doubt.

“Maybe it wouldn’t have lasted,” said Rima calmly. “But it did last for a month. Until the night he died.”

“He continued to see Toyfell and Jacquard?”

“Yes. But he told me it was to test himself. He said that he still went to the Roadside Tavern with them and that while they drank he sat with an empty glass before him. Jacquard laughed at him, he said—he was angry about it. Maybe being angry helped him.”

“So when he quarreled with somebody on Little Prudy’s Cliff a week ago tonight, you think he was sober?”

“I’m positive he was.” She couldn’t possibly be, but she was. And, unreasonably, Ellery was, too.

“And he didn’t get around to telling you why he’d suddenly decided to give up drinking?”

“No. I knew he’d tell me in time. I didn’t want to press him. Daddy couldn’t take much pressure.”

And Ellery, nodding, began to drift about again. After a while he came to a decision. It was an uneasy decision, because Rima was an enigma he had not entirely solved. The case was difficult and called for improvisation. He said to her, “Rima, have you ever sent me a letter?”

It was a ridiculous question. But then Anonymous was always a shy bird, too. It seemed the right shot at the moment. It might flush a look, a tremor, a breath.

But Rima merely shook her head.

Ellery kept looking at her. “Did you know an old man in High Village named MacCaby?”

“Luke MacCaby? I’ve heard about him through Daddy. Harry Toyfell worked for him. But Luke MacCaby is dead. He died leaving a lot of money to a doctor in High Village named Dodd, Sebastian Dodd.”

“Did your father ever talk to you about MacCaby’s death?”

“He told me what he’d heard, especially from Toyfell. But everybody in town was talking about it, he said. Everybody was very excited.”

“Did he know MacCaby?” persisted Ellery.

“I don’t know. Why do you keep asking about MacCaby?”

“Do I ask you why you keep performing tonsillectomies on ailing meadowlarks, Rima? I manage to keep in touch with Wrightsville,” said Ellery manfully, “one way and another. Tell me: What do you know about John Spencer Hart?”

No flash or flicker. She was really trying to remember. “Hart … Wasn’t he connected with Luke MacCaby in some way? I think a man of that name died recently in town, too. I don’t know much about Wrightsville,” confessed Rima. “I hardly ever go into town. The only people I see are kids who wander off into the woods to pick berries and get lost and have to be taken back home. I know more Wrightsville dogs than people. There’s always a gang of them around the shack, scratching themselves and wagging their tails.”

“Did your father know John Spencer Hart?”

“Oh, I’m sure he didn’t! Because now I remember. Wasn’t Mr. Hart a very rich man who lived on a huge estate on North Hill Drive?”

“Did your father ever mention John Spencer Hart?”

“I don’t recall his saying …”

“Did your father know Dr. Dodd, Rima?”

“Dr. Dodd? I don’t know.” She was distressed now; her exquisite little hands fluttered. “You must think I’m stupid. But it’s just that I’ve had no interest in Wrightsville affairs and I never questioned Daddy about whom he knew or what he did or where he went. Not because I didn’t want to know but because he didn’t like being pushed. If he wanted to tell me something, I listened. If he needed my help, I gave it. Otherwise I let him alone. People were lecturing him all the time. I was the only one who took him as he was and respected his rights as a human being, even if according to Wrightsville he was a very poor human being … I just don’t know, Mr. Queen.”

“I understand Dr. Dodd does a great deal of work in Low Village, and I thought—”

“But we’re never sick. I mean, we never were.”

“Not even your father?”

“He was a funny man in some respects. He thought going to a doctor was a sign of weakness. He’d fight off things that would put other people into bed.”

“Rima, you’re the world’s most unsatisfactory client. There’s nothing to go on.”

“I’m so sorry—”

“I suppose you’ll tell me your father hadn’t an enemy in the world.”

“He hadn’t.”

“He must have had at least one!”

“No … Daddy charmed people. Even Mrs. Coolye, the principal who kicked him out of Wrightsville High—the day she dismissed him she cried. Chris Dorfman, the radio car policeman who was brought up last year on charges of breaking the nose of one of Big Tootsie’s girls in a drunken brawl, used to bring Daddy home instead of running him in; he’d tell me, ‘It’s a shame about your old man. He’s a great old guy.’ Nobody’d want to hurt Daddy because of anything Daddy was.”

“What do you mean by that?” Ellery stared at her.

“Some people will kill a ladybug. Not because the ladybug is harmful but because it happens to get in their way. Nothing personal. Just a matter of convenience.”

Ellery kept staring.

“If there’s nothing to go on …” Rima got off the sofa, slowly this time. “You won’t take the case.”

“Rima, how much money do you have?”

The blood flooded her cheeks. “I’m stupid. Of course, your fee. Mr. Queen, I’m sorry. I—”

“I didn’t say anything about my fee. I asked you how much money you have.”

She looked at him. Then, as suddenly as she did everything, she opened her imitation leather purse and held it out to him.

The purse contained a handkerchief, a railroad ticket, a box of wild cherry drops, and some coins. Perhaps fifty cents.

“It’s what I had left after I bought my ticket to New York and return, and paid my bus fare here from Grand Central Terminal. Daddy hadn’t touched the money from Racine last time. Otherwise I couldn’t have come.”

“Bad.” Ellery scowled.

“Bad?”

“It interferes with my plans.”

“Plans? I don’t—”

“I wanted you to look big-cityish when we went back to Wrightsville.”

“You’re coming back with me!” That bird peal again.

“What? Oh, certainly,” said Ellery. “I mean to say, it’s important that you look … smart, Rima. Up-to-the-minute. New York chic, as it were—”

“You want me to buy different clothes.” He blushed slightly as she glanced down at herself, up at him. “I know these are awful,” she said helplessly. “But I couldn’t afford any better. I have no wardrobe.”

“It’s a bother,” said Ellery with a fierce frown. Then his forehead cleared. “See here, I don’t see why we should endanger my plan of action merely because of the lack of a little money. Suppose I advance you a couple of hundred, Rima.”

“Dollars?”

“Why, yes.”

“But I couldn’t ever pay that much back.” She trilled at his childishness.

“Of course you could. You’re not going to keep living in that mosquito-infested flowerpot, are you?”

She was amazed. “Where else would I live?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. But you’ve got to get yourself a job of some sort—”

“Why?”

“Why? Because … because you’ll owe me two hundred dollars!” He grasped her arm and was surprised to find it as pliantly tough as a gull’s wing. “Now we’ve had enough talk. We’re going out to get you a suit, blouses, hat, underthings, stockings, shoes, a hairdo, manicure, pedicure …”

It was the best he could muster on the moment.

Weekend, April 8–9

They passed over another bridge or two before the weekend was out. The first crossing from formality proved to be their shopping excursion. Ellery smuggled Rima into Lachine’s on Fifth Avenue, where you may buy everything from a bobby pin to an ermine wrap and whose salespeople are never surprised by anything. He spent most of the afternoon worrying his thumbs and wondering what magics were being performed in the dressing room. At 4:30 he saw and was awed. Then there was an interminable session with François on the fifth floor. Rima emerged at last, accompanied by an agitated Gallic male who kept wailing that one does not gild a lily and what should one do to improve such a complexion, Monsieur?—but the hair, Monsieur, and the feet, Monsieur! Ellery replied hotly that the hair, Monsieur, and the feet, Monsieur, were as God had made them, François retorted that if such was the case, Monsieur, why in the sacred name of a paper bag had Monsieur brought Mad’moiselle to his salon, and Rima sat down in her new clothes and put her manicured fingers to her made-up eyes and wept all over them, reducing both François and Ellery to agonized silence. At this point a motherly saleswoman sent them both away, and when Ellery next saw Rima she was cool, and perfect, and she smiled a New York smile and said, “Am I according to plan, Pygmalion?” whereupon his shame melted in a warm gush of something and he found himself suddenly adoring her.

Then he took her off to dinner at the snootiest place he could think of.

He no longer thought of her as a child. Quite the contrary. In fact, he found himself glaring at the Van Johnson type at the next table. Afterwards, back on 87th Street, he saw the admiration in Inspector Queen’s eyes; and when the Inspector, who was an absolute Englishman about the inviolability of his room, actually offered Rima the use of his bed for the night, Ellery knew the worst. Hastily, he took her to a women’s hotel in the 60s, where it would be necessary to say goodnight under the frigid eye of an elderly female desk clerk.

He returned to 87th Street slightly damp under the collar.

He found his father waiting up for him.

“Back so soon?” asked Inspector Queen.

“The question answers itself,” said Ellery coldly. “What did you think I’d be doing?”

“Odd type, that girl,” said the Inspector in an absent way. “From Wrightsville, you said?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re going back with her tomorrow?”

“Yes!”

“I see,” said the Inspector, and he went to bed.

She was a nuisance all night.

On the train the next day, rather hollow-eyed, Ellery tried to analyze it. It wasn’t the clothes. All the clothes did was to point up what she was. But what was she? he thought as he felt her fingers withdrawn from his. After a moment he attacked the question negatively. She wasn’t a … She wasn’t a great many things, but when you added them all up you still had a positive something left that remained as irritating a mystery. In the end he decided that the secret of her lay in the child-woman dichotomy somewhere. She was neither, and she was both. Like a child, she took your hand; like a woman, she suddenly let go. At bottom it was probably—he winced—unbelievable innocence. You simply didn’t find innocence like hers. She had no tactile experience of the world. Of the world of books, yes; of nature, decidedly; but of man, none at all. It came of being brought up in the woods like a wild animal. Something Thomas Hardy Anderson hadn’t figured on. A girl like this could do devastating damage, to others as well as to herself. You couldn’t depend on either her actions or her reactions; she moved in other spheres. Where values were indecipherable. Normal contact with parents, friends, relatives, strangers, teachers, bigots, bullies, lovers—with terrestrial life—the contact of bruises and caresses which prepares the growing individual for maturity had been kept from her during her formative years. There were blank spaces in her, to an extent and of a nature no one could fathom, least of all Rima herself. You had to keep remembering how she had been brought up, how green she was, how alone.

And of a sudden Ellery saw the danger that she might attach herself to him like a motherless doe. There were signs. She had stopped calling him Mr. Queen and was addressing him as “Ellery” and “darling.” She had put her hand in his a dozen times. She was asking no questions; she seemed to have no concern about what he proposed doing with her when they got to Wrightsville; she had put herself utterly in his keeping. After lunch in the dining car she had kicked off her smart shoes, lain down on the long seat of their compartment with her head in his lap, burrowed for a moment like a puppy, and then fallen asleep with a happy sigh. As if she were Mowgli and he were the branch of a tree. The trouble was—and it was a trouble—he wasn’t the branch of a tree. He doubted if any normal man, similarly situated, could feel like the branch of a tree. Ellery found himself determining to marry her off to a deserving young poet—he would have to be a poet—just as quickly as one could be found. She simply couldn’t be allowed to run around loose.

When Rima woke up she yawned and stretched and wriggled, but she made no move to sit up.

“Hello, darling.” Her voice was sleepy, and her smile. He felt her hand in his again.

“Had a good nap?” Ellery tried to keep his tone on a fatherly level.

“Aery light, from pure digestion bred,” laughed Rima.

“What?”

“Didn’t you ever read Paradise Lost? You’re funny, Ellery.”

“Comical, or queer?”

She laughed again, throwing her head back. “My error! Oh, I like you so much.”

“I like you, Rima.” The skirt of her new suit had ridden up well over her knees and in spite of himself Ellery reached over to pull it down.

She watched him curiously. “Why did you do that?”

“Why did I do it?”

“Because my legs are ugly?”

“Because they’re not.”

“Then why cover them?”

“See here, Rima,” Ellery began angrily.

“I’ve never quite understood that. I’ve seen girls at Slocum Lake and the lake at Pine Grove parading around in bathing suits that made them practically naked. But when they got dressed they’d keep pulling their skirts down. Over the same legs.”

“Yes. Good point. Exactly. There’s a time and a place for everything, you see, Rima.”

“But we’re alone, Ellery. Don’t you want to see my legs?”

“No. I mean yes, very much. That’s why the rules say you mustn’t let me.”

“Rules?”

“Haven’t you ever gone to church?”

“No.”

“You should. You should, Rima.”

“But I don’t mind your seeing my legs, Ellery.”

“Perhaps I do!”

That was when she withdrew her hand. “You want to see my legs but you mind seeing them? What’s the matter with you?”

“Would you let any man see your legs who wanted to?”

“No …”

“Well, there you are.”

“I mean, it would depend on the man and why he wanted to see them. Which rules?”

“What? Oh! The rules of society, morality, good manners, er … any number of things.” Ellery said desperately, “Didn’t your father ever teach you anything but English literature?”

“He taught me everything.”

“Well, he appears to have left one or two things out—”

“You mean about sex?”

“Look there, Rima! In another two weeks the countryside will be simply beautiful—”

The problem of Rima Anderson, it seemed, was going to present even greater difficulties than the problem of her father.

It was twilight when they reached Wrightsville. And there was old Gabby Warrum in the doorway of the stationmaster’s cubby waggling his one tooth and waving to the trainman. And the two boys in jeans swinging their bare feet from the handtruck might have been the very same boys who had sat there on a certain summer day in 1940 when Ellery had stepped off the same train onto the Wrightsville station platform for the first time.

Nothing had changed. Well, almost nothing. The chrome on Phil’s Diner had a less pristine glitter and the blue of its awnings was considerably faded; the garage which had been a smithy cowered under a new neon sign; there was a three-story “hotel” (nameless) among the shanties across the tracks which had not been there before; and the gravel about the station had disappeared along with the horse droppings, replaced by paving. But there was the same crackerbarrel skyline above Low Village, the same fat-behinded bus marked Wrightsville Omnibus Company backing up to the station platform, the same broad fields to the south, the same crooked thread of Lower Whistling Street wandering west and north to become Upper Whistling when it reached High Village and respectability. And there were Lower Dade and Washington, from the west side of town, and Lower Apple and Piney Road and Shingle Street from the east side of town—they all squeezed close to one another as they ran down to the station in the extreme southeast corner of the municipality.

And they all looked good and the air, Low Village notwithstanding, smelled as if it had been washed, washed and hung out in the sun to dry.

“You like Wrightsville,” said Rima as Ellery handed her into Ed Hotchkiss’s taxi. She sounded amazed.

“Very much, Rima.”

Rima looked at him and then at Wrightsville, through the window, a little frown between her eyes.

“Where to?” said Ed.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” asked Ellery with a smile.

Ed Hotchkiss scratched his nose. He was heavier; he had another chin. “I hacked you years ago. Say!”

“You do remember.”

“Green. No … Queen! By Christmas, Mr. Queen!”

“Hi, Ed.”

“Say!” They pumped each other’s arms. “Paying the old dump another visit, hey? Who’s the bad news for this time?” Ed started his motor. “Or is it a honeymoon?”

“Does he mean me?” murmured Rima.

Ed looked around at Rima, glanced at Ellery, and winked.

“Upham House,” said Ellery. It was impossible to stop at the same hotel. Simply impossible. Not in Wrightsville. As Ed Hotchkiss swung the cab into Washington Street Ellery took Rima’s hand and said, sotto voce, “That wink did it. It’s Wrightsvillese for naughty-naughty.”

“He thinks we’re married!” Rima doubled up, laughing silently.

“I doubt it. Rima, I’m going to register at the Hollis—”

“But you told him Upham House.”

“That’s where you’re registering.”

“Me? In a Wrightsville hotel?”

“Now don’t start that business about Mosquito Manor again. They’ll be nice to you—you’ll be alone, and you have a respectable-looking suitcase.”

“Is this part of your plan?”

“I want you to take this money.”

She stared at the bills he had pressed into her hand. “But I owe you so much already.”

“My plan,” said Ellery firmly. He had no idea what his plan was, except as it got her decently clothed, housed, fed, and protected. “We’ll worry about the business details later. Er, Rima. Have you ever been in a hotel before?”

“No.”

Another problem.

“But I know what to do,” Rima went on, a bit dryly. “If that’s what’s worrying you. You seem to think I’m some sort of savage.”

“It does sound that way, doesn’t it?” Ellery said feebly. “Books, I suppose. They’re full of hotels.”

“It can’t be very hard. You sign your name on a card and you tip the bellboy a quarter.”

“And lock your door!”

“Yes, Ellery.” And this time she didn’t sound like a child at all.

He dropped her at Upham House, reviling himself for the nasty caution which told him not to be seen taking her in, and he had Ed drive him around the Square to the Hollis.

Ed seemed puzzled.

They had dinner at the Hollis Gold Gardens, a rather unsuccessful affair, since Rima was unaccountably cool and unimpressed with the Gold Gardens décor, whose lamé-like balloonings and gilded tablecloths were Wrightsville’s pride. She did not even respond to the “dinner music” of Floyd Lycoming and His Hollis Hummadours, but this was probably because Ellery forgot himself and asked her to dance. “The fact that I know a fork from a knife has fooled you,” Rima said sweetly. “I’m a barbarian, remember?” And afterwards she said she was tired and would he take her back to Ma Upham’s. So Ellery took her back to Mrs. Upham’s chaste Revolutionary hostelry and they said goodnight on the steps between the Colonial pillars, with their fingertips. He half-suspected that as soon as he was gone she would slip off her New York shoes and sprint downtown through Low Village to the shack in The Marshes.

Ellery was definitely depressed as he wandered back to the Square. Of course, Wrightsville was not at its best on Sunday nights. Most of the shops were closed. The streets were empty, except for Lower Main between the Square and Upper Whistling, and there was little activity even here because everyone was in the Bijou. The Gold Gardens had had its sprinkling of diners, and probably the Upham House Colonial Terrace was half-full of old ladies, but most of the upper crust, he knew, were visiting one another’s homes on the Hill, North Hill Drive, Twin Hill-in-the-Beeches, and Skytop Road; it was the Sunday night tradition. If there was any liveliness, it could be found only on Route 16, along the three-mile stretch between Low Village and Wrightsville Junction, where the roadhouses were.

But it was not Wrightsville that depressed him.

It was himself.

He couldn’t seem to get hold of anything.

The facts of the MacCaby-Hart-Dodd hodgepodge were meaningless, or he was dull. He had no idea where to begin …

And perhaps Rima had something to do with it.

Ellery found himself on State Street, outside the County Court House. It was about 10 o’clock and everything was properly dark, the old elms nodding overhead and the occasional flash of headlights darting across State and Upper Whistling barely jerking the neighborhood from its drowse. Across State the Northern State Telephone Company, the Wrightsville Light & Power Company, the tomblike Chamber of Commerce, the Carnegie Library buildings were almost nonexistent. The entrance to Memorial Park, fronted by the long concavity of the Our Boys Memorial, whose gilded roster was already flaky and half-illegible, gaped vacantly. Beyond, the marble apron on the lap of Town Hall glimmered clean under the “eternal light” surmounting the flagstaff. Ellery was tempted to invade the dark park and sit down on one of the benches near the American Legion Bandstand to commune with the bracing ghost of Sousa. He actually started for the entrance. But then he noticed the green lights in the driveway between the park and the Court House, and he stopped.

Wrightsville police headquarters.

Chief Dakin.

He went in. A little, black-tonsured officer sat behind the desk, his chin on his breast.

At the opening of his door, Dakin grasped the arms of his swivel chair.

“Positively not an apparition,” said Ellery. “Excuse me for not knocking. But I didn’t want to wake Lieutenant Gobbin up.”

“Mr. Queen!”

“I said to myself,” said Ellery cheerfully, “that the state of crime in Wrightsville might be sufficient to make you pass up your Sunday night church choir, and it seems I was absolutely solid. How are you, Dakin?”

“Oh, you baby doll.” Dakin pumped for all he was worth. “What are you doing in Wrightsville?”

“I hardly know.” Dakin was an old man. That lean Yankee look was swelling and showed little red veins.

“I’m tickled to see you anyway. Sit down, sit down! Just get in?”

“Few hours ago.”

“How long you figurin’ on staying?”

“That,” said Ellery, “depends on what you can tell me about Little Prudy’s Cliff.”

Dakih’s colorless eyes crimped at the corners. “The Anderson girl?”

“She came to me in New York. I came back with her.”

“So you’re fixing to find out what happened to Tom Anderson.”

“Can you save me the trouble?”

Dakin laughed. “Do I look that contented?”

“Tough?”

“Tougher than a preacher on Sunday.”

“You’re sure Anderson was murdered.”

Chief Dakin swiveled to stare at a photograph of J. Edgar Hoover above his water cooler. “I’ve sat here night after night thinkin’ on it. It’s got so it’s almost a personal issue between me and Anderson. What’s another case? An old rummy … he’d have got his sooner or later, one way or another—a knife in the ribs some night at Vic Carlatti’s, or drowned in Willow River when he was too full to navigate, like Matt Mason in ’26. Just the same …”

“How do you know Anderson was murdered?”

“His coat was torn fresh in half a dozen places. Two buttons yanked off. His hat trampled. There was some blood.” Dakin turned around. “The way I figure it, Anderson had an appointment with somebody. He was jumped, he fought back, and he lost. I couldn’t trace his movements past 11 o’clock Saturday night—the night before the morning his coat and hat were found on the Cliff. He was last seen around that hour walking along Congress Avenue in Low Village, alone.”

“Sober?”

“Walking straight as a Baptist deacon. And headed east, to the outskirts of Low Village, where The Marshes begin. But Anderson didn’t get home that night, his daughter says. I figure at 11 that Saturday night he was headed for his appointment at Little Prudy’s Cliff. It was Garrison Jackson saw him on Congress Avenue—Abe L. Jackson’s kid brother. Garry says Anderson was walking like he was bound somewhere. My guess is he was dead by midnight.

“The aggravating thing about this case, Mr. Queen,” said the chief of police slowly, “is that it don’t add up to nothin’. Nobody stood to gain by Anderson’s death. No enemies. Hadn’t had any trouble. Harmless and friendly. Everybody liked him. He couldn’t have been killed by mistake; full moon that night, brightest night in a month. Maniac? Hophead? We’ve checked and checked. But we wasted our time. It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a freak, it wasn’t a mistake. Tom Anderson was lured to his death by somebody who knew just what he was doing. But who, and why?” Nothing personal. Just a matter of convenience. “What’s that you said, Mr. Queen?”

“I was thinking about ladybugs,” said Ellery. “I take it you didn’t neglect Anderson’s soul-mates?”

“Who?”

“Harry Toyfell. Nick Jacquard.”

“First ones I questioned. If either of ’em did it, he did a mighty fine job of covering up afterwards.”

“Neither had any idea whom Anderson might have been meeting?”

“They say no.” Dakin swiveled to stare out at State Street. “Anyway, they’re small potatoes. This is big. I feel it in my bones.”

“Anderson had given Jacquard and Toyfell no hint about anything unusual in his life?” persisted Ellery.

“No. Though talking about something unusual in his life, you know Anderson had taken the pledge.”

“So Rima told me.”

“I have a sneaky notion,” muttered the chief to State Street, “that had something to do with it.”

“If that’s true, it points a hard moral.”

Dakin turned back, smiling faintly. He was a teetotaler.

“What did you mean this thing is ‘big,’ Dakin? Big how? Importance? Ramifications? Involving well-known people?”

“Maybe.”

“Give me an example.”

“I can’t.” Dakin pulled himself to his feet, angrily. “You see, I’m a useless old man. Worn down to the nub and bellywappin’ on the raw material. Have a cigar?”

Ellery had a cigar and for a half hour they talked about pleasanter things. Governor Cart Bradford was making the pork-barrel fraternity in the State Capital rear back and howl. “You mark my words, that boy’ll wind up in the White House yet.” Prosecutor Chalanski, the idol of Low Village, had cracked a scandalous embezzlement case wide open and there was talk of running him for Congress next year. Everybody was complaining about the four-mill jump in the tax rate. Judge Eli Martin had had a mild stroke the previous winter, after the death of his wife Clarice, but he was fine now, although retired from his law practice and raising prize asters which he gave away to all comers; Andy Birobatyan of the Wrightsville Florist Shop was looking pained. Wolfert Van Horn had been caught in flagrante delicto last fall at his Lake Pharisee summer lodge in the upper Mahoganies with one of the young Watkins girls, the giggly one, and Jess Watkins had beaten him up good with an old buggy whip and afterwards refused to prosecute—“Leave it to Jess to turn a profit on a deal.” Julie Asturio had got religion and had left town in the wake of a foaming evangelist. The Busy Bee Stores were building a supermarket on the California plan on Slocum Street, between Washington and Upper Whistling, next door to the Bluefield Block; Bloody Logan across the street was chewing his nails to the quick. One of Jorking’s sows over on the pig farm on Route 478 had dropped a five-legged piglet. Doc Sebastian Dodd had come into something like four million dollars by the will of old Luke MacCaby, and Doc was planning a new wing for the hospital.

“Oh, yes,” said Ellery. “I’ve heard about your Dr. Dodd. Fellow who seems determined to earn the title of Town Saint.”

“He’s earned it,” said Dakin. “Lord knows Doc deserved a break.”

“Unsuccessful?”

“Heck, no. Most successful doctor in town, if you count patients. Only thing is,” chuckled Dakin, “his patients don’t have the scratch. Doc still lives in the house he was born in—big three-story turkey on the corner of Wright and Algonquin. Dates back to the Civil War. It’s so darn big the spare bedrooms on the third floor ain’t even used. Doc’s a bachelor—never been married.”

“Then why does he need such a big house?”

“Who’d buy it? And he’s got to live somewhere. At that, he’s got a houseful. There’s Doc’s housekeeper and cook, Regina Fowler—Mrs. Fowler’s a distant cousin of old John F. Wright’s, his middle name was Fowler; know he’d died?—and then there’s the maid, Essie Pingarn, and Tom Winship’s boy Kenneth, and now old Harry Toyfell.”

“Tom Winship. Is that the Thomas Winship who testified in the Haight trial for the State in ’41? Head cashier of the Wrightsville National?”

“That’s the one. Well, Tom died about six years ago. Didn’t leave much, because his wife was an invalid and nearly every cent went to hospitals and sanitariums and fancy big-city specialists. Not that it did Mrs. Winship any good—when their only child, Kenneth, came back from his hitch overseas he found his ma dead, too. Well, it sort of broke Kenny up and he went to pieces for a while. And who d’ye think—?”

“Dr. Sebastian Dodd.”

“Right. Doc Dodd took Kenny in hand, straightened him out, sent him back to college to finish up his medical course that was interrupted by the war, and now Kenneth is Doc’s assistant and protégé. Doing a fine job, too, Doc tells me. He’s mighty proud of that boy, says he’s going to be a big doctor some day. Cast your bread upon the waters, that’s Doc’s motto.”

“I must meet this paragon,” murmured Ellery. “I really must. In fact, I think I’ll walk over and look in on him tomorrow if I can find a spare half hour. And Harry Toyfell’s working for him now. And living there. It certainly is a blessing to have a man like Dodd around. By the way, Dakin, I understand old Luke MacCaby’s having all that wealth came as something of a surprise to Wrightsville.”

“Set the town right on its hams.”

“And that partner of MacCaby’s—what was his name?—Hart, John Spencer Hart, Wrightsville Dye Works. Must have come as quite a shock when Hart blew the top of his head off.”

“How long’d you say you’ve been in Wrightsville, Mr. Queen?” said Chief Dakin dryly.

Ellery laughed. “I suppose you’re satisfied that Hart did die by his own hand? And MacCaby by God’s?”

“What?”

“I know about the Hart inquest, but did anybody go into the question of MacCaby’s death?”

Dakin was sitting still. “I didn’t know it was a question. No. Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Luke MacCaby was 74 years old,” said the chief of police slowly. “He’d had heart trouble near twenty years. Doc Willoughby once told me MacCaby would have died years ago if not for Doc Dodd’s care. And old Luke knew it; that’s why he left his bundle to Doc. So it all adds up just dandy. Except that you’re curious, Mr. Queen. I thought we were talkin’ about the Anderson case. Or were you?” Ellery was silent. A flick of eagerness scudded over Dakin’s face. “You know something I don’t!”

“I don’t know anything, Dakin.” Ellery got to his feet. “But there are two sides to every coin. Take the Anderson case. You’re convinced Anderson is dead. But you can’t produce his body, Dakin. I always turn the coin over. Have that type of mind.” Dakin was gripping the rim of his desk. “As for MacCaby and Hart, maybe they died as advertised, and maybe they didn’t. And maybe their deaths had nothing to do with Tom Anderson’s disappearance, and maybe their deaths had everything to do with it.”

“And maybe I’m crazy!”

“Keep that reversible mind, Dakin. Keep that coin on edge, where you can take a quick look at either side.” Ellery laughed and shook Dakin’s slack hand.

Dakin was still staring at him as he shut the door.

Of course, thought Ellery charitably as he crossed the Square to the Hollis, poor Dakin doesn’t have an obliging friend named Anonymous.

Monday, April 10

In the morning Rima was pitifully interrogative. It was apparent that during the night life had crept up on her. Or the Monday morning austerity of Upham House, smelling of slop suds and floor polish, had settled over her like an uneasy dew. She no longer took the future on faith. Tomorrow was a question mark; even today. How long did he expect her to remain at Mrs. Upham’s? Didn’t he realize she was running up a debt to him it would take her years to pay back? When could she go back to The Marshes? Why did she have to stay at Upham House at all? What had the redheaded bellboy meant last night when he had said that if she was expecting anybody he’d be glad to leave the side door unlocked? Where had Ellery gone after leaving her last night? (So Rima was the one who had phoned the Hollis, leaving no message.) Did he find out anything? Did he see anybody? Her feet were swollen from these shoes; when could she take her clothes off? What were his plans? Were they getting anywhere? Where were they going this morning?

“To answer omega first,” sighed Ellery, “to breakfast. I can’t talk before I’ve had my coffee.”

On the walk over to Miss Sally’s Tea Roome, he thought furiously. He had had a bad night not entirely ascribable to Manager Brooks’s Himalayan mattress. And when he had fallen asleep, it had been not Anderson but the daughter of Anderson who darkened last in his consciousness. He could not improvise with twenty-dollar bills indefinitely. Sooner or later he would have to settle the question of Rima’s immediate future.

Miss Sally’s was providentially deserted. When they were seated, Ellery said: “Rima, if you had the problem of earning your livelihood, how would you go about solving it?”

“I don’t know,” said Rima coldly.

“Well, what can you do? I mean, besides doctoring birds?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t suppose you can operate a typewriter or anything like that?”

“That’s right.”

“If worst came to worst, you might get a job as a salesgirl …?”

“And be cooped up in a stuffy store all day? I’d die.”

“How about a tutoring job? There must be children of well-to-do parents in town who’d—”

“Cooped up.”

“But you’ve got to do something!”

“Oh, your money. It’s worrying me, too. But I’ll find a way of paying you back.”

Ellery ordered breakfast.

With the coffee, the questions began again. Ellery listened glumly. Finally he said, “See here, Rima. I have only one plan and you may as well get it clear now.

“Everything else is irrelevant.

“I have reason to believe that what happened to your father is connected with a series of events that began here in Wrightsville two months or so ago. The death of Luke MacCaby. His secret partnership with John Spencer Hart. MacCaby’s bequest to Dr. Sebastian Dodd.” Rima clutched a piece of cooling toast, a little pale. “How your father fits into that picture is, I think, the major question. If it can be answered, we may be able to figure out that business of Little Prudy’s Cliff.

“I saw Chief of Police Dakin last night,” continued Ellery, “and he hasn’t any idea that your father’s fate is tied up with these other matters. So Dakin’s no help. We’re on our own.

“I can see only one way to make a start. The man who treated Luke MacCaby for years, who signed MacCaby’s death certificate, is Dr. Sebastian Dodd. The man to whom MacCaby left his unsuspected fortune is Dr. Sebastian Dodd. The man who through MacCaby’s will became in effect the business partner of John Spencer Hart is Dr. Sebastian Dodd. The man whose sudden association with the Hart-MacCaby dye works resulted in Hart’s suicide is Dr. Sebastian Dodd. Dodd seems to be the great common denominator of all the events preceding your father’s disappearance. So the first thing we’ve got to do is try to find out if Dodd was in any way involved with your father, too.”

Rima nodded wordlessly.

“I phoned the Dodd house this morning and made an appointment for 11 A.M. at the doctor’s office. He’s expected back from the hospital then and it will be before his office hours, so we’ll have some time to reconnoiter.

“I don’t know what we’ll run into. Maybe nothing. Maybe a great deal. I’ll have to develop a strategy as we go along.

“That’s where we stand, Rima. Now finish your eggs.”

But Rima said, “I see. I see,” and Ellery was startled to see tears in her eyes.

He said gruffly, “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t really come into it at all.”

That made him think again of how alone she was, which was exactly the thought he had been dodging. He found himself melting like the butter on her toast, which made him think that she wasn’t eating, and he snapped, “You eat your breakfast!” Dutifully she crunched off a piece of toast and he reached over and took her hand, so that she looked at him, surprised. “Rima, I’ve always believed in being forearmed. You do come into it. How, I haven’t any idea. But I’ve got you ready. You’re Tom Anderson’s daughter. What involved him may involve you. By your existence you assert the emotional, if not the moral, right to enter the problem. No one’s going to question your intercession but the author of your father’s fate, whatever it was; but that’s exactly what we’re aiming at. And that’s the technical reason for our visit Saturday to Lachine’s, the reason why you’ve got to keep limping around in those shoes if they kill you.

“Something may come up. We may be able to wing an opportunity. Of course, it may be dangerous. I’ve got to emphasize that. In fact, it will almost certainly be dangerous. Do you know what you really want, Rima?”

She looked down at her plate, saying in a low voice, “Daddy and I were very close. Much closer, I think, than normal people. Yes, I know what I want.” She looked up, almost with anger. “Do understand. This has all been horribly new to me. You’ve been so patient … kind … I won’t give you any more trouble. I promise, Ellery. From now on I’ll do just what you say.”

The house on the corner of Wright Street and Algonquin Avenue was suffering from all the diseases of neglected old age. Its porch, which ran around the side as well as the front, had a feeble-looking, crippled floor. Its squat wooden pillars were cracked and chipped. Its blistered brownish paint erupted in pustules, as if it had an advanced case of acne. The shingled roof sagged in places, curled up with a sort of arthritis in others; and the dormer windows of the sloping top story looked for all the world like the bulging eyes of a row of old blind men. Some shutters were broken, others missing. On its Algonquin Avenue side it elbowed a four-story remodeled apartment building in zippy blue stucco, on its Wright Street side it threatened to topple over on a one-story crate of a shop with a window full of dummy whisky bottles and placards of long-legged toothy women—the crudely painted script on the window said JACK’S PALACE BAR & GRILL.

But the old house was set well back from the street and its rejuvenating lawn was beginning to sprout new grass. There was a flagged walk, bordered by files of freshly manured earth, which meandered around to the side of the house and beyond to what was apparently a rear garden. A great elm in the center of the lawn loomed higher than the house; in summer it would shade the lawn and porch almost agreeably.

A small black-painted sign on a wrought iron standard beside the front gate announced in uncertain gilt lettering:

SEBASTIAN DODD, M.D.

KENNETH WINSHIP, M.D.

“It doesn’t look so bad,” said Rima doubtfully as they went up the three precarious wooden steps.

“I imagine it could have its gruesome side,” said Ellery. “At night, under an orange moon.” He pressed his thumb on an iron button marked: RING FOR DOCTOR.

The pebbled glass door was opened by a rawboned, empty-eyed female with a broom. “Which one do you want?” she said.

“Dr. Dodd, please.”

“Ain’t here yet. Office hours start noontime.”

A piercing female voice screamed, “Now Essie, who is that?”

A glint of rebellion sparked in Essie’s glassy eyes. “Body would think a body couldn’t answer a darn door,” she muttered. But then she screamed back, “They’re for Dr. Dodd, Mis’ Fowler!”

“You let ’em in, Essie,” Mis’ Fowler screamed in retort. A stout elderly woman in a white house dress appeared at the rear of the hall. She wore an earpiece and the cord was speckled with flour. “You the man called this mornin’?” she shouted.

“That’s right,” said Ellery.

“Essie, show these folks into the waitin’ room. Dr. Winship’s in there. Don’t rile him. He’s in an awful stew about Miss Pinkle.”

“But they want to see Dr. Dodd!” bawled Essie.

“It’s Dr. Winship I spoke to this morning,” put in Ellery.

“Course it is,” yelled the stout woman cheerfully. “Don’t pay Essie no mind. She’s got a surgical sponge where her brains ought to be. Essie, you get a move on!” The housekeeper disappeared.

There was a strong, baffling odor in the hall, warm, yeasty, and antiseptic. Then Ellery identified it: baking bread and Lysol.

The hall was dark, flanked with wide panels of aged walnut interspersed with panels of a wallpaper whose original design had faded beyond recognition. There was a stained-glass chandelier, and a walnut stairway which curved gracefully to the upper floors. On the midway landing there was more stained glass.

A double French door to the left, heavily curtained in ecru lace, was shut. Essie preceded them to the right and marched through a wide archway from which the doors had been removed into a waiting room. Standing about like prehistoric monsters was a congregation of hideous overstuffed furniture; on the floor was a handhooked rug so old and worn that its colors were gone. There was a door marked Dr. Dodd and there was a door marked Dr. Winship. The walls were painted a dingy green and on them hung some ancient color-prints of Western scenes by Frederic Remington. Several verses or mottoes printed artistically on imitation wood-grain cardboard dangled by tasseled cords. One of them said:

As a rule a man’s a fool,

When it’s hot he wants it cool,

When it’s cool he wants it hot,

Always wanting what is not.

Another began:

Laugh and the world laughs with you,

Weep, and you weep alone.

For the …

Ellery was fascinatedly trying to make out the rest when Essie, with a leer, poked him in the ribs.

“That’s him,” she said.

A very large young man in a white office jacket looked up from the secretarial desk at which he was rather peevishly going through a disorderly heap of filing cards.

“They want to see Dr. Dodd,” said Essie, and she tramped off in triumph, holding her broom like a lance.

“Yes?” snapped the young man.

“I’m Ellery Queen, Dr. Winship.”

“Oh!” Dr. Winship scrambled to his feet, knocking his chair over backwards. His big, serious face reddened as he stooped and yanked the chair upright. “Not functioning this morning. Ever try to make sense out of the filing system of a secretary who’s always mooning about last night’s date? Damn all the Pinkles of this world! Dr. Dodd’s not back from the hospital yet, Mr. Queen.” He looked as if he would have been more at home in the dressing room of a college stadium. He came around the desk and seized Ellery’s hand. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’m an admirer of yours from way back. Remember when you first came to town. ’40, wasn’t it?” His grin was as broad as his shoulders. “Won’t you and the young lady sit down?” Then his rather battered brown eyes took in “the young lady,” and they lost their fatigue.

“Miss Anderson, Dr. Winship,” said Ellery.

“How do you do,” said Miss Anderson.

“How do you do,” said Dr. Winship.

They stared at each other.

And at that moment Ellery’s idea was born. It was tiny and vague and, like most inspirations, it preceded its rationale. But even afterward Ellery found very little of a concrete nature to go on: a large, sober young man immersed in his work, showing the physical effects of long hours, insufficient sleep, a monkish life; and a pixy of a girl with a temporarily Fifth Avenue look and a naked yearning to be back among her butterflies and mosquitoes. Not much. But perhaps enough. It was necessary to revise his previous notion about deserving young poets, for—and Ellery could not have said why he was so sure of this—there was work to be done here.

“There’s a button missing from your coat,” said Rima. She pointed.

Dr. Winship looked down. “There always is.” Then he looked at her again as if she had said a wonderful thing. “You’re not from Wrightsville,” he said.

Rima laughed. Her shrill sweet bird laughter.

“You are?”

Ellery said casually, “Miss Anderson, Dr. Winship, is Tom Anderson’s daughter.”

It was too easy.

“The Town …” The young doctor bit his lip, glancing quickly at Ellery. Ellery smiled and nodded. Eagerly Winship dragged a chair forward. And Rima lowered her eyes and slipped into the seat. He remained over her, with joy. He’d hardly have believed it. Where had she been keeping herself? But he supposed the thing that had happened to her father … Did she ever get down to the hospital? She must be awfully alone these days. Loneliness wasn’t wise at her age. He ought to know! But then she was probably kept pretty busy—and by the way, what did she do with herself? Say, on weekends? Did she ever get over to Connhaven for the summer series of concerts? He found music wonderfully relaxing … did she know Fauré’s “Pavane”? Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme of Tallis”? The slow movement of the Schubert Quintet? He had a pitiful collection of records—couldn’t afford what he’d like—but if she’d care to spend a musical evening with him sometime …

He’s been badly bruised, thought Ellery. Hurts all over. He’d shy away from most girls. But she’s as soothing as a brook. There’s no danger in her. He wants those wounds laved.

Rima was acting remarkably coy. Answering in dovelike murmurs. Not like herself at all. She was afraid her musical education had been neglected. Unless you consider poetry to be music. Which of course it is. Did he know Lovelace? Marvell? Henry Vaughan?

I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light.

Ellery listened, smiling.

But then Dr. Sebastian Dodd came in and Ellery had something else to think about.

Dr. Dodd’s appearance shocked him.

Ellery had visualized the beneficiary of Luke MacCaby’s will as a rather sad-eyed little man with a workworn body and a halo of silvery hair—a slender, almost fragile, saint at peace with himself and the universe. The man who came swiftly, almost furtively, into the waiting room and stopped in his tracks in the archway was a harried brute. His great body was powerful and grossly fleshed; had he been smaller, he would have been fat. He was all but bald and his glossy skull was stippled with liverish-looking pigment, like the spots on his big, unsteady hands. His face was startling. It was a great jowled face, its jowls shaking. The eyes were buried in pits of deeply sagging flesh, like pouches, and the pouches quivered, too. They twitched and jerked. The eyes themselves, small and overbrilliant, were never still. They kept darting from side to side like minnows. And his skin was lifeless and of a yellow color, as if some poison was sapping its vitality.

Had his voice been in tune with his appearance, Dr. Dodd would have been monstrous, a vast obscenity. But when he spoke the sounds that came out of his throat were grave and sweet and slowly given. His voice was the only part of him with beauty. It suggested what he might have been, or what perhaps he once was.

“No, no, Mr. Queen. Dr. Winship phoned me at the hospital; I was expecting you. Pretty nearly bowled me over. Been as flustered as a girl. Kenneth, you know who Mr. Queen is, don’t you?”

“What?” said Dr. Winship.

“You’ll have to forgive Dr. Winship, Mr. Queen. He’s one of these born healers of humanity—always worrying about the incidence of next year’s diseases.” Dr. Dodd chuckled, his jowls flying. “At that, he’s got a dietary theory that I think is going to make medical history. Get him to tell you sometime about the ‘metabolic personality.’ And who’d you say this very pretty little girl is?”

“Rima Anderson, Dr. Dodd.”

“Ri … Tom Anderson’s daughter?”

Rima said, “Thomas Hardy Anderson.” Distinctly.

The minnows darted about in a sort of pain. Then Dr. Dodd took Rima’s little hands in his and he said in a rumble, “I’m sorry about your father, Rima. I knew him well. He was a fine man, and now that I’ve seen you I know he didn’t waste his life. Won’t you both come into my office?”

Dr. Winship automatically followed, as if Rima led him on an invisible leash.

Dr. Dodd’s consulting room was big and oldfashioned, with an antiquated-looking oak-framed fluoroscope in one corner and an apothecary’s cubby in another. One wall was solid with dusty medical magazines and books. Through an open door Ellery saw an examining room: a stirruped examining table, a case of surgical instruments, a scale, a sterilizer.

But he noted these things by habit. His mind was busy with Dr. Dodd, and his remarkably fluid appearance, and his words, I knew him well. Poor Yorick Anderson. I think we’ve come to the right place …

“What, Doctor? Oh, yes! I’m looking into Tom Anderson’s death for Rima,” said Ellery. “Frustrating case. So little to go on. We don’t actually know that Anderson died of violence. We don’t even know that he’s dead.” And all the time Ellery was speaking he was fascinated by those two unquiet eyes in that unquiet face, and by the big hands that kept playing with things on the desk. What’s worrying him? Ellery kept thinking. Most worried man I ever saw. Whatever it is, it’s put him under enormous tension. Getting him down. No man could go on under such pressure for very long. Is it the money? “So I decided to talk to everyone who might have known him, Doctor. And since I was told you’re so well acquainted with the people of Low Village particularly …”

Dr. Dodd nodded. “Matter of fact, Mr. Queen, your coming here today to see me is something of a coincidence. I said to Kenneth only yesterday that I really ought to drop in on Chief Dakin, or call him up. I don’t know that it has a thing, to do with what happened to Tom, but it might well have, and if I hadn’t been so blamed busy, what with my patients and this diphtheria scare we’re having, and—” he grinned suddenly, rubbing his chin in a sheepish way—“and certain developments recently in my personal life, why, I’d have gone to Dakin right off. Remember my saying that to you yesterday, Kenneth?”

“Hm? Oh. Oh, yes, you did,” said Dr. Winship. “And I said you darned well ought to, and you said you’d do it first thing this morning, only I suppose you’ve forgotten, as usual.”

“Well, Shumley Purvis’s wife is pretty bad,” said Dr. Dodd apologetically. “You may have to do a tracheotomy on her. If that swelling gets any worse—”

“You don’t know that what has anything to do with what happened to Tom Anderson, Dr. Dodd?” asked Ellery.

“Beg pardon? Why, that money I gave him.”

“You gave Daddy money?” exclaimed Rima. She glanced quickly at Ellery. He gave no sign, but she said no more, looking down at her hands.

“Which money was that, Doctor?” said Ellery.

“Oh, it’s something of a yarn,” replied Dr. Dodd with a sigh. “I have a confounded meddlesome streak in me, Mr. Queen. Always interfering in people’s lives. I remember when Tom Anderson first showed up in Wrightsville—taught at the high school. It wasn’t so many years ago, Rima, was it? He was a fine-looking man, with a lot of trouble in his face. A gentleman and a scholar, I always thought. I was sorry to see him lose his grip on himself that way. An awful waste.

“Well, I’d meet him on the street every so often and ask him to stop in and see me. Finally he did. I saw right away that what was wrong with him couldn’t be diagnosed on my examining table, anyway. It was a case for a psychiatrist and we don’t have any psychiatrists in these parts. But we talked things over. Well, he got to crying and feeling penitent and I knew I wasn’t doing him any good. I knew he’d go right out and hunt up another drink.”

Unexpectedly, Rima started to cry. In silence, putting her hands to her face and shaking all over. Dr. Winship looked as if someone with a large foot had kicked him in the groin. But Dr. Dodd caught Winship’s eye and shook his head, and Ellery signaled to the big man to go on. And in a moment Rima had stopped crying and her hands were back in her lap and she was staring at them.

“Then, a short time ago,” Dr. Dodd went on, “I came into all this money through the will of Luke MacCaby—”

“—blessed be his name,” muttered Dr. Winship with an eye on Rima, and he brightened when she laughed. “But the trouble is, Dr. Dodd won’t use it for himself. All he does—”

“Now Kenneth,” said Dr. Dodd. ‘The will isn’t through probate and what I’ve been able to squeeze out of Otis Holderfield is by mercy of the Surrogate, whom I used to whale the daylights out of when we were boys playing hooky from Miss Schoonmaker’s school-house over on Piney Road … when it was a road, not a damned death trap of a garbage dump. Well, anyway, not long after the MacCaby business came out I bumped into Tom Anderson. Almost literally. I’m sorry, my dear,” said Dr. Dodd gently to Rima, “but he was sitting in the middle of Polly Street reciting poetry and I almost ran over him.”

“It’s all right, Dr. Dodd,” said Rima. Then she added, oddly: “Daddy wasn’t half as unhappy as people thought he was.”

“Well, Rima, he wasn’t leaping for joy that day,” retorted Dr. Dodd. “I got him into my jalopy and pulled over to the curb and we had a long gabfest. He started to cry again—your dad always seemed to cry when I talked to him.”

“What was he crying about, Doctor?” asked Rima very quietly.

“You.”

“Me!” She looked incredulous.

“That’s right. Said he’d been worrying a lot about you lately. That he realized he hadn’t brought you up right.” Rima was getting pale around the nostrils. “Now, my dear, I’m just telling you what he said—”

“My father brought me up very well!”

“Course he did,” said Dr. Dodd. “And look at the results. Just remarkable. But Tom seemed to feel he hadn’t prepared you for life, Rima. That if anything happened to him you’d be left all alone without a friend or a way of getting along.”

“Rima,” said Ellery.

“Yes.” Rima was angry.

“A squatter’s shack in a swamp, he said. No place for a fine girl—”

“He was playing on your sympathies, Dr. Dodd. He didn’t mean it. I knew my father.” Rima’s eyes flashed. “I don’t think anyone can understand how well we knew each other. He knew he couldn’t have kept me for five minutes if I hadn’t wanted to stay with him and The Marshes. I won’t have even Daddy spoiling what he and I had together!”

“Now maybe,” said Dr. Dodd mildly, “maybe you didn’t know your father as well as you think you did, Rima.”

“I remember my father,” said the young doctor in a low voice. “I thought I knew him, too. But the letters he sent me while I was overseas …” Then he grinned. “You listen to old Doc Dodd, Miss Anderson. He dispenses pretty sound medicine.”

“And I want to hear the end of this yarn,” said Ellery with a smile. “Won’t you go on, Dr. Dodd?”

“Well, I said it was a pretty late date for him to be talking that way, and Tom said he knew that, and he cried some more, and it went on that way for some time. But then he said something that gave me a notion.”

“What was that, Doctor?”

“He said he wished he could quit drinking. And he stopped crying when he said it. Really seemed to mean it. I asked him why he didn’t, and he said, ‘A man has to have something to work for. Or to. I’d like to rehabilitate myself. Open a little bookshop, maybe. Make a decent home for my daughter. But I’m weak, Doctor. I can’t seem to get started on it.’ Well,” said Dr. Dodd, screwing and unscrewing the cap of his ancient fountain pen, “I’d heard alcoholics talk that way before. But, as I say, he’d stopped crying. And just then Mrs. Gonzoli’s daughter’s child, ’Tita, came running up Polly Street holding something up high and screaming, ‘Look what I found! A four-leaf clover!’”

“Four-leaf clover,” said Ellery.

Dr. Dodd said slowly, “Four-leaf clover. It’s not very scientific, Mr. Queen, I know. But then I’m just an old country practitioner … Got one of my blamed sudden impulses. I said to Tom, ‘Tom, I’m not sure I believe you. But by golly I’m going to give you your chance.’ And I made a deal with him. I’d make the down payment on a new life for him. Provide the finances if he’d provide the will power and stick-to-it. Kind of a partnership. He had to give up the bottle. Not gradually. But all at once. And not touch the stuff again. I said to him, ‘Tom, you come to me one week from today. If you’re cold sober and haven’t had a drop in the meantime, I’ll give you five thousand dollars in cash. And if six months from now you’re still on the wagon, I’ll settle an annuity on your girl.’ You know, a week is a long time in the life of an alcoholic. I figured it would be a good test.”

Dr. Dodd put his left thumb into his mouth. He began to worry the nail with his teeth, producing swift uneven little clicking sounds.

“And what did he say to that, Doctor?” asked Ellery. The big man’s nails were bitten away painfully.

“Why, he didn’t say a word for a long time. Just put his hands on my arm and looked at me. He was pretty bleary-eyed and he couldn’t focus very well, but he kept trying. Then all of a sudden he said, ‘I wouldn’t want the money. Not till I’d proved something to myself.’ I said, ‘No, Tom, I want you to have it. A man has to feel solid ground under his feet.’ He kept quiet again. But he was thinking, I could see that, thinking hard. Finally he said, ‘Maybe you’re right, Doc. All right, but I won’t spend a penny of it till I’ve earned the right.’ He got out of my car on all fours and when I tried to help him he shook my hand off. So I let him do it by himself; I could see it was important to him. And then he staggered up the street.”

And Rima’s eyes were big and full of tears.

“The next time I saw him was a week later. He was among the people in my waiting room out there. Sober and looking as if he’d been having a pretty bad time. He said, ‘Doctor, if you want the proof—’ I said, ‘No, Tom, I don’t ask for proof. Just looking at you is proof enough,’ and I called up Otis Holderfield—I’d given him his instructions just in case—and told Holderfield I was sending Mr. Anderson over to his office. A man who’s had a bad time,” said Dr. Dodd apologetically, “needs little rewards like that—being called Mister, I mean. It certainly did something for Tom. I could see him sort of straighten up as he walked out … Well, about an hour later, there was Tom back in my waiting room. When I was able to see him again, he pulled an envelope out of his pocket. Didn’t say a word. I said, ‘Well, Tom, is it all there?’ and he said, ‘Yes, Doctor, it’s all there. I don’t think I believed it before. Now I do.’ And then he said something that kind of embarrassed both of us, and this time we shook hands and he walked out with his shoulders way back, like a man.

“Last time I ever saw him,” muttered Dr. Dodd. “But I kept hearing about him. He was holding to his word. Kind of made me feel there was hope for the human race. That’s why it was such a stunner when I heard about his death. And more than once it’s passed through my mind that maybe my giving him that money had something to do with what happened to him.”

And the big man in the shiny blue serge suit was silent, the floppy places on his face jerking as if they had life of their own, his thick fingers prowling around his desk.

And then he cried out. It was almost a cry of fear. Because Rima had flashed from her chair to his desk and she had snatched one of his restless paws and put it to her lips. And then, with the swiftness which always surprised Ellery, she was at the window facing the blue stucco wall of the apartment building next door, her back to them.

Dr. Dodd was on his feet. His yellow skin had turned burnt orange. He stood leaning his heavy body on his fists, apparently at a loss for what to say. Dr. Winship sat rigid. And Ellery merely sat.

Finally Dr. Dodd rumbled, “Well, Rima, that money ought to take the pressure off you, give you a start. Don’t let any sharpers take it away from you … Kenneth, I think I hear the mob gatherin’ out there. Mr. Queen, if there’s nothing else—”

Ellery said, “But Rima doesn’t have the money, Dr. Dodd.”

“Eh?”

“She knew nothing about it. She never saw it and he never mentioned it to her.”

The two doctors stared.

“May I use your phone?” And when Ellery set the telephone down, he said, “I didn’t think he had, but it’s always best to check. Dakin says he found no money in the coat on Little Prudy’s Cliff. No money at all.”

“Robbery!” exclaimed Dr. Winship.

Rima was facing them.

“Oh, no,” said Dr. Dodd. “Oh, I hope not.” He sank into his chair, the nerves and muscles doing a dervish dance. His skin was yellow again.

“Two sides to every coin,” said Ellery. “Maybe it was robbery. And on the other hand maybe it wasn’t.” He added smoothly, but with just the right touch of urgency, “Well, Rima, these good men are going to be busy in a moment and we’ve still got the problem of your immediate future to settle, so—”

Dr. Dodd had sunk into himself again, twitching and shaking, but young Dr. Winship rose nobly to the fly. “What do you mean by that, Mr. Queen?”

“Rima can’t go back to that shack in The Marshes, Dr. Winship,” said Ellery. “And to live anywhere else—I mean, to lead any sort of normal life—she’ll have to find employment somewhere. Kind of you to be interested. Come on, Rima—oh, by the way, Doctor,” said Ellery, turning back, “you wouldn’t know someone who needs an intelligent girl with a superior educational background, would you?”

“Wait a minute. There’s still some time—” Dr. Winship glanced quickly at his wristwatch. “Plenty of time! Wait just one minute, Mr. Queen. Doc!”

Dr. Dodd came back with a start. “Yes? Yes?”

“Y’know, I’ve meant to talk to you about Pinkle—”

“Miss Pinkle. Oh. Yes.”

“She’s got the case cards in such a mess it’s taken me most of the weekend and all of this morning and I’m still not through straightening them out. Pinkle’s going steady with Rafe Landsman and half the time she’s still back in Memorial Park last night, smooching on the grass. She broke my sterilizer through downright carelessness Saturday and when I bawled her out she said she wouldn’t have to take my ‘abuse’ much longer because she and Rafe were going to elope any day now and he didn’t want his wife working, or some such slop. Why, she hasn’t even showed up this morning.”

“Hasn’t showed up this morning. Oh,” said Dr. Dodd. “Lord, what are we going to do?”

“Well, I think we might give her a couple of weeks’ pay and our good wishes and give her back to Rafe. Just a second now, Mr. Queen—”

“But Kenneth,” said Dr. Dodd helplessly, “we’d have to go all through that awful business of finding a new girl—”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dr. Winship. “How about … well, how about Miss Anderson here?”

Dr. Dodd turned slowly.

“Oh,” said Rima. “Oh, I don’t know if I—” Ellery pinched her ankle as he stooped to pick up the cigaret he had dropped. Rima stopped.

“There’s certainly nothing in the job that ought to tax an intelligent girl like Miss Anderson,” said Dr. Winship carelessly. “If that Pinkle troglodyte could mangle the job … Don’t you agree, Mr. Queen?”

“Well, it’s certainly providential. But I don’t know,” said Ellery craftily. “Rima doesn’t know how to type—”

“Is that all?” cried young Winship. “You ought to see samples of Pinkle’s alleged typing. If Rima can’t do better in one lesson I’ll—I’ll kiss Pinkle’s foot! I’ll bet Miss Anderson can at least spell. And whatever help Dr. Dodd and I need with patients—I mean, preparing them for examination, working the sterilizer, and so on—why, she could learn that in no time. You know we lost our regular office nurse during this damn diphtheria outbreak in Low Village and every trained nurse in town is needed for case work, and at the hospital. So we’ve been more or less limping along here, anyway. Doc, what do you say? It would tide us over and sort of help Miss Anderson out at the same time.”

Dr. Dodd was swabbing his forehead with a soggy handkerchief. “Yes, I … Think you’d like that, Rima?” He sounded feeble.

“I don’t know, Dr. Dodd. I’ve never been cooped up in a—”

“Sooner or later you’ll have to start being cooped up, Rima,” said Ellery crossly. He felt like spanking her. “You can’t live like a butterfly indefinitely. And this is really wonderful luck, Dr. Winship’s suggestion.”

“Maybe you’re worried about the salary,” said Dr. Winship anxiously. “Pinkie’s been getting thirty a week but, Doc, I think we might stretch a point and make it thirty-five for Rima—Miss Anderson—”

“Yes, yes, Kenneth. The only thing that’s bothering me,” said Dr. Dodd painfully, “is that I promised Henry Pinkle I’d give Gloria every chance. You know she hasn’t been able to hold a job and the Pinkles need the money—”

“I tell you the nitwit is planning to elope!”

“Well … let’s talk to Gloria again, Kenneth—see if this marriage business is definite.” Dr. Dodd looked relieved, as if he had solved a difficult problem. “If it is, Rima, it would be just fine having you work with us.”

Dr. Winship looked dissatisfied.

“Fair enough,” said Ellery cheerfully. “You can let Rima know how it works out through me, Dr. Winship. I guess we can manage to hold out another day or so, eh, Rima?”

“Yes,” said Rima.

Dr. Dodd’s hands were shaking so badly that he dropped his handkerchief. “It’s all right, Kenneth. Got ’em worse than usual today! Meanwhile, child, if you need any money—”

“Thank you, Dr. Dodd.” Rima’s voice was soft. “You’ve done … enough already.”

“And Mr. Queen, if there’s anything further I can do—”

“I’ll certainly not hesitate to call on you, Doctor. Dr. Winship, it’s been a pleasure—Oh! Just one thing.” This is insanity, Ellery thought. But nothing’s gone right, anyway. “Has either of you gentlemen sent me a letter recently?”

Rima looked at him sharply. And then at the two doctors. But they were merely looking bewildered; and I can’t say I blame them, Ellery said to himself. He shook Dr. Dodd’s hand—it was unpleasantly moist—and Dr. Winship walked them out.

The waiting room was crowded. A fullblown young woman in spike-heeled shoes and a transparent peekaboo blouse was making her lips up at the desk, fretfully.

“See what I mean?” hissed Dr. Winship, and he glared all the way to the front door.

Outside, Ellery said: “And what happened to your promise in Miss Sally’s Tea Roome this morning, Rima? Wasn’t it fundamentally obvious that I wangled that offer for you? And you went ahead and spoiled it!”

“Dr. Dodd didn’t want me.”

“Oh. Sensitive, too.”

“He didn’t, Ellery.”

“You’re wrong. Dodd’s a chronic do-gooder. Whatever’s messed him up expresses itself through acts of charity and lovingkindness. More power to him. He’s genuinely worried, I think, about his promise to this Wrightsville peony’s father. But Rima, you’re on his conscience, too. We’re working in the dark, groping for a little light on a man’s death. We’ve got to take advantage of every glimmer. We can’t afford to have scruples. With a little intelligent assistance from you—” He was fuming.

“I’m sorry.” Rima was staring at the lawn, where beside the walk an old man on his knees was transplanting seedlings from a flat. “It seemed like taking advantage. Dr. Dodd was so kind to Daddy. And Dr. Winship—”

“Ah, Dr. Winship. The tone changes. I didn’t think you knew how, but apparently the art is bred in the bone. What about Dr. Winship?”

“You don’t like him.”

“I love him! But he’s still only a piece in a puzzle as far as I’m concerned. What about Dr. Winship?”

“Well, he was so nice. And I don’t know anything about office work.”

She looked so small and isolated. “Well, well,” Ellery said, “we’ll talk about it some more … That old man. Is that—?”

“That’s Harry Toyfell.”

Toyfell’s knobby hands were working swiftly in the soil. He wore a grim suit of what had once been black cloth, patched in odd places and earthstained at the knees and cuffs. A violent blue shirt. And an incredible high stiff collar with a string tie. He was long and narrow, with sucked-in cheeks and a gritty skin. His skull was a squeezed bone thinly striated with hair. Put a stovepipe hat with a ribbon around its crown on that skull, thought Ellery, and you’d have Old Bluenose in person. Strange philosopher.

“Let’s talk to him, Rima.”

“No!”

“Are you afraid of him?” he asked her gently.

“Yes!”

“Stay behind me.”

Rima followed reluctantly.

“Toyfell.”

The gardener looked around and up with a jerk. Trying to give the impression he hadn’t noticed us, thought Ellery.

“Yes, Mister?”

Ellery said sharply, “I’m a detective. Ellery Queen. Investigating the death of Tom Anderson. You were a crony of his, Toyfell. What do you know about it?”

“What do I know ’bout it?” Toyfell got to his feet in sections. “Why, Mister, I know that man is mortal and I know that death is sad. That’s what I know ’bout it. Do you know any more?” His voice was a rusty abomination. His little blue eyes shifted. “Ain’t that Rima Anderson?”

Ellery squeezed her hand.

“Hello, Mr. Toyfell,” she said quickly.

“Didn’t know ye at first in those togs. Make ye look like a real grownup young woman.” The mineral eyes stared.

Rima’s grip tightened.

“When is the last time you saw Anderson?” Ellery snapped.

“Night he disappeared. We were settin’ in Gus Olesen’s. Tom, Nick Jacquard, and me.” Toyfell kept glancing at Rima, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “On Route 16,” he said.

“All leave together, did you?”

“No, Mister. Tom left first.”

“Time?”

“’Bout 10:30. After a spell Nick, he got up and left, too. Then me.”

“Anderson was sober?”

“Hadn’t drunk a lick. ‘A ginger ale,’ he says to Gus.” The old man spat on the grass.

“Didn’t you or Jacquard ask Anderson where he was going?”

Toyfell looked at Ellery. “Want to make your own liberty secure, guard your enemy from oppression. That’s Paine. And I say to that, Amen, brother.”

“I thought Tom Anderson was your friend.”

“He was. Therefore I say, How can a man do less unto his friend?” Toyfell spat again.

Valuable philosophy, thought Ellery. Especially in a homicide investigation. “And you didn’t see him again?”

“Not in this life.” Toyfell grinned, but then Ellery saw that the old gardener was drawing his lips back over his empty gums in a grimace of genuine sadness. And he thought that many of Toyfell’s disagreeable aspects might be similarly the result of physical distortion; but he thought this for only a moment. There were those flinty eyes, and Rima holding herself in by his side.

And Ellery found himself repeating the foolish litany: “Did you send me a letter or two recently?”

The old man stared. “Now that’s a question I just don’t get, Mister.”

“To Ellery Queen. West 87th Street, New York City. Two letters.”

“Haven’t writ a letter in twenty-five years.”

“See the Record regularly, do you?”

“I see it, but I don’t read it. There’s no truth in newspapers, only facts. Do you want to argue the case?”

“Some other day,” smiled Ellery. “But Toyfell, I must say I admire you. You seem to be standing up under blows that would have knocked the starch out of a lesser man. In a short time death’s taken two employers and a friend, and here you are—still philosophizing.”

“Know thyself,” said Harry Toyfell, getting down on his knees again. “The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.”

“You’re a religious man?”

“A pagan said that, Mister. Read your Plato. But people don’t read Plato any more. Just newspapers. As for my religion, I worship God in every seed. When did you find anything in a church but cut flowers? Not that it’s any of your business, Mister.”

They left The Town Philosopher crawling about among his young plants, dealing with them tenderly. He did not look up as they left him. Not even to look at Rima Anderson.

Rima said no, she didn’t care for any lunch, thank you, she wasn’t hungry, and unless he had some special reason for wanting her she’d like to go back to the hotel and take off her shoes, she really would. Also, she was used to taking a nap in the afternoon, and so on. No, he needn’t bother to take her back, really he needn’t; she didn’t want to interfere in any way with his plans.

“I’ll pick you up in a couple of hours, Rima. Some things I want to do.” Ellery took her hand.

“At Upham House?” She withdrew it.

“Yes.”

“All right.”

He watched her swing away. Hurrying strides. He would not have been surprised if she had broken into a run.

Ellery walked up Algonquin to State and west on State to the County Court House.

Chief Dakin grabbed him. “What’s this about did I find money?” he cried.

Ellery told him.

Dakin got red. “Now that wasn’t right,” he spluttered. “Doc Dodd should have told me about that right off. Five thousand dollars! Where is it?”

Ellery tapped his teeth with a thoughtful fingernail.

“There wasn’t a brass cent in that coat. And no sign of anything on the cliff or around it.”

“He might have hidden it, Dakin. Probably did. Did you search the shack?”

“Tore it apart. Looking for anything we could find. But all we turned up was three bottles of whisky in different hiding places under the floor.”

“No money. In any amount.”

“Not a Confederate dime. But that’s it, Mr. Queen. There’s the motive and there’s the crime.” The chief of police rubbed his hands. “He had that five thousand on him and he was lured to that spot, attacked, robbed, and flung over the cliff.”

Ellery pushed his lips out.

Finally he said, “Maybe,” and rose.

“Where you goin’?”

“There’s still a byroad or two. By the way, Dakin, none of your local riffraff’s been displaying unusual riches lately, I suppose.”

“Haven’t heard of any, but I’m goin’ to get busy on that first thing.”

“Might pay to keep this under your visor for a while, Dakin.”

“I wasn’t figuring on getting up in Town Meetin’ about it. Who else knows besides Doc Dodd and Kenny Winship and you and me?”

“Rima, of course. And Otis Holderfield.”

“Well, you can take care of Rima, and Otis’s father on his mother’s side was a clam—”

“By the way, what about this fellow Holderfield? What’s his reputation in Wrightsville?”

“Otis,” said Chief Dakin with a grin, “is black and blue from pinchin’ himself. How Luke MacCaby came to pick him when he needed a lawyer nobody’s been able to figure out. For years he’s scrabbled along on accident and rent-collection cases, doing an insurance business to pay for the butter. Mysterious little guy always full of secrets and you always know most of it’s hot air. The Rotary bunch groan when they see him comin’. That is, up to the last month or so. Otis sure has blossomed. From rags to riches. Got into a big new office in the Granjon Block, smokes quarter cigars, has his shoes shined every day, calls Donald Mackenzie and J. C. Pettigrew by their first names, and Clint Fosdick told me the other day he’d seen Otis over at Marty Zilliber’s agency looking over a Buick convertible. Mostly on prospect of course—the money hasn’t started to come in yet, but they’ll be through probate any day now and when they are—why, Doc Dodd’s retained Otis to represent his legal interests and I guess Otis will be rolling in clover. But he’s a smart one, Otis is, considering his limitations. At least he doesn’t make the mistake of shootin’ off his face. We might slip this five thousand dollar deal by the Record, at that. If they haven’t got hold of it by this time …”

“The Record,” said Ellery; and he looked thoughtful as he left.

He walked slowly up State Street, past the Our Boys Memorial, past the Town Hall, into the Square.

Here he paused, facing south. One spoke away was Lower Main, and on the south corner of Lower Main the Record building stood. Ellery became aware for the first time that the Record building was not what it had been. It had been a blackish green affair of decayed woodwork with a gingerbread cornice and a stubborn look. The mordant woodwork was no more; the face of the building was now bright coral stucco and chrome, off which the sun ricocheted angrily. The old dingy sign, which had stretched across the building under the cornice, was gone, replaced by an intricate mechanism on the roof of neon tubing. The whole structure had a coltishly rejuvenated air, and it tickled his interest. He actually started across State Street.

But then he about-faced and made his way along the rim of the Square to the Wrightsville National Bank.

Scowling, he went in.

Fifteen minutes later he came out, crossed Upper Dade, passed the old Bluefield store, J. P. Simpson’s Loan Office, Dunc MacLean—Fine Liquors, the Hollis entrance, Sol Gowdy’s Men’s Shop, the Atomic War Surplus Outlet Store. At the corner of the Square and Lincoln Street, where Hallam Luck (the First) in 1927 had erected his Greek temple of finance, the Public Trust Company, Ellery stopped again.

After a moment he went into Wrightsville’s other bank.

Ellery was back on the sidewalk in twelve minutes.

He hesitated, staring vacantly across Lincoln Street at the Bon Ton, and the High Village Pharmacy and the New York Department Store beyond. The Square was lively with Monday morning commerce and he was elbowed a little.

Finally he walked back along the western arc of the Square to the Hollis Hotel.

There was one cab at the taxi stand and a man he had never seen before sat behind the wheel reading a copy of the Record.

“Cab, sir?”

“Well, I wasn’t intending to walk all the way to Slocum,” said Ellery grumpily; and he got in.

At three o’clock in the afternoon Ellery was back in Wrightsville, on the ground floor south wing of Upham House, knocking on the door of Room 17.

He knocked again.

“You Mr. Queen?”

A redhaired bellboy was at his elbow, leering.

“Yes.”

“Miss Anderson said to tell you she got clau—clau—”

“Claustrophobia?”

“Yes, sir. I had it written down but I guess I lost it. Anyway, she said to tell you she’s over in Memorial Park somewhere, holding down a tree.”

Ellery hurried back to State Street.

He found Rima deep in the park, at its hilly northern side, lying under a willow tree on the bank of Mullins Creek. Her skirt was halfway to her waist and her bare toes were wiggling in the water like little pink fish; he saw her shoes and stockings ten feet away, as if they had been flung. As he approached, a dozen birds rose from the grass about her and raced up into the willow, from which they scolded him.

“Bird talk for ‘Unclean! Unclean!’” said Ellery. “Your name should have been Avis, or at least Rara. How do you do it?”

“I just lie very still and talk softly to them. Did you have any trouble finding me?” She was all dreamy friendliness again, as she had been on the train.

“Natty Bumppo Queen?” He looked down at her. “Feeling better?”

“Oh, ever so much.” She sat up abruptly, pulling her skirt quickly over her knees. When he grinned, she laughed and jumped to her feet. “Where have you been, Ellery?”

“Here and there. Hungry?”

“No.”

“Do you eat like a bird, too? Suppose you pull those instruments of torture back on, Rima—”

“We going somewhere?”

“Calling.”

“Again? Where?” Her whole face flashed.

“The Granjon Block.”

“Oh.”

They strolled back through the park. After a while Rima’s hand slipped into his. Ellery squeezed and she smiled faintly and did not let go until they reached the American Legion Bandstand opposite the Town Hall steps and flushed two teenagers from under the latticework.

The Granjon Block was the building on the southwest corner of Washington and Slocum Streets, across Slocum from the Professional Building. Unlike the Professional Building, whose copestone said that it had been built in 1879, the Granjon Block was “new”; it was less than thirty years old and it advertised elevator service for its four stories. According to the directory in the lobby, it was tenanted chiefly by lawyers and other professional men. The legend, HOLDERFIELD, OTIS, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW … 401, glistened.

A bulky old man in a black alpaca jacket took them up in the elevator. “Aren’t you Mr. Queen?” he asked Ellery.

“That’s right. And you’re Buzz Congress. You used to be the ‘special’ at the Wrightsville National in John P. Wright’s day.”

“Recognized you right off, Mr. Queen.”

“Can’t beat a trained eye. Know if Otis Holderfield’s in his office?”

“Took him up from lunch an hour ago.”

“I hear Holderfield’s in the chips.”

“Changed man. Why, seems only yesterday he was goin’ around with a handkerchief tucked into his collar and holes in his shoes.” The old man’s tone was without irony; it was even respectful. “Nobody’d hardly talk to Otis. He’d have to hang onto their lapels. Now the same folks who’d been uppity to him come up here to shake his hand and give him their law business.” Buzz Congress wheezed—not at Otis Holderfield, it was clear, but at the folks who had been uppity. “It’s that office there, sir. With the gold letters.”

The outer office was shiny and new, the furniture was shiny and new, the law books were shiny and new, and even the secretary looked as if she had just been unpacked. Her blouse plunged steeply at the neckline, her eye was cold and wise, her figure insolent; she was what Wrightsville still terms “a hot number.” Ellery’s pre-estimate of Otis Holderfield underwent a modification. He began to feel sorry he had brought Rima.

Wrightsville’s newest legal comet zipped out of his private office. He was the newest-looking little man Ellery had ever seen—a haberdasher’s dream and a barber’s delight; he stood in an almost visible field of eau de cologne. His suit, his striped silk shirt, his handpainted silk necktie, his suède shoes, the diamond on his stubby finger—their wearer was obscured by the blaze. And a good thing, too, thought Ellery; for Holderfield was no beauty. He was built on the lines of a small keg, with womanish hips and shoulders whose meagerness was only accentuated by the sharp pads which broadened them. The top of his head was perfectly flat, a pinkish plateau covered with a sparse scrub of oily black hair; he had small cunning features, crooked teeth, and a nervous little bounce.

“Ellery Queen? The Ellery Queen from New York? Say!” Ellery’s hand was wrung by two moistly eager members. “Couldn’t believe my ears when my secretary announced you.” His secretary was looking Ellery over frankly. “Come in, come in, Mr. Queen! Can’t get the little old ham-burg out of your blood, hey? Haha! Say, I used to read about you in the Record and I remember saying to myself, ‘Now there’s a smart cookie I’d like to meet up with some day,’ and, by damn, here you are! Walking into Otis Holderfield’s private office like you owned the place. Well, sir, you do, you do. Here, take this one—that’s real leather. Should have given me a buzz, Mr. Queen. I’d have set up a lunch with some of the boys—you know, Donald and J. P.… Say! I almost didn’t see this little lady. New York stock, hey?” The little man’s left eyelid drooped and the left side of his face screwed up for a moment. “Hiya, little gal. Here, you take this chair where we galoots can both get an eyeful, haha! What did you say this cute trick’s name is, Mr. Queen?”

“Rima Anderson,” said Ellery.

Holderfield’s animation died. His little eyes narrowed and he shot a quick glance at Ellery.

“The Old Soak’s girl, hey?” he said pleasantly. “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Just goes to show—never judge a book by its bookie, haha! Well, well, I suppose this visit has something to do with your father, honey, hm? Though, Mr. Queen, I don’t see …”

“I saw Dr. Dodd this morning, Holderfield.”

“You did?” He was behind his desk now, tilting his swivel chair, fingertips meeting in a juridical way. Very attentive.

“Dr. Dodd told me all about the five thousand dollars.”

“Five thousand dollars?”

“That he instructed you to get for Tom Anderson.”

“Dr. Dodd told you that, did he?”

“I’m looking for additional information.”

Otis Holderfield was silent. Then he said, smiling, “You understand, Mr. Queen, Dr. Dodd’s an important client, and the client-attorney relationship …”

“You mean you’d rather not talk about it?”

“I didn’t say that,” said the attorney with a slight sharpness.

“Dr. Dodd didn’t seem reticent.”

“He didn’t. Well, that’s fine. By the way, did Dr. Dodd tell you to come to see me, Mr. Queen?”

“No.”

The little man looked regretful. “In that case …”

“May I use your phone?”

“What?” Holderfield was alarmed. “Who you going to call?”

“Your client. You seem worried about the propriety of discussing this with me, Holderfield. I think Dr. Dodd will relieve your mind—”

“Say, don’t think about it.” Holderfield was all smiles again. “Not the least bit necessary, Mr. Queen. It’s just that Dr. Dodd’s one of my big clients and naturally an attorney … I mean, my father used to say to me, ‘Otis, two things a man has to keep buttoned if he’s going to stay out of trouble. The other one is his mouth.’ Haha! Never forgot that bit of wisdom. Though we all ignore even the best advice at times, now, don’t we, haha! Don’t mind telling you about the Anderson business, Mr. Queen—don’t mind at all. Though, as I told Dr. Dodd, I thought it was ill-advised in the first instance, and then the old barfly disappearing that way—”

“He’s dead,” said Rima.

“Now, now, little girl, we don’t know that, do we? Not as a fact. No, sir, if I were you I’d put that thought clean out of my head, little girl. That hat and coat on the cliff don’t constitute a corpus delicti and that’s my legal opinion. Won’t cost you a penny, either, haha.”

“He’s dead,” repeated Rima.

Holderfield scowled. “Well, this is a free country. But I can’t see that that kind of talk does anybody any good. I’m a great believer in facts—”

“So am I,” said Ellery. “But I believe we’re still ambling around in the realm of opinion. Why was Dodd’s gift to Tom Anderson ill-advised?”

“Well, you give an old rummy—I mean, The Old Soak hadn’t had five silver dollars to rub against one another for years—now had he, Miss Anderson? A fact’s a fact. And then … Of course, it was Dr. Dodd’s money and I’m a great believer in following through on my clients’ wishes—within reason, of course, haha!—even though in this case it meant putting myself and my client under obligation to the Surrogate. At that, I had the devil of a time …”

“In other words, Holderfield, you were against Dodd’s giving Anderson that money.”

“Yes, sir, I was.” The little man looked stern. “Sebastian Dodd’s got a heart as big as Wright County. Too darn big for his own good. Got absolutely no conception of the value of—Excuse me. What is it, Floss?”

The secretary was in the doorway, leaning. “Dave Waldo.”

“Dave? Say! Mr. Queen, this won’t take a minute. Matter of fact—Send him in, Floss. Mr. Queen, seeing you’re from New York, I’d like your reaction to this. Come in, David!”

As the lawyer bounced from his chair Ellery glanced at Rima, shaking his head slightly. Rima relaxed.

The man who hurried into the office was tiny and anxious looking. He was so small that he had to look up to Holderfield. His little narrow shoulders were curved inward, his eyes stared myopically, his skin was a clayish gray, and there were innumerable pricks in his fingers. It was no surprise to learn that he was a tailor—“Dave Waldo, runs the tailoring shop downstairs, he and his brother Jonathan. David and Jonathan—pretty good, uh? They’re twins, haha! But they certainly know how to make a suit. Wouldn’t have my clothes made anywheres else, hey, Dave?” David Waldo smiled nervously as he laid a bolt of cloth on Holderfield’s desk. “Just came from New York, Mr. Holderfield. You said you wanted to see it in the bolt, so I ran right up with it. Finest lightweight camel’s hair. Imported.” “How’s it look to you, Ellery?—y’know, Dave, this is Ellery Queen, you’ve heard of him. From New York. Going to have Dave make me up a spring top-coat. Hollywood style. You know, big shoulders, loose cut, lots of material, tie belt. Think it’ll be worth a hundred and fifty with this material?” Ellery murmured something sage about relative values, wondering where he had seen David Waldo before, and Otis Holderfield examined the cocoa-colored material critically, finally saying it would do all right—“I’ll be down for a fitting on that gabardine suit, Dave, first chance I get. Charge the oxford gray to my account, Davey-boy”—and the little tailor looked grateful and scurried out. Holderfield seemed sorry to see him go.

Ellery said abruptly, “I have one or two other things to do today, Holderfield. I’m trying to locate that five thousand.”

“Locate it?”

“It’s disappeared.”

Holderfield looked unhappy.

“It wasn’t in the coat Dakin found on Little Prudy’s Cliff. It wasn’t hidden in the Anderson house. I’ve spent part of today checking back to see if Anderson mightn’t have deposited it in a bank or hired a safe deposit box somewhere. The two Wrightsville banks have no record of either an account or a box. I’ve been to Slocum with no luck, either. There’s no bank at the Junction, or in Fidelity or Bannock, and I hardly think Anderson would have gone so far afield as Connhaven. Holderfield, have you any idea what he may have done with that five thousand dollars?”

“Think it has something to do with his disappearance, do you, Mr. Queen?”

“I don’t know whether it has or not. That’s what I’m trying to find out.

“Well, it hasn’t or I’d have advised my client long ago to tell the whole story to the police …” Holderfield was perspiring, swabbing down the flat of his head with a handrolled, Irish linen handkerchief.

“Where is that money, Holderfield?”

The little man bounced to his feet. “Dang it, it’s a nuisance!” he cried. “Don’t know why I’m placed in this position. Try to keep your client happy … Few days after Dr. Dodd phoned me and Anderson came over and I handed him the envelope with the money in it, why, Anderson came back. Came back with the envelope.”

“Here? To your office?” asked Ellery sharply.

“That’s right!”

“The same envelope?”

“Same envelope. My imprint. But sealed—double-sealed. With Scotch tape. It wasn’t sealed when I’d given it to him.”

“Then you didn’t actually see the money when he visited you for the second time?”

“No. But it was in there, all right—it had been in twenties, fifties, and hundreds and it made a whopper of an envelopeful. Besides, Anderson said so. Said he was too nervous to hide the money and too nervous to keep carrying it around, and would I hold onto it for him till he proved something to himself, or words to that effect.” Holderfield’s expression was distinctly disagreeable. “I should have had my head examined! Tried to argue with him—asked him why he didn’t put it in a bank—and he said no, if anything happened to him the money’d get all tangled up in legal red tape and he’d rather it was in a place where it could be got to without a fuss. Asked me to keep it in my office safe. Well, I was jammed up that day, had an office full of people, so I didn’t stop to think and I said I’d do it. He handed me the envelope and I noticed he’d written on it, ‘If anything happens to Thomas Hardy Anderson, this envelope is to be turned over to Nicole Jacquard.’”

“Nick Jacquard?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s the second time you say he referred to something possibly happening to him. Did you get the impression, or did he specify—?”

“Not a bit of it. It was more like a man’s making out a will. He indicates a disposition of his property just in case—”

“But why Jacquard?”

“Of all people,” said Rima. Her eyes were sad.

Holderfield shrugged. “I didn’t ask him and he didn’t say. He just said there was a letter of instructions to Jacquard included in the envelope, telling Jacquard just what to do with the contents. I thought myself it was sort of queer, his picking Jacquard, I mean, but as I say I was busy, so I put the envelope in my safe and Anderson left.” Holderfield used his handkerchief again. “Well, when his hat and coat turned up on Little Prudy’s Cliff, that certainly came under the heading of something ‘happening’ to Anderson, so I sent word to Nick Jacquard and he dropped into my office here and I gave him the envelope. I’ve got a receipt for it signed by Jacquard,” Holderfield added quickly, “so everything’s hunky-dory, as the old rubes around here say, haha!”

“May I have that receipt, please?”

“Well, now, Mr. Queen, I don’t want to seem uncooperative, but the fact is that receipt’s my only proof I gave Jacquard Anderson’s envelope—”

“Then may I see it.”

“Well, it’s in my safe and I’ve got a client coming up any second now, Mr. Queen—”

“Let it go,” said Ellery. “But everything’s not quite as hunky-dory as you’d have me believe, Holderfield. In the first place, the moment you heard about Anderson’s death—”

“Disappearance,” said Holderfield rather breathlessly.

“—you should have hotfooted it over to Dakin’s office and told Dakin the whole story—”

“Not at all, not at all,” said the lawyer. “That money involved my client. I mean, it brought him into what might have been a mess. My duty is to my client first and foremost—”

“Your duty, Holderfield, is to the law first and foremost.”

“It was my client’s place to go to the police if he saw fit, and, if he didn’t, it was my place as his attorney to back him up—”

“It was your place as his attorney to advise him to go to the police and you know it. But, aside from that, you certainly had no right to give that envelope up to Jacquard or anyone else. It was material to a suspected homicide. Anderson was dead, following a felonious assault. That’s murder—”

“You prove it!” said Holderfield triumphantly. “You prove Anderson was murdered. You prove he’s even dead! All anybody knows for a fact is that he’s disappeared. Not a particle of evidence to any other effect. I held that envelope of his as a confidential trust. I had my instructions: If anything ‘happened’ to him, I was to turn the envelope over to Nicole Jacquard. Mine not to reason why, as the poet says, hey, Mr. Queen? You can’t get around that, no, siree-bob.”

“What you wanted to do, and what you did,” said Ellery, rising, “was to get rid of that envelope just as fast as you could. Holderfield, you’re in a mess, and you know it, and I know it, and none of your pettifogging legalisms can change the fact.” Otis Holderfield was pale, but whether with fear or with anger Ellery could not decide. The man sat worrying his lower lip and turning the diamond ring on his fat finger. It seemed an excellent moment for his standard question, so Ellery went on, “And talking about envelopes, Holderfield, did you address a couple of same to me recently?”

“Me? Send you letters?”

“Yes.”

“If you got any letters on my stationery,” said Holderfield excitedly, “they were forged. I never sent you a letter in my life. And you can’t prove I did!”

“A simple negative would have served the purpose,” sighed Ellery, nodding to Rima. “Oh, by the way, Holderfield.” Ellery detained Rima in the doorway. “I’m curious about one other matter. How did Luke MacCaby come to call you in when he wanted to make a will?”

The little man bounced to his feet, purple. “And what’s the matter with me?” he shouted.

“I didn’t say anything was the matter. I just asked you a question.”

“I’ve drawn a will or two in my time!”

“I’m sure you have. But how did MacCaby happen to pick you when he wanted his drawn?”

“Mr. Queen, you’ve got no right asking me questions like that! I don’t have to take that sort of thing!”

“I seem to have stumbled on your sore toe, Holderfield—”

“And anyway, what’s MacCaby got to do with this Anderson business? I don’t get it, Mr. Queen, I don’t get it!”

“I don’t either, Holderfield, which is why I’m trying. Sorry if I’ve offended you—”

“Just because I was scraping along in this town—! All right, I was lucky. If you must know, MacCaby got my name out of the classified directory. But I had a break coming, fella! And all these wiseacres who used to look down their noses at me—why, I’ve got ’em eating out of my hand. I’m big potatoes in this hamlet now and, Brother Queen, I mean to stay that way!” Holderfield’s high color slowly faded, but some of it lingered on his cheekbones. He began to fuss with some papers on his desk, a little blindly.

“Did your father ever say anything to you about Nick Jacquard’s being his executor, so to speak, in case anything happened to him?” Ellery asked Rima when they were on Washington Street again.

“No.”

“Did Jacquard ever get in touch with you after your father disappeared?”

“No.” Rima shivered.

“Dodd to Holderfield to Jacquard,” muttered Ellery, taking Rima’s arm. “Town Saint to Town Rabbit’s-Foot to Town Thief. Fascinating gambit. Let’s go smoke out Nick Jacquard.”

They found him immediately, for Ellery said the logical place to start looking was Gus Olesen’s on Route 16 and when they took a cab to the Roadside Tavern and walked into its malty interior there was Jacquard, alone, spreading his shoulders over the bar, his battered hands closed about a glass of beer. Jacquard was a hulk, with all the hulk’s derelict nature; he may have been a trim vessel once, but brawls and hunger and liquor had left him dismantled and unfit, a huge and dirty piece of uselessness lapped by the brown waters of a drunken daydream. He was unshaved, unshorn, and unwashed and his costume was improvised from crooked bits of a once-honest workman’s wardrobe.

He spied them in the bar mirror and it seemed to Ellery Jacquard’s seaglass eyes sparkled briefly at sight of Rima, but the man did not turn on his stool, he kept guard over his beer and stared into the mirror and beyond.

Gus Olesen was not about and the bartender was a new man, for which Ellery gave thanks. He ordered a root beer for Rima and a Martini for himself, and then he set Rima down to one side of Jacquard and he took the flanking stool, so that Jacquard sat humped between them. The man stirred.

“Don’t go away, Nick,” said Rima. “My friend wants to talk to you.”

“’Allo,” said Nick Jacquard. His diction was half-slurred and difficult. “They find your old man?”

“My friend, Nick,” said Rima. “On the other side of you.”

“You got a friend?” Jacquard’s eyes shifted. “Pretty quick.”

“On this side,” said Ellery.

Jacquard turned.

“My name is Queen. Ellery Queen.”

The bloodshot eyes blinked. “Pleased to meet you. I got to go—”

“Sit down, Jacquard.”

After a moment Jacquard settled back on his stool. “What you want?”

“To talk about your old pal Tom Anderson.”

“You’re a bull,” said Jacquard heavily. “I know about you. I tell Dakin every thing I know. I got nothing to tell you.”

“Nick, you’re lying,” said Rima.

Jacquard muttered something in patois and tossed his beer down with a jerk.

Ellery tried to focus the three cronies at this very bar. Tom Anderson, Nick Jacquard, Harry Toyfell. The gentle, the dull, the sharp. Town Drunk, Town Thief, Town Philosopher. An ex-professor of English literature, an illiterate bum, an iconoclastic gardener. Tom, Nick, and Harry. Ellery wondered what bitter cement had held them together.

“Maybe you lie,” said Jacquard, cocking his shaggy head at Rima. “Maybe you pull a trick on me, hein?” He laughed, but he was alarmed, his glances caroming off the mirror toward Ellery and back to Rima, his murderous hands gripping the edge of the bar.

“No, Jacquard. We know the whole story of the envelope that lawyer, Holderfield, gave you after Tom Anderson disappeared.”

Jacquard sat still.

“Holderfield did give you an envelope, didn’t he? With your name on it in Anderson’s handwriting. A thick one, sealed with Scotch tape.”

Jacquard said nothing.

“And you gave Holderfield a receipt for it, Jacquard.”

“Then okay!” the man burst out. His little eyes were prowling now.

“What was in it?” Jacquard’s tongue came out. “Jacquard, what was in the envelope?”

“Papers.”

“Papers? What kind of papers?”

“Papers … letters. Old letters. That Tom writes one time.”

“Letters he wrote to you?” smiled Ellery.

“No. To—Yes! To me.”

“Can you read, Jacquard?”

“You’re lying, Nick,” said Rima.

“I can read better as you!” Jacquard licked his lips again. He’s furious and dull-witted, thought Ellery.

“How much money did the envelope have in it, Jacquard?”

“Money?”

“Money.”

“You crazy! There is no money in that! No money, you hear?” He waved his thick arms, getting off the stool.

“Jacquard, there were five thousand dollars in that envelope.”

“No money!” He backed away.

“And a letter of instructions from Anderson to you. What were Anderson’s instructions, Jacquard?”

“No money.” Jacquard lurched through the swinging doors, at the last with a lunge. His hoarse voice came back. “No money!” he cried, as if with each repetition his cry became more believable, to himself as well as to them.

They heard him scuffing rapidly away through the gravel.

Rima laughed. “Poor Daddy.” But her lips were trembling.

“Nature of the beast,” said Ellery reflectively. “He’s dazed with the immense, the immense good luck of it all. Five thousand dollars. To Jacquard five million wouldn’t be more. Could you hold a starving tiger from the helpless kill? He means to keep it, Rima. He’s dazed, and he’s scared, and he’s sick to his stomach, but he means to keep it. Maybe not even to spend; how could a Jacquard spend five thousand dollars? What amazes me, Rima, is not Jacquard’s childish lying and his dishonesty. It’s your father’s sublime folly.”

“Jacquard was his friend. Daddy had only two friends in the world. Besides me.” The last was said to her root beer, which she had not touched.

“Two friends. Of whom one was a thief and the other a philosopher. And he entrusts his money to the thief.”

“My father,” said Rima, “was a wonderful man.”

“The exact word,” nodded Ellery, throwing a bill down on the bar. “Possibly, Rima, he had even less faith in the honesty of the philosopher than in the crookedness of the thief. Friendship isn’t necessarily based on trust. A man who’s lonely will cling to his worst enemy … Or he might have been borrowing a leaf from the golden book of Sebastian Dodd—giving the crooked man his chance to straighten out.” Ellery said gently, “Come, Rima.”

But Rima kept staring into her glass. “Why didn’t Daddy give it to me? Didn’t he trust me?” She laughed again. “Or did he trust Nick Jacquard more?”

It was a question Ellery had been asking himself for some time. “You should know the answer to that.”

“I should, but I don’t.”

“He had to prove something to himself. For all their cronyism, Jacquard and Toyfell were outsiders to him. They didn’t touch him. They weren’t part of him. I think your father felt the necessity of doing this on his own. And then maybe he kept thinking of you as a child … Damn it, I didn’t ask Jacquard my favorite question.” When she said nothing, he said, “About those anonymous letters.”

She looked up this time. “Which anonymous letters?”

“Not that it would have told me anything. And that reminds me. How tired are you?” It was successful. She was interested once more.

“I’m not.”

“Then we’ll have our friend outside drive us back to town. Do you know a newspaper gal named Malvina Prentiss?”

“She’s the one who kept asking me things when Daddy …”

“She’s the one we’re going to see.”

The old scarified front door of the Record building was gone. In its place hung a squarish production of coral-colored plastic bossed with fat chrome studs. A circular window in the door, resembling a porthole, added a puzzling marine touch.

The homely interior was no more. You had always gone from the street directly into the Record’s business office; now you found yourself in a foyer whose walls were of coral plastic and stainless steel. In a circular well in the center of the foyer rotated a large globe of the Earth illuminated from below. Stainless steel chairs stood about and a young woman in a Vogue blouse asked your business icily from behind a stainless steel grille.

“I’d like to see one of your reporters. Malvina Prentiss.”

The ice broke. The young woman giggled. “Better not let Malvina hear you say that!”

“Say what?”

“That’s she’s a reporter. She owns this paper. Owner, publisher, Editor-in-Chief, and Lady High Muckamuck—Lady Muck, we call her for short, but don’t tell her I said so. Who’s calling, please?”

Ellery told her, feebly. The plastic, coral, chrome, steel … a lady publisher it would have to be. Inherited wealth, two trips to Paris with stopovers in London, and a secret yen to look like Rosalind Russell. Smoked cigarets in a footlong holder, gowned by Jacques Fath via an exclusive Boston shop, and loathed men. Native habitat doubtful, but almost certainly not Wrightsville. There might have been a newspaper publisher in her bloodline. Crisp would be the word for her. She must have swooped into town when she heard of the suicide of Diedrich Van Horn, former owner-publisher of the Record, and bought it out from Wolfert Van Horn to work her will on it.

A bucktoothed page in a green corduroy jacket took them in tow, leading them to a gem of a little elevator. The business office was unrecognizable, a tone poem in silver and forest green, with grim stainless-steel-edged green counters and half a dozen metal desks with silvery telephones at which sat selfconscious-looking young women in identical tailored green skirts and white blouses.

“Any second now,” Ellery mumbled to Rima, “a hidden orchestra will strike up and the members of the ensemble will leap as one into a ballet number.” To place a mere five-line ad at one of these counters would take courage.

He wondered what the incredible Miss Prentiss had done with Phinny Baker’s old press room.

The big catchall editorial room on the upper floor had always been a cheerful chaos—comfortably dirty, with mutilated rolltop desks, men sitting around in paper cuffs, spittoons on the naked floor, and behind everything a manly bedlam. Now it was a kind of industrial cloister—hushed, disapproving, cold—divided into gleaming little shells of offices in which unhappy-looking people sat toiling. Ellery could spy no one he knew. Gladys Hemmingworth, Frank Lloyd’s bustling Society Editor, had given way to a mannish female in velveteen slacks who was honking into one of the prevailing silvery telephones. There was no sign of stout Clara Peacher, who under the name of “Aunt Peachie” had written the domestic column; or of Obie Gilboon, who had covered sports for twenty-six years and whose tie was always smoldering from the droppings of his palsied bulldog pipe. And the plate on eyeshaded Woodie Wentworth’s old city desk now said freezingly, DEAN ST. A. ST. JOHN, which was certainly not a Wrights-ville-sounding name.

With a bleeding heart, Ellery followed Rima and the page through the coral door on which stern steel letters spelled out M. O. PRENTISS.

The lady publisher’s office was what he had expected, and so was the lady publisher, except more so. Here not only were the walls covered with the lecherous green plastic material, but the ceiling was cushioned, too. The steel desk was as big as a baby tank; the desk set was of sterling silver; the Venetian blinds were of aluminum. The lady herself, as anticipated, was a Rosalind Russell type, but in a superproduction by Ernst Lubitsch. She was tall, svelte, and dressed as “smart woman executive” in a business suit which would have looked merely expensive if it had not also been of a disturbing silver-sheened material. Silver seemed her passion: her fingernails were painted silver, her footlong cigaret holder (as predicted) was of silver, she wore silvery harlequin glasses which emphasized the frozen quirk of her eyebrows, and her hair was platinum-dyed. There were so many points of wonder about her that it was some time before Ellery realized that in a normal setting and costume—off the set, as it were—Malvina Prentiss was probably an attractive woman. As she was, and in Wrightsville, she was an absurdity.

She said, “Ellery Queen?” in an insolent contralto, looking him over as if he were a horse. Then she stared at Rima, and Rima blushed. “And who’s this?”

“Rima Anderson.”

Malvina Prentiss threw back her head, exhibiting a set of powerful, immaculate teeth. “What have you done to our little wood nymph, Queen? Ever see such a transformation, Spec?”

Then Ellery realized that seated beside her desk was a redhaired man in his mid-thirties who was trying not to look miserable and being thoroughly unsuccessful. Exactly the type of male claque-leader Malvina Prentiss would keep in her private employ—intelligent eyes behind hornrimmed glasses, hair parted in the middle, unpadded shoulders, a studious pallor to offset a nonexistent waistline, and a meek, almost suffering, manner. All togged out in a conservative business suit and a correct pindot tie.

The man said, “Yes, Miss Prentiss, I mean no! Miss Prentiss,” his freckled skin turning old rose; and he clutched the back of his chair, from which he had jumped, as if to hold himself up.

“Mr. Queen, Francis O’Bannon. My executive assistant. Pure Back Bay. Harvard, of course. Sound politics, fair brain, but very nearly distracted about everything, especially me. We like to have him around, though, Spec, don’t we?” The old rose deepened. She was enjoying her cruelty in a contemptuous way. “Knows a surprising lot about running a newspaper—”

“Not as much as you do, of course, Miss Prentiss.”

She glanced at O’Bannon sharply. “And that’s the truth,” she said; but then she laughed. “Well, well, Mr. Queen, and what’s a twelve-cylinder smartiepants like you doing in little Wrightsville?” She glanced surgically at Rima. “Or is it love?—or something?”

Rima said, “I don’t like you.”

Malvina Prentiss stopped smiling. “That was clever of you, darling. Who’s been teaching you the finer shades of meaning?”

“I know enough to interpret a nasty remark like that, Miss Prentiss.”

They stared at each other. Then the lady publisher shrugged. “Well, the best people don’t like me, dear, but I didn’t think it had filtered down into the lower classes quite so soon.” And she jabbed a cigaret into her holder. O’Bannon leaped for the silver lighter on her desk. “All right, Mr. Big. Come to the point.”

“To take the points one at a time,” said Ellery, “this girl has just lost her father under tragic circumstances, she’s pretty much alone in the world, and kindness would make an awfully good starting one, don’t you think, Miss Prentiss?”

“Does she have to kick me in the face?” She laughed again. O’Bannon, who had been transfixed on the point of her desk, immediately laughed too. “What’s on your mind, Mr. Queen?”

Ellery placed two envelopes before her. “Look at the contents of these, Miss Prentiss.”

After a moment the platinum-haired woman looked up. “What about them?”

“They were mailed to me in those two envelopes. Did you send them?”

“Certainly not. Spec, did you?”

O’Bannon quivered under the lash. “No—no, Miss Prentiss,” he stammered.

“We seem to have a press agent in our midst.” She frowned. “Sit down, Mr. Queen. You, too, Rima. There’s more to this than meets the eye.”

“There certainly is,” said Ellery. “For instance, note the curious juxtaposition of subject matter. The death of Luke MacCaby. His bequest to Sebastian Dodd. The suicide of John Spencer Hart. And the disappearance, with strong suspicion of murder, of Thomas Hardy Anderson.”

“The MacCaby-Dodd-Hart business is all part of the same story. The Anderson thing stands on its own. Why should anyone string them together?”

“That’s the question, Miss Prentiss, that I came up here to ask you.”

Malvina Prentiss stared at him, then at Rima, and finally at Francis O’Bannon.

“Any ideas, Spec?” she asked crisply.

O’Bannon said, “Not a glimmer,” with regret, but it seemed to Ellery the redhaired man’s interest had quickened. Ellery was sure of it when O’Bannon removed his eyeglasses and began to polish the lenses with a pinked rectangle of yellow cloth.

“Miss Prentiss, I’m convinced Anderson’s death is linked in some way with the events that preceded it. If you have any information that would confirm this, let me in on it.”

“You’re not serious?”

“You’re not withholding information?”

“Why would I withhold information in a murder case?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, Miss Prentiss. Why would you?”

She smiled sweetly. “You’re fumbling, Mr. Q. The Record doesn’t withhold information, conceal evidence, or suppress news. Not this Record, Mr. Q. On the contrary. The publisher of this Record will print anything that sells more papers and attracts more advertisers.”

“Anything covers a large area, Miss Prentiss.”

“Now you’ve got it.” She might have been talking about her religion, or her lover. “When I bought this sheet from the Van Horn estate it was a typical do-gooder rag, country style. The eternal verities. Elbert Hubbard and those-men-in-the-State House. And before that Frank Lloyd, coming through the rye, the farmer’s friend. Lofty sentiments, or personals, never built a moneymaker. Of course, we have to keep it more or less at the ruben level. Folksy writing. Lots of local news and issues. But for expanding circulation give me a nice dirty adultery, a divorce suit with a motel in it, suicide of a big shot, murder of anybody. They call me Lady Muck around here! I don’t mind, I love it. Do you know what the circulation of this miserable rural rag had dropped to at the time I took it over? Twenty-eight hundred-odd! Do you know what it is today? Paid circulation?”

Without looking at him, she snapped her fingers at O’Bannon.

“Thirty-two thousand, two hundred and ninety-one,” said Francis O’Bannon.

“In a town of ten thousand. Are we magicians? In a way. We muscled into the other guys’ territory. Bannock. Slocum. Limpscot. Fyfield. Even Connhaven. We’re blanketing the southern part of the county. You ought to see our mail subscription list. And we’ve only started. Merchants who used to take a thirty-line ad in Lloyd’s and Van Horn’s day now fight for full pages. Before I’m through the Wrightsville Record’s going to be the leading newspaper in Wright County, maybe in the State. Next month I start a puzzle contest—ten thousand dollars in prizes. Not bad for a hick sheet. Of course, I have a slight edge over my yokel rivals—I have money and they don’t—O’Bannon, why don’t you stop me?”

O’Bannon mumbled something.

“Letting me show off this way. Was I awfully girlish?” Malvina Prentiss leaned far back in her chair, eying Ellery. “So you’re taking little Rima in hand,” she said. “Spec, why didn’t we play up this little beauty?”

“We did, Miss Prentiss.”

“That back-to-Nature stuff,” said the woman impatiently. “Who’s interested in a bird-girl? Unless she’s got two heads.” She looked Rima over. “Darling, where did you get those clothes? I mean, who paid for them?”

“We’re wandering,” said Ellery. “If you don’t know any more about the Anderson case than you’ve printed, Miss Prentiss—”

“What’s your hurry? Do you really think there’s real muck in the Anderson disappearance?—I mean, that ties in to MacCaby, Hart, and Dr. Dodd?” Malvina was regarding Ellery speculatively, tapping her teeth with a long silver pencil.

“What I think,” said Ellery, “isn’t for publication. Rima—”

“Why not?”

“Why not what, Miss Prentiss?”

“Why not for publication? I’d like you to go to work for the Record.”

“Oh?”

“Run of the case. Give me an exclusive on your investigation. A daily column, say. We’ll feature it. The Anderson thing needs a shot in the arm and your name would be a big asset to me right now. It’s a cinch to attract the syndicates, too. We’d need a catchy column title … Spec!” O’Bannon gave a little leap. “Get into gear. A name for Queen’s column.”

“It’s Murder,” said O’Bannon mechanically, knitting his salmony brows. “Queen’s Evidence. Queen Quiz. Queen—”

“Quits,” said Ellery.

“Oh, come,” snapped Malvina. “You’re not that good. I’m not haggling with you, Queen. You can waltz in here pretty much to your own music. You’d have the full facilities of my organization—legmen, stenos, blond or brunette, take your choice, unlimited expense account and no kicks about the bourbon. Your own office, mine if you want it. Set your own figure. I can use you and I’ll pay for you. Malvina O. Prentiss is the name—O for Opulent.”

“Ellery N. Queen is mine—N for No,” said Ellery, taking Rima by the elbow. “Thanks awfully, though,” and he guided Rima to the door. Glancing back, he caught Francis O’Bannon in an unguarded pose, gazing after him with admiration and envy.

“If you should change your celebrated mind—” the lady publisher shouted, but the rest was lost in the refined mutter of the editorial rooms.

On Lower Main again, Rima made a chest and looked around with relief.

“I know,” grinned Ellery. “I need a bath, too.”

“But does she really mean all that, Ellery? I’ve never dreamed there were people like her.”

“There aren’t, Rima. She’s an illusion. The silver motif is symbolism. She comes directly off the screen from her original habitat, which was a book. I confess it with shame—I once invented a character like Malvina myself.”

“But I’ve never read,” began Rima with a frown.

“A gap in your cultural education we’re going to bridge right now.” Ellery led her up the street to Ben Danzig’s High Village Rental Library and Sundries. “Your literary background, Miss Anderson, is incomplete without a study of the fictional prototype of specimen Malvina Prentiss … Hm. Yes. Chandler. Or Cain, or Gardner. Wait here a minute.” He went into Ben Danzig’s and came out a few minutes later flourishing a crimson-jacketed book. Rima took it wonderingly. “You read this in bed tonight. It’s not the purest example of its type—Ben’s stock seems to run more to fantasy fiction these days—but it’s virile enough to introduce you to the subject.”

“But isn’t this fantasy?”

“My dear child!” said Ellery in an injured tone. “Read the blurb. ‘Brute realism’—here, see it?”

“All right,” said Rima doubtfully. She tucked the book under her arm.

They stood before Ben Danzig’s window, out of the way of the late afternoon crowds. A band of high school girls and boys were chattering outside Al Brown’s Ice Cream Parlor next door, making dates for Saturday night at Danceland, in Pine Grove. A few early moviegoers were lined up at the box office of the Bijou. Across the street people were dashing into the post office, Mr. Graycee was standing glumly at the door of his travel agency, J. C. Pettigrew was winding up the awning of his real estate office, girls hurried into the Lower Main Beauty Shop, and the doors of the Five-and-Dime were in continuous motion. Outside the Record building a tired-looking mob heaved as a bus placarded SLOCUM TOWNSHIP rounded the corner from the Square for its return trip.

“I can see what you like in it, Ellery,” said Rima suddenly. “I wish that …”

He knew she was thinking of her father.

“You’re dragging,” he said cheerfully, “and I don’t wonder. The Prentiss woman on top of a futile day.”

“This morning it looked …”

“And then all our shiny images faded out. Hungry, Rima?”

“Yes.”

“It’s about time. Let’s get something to eat and call it a day. Gold Gardens?”

“Oh, no. Some place not so … Not Miss Sally’s Tea Roome, either.” She was trying not to cry.

“How about the Square Grill? That little counter joint around the corner on the Square. Caters to the elk-tooth boys, coffee without saucers, and I once had a surprising steak there.”

“Oh, yes!”

As they passed the Record building again, Ellery said casually, “It’s always this way. You look and look and you find yourself with a lot of nothing for your pains. Till one day you turn a corner and there it is.” Her hand tightened on his arm. “I think tomorrow, Rima,” he said briskly, “we’ll take stock. Since the best position for seeing where you stand is on your back, we’ll have to go off somewhere—”

“Ellery!”

“—get away from town.”

“Can we?”

“Let’s see. We’ll need a few trees, a bush or two, and a couple of mossy boulders. Pine needles to lie on, if possible. Oh, and maybe a bit of bubbling water.”

“I know just the place,” cried Rima.

“Wonderful. Where?”

“I found it once when I was poking around in the hills. Nobody in Wrightsville knows about it.”

“How far away is it?”

“Not far at all. But you won’t find it on the map. It’s mine by right of discovery. I’ve even given it a name.”

“What?”

“Guess!” Rima laughed.

“Nova Rima?”

“Way off.”

“Mount Anderson?”

“Try again.

“Of course. Ytaioa.”

“That’s it!” Rima fairly flew into Mike Polaris’s Square Grill.

Tuesday, April 11

The next morning, when Ellery called at Upham House, the desk clerk handed him a note.

DEAR ELLERY—I couldn’t wait. I’ve paid my bill with your money and gone home. Follow my map.

RIMA

P.S.—Bring a pair of swimming trunks if you feel especially stuffy this morning.

She had sketched a route through Low Village. The shack was indicated by a black X.

Ellery walked down Washington Street, passed Crosstown Avenue—the dividing line between High Village and Low Village—and turned into Plum. Here he sought and found Homer Findlay’s garage, whose placard in the Hollis lobby advertised a Drive Urself service. He drove out in a 1939 Plymouth coupé (or “coop,” in Homer’s version) with 92,000-odd miles on its mileage meter.

Back uptown he found an empty space by a parking meter on Wright Street. He strolled up Washington toward Slocum, searching the shop windows. In the middle of the block he spied PURDY’S—DRY GOODS & FURNISH’GS, and he went in. He purchased two large bath towels.

“Anythin’ else today?” asked Mr. Purdy.

Ellery hesitated. He was feeling not the least bit stuffy this morning. On the other hand … “Yes,” he said firmly. “A pair of swimming trunks.”

Mr. Purdy said he didn’t have his summer stock in yet, but he might fish out an odd pair … He returned with a dusty box which revealed three one-piece swimming suits seasoned with moth crystals. Mr. Purdy held one up.

“Left over from one or two seasons back,” he said.

Eying the long limp shanks, Ellery decided that Mr. Purdy’s mathematics were at fault and he said no, he didn’t think so. Mr. Purdy nodded gloomily.

“Might try the Waldo brothers next door. In the Granjon Block. They’re tailors, but ever since Otis Holderfield found himself a gold mine and began toggin’ himself out like a movie star, the Waldos been getting ideas—puttin’ in bathrobes, sport jackets, what-all … talkin’ about carryin’ a full line of gents’ furnishings! Wouldn’t surprise me if they got just what you want. Direct from Paris, likely.”

There was no reason why the name Waldo in Mr. Purdy’s rather bitter accent should have startled Ellery. On the sidewalk, his package of towels under his arm, Ellery stared at the shop next door. It showed evidences of a new prosperity—freshly painted, one window draped elegantly with bolts of men’s suiting, the other displaying men’s furnishings of apparently good quality. There was a brand-new sign over the front: WALDO BROS. EXCLUSIVE TAILORS. Still, his scalp itched and the backs of his hands were fizzy. As if he were on the verge of a discovery.

Ellery entered the shop. Here prosperity had not yet penetrated: the fixtures were aged and few, the triple mirror was tarnished in streaks, and from what he could see of the workroom in the rear, past the calico curtain, it was dingy and miserably lit.

A very small man in his shirt sleeves, vest covered with snips of thread, a tape measure about his neck, appeared at the curtained doorway. “Yes?” Then he brightened. “Oh, you’re the gentleman was in Mr. Holderfield’s office yesterday afternoon. Something in a suit?”

Ellery could hear nothing from the workroom. Apparently David Waldo was alone in the shop.

“Would you have a pair of bathing trunks? Mr. Purdy next door said—”

The itch and fizz were really pretty bad. And they seemed to get worse the longer he was in the shop. Or perhaps it was the soft touch of the little tailor’s hands as he measured Ellery’s waist. What was it?

“We’ve only just put in this line—”

“Fine. Just what I want. By the way, did you know Tom Anderson?”

“Who? Oh! No, not to talk to. Too bad, the way he went. Got some fine-quality gabardine here—”

“I’m not surprised. I mean, I imagine your clientele is a little more exclusive. Didn’t John Spencer Hart get his clothes made here?”

“Wish he had. But Mr. Hart had his tailoring done in Boston, I heard. That camel’s hair we’re making up for Mr. Holderfield—”

“Maybe you’re lucky. Didn’t Hart die owing a lot of money? It’s a bad habit that partner of his didn’t get into, I understand—what was his name again?…”

“MacCaby.”

“That’s it. Wasn’t MacCaby the original miser?”

“I wouldn’t know. If you’re thinking of going swimmin’ this early in the year, maybe a beach robe—?”

“Oh, you didn’t know MacCaby.”

“No. Will that be all?”

“I was saying to Dr. Dodd just the other day—”

Waldo said quickly, “You know Doc Dodd?”

“Why, yes. Is he a customer of yours?”

“Say.” David Waldo smiled. “If we had to depend on Doc Dodd for a living, we wouldn’t stay in business long. Fine man, though. Six ninety-five.”

Ellery walked out with the trunks, still tingling.

What was it?

He crossed the street and went into Jeff Hemaberry’s Sporting Goods store, where he bought a picnic hamper and a Thermos jug. Then he visited The Delicatessen Caravansary, which lay between Logan’s Market and Miss Addie’s Anticipation Shop. Here he found food for digestion as well as reflection and when he came out he was weighted. It was all he could do to get back to Homer Findlay’s coupé.

After studying Rima’s map, Ellery drove down Washington Street into Low Village and turned left into Congress. The map instructed him to follow Congress across town as far as it went.

Congress Street rapidly turned more dilapidated, noisome, and depressing. It paralleled Polly, with the nasty trickle of Willow River between. Here the refuse of Low Village factories floated past the back doors of workmen’s barrows. There was an occasional blotch of green, chiefly weeds; there were no trees at all. Yet Ellery drove slowly. Tom Anderson had taken this route countless times, yawing along its broken walks; how many times had he run aground on the reefs of the jagged asphalt? And along about here was where Abe L. Jackson’s younger brother Garrison must have met him that Saturday night when Anderson was presumably sober and headed for his baffling rendezvous on Little Prudy’s Cliff. Whom had Rima’s father been meeting that night? The answer might lie on this crippled back street behind one of these shaky walls, in the undigested memory of some sodden millhand or his sagging wife or one of his wild children.

Or it might lie in the infinite land of chance. Nothing personal …

The narrow street came to an abrupt end in a mound of dirt, broken brick, tin cans, and assorted debris. The street fell away in a declivity to a deep gulley which was choked with the accumulated refuse of years. From this gulley rose a stench which turned Ellery pale. The thought of having to wade through its sour fumes on the rickety footbridge which spanned the chasm daunted him. Beyond the bridge stretched a skimpy belt of scrub, rubbish, and wasteland. Behind that glowered The Marshes.

Ellery locked the coupé and put a handkerchief to his nose. He was about to step onto the footbridge when he saw Rima Anderson running from a stand of crazily twisted trees a hundred yards down-gulley on the opposite side. She was barefoot and wore a sarong-like garment apparently sewn together from the remains of a man’s old suit. She sped across the bridge, hair streaming.

“I’ve been watching for you.”

It seemed to Ellery that she was tense and unhappy. “Anything wrong, Rima?”

“Wrong? Of course not.” But there was.

“These Congress Street kiddies look predatory. Is it all right to leave the car while we go over to your place?”

“We’re not going to my place.”

“What!” Rima walked to the coupé and Ellery followed her, protesting. “But why not, Rima? I want to see it.”

“Some other time.”

“But only last night you said—”

“Why did you bring a car?”

“So we could go picnicking. Wasn’t that the idea?”

“We could have walked. I always do.”

“You mean you don’t swing through the trees, like Tarzan?”

“Who’s Tarzan?”

Ellery told her as he unlocked the car and they got in.

“Oh, a grownup Mowgli.” Rima’s voice was listless. “I’ve always loved Baloo and Bagheera. And hated Shere Khan. Turn right into Shingle Street, Ellery. That’s Route 478A. You follow it up to just before Twin Hill-in-the-Beeches, then you turn off.” She curled up beside him, staring ahead.

This was not humor, or even mood. Something painful had happened this morning. It had arisen on her return to the shack, not before; her Upham House note had told him to come. Was it that after a journey into the world she had come back to see her home for the pitiful hovel it was? Or …

He could not overlook the possibility that there might be something darkly different behind it.

He drove along in silence.

After a while Rima squirmed. “I read that book last night.”

“Oh? What did you think of it?”

“I laughed. Is that what’s known as a detective story?”

“One kind of detective story.”

“Detectives aren’t that way in life, are they? Kissing or slapping every girl they meet, beating up people, shooting off guns all the time?”

“Most detectives I’ve known have forty-eight waistlines, chronically sore feet, don’t handle a gun from one year to another, and can’t wait for the weekend to water their lawns.”

“And then that girl Ginger, the one Dave Dirk called ‘Gin’ and ‘Gingivitis’—”

“His secretary.”

“She made me tired. Getting into one silly mess after another. And why did she keep calling Dirk ‘Chief? He wasn’t a policeman.”

“He was her chief.”

“Slang,” said Rima thoughtfully. “I wondered about that. Do all detectives’ secretaries call them Chief?”

“All who have secretaries, I suppose.”

“Do you have one?”

“Not at the moment. But then, Rima, I’m not in a book.”

“You ought to be!” They both laughed, and the day brightened.

They were in the northeastern part of town now, climbing into the hills above High Village. The name “Shingle Street” on the signs had disappeared. Young cottages roosted above them. And when they rounded a curve, there were Twin Hills’ big breasts straight ahead, below which twined the expensive girdle of Twin Hill-in-the-Beeches. Beyond Twin Hills lay exclusive Skytop Road, Wrightsville’s newest residential district; and far in the distance nodded the old head of Bald Mountain.

At Rima’s instructions Ellery turned the coupé into a narrow dirt road, little more than a firebreak, hacked, pitted, and ungraded. Three miles of this and the road ended at a boulder. As far as Ellery could see, they were walled in by thick forest. There was nothing in sight that resembled a trail except the road behind them.

“What now? Aviation?”

“Just plain walking.”

Ellery’s recollections of the hour that followed were a flicker of wicked bushes, nettles, emery-barked trees, ground that rolled underfoot; he was stabbed, flogged, and tripped. Rima flitted ahead, slipping by the malignant spirits of the woods as if she carried an aerial immunity. Occasionally she paused to hack a path with a machete-like knife which she carried at the waist of her sarong. At such times he embraced a tree, gasping. At the end of eternity, just as he was about to mutiny, he found himself staggering into the anteroom of paradise.

They were in a small glade which was carpeted with moss and pine needles and guarded on three sides by immense pines, hundred-foot beeches, red spruce, balsam, hemlock, birch, cedar. On the fourth side lay a clear pool. It was fed by a tiny waterfall which came frisking down a sluice of gleaming granite, replenished the pool, and disappeared somewhere in burbly darkness. The sun sparkled on the pool, but in the glade the air was washed and cool and full of wood and earth scents. Birds flashed and chirruped everywhere.

“Ytaioa.”

“Like it?”

Ellery lay back on the aromatic carpet and shut his eyes.

He opened them to catch the glint of a brown body splitting the surface of the pool. The knife, the tweedy sarong, lay on an outcropping of rock above the water.

Her head appeared and a wet brown arm came up and grasped the ledge.

“Aren’t you coming in?”

“If you’ll …”

“Oh, piffle.”

“Well, damn it all!” began Ellery, but she was gone again, laughing. He got into his swimming trunks behind a modest beech, feeling like a fool.

They splashed and dived and romped in the pool; they dried off on the ledge, Rima disdaining his towel for any purpose whatever so that, in all conscience, he had to close his eyes; and when he awoke Rima was squatting crosslegged—in the sarong—beside one of the towels, on which she had spread the contents of the hamper.

“Come on, Ellery, I’m hungry.”

They had a feast in the glade, after which Rima plaited a wreath of vine leaves for his hair while, like a lactic Bacchus, Ellery swigged the last of the milk in the Thermos jug.

“And now if you’ll be very still,” said Rima, “I’ll have some of my friends in for tea. There’s the loveliest doe—”

“I’ll meet Bambi’s ma some other time,” said Ellery, lying back. “Make yourself into an audience, Rima. I feel a monologue coming on.”

It seemed to him the gladness went out of her; but she stretched out on the moss obediently, her head on his chest.

Ellery blew a smoke ring at the dappled ceiling.

“Rima,” he began, “a thing isn’t always what it seems. In fact, there have been whole schools of thought whose scholars have insisted that a thing isn’t ever what it seems. I choose the middle road: Truth and the appearance of truth. Some things are true, and some things merely seem true when they’re not.

“The smart investigator of a crime is always aware of this ambivalence, and it’s his job to separate the conflicting elements of a case and put his fingertip on what is true in them and what is false. Some cases are more two-faced than others, and I’m beginning to believe this one bears the stamp of Janus.”

“You and Daddy,” murmured Rima; and then she was silent, not explaining what she meant. But Ellery thought he knew, and for a moment he squinted at a squirrel racing for his hole, giving Rima time to come back.

“Three deaths,” he went on. “Or two and a probable. Luke MacCaby’s by heart disease—presumably; John Spencer Hart’s by a bullet in his brain—called suicide; your father’s in the quicksand below Little Prudy’s Cliff—again presumably, and presumably as the result of violence. A great many presumptions. Appearances of truth which may be truth and, on the other hand, may be quite otherwise.

“Now let’s follow up the premise laid down by my mysterious correspondent, Anonymous: that the three deaths, or rather the three events, are connected. If they are … if they are, is there evidence of the connection? Does some common factor exist in each event? Yes, Dr. Sebastian Dodd. Dr. Dodd proved to be MacCaby’s heir. Dr. Dodd became Hart’s business associate and, as a result, Hart died in a shooting. And Dr. Dodd presented your father with five thousand dollars a short time before your father’s disappearance.

“Truth and the appearance of truth. Either the three events are what they seem, or they’re not. Either Dodd, who figures importantly in all of them, is what he seems … or he is not.”

Ellery sighted along his nose. Rima’s eyes were turned on him, startled. “Dr. Dodd?”

“I didn’t say Dr. Winship. Why not Dr. Dodd? If all three events are what they seem, they were natural developments of natural means. If the three events are not what they seem, they were unnatural developments of contrived means—in other words, they were criminally brought about. And if we accept Dr. Dodd’s story in each instance as being the whole truth, then Dr. Dodd is what he seems, a good and kind and innocent man; and if we do not accept Dr. Dodd’s story in each instance as being the whole truth, or part of the truth, or any of the truth, then Dr. Dodd may be the reverse of what he seems: that is, an evil, scheming, guilty man. A criminal, Rima.”

“A criminal?”

“There were three deaths,” said Ellery. “Or two and a probable.”

“A murderer?”

Ellery relit his cigaret, which had gone out.

“Be careful of that match!” And Rima took it from him and buried it. Then she said, “But why should Dr. Dodd have murdered Mr. MacCaby? Or Mr. Hart? Or Daddy?”

“Well, let’s see,” said Ellery. “First MacCaby. Is Dodd what he seems in the MacCaby case—a good, kind, innocent man? Then it’s true, as Dodd states, that MacCaby died naturally—that is, of heart disease. Then it’s true, as Dodd states, that he, Dodd, was unaware before MacCaby’s death of MacCaby’s wealth. Then it’s true, as Dodd says, that he had no idea that with MacCaby’s death he, Dodd, would become a very rich man.

“But suppose Dodd is not what he seems? Suppose he’s an evil schemer, cleverly garbing his wickedness in the daily garment of straitened living and good works? Then shortly before his death MacCaby told Dodd he was a wealthy man and that Dodd would inherit MacCaby’s wealth. Then Dodd hastened MacCaby’s death. How? Dodd was MacCaby’s doctor; he was giving the old man certain tablets for his heart ailment. Then Dodd gave MacCaby a rather different box of similar-appearing tablets and, when the next attack occurred and MacCaby took a tablet, MacCaby died. And Dodd, who was called, took back his little box. Truth and the appearance of truth. The two faces of the coin. Look at the obverse and Dr. Dodd is innocence incarnate. Look at the reverse and he may be the devil himself.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Rima. “Not Dr. Dodd.”

“Belief has nothing to do with it,” said Ellery. “It seems to me I’ve said that before, but in my line of work you can’t afford to forget it. Cover yourself with the other towel if you’re cold, Rima. Now let’s take up the case of the late John Spencer Hart. Possibility the first: that Dodd is innocent. In this case, as he says, he sent Hart a routine request through Attorney Otis Holderfield for a preliminary accounting of the dye works’s financial condition, not suspecting that Hart had embezzled part of the assets of the business. Being unaware that Hart had stolen from the company, Dr. Dodd of course could not have anticipated that his request for an accounting would drive Hart to suicide.

“But—possibility the second: that Dodd is guilty. Suppose MacCaby had told Dodd not ‘only about his riches and Dodd’s heir-apparency, but also about one other matter. Because if MacCaby was shrewd enough to invest in a business that proved as successful as the Wrightsville Dye Works, and if MacCaby was as canny in money matters as his pennypinching indicated, then he may well have kept an eye cocked on his partner and found his own way of checking on Hart’s management of the Works. Then suppose MacCaby told Dr. Dodd that he knew of Hart’s wild gambling sprees, his reckless speculation, his embezzlement. In this case, once he had murdered MacCaby, Dodd would have known that his request for an accounting before Hart could cover his tracks might well come to Hart as a deathblow. This is a close-knit community and the character and personality of a man as prominent as Hart must have been common knowledge. So Dodd must have known that John Spencer Hart could not take exposure, disgrace, social ostracism; that to a man like Hart the prospect of trial, conviction, imprisonment was intolerable. So, if Dodd is guilty and has been lying about his actual relationship with Hart, his request for an accounting became as murderous a weapon as the gun which ended Hart’s life.”

“He drove Mr. Hart to suicide?”

“Only on the face of the coin we’re considering. And then—your father’s disappearance.” Ellery scowled. “Obverse: that Dodd is innocent. In that case, as he says, he gave your father five thousand dollars to help rehabilitate a man who needed and wanted rehabilitation. A kind, a generous, a magnificently unselfish act.

“But on the reverse, with Dodd lying … Suppose your father, Rima, had stumbled on some evidence that connected Dodd criminally with Luke MacCaby’s death. For example, the pillbox which should have contained heart tablets. We’ve surmised, if Dodd gave MacCaby a lethal box of tablets, that Dodd took the box away after MacCaby died. But suppose your father got to that box first? He was a friend of Harry Toyfell’s; he might well have been persona grata in the MacCaby house; a fortuitous visit, and something about MacCaby’s death may have excited his suspicions. Since he was an intelligent man, suspicion would lead him to the tablets. And there we have Tom Anderson in possession of the evidence which could send Sebastian Dodd to the electric chair. In this case Dodd’s investment in your father’s rehabilitation may not have been entirely altruistic. In fact, it may have been—impure and simple—hush money.”

“Blackmail?” What he saw in Rima’s eyes made him study an arrangement of branches overhead. “You mean my father blackmailed Dr. Dodd? Is that what you mean?”

“We’re only theorizing, Rima. A lot of ifs stand between the theory and the fact.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“In the end, your faith will probably triumph. I certainly hope it does. But at this stage of the game, Rima, we’ve got to stick to reason. And reason points to blackmail as one face of this particular coin.

“Let’s look at it for another moment.

“Tom Anderson has demanded five thousand dollars for not turning the box of tablets over to Chief Dakin, and Dr. Sebastian Dodd has paid it. Some weeks pass. And there’s Tom Anderson again, with a demand for more—no, Rima, listen. Blackmail is a disease which manifests itself in recurrent attacks. It’s an insatiable hunger. A second demand is inevitable if you postulate a first and a reason for the first.

“Now the victim of a blackmailer has three courses open to him: He can continue to pay, he can refuse to pay, or he can so arrange matters that he has to do neither. If Tom Anderson made a second demand so soon after his first, Dr. Dodd would be far less intelligent than he actually is if he did not get a grim preview of the future … demands at increasing frequency, perhaps increasing demands, and continued over as many years as were left to him or as he submitted meekly to the squeeze. This is a prospect that attracts no guilty man, most particularly one who has other plans for his money. But suppose Dodd refused to pay the second time. Anderson might take his evidence to the police; the threat of exposure is the blackmailer’s weapon. In this case exposure meant death. Defiance was therefore out of the question. That left the third way.”

“Murder.”

“According to this set of premises, the conclusion seems to follow that Sebastian Dodd arranged to meet your father at Little Prudy’s Cliff that night, presumably to hand over another payment for silence, actually to push him over the edge.”

Rima sat up, shivering. She looked so forlorn sitting there, so cold and bloodless and abandoned, that Ellery sat up too and put his arms around her.

“Remember, none of this may be true.”

“And all of it may be true.”

“Well,” said Ellery, “yes.”

Rima said passionately, “And maybe I don’t want to hear any more ‘truth’!”

“Maybe the decision, Rima, is no longer in your hands.” She twisted out of his embrace, resting far back on her heels, staring at him. “Once you take this kind of beast by the tail, you can’t let go. I can’t let go. Are you going to walk out on me?”

She dropped her glance to the moss. “I’d like to.”

“Run away?”

“Yes. But I won’t. You know I couldn’t.”

“I was hoping you couldn’t. All right, then.” Ellery got to his feet, tossing the wreath of vine leaves away. “Our job is to eliminate one of the two sets of possibilities. We’ve got to establish as a fact what Dodd is.”

“How would you go about doing a thing like that?”

“The proper study of Dodd is Dodd. He’s got to be watched, investigated, interpreted. If evidence exists—one way or the other—it has to be found. One of us, Rima, has to get into that Victorian antique on the corner of Wright and Algonquin and stay there. You’re indicated.”

“That’s why you said yesterday—!”

“My assistant. In the most romantic Dave Dirk tradition. I’ll even call you Gingivitis. And, in time, I’ll probably get used to your calling me Chief.”

But Rima failed to smile in return. “I never should have come to you. What you want is a spy and a lady liar. I’m sure I haven’t the talent to be either. And it all seems so silly. Just on the mathematical chance … Ellery, I don’t think I could do it.”

“Then don’t. I’ll find another way.”

“You’re angry with me.”

“Not at all.”

“You are. You think it’s because of … Dr. Winship, or something.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No!”

“It’s really too bad,” said Ellery, “because Winship’s the chink in Dodd’s armor. I mean, the way he went for you—”

“Went for me? Where?”

“I forgot, yours is a classical education. Succumbed to your charms.”

“You’re reading so much into—”

“And that beautiful Pinkle situation. Made to order. Well, forget it. Help me pack up, Rima, will you? Or do you want another plunge before we go? It’s getting kind of chilly.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”

“Plunge?”

“Be your spy. It’s just that …”

“It’s so hard—I know, darling. Murder is a hard business. And smelling it out is even harder. The Thermos jug?”

Rima drifted somehow to her feet. Like a snowflake in reverse. She looked miserably about to dwindle and vanish. “Ellery, what do you want me to do?”

Ellery failed to feel triumphant. He said carelessly, “Be my eyes, ears, and legs. It’s ten to one when I get back to the hotel I’ll find a message from Winship saying he’s arranged everything on the Gloria Pinkle business to Dr. Dodd’s satisfaction and that the job of office assistant is yours. If I’m wrong, I’ll do some more spadework on it. But I’ll work you in, Rima. Leave that to me.”

“And when I get in?”

“Watch for a chance to look over Dodd’s records on Luke MacCaby, his personal papers. Listen to what he says and to whom he says it. Find out from Winship—without giving yourself away—everything about Dodd that you can which may tie in with what we’re hunting for. And report to me whatever you run across. No matter how little it seems to mean.” Ellery said gently, “Don’t worry about Winship. He’s intense, and lonely, and I’m being very generous to him.”

Rima smiled. “And to me?”

Ellery flushed. “There’s a larger ethic. I’ll discuss it with you sometime. You’ve got to stop wearing your heart on your sleeve, Rima. Are you in love with him?”

“Love?”

“Your poets’ glibbest word—”

“I don’t know what love is. I’ve only seen him once.”

“Yes,” said Ellery. “Bear that in mind.” And for a moment he looked like a man who has lost something. But only for a moment. “At this point, baby, Dave Dirk usually grabs his doll, gets a half nelson on her, plants a few cynical smacks on her perfect mouth, and sends her off with a slap on the rump to the villain’s lair, so that ten pages later he can stroll in and cuff her from the jaws of somebody else’s lust. Ready?”

“Ellery, don’t be silly.”

“You don’t seem to get the point, babe. You never use my first name.” Ellery hissed, “Got that straight, Gingivitis?”

This time she laughed. “Got you, Chief.”

“With more humility.”

“Chief.”

“Yes. And don’t forget who is.”

“Who is what?”

“Head man.”

“Oh, you are, Chief.”

“I doubt it.” And Ellery looked so woebegone that Rima laughed and laughed, in a hysterical way.

Ellery picked Rima up at 7:30 that night at the Congress Street end of the footbridge. She was again dressed in her New York finery and she was leaning against the peeling guardrail beyond the cairn of refuse surrounded by admiring children.

Rima shooed them off and got into Homer Findlay’s car quickly.

“Well?”

“I thought we’d run down Slocum way for dinner, Rima,” said Ellery. “Barred Rock Inn. What’s the shortest way from here?”

“South on Shingle for five blocks and then east on the Old Low Road and across the railroad tracks to Route 478. But I didn’t mean that. I meant …”

“The Dodd thing?” Ellery backed and shifted, dispersing the wild seed of the underprivileged. “Why, I won my bet.”

“He’d called.” She sat back, letting her breath out.

“He?”

“All right. Dr. Winship.”

“Only three times. I was a little disappointed in him.”

“What did he say?”

“Miss Gloria Pinkle is no longer associated with Doctors Dodd and Winship. It seems she’s been secretly married to Rafe Landsman for about ten days and hasn’t had the nerve to tell anybody, much to Mr. Landsman’s dismay. They’ve been honeymooning in parks. Dr. Dodd sent her off with four weeks’ salary, his goodman’s blessing, and an order on Myers & Manadnock, Jewelers, High Village’s ‘Gemporium,’ for a hundred-and-fifty-dollar set of silver. You’re hired in Gloria’s place. Salary, thirty-five dollars per week, board and room. That last,” said Ellery, guiding the Plymouth warily over the uncertain boards of the Willow River bridge, “I’m rather proud of.”

“I’m to live there? I couldn’t!”

“And let’s have no more of the caged bird routine. You’ll live there and you’ll like it.”

“Yes, Chief.” Her laughter was candid joy.

“It’s very nearly the whole point. Actually, it was no feat; Dr. Winship did it almost unassisted. He agreed instantly that a girl who’s alone in the world, an innocent and inexperienced girl who has nowhere to live but a shanty, and who owes a New York sharper some hundreds of dollars, needs both a respectable home and the opportunity to save as much of her earnings as possible so that she can get out of the fellow’s clutches. It’s all painfully proper; Dr. Winship repeated that, as if I were a suspicious relative.”

“Aren’t you?” Rima was giggling.

“Mrs. Fowler and Essie are there to chaperon you, I’m triply assured that there will be a lock on your chamber door, and your evenings are strictly your own.” Ellery honked at the intersection, not looking at her. Giggling! He turned left into a narrow macadamized road which badly needed repaying. “Is this the Old Low Road?”

“Yes … I didn’t think I’d have to live there.”

“Adjust, adjust. You start tomorrow morning at eight. Dr. Winship is calling for you in his car.”

“No. All right.”

“Be where I just picked you up. At 7:45 … Oh, don’t be flattered. Dr. Winship told me he picked Gloria Pinkle up on her first morning, too. A sort of standard office courtesy—”

“All right.”

“Chief.”

“Chief!”

Ellery scrutinized her uneasily during dinner. Rima was brilliant. She flashed, trilled, chattered.

Wednesday—Thursday, April 12–20

Early on Wednesday afternoon, after a morning of coffee-nursing in the Hollis Coffee Shoppe, Record-reading, chair-warming in the lobby, haircutting in Joe Lupin’s chair in Luigi Marino’s Hollis Hotel Tonsorial Parlor, pavement-clumping through High Village—even book-hunting in the Carnegie Library on State Street; Dolores Aikin failed to recognize him from her sentrybox, and he was obscurely grateful—Ellery finally permitted himself a telephone call.

It was Rima who answered, and she sounded professional and secretive. Oh, yes, she was getting along just beautifully. Dr. Winship had been very helpful. He had spent an hour with her at the very beginning (over breakfast and later) explaining about the sterilizers and the routine with patients and so on, and then he had had to go to the hospital, but he’d found time to dash back well before office hours to take her over to the Square for a more appropriate office outfit than the Fifth Avenue suit; because of the diphtheria epidemic the Bon Ton was featuring nurses’ nylon uniforms and she’d felt almost like the real thing. They dried in three hours, you know, and didn’t have to be ironed … and, yes, flat-heeled white shoes and white stockings and … Ellery said something snide, about not recalling Gloria Pinkle, Miss Anderson’s predecessor, in such trained attire, or did the nylon uniform come with a plunging neckline, and did Winship pay for it?—but Rima laughed in his ear and said not to be silly, you paid for it, or rather I did with your money, which I’m going to start paying back next week, Dr. Winship had wanted to but I wouldn’t let him. How cosy, said Ellery, at which Rima stopped laughing and said coldly he needn’t be cynical, given half a chance people were human beings in the best sense, anxious to be friendly and even to extend themselves—even old Harry Toyfell had said an encouraging word this morning and Mrs. Fowler had given her the freedom of the icebox and shown her into the loveliest old-fashioned bedroom, ever so much nicer than the patriotic stereotypes at Upham House … in fact, she had learned a great deal today about life. Yes, said Ellery, no doubt you have, but have you learned—? But Rima, either because she was not alone or for some perverse female reason, refused to talk business and instead she said she wouldn’t have the least bit of trouble, except possibly with the typing, and Dr. Dodd was so nice, though she’d only seen him once before office hours, in the morning as he was leaving for the hospital, and … Dinner? Well, she’d try. Dr. Winship had mentioned … Anyway, her first day … And then the Pinkie girl had left things in such a mess, and she simply had to spend some extra time familiarizing herself with the filing system—“Yes, Dr. Winship! Goodbye, Ellery,” and Ellery was left holding the receiver.

He tried her again at 6:30. But when Essie Pingarn said Miss Anderson was eatin’ with Dr. Winship, Ellery said never mind, to tell her Uncle Ellery had called, and he hung up.

He waited in his room at the Hollis until almost 10 o’clock.

The next day was equally unsatisfactory. He could get nothing out of her over the phone beyond a certain tarnishing of tone, as if the glitter of newness had worn off and she did not quite know how to rub it shiny again. At 5:30 he was in Dr. Dodd’s house.

Rima was alone in the waiting room. She was tapping painfully away at the typewriter keys with a puffy forefinger. She looked ill.

“The mountain comes to Fatima. Anything wrong?”

She said quickly, “I couldn’t very well talk to you over the phone …”

“How’s it going, Rima?”

“The work? All right.”

“I don’t mean the work.” He did not bother to lower his voice; from where he was standing, he could see Harry Toyfell watering the front lawn, and Essie and Mrs. Fowler were arguing in the rear somewhere. The doctors’ offices were empty. “Found anything?”

“No.”

“Have you looked?”

“No!”

“I thought something of the sort was going on,” said Ellery. “Well, Rima, what do you suggest?”

“Ellery, I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Sneak. Open drawers like a thief.”

Ellery said softly, “Anybody would think I was Fagin. Certainly I don’t have to go over the whole bloody works again. Have you overheard anything?”

“No …”

“Get anything out of Winship?”

She did not reply.

Ellery pursed his lips. “Rima, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.”

“I’m sorry, Ellery.”

“I’m going back to New York.”

She was silent.

“This is the only course I can plot, and if you can’t follow it I’m helpless.” He took her hand. “I don’t blame you, Rima. It’s very hard. And I’ve been something of a brute. If you change your mind, wire me. Better still, phone. Give me a piece of paper … Here’s my phone number.”

She began to cry.

Ellery stood over her for a few moments, feeling angry and incompetent.

Then he tousled her hair as if she were a child and he went back to the Hollis and checked out.

He was back in Wrightsville at her summons a week later. As soon as he had dropped his suitcase in Room 835 at the Hollis he picked up the phone.

“Ellery.” She sounded cool and perfect, as if wrapped in a secret. Not at all the way she had sounded long distance.

“Shall I pick you up?”

“Don’t bother. I’ll meet you in the Square Grill at 7 o’clock.”

“All right.”

He was sampling Mike Polaris’s coffee when Rima walked in. He was surprised, although he told himself he shouldn’t have been. Of course she couldn’t live in that one suit. She was wearing a skirt made of burlap and a bolero of the same astounding material; the blouse was Lachine’s.

“It’s the latest thing,” she laughed, slipping onto the next stool. “Didn’t you know?”

“Burlap?”

“Al Hummel says it’s being featured by Vogue. Al’s Dress Shop, on Slocum, next door to Jeff Hernaberry’s Sporting Goods store. Five dollars down and the rest in weekly payments. I had to get a number of things. And by the way.” She laid a small envelope on the counter.

“What’s this?” Her hair was done differently, too. Lower Main Beauty Shop, no doubt.

“First installment on my debt.”

“Rima—”

“No.”

“All right.” He pocketed it and ordered two steaks. Then he said, “Well?”

“It isn’t much. I don’t know if it’s anything.” She was rummaging in her bag, but not as if she were looking for something. “I’ve been through the files.”

“MacCaby?”

“I couldn’t find anything wrong. Unless a gun—”

“Where?”

“In D’s office desk. I didn’t touch it.”

“Most doctors up here have them. How about personal stuff? Did you get a peek?”

“Yes, but there’s nothing there, I’m sure. He has a study at the rear of the house downstairs—I’ve even managed to look there. None of his drawers is locked.”

“Is there a safe in the study?”

“I don’t think so. Not one you can see, anyway.”

“Get anything out of K.W.?”

“Only that he’s worried about Dr. Dodd.”

“Why?”

“Because Dr. Dodd is so worried. Ken—” it came out easily—“Ken can’t put his finger on the cause. The physical symptoms, he says, are all those of a man on the verge of a nervous collapse. But Dr. Dodd won’t talk about it, gets very angry, says it’s just nerves and overwork. He won’t take a vacation or see a neurologist.”

But that’s of long standing, thought Ellery. Those twitches didn’t develop overnight. “It’s more than that, Rima.”

She knew what he meant. She was staring at the counter, twisting her fork. “Yes. I think it has something to do with that room on the top floor, though I didn’t tell Kenneth so.”

“Room on the top floor?”

“On the attic floor. Dr. Dodd won’t allow anyone in there. Not even Mrs. Fowler or Essie to clean up. He keeps it locked and there’s only one key. At the end of his watch chain.”

Ellery smiled. “Bluebeard?”

“I told you it was probably nothing.” Mike slammed the steaks down and Rima began to eat, slowly.

“Does he visit the room often?”

“Once a day.”

“Really? Every day?”

“Yes, in the mornings. It’s the first thing he does after he dresses. He unlocks the door, goes in, and locks it after him.”

“How long does he stay usually?”

“Sometimes only a few minutes, sometimes longer. It’s never very long, though. Then he comes out, locks the door, and goes downstairs to breakfast. Essie told me about it. So I watched.”

“Mrs. Fowler doesn’t know what’s in the room?”

“No.”

“Winship? Have you discussed it with him?”

“I couldn’t very well without explaining how I knew. And he’s never mentioned it. I don’t think he knows about it.”

They ate in silence.

Finally Ellery said, “And how are you coming along, Rima? Are you happy there?”

“Well, I miss the outdoors, but …” She put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry I brought you out here for nothing. I didn’t know, Ellery. But you said—”

“It wasn’t for nothing.”

“You think it’s important?”

“Yes.”

“But what can it mean?”

“I don’t know. Rima, that room has to be inspected.”

She went quite pale. After a moment she said, “All right, I’ll try. But I don’t know how … and the key …”

“No,” said Ellery. “That’s my department.”

Friday, April 21

Ellery’s department began functioning the next morning. He walked over to Algonquin Avenue shortly after 11. Harry Toyfell was manuring the lawn. The man did not look up.

“Morning. Doc Dodd in?”

“Don’t ye see his car over there?” Toyfell straightened, resting the heavy bag on his hip. “Long as you’re here …” he said slowly. “Find out anything about Tom Anderson?”

“Nothing conclusive, Toyfell. I don’t suppose you’ve run across anything?”

But the man was back at his manure scattering.

Ellery found Rima and Dr. Winship with their heads together over a stack of case cards. Through the doorway of Dr. Dodd’s office he could see Dodd getting into his white office coat. Ellery thought Rima and young Winship jumped up rather too quickly; there was a slight flush on Winship’s face.

“Rima said you were back,” he said, shaking hands. “She’s missed you.”

“I’ve missed her, Dr. Winship. But then I probably haven’t been as busy as you people. Hello, Dr. Dodd.”

The burly man had come in with his surprising stride. He was looking wretched. The twitches were continuous and his jowls had a steady underswell. But he sounded genial.

“Busy. We can barely keep supplied with diphtheria toxoid. Giving Schick inoculations all over the place and not getting too much sleep, I’m afraid. This little girl has been just fine, Mr. Queen. Wonderful help to Kenneth and me.”

Rima went scarlet and disappeared in Dr. Winship’s office with some cards.

“I was kind of surprised when Rima said you’d gone back to New York, Mr. Queen. Thought you’d given up.”

“No,” said Ellery, and he primed his big gun. “It’s hotels, Dr. Dodd.”

“Hotels?”

“Can’t stand ’em longer than a night or two. Anything beyond that is insomniac torture. I’m not as lucky this time as I’ve been. On most of my visits to Wrightsville I’ve been able to avoid staying in a hotel—generally managed to bed down with some private family. But I haven’t seen Hermy Wright or the Foxes for years, and of course the Van Horns …”

He saw at once that he had misfired. Dr. Dodd’s tormented eyes blinked rapidly and he said, “Oh. That’s too bad,” in a vague way and immediately went on to ask, “Then you haven’t got very far in your investigation of Tom Anderson’s disappearance?”

“Haven’t got anywhere. Well, Doctor, I won’t take any more of your time—”

“No, no, Mr. Queen. Does me good to see a foreigner once in a while—”

“Seeing that he’s so crazy about your company, Mr. Queen,” grinned Dr. Winship, “maybe you can talk him into knocking off for a couple of days. Doc, why don’t you run up to Lake Pharisee?”

“This early in the year? Rot, Kenneth.”

“What’s at Lake Pharisee?” asked Ellery, as if he didn’t know.

“It’s north of Quetonokis Lake, Mr. Queen—high up in the Mahoganies,” said Dr. Dodd. “Summerin’ place. Lots of us have summer cabins up there. If it was the fishing season …”

“You could open the cabin, Doc,” argued Dr. Winship. “Get her ready.”

“No, Kenneth—”

“Must be beautiful up there this time of year,” said Ellery. “Especially having the whole place to yourself … Couldn’t you get away, Dr. Dodd? I’d like to invite myself to a day’s work with an ax.”

“Would be sort of a change,” muttered the doctor. “But I don’t see how … the hospital, clinic, my patients …”

“For a couple of days?” cried his young associate. “Who do you think you are, God? If necessary, I’ll get Walter Flacker to pitch in—he’s mildewing up in that rarefied Hill office of his, anyway. I’m not worried about your patients, Doc. Suppose you dropped dead from overwork? What good would you be to them then?”

It seemed to Ellery that Dr. Dodd’s vital machinery sputtered and stopped. For just a moment.

It was curious how yellow he got and how quickly he took hold of himself.

But perspiration stippled his bald skull and Ellery knew he would have at least one day in which to make a proper study of Dr. Sebastian Dodd.

Saturday, April 22

Rima lay on the overstuffed waiting-room couch in the three-quarter darkness. A golden clear youth’s voice was singing something tender and longing in a queer language to the accompaniment of a native stringed instrument and beside her, through the song, she could hear Kenneth Winship breathing in masculine rhythm to the music and feel the still heat of his hand on her ankle, like a minor sun, strengthening but full of fiery danger. She did not know what time it was; she supposed it was close to midnight, and it was Saturday night, but what was time? A way of spacing things that happened, and she was in no statistical mood tonight. The day had been too full of pain and flushed faces, whistling breaths, high temperatures, submissive people at the clinic, the hiss of the sterilizer, the croak of sick children. She was so exhausted that she felt lightheaded. Or perhaps it was that odd antique music.

Or the burning place on her ankle.

The voice stopped and the heat lifted as she felt and heard him get up from the couch. The record was scratching away in the living room across the hall and she saw his big figure cross under the dim night light in the hallway chandelier and get lost in the darkness “beyond. A moment later the scratching stopped and then it began again. The same golden young voice accompanied by the same childish instrument was lifted in a grave and fervid plea of some sort; and Dr. Winship came back across the hall and took his place again.

“What was that, Ken?” Rima murmured.

“An Italian ballade of the fourteenth century. Remember the Decameron? Boccaccio’s young rakes who fled the plague of the city and found so much time on their hands in the country? That was one of the songs they sang to the accompaniment of the viol.”

“And this?”

“‘Gloria in Cielo.’ Same period. It’s rather different, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Yes, thought Rima. This is all proper things and the other had been, had been … She felt her hand taken and she made a convulsive movement, half sitting up.

And suddenly he was saying the most absurd things. She heard his voice and she knew what the words meant but none of them seemed real; it was like the language of the ballade singer, incomprehensible but clear as the sun on leaping water, full of turbulent things in a dream.

“I loved you the second I saw you, Rima. I knew I couldn’t ever really be satisfied again unless you were in the same room. I’m a clumsy ox and you’re so little and wonderful, but I’ll try, I’ll try awfully hard, Rima, so awfully hard, Rima …”

And she was saying, as the record went round and his voice went round, “I love you, Ken, I love you. I don’t know what love is but whatever it is I’m full to the brim and it’s all for you, darling, it’s been that way since …”

And then only the record went round and round, although things in Rima’s head seemed to be doing it too in the same sweet unbearable rhythm.

It was hours or years later when the light sprang up in the living room across the hall and Rima heard Dr. Dodd’s voice saying, “Funny, this record on. Where’s everybody?” But now time was spacing things again and she found herself on her feet, the backs of her legs bracing her against the couch, and Ken’s big hand steadying her and his voice saying, “It’s all right, dearest. Just Doc and Queen back from Pharisee.” And then the light came on in the waiting room and there were Dr. Dodd and Ellery in the doorway, startled and aware in the same moment; and everything was over.

Later, they sat around in the darkened living room, the three men and Rima, talking about the miracle and making plans for its consecration, and it was a very happy time. Or so it seemed to Rima. She leaned against Ken’s shoulder content to drift and listen, not thinking of her father or the dark colors of her recent trouble, only wishing that Ellery would talk less and Ken more, so that she could keep hearing his voice. But Ellery was all over the place. Now he was telling about the day’s outing and what a cunning old woodsman Dr. Dodd was, and all the time he chattered he avoided looking at Rima, so that gradually she became conscious of his avoidance and some of the joy went out of things.

When suddenly he broke off. Rima thought he was being very erratic and she began to laugh; but when Ken put his hand over her mouth she felt a little thrill of alarm.

“Did you hear that, Ken?” asked Ellery in an undertone.

“A window. At the back of the house somewhere.”

“Funny,” said Dr. Dodd.

They listened again.

This time Rima heard it. A creaky window was being slowly opened. There was a squeak, then silence, then another squeak, then another silence.

“Burglars?” asked Rima facetiously.

But no one smiled. Dr. Dodd got up.

“Doc, where you going?”

“I’ll be right back.” He passed quickly under the night light in the hall and disappeared in the darkness of the waiting room.

“What the devil,” muttered Kenneth Winship.

Dr. Dodd recrossed the hall. Something was glinting in his right hand.

“Oh, no, you don’t. Doc, give me that!”

“Kenneth—”

“For heaven’s sake. You’d probably shoot yourself with it.” The younger man took the revolver. “Now, Doc, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Dr. Dodd’s teeth were actually rattling. Ken put his hand on the burly man’s arm. “Now, Doc,” he said. The little sounds stopped and Ellery heard Dodd mumble something. “You all stay here—”

“No!” whispered Rima.

“Don’t … leave me,” said Dr. Dodd with some difficulty.

Ken was already in the hall. Rima flew after him.

Dr. Dodd began to shake again.

“It’s all right, Doctor,” said Ellery. He took the man’s arm; it was rigid as wood. “We’ll trail along. There’s no danger. Ken’s had army training.” Of course, Winship was right. The day in the woods had told Ellery only one thing: Sebastian Dodd lived in a monster-infested jungle, the prey of—what? Ellery did not know.

Ken was at a door at the rear of the hall, listening, Rima against the wall. Ken looked back; Ellery nodded toward the hall chandelier and, still gripping Dr. Dodd’s arm, moved over and touched the switch button.

In the darkness, Dr. Dodd’s breath whistled a tune.

The door at the other end of the hall crashed open and there was a streak of light from the room beyond, wheeling in a surprised arc, then a blaze as Ken’s left hand sprang into view against an invisible wall, fixed on a light switch.

And they heard Ken say, “Hold it, you,” quietly.

Ellery ran up the hall, brushed by Rima, stopped.

The room was a study, with an old mission desk and chair and a black leather couch and mission bookcases and two windows beyond, one of which was open to the night. Several of the desk drawers were open and in one of them a large dirty hand was caught while the other gripped a flashlight. Behind loomed the bulk of Nicole Jacquard.

“Jacquard, what do you think you’re doing?” asked Ken.

The man’s tongue came out of hiding, darted in again.

“What,” asked Ellery, “were you looking for?”

But Jacquard only glared.

“Nick.” Dodd’s voice. Shaking. “Did I ever send you a bill for Emilie’s operation? For saving little André’s leg? For delivering your wife of your last three children? Is this the way you pay me back, Nick?”

Jacquard said nothing. The glassy eyes were hunting.

“You won’t get anything out of him,” said Rima. “He knows only two things, drinking and stealing. Not even my father could do anything with him.” All of the past was in her voice.

Jacquard moistened his lips again.

“Queen, take this gun and cover him,” said Ken Winship. “While I get some rope to tie those hams of his—”

That’ll teach you never to take your eyes off a cornered man, Ellery thought as he flung his arms up and backward, bowling Rima over and doubling up Dr. Dodd. And then he was sprawled on both of them, covering them with his body. At the slight turn of Winship’s head Jacquard had sprung with animal agility, his paws flashing for the gun. The two men went down with a crash, Ken hanging on to the weapon. There was no time for Ellery to help; he jumped backward against Rima and the older doctor as Jacquard leaped; they all struck the floor at the same instant. And immediately after there was a shot, and all motion stopped.

For a moment the two men lay entangled.

Then Rima screeched, clawing her way from under Ellery just as he lunged toward the antagonists.

He felt the warm blood on his hand as he pulled.

“Ken!” Rima screamed. Then she cried joyfully, “It wasn’t Ken! It wasn’t Ken!”

Everything on Ken’s face was straining to open wider. Ellery pulled him to his feet. He tried to pull away, staring down at Nick Jacquard. But Ellery said, “No, Ken, no. Let Dr. Dodd do it.”

Dr. Dodd looked up after a while, his face alive with some mysterious yeast. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?” said Ken in an outraged voice.

“In the heart, Kenneth. He’s dead.”

“I killed him.”

“Darling, he was fighting you for the gun,” said Rima rapidly, holding on to him. “We all saw it. It’s not your fault, Ken. We all saw it.”

“I killed a Jerry once. In Italy. Big bruiser. Big as Jacquard. He spun around like a ballet dancer and then his knees buckled and he fell on his face and lay there on his knees with his behind in the air like a praying Arab. Dead?”

“Get him out of here,” muttered Ellery to Dr. Dodd and Rima. “Doctor, give him something. Keep telling him it wasn’t his fault. Go on, now! I’ve got to phone Dakin.”

Chief of police Dakin, who had been decently in bed, was there by 1:45 A.M. and Prosecutor Chalanski, who had been at a party on Skytop Road, did not arrive until 2:15—which was a valuable lesson, said Chalanski, for the good shall inherit the headaches—“though talking about headaches … what was in those Manhattans?… this doesn’t promise much of one at all, eh, Queen?”—and the prosecutor of Wright County shook hands limply, adding that crime seemed to follow Ellery around like a bill collector and prompting Ellery to mumble that he rather thought—at least he hoped—it was the other way around.

No one, with the interesting exception of Harry Toyfell, seemed to take the death of The Town Thief very seriously, at least in a social sense. Ken was immersed in his own psychological troubles; Rima was immersed in Ken; Essie Pingarn, who flew downstairs in tight rag curlers and a surprisingly elegant quilted bathrobe covered with big red roses, fainted and, on being revived by Dr. Dodd, immersed herself in the roaring waters of her faith; Mrs. Fowler, pale but showing the iron of her Puritan genes, bustled about with pots of coffee, fumbling with the control box of her earpiece and saying that the Lord had His own way of punishing shiftlessness and sin; Dr. Dodd turned very nearly cheerful, joking with Chief Dakin about his gun license, telling stories of other gunshot deaths in his experience, and generally being—not altogether to Ellery’s surprise, for he had seen men falsely bucked up by death before—a tower of strength; and Dakin and Chalanski handled Jacquard as if he were a card in a file. As for Harry Toyfell, he appeared like some medieval monk in a long earthcolored bathrobe and tattered carpet slippers and took his place over the hulk of his old crony, now a total wreck, with a hardbitten stoicism. Toyfell slept in a room above the garage, which was to the rear of the house and had once been a coach house; he had shuffled through the rear garden and the earth crumbs on his carpet slippers were very near his friend’s dead face.

“No, I sleep hard,” he replied to Prosecutor Chalanski. “Didn’t hear a thing till your siren woke me up.”

“Better for Jacquard if you had, maybe,” remarked Dakin.

But Toyfell shook his head. “He’d got in a bad mess one way or ’nother,” he said. “Nick was an angry man,” he said. “All his life he was lost and couldn’t find his way out.”

“Well, he’s found it now,” said Chalanski with a laugh, turning away.

Toyfell remained out of everyone’s way, near the body.

Malvina Prentiss descended out of space with a flash. Ellery got to the window just in time to witness her landing in a rocket-shaped convertible, its iridescent silver paint reflecting the amazed street lights. Dakin’s men had roped off the area before the Dodd house; beyond pressed a crowd; and they were all gaping, police included, at the silver monster. Apparently, like Chalanski, the publisher had been to a party: she was half-dressed in a silver lamé evening gown of Polynesian décolletage and a billowing evening cape of some other silvery material; and as she sailed up the walk pulling Francis O’Bannon along in her airstream, she looked about as indigenous to Wrightsville as a Venusian warlord. O’Bannon, at least, had been to no Saturday night social. He needed a shave, his neat Boston suit was rumpled, the laces of one shoe dragged. If he looked surly and rebellious, it was only in transit. By the time they were in the house he had a pad and pencil out and was trotting after his employer with not a shirttail of independence showing.

Miss Prentiss was there, it seemed, to see justice done.

When the facts were presented to her—Chalanski was gracious and tumblehaired, as befitted a man nuzzling a Congressional candidacy and counting on his boy-of-the-people personality to get over to the electorate by way of the press—Miss Prentiss’s highborn nostrils quivered as if she detected the odor of corruption and she demanded an interview “with the murderer of this poverty-stricken father of twelve orphaned children.” Mayhem, in the small person of one Rima Anderson, was averted by the gentleman from New York. That authority pointed out with a smile that the shooting was accidental and wholly the result of the dead man’s own folly, and that any attempt on the part of the Record to needle public sentiment against Dr. Winship in advance of the inquest would be cynical, unjust, prejudicial, and a damned dirty piece of xanthous journalism, and how are you again, Miss Prentiss? Miss Prentiss laughed and so the disagreeable incident was squashed, threatening to arise again only once, when Harry Toyfell said thoughtfully: “Man who expects truth from a newspaper would look for mercy from a Japanese beetle.”

When Miss Prentiss finally took off in a puff of silver, trailed by her exhaust, Mr. O’Bannon, with his padful of curlicues and pothooks, everyone drew an extra breath.

They were all accountably sober as two men from Duncan’s Funeral Parlors packed Nicole Jacquard off for temporary safekeeping and the pleasure of Coroner Grupp and a jury of Dr. Winship’s peers, Dr. Dodd mumbling something about having to see what could be done for Jacquard’s widow and children. Harry Toyfell shuffled after the undertaker’s men as far as the elm on the front lawn. His long face was set in a deep and monkish wisdom.

Dakin conferred with Chalanski and the prosecutor said that it would not be necessary to put Dr. Winship to the nastiness of cell detention until the inquest; he could be booked for the record and released on his own recognizance until the hearing. So they all went out to the cars.

Ellery’s ascent into Dr. Dodd’s decrepit vehicle was accomplished not without a groan or two, for he was feeling a dragging weariness. Nothing seemed right, nothing came to a point; the fate of Anderson, the significance of the deaths of MacCaby and Hart, were as far from comprehension as ever; perhaps further. The events of the night had only piled nonsense on confusion. And yet he could not escape the puzzle. It pressed on him so heavily that his head ached. I’m bushed, he thought as Dr. Dodd started the car. I’ve got to—

Then he was bushed no longer.

A sort of double exposure, he was thinking at the jump of his blood, because they were really one face duplicated. Two tiny men in undershirts, their pants sagging, with lumberjackets identically hung over their pigeon shoulders, stood side by side on the porch of a small frame house directly across Algonquin Avenue from the Dodd house.

Watching.

The little elderly tailors of the Granjon Block on Washington Street.

The identical Waldo twins.

Which was David and which Jonathan? He had never seen Jonathan. Not that it mattered. Seeing Jonathan was seeing David. There were probably differences if you used X-rays and micrometers, even differences in skills; but this was nature in an antic mood—and even so, why should anyone care?

As Dr. Dodd’s car spluttered away, Ellery kept asking himself why his nervous system should jangle an alarm at learning the surely extraneous fact that the Waldo brothers, who made Otis Holderfield’s clothes, were across-the-street neighbors of Attorney Holderfield’s patron saint, the fortunate Dr. Sebastian Dodd?

Sunday, April 23

“What?” said Ellery. He was still hearing the carillon spiel of the First Methodist barker and Dakin’s axhead face was still blurry around the edges. He rubbed his eyes; Rima was there, too, seated on the edge of Manager Brooks’s bed, and without Ken Winship. “I thought Jacquard was dead. Or did I dream it all, Dakin?”

“I didn’t say Jacquard. I said Jacquard’s house. Y’know, Mr. Queen,” said the chief of police, “he lived in a house. More like a chicken coop than a house, with all those youngsters underfoot, but a house you’d have to call it even though it’s on Polly Street and the rats eat out of your hand.”

“Or your hand,” said Rima.

“The point is, I found Rima’s father’s five thousand dollars over there this morning.”

Now the last lingering bong was gone and Dakin was his proper hatchet self again, and Ellery said, “So,” like little Hercule Poirot, and he went over and shut one of the windows, shivering. It would happen on a cold Sunday in April. “So what, Dakin?”

“So I thought you’d be surprised,” said Dakin in a surprised voice.

“So did I,” said Rima.

“Really, you should have brought some coffee up with you,” said Ellery. “Where do you think Jacquard would hide money that didn’t belong to him?”

“Then why didn’t you look there?” Dakin was being awfully disagreeable so early in the morning, thought Ellery; a Sunday, too. “Now ask me why I didn’t look there. Well, sir, I didn’t look there because nobody bothered to tell me about Anderson’s coming back to Holderfield with Dodd’s five thousand in an envelope and turning it over to Holderfield with instructions to turn it over to Nick Jacquard if somethin’ happened to him, and Holderfield’s doing so. That’s why I didn’t look there, Mr. Queen. And I’ve got a little business with Mr. Holderfield this morning, too, that’s goin’ to make Mr. Holderfield remember me.”

“You’re so right, Dakin,” groaned Ellery. “It’s this damned zipper-mouth training I got in my youth. By the way, who did tell you?”

“I did,” said Rima. “I woke up early this morning after bad dreams and I went right to Chief Dakin. Didn’t tell Ken or Dr. Dodd or anybody—Ken had gone to the hospital and Dr. Dodd was still asleep.”

“Got me out of bed with it, bless her heart,” said Dakin, “and don’t give her that wait-till-I-get-you-alone look, Mr. Queen, ’cause she’s a better friend of mine than you are. Or were you waiting for Jacquard to cash in so you could find that five thousand yourself?”

“This is unworthy of our long friendship,” said Ellery with dignity. “I really must have some coffee … Well, anyway, you’ve got it, and that’s the main thing, and now that you have, what are you going to do with it? Oh, did you find the envelope and the letter Tom Anderson told Holderfield he had enclosed with the money?”

“To the second question, no, Jacquard must have destroyed it. To the first,” said the police chief, “why, Dr. Dodd gave that money to Tom Anderson, and Tom Anderson no longer being with us …”

“That’s why I’m here,” said Rima, looking Ellery in the eye. “I don’t want that money. Dr. Dodd gave it to Daddy for a purpose and Daddy didn’t live long enough to accomplish the purpose, so the money ought to go back where it came from. And that’s just where it’s going.”

Dakin looked at Ellery hopefully. “Well,” he said after a moment. Then he went to the door and Rima followed him.

“Wait,” said Ellery. They both stopped. “Rima, I’ll meet you in the lobby. I won’t be five minutes dressing.”

Dakin looked reproachful as they went out.

Ellery took Rima into the coffee shop and they sat down five tables away from the nearest traveling man. Rima said she would have just coffee, thank you, so Ellery ordered two pots of coffee and said, “What else did you tell Dakin?”

“Nothing else.”

“Why did you tell him anything at all?”

“I thought he ought to know.”

“You thought he ought to know. Do you know, in war you’d be shot for this?”

“I didn’t know Mr. Dakin was the enemy.”

“You argue like a Levantine,” growled Ellery. “Of course, he’s not. But you’re sworn. Head man—chief. That was supposed to be me, remember?”

“Ellery.”

“What?”

“I’m resigning.”

Ellery nodded and for a few moments they devoted themselves to their coffee. Finally Ellery lit a cigaret and blew a question mark.

“Yes. After what happened last night—Ken and me … Ellery, I couldn’t. Not and stay in love with Ken. It’s something neither you nor I knew would happen when we made our bargain. Of course you understand.”

“Of course.” Of course. But it had not occurred to him before. This is what comes, he thought ruefully, of thinking of people not as people but as chess pieces. “You’re perfectly right, Rima. There can’t be any other basis for your relationship. Only … respect my position, will you?”

“You mean I’m not to tell Ken anything?”

“Because of Ken’s loyalty to Dodd. He’d probably boil over and in his anger tip off Dodd. And that might spoil everything.”

“You’re going ahead with this?” Rima was astonished.

Ellery looked astonished at her astonishment. “Why, certainly.” And then he said, irrelevantly, “You know, Rima, Dodd is a very sick man.”

“You mean his nervousness?”

“His phobia.”

“Phobia?”

“It isn’t just worry or anxiety, Rima. It’s fear. And not an ordinary intermittent fear—a pathological fear. Obsessive. I suppose that’s what’s really keeping me in Wrightsville. What in the world is Dodd so unreasonably terrified of? And whatever it is, how is it connected with the deaths of MacCaby and Hart? And with what happened to your father? And to Jacquard?”

“To Jacquard?”

“Yes.”

“But Jacquard’s death …” She was bewildered.

“Exactly. First MacCaby’s death, then Hart’s death, then presumably your father’s death, and now Jacquard’s death. All connected. Or are they? Two possibilities, Rima. Remember? The double play.”

“But—it was his own fault!”

“Good heavens, I’m not turning a beady eye on your beloved. Poor Ken in any event would be an instrument of fate. I didn’t mean that. I meant—in theory—the two faces of the coin. One possibility: Jacquard, a petty thief, broke into the house of the town’s newest rich man. Past midnight, when it was in almost total darkness, you’ll recall. Why? For the obvious purpose of stealing something. What? Anything he could lay his hands on. Place, time, circumstances, intended victim, known character of the culprit—they all fit the simple interpretation. As, incidentally, did the previous events.

“But the reverse? Dodd the wicked man? In the grip of a deathly fear?… Follow him through to Jacquard.”

“I don’t see …”

“Suppose, again, Dodd murdered MacCaby for the fortune, drove Hart to suicide to gain sole control of the dye works, killed your father to avoid paying more blackmail. If that’s the truth, your father had some evidence that proved Dodd’s guilt—the box of pills Dodd gave MacCaby, or something else. It doesn’t matter what.

“Now Tom Anderson. Tom Anderson is an intelligent man. He knows Dodd is a murderer and that a man who has murdered twice will murder a third time. And he, Anderson, is putting pressure on that Dodd. He sees the dreary possibility. So he hides his evidence.

“He hides his evidence, and what does he do? He leaves a sealed letter with Holderfield with instructions that, if anything should happen to him—Anderson—Holderfield is to turn the envelope over to Nick Jacquard. And in this envelope he has not only placed the five thousand dollars he got from Dodd but also a letter of instructions to Jacquard telling Jacquard all about Dodd’s guilt, about the evidence, its nature and where Anderson has hidden it. So that if Dodd thought to resolve his difficulties by killing Anderson, Jacquard could disillusion him by carrying the blackmail on. They were friends, weren’t they? And Tom Anderson had come a long way from his poetry and his mortarboard.”

Rima said nothing, but her scorn was explicit.

Nevertheless, Ellery went on. “And where had Tom Anderson hidden the evidence of Dodd’s guilt? Well, what did Jacquard, Anderson’s heir, so to speak, do last night? He broke into Dodd’s study. Then suppose Anderson’s letter to Jacquard had said: I hid the evidence in the last place Dodd would think of looking for it—his own study. At Dodd’s own word, Anderson had been in Dodd’s house at least twice. Suppose it had been, however, not in Dodd’s waiting room as he said, but in Dodd’s study, that their conversations about the five thousand dollars took place. And suppose Dodd had been called out for a few minutes, leaving Anderson in the study alone? You see where the other fork of the road takes us, Rima? To Jacquard breaking into Dodd’s house to get possession of the evidence by which Anderson had blackmailed Dodd and for the suppression of which Dodd had killed Anderson. Dodd, Dodd, and Dodd. Dodd the frightened man. Always Dodd. That’s why I want so badly to get into that house, Rima. It’s only one of two possible theories, but finding that evidence—which Jacquard didn’t get—would block off one road and take us down the other to a destination. Now, wouldn’t it?”

Rima smiled. “Sorry, Mr. Queen. I don’t believe it. Except as perverted poetry, perhaps. But it’s pure imagination. You should have lived in Coleridge’s day. Or smoked opium with De Quincey. I’m going back to Ken and Dr. Dodd, who’s a sweet, troubled man … maybe sick from overwork, from nervous exhaustion, but not a murderer, not the nemesis of a rich man and a foolish man, a pauper and a thief … Ellery, what’s the matter?”

For Ellery was crouched there watching his cigaret scorch the flesh of his forefinger as if he were a Yogi.

“Ellery!” She slapped his hand and the butt fell into his coffee with a frustrated hiss. “What’s ailing you?”

He came back to the Hollis Coffee Shoppe with a start. And almost upset the table, he jumped up so wildly.

“Ellery! Where are you going?”

“Dodd!… Pay the check. I mean … Oh, hell, I can’t wait for change. Still asleep, you said? Rima, come on!”

“What are you raving about?”

But he was already waving to the taxi parked outside.

Ellery said: “Dr. Dodd, I’m going to tell you a fairy tale.”

They had found Dodd in his study, in pajamas and a frayed black silk dressing gown, behind the desk where Nick Jacquard had made his last stand the night before. He was sipping black coffee with both hands about the dancing cup, staring through the window at his garden. Nothing was visible but Harry Toyfell turning up the earth around a row of narcissus shoots. Ken was giving the doctor a report on some patient he had just seen at the hospital, but the older man seemed not to have been listening.

Dodd was not so much shaking this morning as being shaken by a personal earthquake.

He tried to smile; the smile burst into fragments, leaving a stubbled chaos, everything in trembling motion. He seemed fascinated by Toyfell’s movements, the rise and fall of the bits of earth.

Ken Winship was frazzled himself this morning; Rima gently stroked his lids. “Ellery, I don’t think this morning is a good time.”

The best time, thought Ellery.

“A fairy tale,” he repeated. “But it has to be believed. And because it has to be believed, Dr. Dodd, I ask you to open your mind as wide as it can go.”

Now he had Dodd’s attention; an unpleasant victory, for this man was shaking to pieces before his eyes.

“I said—” began Ken.

“Darling, listen,” said Rima.

“I’ll have to start at the beginning. I came to Wrightsville with a theory. My theory was that Tom Anderson’s death was only a link in a chain. My theory was that it was the third link, the first link having been the death of Luke MacCaby and the second link the death of John Hart. Last night Nick Jacquard died. My theory last night was that Jacquard’s death was the fourth link.”

“What the devil are you talking about, Ellery?”

“Ken. Listen.”

“Dr. Dodd, this morning the theory became a fact. The deaths of MacCaby, Hart, Anderson, Jacquard are positively connected. In that exact order, by the way. As to what connects them …”

“What?” croaked Dr. Dodd.

“I want you to work it out with me, Doctor,” said Ellery. “MacCaby was the first to die. How would you describe MacCaby?”

Dodd was squeezing the edge of his desk. “How do you mean?”

“Not physically. As a personality.”

“An eccentric.”

“No. In social terms. The thing Wrightsville talked about most when they discussed him after his death.” Ellery paused. “Everyone thought he was—?”

“A poor man?” Dodd was squinting across the desk.

“When he was actually—?”

“A wealthy man.”

“The second casualty, Hart. In exactly the same sense, Doctor, how would you describe Hart?”

“He turned out to be an embezzler.”

“Yes, but what’s the fact that brought Hart down to the level of the lowliest Low Villager?”

“Everyone thought he was a millionaire when he was really penniless?”

“Yes, the have turns out to be the have-not. In our society, where the accumulation of wealth is the preoccupation of most individuals, the loss of it is the most tragic—that is, the most dramatic—of possible turns of the plot. So—in the scale of our social plot values—just as the most significant thing about Luke MacCaby was that, thought to be a poor man, he was actually rich, so the most significant thing about John Spencer Hart was that, thought to be a rich man, he was actually poor.

“And now,” said Ellery, “describe Tom Anderson.”

“It’s all right, Doctor,” began Rima.

“No,” said Ellery, “let’s stick to socio-economics. It’s obvious that we’ve been dealing with classifications of property, isn’t it? Riches, poverty. In that frame, Dr. Dodd, what was Tom Anderson?”

“Poverty.”

“More than poverty. Or, rather, less. Poverty is a relative term, Doctor, like vacuum. But Tom Anderson was an absolute. The economic untouchable. Rima, you told me in New York what Wrightsville called your father when they weren’t pinning the drunkenness label on him.”

“The Town Beggar.”

“He was also called The Town Beggar. And Jacquard, who followed The Town Beggar in this mystifying sequence? What was Jacquard noted for?”

“Petty thievery. The Town Thief.”

“MacCaby the rich man, Hart the poor man, Anderson the beggar, Jacquard the thief. In that order.” Ellery paused. Then he said lightly, “Rich man, poor man, beggar, thief.” And paused again. And when they said nothing, when they glanced blankly back at him, Ellery whipped his jacket open, flung his necktie over one shoulder, and jabbed at the top button of his shirt with a furious forefinger. “Rich man—” the button below—“poor man—” the button below that—“beggar-man—” the fourth button—“thief!”

Now they saw, and he pulled his tie back straight and rebuttoned his jacket and shook himself a little. “All right, I’m off my chump. Four men die, each under perfectly … adult circumstances, and here the fellow comes along and works out a child’s jingle, a counting game of the young, a fortune-telling abracadabra. ‘What are you going to be when you grow up, Junior? Tell your beads—I mean your buttons.’ And Junior puts his chubby little finger on his shiny little buttons, and he pipes, ‘Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief …’ Well, say it! Or do you see, Dr. Dodd, that mad or not, that’s the incantation arising out of the ghosts of MacCaby, Hart, Anderson, and Jacquard? You’re a man who believes in four-leaf clovers! Will you believe that four deaths can follow a jingle?”

The sweat was rolling down Dodd’s speckled skull. “I don’t know what to say,” he stammered.

“You’ve got to believe! Try it yourself. Test it any way you want to. Sleep on it. Be scientific. What else can it mean? What else can it be? Four men die, following the pattern of a child’s counting game. Ridiculous! Insane! But true.”

“Coincidence.” Ken Winship was angry.

“Four? One certainly, two possibly, three conceivably, but four, Ken? No, not coincidence. Plan.”

“Whose?”

Rima said nothing, but she had grown very pale.

Dr. Dodd wiped his skull.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Doc. Look, Ellery.” Ken was being reasonable now. “This would be great stuff for one of your books, but chase those romantic cobwebs away for a minute. MacCaby’s heart quit. Hart put a bullet through his brain. Anderson—we don’t even know he’s dead. Jacquard … And you say there’s a directing mind behind this?”

“And yet … rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief. Plan, Ken. A directing mind. Not necessarily a hand, but a mind. I believe it. I have to. What’s more,” Ellery leaned on the desk, and he was not speaking to Dr. Winship now, “you have to, Doctor.”

“Me?” Dr. Dodd’s eyes kept roving. “Why?”

“It’s not finished.”

“What’s not finished?” demanded Ken irritably.

Rima was terribly still.

“Wait, Kenneth.” The shaking man remarkably stopped shaking. And he said slowly, “Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief; doctor …”

“No, Rima.” Winship laughed, on his feet. “So that’s the way it works out.”

“Doctor,” nodded Ellery. “Dr. Dodd, Ken. Indicated. Next on the list.”

Dodd began shaking again. It was hard to look at him.

“The fifth character in the jingle is ‘doctor,’ so that means Dr. Sebastian Dodd. In a town with thirteen doctors of medicine, four doctors of dentistry, and I don’t know how many doctors of other sorts, ‘doctor’ in a jingle means Doc Dodd. Queen, who’s pulling whose leg? And why?” And now Ken sounded almost ugly.

“I don’t blame you, Ken,” said Ellery without rancor. “On the surface it’s lunacy or worse. But dig in. Dr. Dodd is the only doctor in Wrightsville who’s had an important connection with MacCaby’s death, Hart’s death, Anderson’s death, and Jacquard’s death—with all four. MacCaby was Dodd’s patient and Dodd inherited his fortune. Dodd became Hart’s business partner and then sole owner of the Hart-MacCaby business through Hart’s suicide. Dodd gave Anderson five thousand dollars a short time before Anderson’s disappearance. And it was in Dr. Dodd’s home, with Dr. Dodd’s gun, that Nick Jacquard met his death. That’s why ‘doctor’ in the rhyme means Dr. Dodd to me, Ken. Call it hunch, paranoia, superstition, but that’s why I’m convinced that Dr. Dodd is down in somebody’s book as victim number five. You people have to see it. You have to take precautions. I’ll help, if you’ll accept help—”

“Ken!”

At Rima’s shriek Dr. Winship whirled. But Ellery was already pushing him aside.

Sebastian Dodd was on his feet behind the desk. His mouth was flapped back. His eyes glassed terror in, like cages.

He pitched forward just as Ellery got to him.

Shock, said Ken, his tone official. They were outside Dodd’s bedroom. Rima was keeping watch over the doctor. Each man was stiffly on edge.

“There’s nothing wrong with his heart. If there were, Queen, you’d have killed him.”

“He’s sicker than I thought. But I had no choice. He’s tagged. I had to warn him. He’s got to watch himself.”

“I’ll watch him. He’ll be up by tomorrow morning.”

“I’d like to help, Ken.”

Winship did not reply.

“There’s no point in our acting like two strange dogs. You’ve got Rima and a long life ahead of you and I’ve got my conscience to live with. We both owe Dodd something. The job is to take care of him and find out what this is all about.” Ellery said patiently, “I’m going to do it anyway.”

“But I don’t believe any of this,” Ken Winship snarled.

“Dodd does. You heard what he said when you revived him. Do we join forces, Ken, or square off?”

Ken relaxed suddenly. “Oh, hell, pull out of the Hollis and move into one of these rooms. If you’re right, Ellery, I’ll … buy you a whole set of nursery rhymes!”

Monday, April 24

He could have taken the key from the chain while Dodd was asleep under sedation, Ellery reflected, but there had been Ken, big brass and bridling, and Rima, little and loyal as the sergeant of his own conscience in her enlistment on the other side. Afterward, he had had to go to the Hollis for his suitcase, and when he got back to the Dodd house Ken, an ally who kept his weapons primed, made it impossible to be alone.

Sunday night, on the pretext of “looking the house over,” Ellery had maneuvered the young doctor to the attic floor, and they had opened doors and poked into cubbies stored with historic furniture and the opulent whatnots of the last century—these had been servants’ quarters in the mansion’s heyday—until finally they had come to a narrow door with a modern lock, and this door did not open. “What’s in here?” Ellery had asked casually. “Darned if I know. The plusher Dodd family heirlooms, maybe. I don’t think Doc ever said,” and Ken had passed on. So that had been that; and later, when they looked in on Dr. Dodd, they had found him sitting up in bed like an aged frog in the stillness of some hopeless disease, a spready blotch against the lily pad of the wornout patchwork counterpane.

Their discussion with him, a tragic sonata in which the Winship and Rima variations were unsuccessfully lively, produced an unexpected coda. The doctor was grateful for Ellery’s interest and Ellery was more than welcome to stay, it seemed, but he had had time to think things out and he knew now that ordinary precautions were a waste of time. “I don’t need watching, Mr. Queen. I’m to die and it won’t be a hand that does it. Some things you can’t do a biopsy on. With all our sulfas and atomic bombs and electronic microscopes and two hundred inch telescope lenses we don’t begin to know the powers that fill the universe. Any more than the ameba in that glass of water knows what’s going on in this room. All we can do is wait and try not to be too afraid.” He had even managed a smile that was more depressing than the dreary burnside set of his jowls. And all the time he spoke his clothes lay on a chair beside his bed with that bit of watch chain peeping out, unattainable as the Little Dipper.

And when, at two in the morning, Ellery had crept down the hall in his naked feet, he had found Dr. Dodd’s door locked. In his peevishness it had struck him as an infantile defense against a Juggernaut, although effective enough against softer material. Ellery had crept back to bed cursing.

Which is how the indifferent dawn came to find him barefooted, pajamaed, and shivering, spreadeagled on the perilous pitch of the rearward Dodd roof and inching his way over to the armored eye of one of the dormers, the window of the little attic room that was locked. He had made up his mind about this after a predawn inspection—from the garden behind the house—of the mysterious dormer three floors above. The beam of his flashlight, a powerful one that occupied a permanent niche in his suitcase, had revealed a battered blind; and on this slender thread he had climbed to the top floor, entered the cubby next to the locked room, opened the cubby’s dormer window, and crawled out to the roof. Fortunately, there was a sound if ancient copper gutter along the edge of the eaves, and he was able to brace himself against this in getting over to the next dormer. Arrived at his goal, he found that the only rent in the blind of any promising size required him to hang on to the bulging eyelid of the dormer like a crooked lash, with half of him unsupported by anything more substantial than the heavy dawn air.

It was light enough by now, and the tear in the blind was sufficiently flapped away, to enable him to see most of the attic room. If he had expected dead bodies (or live ones), he was disappointed; what he could see of the room was unoccupied. It was small and meagerly furnished. There was a desklike table on the uncovered floor, a grayish mission “library table” of a previous generation, and an angular slatted armchair of the same style and period; on the interior shelf of the one end of the table which he could see stood some books; along the braceboard below the tabletop ranged an assortment of objects he could not identify; on the tabletop itself lay what appeared to be two decks of playing cards, stacked face down; and there was nothing else in the room that he could see except dust and spiderwebs.

Ellery drew back and sat down with his knees up and his bare heels in the copper gutter. He lit a cigaret from the pack he had cannily slipped into his pajama pocket and he smoked under the rising sun of Wrightsville on a crumbling roof watched by the northerly hills. He was filthy, and thoughtful. An elderly country doctor rose every morning and locked himself into a secret room in his attic and did … what?

Played solitaire? Read books? Prayed?

The sun was only a finger higher and his legs were only a little stiff. The doctor would be an early riser and this morning he would have reason to rise even earlier … The roof was shedding with age and through its thin skin Ellery heard the little door begin to beat.

He took his time getting his eye back to the peephole. Finally the dormer was embraced. About the sun at his back and his shadow on the blind he could do nothing; that was in the hands of God.

But Dr. Dodd was blind to changes in light. He was dressed in his working suit of blue serge. The key dangled from its chain, touching his thigh. He stood at the table staring down; and, yes, perhaps his lips were moving. Behind him the little door barred everyone.

Suddenly the doctor sat down, his big hand closing shakily about one of the decks of cards.

He sat there, arm resting on the edge of the library table, hand about the deck.

It came away in a spasm, severing the deck like an executioner. For a moment he was motionless, part of the deck on the table, part of the deck in his hand. Then he exposed the card he had cut to.

The ace of spades.

Dr. Dodd slammed the cards back and heaved to his feet. He ran to the door clawing for the key at his thigh. His thick blue back looked armored, as if he expected a blow from behind. He could not get the key into the lock; Ellery saw him seize his right hand with his left to steady it.

But then his hands dropped and he stood still again. Offering his back as a target? But Ellery was wrong. This was not surrender. Dr. Dodd turned—slowly, but he turned—and went heavily back to his altar.

And conducted a second service.

This was done very slowly indeed. The man who goes twice to question his god knows there can be no third appeal.

Dr. Dodd put his hand on the second deck of cards. It came away with part of the deck concealed in it. After an infinity of meditation he looked.

And this was the strangest thing of all, that he no longer quaked or leaned upon the table but simply stood in the hardening seizure of a kind of death, strong and sure of itself and not to be struggled against.

Stood looking at another ace of spades.

After a long time Dr. Dodd dropped the cards on the other deck and with remarkable steadiness marched to the door, unlocked it, and went out, leaving the little room only a shade altered.

Ellery found himself some time later squatting on the curled shingles contemplating the garden below his navel, a meager and perplexed Buddha. There was an earthstained spade beside a tulip bed by the wall of the garage, but it was not nearly so mordant as the memory of those other spades, of ink and pasteboard, in the hand of Dr. Dodd. The nine of diamonds had served the butcher duke of Cumberland in another age to put the curse of death on the Jacobites of Scotland. That card, fresh from Culloden Moor, had had writing on it; was there a sentence on Dr. Dodd’s two aces of spades?

And who was the butcher duke of Wrightsville?

Dr. Dodd would have said the noble Fiend, that teller of black fortunes. Telling death twice, as if he would not be misunderstood.

Ellery sat on Dr. Dodd’s roof thoroughly confused.

At last he crept over to the other dormer and prepared to re-enter the house. He had just scrambled through and was shutting the window when he spied a slotlike face at another window, a window below him and the garden’s width away, in the upper story of the garage.

Harry Toyfell.

Immediately the curtain fell straight.

Ellery let himself into the attic hall. The house was churchly; nor was there sign or sound of Dr. Dodd. As he tried the door of Dodd’s dusty chapel and found it locked again, Ellery fretted over more than the doctor’s secretiveness.

How long had the slabjawed gardener been peering from behind the curtain of his room above the garage? Had Toyfell witnessed the acrobatics on the roof? Would he drop a philosophical word to his new employer?

It was a nuisance; and Ellery went down to his bedroom, showered, washed out his grimy pajamas, and dressed, all in an unsettled haste.

In the hall again, he took stock. Rima’s door was shut, Ken Winship’s door was shut; Dr. Dodd’s door was open, as were the doors of Mrs. Fowler and Essie.

Ellery went downstairs.

Dr. Dodd was not in his office, not in his study.

Coffee warmed the kitchen. “No, just coffee, Mrs. Fowler. Thought I heard Dr. Dodd stirring. Is he up?”

“Doctor’s always up with the birds,” Mrs. Fowler shouted cheerfully. “Never saw such a man for early risin’. Though he’d have prescribed staying in bed for a body looked as peaked as he did this mornin’. No breakfast, thank you, and he takes his hat and marches out. I declare, all men are infants, and doctors are the worst of all!”

“Where did he go, Mrs. Fowler? Oh, thanks. Hospital?”

“He didn’t say, though I expect that’s where he is. Just said to say he’d meet you, Miss Anderson, and Dr. Winship at the inquest this afternoon. Oh, that awful Jacquard!”

Ellery put down his cup and went back to his bedroom, walking softly as he passed the closed doors. Of course I might ask Dodd, he thought. But a man who keeps locking a door with a key doesn’t usually open it with a word. In any language. And afterward he’d be hysterically on his guard.

Ellery opened his suitcase, which had an uncandid side to it. From the false bottom, where he regretfully carried certain tools of his trade, he took this and that; and he went out and past the sleeping doors to the attic stairs.

A little later he balanced himself on the edge of Chief Dakin’s desk and he said, “Dakin, I’m going to ask you to help me commit an illegal act.”

“Sure,” said Dakin, rising with alacrity. “But we’ll have to work fast if we’re to make that inquest this afternoon. What crime do I commit?”

“You arrange the technical details. Is there a locksmith in town?”

“Millard Peague. Got a little shop down on Crosstown and Foaming.”

“How good is he?”

“He’s done a job or two for the county in his time, and once in a while he gets a call from as far away as Connhaven. What do you want Millard to do?”

“Make a key from a wax impression I just happen to have on me.” And Ellery placed a little carefully wrapped bundle on Dakin’s desk.

Dakin sat down again. “Whose?”

“That,” said Ellery, “is surely irrelevant and immaterial?”

“I could hold you up, Mr. Queen.”

“And I,” smiled Ellery, “could let you down.”

“Suppose we make a dicker—”

“On my terms, Dakin. You get this little job done for me without questions or publicity and I’ll tell you what door the key fits when I think you ought to know.”

“Tell me this,” said the chief of police. “You going to take anything?”

“No.”

“You going to put anything?”

“Cold, Dakin, cold.”

“Then what do you want to get in for?”

“Let’s say murder, shall we, and let it go at that?”

“You’re a hard man,” said Chief Dakin, rising and reaching for his cap, “and I’m just wax in your hands. If you’ll give me that thing I’ll go see what Millard Peague can do.”

The inquest into Nicole Jacquard’s death went off like an operation under the surgical hands of Coroner Grupp, presiding in Judge Eli Martin’s old courtroom in the County Court House. Grupp cut deftly through issues and skillfully tied off arterial impediments like the flowing Widow Jacquard and her distressed priest, Father Crétien of Low Village; and he handled the jury as if they were his masters, which they were not. It was all over in a wonderfully short time. Dr. Ken Winship, to his and Rima’s piteous relief, was exonerated by his peers, and the widow—though not in her hearing—was congratulated by the jury, for she had not only been cut free from the deadweight of her humorless husband but it was rumored that Dr. Sebastian Dodd was settling a far more substantial weekly sum on her and Nicole’s progeny than the corpse had provided in the most successful days of his pilferage. The verdict of the coroner’s jury was “It’s a good thing all around,” although expressed in more formal terms; and the atmosphere in the courtroom when the inquest broke up was such as to make Prosecutor Chalanski wish, humorously aloud to Mr. Queen, that he could hurry the date of the Congressional primaries.

Ellery’s interest in the proceedings was narrow. He had eyes chiefly for Sebastian Dodd. They had found Dr. Dodd seated heavily in the courtroom; he seemed to have signed a temporary truce with events. He said nothing of where he had been all morning. And afterward, Dodd had gone straight to the house on Algonquin and Wright and locked himself in his bedroom. He thought he would take it easy for the rest of the day, he said; his office hours had been canceled by Rima in the morning and Kenneth could take his evening house calls. He was happy, he said, very happy that the inquest had turned out so well, and would Mrs. Fowler leave a tray outside his door? This had been a sop to Mrs. Fowler, whose remedy for any sort of distress was invariably hot food in quantity. Ellery, passing Dodd’s door later that evening, found the tray cold, as Mrs. Fowler had not left it; he resisted an impulse with difficulty to kick it and blow up the charged silence of the house.

They were all affected by Dr. Dodd’s peculiar suppressions, even Essie, who just before dinner suddenly burst into tears and fled to her room; even Harry Toyfell, whose elongated jaws ground away in the kitchen to the exclusion of all possibility of communication. Mrs. Fowler served, and it was a question which was worse, her loquacity or the silence at the supper table. Ken did not even pretend to be hungry; he kept glancing upward. Rima watched him anxiously, a little island of helplessness. And Ellery nibbled, feeling the cold burn on his thigh of the key Chief Dakin had slipped into his hand as they were leaving the courtroom.

Finally Ken tossed his napkin down. “I’ve got to get out on those calls.”

“Ken. Don’t you think you ought to do something about Dr. Dodd?” At last it was out.

“What, darling? Take his blood pressure?” Dr. Winship sounded savage. He kissed Rima, excused himself, and they heard him drive away in a rush.

“Rima,” began Ellery.

But Rima said steadily, “No, I won’t listen to anything. I don’t understand and I have Ken’s and Dr. Dodd’s bills to make out and if you don’t mind, Ellery, I’d like to get to it.”

Nobody seemed to want to talk but Mrs. Fowler; and it was Mrs. Fowler’s conversation that eventually drove Ellery upstairs.

From his room he could hear the sputter of Rima’s typewriter, the offended bang of Mrs. Fowler’s dishes; punctuations to the silence. Ellery hurled himself about the bedroom under the spur of the duplicate key in his pocket. His was a corner bedroom, in a small ell, and from his window he could see the windows of Dr. Dodd’s room. Dodd’s light was on; it had been on all evening. Occasionally Ellery could see his bulk drift past like a paramecium on a slide.

It was impossible to investigate the locked attic room while Dodd was awake. It was almost directly above Dodd’s bedroom and the floors, dryboned with age, squealed and tattled with every step.

At 9:30 Ellery heard Mrs. Fowler’s heavy step come up the hall. He heard her knock on Essie Pingarn’s door and Essie’s sniveling reply. A moment later Mrs. Fowler’s light came on and a moment after that there was a muffled swoosh of water. Ellery groaned. Mrs. Fowler’s bedtime tub the night before had taken exactly one hour and ten minutes.

He left his room and went down the hall. There was the taunting moat of light under Dodd’s door. The tray was gone; Mrs. Fowler must have taken it away.

He knocked.

He knocked again.

“Yes? Who’s that?”

“Queen.”

“Oh.” He sounded hoarse, as if he had been addressing audiences. “Yes?”

“I saw your light on, Doctor. May I come in and visit?”

“Well, the fact is I was just going to sleep—” The moat blacked out. Ellery heard the clash of springs.

“Feeling all right, Doctor?”

“Fine. Had a wonderful rest this evening. You comfortable, Mr. Queen? Have your dinner? Everything you want?”

“Yes, thanks. Good night. Sleep well.”

“Thanks …”

Ellery continued loudly down the hall. At the head of the stairs he stopped.

He waited one hour by his watch. Then he went back; it took him ten minutes to retrace the fifteen feet to Dr. Dodd’s door. He braced himself with both hands and put his ear to the panel.

The breathing was deep and slow, with a slight snore in it occasionally. And once a whimper.

Ellery straightened. Rima’s typewriter was still going downstairs; Ken had still not returned. Toward the other end of the hall the transom above Mrs. Fowler’s door was dark.

Carefully Ellery went back to the stairs and started for the attic.

He used a pencil-sized flash this time.

The key had a film of oil on it and he eased it into the lock of Dr. Dodd’s sanctuary with no sound.

Then he put the flashlight between his jaws, like a cigar, grasped the knob firmly with his left hand, and with his right he twisted.

The key would not turn.

Ellery could have sat down on the attic floor and cried.

Then he was angry. It was the most ridiculous case he had ever stuck his nose into. It was made of froth and dancing flecks and the look in a man’s eyes, with not enough substance to keep a dwarf going.

He made his way back to the second floor, and he rummaged in his suitcase again, and then he returned to the attic and with gritted teeth made another wax impression of the lock.

As he finished, he heard a car in the driveway, and by the time he got downstairs with his hat Rima was sitting on Ken’s lap in the waiting room, her arms about his neck.

“Don’t get up,” said Ellery, smiling. “I’m just passing through. You look beat, Ken.”

“He’s going right to bed. Which is where I thought you were, Ellery,” said Rima.

“Itchy. By the way, Dr. Dodd’s asleep.”

“I was just going up to see him,” said Ken guiltily. “But if he’s sleeping—Where you going?”

“I thought I might walk this flea mood off. Talking of sleep, Ken, this female you’ve captivated has been working on your damned bills all evening.”

“I know it, and I’ve been giving her hell. Darling, I told you …”

Ellery let himself out. There was a raw edge to the night and he shivered as he hurried around the corner to Wright Street. The alcoholic heat of Jack’s Palace Bar and Grill was almost pleasant. Ellery went to the bar and ordered a beer. He sipped it long enough to outwait the interest his entrance had stirred up, and then he slipped into the telephone booth.

“Dakin? Don’t you ever go home?”

“Well, since my wife died there’s not much to go home for. But I was on my way. What’s up?”

“The key Peague made doesn’t work. I’ve got another impression.”

“Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be right over.”

Dakin was waiting for him on the steps between the green lights. “No point to popping Gobbin’s popeyes,” Dakin said mildly. “He’s got a direct pipeline to Malvina Prentiss’s office. Where is it?”

Ellery gave it to him and Chief Dakin put it carefully into a Boston bag he was carrying. They began to walk east on State Street, past the Court House.

“Too late to do anything on this tonight, Mr. Queen.”

“When will you get it to Peague?”

“First thing in the morning. You’ll have it by noon tomorrow. Any news for me?”

“No. Any news for me?”

“No.”

They parted at State and Upper Whistling in silence.

Tuesday, April 25

Nick Jacquard was down on all fours on the rocky ledge staring into the pool which seemed made of brown sugar and sparkled like a million fireflies under the moon, and Ellery peered over Jacquard’s thick back to see a face imbedded in the sugar below which was suddenly not sugar but writhing lava, smoke drifting over the face just in time to prevent identification although there had been a plea in it for recognition of some sort. At this the moonrays turned scarlet, pouring into the lava pit, and Nick Jacquard threw back his shaggy head, Ellery seeing that he was a dog howling in unfeeling agony at the incomprehensible nature of the night. There was such a piercing note in his canine grief that Ellery cried out and covered his ears. Now the howls muffled, and Ellery awoke to find himself pressing the ends of his damp pillow to his ears.

The dog still howled.

Ellery sat up in bed, blinking at his wrist. After three. His skin was still slick and he irritably got out of bed and lurched to the window, trying to rouse himself.

The dog was howling in or beyond the garden in the monotonous terror of the dream. There was no moon. The only light came from a window toward the other end of the house.

Dodd’s bedroom window.

And Dodd was at the window, his arms raised as he hung on to his drapes, a gross, supplicating silhouette.

The howling persisted.

The howling persisted and Ellery’s head cleared suddenly, his hairs prickling.

He kept staring across at the man in the window.

A dog howling in the night. And recently there had been an ace of spades, twice dealt.

The noise persisted. Ellery wondered how anyone could sleep. Dodd, at his window, never moved.

It stopped just before dawn and only then did Dr. Dodd come alive. The black arms dropped, the window was blank. A moment later the light went out.

Ellery crept back to bed, inviting sleep. But sleep was a sensitive plant tonight, shrinking from the breath of the dog. And there was always that infernal jingle. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief; doctor … Something Sisyphean about it; a stone he kept pushing endlessly toward a conclusion and which rolled endlessly back on him.

And in the morning there was another vexation.

Ellery was dragging his tail down the stairs when he froze on the landing above the front hall. Something between a scream and a bellow had suddenly split the early morning silence. Immediately there were sounds of feet which one moment ran, the next scuffled violently; then a crash and a thud, and the bullish voice rose again in maddened anger.

He found himself at the rear of the downstairs hall looking about wildly.

“Mrs. Fowler! Essie! Where’s that coming from?”

“The doctor’s study,” shrieked Mrs. Fowler. “They’re murderin’ him, Mr. Queen!”

From the noise, they certainly were. Ellery hurled himself at the study door and almost broke his neck. It gave at a touch.

Dr. Dodd was running about his study brandishing a rolled-up copy of the Wrightsville Record, flailing away at walls, desk, bookcases, floor in a grotesque balletry of rage. The dancing doctor accompanied himself with a song half prayer and half imprecation, fitting music to his choreography. In one of the windows, open to the rear garden, old Toyfell’s gloomy face was framed.

Then Ellery solved the mystery. Dodd was not executing a ritual dance; he was trying to kill a bird. It was a small dreary-colored bird, a sparrow or bunting, which had evidently blundered into the study through the open window, and Dodd and the bird had surprised each other when he came downstairs. Why the sight of the trapped and frightened little creature, which swooped and soared desperately among the invisible parabolas of the doctor’s blows, should have upset Dodd so eluded Ellery for the moment.

“Dr. Dodd. Doctor—”

“Get that damned thing out of here!” panted the doctor. “Get it out!”

“Ellery—” Rima was in an old wrapper of Mrs. Fowler’s, pale.

“See what you can do with Mr. Sparrow—he’s probably an old friend of yours. Doctor. Dr. Dodd! Stop that, now.”

He managed to get the big man in an armchair while Rima stood still in the center of the study and made chirruping sounds. The bird, perched on the highest bookcase, gave a querulous reply. And in a little while, apparently reassured by Rima’s conversation, it flew down and perched on her shoulder. But only for a moment. Then it streaked for the opening in the window and whistled past Harry Toyfell’s head like a bullet and was gone.

“A bird.” Rima sounded shocked. “And you tried to kill him, Doctor.”

Dr. Dodd cowered in the armchair.

“Drink this.” Ellery held a glass to the doctor’s liverish lips. “Rima, where’s Ken?”

“He had to be at the hospital early this morning for a consultation. Dr. Dodd, what was the matter?”

Dodd did not reply. He pushed the glass from his lips.

“We’d better get Ken or somebody right away,” said Rima in a low voice. At the window Harry Toyfell’s saturnine face still hung. Mrs. Fowler and Essie clung to the doorway.

“No doctor.” His mouth seemed stiff. “I’m all right. Just let me lie down on the couch. I’ll be fine.”

They left him stretched out on the black leather couch, face turned to the wall.

“Always was the nervous kind,” Mrs. Fowler whispered loudly in the hall, “but I declare, lately he’s a wreck. I don’t see how he can go on much longer this way.”

“Scared of a little old bird,” sniffed Essie Pingarn. “If you ask me, Mis’ Fowler, it’s his ma all over again.”

“Essie!” hissed the housekeeper; and Essie flounced off.

“What did Essie mean—‘his ma all over again’?”

Mrs. Fowler took refuge in her earpiece. “What?”

Ellery repeated the question.

“Don’t seem to hear you, Mr. Queen. I’ve got to get your breakfast started—”

“Bother my breakfast, and you heard Essie perfectly. If she knows about it, it can’t be much of a secret. What about Dr. Dodd’s mother, Mrs. Fowler?”

“You ask Dr. Winship. You do that. Got my laundry to sort, and—”

“He’s not here and you are. Tell me.”

The housekeeper glanced fearfully at the closed study door. Then she whispered, “His ma died in Slocum State Hospital,” and fled.

It accounted for a great deal.

But not enough.

Ellery looked into the waiting room. Rima was on the phone trying to locate Dr. Winship.

Ellery waved and went across the hall to the dining room.

As he cracked his first egg a partial answer came to him.

A bird coming into a house was one of the oldest of evil omens. A bird coming into a house. Like a dog howling in the night. Or an ace of spades.

They all announced the imminent visit of death.

Ellery returned from Dakin’s office at a little past noon with the second duplicate key in his pocket to find the waiting room crowded and Rima and Dr. Winship running about like harassed store clerks in a going-out-of-business sale. He managed to see Winship for a moment.

“It’s the Jacquard shooting,” said Ken despairingly. “Half the people out there have nothing wronger with ’em than an acute case of rubberneck. Local politics and other people’s troubles are Wrightsville’s two main interests.”

“Where’s Dodd, Ken? He’s not in his study.”

“He ducked out just before office hours, said he wanted some air. I told him to go. He’d be no good here in the condition he’s in.”

“Ken, what’s the matter with Dodd?”

“I wish I knew. He’s in a highly nervous state, bordering on hysteria.”

“Bordering hell. Didn’t Rima tell you what happened this morning?”

“Of course. If this keeps on I’m going to call in a psychiatrist. He can’t go on this way, something’s bound to give. I wish I had more time for him. But now that I have to take care of two practices—”

Rima came in hurriedly and said, “I’ve got Mrs. Broadbeck on the table, Ken. She knows it’s a tumor.”

“Tumor my left ovary. I told her last month she was pregnant. Rima, did I say it today?”

“No, darling.”

“I love you. Who’s after Broadbeck?”

Ellery went out. He had passed Harry Toyfell on the front lawn spading some rose bushes. Essie Pingarn’s vacuum cleaner was whining in the dining room. He poked his head into the kitchen; Mrs. Fowler was on the extension, reading a grocery list to Logan’s Market.

So he went upstairs, rubbing his thumb over the key in his pocket.

Now that he was in the attic room, with the door locked behind him, Ellery was let down. He did not quite know what he had expected to find in the part of the room which had been beyond the line of his vision when he hung over the roof, but it was certainly nothing so unexciting as the rusty iron sink and small electric burner that he now saw.

The rest were as he had last seen them. The two decks of cards on the table, the row of objects on the braceboard shelf below, the mission chair.

The room was close and musty. Browning wallpaper curled everywhere.

He picked up one of the decks of cards and glanced through it; then the other. Perfectly ordinary cards. He replaced them on the table as he had found them.

Now he squatted on his heels for a closer look at the shelf which ran the length of the table underneath. It supported a conglomeration of things, as random and unrelated as the contents of a boy’s pocket. A heap of pebbles. A carton of salt. A little box of assorted finger rings, some antique-looking, others of modern design; none was valuable. A pair of red dice. A rusty sadiron that looked as old as the house. Absurdly, a bundle of arrows—old Indian arrows, he thought; at Creecher’s Barn, over toward Connhaven, you could pick up anything from the petticoat of a Salem witch to Increase Mather’s shoe buckle. For that matter, all you had to do was dig almost anywhere. Boys were always turning up arrowheads, maize pestles, and whatnot; this had been congested Indian country. Seven arrows, and other things equally childish.

But as he squatted there, taking inventory of Sebastian Dodd’s haphazard treasures, pebbles, salt, rings, dice, sadiron, arrows and the rest ranged themselves along the shelf like instruments in an orchestra, of different materials, shapes, and sizes but all bound by a common function to a common destiny.

And now Ellery heard and apprehended the music of Dr. Dodd’s queer orchestra; but comprehension was still beyond him, for Ellery was a man of simple sanity and certain things of which he knew remained just outside the grasp of his understanding.

The Dodd who had collected these objects was not to be salvaged by an ordinary man. That was a reclamation job for experts.

As Ellery relocked the little door from the outside, he tasted a guilty brash. On Sunday he had quoted Dodd a jingle, prophesying doom. No wonder Kenneth Winship had been furious. It had been like putting out the light in the room of a child who was screaming because he was afraid of the dark.

When Ellery got downstairs, Rima jumped up from her desk and took him into the hall.

“Dr. Dodd’s back and, Ellery, what do you think?”

“What?” asked Ellery quickly.

“He’s back in his office examining patients!”

“Funny,” muttered Ellery.

“You and Ken. Ken said the same thing. ‘It isn’t natural,’ he said—”

“It isn’t.”

Rima stamped back into the waiting room.

Ellery saw Dodd after the last patient left. The doctor was looking tired but calm. “That silliness this morning, Mr. Queen—”

“I’m delighted to see you back in harness.”

“Must have overdone it. It creeps up on you at my age.” He even laughed. “I can’t guess what you’ve been thinking. Mrs. Fowler treating you all right?” He actually put his hand on Ellery’s shoulder in a friendly way.

But Ellery felt it tremble.

Thursday, April 27

The household brightened quickly, snatching a half-portion as the whole. At the same time there was a common watchfulness which centered on Dr. Dodd, responsive to the slightest twitch of his jowls. But the doctor seemed really better. He was nimbly in and out on calls at all hours of the day and night; he went back to his clinic duties; he visited the hospital frequently. He even made little jokes about “Mrs. Kenneth Winship” and young Dr. Kildares in love. Rima worked and trilled and made them laugh, recounting Ken’s exasperated attempts to teach her to drive his car in the odd hours they were able to snatch together. Mrs. Fowler broke out in a rash of cookies and pies. Essie Pingarn unpacked her bag. Even Harry Toyfell looked less glum as he worked over his flats and transplanted seedlings; on Wednesday Ellery heard him rustily whistle a tune.

If Ken remained skeptical, he was at considerable pains to conceal it.

Still, there was something artificial in the doctor’s gaiety and their grateful responses. They were like people on a stage going through carefully rehearsed emotions.

Ellery lounged about the house. There was nothing to be done except to go over the same shifty ground retesting his footing. But he could find solidity nowhere. There was the past, and there was the jingle, and between them the mysterious quicksand. Dakin knew nothing. Nothing had happened, nothing had changed. A rich man was dead, a poor man was dead, a beggar-man was gone if not dead, a thief was indubitably dead; and there was the doctor, playing the scherzo of his tragic symphony. Who was composing what in purgatory?

As he dropped off to sleep Wednesday night, Ellery was thinking that he might as well give up and go home.

But that was Wednesday night.

On Thursday Dr. Dodd’s composition came to its end with a crash, double forte.

Ellery was at breakfast with Winship when Rima came hurrying down, yawning guiltily. “I am sorry, Kenny. Good morning, Ellery! Oversleeping, I mean—”

Ken kissed her. “You and Doc. I’d have waited for breakfast, but I’m due at the hospital. Dr. Flacker has a tracheotomy scheduled and he’s a little touchy about it—”

“Did you say,” said Ellery, “‘you and Doc’?”

“What?”

“Dr. Dodd? Oversleeping?”

“Yes. He hasn’t been down yet.”

“He has been. I looked into his room on my way down and he’d been up and gone.”

“But Mrs. Fowler said—” And Ken stopped.

There was a little interlude.

“Don’t be silly,” said Rima gaily. “It was probably a night call, an emergency or something. He has an extension by his bed and now I remember I thought I heard a phone ringing during the night. Will you two,” cried Rima crossly, “stop looking that way?”

“Are you sure, Rima, you heard his phone ring during the night?”

“Of course I’m not sure. I may have dreamed it. Or he got up early and went out for a walk before breakfast. He’s done that twice since I’ve been living here. I don’t know why everyone has to be so … There he is now! Ringing the front door bell. Forgot his key. Essie? Is that Dr. Dodd?”

“It’s a policeman,” came Essie’s nasal voice. “Wouldn’t you be Mis’ Gotch’s boy Dodie? That was in the navy? Sakes, how you’ve shot up.”

They were in the hall, not conscious of having run. Mrs. Fowler’s head was caught in the swinging door to the kitchen. Harry Toyfell, with egg on his chin, pushed it wider.

“Mr. Queen? Dr. Winship?” He was a young officer, tall and serious; the new crop. Ellery did not know him. “Chief Dakin’s sent me to get you.”

Ken said, “Something’s happened to Doc.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mrs. Gotch’s boy Dodie respectfully. “We found his jalopy over on Route 478 in a culvert. Just past the railroad tracks. He’d crashed through the concrete wall on the curve of the overpass there. Car’s a junk heap.”

“But Dr. Dodd,” said Ken. “Dr. Dodd!”

The young officer said with an awkward tact, “I guess, Doc, he’s pretty dead.”

Dr. Dodd was very dead. At the impact with the concrete wall he had been hurled headfirst through his windshield into the culvert and the car had followed, landing on top of him. They had been an hour extricating the body. One of the policemen, as new on the force as Mrs. Gotch’s Dodie, had had to be sent home.

Coroner Grupp was there, and Prosecutor Chalanski, and Malvina Prentiss and Francis O’Bannon and a photographer from the Record. And for a short time the chubby startled face of Attorney Otis Holderfield appeared, but after talking to Dakin and Chalanski he disappeared. There were two ambulances, one from Wrightsville General and the other from the County Hospital beyond Slocum. Cars were lined up on both sides of the overpass; the edge of the culvert was jammed with people. In a nearby field a farmer was screaming at some boys who were racing through his radish and lettuce plants. The sun was warm and everything was clear and beautiful.

“No, Doc,” Dakin was saying to Ken at the bottom of the culvert, “I’m not goin’ to let you see him. Now, I’m not.”

“I’m a doctor!” shouted Ken. “Get out of my way!”

“No, sir, I don’t think it would be a good idea,” said Dakin. Rima took Ken by the arm and led him off to a rock, where they sat down, Rima holding his hand.

Dakin nodded to Ellery.

So Ellery saw Dr. Dodd; or rather he saw enough of Dr. Dodd to tell that it was Dr. Dodd, but such a Dr. Dodd as even he was barely able to stomach. But he steeled himself and asked them to turn the body over. He looked down at what had been the back of Dr. Dodd’s head and turned away to stumble over to where the coroner and the prosecutor were talking to Malvina Prentiss. Francis O’Bannon stood at her elbow holding his notebook at the ready.

“The back of his head, Dr. Grupp—” began Ellery, swallowing.

“I know all about the back of his head,” said Grupp in a querulous voice. “How would the back of your head look if you were tossed through a windshield, bounced twenty-five feet off sharp rocks, and then had a car fall on top of you?”

“Mr. Queen, are you on Miss Prentiss’s payroll?” asked Prosecutor Chalanski with a slight smile. “She’s interested in the back of his head, too.”

“Why aren’t you, Chalanski?” demanded Malvina Prentiss. The sun on her silver harlequin glasses as she tossed her head made Chalanski shift to the other foot. “Seems to me you people are in an awful hurry to write this off as a common highway accident.”

“Now what do you mean by that?” asked the prosecutor without the smile.

“Coroner, didn’t you say it looks to you as if he’s been dead since about five?”

“A snap opinion. Completely unofficial.”

“What was Dodd doing on the road at 5 A.M.?”

“He was a doctor,” said a dry voice, “and he never refused a sick call in his life.” It was Chief Dakin. “And he had his medical bag with him, Miss Prentiss.”

“Well, who called him? Have you located this hypothetical patient? That oughtn’t to be too hard, even for a Wrightsville policeman.”

Dakin’s colorless eyes flickered. But he said mildly, “You might give us a chance, Miss Prentiss. This only just happened.”

“And even if you do locate somebody, suppose Dodd was followed? Suppose he was cut off near the overpass and stopped? Suppose he was cracked on the head? Suppose his car was sent tearing at that wall up there with an unconscious man at the wheel?”

“Then I’d say somebody committed the perfect murder,” replied Chalanski, smiling again. “Miss Prentiss, you have to have some fact to start supposing things with. If somebody stopped his car, there’s no sign of it on the road up there. If somebody cracked Dodd on the head—which is possible and wouldn’t be detectable now, Coroner Grupp has admitted—we haven’t found the weapon it was done with, or it’s part of that pile of bloody junk there and won’t ever be identified. If Dodd’s car was sent crashing at high speed against the retaining wall we can’t tell it, because the tire marks visible up there are just such marks as the car would have made if Dodd ran off the road in an ordinary accident. In other words, Miss Prentiss, the facts we have to this point indicate an accident, like thousands of similar accidents messing up our roads every year. When we turn up something that points in the opposite direction you’ve got my word, Miss Prentiss, you’ll be the first to be notified.”

“Oh, come on, Chalanski,” said Coroner Grupp; and the prosecutor followed him abruptly. Chief Dakin followed both.

The lack of a fact, thought Ellery. Again. How true. Bringing up, again, two possibilities. Either-or. Accident or murder. Natural or contrived. Obverse or reverse.

Rich man dead, poor man dead, beggar-man dead, thief dead, and now doctor dead.

“What?” said Ellery. “I beg your pardon, Miss Prentiss, I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.”

“I said,” said the publisher, eying him frigidly, “what are you waiting for, Mr. Queen, a sign from heaven? They’re waiting for Charlie Duncan’s dead-wagon to cart off the pieces, but you’re not an undertaker. Or are you?”

“I’m afraid—”

Francis O’Bannon said placatively, “It’s all these deaths, Mr. Queen. MacCaby, Hart, Anderson, Jacquard, now Dodd. We’re bothered, too—”

“Though in a different way, Spec, a different way,” said his employer briskly. “The point is the great sleuth has been in our fair township for how long is it now?—and the longer you stay, Mr. Queen, the more people die. When do you make more history with some big deductions? When do you start sleuthing?”

Suppose I said to her right now, thought Ellery, with the wreckage of Dodd and his car not cold: Would you like to know, Miss Prentiss, who’s going to be next? Because I can tell you, Miss Prentiss. And you’d laugh, and I’d have to laugh with you. Because we’d know and we wouldn’t know. We’d see and we’d be blind. We’d act and we’d be running around in a circle.

“Tell me,” she was saying—“since you don’t seem to want to answer those fundamental questions—tell me, Mr. Queen. Do you think it was an accident?”

“I don’t know,” said Ellery.

The woman smiled. It was a radioactive smile, and Ellery thought: O you would-be Rosalind Russells of this world. He watched her as she turned to O’Bannon, everything about her flashing. “Use the murder tag with question marks, Spec. Connect Dodd with the others by association. MacCaby, Hart, Anderson, Jacquard, Dodd. What’s behind it? Who’s out to depopulate Wrightsville? Why? And who’s next? That’s our lead, Spec: Who’s Next? Pratt!” she shouted at her photographer. “Did you shoot Queen? Well, why not?—come down here! ‘Famous Sleuth at Scene of Crime Question Mark?’” Malvina Prentiss smiled atomically at Ellery. “We’ll drag you into this yet, Ellery.”

Francis O’Bannon, his redhead’s face earnest and preoccupied, wrote and wrote.

Monday, May 1

“It was fear of the ultimate,” said Ellery.

“Fear of what?” said Kenneth Winship.

“Fear of death.”

They were sitting about in the Dodd living room waiting for Otis Holderfield. Until now they had avoided talking about the past four days—the police, the autopsy report, the inquest, the funeral, Mrs. Fowler’s lamentations, Essie’s hysterics, the dry and tasteless titbits of Harry Toyfell’s philosophy, the prying telephone, the visits of the curious, the demands of the Record.… the house fuller of Sebastian Dodd now that he was gone than when he had clumped through its halls. But Attorney Holderfield, looking put upon, raised a petulant voice Sunday afternoon after the funeral, announcing that he would be over the next morning with the deceased’s will, which, Holderfield snapped, Dr. Dodd had drawn up only a few days before the accident; and this had brought a certain resurgence of interest in all quarters. Prosecutor Chalanski had indicated that he would be present; Chief Dakin had remarked that he’d likely be along, too. And Malvina Prentiss promised grimly that the press would not evade its responsibility to report the proceedings. In fact, her Monday edition—an advance copy of which lay on the living room floor, hurled there by Dr. Winship—cried the probability that with the reading of Sebastian Dodd’s will “the motive of his murderer” would be revealed. (Friday’s Record had merely raised the question of murder; by Monday—to the Record, at least—the question had been answered and was beyond dispute. Which was exasperating to Coroner Grupp and Prosecutor Chalanski, since nothing had come out in the interim to add a crumb’s weight to the evidence; in fact, Wesley Hardin, 54, truck farmer, whose farm was located on Route 478 roughly halfway between Wrightsville and Slocum, came forward with the statement that it was he who had telephoned Dr. Dodd a little after 4 A.M. Thursday to come right away as Calvin, 9, was delirious and he was afraid the boy’d caught the diphtheria; when Dr. Dodd failed to arrive, Mr. Hardin had phoned the hospital and they sent an ambulance and Calvin was placed in the isolation ward—diphtheria sure enough. So that had been that and the coroner’s jury had brought in a prompt verdict of “accidental death,” to which the Record paid no attention whatever.)

“Fear of death,” repeated Ellery as they sat waiting for Holderfield, Dakin, Chalanski, and the Record. “It had become a phobia. Unless you understand that … Didn’t you know, Ken, that Dr. Dodd was obsessive on the specific subject of death?”

“No! A doctor—who sees it all the time—”

“Fears it all the more if there’s something wrong with him to begin with. Dodd was so terrified of death that he took steps regularly to thwart it.”

“To do what?” asked Rima bewilderedly.

“Well, the practice of divination is largely devoted to foretelling the future; and no diviner tries to foretell the future who doesn’t have the frantic hope that somehow he can forestall it.”

“Divination?”

“Only the practice of divination,” nodded Ellery, “explains the variety of things Dodd kept in that locked room I showed you this morning. A pile of pebbles, books, finger rings, flatiron and burner, salt, dice, playing cards, and so on. Divination is practiced in many forms and each form is respectable with tradition, to the point of having scientific names like ‘pessomancy,’ for example, divination through the use of pebbles. Books, finger rings, redhot iron, salt, dice—and playing cards, of course—each has its prescribed divining uses and ritual, and each is represented in Dodd’s locked room. I haven’t seen anything like it in a long time.”

“But Dr. Dodd?” said Rima faintly.

“You doubt it. Well, take the arrows, seven of them. Our Christian world has no monopoly on the practice of divination; the Mohammedans, for instance, are old hands at it and one of their favorite forms employs arrows to the number seven. There are seven ‘divining arrows’ in the great mosque at Mecca. Some authorities claim the Arabs actually employed only three. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that with that bundle of arrows upstairs, on top of all the other objects—every one of which is used in some form of divination—you simply have to conclude that Dr. Dodd for a long time had been trying to find out what the future held for him, using numerous prescribed methods, including the Mohammedan. And since the most important question about anyone’s future is when and how he is going to die, it’s obvious that the subject of his phobia was death. I myself saw him knocked galley-west by a couple of aces of spades. A dog howled and he was up all night. A bird got into his study and he had hysterics. All death omens … if you believe that sort of thing. He believed. And when he was convinced death was coming, he stopped fighting. You saw how he acted the last couple of days.”

There seemed nothing to say, and no one said anything further until Essie Pingarn whined from the doorway, “They’re here.”

Otis Holderfield marched in followed by Chalanski, Dakin, O’Bannon of the Record, and a man who looked like an aged and prosperous Sherlock Holmes and was introduced as Dr. Farnham Farnham, internist and member of the Board of Directors of Wrightsville General Hospital. A moment later Mrs. Fowler and Toyfell appeared, remaining in the doorway beside Essie.

Attorney Holderfield made no attempt to dissemble his feelings. He slammed his antelope gloves and fawn Homburg on the fireplace mantel and opened his alligator briefcase with a yank of zipper disapproval that included not only his late client but all said client’s earthly connections.

“It’s nothing to me, you understand,” Holderfield began, resuming a conversation he had apparently been having with himself. “Less than nothing. I’m just the instrument of my client’s will, haha! Man has a right to dispose of his worldly goods as he sees fit, doesn’t he? Ours not to reason why, hmm? Unless someone wants to raise the question of non compos mentis, which I doubt, seeing that my late client died unwed and without issue and leaving no blood relations that he knew of. Not that it would make any difference. My client certainly knew what he wanted to do with his estate, once he got going. He’d never had a will before last week—kept putting it off.”

“People who are afraid to die,” said Ellery, “generally do.”

“Read it, Holderfield, read it,” said the prosecutor indulgently. “Wills usually speak for themselves.”

“Yes,” said O’Bannon with a surprising incisiveness. “The Record’s very interested in this will.” Then he glanced at Ellery in a startled way. “Did you say Dodd was afraid to die?”

“Who isn’t?” said Chief Dakin. “Come on, Holderfield.”

Otis Holderfield had taken an elegantly bound legal paper out of his briefcase and was gazing down at it with a scrubbed and shaven bitterness. Now, with almost a smile, he flipped back the blue cover.

“I, Sebastian Dodd, now residing in Wrightsville, do hereby make, publish, and declare this to be my will …”

The little lawyer attacked Dodd’s will as if it were an enemy to be dispatched as quickly and venomously as possible. Testator directed that the Wrightsville Dye Works, which constituted the bulk of his estate, was to be liquidated. Out of the general estate legal fees, taxes, and all claims against the estate were to be paid. The mortgage on his house at Algonquin Avenue and Wright Street, which was large, was to be paid off. The house with its office equipment, furniture, furnishings, personal property and effects, et cetera, was to be placed at the disposal of “my associate, Dr. Kenneth Winship, for his residence and use should he so elect, rent free, for a period up to five years from the date of my decease, provided however that said Dr. Winship maintains the property in reasonable condition, pays taxes, et cetera, during his occupancy; thereafter, or at any time within said five years when said Dr. Winship may at his election vacate the premises, the house, its furnishings, et cetera, shall be sold and the proceeds added to my general estate.”

The sum of one thousand dollars in cash was bequeathed to “my housekeeper, Mrs. Regina Fowler.” (Mrs. Regina Fowler started, then fumbled for her apron.)

The sum of five hundred dollars in cash was bequeathed to “Essie Pingarn, housemaid.” (Essie Pingarn looked incredulous, then joyful, then she burst into tears.)

The principal remainder of the estate was to be placed into a Fund. Said Fund was to be known as “The MacCaby-Dodd Wrightsville Municipal Health Center and Receiving Hospital Fund” and was to be administered by the Board of Directors of the Wrightsville General Hospital as Trustee, who were also to act as Executor of the estate, to rebuild said hospital “from the ground up and in its entirety, if necessary, in order to give Wrightsville the modern hospital facilities its size and needs warrant. The rebuilt hospital is to include’ a modern Children’s Wing along the lines indicated in my memorandum to the Board of February 19 of this year.” (Dr. Farnham Farnham permitted himself a gratified smile.)

There was a little more legal language, and then Attorney Holderfield slammed the cover over the document and said malevolently, “That’s that.”

“Any comment, Dakin?” asked Prosecutor Chalanski after a silence.

“No comment.” Chief Dakin rose. It was impossible to tell whether he was disappointed or relieved. Ellery, eying him closely, had to decide on a psychic basis that Dakin was relieved.

“And you, Mr. O’Bannon?” asked the prosecutor, turning a rather amused eye on Malvina Prentiss’s shadow.

“What I think personally, Mr. Chalanski,” replied O’Bannon, “hardly matters. And what the Record thinks it will undoubtedly print.” And with a dyspeptic Harvard smile O’Bannon went away, tucking his notebook soberly into his pocket as he did so.

“I’ll go over everything with your Board, Dr. Farnham,” said Otis Holderfield coldly, “at your convenience. I’ll be at my office for the rest of the day, if your attorneys are interested. I don’t believe, gentlemen, there’s anything else—”

“—except his bill for services rendered,” said Chalanski dryly, when Holderfield had gone, “which I’d examine under the microscope, Dr. Farnham. Well, good people, I think I may say the county authorities are satisfied. Glad it worked out this way. Hey, Mr. Queen? Nice, clean disposition. Miss Anderson, Dr. Winship … Coming, Dakin, Dr. Farnham?”

“You know, Winship,” said Dr. Farnham, speaking for the first time as he shook hands, “with Dodd’s death there’s a vacancy on the Board. In the light of this magnificent gift of Sebastian Dodd’s, I think it’s no more than right that you should take his place on the Board, and I’ll certainly recommend it to—”

But Ken, smiling, was shaking his head. “Thanks, Doctor, but I’m afraid I’d have to decline. I’m going to be pretty busy making a living. See me five years from now.”

Everybody laughed, but when the others were gone a silence settled rather heavily. It was stirred up after a while by Ellery.

“You can understand Holderfield’s pique. To have the whole suety pudding kicked out of his hungry little fingers like this must be maddening. All those wonderful plums he expected—for negotiating the sale of the dye works, the nourishing fees he’d have commanded as Trustee and Executor of the estate—snatched. Poor old Otis. I wonder when the Waldo brothers will start dunning him to pay those tailoring bills he’s been running up.”

“And O’Bannon,” grinned Ken. “Did you see his face? The Record can hardly accuse the Wrightsville General of having murdered Doc. Or Mrs. Fowler for the thousand dollars he left her or Essie for her five hundred.”

“Or Harry Toyfell,” murmured Ellery, “for his nothing.”

“Or me for mine! Well, baby, what do we do about our handsome legacy? Do we accept Doc’s offer?”

“It’s entirely up to you, darling,” said Rima seriously. “With Dr. Dodd gone I imagine many of his patients will go elsewhere, so it might come in handy to have no rent to pay. Ken …”

“What?”

“I’m glad he didn’t leave you anything.”

“Huh?” Ken and Ellery exchanged glances. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing. I’m just … glad.”

Ken laughed and enfolded her in his big arms. “You’re about as subtle as a Record editorial. Darling, you’re engaged to a guy who’ll never have a dime. All I’ve ever wanted out of life is a little security, you, and enough surplus to buy some good recordings every once in a while. The rest is love and medicine—money doesn’t come into it. And talking about love, you won’t mind living here?”

“With you? I’d live in a tree. Oh, I wish we could!”

There was some kissing. Then Ken said, “Then let’s get married.”

“When?”

“Now. Tomorrow.”

“But Ken—!”

“Hold it,” said Ellery. “I have to see a street about some ozone.”

“Ellery, no!” Rima was laughing. “Ken proposed long ago; this is just arrangements. You’ve got to be here to protect my interests.”

“You can bloody well protect your own interests. I’m sick of being your Uncle Patsy.”

“Oh, be quiet and listen. Ken, it’s so soon.”

“All right, move out of here,” growled her swain. “Tongues are going to clack if you don’t, Mrs. Fowler and Essie notwithstanding. Not that I give a curse, you understand, but Wrightsville can make it awfully tepid for anyone they drop into their kettle. Rima, Doc’s forced our hand. We’ve got to get married.”

“Ken’s right,” said Ellery. “You two couldn’t go on living here together with Dodd gone, and to go off and live alone in a rooming house or that marsh-surrounded shanty—which I haven’t seen yet, by the way!—would be inane. If you’ve actually made up your mind to marry young Dr. Kildare, Rima, you may as well shut your eyes and jump now as later.”

So it was decided that they would get a license from Town Clerk Caiaphas Truslow at Town Hall in the morning and then run over to Justice of the Peace Burleigh Pendleton’s place near the Junction on Route 16. “Of course,” said Ken, “’Aphas will spread the good word, but we’ll be spliced before he can do much damage and a phone call to the Record right afterward ought to calm everybody.” Ken glowered. “I wish we could take a couple of weeks off for a honeymoon.”

“Dearest, I don’t care—”

“I’ve got not only my patients on my hands, but Doc’s. With the diphtheria epidemic still jamming everybody up there’s no one I could turn them over to.”

“Ken, I adore your being the reincarnation of Hippocrates. Really I do.”

“Maybe you’d better forget the whole thing. Doc always said a doctor had no business getting married. And what can I offer you, after all? Certainly not what I’d hoped to be able to.”

“Darling, I don’t want a honeymoon.”

“Well, I do! A man getting married is entitled to a honeymoon!”

It went on that way for some time, somewhere in between Ellery finding himself invited to be Ken’s best man and the Winships’ house guest afterward.

“Are you mad?” Ellery howled. “Camp with a couple of newly-weds? What do you think I’m made of, salt water taffy? Winship, I’ll have you understand I’ve cracked a ventricle or two over this wench, too.”

“Then you’re giving up,” said Rima before Ken could say anything.

“Giving up? What?”

“What brought you here. Not that I blame you, poor dear—”

“No such thing,” said Ellery testily. “It’s simply—”

“Then you’ll have to stay,” retorted Rima with supreme logic. “And since you’re staying, you can’t move to a hotel now or the Record will dream up all sorts of nasty things to print.”

“Ellery, the house is huge. Rima and I’ll have acres of privacy. That’s settled.” Ken got up, looking for his pipe. “The only thing is, where do we go from here?”

“There’s that.” Rima found it for him. “Ellery, what is the next step?”

“Well … now that Dodd’s gone,” said Ellery gloomily, “I’m pretty much locked on my course.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know the two sets of possibilities I’ve had to keep juggling, Rima. They’re reduced to one. It simplifies matters wonderfully.” But he failed to look starry-eyed.

“Two sets of possibilities?” demanded Ken. “How? About what?”

“Oh, dear, it’s kind of intricate, darling.” Rima was looking anxiously at Ellery. When he nodded, she brightened. “Ellery said there were two viewpoints you had to look at the case from. Looked at one way, Dr. Dodd was what everybody thought he was. Looked at the other way, he was …” She stopped, seeing something in her lover’s eye.

“He was what?”

“Criminally involved,” finished Ellery.

“You suspected Doc of … of what, for pete’s sake!”

“Of murdering MacCaby. Of driving Hart to suicide. Of being blackmailed by Tom Anderson and pushing him over Little Prudy’s Cliff to loosen Anderson’s hold.”

“Of all the dribbling … pus!”

“Now, yes. But before Dodd died—no.”

“How the devil does his death change anything?”

“Alive, Dodd was possibly a murderer. Dead, he’s possibly a victim, certainly an innocent man. Innocent, he told the truth. Then, as Dr. Dodd said, Luke MacCaby died of coronary whatever-it-was; Dodd did not deliberately drive John Spencer Hart to suicide; and when he gave Anderson the five thousand dollars, it wasn’t because Anderson was blackmailing him but simply out of the goodness of his heart. With Anderson not a blackmailer, the letter he left with Holderfield in the envelope containing the five thousand dollars probably instructed Jacquard to hold the money for Rima—nothing else. And when Jacquard, after appropriating the money, Rima, broke in here it wasn’t to find ‘blackmail evidence’ but merely to burglarize the house.

“With Dodd innocent, we’re on a straight track, with no alternate route. We’re back where we started from: in a series of deaths following the precise pattern of a child’s game. Rich man MacCaby, poor man Hart, beggar-man Anderson, thief Jacquard, Doctor Dodd.”

“But why?”

“That,” mourned Ellery, “remains the question.”

Ken shook his head, his pipe waggling. “It’s no question at all, Ellery. I think you’re shadowboxing. An old man with chronic heart trouble dies of it, a businessman caught embezzling blows his brains out, a penniless man who suddenly came into possession of five thousand dollars is killed in what was probably an attempted robbery by somebody who didn’t know he’d deposited the money for safekeeping with a lawyer, a petty thief breaks into a house and when he’s caught tries to grab a gun and gets shot in the scuffle, an overworked and highly neurotic doctor on a night call runs off the road. Every damned one has a natural explanation. Why try to string them together because they happen to fit a hunk of nursery nonsense?”

“That’s why,” said Ellery. “Because they do. Oh, it’s silly. But how do you explain it?” When they did not answer, he said, “I have an inbred mind. Eats itself up alive. This is the sort of problem that drives me crazy. I couldn’t let go of it if I wanted to. Especially,” he said suddenly, “since it isn’t over.”

“What isn’t over?”

“The deaths.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Wait a minute, Ken,” said Rima.

“Dodd blinded me. There was someone else wound up with MacCaby, Hart, Anderson, and Jacquard. And with Dodd, for that matter.”

“Who’s that?” demanded Ken.

“Otis Holderfield. It’s Holderfield who drew the MacCaby will. When Dodd retained Holderfield to look after his interests, it was Holderfield who suggested and composed the letter to Hart for Dodd’s signature which was the direct cause of Hart’s killing himself. It was Holderfield who turned Dodd’s five thousand dollars over to Tom Anderson. It was Holderfield who at Anderson’s request regained possession of the money, allegedly in trust. It was Holderfield who turned Anderson’s sealed envelope over to Nick Jacquard. And it was Holderfield who, as Dodd’s attorney, drew up the Dodd will.”

“You mean that shiny little squirt,” said Ken, “is behind everything that’s happened?”

“No, because—don’t hit me, Ken—there’s reason to believe Holderfield is going to be the next victim.”

“Here we go again!”

But Ellery kept chanting through his teeth, “Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief; doctor, lawyer …” He spread his hands. “A lawyer is next in the series, and Holderfield is the only lawyer up to his neck in everything that’s happened so far.”

They were silent until a voice said from the doorway, “’Scuse me.”

It was Harry Toyfell.

“I’d like to talk to ye, Dr. Winship.”

“What about, Harry?”

“It’s Doc Dodd give me this job, Dr. Winship. Maybe this ain’t the time. But I’d like to know where I stand.”

“Oh.” Ken looked embarrassed. “Matter of fact, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I’m going to have to take over the running of the house, the expense is considerable … Maybe, Harry, it would be better if you looked around for another job. Right away.”

Harry Toyfell did not seem surprised. It was as if he never expected anything but the worst and could be surprised only by something short of it.

He shuffled out of sight beyond the doorway.

“Mr. Toyfell, wait!” Rima said in a low voice, “Darling, I know it’s practical to start by cutting expenses, and I’ve never cared for him … much myself, but couldn’t we keep him on a little while? He has had such a hard time …”

“Hell, it isn’t the expense,” said Ken, redfaced. “He’s a damned Jonah!”

“So you’ve noticed it, too,” murmured Ellery.

“I’m not blind! Toyfell worked for MacCaby and MacCaby died. He went to work for Hart and Hart committed suicide. He had two friends, Tom Anderson and Nick Jacquard—and where are they? And he no sooner goes to work for Doc Dodd than Doc dies. Damn it all, baby, we’re starting a new life. Call me superstitious—”

“No, darling. I hadn’t thought of it that way … Ken, do you mind if I do something for him?”

“Cripes, I’ll do something for him. I just don’t want him around here. Toyfell!”

The gardener shuffled back into view.

“Harry, this is kind of sudden, I know. Suppose I pay your salary till you find another job.”

“And you can stay at my shack in The Marshes, Mr. Toyfell,” added Rima, “till you do. There’s some canned food there, and I planted some vegetables that …”

But Toyfell was shaking his long head, his crocodile jaws parted in the imitation of a smile. “Tom brought ye up right, Rima. Mighty Christian. But it’s better to give than to take. The giver gains and the taker loseth. That’s wisdom ye won’t find in the medical books. I’ll be out of here tonight.”

He went away without once having glanced at Ken, the only sign that his philosopher’s skin had been scratched.

It was a remarkably different Otis Holderfield who received Ellery in his office that afternoon. Holderfield was in high spirits. One of the Waldo brothers—Ellery could not determine which—was hurrying away with a handful of swatches; the nubile secretary was still very much in evidence; and the little lawyer himself had his British-last shoes higher than his head in an attitude of nabob comfort.

“Sit down, Mr. Queen! Tickled to see you. Hope you didn’t think I made a darn jackass of myself this morning. Attorney ought never to let his emotions get the better of him; it’s absolute death, haha! When I got back and thought it over, things didn’t look so bad. No, sir. Of course, it’s a blow losing an estate like Dodd’s; but we’ll make out, we’ll make out. What’s on your mind?”

“You.”

“Me?” Holderfield was startled. “How do you mean?”

“Holderfield, do you carry any life insurance?”

The lawyer took the cigar from his teeth. “What’s the joke?”

“Suppose I tell you I have reason to believe you’re going to die.”

Holderfield stared. Then his swivel chair squealed as he sat up. “So are you.”

“But not before my time, I hope.”

“You mean I will before mine?” smiled the little man.

“Any day now.”

“What is this,” he asked genially, “the introductory remarks to a shakedown? Who—I mean whom—do I pay, and for what?”

“I don’t blame you,” said Ellery morosely. “And yet I couldn’t have slept tonight if I hadn’t warned you. There are times, Mr. Holderfield,” he said, looking out the window at Washington Street, “times of peculiar crisis, when almost everything goes wrong, nothing makes sense, all that’s left is a common language. And I don’t suppose you have the faintest notion what I’m babbling about.”

“That’s right,” grinned the lawyer. But his eyes were watchful.

“So I’ll have to tell you my favorite fairy tale these days. Once upon a time there was a miserly old man named MacCaby,” began Ellery; and he proceeded to relate the story of the five men whose deaths followed the specifications of a jingle. “Doctor, lawyer …”

Ellery turned from the window. Otis Holderfield’s head was thrown back, his hands held his jiggling sides, and he was laughing so hard his eyes ran over.

“You find it funny, Holderfield?”

“Funniest thing I ever heard!”

It’s not this funny, thought Ellery. And suddenly it came to him that Holderfield knew something, something he had never revealed, and that it was this knowledge which made him laugh now. Not because he was amused, but because he was not. He’s covering up, thought Ellery. I’ve hit him somewhere. If I only knew where!

“Course, you’re only pulling my leg,” gasped the lawyer as he wiped his eyes.

“No.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

“For heaven’s sake. See here, Mr. Queen, I’m a man with no imagination at all.” Holderfield waved his cigar. “Don’t misunderstand me. I take it kindly of you to warn me. But—haha!—I can see myself asking Chief Dakin for protection because—”

“I doubt that he could give it to you,” said Ellery, picking up his hat.

“Wait just a minute, Mr. Queen!” His telephone was ringing. “Who, Floss?… Huh? All right, put him on. Hello?… Yes … Oh … Well, maybe I could at that. Matter of fact, I could … No, no, entirely selfish on my part. Wait till you see the condition it’s in, haha! What?… Now wait a minute. I’m not one of your Wrightsville millionaires. Let’s say eighty-five a month and maintenance. Best I can do … You know where it is?… Okay, see you tonight.” Holderfield hung up. “And you hanging crape, Mr. Queen. Why, this is my lucky day. Here, I’ll see you out.”

“Lucky day?” said Ellery.

“I’ve got a little place over on Upper Curling. Pretty much gone to seed. I’ve been thinking about a gardener and handyman, and by crickmajiggy, as old Ivor Crosby used to say, I’ve just hired me the best damn one in the county. Much obliged, Mr. Queen, I’ll remember you in my will, haha!”

Harry Toyfell had found a new employer.

Waiting for Buzz Congress and the elevator, Ellery felt icy mice scamper along his spine. It was ridiculous, but there they were.

Tuesday, May 2

Rima and Ken were married after Ken’s office hours Tuesday afternoon in Burleigh Pendleton’s parlor, with Ellery and a beaming Mis’ Pendleton to witness.

“It’s an omen,” chortled Ken as they walked back to his car. The homegoing Junction traffic was zipping joyously by. “Burleigh never has Mis’ Pendleton to witness except when she’s sober. Did you hear that extra zing in his delivery? We’ve got a mighty good start, Mrs. Winship.”

“Bless them. Bless everybody.” Rima was hanging on to her husband’s arm as if she were afraid he might vanish.

“Get in, Ellery.”

“Not this time,” said Mr. Queen hollowly. “There’s a limit to every man’s endurance, and this marks mine. You two go on about your business and let me get quietly potted. I’ll notify the Record, so don’t bother to stop in town.”

“Oh, Ellery …”

“Oh Ellery nothing. I don’t even want to know where you’re going.”

“Up to Durkee’s Falls.”

“Just for overnight, but we thought you’d at least have our wedding supper with us.”

“There is a dreadful noise of waters in mine ears, as the poet says, and they hear not. God speed and bless your union and may neither of you ever scab. Now get the hell out of here before I break down and blub.”

“We’ll be back first thing in the morning!” shouted Ken as they drove off.

Ellery stood at the justice of the peace’s gate until the exhaust of Hymen’s chariot mingled with the haze of the hills.

He began to trudge up Route 16 with his hands in his pockets, wondering what it must feel like to be happy. Rima was happy, so happy she was numb. Ken was happy, with a masculine exuberance he had tried decently to control. Mis’ Pendleton had been happy, perhaps in anticipation of the bottle she was reputed to keep stashed in her chicken coop. About dour Burleigh Pendleton Ellery was not sure; he was a Yankee of Scotch blood; but at least he dispensed happiness. Life went on in and about Wrightsville, working, drinking, quarreling, copulating; people died and people married, everybody exercised some function.

And here he was, about as useful as an extra appendix.

Ellery found himself before Gus Olesen’s Roadside Tavern. It was only a hundred yards or so up the road from Burleigh Pendleton’s, a juxtaposition both merchants had found profitable.

He went in.

Gus’s was crowded with people decently having a beer or a shot or two before going home from the mill or the office. Everybody seemed to be enjoying himself except one man alone in a booth, who was plainly suffering. Ellery walked over and said, “I’m a desperate man and there’s nowhere else to park. May I share this, or do I fight you for it?”

The man said belligerently, “Sit and be damned to you,” and when he looked up Ellery saw under the fedora—which looked as if an elephant had trampled on it—the once-precise red hair and countenance of Francis O’Bannon. “Haven’t we met? Don’t answer. I’m really not interested.”

“Why, O’Bannon.” Ellery sat down, pleased. O’Bannon crocked seemed another man. His pink plastic glasses hung from one ear and a splash of what was probably whisky debauched his chaste tie; but it was more than that. The glare in his eye reflected a fire from which the damper had been lifted. He gave out a fierce exhalation of manhood. “What’s happened? You and Malvina have a bit of a thing, old boy?”

“Look, sucker—”

“The name is Queen.”

“Queen, look. Have a drink.”

Ellery filled one of the numerous vessels strewn about the table from the incumbent bottle. “Cheers.”

“Just drink it. What did you say the name was?”

“Queen. How about you and Malvina—”

“Queen, when you bandy the name of that bitch about a bistro you insult an honorable profession. That silverplated houri. That svelterumped Hitler. The brass of a gold brick, the conscience of a bookie, the soul of a press agent, and the ambition of a body louse. And no more heart than a frozen fryer. She flicks her tail in your face and dares you to think of anything lower than last week’s paid advertising. There is a broad, Mr. Quinn, who defies analysis. She buys a ninety-five-thousand-dollar house on Skytop Road, fills it with fifty grand worth of decorators’ daydreams, and she sleeps in a whitewashed cubbyhole with nothing in it but a hospital bed and a straightbacked chair. She has a ten-thousand-dollar collection of classical recordings and a twenty-five-hundred-dollar machine and all she plays on it are Bozo, Babar, Christopher Robin, and Frank Luther singing Mother Goose. And she hates kids. Contradictory, see?”

“Maybe she once lost a child. Has she ever been married?”

“Thrice. Number one was a millionaire pork packer, around seventy, number two was a ballet dancer, number three was a society fungus who wore corsets and paraded around the ancestral keep in a Japanese kimono and a riding crop. Maybe you’ve got something there. But me, I’m a primitive soul. One of these days I’m going to beat her brains in with an eight-column head of pi.”

“Tell her off. It’s not so messy.”

“Mr. Green,” said O’Bannon morosely, “every man goes nuts in his own way.”

“Why not quit if it’s so unbearable?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I try to render service where it’s in obvious demand. O’Bannon, if you ever saw Harvard Square it was only to get a story on the mating habits of the Crimson undergraduate for the American Weekly. Why this flowering-of-New-England getup?”

“Yikes, the fellow undoes me. Would you really like to know?”

“We have the evening before us.”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“I’m a specialist in fantasy. Try me.”

“Then get a load of this—Breen, is it? I first spot this Prentiss calamity at one of the last presidential conventions. She irks me—you know what I mean? Right off the bat. Ever see a dame who the first time you saw her you wanted to make like you’re milking a cow with her neck? Gorgeous, knows all the shots, just the slightest curl around the edges, and don’t-touch-me-peasant-I’m-for-your-betters. Hell, for all I know she was there trying to get herself nominated; I wouldn’t put it past her. Anyway, I kind of follow her around like a dog. You can’t deny it, Feeney, she’s got racy lines. But a sort of instinct tells me, ‘O’Bannon, don’t let this hunk of frozen Chanel get her hooks in you.’ So I hang back, see? Well, I get back to New York where I’m wiping up after a city editor at the time and, Sweeney, the first thing I see is a Guild piece about this lady publisher in a jerk New England town who’s bought up an alleged newspaper and is making large motions in the direction of the national screwball prize. And what should her name be but Malvina Prentiss, my convention dream-girl! I make a few reckless inquiries among some unemployed beagles I know and I find out Malvina is hunting for an editorial assistant on this bumpkin bedsheet with bigtime, brass-knuckle newspaper experience. But there’s a catch. I discover a lot of guys are tripping over who would like to bury themselves in the hay for a couple of semesters for personal reasons, and otherwise qualify. And that is that the successful candidate must also be refined, of Pilgrim stock, and—I quote—‘with a sound Harvard background.’ What she wants, apparently, is a sort of journalistic thug type who was baptized in the Charles River and cut his first incisors on the silver service of the Copley-Plaza. Well, my name isn’t O’Bannon by accident. Every Irishman in America has at least one cousin in Boston and mine is also named Francis O’Bannon. Cousin Francis has pale hands, Back Bay manners, a crampy look, and he got an M.A. from Harvard and is now running a suds parlor at Revere Beach. So after spending a couple of weeks with him getting the feel of my Back Bayground again and brushing up on my memories of the Common, the Yard, Copey, and Radcliffe, another week in Cambridge studying the lingo of the natives, their peculiar habits and customs and so forth, buying me these plate glass cheaters for twenty bucks, and finally visiting a Harvard Square funeral parlor at four in the morning to borrow the clothes from an old alumnus who had no further use for them, I entrained sedately for Wrightsville with Cousin Francis’s sheepskin under my arm and a letter of introduction from President Conant, which I forged, and I was in. Quickest thing you ever saw.

“The question is,” said O’Bannon, refilling his glass bitterly, “who took whom and who gets it in the end? Mr. Greeley, sex is the third leg of humanity. It ought to be abolished along with falsies, mint-flavored potato chips, and inherited wealth. Here’s blood in your eye.”

“And in Malvina’s,” said Ellery, “in case you’re interested.”

O’Bannon straightened up as if he had been shot in the back. “Where is she?” he asked cautiously.

“Standing in the doorway having herself a panoramic look.”

“The hell with her.”

“She’s advancing.”

“I’ll tell her off. That’s what I’ll do.”

“Uh-uh,” said Ellery. “She’s spotted me.”

O’Bannon turned toward the wall, shoulders high. “Decoy her, for God’s sake. Get off your fanny.” His fingers fumbled with his tie.

“Too late.”

O’Bannon sprang to his feet. “So! You thought you could get me intoxicated, did you?” he cried scornfully, leveling an indignant forefinger at Ellery. “You scoundrel, I’ll have you know most of this liquor you’ve been urging upon me has been secretly poured on the floor! Oh, hello there, Miss Prentiss. Miss Prentiss—”

“Spec.” The word dropped as softly as snow on a cake of ice. “Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you? You’re drunk.”

“Miss Prentiss, the cur phoned me. He had me meet him in this low saloon on a very plausible excuse that escapes me at the moment. He’s been plying me with bourbon and asking insidious questions, Miss Prentiss, a great many insidious questions. Oh, he’ll deny it—what’s your name, again?—”

“Queen,” said Ellery. “Won’t you join us, Miss Prentiss?”

“Thank you.” She sat down beside Francis O’Bannon, eying him curiously. “Sit down, Spec, you look ridiculous. And fix your hat. I didn’t know you were human.” O’Bannon sat down, muttering. “But why Spec, Queen? Not very sporting of you. Where I come from we throw those back.”

Ellery’s heart bled for O’Bannon. “I think you underestimate O’Bannon, Miss Prentiss. He didn’t give a thing away.”

“What would there be to give? You must be desperate if you’re looking for clues in the Record’s direction.”

“Exactly what I told the fellow, Miss Prentiss!”

“Shut up, Spec.” Malvina laughed. “I’ve been looking you up, Ellery. This is your fourth crack at Wrightsville and your score is perfect. A string of … what do they call them in the sports department, Spec?”

“Skunk eggs,” said O’Bannon.

“Skunk eggs, Ellery. And from the look of things, you’re preparing to set on still another striped pussy.”

“I don’t think,” said Ellery with a secretive smile, “that that’s quite what I’m hatching this time, Miss Prentiss.” Her laughter had recalled Otis Holderfield’s, and it had occurred to him that Holderfield was Wrightsville, which endows the printed word with a magic that transforms hearsay into fact. To read it in the Record might stop Holderfield’s hilarity.

Malvina Prentiss frowned; O’Bannon blinked and looked interested.

“You’ve found out something.”

“The name of the next candidate.”

“Oh, come!”

“You talk like his campaign manager,” said O’Bannon in an angry tone.

“You flatter me,” said Ellery. “However, I’ve begun to detect some of the strings. Number one, MacCaby, was a rich man, for instance. Number two, Hart, turned out to be a poor man. Rich man, poor man. Tom Anderson was known as The Town Beggar. Beggar-man. Nick Jacquard, number four to leave us, was The Town Thief—”

“Rich man, poor man, beggar-man … thief?” mumbled O’Bannon. He started. “Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief; doctor … Dr. Dodd!”

“Lawyer,” said Malvina Prentiss swiftly. “Spec—”

“Oh, no,” groaned O’Bannon. “No, Miss Prentiss.”

“You chanted it yourself. What else could it mean?”

“You can’t print a thing like that!”

“Why not?”

“They’d be howling from the lobster beds of Maine to the perfumed strand of Baja California!”

“Queen isn’t howling.”

“He made it up.”

“Not I,” said Ellery. “You needn’t squirm so, O’Bannon. Think of it in terms of lunacy and it at once becomes reasonable.”

“You’re a fiction writer!”

“I didn’t write this fiction.”

Malvina Prentiss was tapping the table with her silver fingernails. “Are you through, Spec? This is the tieup we’ve been looking for. Whether it makes sense or not. For all I know, it does. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’ll handle it from the editorial end. You run over to Boston first thing in the morning—no, make it tonight; take my Caddy—and track down the source of that rhyme, or game, or whatever it is. Bring back every book you can find that gives anything on it. Are you in condition to drive tonight?”

“Please, Miss Prentiss,” said O’Bannon, offended.

The woman in silver rose. “That was sharp, Queen. Your spotting that. My offer of a column is still open. At your own figure.”

Ellery shook his head. “I’m allergic to millstones, Miss Prentiss. By the way, Rima Anderson and Kenneth Winship were married this afternoon by Justice of the Peace Burleigh Pendleton. They’re on a one-night honeymoon and don’t ask me where.”

Malvina seemed surprised. But all she said was, “Our bird-girl does all right, doesn’t she? Spec, get a move on,” and she strode off.

O’Bannon muttered, “Thanks for not crabbing my act, chum,” pushing himself to his feet. His hand collided with the bottle and he looked around furtively. But then he called, “Coming, coming, Miss Prentiss!” and hurried after her.

Ellery stared at O’Bannon’s bottle.

Dark brown secrets guaranteed.

Besides, what else was there to do?

Ellery reached for the bottle.

Saturday, May 13

O’Bannon disappeared, Rima and Ken came back, Malvina Prentiss went to town on the front page of the Record, O’Bannon returned; and Ellery simmered in the May sunshine like an emptying kettle or sulked in the gloomier parts of the Dodd house trying not to hear the music of the newlyweds. Rima reminded him of a newly mated bird busy with her nest. She shopped, tore down curtains, changed drapes, made diplomatic changes in Mrs. Fowler’s and Essie Pingarn’s routine, received patients, typed case cards, answered the telephone, hauled her books over from the shack, took her driver’s test in Ken’s aging but faithful Packard, announced that she was going to repaper the house herself and spent snatched hours at Whitby’s Paint Store poring over wallpaper books, overhauled her husband’s wardrobe—which she declared a disgrace—and at night dropped into bed tired and ecstatic. And Ken could be heard whistling at all hours, even when the record player Ellery had given them as a wedding present was silent. At other times the house was full of Mozart, Haydn, and Bach—good round geometric beauty which succeeded only in mocking the insoluble mathematics in Ellery’s head. Sometimes the music drove him into the garden with a hoe or the insecticide spray, but this invariably invoked the departed image of Harry Toyfell and from this it was but a frame to the picture of little Otis Holderfield; so gardening was no escape, either.

The Record recited its deadly rhyme and O’Bannon was avenged. Everybody howled. From the refuse heaps of Low Village to the cathedral aisle of the Hill Rich man, poor man raised its treble voice in glee. It became a proud Wrightsville property and strong businessmen took it into their councils whenever the moment called for hilarity. Floyd Lycoming set it to music and His Hollis Hummadours gave its première at the annual May dance of Wrightsville High. The next day the whole town was singing it, and it was the feature of Lycoming’s broadcast over KWRI the following week.

The Record’s editorial retorted—against O’Bannon’s advice—that fiddling was an old custom but Rome burned just the same. The ineffable Malvina, it seemed, had a tarnish spot on her polished armor: she could let pique make her tilt at windmills. The laughter only infuriated her and Who Is the Lawyer? remained her stubborn head. Even the halls of the County Court House and the County Lawyers’ Block rang, and Judge Lysander Newbold, presiding over the spring term, was heard for the first time within the memory of court attendants to utter a witticism: When an attorney for the defense failed to answer at the opening of court one morning, Judge Newbold smiled and said archly, “Cherchez l’avocat.”

Prosecutor Chalanski and Chief of Police Dakin were monotonously reported in the Record as declining comment. But one day Essie Pingarn called Ellery to the phone and he picked it up to hear Dakin’s bitter voice remark, “I suppose this is your doings, Mr. Queen. Who is this lawyer that’s tagged to be next?”

“Otis Holderfield, I think,” said Ellery humbly. “Maybe Holderfield will listen to you, Dakin. Or if he won’t promise to be careful, put him under guard.”

“I haven’t the time, manpower, or budget to play games, Mr. Queen,” rasped Dakin. “Got a town of ten thousand to police. Besides, Holderfield came to me and told me what you’d told him. He’s blaming you for this whole thing. Otis ain’t laughing, and I’m not either!”

“Well, I’m glad to hear he doesn’t find it funny any more.”

“Mr. Queen, I made up my mind about something and I may as well tell you right now.”

“What’s that?”

“This Rich man, poor man tripe did it. There’s not been a crime in the carload. I can’t go along with you any more on this.” And Chief Dakin hung up abruptly.

Ellery crept away.

Ellery was alone in the living room one Saturday afternoon, leafing listlessly through a copy of Mother Goose which he had borrowed from the Carnegie Library the night before. Ken was out making house calls; Rima had gone over to Logan’s Market to place her weekly order, an act of housewifely initiative to which Mrs. Fowler had not yet become inured—Ellery could hear her rattling pots around in the kitchen; Essie was pushing a carpet sweeper somewhere upstairs. Then the front door banged, and Ellery looked up to see Rima, panting.

“Otis Holderfield …”

As he raced for his coat and hat, Rima gasped out what she knew. She had been in Logan’s waiting her turn at the meat counter when she heard screams from the street. People were converging from every direction on the Granjon Block diagonally across the street. She had caught one glimpse of something sprawled on the pavement before the Waldo Brothers’ tailoring shop and then the crowd had closed in.

“A taxi driver said it was Lawyer Holderfield … fell out of a window …”

Ellery found the southeast corner of Washington and Slocum Streets roped off. Saturday afternoon was High Village’s busiest time of the week and several hundred people pressed against the police lines. In the doorways of the shops within the lines pale faces were packed; among them Ellery glimpsed the duplicate Waldos. A blue-coat was leaning far out of a fourth-floor window of the Granjon Block on which was lettered OTIS HOLDERFIELD, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. On the sidewalk directly below him Chief Dakin, Malvina Prentiss, Francis O’Bannon, and several uniformed men stood about a newspaper-covered heap.

Ellery shouted; Dakin spied him and said something and an officer let him through.

Ellery lifted a corner of the papers. Holderfield was lying in an impossible position, like a doublejointed acrobat. He was coatless. His custom-made trousers were no longer immaculate and his silk shirt was a camouflage in oily grime, dust, and blood.

An emergency truck from the Volunteer Fire Department on Minikin Road and Lincoln Street, two squares away, was backed up to the curb a few feet from the heap.

The crowd watched in silence.

When Ellery rose, Chief Dakin said, “A lawyer it was, Mr. Queen,” in hostile accents.

“Not just a lawyer, Dakin. Lawyer Holderfield.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s done, Dakin. Can’t be undone.”

“Yeah.”

Ellery looked at him, the hostility penetrating. “You sound as if you blame me for this, Dakin,” he said pleasantly.

“Not talkin’ about blame. But sometimes … you put an idea in a man’s head and he makes it come true.”

“Oh, I see,” said Ellery.

Dakin said abruptly, “They’ll take care of him. Come on upstairs. Chalanski’s there checking my boys.”

There were some law books open on Holderfield’s desk and on a pad of ruled yellow paper Holderfield’s handwriting told that he had been working on a brief in a case in which Prosecutor Chalanski said the lawyer had been scheduled to appear the following week. Holderfield’s beautiful suit jacket poised over the back of his chair and on the clothestree floated his twenty-dollar hat.

“Holderfield let his secretary, Flossie Bushmill, go at around 2:30,” said the prosecutor. “She’s usually off at one on Saturdays, but she says she had a lot of correspondence to get out. He went down with her and they walked over to the Kelton grill and had a bite of lunch together. He left her outside the Kelton and she saw him walk back toward the Granjon Block. Buzz Congress took him up in the elevator, alone.”

“Buzz says he was moody,” said Chief Dakin, “not his usual wisecracking self. So does Flossie Bushmill.” He added, “They say he’d been that way ever since Dr. Dodd died, and specially bad this week.”

“Buzz saw him unlock the office door and go in. And that’s the last anyone saw him alive.”

“Except his killer,” said Malvina Prentiss.

“No evidence of that at all, Miss Prentiss,” said Chalanski mildly. “At some point in his work Holderfield got up from his desk and went to the window, which was open, by the way. It’s been hot for May and he probably wanted a breath of air. And he fell out—”

“Or threw himself out,” put in Dakin. He was staring at Ellery.

But the prosecutor shook his head. “Doubt it, Dakin. Some of the letters Holderfield dictated this morning referred to appointments for Monday, and so on. And his brief is lucid and concise, not like the work of a man whose mind was playing around with thoughts of suicide. No,” said Chalanski, “this was an accident. It wouldn’t be the first time a man went to a window on a warm day, feeling dizzy, and fell out.”

“Or was pushed out,” smiled Miss Prentiss.

The prosecutor glanced heavenward and went to the window.

Ellery stirred. “Have you talked to the other tenants in the building?”

“Nobody to question,” Dakin said. “The last tenant but Holderfield to leave the building was Lawyer Wendell Wheeler, third floor, who was late for a golf date at the Country Club and left at 4:15; Buzz Congress took him down. Buzz went home at five, his regular Saturday quittin’ time; there’s no night man and after hours late tenants walk down. We questioned the storekeepers on the street floor—”

“Including the Waldo brothers?” Ellery found himself murmuring.

“Sure including the Waldos,” snapped Dakin. “They’re no privileged characters. But nobody saw anyone enter or leave the building after five.”

“And if somebody had,” remarked Francis O’Bannon, “would the storekeepers have noticed? Or were they all sunning themselves on the sidewalk between five and six on their busiest afternoon of the week?”

“Good point, Spec,” said his employer. “The thing is, gentlemen, this could have been murder and you know it. Either Holderfield’s killer got in by the Washington Street door or the back entrance via Granjon Alley, either from Slocum Street or Wright. And out the same way.”

Chalanski turned around. “I’d like something a little more concrete in the way of evidence, Miss Prentiss.”

“Read the Record,” she retorted. “Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief; doctor, lawyer—”

“Indian chief,” finished the prosecutor with a broad smile. “Dakin, do we have any redskins in Wrightsville? Because, according to Miss Prentiss—and Mr. Queen?—somebody named Hiawatha is going to be the next victim of Phantom Killer.”

“Do you have any Indians in Wrightsville?” asked Ellery.

“No!” shouted Dakin.

“I don’t mean necessarily a character in breechclout and turkey feathers,” said Ellery. “A remoter connection will do. For instance, someone with Indian blood who’s descended from—forgive me—a chief.”

“Far as I know, Mr. Queen,” replied Chalanski with gravity, before Dakin could explode again, “no one in town qualifies. However, you might ask Dolores Aikin over at the Library. She has the genealogy of Wrightsville at her fingertips.”

“Make a note of that, Spec,” said the newspaper publisher.

“I asked the Aikin woman that last week,” replied O’Bannon. “No Indian chief.”

“What,” demanded the chief of police in a howl, “has all this fiddlededee got to do with Otis Holderfield? Now, you tell me! Mr. Chalanski, I’m through here! And if you are, too—”

“Just another moment or two,” said Ellery. “As far as Holderfield’s death is concerned, gentlemen, you can shout your Yankee horse sense hoarse but you can’t get by the fact that a lawyer was called for next in the rhyme and a lawyer was the next to die. And not merely a lawyer, but a lawyer up to his chubby dimple in the MacCaby-Hart-Anderson-Jacquard-Dodd case. You can’t ignore it. You can’t laugh it off … Yes, Holderfield might have fallen out of that window—accident. Yes, he might have thrown himself out on impulse—suicide. But he also might have been pushed out by someone who got into the building at a time when there was no risk of being seen. And of the three theories it’s the murder theory that is supported by our miserable rhyme. Don’t ask me to explain it; that’s why I’ve been hanging around Wrightsville. I can’t explain it. Nor do I expect your coroner’s jury, Mr. Chalanski, to bring in anything but a verdict of accidental death. The legal mills properly reject fantastic grist like this. But I ask you—and you, Dakin—to open your minds unofficially to it. And to keep them open to the last possibility.”

“What last possibility?” snarled Dakin.

“With no Indians in Wrightsville, there’s only one other place the rhyme can go.”

“Is there more to it?” exclaimed Chalanski.

“Not in that version, no. But it happens that the rhyme, or verse, or game, exists in two forms.” That everlasting dualism, thought Ellery. “In one version it’s Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief; doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. In the other version it’s Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief; doctor, lawyer—”

“Merchant chief,” said O’Bannon.

“Exactly.”

Dakin made a despairing sound and Chalanski threw up his hands.

“Frankly,” said Ellery, “if I owned a successful retail business in this town—especially if I were the leading merchant in my line—I shouldn’t sleep too well tonight. This last one adds a nice touch. There’s no ‘merchant chief who’s been involved in any of the deaths so far. Not only can’t we prevent the last death, we can’t even hazard a guess as to who’s going to be honored. Perhaps, Miss Prentiss,” said Ellery, turning to the silver woman in the very silent office, “that’s a fact which in the interest of Wrightsville’s peace of mind you won’t care to print in your newspaper.”

That night Ellery walked over to Upper Curling Street under black young leaves to find a group of High Villagers standing on the broken walk before the house he was seeking. They were women as well as men and some of the men had been drinking. He did not like the suspended faces or their lack of conversation. Ellery made his way through them very carefully.

It was a shabby little building in need of paint, with the shrunken look of so many of Wrightsville’s very old houses, and its interior was harmoniously miniature and seedy. He’d have got rid of this if things had gone differently for him, Ellery thought in the flickering entrance hall; as it is, it’s getting rid of him.

He found Dakin in the yellowlit parlor going through a sagging breakfront, watched by Harry Toyfell. Toyfell wore a torn gray sweater buttoned to his rootlike neck, as if he were cold. His eyes were just visible.

“Going through Holderfield’s personal stuff,” grunted the chief of police. “Begins to look like Otis’s death is going to make lots of folks in town mighty sad. Didn’t leave much beside debts.”

“Oh?” said Ellery. As Toyfell turned, he said, “Don’t go yet, Toyfell. I came over to see you.”

Toyfell stopped.

“Carried a second mortgage on the house, they’ll repossess his car, and if there’s two hundred dollars’ worth of cash value in his household effects I’ll eat ’em with molasses. A hundred and sixty-four dollars in his checking account, no savings, no stocks or bonds, and no insurance. Some accounts receivable outstanding, and course there’s what the Dodd estate owes him, but that’s going to take months and balancin’ it off against his bills, when it’s all settled there won’t be enough left over to buy him a grave marker. He owes the Waldos alone over a thousand dollars for tailoring.”

“Vanitas, vanitas, eh, Toyfell?” said Ellery.

“Live a fool and die a pauper,” said Harry Toyfell. “Live a pauper and die a fool. It comes to the same thing in the end. Riches are all around us, and every man is free to partake.”

“That’s what Nick Jacquard thought, too,” said Dakin dryly. “And in his own way Otis Holderfield. Then you can’t think of anything Holderfield said or did, Harry, that might explain the way he died?”

Toyfell bared his gums, and Ellery wondered if he was laughing. “No more than the others.”

“What others?” Dakin was looking through papers.

“Doc Dodd, Nick Jacquard, Tom Anderson, Mr. Hart, Mr. MacCaby.”

“Oh, you think they’re all connected, too.”

“Maybe.”

“How?”

“Don’t know,” said Toyfell. “Maybe by me.”

“By you!” Dakin rose. “How d’ye mean?”

Toyfell shrugged. “Every one of ’em I worked for or had anythin’ to do with up and died. They’re sayin’ I’m a Jonah. If this was tar-and-feather country, I’d likely be rid out on a rail.” He stopped, but his jaws kept working. “Maybe I won’t find me another job so easy.”

Dakin considered this for a long time. Finally he closed the break-front decisively. “I’ll see you’re not pestered, Harry. Course, you’ll have to clear out of here. Somebody from the Sheriff’s office’ll be here tonight or tomorrow.”

“Have anywhere to go, Toyfell?” asked Ellery.

“I’ll find some place.”

“That’s why I walked over tonight. There’s still the Anderson shack. Rima asked me to tell you again you’re welcome to use it.”

“Thank Rima kindly. Now maybe I will.”

He accompanied them to the front door.

“Better lock it, Harry,” said Dakin.

“No, sir.”

“That’s an ugly bunch out there.”

“I’m as good as they are, Mr. Dakin. No better, no worse. I ain’t goin’ to run and I ain’t goin’ to hide behind a lock.”

He was shuffling down the dim hall before the door closed.

Dakin said something to one of his men and after a few minutes the people before the house dispersed. The two men stood in the lilac shadows of the porch until the street was empty. The house behind them grew dark.

“Mighty hard man to figure,” grunted Dakin finally.

“So was Tom Paine,” said Ellery. “No thanks, Dakin, I’ll walk. Good night.”

“Good night,” said Dakin stiffly.

Wednesday, May 24

The fire occurred eleven days later.

Ellery was awakened in the middle of the night by the sirens. He scrambled wildly for his robe and slippers, certain he could feel the heat of flames underfoot. The hiss of water under high pressure and the cry of the engines were very close by.

Rima and Ken were struggling into robes in the hall. Essie blubbered somewhere. From downstairs Mrs. Fowler was shrieking, “Fire! It’s a fire!”

From the glare and heat the whole street might have been going up. But when they joined Mrs. Fowler and Essie at the front gate they saw that the heart of the blaze was a small frame house directly across Algonquin Avenue.

“The Waldos,” cried Ken. He dashed into the street and Ellery ran after him, Rima screaming at them to come back.

Four engines were pumping away. The street swarmed with firemen and volunteers. But it was clear that they could only try to keep the fire from touching off the adjoining buildings. The Waldo house was unapproachable; the entire structure glowed with flame.

A smoke-blackened figure lay in the middle of the street.

“Here’s Dr. Winship!”

“This one’s smoked up bad, Doctor. Ambulance hasn’t come yet.”

Ken shouted at Rima and a few moments later she came racing from the house with blankets and his medical bag.

The little man was writhing and moaning.

“Which one are you?”

“David. Is my …?” He fainted.

Ellery ran over to Fire Chief Everitt Apworth, an elongated countryman who might have been Dakin’s brother. Chief Apworth was chewing tobacco mechanically and spitting in the direction of the fire.

“Where’s Jonathan Waldo, Chief?”

“Still in there. Couldn’t get to him. Lucky we got David. They were sleepin’ ’sthough they were drugged.”

A voice said, “They were,” and Ellery looked down at Rima.

“Drugged?”

“They were Dr. Dodd’s patients. I’ve seen their case cards in the file. They suffered from chronic insomnia and Dr. Dodd used to prescribe nembutal so they could sleep. They took it regularly.”

“So that’s it.” Chief Apworth ran off, swearing at one of his firemen.

When the ambulance took David Waldo away, Ken said, “He’s not bad at all. They didn’t get the other one out?”

At dawn they did. The little body was a cinder.

“Merchant chief?” said Dakin patiently. “Not Jonathan, Mr. Queen. Not hardly. A two-by-four tailor. Besides, Jonathan wasn’t even Dave’s partner, at least legally. I’ve had a talk with Mr. Gonzales at the Wrightsville National and he tells me the business was owned by Dave. Even the house is in Dave’s name. So where’s your merchant chief?”

“I don’t know,” groaned Ellery.

“This time you’re surely barking up the wrong tree.”

But Ellery gritted his teeth. “The Waldos were Otis Holderfield’s tailors and Sebastian Dodd’s patients. They shared in the prosperity that began with the death of Luke MacCaby. And now they’ve shared in the deaths, Dakin.”

“Pretty thin, Mr. Queen.” Then Dakin’s face softened. “Why don’t you give up? Darned if it wasn’t gettin’ me, too, till I got hold of myself.”

“Where did the fire start?”

“In the cellar. A neighbor saw the flames shoot out of the cellar windows. Then the whole house went up.”

“Doesn’t that sound like arson to you?” Ellery said desperately.

“No. The Waldos stored a lot of cleaning fluid in their cellar; used it in the shop. The house was one of the oldest on Algonquin Avenue. Just a tinderbox. No, Mr. Queen.”

“The fire started by itself, I suppose.”

“It’s called,” said Dakin gently, “spontaneous combustion. Or did you ever hear of defective electric wiring?”

“Any evidence of either?”

“You saw the ashes this morning. A smolderin’ lot.”

“Have you questioned David Waldo?”

“He can’t be talked to yet.”

Ellery left Dakin’s office and wandered over to the Square in the twilight. He had begun the day in a gyroscopic activity and his progress had been gyroscopic, too. Nothing was resolved. The fire might have been an accident and it might have been set. At the hospital David Waldo, while pronounced out of danger, was unapproachable. Jonathan Waldo was not a merchant chief, but he was dead. Either-or.

Dakin was right. The sensible thing was to pack up and take the first train back to New York.

The neon sign on the Record building was already glowing. Ellery turned into the Square.

He had never been so confused. Failure was an old story, but this was chaos. He could not even be sure the death of Jonathan Waldo and the narrow escape of his twin were part of the pattern. Their connection with the others was remote. He could not blame Dakin. Dakin was being reasonable.

Maybe that’s the trouble, Ellery thought He’s being reasonable. And this isn’t a reasonable case.

He found himself before the coral front door of the Record.

On impulse, he went in and asked to see O’Bannon.

Malvina Prentiss’s editorial assistant was framed in a boudoir of an office jabbing with two lackadaisical fingers at a rosecolored typewriter.

“If it’s a shakedown,” he said without looking up, “you can tell her and to hell with you. I’m about fed up, anyway.”

“By which I take it Malvina isn’t on the premises. O’Bannon, did you find the books in Boston?”

“Books in Boston,” said O’Bannon. “Hey?”

“Source books for the rhyme.”

“Oh! They’re around on the shelves somewhere.” O’Bannon began to peck again. “I’m roughing out a followup for Lady Muck on the Waldo conflagration. What do you know, Joe?”

“About what you do, I imagine.” Ellery located the books. “All these shelves need is some pink ruching and they’d look like lace panties. Are these all of them?”

Ellery sat down with the books in a chartreuse plastic chair. They were only an armful: Burton Stevenson’s Home Book of Modern Verse, William H. Newell’s Games and Songs of American Children, a volume called The Music Hour by Osbourne McConathy, a few others. He began turning pages.

“You won’t find anything in them,” said O’Bannon. “Original author of the lines unknown. Thrilling. Were you able to talk to David Waldo?”

“No.”

“Neither was I. What did Dakin tell you?”

“What did he tell you?”

“Check. I’ve interviewed the representative of the fire underwriters and he’s very unhappy. Are you happy, Queen?”

“No.”

“Nobody’s happy. Not even Malvina. Do you know this town is on the thin edge of group diarrhea?” Ellery had stopped turning pages and he was staring at some words. “Queen, tell me. Were the Waldos part of this mishmash?”

“Yes.”

The typewriter stopped. “Did you say yes?”

“Yes.”

“Say …”

“Yes!” Ellery got up. The books tumbled to the floor.

“Wait a minute!”

But Ellery was gone. O’Bannon picked up the books, puzzled.

“Two possibilities,” Ellery said after dinner that night. “Two again. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is a comma.”

Rima glanced at her husband. Ken was scrutinizing Ellery with a frown.

“Comma, comma.” He was striding about the living room smoking furiously. “O’Bannon saw it with his own eyes and didn’t see it at all. Nobody’s seen it. What’s the alternate version of that rhyme? Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief—”

“Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief,” said Rima.

“No, that was out long ago on sufficient grounds. The other one.”

“Doctor, lawyer, merchant chief.”

“Gives us seven victims of lunacy. Seven corpses. But oh, that comma.” He chuckled and rubbed his hands.

“What,” said Ken, “are you gassing about!”

“Why, Dr. Winship, it seems that of the second version there are two sub-versions. Two again, see? In the first sub-version the rhyme winds up with Doctor, lawyer, merchant chief. But go to the source books and you find the second sub-version: Doctor, comma, lawyer, comma, merchant, COMMA, chief!”

“Merchant comma chief,” Rima repeated. “Merchant and chief? Two separate—?”

“Beautiful, isn’t it? Yes, two separate words, Rima. Merchant, chief. Makes eight items where there were seven. Does it fit? Oh, yes. The Waldos weren’t ‘merchant chiefs’—but they were merchant tailors … merchants. So somebody’s following the second sub-version, the one with eight characters. Number seven was Jonathan Waldo.”

“Then there’s an eighth to come,” said Rima damply.

“Chief?” muttered Ken.

“Chief what, Ellery? What kind of chief?”

Ellery’s glee faded. “Now there you’ve got me. The only chiefs in Wrightsville I know of are the chief of police and the fire chief.” Ellery hurled his butt into the fireplace. “Damn it, don’t look at me that way! Of course Dakin and Apworth will have me committed! But what else can I think? What else can I do? I’m going to bed!”

Thursday, June 8

Decoration day it poured, but the annual exercises in Memorial Park were dampened by more than the heavens. Mrs. Holmes of Wrightsville High, who taught Comparative Lit., was heard to murmur something Hardyesque about the Greek unities. Other comments were less highfalutin. Some said the exercises had never been the same since 1939, which was the year Murdock Wheeler, Wrightsville’s last surviving veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic, passed away; others ascribed the flickering of the patriotic fire to more recent passings.

Everyone seemed glad to go home.

The weather turned nice the next day, but Wrightsville’s mood remained glum. No one knew why, but you could feel it all over town.

At least this was the litmus reaction of one outsider. Ellery admitted to himself that it might be his chemistry, not Wrightsville’s, which turned everything blue. He had taken to wandering about town at all hours, leaving the doves on Algonquin Avenue to their hearty cooing.

Nothing came up. Nothing.

One day Ellery hunted up the Anderson shack in The Marshes. He located it after blundering about in a state of growing excitement, as if at last he faced a clarifying issue. But all he found was a pretty hut, blackweathered and overgrown with roses, lilac, and lily-of-the-valley, complete with backhouse, mossy well, and vegetable garden. And inside Harry Toyfell with some of the books Rima had not removed.

The Town Philosopher was serene. “What more does a man need? Tell me I’m not the equal of the richest man on the Hill. What’s he got I haven’t? Worries. And what have I got he’ll never have? Liberty. Yes, sir, I couldn’t ask for better ’n this … The Waldos? Too bad. Well, at least they can’t set the blame for that on me!”

On the way back Ellery detoured to Little Prudy’s Cliff. He spent a few minutes trying to read the soft mass at its foot. It remained illegible.

Another day, with a sudden yearning for the company of the late Otis Holderfield’s secretary, he walked over to the Granjon Block.

“Where does she live?” Ellery asked the old elevator man.

Buzz Congress chuckled. “With Flossie Bushmill ye have to work fast, Mr. Queen. She’s lit out.”

“Gone? From town?”

“Yep. With some drummer for a Boston, now, ladies’ underwear company. I seen it comin’, Mr. Queen! And then she’ll ditch him and latch onto somebody else. Itchy feet, that Floss. Always had, ’specially since her dad died. Jake Bushmill, the blacksmith. Real pioneer type, Flossie.” The old man cackled.

And still another day, learning from Ken Winship that David Waldo was on the mend, Ellery visited the Wrightsville General Hospital. But the intern on duty in the men’s ward shook his head.

“He gets hysterical when anyone tries to question him. Chief Apworth, a man from the Record, and the fire insurance people didn’t get a thing out of him. Better come back next week, Mr. Queen.”

When Ellery went back to the hospital the following Thursday, Waldo was gone. He had left the hospital three days before.

Rather annoyed, Ellery set about finding him. His annoyance soon vanished.

On Waldo’s release from the hospital on the morning of June 3 he had gone to Slocum Township. In Slocum he had sought out a tailor named Elbert Scolly who, it seemed, had been trying for a year to buy out the Waldos. Waldo had signified to Scolly that he was now willing to sell, but only for spot cash and provided the sale could be effected in twenty-four hours. Scolly, a down-Easter, had driven a smart bargain. Waldo had agreed to accept a sum far below the actual value of his stock, fixtures, lease, and good will and the two men had driven over to Wrightsville in Scolly’s delivery truck for a session with Sam Izzard of Finegold & Izzard, Upham Block, who were the Waldos’ accountants. The papers were then drawn up at the Wrightsville National Bank, Scolly had returned to Slocum to arrange matters with his bank there, and David Waldo—after a short visit to his shop in the Granjon Block—had disappeared; Ellery could not discover where he had spent the night. However, he had turned up again on Tuesday morning, closed out his accounts at The Public Trust Company and the Wrightsville National, paid all his bills, met Scolly and the bank officials and consummated the sale, and at 2:30 P.M. he was driven by Ed Hotchkiss to the railroad station with a new suitcase and a considerable amount of cash in a wallet he had purchased from saleswoman Eppie Simpson at the leather goods counter of the Bon Ton, along with the suitcase. The settlement of his fire insurance claim he had left in the hands of Lyman Hinchley, the insurance broker in The Public Trust Company building.

Gabby Warrum, the stationmaster, could not recall David Waldo’s having appeared at the ticket window. “Saw him climb onto the southbound, though,” said Gabby. “Figure he bought his ticket on the train. The 3:12.”

The 3:12 was a Connhaven local, stopping at every station.

Waldo had left no forwarding address. He had told Lyman Hinchley, “I’ll get in touch with you in a few weeks.” Scolly, Izzard, Mr. Lorrie Preston of the Wrightsville National, Hinchley, Eppie Simpson, and everyone else who had been in contact with Waldo during those twenty-four hours agreed that he was “the most jittery man” they had ever seen. They ascribed it to the horror of his experience in the fire and the shock of his brother Jonathan’s death. “You know how it is with identical twins,” said Lyman Hinchley, whose aunt, Sara Hinchley of the Junction Hinchleys, had been a trained nurse. “Very delicate and sympathetic nervous systems.”

There was no evidence, however, that David Waldo had visited his brother’s grave in Twin Hill Cemetery before disappearing.

“Dakin, you’ve got to find Waldo for me,” Ellery said in the police chief’s office Thursday night. Ellery looked tired and sounded urgent.

“But why?”

“I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why.”

“You’ve got to have a reason!”

“Maybe it’s because I think Waldo knows something. Maybe he doesn’t even know he knows it—”

Dakin held his head. “Doesn’t even know he knows what?”

“That’s what we’ve got to find out, Dakin, don’t you see?” said Ellery patiently. “Dave Waldo may be the key to the whole thing.”

The chief of police glared at Ellery like a paralytic confronted by a hornet. “You’re the man recites kiddie rhymes ending in ‘chief,’” he said bitterly. “But I’m still breathin’ and Ev Apworth says he never felt better in his life. Why don’t you let me be?”

“If you won’t do it, Dakin, I’ll have to do it myself. But it’s going to take me a lot longer than it would take you, with your facilities, and by the time I got to him …”

In the end Dakin flung up his hands and agreed to look for David Waldo.

Saturday—Sunday, June 10–11

Rim a and Ken were at the Bijou seeing a movie, Ellery having begged off, and Ellery was alone in the living room listening to the Huddersfield Choral Society’s recording of Holst’s “Hymn of Jesus”—which seemed to him for the first time very distant music—when the telephone rang in the waiting room.

“It’s for you, Mr. Queen,” said Essie. “Long distance.”

He almost knocked her down getting by.

“Dakin?”

“Hello.” Dakin sounded weary.

“You’ve found him!”

“In a farmhouse in Huxton—that’s northwest of Connhaven. We talked him into coming with us and we’ve got him holed up in a room at the Hotel Dorcas in Connhaven.”

“Where is that?”

“It’s just as you pull into Connhaven on 478. Room 412.”

“Dakin, hang on to him. I’ll be there in two hours.”

“And then what?” said Dakin sourly; but Ellery hung up.

He turned off the record player, thrust Holst back between Haydn and Humperdinck, scribbled an explanatory note to Rima and Ken, and raced upstairs for his coat and hat. On his way out he halted; then he went back and opened his suitcase. Absolute rot, he kept saying to himself as he rummaged in the false bottom. He wondered if it was still there. It had been given to him years before by his father—a birthday gift which was a joke of long standing. It was there; and when he came out of the bedroom its weight made him feel silly.

Homer Findlay’s newest used car, a Buick Roadmaster, was waiting for him at the curb. It had been waiting there with a full tank since Friday morning.

In three minutes he was on Route 478, whistling in the wind and stretching his legs for the seventy-five mile run through Slocum, Bannock, Agunquin, Scottstown, and Fyfield to Connhaven.

Dakin rose from the lobby settee. “I was beginning to worry about you. It’s almost midnight.”

“I didn’t figure on that ten-mile detour south of Fyfield. Does he know I’m coming?”

“I told him. He didn’t do a jig about it.”

“Done any talking?”

“No.”

One of Dakin’s younger men, in plainclothes, nodded from an alcove near the elevator. They crossed the hall and Dakin opened the door of 412 without knocking.

David Waldo was lying on the bed with the candlewick spread drawn up to his little chin. Beyond the fact that his eyebrows and hair looked singed, Ellery could see nothing wrong with him. Another young officer sat in the single armchair under a lamp with a newspaper over it. He got up as they came in.

“Tried to get Mr. Waldo to take his clothes off and make himself comfortable,” he said, “but he wouldn’t even douse his shoes.”

“All right, Jeep.”

The officer went out.

Ellery took the newspaper off the lamp and went over to the bed. “How are you, Mr. Waldo?”

The little tailor kept his eyes shut.

“Mr. Waldo.” Waldo blinked. “Does the light bother you?”

“No.” The eyes opened. They were bloodshot and fixed on some inner object.

Ellery sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’ve spent the past two months of my life up here because I’m convinced there’s a killer loose in Wrightsville, a killer who covers his tracks so well he leaves no evidence of murder. I think the fire that killed your brother and so nearly killed you, Mr. Waldo, is part of a murder pattern that began with Luke MacCaby’s death. Now I can’t prove that—or anything else—so it’s of tremendous importance that you give me what help you can. Of importance to you personally if you’re to stay alive. That’s why I asked Chief Dakin to find you and why I drove here from Wrightsville tonight to talk to you.”

David Waldo quivered. “I’m going to die.”

“No. Not if we compare notes and see this thing through together.”

“But I don’t know anything.”

“Why did you run away?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Of what? Of whom?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. The fire was set. Somebody was out to kill us. I was just lucky or I’d be dead, too.”

“Why do you think the fire was set? Did you see or hear anything? Get a warning of any kind?”

“No. But the Record … the rhyme … merchant … I’m no merchant now! I sold out! You’re not going to take me back to Wrightsville! I won’t go!” The little man grew hysterical. Ellery and Dakin had to muffle his cries. Finally he began to weep quietly into the pillow.

Ellery sat doubled on the edge of the armchair, frowning at the elderly little figure on the bed.

“Never was one to kick a man when he was down,” came Dakin’s dry voice, “but between you and the Prentiss woman, Mr. Queen, you’ve given poor Dave a bad case of frozen toes, and that’s about the story.”

“No,” said Ellery absently.

“You’re just a mule. Well, I can’t hang around here. What are you going to do?”

“Stay with it.” Ellery got up. “Dakin, would you leave your men here with me?”

“Now look, Mr. Queen—”

“Suppose you’re wrong, Dakin. Suppose tomorrow morning the Connhaven police called you and said—”

“Cripes!” Dakin yanked the door open and a moment later the officers came in. “I’m going back to town. You’re under Mr. Queen’s orders till you hear from me.” He clumped off down the hall toward the stairs, tugging angrily at his hat.

“You’re Jeep. I remember you from the Van Horn case, but I never did know your last name.”

“Jorking, sir. My dad’s the pig farmer just off the Old Low Road, on 478.”

“And I don’t know you at all,” Ellery said to the other officer.

“Plaskow, sir. Phil Plaskow.”

“Oh, yes. Well, boys, I’m going to try to get some information out of this man. You’re here to protect him. Can we get some sandwiches and coffee?”

“There’s an all-night diner about three squares into town,” said Jorking.

“Swell. Get enough for the four of us, Jeep, with a couple of quarts of black coffee.” Ellery gave him a ten-dollar bill. “Phil, you hole up in that alcove across the hall and keep your eyes open. This looks like a long session.”

At 1 A.M. David Waldo was sitting up in the armchair with a blanket around him—although it was a warm night and he had swallowed two cups of scalding coffee he kept complaining of the chill. But there was color in his face and he seemed touched by their solicitude.

“Now you understand, Mr. Waldo,” Ellery said, setting his cup down on the bureau, “I haven’t any idea where this is going. Let’s begin where the case did. Did you know Luke MacCaby?”

“Not to talk to, Mr. Queen.”

“Does that mean you did see him occasionally?”

“Once or twice, years ago, on the street. He was pointed out to me.”

“By whom?”

“A storekeeper, I think. Maybe it was Jeff Hernaberry—the sporting goods store.” He was stumbling, and Ellery kept smiling at him. “Yes, it was Hernaberry.”

“MacCaby never had a suit made by you or your brother? Or any mending, cleaning, pressing—?”

“No.”

“Do you recall anybody ever discussing MacCaby with you?”

“Jeff Hernaberry—”

“Aside from Jeff Hernaberry.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Not even Otis Holderfield?”

“Well … no … I don’t think so. No, sir. Maybe Mr. Holderfield might have mentioned something to Jonathan—”

The tailor’s voice trembled, and Ellery quickly left Otis Holderfield. He asked a few more questions, more to restore Waldo’s confidence than out of any hope, and then he switched to John Spencer Hart.

“No, Mr. Hart had his clothes made in Boston, I think. I think I once told you that.”

“Yes, the day I bought those bathing trunks from you. How about his pressing?”

“No, sir. Mr. Hart had his own vallay did that. Everybody knew that. We never did any work for him.”

“Were any of the employees of the Wrightsville Dye Works customers of yours?”

“Dye works. Well, there was George Churchward, the plant manager, he had two or three suits made at one time. But we didn’t do his pressing and cleaning.”

“Did Churchward ever mention Mr. Hart?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Did he ever mention MacCaby?”

“I don’t think so …”

Ellery abandoned John Spencer Hart after a while and brought up Thomas Hardy Anderson. Waldo reiterated his ignorance. He had not known Anderson except as one of the town characters; Anderson had never done any odd jobs for the brothers; neither David nor, to his knowledge, Jonathan had ever given Anderson any money; they had had no contact with Anderson’s cronies, Toyfell and Jacquard; and so on.

He fared no better on the subject of Nicole Jacquard.

When he came to Sebastian Dodd, however, Waldo’s replies were meatier. Yes, David and Jonathan had been patients of Dr. Dodd’s for years. Nothing of any importance—their yearly bout of flu, Jonathan’s touch of rose fever every June—nothing important, that is, except their insomnia, which was very important; the doctor prescribed nembutal and they had taken it rather more regularly than he had advised, but a tailor was like a fiddle player, his hands were his livelihood, and if he didn’t sleep they shook so he couldn’t ply a needle for beans. Oh, yes, they’d thought a lot of Doc Dodd; salt of the earth, right smart and obliging. And then, it was convenient having him just across the street—

“When did you see Dodd last?” interrupted Ellery.

“Let’s see. When did he die, again?”

“Very early in the morning of April 27th. A Thursday, before dawn.”

“Thursday. Yes, I saw him two days before he died.”

“On Tuesday the 25th? Where, Mr. Waldo?”

“In Mr. Holderfield’s office.”

So that was where Dodd had been late that morning. It was the morning of the trapped bird, and later Ellery had gone over to Dakin’s office to pick up the second duplicate key made by Millard Peague and when he had returned to the house Dodd was gone.

“You saw Dodd in Holderfield’s office two days before Dodd’s death. What was he doing there, Mr. Waldo?”

“Making his will.”

“Oh.—What were you doing there?”

“Witnessing it, Mr. Queen. My brother and me. Mr. Holderfield phoned down to our store and said he needed two more witnesses to a will, would Jonathan and me come up. We came up and Dr. Dodd was sitting there, looking peaked. Mr. Holderfield called in his secretary, that Flossie Bushmill, Dr. Dodd said the paper in front of him was his will, he signed it, and Floss Bushmill and my brother and I signed as witnesses. Then we went back downstairs, I mean Jonathan and me. Whole thing didn’t take five minutes. Course, the will was all made out beforehand.”

Ellery switched to Otis Holderfield. He asked a great many questions: about the Waldos’ relationship with the dead lawyer, when they had got to know him and under what circumstances; he asked Waldo to recall each occasion on which he had been in contact with Holderfield, each consultation about new clothes, each fitting, each delivery, and the substance of Holderfield’s remarks in every case, to the best of Waldo’s recollection. He brought Waldo up to the Saturday of Holderfield’s death and went over the day like a doctor searching for broken bones, feeling for some splinter of fact, some detail, some incident not known to him. He was sure one lurked in David Waldo’s memory; at least one. It was infantile to feel sure on the basis of nothing whatever, but he felt sure.

And he found nothing.

Waldo began to nod. His lids, yellowswollen with exhaustion, would crawl down over his eyes like grubs over two rotting berries, then they would draw back with a start.

“Are you too tired to go on? Would you like to sleep a bit now?”

“I couldn’t. Run out of nembutal. It’s the light now. Please turn the light down.”

Ellery put the newspaper back over the lamp and went to the door. Phil Plaskow was in the alcove by the elevator and Jorking was down the hall near a door through which loud, mixed laughter was coming. Jorking came back quickly.

“Broadminded hotel. That’s quite a party going on in there. How’s it coming, Mr. Queen?”

“By way of Okinawa. Jeep, do you suppose you could rustle more coffee?”

“There’s some left in the container. Phil, is it still hot?”

“Warm.”

Ellery shut the door and held the container to Waldo’s lips. The tailor gulped, choked.

“No more!”

“Then let’s start all over again.”

Waldo moaned.

MacCaby.

Hart.

Anderson.

Jacquard.

Dodd.

Holderfield.

Jonathan Waldo.

The room was beginning to feel unstable; the floor developed a tilt.

MacCaby.

Hart.

Put two men in a hotel room for a few hours, thought Ellery, and it begins to smell like a tomb.

Anderson.

Jacquard …

At one point Waldo was sick and Ellery had to take him to the bathroom. He was sweating himself and the floor was really unreliable.

MacCaby.

Hart.

Anderson …

They had worked their way back to Dodd again and Ellery was saying through his teeth, “The time you witnessed Dodd’s will, Mr. Waldo. Do you recall Dodd’s saying anything to Holderfield, or Holderfield’s saying anything to Dodd, about …”

“No,” whimpered David Waldo. “Let me alone.”

“… about some third person, say? Or about being afraid? Or about anything that might have struck you at the time as being queer in any way?”

“You’re just trying to kill me. I answered you a thousand times. You’re killing me.”

“I’m trying to keep you alive. Think, man! Anything like that? Answer me!” Ellery shook him.

“What was the question?”

Ellery had to think a little himself. Then he repeated it.

“I can’t remember.” Waldo’s eyes were brimming over with self-pity. “How can a man remember things like that? In the middle of the night?”

“You’ve got to!”

“We just came upstairs …”

“You came upstairs, you and Jonathan. And—?”

“We came upstairs when Mr. Holderfield phoned down. It was three days before Doc Dodd died. There was my brother Jonathan, there was me, there was that floozy—”

“Yes,” sighed Ellery. It was no use. The man simply had nothing to offer. Another dead end. Might just as well—

“It was three days before Doc Dodd died,” Waldo said miserably. “My brother, me …”

“What did you say, Mr. Waldo?”

“You’ve got no right holdin’ me here. I haven’t done anything. I’m a citizen—”

“Yes, sure you are and we don’t and you haven’t, but what did you just say, Mr. Waldo? How many days before Dodd died?”

“Three.”

“Three?”

“Three!”

“I wish you’d be consistent,” said Ellery fretfully. “Aren’t you making a mistake, Waldo? That would have made it Monday. You said before it was two days before Dodd’s death that you witnessed his will. On Tuesday. Make up your mind, will you?”

Waldo kept blinking. “My head’s goin’ around, Mr. Queen. That’s what’s the matter.”

“Which was it, Waldo—two days before Dodd’s death, or three?”

“Two … or three?” muttered the tailor. “Let me see, now …”

“The day Holderfield phoned you to come up to his office to witness Dodd’s will. Was that on Monday or on Tuesday of the week the doctor died?”

To Ellery’s consternation, Waldo began to cry. “You keep pesterin’ me!” he wept angrily. “I’m in no condition, you can see that! I can’t think. I can’t!”

Ellery braced himself. “Of course you can’t, Mr. Waldo. But try. Don’t fall asleep!” He pounded the little man’s back and Waldo’s eyes blinked open. “It’s a small point, but those are the ones that bother me. Waldo, was it Tuesday or Monday?”

“What difference does it make? One day or another …”

“Waldo. You witnessed Dodd’s will. Was it two days before the accident you did that, or three? Tuesday or Monday?”

“Chnnnh …?”

“Waldo, I’ll snap that skinny windpipe of yours with my bare hands if you fall asleep now! Tuesday or Monday?”

“It was …” Waldo’s voice cracked with hate. “It was … both days,” he said triumphantly. “Yes, sir, that’s it! Both days. Now I’ve answered your question and that’s that. I stand on my rights. I’m goin’—”

“Both days? Now, Waldo, that’s not very likely, is it? You’re just making that up to satisfy me. Nobody witnesses a will two days in succession. You’re not getting out of here! Answer me!”

Waldo’s teeth rattled. “Both days, I tell you. We witnessed it twice. I remember it clear as anything now, Mr. Queen. Can’t we stop now? I’m going to be sick again. I just feel it—”

“Dr. Dodd’s will witnessed twice? Was Dodd there both times? On Monday, then again on the following day?”

“That’s right, and Mr. Holderfield called us up both times. Jonathan and me. That no-good secretary witnessed both times, too. You don’t have to believe me. Go ahead, ask her. She’ll tell … you …”

“You’re certain of this.”

Waldo did not reply.

“Waldo! You’re positive it was two successive days?”

Waldo’s head rolled. “Wha …”

“Positive! Certain! Sure!” Ellery stooped over him, a drop of perspiration falling from the end of his nose into Waldo’s thin gray hair. “Waldo?… Waldo.”

The little tailor’s chin was buried in the blanket. His skin was waxy with exhaustion.

Ellery pulled on his coat. The noise from the party down the hall had stopped. Waldo’s snuffly breathing was very loud.

Ellery opened the door. Jorking had found a chair somewhere and he was nodding against the corridor wall. He got up, yawning. “What time is it, sir?”

“3:40. Waldo’s fallen asleep in the chair, Jeep; don’t disturb him.” Phil Plaskow joined them from across the hall. “I suggest you boys start working in shifts, one resting while the other stands guard. Both of you had better go into the room with him. I want at least one pair of eyes working at all times. Order meals in the room and park here till you hear from Dakin or me. I may be back and I may not. In any event, stick with Waldo till you’re called off. I don’t think he’ll give you any trouble.”

Ellery remained outside the door until he heard the lock turn over.

Then he rang for the elevator.

The night wind had a streamlike coolness that was delicious after the heated air of the hotel room. Ellery opened the Buick’s window to its widest.

He drove slowly along the deserted highway.

The persistency of twoness in this case was certainly remarkable. Either-or. Obverse or reverse. Even the rhyme had two versions. The last line of the second version had two punctuations. And now there had been two witnessings of Dodd’s will, on two successive days.

In any case each suspect may be two-faced, each piece of testimony may be double talk, each act may conceal a double-cross, each motive may be double-dyed, each clue double-edged … right enough; that was what you always kept in mind. But here alternativeness had reached into death itself. Each death offered two faces, the story of each victim was twice-told depending on the twin choice of viewpoints.

The eyes of a car glared in his rear-vision mirror, getting rapidly larger. Ellery slowed down further and the car rushed by into the darkness ahead.

… It was as if the case as a whole, the complete fabric of confusion, concealed a double meaning. A deadly sampler with its secret woven in.

Some time later a car tore past again, this time headed the other way.

Ellery paid no attention.

But it was the same car.

And a few minutes later the fast car was northbound again, pulling up rapidly behind the Buick until a hundred yards separated them.

Now it followed meekly, keeping its distance.

Some time passed before the car behind began to close up. Its lights annoyed Ellery into alertness. But suddenly the lights swung away and he forgot them.

The second car had turned off into a side road, a dirt lane. Its lights went out, then its motor, a few yards from the turnoff under the lee of an embankment.

Ellery kicked his brake and the Buick squealed with indignation. He had almost overrun a roadblock.

He was on the ten-mile stretch of detour between Connhaven and Fyfield, on a poor-relation county road whose two ragged lanes had been further chewed by the teeth of the steam shovel tractors and big gravel- and dirt-carting trucks which were working on the state highway paralleling it a few hundred yards away. Shoring, sections of pipe, wooden trestles, the jointed carcass of a small bridge were stockpiled along the soft shoulders. Flarepots were everywhere.

The two trestles which barred the road stood side by side. Each said DANGER.

Ellery stopped the car.

He had come south on this road just before midnight and it had been open all the way. The same clutter along the shoulders, flare-pots flickering, work stopped for the night and workmen gone.

Had they come back to resume work in the middle of the night?

Ellery turned off his lights, let his eyes adjust to the dark.

But aside from the smoky little flames at road level there was no sign of activity ahead, and the road was straight—to judge from the line of pots—for as far as he could see.

Boys, probably; some country kids’ notion of a Saturday night prank.

The road here was hemmed in by crowding woods. He could hear crickets and bullfrogs. But no human sound, and there was no light anywhere except from the pots.

Still, he felt uneasy.

Ellery turned on his lights again. He felt a definite diffidence about getting out of the Buick. There was something hostile in the dark and sibilant countryside with its hundreds of flaming little eyes. But then he became angry with himself and he opened the door and stepped onto the road.

He went forward in the path of the headlights rather quickly.

As he heaved on the righthand trestle, he thought he heard a flat secretive sound behind him, like a footfall.

Ellery turned.

But there were only the Buick, breathing patiently, and the dark road behind.

He pushed the other trestle to the left side of the road and hurried back to the car.

He jumped in, pulled the door to, and released the handbrake.

As he began to straighten up he heard the sound again.

This time it was close by. By the car. By the driver’s seat.

He hurled himself over sidewise, knowing as he did so that he was too late and that the stabbing glint the corner of his left eye had caught in the light of his dashboard was the reflection of a revolver barrel as it flashed over the rim of the open window at his elbow.

He heard two explosions at the same time that a searing agony tore through his left side.

And in the splinter of time between the two shots and the blow of the upholstered seat Ellery underwent a profound experience. It was as if the lightning of death had ripped away the whole concealing roof of the structure, exposing the truth inside for a timeless moment before the darkness closed down.

Ellery returned to life in a slow mangle of images and pain. When he opened his eyes there were lights before them and it was some time before he realized that he was lying on his right side on the car seat and that the lights came from the dashboard. He tried to sit up and after a while he managed it by pushing with his right arm; his left was a dangling uselessness and his whole left side was in flames. When he had succeeded in getting upright he inspected himself. From his shoulder down the left side of his jacket was stained a lively color.

Everything went dark again.

The second time he came to he was still in a sitting position and through the pain he was able to take note of his surroundings. Nothing seemed to have changed since the episode began. The world was still in that talkative darkness, the flarepots still twinkled, the trestles were where he had left them. He tried to lift his left arm to see what time it was but the arm refused to move. Then he became conscious of pain in it and soon the arm was on fire, too. But he was unable to make it function. The stain on his sleeve and side had spread considerably. He knew a warm adhesive satisfaction.

The motor was running. The emergency was off. He wondered if he could do it and then he knew he must and he got his feet in position and his right hand on the wheel and he began to drive.

Later he was turning with caution into Wrightsville’s State Street. The night was backing away before a pale and nervous dawn; the elms lining the street looked pleased, and Ellery looked pleased as he parked the Buick before the County Court House. He turned off the ignition and the lights, edged over to the righthand door, and got out. He walked carefully into the alley toward the green twin lights of the police station and on the steps he tripped and fell on his left side. He felt the rip of coagulation and a warm flow. From where he lay he saw with faraway interest a new stain begin.

He tried to rise, thought better of it, and crawled to the front door. The problem was to get the door open, but to do that he had to support himself with his left arm and that was out of the question. He frowned over the problem for some time. He could raise himself with his right arm but then he had no way of completing the action. Finally he rolled over on his back before the door and struck it with his right fist.

After a long time the door opened and a baldpated man with a rim of black hair was looking down at him, startled.

“Dakin. Get Dakin,” said Ellery clearly. He tried to look reassuringly back at Lieutenant Gobbin; but then it was night again.

When he came to this time he was on a couch looking at a photograph of J. Edgar Hoover, half of whose face was spread alarmingly behind the edge of a water cooler, and a man in a collarless shirt held together at the neck with a large gold collar button was winding bandage around his left arm.

“Here he is, Dakin,” said the man with a grin.

A man who had been standing at a window came to Ellery and Ellery saw that it was Chief Dakin, in a suit of old rose ski pajamas and a black rubber policeman’s cape.

“You’re Coroner Grupp,” said Ellery in a happy voice, as if he had made a delightful discovery.

“How do you feel?”

Ellery saw that he was naked from the waist up. The skin over the ribs on his left side was a brilliant yellow-green-purple-cerise and his left arm was bandaged to the shoulder.

“Not good,” he said.

“Drink this.”

Ellery swallowed something foul. He sank back, tired.

“He’s all right,” he heard Coroner Grupp say a long distance away. “Mostly shock and loss of blood. I’d get him to the hospital.”

“No, no hospital,” said Ellery. “I won’t have it.”

“He won’t have it,” said Dakin.

“I’ve got something to do, Dakin.”

“He’s got something to do,” said Dakin.

“Well, then keep him warm and don’t let him get up for a few hours, Dakin.”

The next thing Ellery knew Dakin was dressed and there was sun in the room. He was lying under a blanket. His arm beat like a drum and his torso felt flayed.

“Feel any better?” asked Dakin.

Ellery tested himself cautiously and found to his joy that he could sit up on the couch. “Oh, wonderful.”

“I’ll bet. I’ve talked to Jorking and Plaskow on the phone and they didn’t know a thing about this.”

“How is Waldo?”

“All right. How come you were wearing this?” Dakin held up an odd-looking garment.

Ellery took it. “Hunch.” A splat of shapeless metal was imbedded in it. “No wonder I felt as if I were kicked by a horse. Right over the heart. Why, Dakin, I carry a few odds and ends in my bag and last night I felt near enough to the payoff to warrant putting on a bulletproof vest before I drove to Connhaven. Too bad it’s sleeveless. How big a hole was blasted in my arm?”

“Big enough. The gun couldn’t have been more than a few inches from you when it went off. Did you see who fired the shots?”

“No.”

“I thought Fire Chief Apworth or me was tagged for the last killing,” said Dakin dryly. “How did it go? Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief? Or’s the game changed to Ring Around the Rosie?”

“It’s the same game, Dakin,” said Ellery with a faint smile. “You see, I’d forgotten I was a chief, too. To one person in this town anyway.” And he was silent.

Dakin grunted and went to the window. “When you’re ready to talk American let me know.”

Ellery lay back, tidying his thoughts.

Finally he said, “Dakin, I know the whole story.” Dakin turned. “It’s an incredible story, and yet it’s a very ordinary story, too. Simple as a kiddie game. The only thing is, you have to see it. Do you suppose Chalanski’s up yet?”

“What?” Dakin sounded helpless.

“Because I think we’d better have Chalanski in on this. There’s a great deal both of you have to understand before we can do what’s called for. Would you phone him to come right over—and bring along one of his shirts? I’m afraid this one’s a bit messy.”

They closed in on the Dodd house in three cars. One shot around to the rear to cover the kitchen door, garden, and alley of the blue stucco apartment building. Another discharged three officers at the curb; one took his stand at the front gate, one ran up to the front porch, and the third strolled across the street to the blackened rubble where the Waldo house had stood. From the third car came Ellery, his left arm in a sling, Chief Dakin, Prosecutor Chalanski, and two plainclothesmen. By the time they reached the porch the patrolman from the second car, Officer Dodie Gotch, had the front door open and was standing just inside the hall with one hand clamped on Essie Pingarn’s petrified elbow. Mrs. Fowler was at the rear of the hall, frantically fumbling with the control box of her hearing aid.

Rima and Ken were at their Sunday breakfast. Both got up slowly, staring at Ellery’s arm, Dakin, Chalanski, the two big plainclothesmen with drawn guns, one of whom blocked the doorway to the hall, the other moving over to the kitchen door and setting his back against it.

“Ellery.”

“We found your note last night—”

“What’s happened to your arm?”

“What is this?”

Ellery lowered himself carefully into a chair, smiling across the table. “I don’t get shot at every day, Rima. I know you’ll understand.”

“Shot.”

“What’s this all about?”

“Why, Ken,” said Ellery, “it’s about something I wish it weren’t. I’m afraid you won’t like it either and if I thought it would do any good I’d ask you to leave.”

Ken blinked. He glanced at Rima. But there was no enlightenment there. There was nothing there except pallor.

“It’s about a child’s game,” said Ellery. “A harmless game, or it was until a diseased mind used it as a pattern for a series of murders. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief; doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief. Until last night the first seven deaths occurred on schedule. In the early hours of this morning, the eighth was attempted on a detour between Connhaven and Fyfield. Somebody put up a road-block, got behind me, waited until I stopped, then stuck a gun over the rim of my window and pulled the trigger twice six inches from my heart. Number eight didn’t come off because for no good reason I wore a bulletproof vest last night. So ‘chief’ didn’t die.

“But the attempt on my life wasn’t a total loss. It identified me as a ‘chief.’ But I’m not a chief. Or am I? Then I remembered that for one short period, in this one town, to exactly one person, I was. It was a gag, of course, but any specialist in mental illness will tell you that the disturbed mind has no sense of humor. The one person who knew me as ‘chief,’ therefore, is the one person who could have plugged me. But why resort to these circumlocutions? Let’s name names—shall we, Rima?”

There was no color in her cheeks at all.

“Shall we what?” roared Ken.

Ellery got up. “Ken, Rima is the only one in Wrightsville or anywhere else who’s ever called me, or thought of me as, chief.”

Ken blinked and blinked. “That makes Rima … what?”

“There have been seven deaths in Wrightsville,” Ellery said to him gently, “and all seven followed the child’s counting game. First a man who was revealed as rich died. Then a man who was revealed as poor died. Then a man who was known as a beggar as well as a drunkard—what price heredity? Then a man who was known as a thief. Then a doctor, a lawyer, a merchant. In that exact order. And finally the attempt on my life … ‘chief.’ Since it was Rima who tried to kill ‘chief,’ it was Rima who also killed merchant, lawyer, doctor, thief, beggar, poor man and rich man. That’s what it makes Rima, Ken.”

“Wait a minute,” Ken said. “Wait a minute.” He seemed to be trying to concentrate. “Last night. She was home. With me.”

“I’m afraid,” began Prosecutor Chalanski in a delicate way, “your testimony as her husband, Dr. Winship …”

“Just between us, Ken,” said Chief Dakin dryly, “can you swear she didn’t leave you snorin’ last night, take your car, follow Mr. Queen to Connhaven, ambush him on his return trip, and slip back into bed before you woke up this morning?”

Ken sat down suddenly.

“The way we see it, Dr. Winship,” said Chalanski with a slight cough, “your wife is … I mean, that child’s game business … after all. Er, mental trouble is the only explanation that makes sense to me—at least at this stage of the game. I assure you she’ll get every consideration from my office consistent with—”

“But you can’t be serious,” muttered Ken. He looked up, and then he sprang to his feet, shouting. “You’re all crazy! Making out a case against my wife on the strength of some kid nonsense dreamed up by a deluded paranoid! I’ll sue for false arrest, defamation of character—!”

He stopped. A plainclothesman had appeared in the hall and was making surreptitious signals to Chief Dakin.

“It’s all right, Charlie. What is it?”

“See you a minute?”

Dakin went into the hall. The plainclothesman talked to him in an undertone. In the dining room the only thing that happened was that Kenneth Winship moved around the table to stand beside Rima. As he moved the detective at the kitchen door moved, too. Rima was holding on to the back of her chair, eyes shut. Chalanski’s lips were pursed, but there was no tune. And Ellery shifted to the other foot.

Dakin said, “All right, Charlie, have it towed in,” and at his words Chalanski stopped pursing, Ellery straightened, and Rima opened her eyes.

Ken was looking wildly at the chief of police.

Dakin was back in the doorway, squared off. Chalanski hurried to him and after a moment Ellery joined them. Dakin whispered something, smiling a little. Ellery said, in an exhausted way, “Then that’s it,” and stepped by the two men into the hall as if there were no longer any reason for remaining.

“What in the name of hell,” asked the doctor thickly, “is going on here?”

Chalanski’s sharp face was settled. “You may as well know now, Dr. Winship. Comparison between fresh tire marks found near the scene of the attempt on Mr. Queen’s life and the tires of your Packard show they’re identical. Since you have only one car, that places your wife where Mr. Queen stopped two bullets. No, it’s not airtight, but I imagine a few days’ steady grilling at the jail will get the whole story out of her. I don’t have to tell you, Doctor, that she’ll be protected to the best of our ability. The town’s been very nervous about these killings lately and there’s a lot of ugly talk. However, I’m pretty sure we can handle any trouble that may arise. So don’t worry about that.” The prosecutor growled suddenly, “Oh, come on, Dakin, get this over with.”

Dakin pulled a paper out of his pocket. “I have here a warrant for the arrest of Mrs. Rima Winship, nee Rima Anderson, on a charge—I guess, Mr. Chalanski, I better read this the way it’s written?”

Chalanski agreed.

Dakin began to read in a colorless voice. He droned on and on. Kenneth Winship’s mouth was slightly open, his breathing noisy. Rima’s eyes were closed again.

Then Dakin was saying, “Take her in, Crabbe.”

The big detective near the Winships sprang, his shoulder catching Ken’s and sending Ken spinning to one side; he almost fell. Before he could recover his balance there was a click, and Rima was staring down at her wrists.

“Come on.” The detective clamped his hand about her upper arm and began to hustle her across the room. He looked as if he were holding her aloft with one hand.

Rima cried out at the pain, once.

And then, somehow, Dr. Kenneth Winship was in the doorway before them, arms spread to their widest.

“Dakin.”

“Don’t make this tougher on yourself, Kenny,” said Chief Dakin.

“Dakin …”

“There’s a man behind you with a gun. Don’t be a fool. One side.”

“Take the handcuffs off her. She didn’t do it.”

“I know, Kenny. Come on, out of the way.”

“She didn’t do it, I tell you! I ought to know! She knows—that’s why she’s kept quiet! She didn’t use that car last night, Dakin—and she’s guessed who did!”

“She didn’t, huh?” said Dakin patiently. “Then who did, Kenny? The man in the moon?”

“I did. I shot Queen. I was behind the whole thing. I killed five of them. Anderson, Jacquard, Doc Dodd, Holderfield, Waldo. I planned it, I tell you! The whole bloody thing.”

“I had to do it this way, Rima,” Ellery said. “There was no proof. I had only one available weapon, Ken’s love for you. So we rigged it, Rima—the impressive attack in force, your carefully staged arrest, the timed entrance of Charlie Brady with the fictitious information that the tire marks matched … there weren’t any tire marks … It was crude, and it was cruel, but Rima, there just wasn’t any other way to establish Ken’s guilt.”

The house was quiet, as if another death had taken place and the people gathered in Algonquin Avenue watching in silence were waiting for a casket to be carried out. As perhaps they were. Rima lay on her bed immovably.

“Ken thought he was going after the only thing in the world he wanted,” continued Ellery. “He failed to get it. But, in failing, he found you. That was a great moment in his life, Rima, and if murder were erasable, like pencil marks, then in finding you Ken might have found himself. But murder can’t be wiped away. Ken found out something else. Past a certain point the murderer loses control of events and events begin to control him. It was too late, Rima.

“And it was too late for you, Rima. Sooner or later you’d have seen that something was terribly wrong. Sooner or later you’d have suspected what it was. And eventually you’d have known.” He had prepared himself to say a great deal more, about how young she was, about the curative properties of time, and so on, but her withdrawn silence, an unapproachable quality in her suffering, like the sinking of a bird, made him stop. He rose undecidedly. Finally he said, “Rima, is there anything I can do?”

The two-edged irony of his question struck him as he stood over her unresponsive little figure. But then, he thought, sighing as he left her, his Wrightsville “triumphs” had never left anything but the taste of mockery in his mouth.

At least there was consistency in that!

Tuesday, June 13

“But we can’t get a thing out of Chalanski or Dakin,” said Malvina Prentiss. “If they know anything of importance, which I doubt.”

“The only one besides you,” said Francis O’Bannon in his most precise Harvard accent, “who can give us the whole story is Winship, and it seems he won’t talk even to his lawyer.”

“Why did he do it, Ellery, and how did you crack it? That’s what the Record wants to know—before AP and UP and INS get onto you—and if you think you’re sneaking off on that train …”

It was the hour of doldrums at the Roadside Tavern, midafternoon of a greengold day, when the saloon seemed becalmed on an empty sea, Gus reading a racing form on the bridge and over everything the cool smell of suds. There was simply no wriggling out. Ellery had played back to Chalanski, in adequate periods, the epitasis of the Winship tragedy; the legal business was all attended to; he would not be needed again until the trial; nothing had remained, it seemed, but to take the first train south. Still, a feeling of incompletion had made him linger. Rima, of course. For one thing, Rima’s predicament appalled him. What would she do? Where would she go? How would she live? She had nothing. When this was over she would have no home, no husband, no income, no money—no friends. Ellery had applied himself to the problem with ferocity. Finally he remembered the Natural History Museum in Slocum, and Dr. Josiah Bull. And afterwards, when he had come back from Slocum, he could not even communicate with her. She had locked herself in at the Dodd house, refusing to see anyone, refusing to come to the phone. So he had sent a note over to Algonquin Avenue by Hosy Dowling, the elderly messenger boy of the telegraph office in the Bluefield Block, and that was that, and Ellery had negotiated his departure. Only … he still lingered. How could he leave Wrightsville without a goodbye? He had even indulged in a brief fantasy in which he revisited Ytaioa with her. The delay had been fatal. Rosalind Russell and her man Friday had caught him at the station, and now he was in their hot clutch having to ransom himself like Scheherazade to get back to his checked suitcase and the next through train, which was the 6:02.

“The thing that threw me most of all throughout,” Ellery began with a sigh, “was the dull question of motive. The more I beat my everloving brains out over what was happening, the more convinced I became that the crimes were not the work of a homicidal maniac. The homicidal maniac makes no attempt to conceal his crimes—usually he flaunts them—but in these deaths there was never any certainty that it was murder at all; every death, until I was shot at, might have been natural or accidental. And when it became positive that the deaths were following a preconceived sequence, I was sure a rational mind was directing events. Because the homicidal maniac doesn’t kill in a precise, undeviating pattern, either.”

Ellery swallowed some of his beer without zest. O’Bannon was writing furiously in his notebook.

“I went over every conceivable motivation. Hate. Revenge. Jealousy. Fear of dangerous knowledge. Elimination of obstacles to what-have-you. Self-protection. Protection of another, or others. To every motive I thought of there were strong objections. Except one—gain.”

“Gain?” frowned Malvina Prentiss. “But—”

“I know. But you couldn’t avoid that allover sheen of property, Miss Prentiss. There was money in everything, at least up to a certain point; either money, or the conspicuous absence of it. Gain seemed the reasonable theory.

“But when I broke it down gain didn’t make sense, either. MacCaby left a large fortune when he died and it went to Dodd. Carry Dodd. John Spencer Hart’s death left Dodd a clear field for the operation of the Wrightsville Dye Works. Carry Dodd again. As for Hart, he died not merely penniless, but bankrupt. Tom Anderson died possessed of five thousand dollars, given to him by Dodd, and this five thousand was appropriated by Nick Jacquard—through Anderson’s folly, incidentally—but Jacquard himself subsequently died and Anderson’s money was found by Dakin, refused by Rima, and made its way back to its original donor. Carry Dodd a third time. All right, there’s Dodd, who so far benefited from everything. But what happened to Dodd? He willed the bulk of his inherited estate to the Wrightsville General Hospital! Dead end. Holderfield? Died broke. Jonathan Waldo? His death benefited no one; his brother David owned the tailoring business and the house was in David’s name all the time. I had to reach the puzzling conclusion that while gain was the only plausible motive, still nobody gained from any of the seven deaths.

“There were other perplexities,” continued Ellery, slumping to his tail and addressing Gus Olesen’s measled tin ceiling. “Were the deaths all natural-or-accidental or were they all criminal? Were some of the deaths natural-or-accidental and others criminal? If so, which deaths were natural-or-accidental and which were criminal? There was no means of telling. There were no clues. If these were crimes, they were flawless.

“Then I got my first break in two months.”

“What was that?” asked Malvina Prentiss. O’Bannon’s pencil waited.

“Saturday night in a Connhaven hotel room David Waldo revealed to me a fact I hadn’t known before. The Waldo twins, who had been witnesses to Sebastian Dodd’s will, had acted in that capacity not once but twice, on two successive days—on the third day, and again on the second day, preceding Dodd’s death.

“To be called upon to witness the same man’s will twice within twenty-four hours could mean only one thing: in that twenty-four hours testator had changed his mind about the provisions of his first will and had had his lawyer draw up a new one.

“What did the new, or second, will provide? That we’ve known: except for a few trifles, Dodd left everything for the financing of a new hospital. What did the first, the superseded, will provide?”

“What?” asked O’Bannon sharply.

“Well, O’Bannon,” said Ellery with a faint smile, “I had no more information than you. But I felt that that first, discarded will concealed a fact of great importance. It was no use hammering away at Waldo; he’d merely witnessed Dodd’s signature. Only three people knew what was in that first will—Otis Holderfield, who prepared it; Flossie Bushmill, Holderfield’s ‘secretary,’ who undoubtedly typed it; and Dr. Dodd. Holderfield and Dodd were dead, and Flossie’d run off heaven knows where with some salesman. So I had to puzzle over it.”

Ellery studied his suds. “Whatever the provisions of that first will were, I could be sure that they were different from the provisions of the later one. But that reopened the whole question of motive.

“In a rather odd way,” Ellery added, looking up. “Cui bono, future tense. Not who benefits, but who expects to benefit.”

He was silent, and after a moment Malvina Prentiss said intently, “I don’t entirely follow.”

“Dodd changed his will. We know what he changed it to—his chief beneficiary is a hospital. But what had he changed it from? Whose loss was the hospital’s gain? Who could have been Dodd’s chief beneficiary before his overnight change of mind?

“Only one person. Dodd left no family. The only one close to him was a young fellow whose career he had financed and sponsored, whom he had sent through medical school, whom he had taken into his home afterward as his companion, protégé, and professional associate. And then I remembered a remark of Ken Winship’s the day Otis Holderfield came to the house to read the will-in-force. After Holderfield left, Ken unwisely said to Rima that he couldn’t offer her as much as he’d ‘hoped’ to be able to. It meant nothing at the time; in retrospect now, the remark took on a significant shade of red.

“There was no doubt in my mind, then, that it was Kenneth Winship whom Dodd had named in his first will. And it was equally obvious that, considering his sole and unique relationship with Dodd, Ken had every right to expect to be named in Dodd’s will. And that,” said Ellery, “was just about that.

“Why Dodd cut Winship off at the last moment? I really couldn’t say. There are possibilities. Toward the end Dodd wasn’t exactly stable. Or the hospital’s needs had grown to such proportions in his mind as to overshadow personal considerations. Or, in a flash, Dodd saw or suspected the truth.

“Anyway, I finally had a clear motive—the expectation of gain—and someone to pin it on.”

Ellery made rings with his beer glass. “Dr. Kenneth Winship wanted those millions of dollars, and he didn’t want to wait for them. Besides, Dodd was so free-handed. Planned a children’s wing for the hospital the moment he found out he was MacCaby’s heir. Gave Hart’s widow an income for life. Handed Tom Anderson five thousand dollars. Settled an income on Nick Jacquard’s widow and children. At that rate, even millions wouldn’t last long. It was apparent to Ken that if he was to get that fortune in anything like its original size, he had to hurry things a bit.

“But there was a rub here, too. Dodd had not made out a will. At all. You heard Holderfield that morning—he’d been after Dodd for some time to do that very thing. As it was, Dodd didn’t have it done until the week of his death.

“In law, if Dodd died intestate, Ken had no claim whatever; he and Dodd had no legal relationship. So while he was hurrying things along, Ken had to be sure Dodd left a will. The problem, in principle, must have seemed simple to Ken. If Dodd made his will, Ken would be the heir. Whom else did the childless country doctor have to leave his money to? Ken was as interested in medicine as he was; he looked on Ken as a son, and he was as proud of Ken as if he were Ken’s father.”

Malvina Prentiss looked disturbed, and O’Bannon looked sick.

Ellery growled, “But in practice the problem wasn’t simple at all. Ken knew all about Dodd’s death phobia, of course, long before I smoked it out. Naturally. He was a doctor and he lived in the same house. Ken knew all there was to know about Dodd.

“Now a man who morbidly dreads death rarely makes a will of his own volition; to such a man, the very act seems like tempting fate. That’s why Dodd kept putting it off. How could Ken force Dodd, in the face of that phobia, to go to a lawyer and have a will drawn? Ken found the answer; he was very resourceful. The man morbidly afraid to die resists the act of will-making because he is desperately hanging on to life and the hope of its indefinite continuance. But suppose he could be made to come to believe that the hope is nonexistent? That his death is not merely inevitable but imminent?

“As Ken saw it, he had to smash Dodd’s hold on hope. He had to convince Dodd beyond the quiver of a doubt that death was a matter of days and that nothing he or anyone else did could stop it.”

“My God,” breathed O’Bannon.

“And then Winship got one of the most diabolical inspirations in the history of murder. There had been two deaths in Wrightsville recently which involved and affected Sebastian Dodd: the death of old Luke MacCaby from heart disease and the suicide of John Spencer Hart. Winship noticed that MacCaby, always considered a pauper, died a rich man, and that Hart, always considered one of the town’s nabobs, died a poor man. The contrast struck him. Rich man-poor man. Rich-man-poor-man.

“Into Ken’s brain, sharpened by acquisitiveness, sickened by his war experiences—Dakin told me Winship went to pieces when he got back from overseas—into Ken’s mind leaped the old children’s jingle.

“Immediately,” said Ellery, “immediately Ken saw his implementation whole. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief—and then doctor. If the death of MacCaby, who had willed his fortune to Dodd, and the death of Hart, which left Dodd in sole possession of the great Wrightsville Dye Works, should be followed by the deaths of a ‘beggar’ and a ‘thief,’ two people with whom Dodd also had a connection, and if that sinister progression were to be brought forcefully to Dodd’s notice, then Dodd would be convinced of two things: first, that a doctor would certainly be the next to die, and second, that he, Dodd, would certainly be that doctor. And if Dodd were so convinced, he would make a will.”

“And if he didn’t?” said O’Bannon.

“But he did, O’Bannon,” said Ellery dryly. “Anyway, that’s the chance a murderer takes. There’s at least one in every crime. Ken took his, and won.”

“Go on!” said Malvina Prentiss.

“Winship got going immediately. His first step was to find somebody in town who fitted the third character in the rhyme. He hadn’t far to look. Tom Anderson was known as The Town Beggar as well as The Town Drunk, and Dodd had given him a large sum of money. Winship arranged a meeting with Anderson at Little Prudy’s Cliff late one night and tossed Anderson into the quicksand below. And once Anderson’s disappearance was accepted as death, Ken mailed newspaper clippings concerning the three deaths—MacCaby’s and Hart’s, with which he had utterly nothing to do and which were exactly what they purported to be, and Anderson’s—to me, anonymously.”

“Why did he do that?”

“Oh, that was very nearly the most important part of his plans, Miss Prentiss,” smiled Ellery. “The key objective of his campaign was to convince Dodd absolutely that death was just around the corner. Ken knew my weakness for the bizarre and he reasoned that if I could be brought into it to expound the death rhyme to Dodd, the job was done. If I didn’t bite, or if I failed to see the death scheme, Ken could always ‘discover’ it himself, or disclose the rhyme pattern through an unsigned letter to the Record. But I was the ideal instrument. Wrightsville knew me. I had reputation and authority. A disclosure by me to Dodd would insure Dodd’s acceptance of the inevitability of his early death … Of course, Ken couldn’t have known Rima would ask me to investigate her father’s disappearance. But I probably would have come to Wrightsville, anyway, on the strength of those three clippings he sent me. Once I showed up in Wrightsville he knew he was on the right track. And he prepared his next move.”

“Jacquard.”

“Yes. The problem there was to get Jacquard to break into the Dodd house. Exactly how he managed it I don’t know—it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Ken duped Jacquard into attempting a burglary. When Ken turned his head, ostensibly to hand me the gun so he could get some rope, it was not an act of carelessness. He was inviting Jacquard to jump him. Had Jacquard failed to do so, Ken would have tried something else—conned him into trying to make a break for it, perhaps. In any event, it’s perfectly clear what Ken’s plan was: to shoot Jacquard in cold blood, but under such circumstances that the shooting would seem an unavoidable and justifiable act. This was the most daring murder of them all, committed before three competent witnesses all of whom swore with perfect honesty that it was an act of self-defense. Ken must have got quite a kick out of that.”

Ellery lit a cigaret. “Now his stage was set. Four Wrightsvillians had died—a rich man, a poor man, a beggar, and a thief. All he had to do was wait for me to see it. And I saw it, as he’d schemed and hoped, and I rushed to Dodd to recite the doggerel and warn Dodd he was next on the list. Dodd accepted the idea of his doom at once. And how Winship must have preened himself on that.”

“This is,” said Malvina Prentiss, moistening her lips, “this is fabulous.”

“Yes,” said Ellery. “Only more so. Winship was a master of detail. I’d obligingly shattered the living hope in Dodd, but there might be fragments that still squirmed. Ken went methodically to work to destroy them. He turned Dodd’s own weapons against him … Which weapons? Oh, you don’t know about Dodd’s secret belief in divination, do you?”

“In what?”

“In divination.” Into their incredulous ears he poured the story of Sebastian Dodd’s attic room and its contents.

“You may be sure Ken knew all about that room and what went on there; in fact, his knowledge of Dodd’s superstitious practices may have been the spark that inspired Ken’s whole plan. He undoubtedly had a duplicate key to the room, unknown to Dodd. How many times he secretly watched Dodd probe the future in that room only he knows, but by the time he was ready to move he was perfectly sure of his ground.

“First, Ken engineered the illusion of the death card, the ace of spades, that grand old standby of bad omens—the double death card, because I myself watched Dodd cut two decks of cards and both times uncover the spade ace. How Ken managed this? Suppose it was your problem. The solution is obvious. You’d buy a hundred and four decks of cards of the same design as the decks Dodd was using, you’d remove the ace of spades from each deck, and with your hundred and four spade aces you’d make up two decks of fifty-two spade aces each. Can’t miss. Unfortunately, by the time I was able to get a workable duplicate key to the attic door, Ken had slipped into the room, removed the planted decks, and restored Dodd’s originals. Those perfectly normal decks of cards gave me rather a bad time.”

“Risky,” mumbled O’Bannon.

“No,” said Ellery. “Dodd never looked at the other cards when he cut for fortune, apparently. A habit is as predictable as a thing. Ken’s knowledge of Dodd was thorough.

“Having dealt Dodd the twin blow of the black pip, Ken followed it with the dog that howled in the night, another common omen of death. He wasn’t aware that he had already won the game, that Dodd had visited Otis Holderfield the morning after my revelation of the jingle and had made his will—the first will. Unaware of this, Ken kept hammering away. He planted a bird in Dodd’s study, still another omen of death.

“It may be,” said Ellery, dropping his cigaret butt moodily into his beer, “that Ken’s own perfectionism defeated him. He kept adding little artistic touches—the cards, the dog, the bird—when, as events proved, they weren’t needed. Under the added pressures, completely demoralized, Dodd not merely made a will—he made two. With one hand he gave, with the other he took away. For twenty-four hours, as it were, Kenneth Winship had his day and didn’t know it. Then it was the morning after. But he still didn’t know it. He must have learned of Dodd’s visits to Holderfield’s office after the bird incident, naturally assumed them to mean a single will, assumed that his objective had been won, and prepared himself for the last move, the mop-up. He waited until an emergency night call took Dodd into an outlying district and then he simply followed and forced Dodd off the road at a spot where death was sure. Or perhaps he listened on the extension, learned Dodd’s destination, went off in advance, waylaid Dodd, hit him on the head, and sent Dodd’s car spinning into the gulley. So it was done.

“It was done,” said Ellery, “and Ken Winship went through all the easy motions of dazed grief, and Dr. Dodd was buried, and the day came when the doctor’s will was read. And Winship, brilliant schemer, artist of crime, three-times murderer, learned that for his great exertions he was going to get his rent free for a few years—and that was all.”

And Ellery was silent again.

Malvina Prentiss stirred. “But the murders didn’t stop. Why, when he had nothing to gain—?”

“That’s true. He had nothing to gain, and he knew it better than anyone in the world. So at first Ken Winship did the only thing he could do: he accepted his defeat. He made the best of it. Wrote the past off. He had something powerful to help him over the hump. He’d fallen in love and he was loved in return. By some crippled ethic he may have consoled himself that his failure to win a fortune through murder was what made it morally possible for him to marry Rima. At any rate, he married her and settled down to the unexciting life of a country doctor. As far as Ken was concerned, considering his failure, he was in a pretty fair position. The fact that he gained practically nothing from Dodd’s death left him above suspicion. There was still the hanging loose end of the child’s rhyme, but he was quite content to let me break my head over it.

“And then a queer thing happened,” said Ellery, “and, O’Bannon, you might put this down in double pothooks, because it’s the really beautiful part of the story.

“Up to this time, Ken had manipulated events.

“Now events began to manipulate Ken.

“You know,” said Ellery, “every once in a while I’m caught up short. There’s no explaining some things in feet, minutes, or pounds. There are times when nature, fiddled with, cracks down with a sort of cynical intelligence. Determinism seems proved and fate seems to work in a dark humor. What Hardy called satires of circumstance. Certainly Kenneth Winship must have found himself in the grip of a force he didn’t grasp. He had brought a certain pattern of events into being. When he tried to stop, by a tremendous irony he found he couldn’t.”

“What do you mean?” asked Malvina Prentiss.

But Ellery went on talking as if he were alone. “Where does coincidence end and the force of circumstances begin? It’s a fine point. In the last analysis there may be no such thing as coincidence. At least it wasn’t coincidence that kept Ken’s pattern going. It couldn’t have been. It was too implacably right.

“What do I mean?” Ellery looked up. “I mean that the pattern, entirely aside from Ken, insisted on completing itself.

“Holderfield drew both of the Dodd wills. Therefore Holderfield knew that in the first—the revoked—will Kenneth Winship had been Dodd’s heir. Under his lard Otis Holderfield was a sharp, shrewd citizen. He solved the mystery. He saw that Winship, and Winship alone, had a motive for murder.

“At one point in this game,” said Ellery, “I played with the theory that Tom Anderson might have been blackmailing Sebastian Dodd. There was a blackmailer in the case, all right, only it wasn’t Anderson. After Dodd’s death Holderfield must have talked to Winship, told Winship what he knew, and promised silence on the damning fact of the first will—for a consideration.

“Ken had no money that would satisfy a blackmailer, but he had inherited Dodd’s practice, or most of it. It’s likely, therefore, that Holderfield proposed a steady bleeding, a share of Ken’s earnings on a businesslike basis. That’s why Holderfield, who on the morning he read Dodd’s will to us was angry and embittered, shortly afterward was all smiling heartiness again. He’d figured out his blackmail scheme … And there was Ken, with nothing to show for his crimes, and now he was in even a worse position: now he had to pay for them.

“Ken saw what he had to do. He was not the kind of man who submits meekly to blackmail, as Holderfield should have known. One murder more would hardly stop him. He stole into the Granjon Block late one Saturday afternoon, when the building was deserted, and tossed Holderfield out of his own window. If Holderfield had a copy of that first will in his office, as he undoubtedly did, Ken looked for it, found it, and destroyed it.

“Another murder, committed without hope of gain, entirely against his wishes, I’m sure, and only because of expediency. The murder of a blackmailer named Holderfield. The only thing was … in murdering a blackmailer named Holderfield, Ken murdered a lawyer, and a lawyer was what the pattern called for to follow the doctor. Coincidence? I can’t think so.”

“Kind of odd, at that,” muttered O’Bannon, scribbling away.

“If this had been the end of it, merely ‘odd’ might have described it. But it wasn’t. Having eliminated Holderfield, Winship found he still couldn’t stop. The Waldo twins had witnessed that will, the will which established Winship’s sole motive. For all he knew, the Waldos knew its contents. But even if they did not, they knew there were two wills a day apart, and that knowledge was dangerous, too … The Waldos took nembutal to make them sleep, they lived directly across from the Dodd house, and their house was an old tinderbox. Ken set a fire in their cellar and went back to bed.

“He may have planned the murder, too, of Floss Bushmill, Holderfield’s secretary, who had been the third witness to the will—after all, if he got nothing out of all his work, the least he could do was remove all trace of his involvement. But then everything went to pot and by the time he was bogged down in stickier problems Floss had skipped Wrightsville for greener fields.

“Doctor, lawyer, merchant … He had planned to murder two brothers who possessed some dangerous knowledge. In setting that fire Ken may have overlooked the fact that tailors are merchants, but it’s obvious that some higher authority had not.”

“Incredible,” said Malvina Prentiss.

“The authority I’m referring to, Miss Prentiss,” said Ellery with a smile, “specializes in incredibilities. Only this doesn’t happen to be one of them. A law almost as natural as Newton’s controlled Winship’s ‘happening’ to murder a merchant after a lawyer when the jingle called for precisely that sequence. For how did the ‘merchant’ Waldos get on Winship’s list? They were called in by Lawyer Holderfield to witness Sebastian Dodd’s will. Now note that Lawyer Holderfield’s office was in an office building, and that the office building, like virtually all office buildings, contains retail stores on its ground floor, and that the building is in the heart of the business district of Wrightsville, which is largely composed of retail storekeepers. Nine out of any ten people Holderfield called in to witness Dodd’s will would therefore have been merchants of one sort or another. The two who were called happened to be merchant tailors. They might just as well have been Mr. Purdy of the drygoods store or Jeff Hernaberry of the sporting goods store. No, not incredible, Miss Prentiss; not coincidence.

“But to get on to the end of this. Fate was coming to enjoy the game. One of the Waldo brothers failed to die in the fire.

“At this point everything began to move rapidly. Ken realized that in David Waldo’s survival lay the very danger he had tried to stave off by setting fire to the Waldo house. He could hardly murder Waldo in the hospital—far too great a risk of detection. Then Waldo, frightened witless, got out, secretly cleaned up his Wrightsville affairs, and disappeared.

“Ken knew I was determined to find Waldo. If I did, I might pry out of him the story of that first will. When Waldo was found, therefore, and I left a note at the Dodd house telling Rima and Ken where I was going, Ken waited until there was a night call for his professional services, or more likely invented one for Rima’s benefit, got his car out, and followed me to Connhaven. All along, by the way, his profession gave him beautiful mobility. No one dreams of questioning a doctor’s going out in the middle of the night.

“He followed me, he set a trap, the trap worked, and he fired two shots at my heart from a distance of six inches.

“And fate had a good belly laugh at his expense. First, I was wearing, of all things, a bulletproof vest. And second, I was—and utilized in my countertrap—a ‘chief.’ Winship must have thought he was having a nightmare—he certainly wasn’t trying to fill out the last line of that rhyme when he shot me!

“It’s true that ‘chief’ didn’t die. But it’s also true that I was ‘chief’ only in the most absurd and narrow of senses. The pattern is going to fulfill itself quite realistically. There’s still a death to come.”

O’Bannon’s pencil point snapped and Malvina Prentiss sat up very straight.

“Ken’s, for his crimes,” said Ellery. “And there, without a note of sophistry, you’ll have the supreme satire of circumstance. Because the truth is Ken was the chief of everything. The chief criminal, the chief planner, the chief of operations, the chief victim. The perfect ending to his rhyme, although I doubt that he’ll fully appreciate it until it’s too late. Are you people as dry as I am? I’d like another beer.”

The place was half full now, workmen from the mills, businessmen on their way home. It took some time to get Gus’s attention. Meanwhile, Francis O’Bannon was staring at his notebook in a thoughtful way. Malvina Prentiss tapped her silver fingernails on the table absently. Ellery lit another cigaret.

“What’ll it be?” asked Gus.

“One beer,” said the publisher of the Record. “For Mr. Queen.” She laid a bill on the table and rose.

“Make mine a bottle of bourbon,” said Francis O’Bannon.

She stared coldly down at his red thatch. “I thought we’d gone all through that, Spec. Get off your bottom and back to the shop. We’ve got quite a haul ahead of us.”

“Bourbon,” said O’Bannon.

“Yes, sir,” said Gus doubtfully.

“Spec,” said Malvina Prentiss. “I spoke to you.”

“You spoke to me. What do you know about that.” Harvard’s crimson was slowly rising in O’Bannon’s neck. “What am I supposed to do?”

“What you’re paid to do. Jump through a hoop!”

“Malvina,” said O’Bannon softly, “you can damn well go back to the shop yourself. Gus, bourbon.”

“Back Bay,” said Malvina contemptuously. “You sound more like a New York garbage collector.”

“Well, that’s what I am, you silverplated refugee from Madame Tussaud’s!” O’Bannon sprang to his feet. He snatched off his glasses and broke them excitedly before her eyes.

“Spec.” She was horrified.

“Spec your left one! Gus, you get me that bottle of bourbon or I break up the joint. Why, Malvina honey, I’m a phony, didn’t you know that? I let you wipe up the Record floor with me because I liked it. Well, I don’t like it any more!” he yelled. “You can take your powder room job and stuff it!”

“Spec—” she stammered.

“Francis Vincent Xavier O’Bannon is the name, and now I’m going to call you a few, my proud hunk of beauty!” And Francis Vincent Xavier O’Bannon did so, with a blasphemous fluency that brought respectful silence from Gus’s customers. And all the time she was being so graphically described, Malvina Prentiss stood in the booth with her mouth open, a vision of stupefaction. And when O’Bannon had concluded, and he had downed a quarter of a fifth of bourbon via the mouth of the bottle Gus had fetched, and he had saluted Ellery and stalked from the tavern to the accompaniment of whistles and applause from the multitude, Malvina Prentiss shut her mouth, looked around fearfully, blushed to the roots of her platinum hair, and fled.

And now two will be one, thought Ellery. Life goes on, unifying dualities.

He looked up from his watch to see Rima in the doorway.

They met in the middle of the barroom, beside a table at which an overalled man with a grease streak on his nose was lining up four glasses of whisky, carefully.

“Are you a detective, too?” asked Ellery, not smiling.

“You weren’t hard to find. You’re very famous.”

“I’m glad you came, Rima.”

“That was sweet of you—getting me a job.”

“You’ve spoken to Dr. Bull?”

“I phoned him.”

“What did he say?”

“He asked me a great many questions. He’s putting me in the Wild Life wing—assistant to the curator. It was very sweet of you, Ellery.”

“I’m sure you’ll be happy there, Rima. There’s a great deal of field work involved, I understand. When do you start?”

“Dr. Bull said any time at my convenience. I picked tomorrow morning.”

“Well,” said Ellery with a smile. Then he said, “I’m glad you picked tomorrow. It’s an excellent day for it.”

Rima looked as if she did not quite agree.

“Besides,” she said, “I couldn’t let you leave without saying goodbye.”

“I’ll be back, Rima.”

“Oh, yes. For the trial.”

“Not entirely for the trial.”

A big fellow in a checkered shirt yelled, “Gus!”

“Not … entirely, Ellery?” It pained him to look at the purple-brown underscoring of her eyes.

“Have you forgotten my lecture in Ytaioa? Rima, I’ve got to go. Cab down to the station with me.”

“Lecture?” Rima said.

“There are always,” said Ellery, “two possibilities.”

The color of something alive entered her face, and as Ellery took Rima outside to where Ed Hotchkiss was waiting in his hack he kept thinking, not very originally, that it was like seeing the sun come up on a darkened world.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1950 by Little, Brown and Company

Copyright renewed by Ellery Queen

Cover design by Kat Lee

ISBN 978-1-5040-1703-9

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Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Tuesday, April 4

Friday, April 7

Saturday, April 8

Weekend, April 8–9

Monday, April 10

Tuesday, April 11

Wednesday—Thursday, April 12–20

Friday, April 21

Saturday, April 22

Sunday, April 23

Monday, April 24

Tuesday, April 25

Thursday, April 27

Monday, May 1

Tuesday, May 2

Saturday, May 13

Wednesday, May 24

Thursday, June 8

Saturday—Sunday, June 10–11

Tuesday, June 13

Copyright Page