“Any fix on the time of the murder? Did Prouty’s man say?”
“Prouty’s man? Are you kidding? This one was important enough to bring the eminent Dr. Prouty trotting out in the flesh. Last night around 10 p.m. is Doc’s preliminary estimate.”
“Didn’t anyone hear the fight?”
“The servants’ quarters are way to hell and gone at the other end of Julio’s apartment, which goes on forever. And as far as overhearing is concerned, you could stage a kid gang rumble in one of those rooms and nobody’d know it. They built walls that were walls in the days when 99 East was put up, not the cardboard partitions they use today. No, nobody heard the fight.”
Ellery set the photograph down. Sergeant Voytershack reached for it. But Ellery had already picked it up again. “And Prouty couldn’t be more exact about the time?”
“Restless, my son?” his father asked. “Doesn’t this case come up to your usual standard? No, Doc couldn’t-not today, anyway. He says he’ll give us, quote, ‘a more accurate stab in the dark,’ unquote, as soon as he can. If he can.”
“You don’t seem to have much confidence in anything about the case.”
“And you,” Inspector Queen retorted, “don’t seem in much of a hurry to hold forth on the left-handedness business.”
Ellery scowled and squinted at the photograph. One of the short ends of the desk met the side wall. The desk’s long dimension was therefore parallel with the rear wall, the one behind the dead man’s chair.
“No mystery about it,” Ellery said. “Certainly not from this photo. From the position and angle of the line of impact made on this side of the skull by the weapon, assuming that when Julio was struck he was sitting up normally in the chair, the blow could certainly have been delivered by a left-handed man.”
The Inspector and Sergeant Voytershack nodded without enthusiasm.
“That’s it?” Inspector Queen asked.
“Not to me it isn’t,” Ellery said. “Not yet. It’s consistent with Marco’s left-handedness, all right, but that may be the trouble. If Marco’s being framed, if the button and shoe-print were plants, this left-handedness possibility may be a plant, too. I’d like to see Julio’s library close up, dad. And can you arrange to have the confidential secretary-what’s his name? Peter Ennis?-join us there?”
It was 9:35 p.m. when the Queens rode the small private elevator to the top floor of 99 East and stepped out into the modest vestibule that served both the east and west 9th-floor apartments. They had had to struggle through the wasps’ nest of reporters and photographers downstairs, and both men were ruffled.
“Open up,” Inspector Queen snapped to the officer on guard at the east door. The man rapped three times, and the door was unlocked from inside by another officer.
“Bad down there, Inspector?” he asked.
“It’s as much as your life is worth. It’s all right, Mulvey, we’ll find it. I have hound-dog blood in me.”
Ellery followed his father, taking in the high ceilings and rococo ornamentation of the apartment. The furniture was ponderous and for the most part Italian, but the decor was haphazardly bright, expressing no particular scheme or period but rather the whims of the decorator, undoubtedly Julio Importunato himself. The murdered man, Ellery reflected, must have been a lighthearted, chromatic amante of life. The life-sized oil portrait in the living room through which they passed confirmed his guess. It was of a large, doughy man with a lusty mustache and eyes that reminded him of a Hals he had seen in the Louvre, The Gypsy, brimming over with amiable mischief. The portraitist’s symbolism was as hearty as the subject himself. On the table at which the artist had painted the youngest brother lay an overturned leather dicebox with the dice spilled out beside an empty bottle of vino; a slopping wineglass was clutched in the fist resting on the table. And, reflected in a background mirror (the curlicued frame was festooned with gold cupids), on an opulent bed, lay a smiling woman of noble dimensions with one rosy leg drawn up and no clothes on.
“Pity,” Ellery said.
“What?”
“I was having a platitudinous thought about death. An epitaph for Julio. How many rooms are there in this labyrinth, anyway?”
They finally penetrated to the scene of the murder. The library, Inspector Queen said, was in the same condition as when Peter Ennis had found the dead man, except for what had necessarily been disturbed in the police workover. Chairs were overturned, lamps lay broken on the floor, the rack of fire tools at the fireplace sprawled on the hearthstone; even the debris of the antique taboret lay where it had collapsed. And while Julio Importunato’s body was no longer there, its surrogate remained-the ghostly outline of his torso and head chalked on the bloodied desk.
“That’s where the shoeprint was?” Ellery pointed with his toe to an erratic hole some two feet in diameter in the cobalt blue Indian rug. The piece had been cut out of the rug near one of the front corners of the desk.
Inspector Queen nodded. “For the D.A.’s office.” He added, “Hopefully.”
“That’s the name of this game. Is Ennis here?”
The Inspector nodded to the patrolman on duty and the patrolman opened a door at the far end of the library. Two men came in. The man who appeared first could not have been Ennis in any event; he strolled, in no hurry, the captain of a ship, unquestioned master of his decks. Peter Ennis followed with quick small steps, in a sort of choreography, the very model of the subordinate; the small steps shrank his natural advantage of height over his employer to their real proportions.
“This is Mr. Importuna,” the younger man announced. “Mr. Nino Importuna.” He possessed a surprising high tenor voice, incongruous in a man of his size and virile blond appearance.
No one acknowledged the fanfare; Ennis took one step back, flushing.
Importuna stopped before his murdered brother’s desk, surveying the dried blood, the bits of tissue, the chalked outline. Whatever he felt, he did not allow it to show.
“This is the first time I’ve seen”-his right hand with its four fingers described a vague oval-”this. They wouldn’t let me in before.”
“You shouldn’t be here now, Mr. Importuna,” Inspector Queen said. “I’d rather have spared you this.”
“Kind but not necessary,” the multimillionaire said. His voice sounded deep and dry, with a faint echo of remorse, like an abandoned well. “Italian contadini are used to the sight of blood… So this is how the murder of a brother looks. Omicidio a sangue freddo.”
“Why do you say ‘in cold blood,’ Mr. Importuna?” Ellery asked.
The adversary eyes turned Ellery’s way. They took his measure. “Who are you? You’re not a policeman.”
“My son Ellery,” the Inspector said, quickly. “He has a professional interest in homicide, Mr. Importuna, though his profession isn’t police work. He writes about it.”
“Oh? My brother Julio becomes your raw material, Mr. Queen?”
“Not for profit,” Ellery said. “We have the feeling this is a difficult case, Mr. Importuna. I’m helping out. But you haven’t answered my question.”
“You understand Italian?”
“A very little. Why in cold blood?”
“One stroke of the weapon, I understand. Directed with great force and precision. That is not the work of anger or blind hatred. If my brother had been attacked in passion, there would have been not one blow but many.”
“You should be a detective, Mr. Importuna,” Ellery said. “You’ve just made a most important observation.”