A dramatic trial was forecast.
Ellery’s interest in the case flagged early. He had lived with it far too long at too steep a pitch to experience anything but exhaustion after the events of the night of October 29–30. He found himself trying not merely to forget the past but to dodge the present. The present, at least, would not to be evaded; it insisted on applying pomp to circumstance. There were Athenian honors, press and radio-television interviews, a hundred invitations to address civic groups and write articles and investigate unsolved crimes. He managed to back away from most of these with approximate grace. The few he could not avoid left him irritable and profane. “What’s the matter with you?” demanded his father. “Let’s say,” snapped Ellery, “that success has gone to my head.” The Inspector puckered; he was no stranger to migraine, either. “Well,” he said cheerfully, “at least this time it’s not caused by failure.”
Ellery continued to fling himself from chair to chair.
One day he decided he had located the infection. It was the boil of pressure. But not of the past or the present; of the future. He was not finished. On the morning of January 2, in one of the larger courtrooms under the gray dome of the Supreme Court building in Foley Square, a Mr. Justice-Somebody would make his blackrobed entrance from chambers and one Edward Cazalis, alias the Cat, would go on trial charged with murder. And in this trial one Ellery Queen, Special Investigator to the Mayor, would be a major witness for the people. There would be no release for him until that ordeal was passed. Then he could go about his business purged of the whole corrupting mess.
Why the trial should cause him such twinges Ellery did not attempt to diagnose. Having discovered — as he thought — the source of his malady, he adjusted his psychic screws to the inevitable and turned to other matters. By this time Reva Xavinzky had been collated and the spotlight probed elsewhere. He was able almost to relax. Even to think about getting back to writing. The novel he had neglected since August 25 lay in its lonely grave. He exhumed it and was surprised to find it as alien as any tax roll papyrus dug out of the Nile delta after three thousand years. Once, long ago, he had labored greatly on this, and now it had the historic smell of shards. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Despairing, Ellery dropped the primitive effort of his pre-Cat days into the fire.
And sat him down to compose a newer wonder.
But before he could settle his feet on the bottom drawer, there was an agreeable interruption.
Jimmy McKell and Celeste Phillips were being wed and it seemed that Mr. Queen, in his single person, was to constitute the wedding party.
“Exclusive,” grinned Jimmy, “by McKell.”
“Jimmy means,” signed Celeste, “that his father hit the roof and won’t come.”
“He’s biting the Chippendale,” said Jimmy, “because his hitherto invincible weapon — disownery? disownment? — has turned to womanish water in his hand, now that I’m buckled into Grandfather’s millions. And Mother’d no sooner got over sopping up the tears than she started planning a twenty-thousand guest wedding. So I said the hell with it—”
“And we got our license, we’ve taken our Wassermanns—”
“Successfully,” added Jimmy, “so would you hand my bride over to me in City Hall at 10:30 tomorrow morning, Mr. Q?”
They were married between the Arthur Jackson Beals of Harlem and the Gary G. Cohens-to-be of Brownsville, Brooklyn; the City Clerk did them distinguished honor by going no more than half so rapidly as usual; Mr. Queen bussed the bride with a fervent “At last!”; and afterward there were only eighteen reporters and cameramen waiting for them in the hall. Mrs. James Guymer McKell exclaimed that she couldn’t imagine how in the world they had all known, because she and Jimmy hadn’t breathed a word to anyone but Ellery... and her groom growled an invitation to his ex-fellow-journalists to hoist a few on him, whereupon the augmented party set out for La Guardia Airport and the wedding luncheon was imbibed in a cocktail lounge, with Parlay Phil Gonachy of the Extra crying the square dance which somehow followed. At the climax of the thunderous quadrille the Airport police appeared, causing certain strict constitutionalists among the working guests to defend with camera, bottle, and bar stool the sacred freedom of the press and enabling the happy couple to slip away with their sponsor.
“Whither do you fly with your unravished bride?” inquired Mr. Queen in a slightly wobbly tone. “Or is said question none of my olfactory business?”
“It is entirely comme il faut,” replied Mr. McKell with the grandeur of one who has also given generous lip service to the sacraments of Reims and Epernay, “since we fly no-whither,” and he steered his bride gallantly exitward.
“Then why La Guardia?”
“A ruse to mislead those roistering anteaters. Equerry!”
“We’re spending our honeymoon at the Half-Moon Hotel,” confided the bride with a blush as a cab rushed up. “You’re positively the only one who knows that.”
“Mrs. McKell, I shall guard your secret with my honor.”
“Mrs. McKell,” murmured Mrs. McKell.
“All my life,” said her husband in a whisper that shot heads around twenty feet away, “I have yearned for a winter’s honeymoon among the frolicking Polar Bears of Coney Island.” And Mr. McKell yelled to the apprehensive hack, “Okay, White Fang. Mush!”
Ellery observed their exhaust fondly as they rode off into the smog.
After that he found it joy to settle down to work. Ideas for a new mystery novel flowed like the wedding party’s champagne; the only problem was to keep a sober judgment.
One morning Ellery looked around to find Father Christmas breathing down his neck. And he saw with some astonishment that New York’s Yule was to be white; overnight, 87th Street sparkled. A Samoyed rolling in the snow across the street made him think of the arctic huskies; and thus he was reminded of the James McKells and their Coney Island honeymoon, among the curious tribe of New Yorkers who called themselves the Polar Bears. Ellery grinned, wondering why he had not heard from Jimmy and Celeste. Then it occurred to him that he had, and he began looking through his deserted mail, an accumulation of several weeks.
He found Jimmy’s note in the middle of the heap.
We like it Ellery. We like it.
If you have a mind to crack a friendly jeroboam for auld lang syne, the McKells are receiving in the back room of Kelly’s Bar on East 39th at 2 P.M. tomorrow for all of the tribe of Jurgen. We still haven’t found an apartment and are bedding down with various disreputable characters. I won’t take my wife to a hotel.
P.S. If you don’t show, we’ll see you at the Assizes.
P.P.S. Mrs. McK. sends love. J.
The postmark was ten days old.
The McKells and, Christmas... This called for heroism.
A half hour later Ellery was up to his armpits in lists, and a half hour after that he was sallying forth in galoshes.
Fifth Avenue was already a speckled swamp. The plows were still working in the side streets but along the Avenue they had toiled all night like beetles rolling dung and the brown-spattered snowplows challenged the agility of jaywalkers and squeezed motor traffic into an impossible bottleneck.
A white Christmas, everybody was saying, shuffling through the slush, sneezing and coughing.