But her voice was not convincing, and Adam could see that she knew it. It was then that the telephone on Mark Willoughby’s desk rang and the lieutenant answered it quickly, as if he had been waiting for it.
“Yes?” he said. “Speaking.” He waited and listened. “Good,” he said. “We’ll come right down.”
He put down the telephone and turned to Adam.
“This is your chance to look over the rest of the books,” he said. “But I don’t think we’ll have to know much about them. I think we have all we need, now.”
He nodded to Miss Clark.
“Get your coat,” he said. “We’re going down to the District Attorney’s office. He wants to ask you some questions.”
Later that day Adam could still be surprised at the simple and final way the scene had ended. She had gone at once, the police with her, without a word, as if there were nothing more to say. Lieutenant Ames stopped to speak to Adam as he left.
“They have verified the fingerprints,” he said. “Had some trouble finding them on the old gun, getting them clear. But her prints are there, and only hers. Don’t spend any more time here than you want to; I’ll be in touch with you later.”
Adam browsed through the Willoughby stock for no more than two hours, finding nothing to surprise him, and returned to the library. But his mind was not on his work, and at dinner, alone in the small restaurant near the library, his mine was not on his food. He found himself experimenting with his spoon to see how clear a fingerprint he could leave; would it wipe off? Would a second one blur the first? He was unable to remember whether fingerprints were no longer bothered with by the police, or whether, on the contrary, the science had been greatly improved. Could they hang a person on the evidence of fingerprints alone?
After dinner he went back to the library. An interesting monograph on the illustrations for various editions of Paradise Lost lay before him. He looked at woodcuts of Satan tempting the woman and the woman tempting the man, and then he noticed, as if he had never known it before, that the man’s name was Adam, and he threw the pamphlet into the wastebasket.
It was ten o’clock.
Adam went out and got a taxi. It traveled through the streets of New York slowly enough to push a tired librarian over the edge of sanity, and his meditations were not religious. At 75th Street he got out, paid his fare, and walked down the street toward Willoughby’s Books.
As he came opposite the shop, he could see from across the street that Sherlock Holmes had returned. The window display was reassembled, and the red leather case burned like a coal under the red spotlight. Adam crossed the street and gazed with interest at the display. In the center, Mark Willoughby’s red leather case, with the copy of A Study in Scarlet beside it. Against the black of the velvet the case gleamed, as the incredible Bellows had said, like a jewel.
Now, as Adam watched, a remarkable thing happened. His taxi, moved by the inscrutable impulses that sometimes activate taxis, drove part way up 75th Street and then turned around, defying various city ordinances. For two seconds or less its headlights shone straight into the window of Willoughby’s Books, flooding it with bright light. And in that light the red leather case, the knife, the hat, the pipe, were seen to lie upon a piece of green velvet. Then, its maneuver completed, the taxi disappeared and the window was dark.
The window was dark — and now the velvet was black.
Green headlights? Nonsense. But the cloth had become green under their light.
Then memory returned.
“A piece of green velvet,” the lieutenant had said. Adam was positive. And he was positive of something else.
Someone had stood, at night, looking into the window which Miss Clark and Mr. Willoughby had finished arranging; had stood there after all lights but the red spotlight had been put out, and the window glowed in red, set back in that dark, quiet street. Someone who had not seen the velvet cloth before and did not know it was green. Someone who was known to Mark Willoughby, who would be admitted late at night, who could slip the gun into a gloved hand, who could follow Willoughby into his office where the gloved hand became a hand of iron and struck, and struck again.
Someone whose only mistake was to tell the truth as he saw it.
Miss Tilley, the assistant cataloguer, came quickly across to Adam Lake’s desk, and spoke hurriedly.
“There’s a policeman to see you,” she said.
“Send him right in.” It was a red dress today. Very suitable, Adam thought.
Lieutenant Ames came in and greeted Adam with his usual composure.
“It was easy, after we got started,” he said. “He had been on bad terms with Willoughby for a long time. And in debt. Rapidly becoming the seedy failure, all front and talk. Well, he had to sell something, and Willoughby would take nothing but the Sherlock Holmes book. His most prized possession. It touched off something crazy in the old man; he had to come back to see it displayed, and the sight of it in the exhibit really pushed him over the brink. But I don’t see how you remembered about the color.”
“Trivial detail,” said Adam. “That’s what the bystander always notices. I remembered that you had called the cloth green. When Bellows called it black, he was talking about jewels, and they are usually set on black, so it passed quite naturally.”
“But how did you know that any color but red turns black under pure red light?”
“Ah, that, now, was interesting. We were going to photograph an illuminated manuscript, and I took it to the photographer to be done. Chap had the red safe-light on, and I noticed that all the colors of the illuminated initials with the exception of the red ones turned black under the red light. The photographer explained it to me.”
“It was good work,” said Lieutenant Ames, with quiet approval; to Adam, it was like an honorary degree. “Of course, the book itself probably interested you more than anything else. Too bad it was of no help at all.”
“It could have been, though,” said Adam, with a smile. “It could have suggested one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous remarks.”
“What was that?”
“I’ll paraphrase it. ‘I call to your attention the peculiar behavior of the cloth in the night.’ ”
“But the cloth did nothing in the night,” said the lieutenant, falling unconsciously into the proper response.
“That was the peculiar behavior,” said Adam, delighted. “Oh, well, it almost fits. It’s as close as lesser mortals can hope to come.”
Q.B.I.: Queen’s bureau of investigation
Lost & found department: The Lonely Bride
by Ellery Queen[2]
Certain things should conic together: for example, one shoe and another or one love bird and another. So when Ellery observed on the fourth finger of his beautiful young petitioner’s left hand a circlet of entwined golden roses which had not yet lost the bright dew of the jeweler’s garden, he grasped at once the missing complement: a groom, probably young and almost certainly a fool or a rascal. Only folly or worse explained a newlywed husband who left such a bloom untended.
Her name was Shelley, she confessed in the Queen apartment, she was a New Yorker from Evanston, a model by profession, and the fellow having seen her laminated in four colors on a magazine cover had pursued her with such wolfish purpose that she found herself one day in the City Clerk’s office being made Mrs. Jimmy Browne. For their honeymoon they had cruised the world, madly rich in love, and lesser goods, too, for young Mr. Browne seemed bottomlessly supplied with the vulgar commodity by which lovers satisfy their appetites for giving, and he was insatiable. On their return to New York three days before, he had set her up in a princely furnished suite at L’Aiglon Towers, excused himself “for a few hours on a little business matter,” kissed her passionately, and she had not seen or heard from him since. It then occurred to Mrs. James Browne, a little tardily, that she knew nothing whatsoever about her dark, tall, handsome spouse. Accordingly, she had hunted through his things and found in his bureau drawer, rolled up in a pair of cashmere hose, two specimens of United States folding money bearing the rare portrait of Salmon P. Chase — apparently Mr. Browne’s golden umbrellas against a rainy day. Mrs. Browne’s $20,000 question was: Who, why, and where was her husband?
2