The cop said, in a curious voice, “Pardon me, Miss. But didn’t you know you were shouting at the top of your lungs? You could be heard all over the place.”
“Of course,” I said. “I knew it, but she didn’t. They never realize. It’s the dryer, roaring in their ears. They can’t hear a sound unless we scream.”
His eyes changed. Then he said, respectfully, “Sergeant Davis. This is Mrs. Maybee.”
“We’ve met,” the man we’d been waiting for said quietly behind me.
I looked up at him. “Then you’ll know!” I gasped. My watch said the twenty minutes were more than half gone, and now there would be two police cars, maybe a crowd...
I took a big breath. “Ask Mrs. Maybee where she got that purple-red stuff under the right middle fingernail. Please, sir, ask her when!”
He got it at once. He didn’t have to be told one word more. There was that bottle, broken when the man fell down. The man fell down when he was shot. So when had Mrs. Maybee put her hand into her husband’s hip pocket?
The purple stain said — after he was shot! But it wasn’t after we had run away, because the neighbor was out there then. Mrs. Maybee was locked in the house, and when the police came she had fainted, and it was the neighbor who had identified the dead man. When, then?
This detective — he was in plainclothes — picked up her right hand.
“You know what it is?” I said. We had to hurry. I didn’t know what Tom would do.
“Yeah,” he said. “A special woodstain. He had it mixed downtown the same day. He had a hobby. How about it, Mrs. Maybee?”
“I...” She didn’t say more than that single sound.
Sergeant Davis looked thoughtfully at me. “So she was out there and found him before you and your husband did?”
“And didn’t notify us,” the young cop said.
“Sergeant,” I said, “there’s one thing more. When I rang her bell, I knew what she had just been doing. I knew the smell, absolutely, certainly. She’d been painting her fingernails!”
“So she was out there,” he said, “after he died. And she didn’t tell us. Instead, she went back in the house and covered up her nails with some paint. Your idea is that she had a little something to do with that shooting?”
“Don’t you think so?”
He frowned. “So she shoots her husband. And she sits down...” He touched a bottle of polish on my table. “I’ve heard it takes a pretty steady hand to put that stuff on your own nails.”
“It does,” I said. “But she had to. What did she put her hand into his pocket for? She knew him. And somebody was bound to find him soon. The police were bound to come eventually. She could scrub the purple off the skin of her hand, but she couldn’t possibly get it out from between the nail and the quick. She absolutely had to cover it!” Then I told him very firmly, because this I was sure of. “You can be steady when you have to be.”
“Uh-huh,” he said.
Then we heard the street door open again. There were hard, quick footsteps. High, nervous, but very angry, Tom’s voice demanded, “Where is my wife? Ellen, what are they doing to you?”
Now I knew what Tom would do — now and from now on. “They’re listening to me,” I called. “P-pig,” I blubbered, with his hand in mine, “help me explain it to them...”
It was a strange thing that out of all the people in the world she asked me to do her nails. The only person — the only woman, anyway — who could recognize that purple mark.
She’d walked right into a trap.
It wasn’t a very new plot on her part. There was a boy friend, hidden in her life. He’d done the actual shooting. I suppose she had to be out there, supervising, and helping make it look like a robbery. They never would have tried to spend that purple money. There was much more — in the insurance.
All this came out after a while. That day, when Sergeant Davis talked quietly with Tom and me, he didn’t exactly scold us. But he made us understand what a nuisance we’d been, and how we’d wasted his time. For, of course, we’d have to be explained. When he heard how Tom had been mixed up in that old trouble, he said soberly, “Rough deal, Harkness.” But then he laughed a little. “You kids don’t want to be so sure you know what the other guy is going to think. It isn’t easy, you know, to admit you were dead wrong. Believe me, if they had you and let you out, back there, I’d know you were clear.”
I babbled all the way home. But Tom said, “Why the pitch about mercy, Ellen?”
“I was scared she’d take her hand to Canada or somewhere. I was scared she’d cut the finger off and throw it in the garbage. I was so shocked — with hope — once I took her old polish off and saw the purple stain. I knew somebody else had to see it, somebody who’d know, somebody like Sergeant Davis.”
“Nice guy,” said Tom, very offhand.
I swallowed. “And I knew Elise could hear me. She’d yell for the police. In the meantime I had to talk about something! I chose mercy because... well, it was a sort of test. You see, if she’d been right with the world, she’d have had no mercy, Tom! That was s-silly!”
“She ought to have called the cops,” Tom said, nodding, and that was when I finally began to bawl... all the way home.
Ellery Queen
The Lonely Bride
Certain things should come 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?
Ellery gloomily excused himself and went into his study to telephone one or two ruffians of his acquaintance. On his return he said sadly: “As I suspected. Mrs. Browne, your husband is a professional gambler known to the fraternity as The Boy Wonder. The two ten-thousand-dollar bills are undoubtedly his emergency poke — he shot the rest of his roll on your courtship and honeymoon — and he has been closeted since Tuesday in a hotel room off Times Square frantically trying to replenish the exchequer at the expense of a gent known as Big T. I’m afraid love has forced Jimmy to go out of his class. Big T is large time and he played poker when Jimmy was playing tag.”