Ellery nodded. “By the way, Senator, I suppose you knew nothing of Gimball’s decision to change his beneficiary?”
“Nothing whatever. The idiot!”
“You, Mr. Jones?”
“I?” The young man raised his brows. “How would I know? We weren’t on what you’d call intimate terms.”
“Ah, your prospective father-in-law didn’t care for you, Mr. Jones, or was it merely lack of common interest?”
“Please,” said Andrea wearily. “What good does this sort of thing do, Mr. Queen? Joe hadn’t anything to say about it, anyway.”
“I see.” Ellery rose. “You understand, Finch, that if I accept your assignment there are to be no strings whatever on my activity?”
“I took that for granted.”
Ellery picked up his stick. “I’ll let you know my decision in a day or so, when more facts leak out of Trenton. Good-morning.”
It was growing dark Monday evening when Ellery rang the Borden-Gimball bell on the eleventh floor of a rather staggering Park Avenue pile. A fish-faced man in tails admitted him to the living-room of a duplex apartment in the grand manner. As he lounged about waiting to be announced, inspecting the canvases and the authentic period furniture, he wondered idly out of whose pocket the cost of all this magnificence had come. The apartment itself must lease for between twenty and thirty thousand a year, he judged; and the appointments must have run into six figures, if the room he was in was a criterion. It smacked more of old Jasper Borden than the slight, poetic gentleman he had left on a slab in the Trenton morgue the day before.
The fish-faced man conducted him noiselessly to a suite mysterious with dim lights and velvet hangings, in the midst of which sat a gigantic old man on a wheelchair, enthroned like a dying king. A nurse with forbidding eyes stood guard behind him. There was a brocade dressing-gown over his wing-collar and ascot tie, and a heavy ring with a curious seal on the finger of his gnarled right hand. For an octogenarian he was remarkably well-preserved, Ellery thought, until he noticed the peculiar rigidity of the old man’s left side. The muscles on the left side of his face did not move, and even his left eye stared unwinkingly ahead as the right swam about. It was as if he were composed of two bodies, one alive and one dead.
“How do you do, Mr. Queen,” he said in a rusty bass voice out of the side of his mouth. “Please excuse me for not rising. And let me thank you for your kind and courteous message Saturday night. To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
There was a mustiness in the dark air that was almost necropolitan. Ellery saw that this man was already in his tomb. The cobalt orbits in which his eyes lay were huge and dead. But, studying that grim chin and rhamphoid nose, imbedded in a face the color of unwatered earth, it came to Ellery that old Jasper Borden was still a force to reckon with. The one fierce moving eye made him as uncomfortable as if it had been a potential convulsion of nature. “Good of you to see me, Mr. Borden,” he said quickly. “I shan’t waste time in amenities that can only be painful to you. You know the nature of my interest in the death of your son-in-law?”
“I have heard of you, sir.”
“But Mrs. Gimball—?”
“My daughter has told me everything.”
Ellery paused. “Mr. Borden,” he said at last, “truth is a curious thing. It will not be denied, but one can hasten its inevitability. Since you’ve heard of me, it’s unnecessary for me to assure you that my concern with such tragedies as this is completely detached. Will you answer my questions?”
The sunken moving eye steadied. “You realize, Mr. Queen, what this means to me — to my name, my family?”
“Quite.”
The old man was silent. Then he said, “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know when you first learned that your son-in-law was leading a double life.”
“Saturday night.”
“You had never heard of Joseph Wilson — the man or the name?” The ponderous head shook once, slowly. “Now, I believe you were responsible for your son-in-law’s taking out the million-dollar policy?”
“I was.”
Ellery cleaned the lenses of his pince-nez. “Mr. Borden, did you have any special reason for doing so?”
He fancied that a faint smile lifted the grim blue lips at the right side. “Of a criminal nature, no. My motive was purely one of principle. My daughter did not need her husband’s financial protection. But,” the rusty voice hardened, “in these modern days, when every man is godless and every woman a shameless gadabout, it is good that someone enforce the old-fashioned virtues. I’m a man of the past, Mr. Queen, an anachronism. I still believe in God and the home.”
“And very properly, too,” Ellery hastened to reply. “By the way, of course you did not know that your son-in-law—”
“He was not,” rumbled the octogenarian, “anything of the sort.”
“That Gimball, then—”
Borden said quietly, “He was a dog. A carnal beast. A shame and a degradation to everything people of quality stand for.”
“I understand your feeling thoroughly, Mr. Borden. I meant to ask if you had known of the change he made in his beneficiary?”
“Had I known,” growled the old man, “feeble and chained to this foul chair as I am, I should have throttled him!”
“Mr. — would it be too personal to ask, sir, precisely under what circumstances Gimball courted and married your daughter?” Ellery coughed. “You must understand I use the conventional terms for lack of a more precise phraseology.”
For an instant the fierce eye flashed, then the lid drooped. “These are strange days, Mr. Queen. I never liked Joseph Gimball. It always seemed to me that he was a weakling, a shell of a man, too handsome and irresponsible for his own good. But my daughter fell madly in love with him, and I could not deny my only child her chance for happiness. My daughter, you know,” the bass voice paused, “was unfortunate in her first marriage. Married young, she suffered the tragedy of seeing her first husband, a very worthy young man of unimpeachable family and position, die of lobar pneumonia. When, years later, Gimball came along, Jessica was already forty.” The great right shoulder twitched. “You know how women are.”
“And Gimball’s financial condition at this time?”
“A pauper,” Borden grunted. “His mother was a cunning she-devil, and I’m sure her ambition drove him to the decision to risk bigamy. Joseph Gimball didn’t have the gumption to resist a louse, let alone a creature like his mother. Jessica had a substantial fortune in her own right — a combination of her first husband’s estate and a legacy from my dear wife — and of course I could not permit her to marry without... He had nothing. I took him into my own business. I thought it might work. I gave him every chance.” The voice died off in a dangerous mutter. “The dog, the ungrateful dog. He could have been my son...” The nurse signaled imperiously.
“He managed your affairs, Mr. Borden?”
“That part of them to which he could do the least damage. I have considerable holdings. I presented him with several directorships in corporations I control. In the crash of ’29 and ’30 he lost everything I’d given him. On Black Friday he must have been off in that den of his in Philadelphia, carousing with that woman!”
“And you, Mr. Borden?” asked Ellery with bland respect.
“I was still active then, Mr. Queen,” replied the old man grimly. “They didn’t catch Jasper Borden napping. Now—” the shoulder twitched again — “now I’m nothing, a living corpse. They don’t even let me smoke my cigars any more. They feed me with a spoon like a cursed—”