“Think, now. Who went in and out?”
Frank drew his sparse brows together. “Well, let’s see now. Let’s see. Not Mr. Spaeth. I mean — him.” He jerked a dirty thumb toward the ell where the coroner’s physician was working. “I didn’t see him all day... You mean after the auction?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes.”
“After the auction... Well, the crowd petered out. So did the cops. A little while later Miss Moon drove out. She came back about four o’clock. Shopping, I guess; I saw packages. Her aunt, Mrs. Moon, is away in Palm Springs. Did she come back yet?”
“No,” said Glücke, as man to man.
Frank scraped his lean chin. “Let’s see. I guess that’s all... No, it ain’t!” Then he stopped and looked very frightened. “I mean, I guess—”
“You mean you guess what, Frank?” asked Glücke gently.
Frank darted a hungry glance at the door. Walter sat up straighter. Val held her breath. Yes? Yes?
“Well,” said Frank.
“Some one else came this afternoon!” snapped the Inspector, mask off. “Who was it?” Frank backed away. “Do you want to be held as a material witness?” thundered the Inspector.
“N-no, sir,” chattered Frank. “It was him. Around half-past five. Half-past five.”
“Who?”
Frank pointed a knobby forefinger at Rhys Jardin.
“No!” cried Val, springing out of the chair.
“Why, the man’s simply mad,” said Rhys in an astonished voice.
“Hold your horses,” said Glücke. “You’ll get your chance to talk. Are you sure it was Mr. Jardin, Frank?”
The gateman twisted a button on his coat. “I... I was sitting in the booth reading the paper... yes, I was reading the paper. I heard footsteps on the driveway, so I jumped up and ran out and there was Mr. Jardin walking up the drive toward the Spaeth house—”
“Hold it, hold it,” said Glücke. “Did you leave the gate unlocked?”
“No, sir, I did not. But Mr. Jardin had a key to the gate — everybody in San Susie’s got one — so that’s how he must have got in.”
“Was there a car outside?”
“I didn’t see no car.”
“This is a joke,” began Rhys, very pale. The Inspector stared at him, and he stopped.
“By the way,” drawled Ellery, “if you came out of your warren, Frank, and saw a man walking away from you, how can you be so sure it was Mr. Jardin?”
“It was Mr. Jardin, all right,” said Frank stubbornly.
Glücke looked irritated. “Can’t you give me a better identification? Didn’t you see his face at all?”
“I won’t stand here—” cried Val.
“You’ll stand here and like it. Well, Frank?”
“I didn’t see his face,” mumbled Frank, “but I knew it was him, anyway. From his coat. From his camel’s-hair coat. I knew him.”
Walter very slowly slumped back against his chair. Val flashed a glance of pure hatred at him and Rhys sat down, jaws working, in the chair she had vacated.
“Oh, come,” said Ellery with amusement. “Every second man in Hollywood wears a camel’s-hair coat. I wear one myself. Are you sure it wasn’t I you saw, Frank? I’m about the same size as Mr. Jardin.”
Anger shone from Frank’s eyes. “But your coat ain’t torn,” he said shortly.
“Oh,” said Ellery; and the Inspector’s face cleared.
“Torn, Frank?”
“Yes, sir. This afternoon, when Mr. Jardin left after the auction, his coat caught on the handle of his car and tore. Tore a flap right down under the pocket on the right side, a big piece.”
“I thought you said,” remarked Ellery, “that you saw only the man’s back.”
“He was walkin’ slow,” muttered Frank, with a malevolent glance at his tormentor, “like he was thinking about something, and he had his hands behind his back under his coat. So that was how I saw the pocket and the rip. So I knew it was Mr. Jardin.”
“Q.E.D.,” murmured Ellery.
“I even called out to him, I said: ‘Mr. Jardin!’ in a real loud voice, but he didn’t turn around, he just kept walking. So I went back to the booth. Like he didn’t hear me.”
“I absolutely insist—” began Val in an outraged voice, when a man came in and held up something.
“Look what I found,” he said.
It was a long narrow strip of tan camel’s-hair cloth tapering to a point.
“Where?” demanded Glücke, seizing it.
“On top of one of those stakes on the fence. Right over the spot where the bench was pushed.”
The Inspector examined it with avid fingers. “It was torn already,” he mumbled, “and when he climbed over the fence the torn piece caught and ripped clean away the length of the coat from the pocket down.” He turned and eyed Rhys Jardin deliberately. “Mr. Jardin,” he said in a cold voice, “where’s your camel’s-hair coat?”
The room was drowned in a silence that crushed the eardrums.
By all the rules of romantic justice Walter should have jumped up and explained what had happened, how he had taken Rhys’s coat by mistake, how— But Walter sat there like a tailor’s dummy.
Val saw why with acid clarity. He could not acknowledge having worn her father’s coat without admitting he had lied. He had said he never entered the grounds at all. Yet it was clear now that he had entered the grounds with the key he also carried, that Frank had mistaken him for Rhys Jardin because of the torn coat, and that he had gone up to his father’s house and... And what? And what?
Was that — Val said it to herself in a chill small voice — was that why Walter had lied? Was that why he had hidden or thrown away the telltale coat? Was that why he sat there so dumbly now, letting the police think Rhys had gone into Spaeth’s house about the time Spaeth had been skewered?
Val knew without looking at him that her father was thinking exactly the same thoughts. It would be so easy for him to say — or for her — to Glücke: “Now look here, Inspector. Walter Spaeth took that coat by mistake this afternoon, and Frank mistook him for me. I haven’t even got the coat. I don’t know where it is. Ask Walter.”
But Rhys said nothing. Nothing. And as for Val, she could not have spoken now if her life depended on one little word. Oh, Walter, why don’t you explain, explain?
“So you won’t talk, eh?” said the Inspector with a wry grin. “All right, Mr. Jardin. Frank, did any one but Miss Moon and Mr. Jardin enter Sans Souci after the auction today?”
“N-no, sir,” said Frank, half out of the room.
“Walewski, when you took over from Frank, was Mr. Ruhig the only one you admitted — and then you both found the dead body of Spaeth?”
“That is the truth, sir!”
Glücke waved his hand at the gateman with a certain grim weariness. “Let ’em go home,” he said to a detective. “And get that Moon woman in here.”
The thought began to pound in Val’s ears now. The more she tried to shut it out the stronger it came back.
Walter, did you murder your father?
VI
Thrust and Parry
Winni Moon had been weeping. She paused at the door in an attitude of pure despair, a black handkerchief to her eyes. Fast work, thought Mr. Ellery Queen admiringly; in mourning already!
It was Mr. Queen’s habit to observe what generally escaped other people; and so he now detached a metamorphosis in Attorney Anatole Ruhig. Mr. Ruhig, who had been taking everything in with admirably restrained impersonality, suddenly with Miss Moon’s tragic entrance became excited. He ran over to her and held her hand, whispering a sympathetic word — to her quickly suppressed astonishment, Mr. Queen also noticed; he ran back and pulled up a chair and took her shoulders — he had to reach up for them — and steered her gallantly to the chair, like an orthodox Chinese son. Then he took up his stand behind her, the picture of a man who means to defend beauty from contumely and calumny with his last breath.