“Isn’t any one going to congratulate me?” sighed Ellery.
Glücke glared at him and turned his back. “We’ll have to get busy on that cyanide,” he snapped.
“I’m afraid you won’t be very successful,” said Bronson, packing his kit. “It’s too common — used commercially in dozens of ways — film manufacture, cleaning fluids, God knows what else. And you can buy it at any drug store.”
“Nuts,” said the Inspector, plainly disappointed. “Well, all right, Doc, get him out of here. Let’s have your report the first thing in the morning, if you can make it.”
Ellery backed off as the detectives milled about and Dr. Polk superintended the removal of the body. He seemed worried about something.
“Oh, Dr. Polk,” he said as the coroner’s physician was about to follow Solly’s remains through the doorway. “Does the condition of the body confirm the time of death as indicated by the wrist-watch?”
“Yes. The man died of cyanide poisoning, not of stabbing, and within a very short time after the blow. From the local conditions in this room and the state of the corpse, calculating roughly, he figures to have passed out around 5.30. And the watch says 5.32, which ought to be close enough for any one... Smart work, Mr. Queen. Detective, eh?”
“Enough of one,” sighed Ellery, “to detect traces of hostility in the official atmosphere. Thanks, Doctor.” And he watched Dr. Polk and Bronson depart.
“May we go now, Inspector?” asked Val again, examining the freckle on her left ring-finger. There had been something unpleasant about Solly’s quiet contour under the morgue sheet, and there was a vast desire within her to go somewhere and consume sherry frappés.
“When I’m through with you. Here,” roared Glücke, “what are you doing now, damn it?”
Ellery had dragged a chair over to the fireplace and was engaged in standing on it while he made mysterious movements with his body. He looked, in fact, as if he meant to emulate Dracula and climb the fireplace wall.
“I’m trying,” he said in a friendly tone, stepping down, “to find the answer to three questions.”
“Listen, Queen—”
“First, why did your murderer employ that particular sword for his crime?”
“How the hell should I know? Look—”
“Why,” continued Ellery, going close to the fireplace and raising his arm to the wall above it, “why didn’t he take down this needle-bladed French dueling sword?”
“I don’t know,” barked Glücke, “and what’s more I don’t give a damn. If you’ll be kind enough—”
Ellery pointed. “See where that dustmark on the wall is — where the missing rapier hung. Now, no man could possibly have reached that rapier without standing on something. But why haul a chair over here to reach a cup-hilted Italian rapier of the seventeenth century when you have merely to stand on the floor and extend your arm and reach a nineteenth-century French dueling-sword which will do the work equally well?”
“That’s an odd note in an unpremeditated crime,” said Rhys Jardin, interested despite his preoccupation.
“Who asked you?” said the Inspector, exasperated.
“And who says it was unpremeditated?” said Ellery. “No, indeed, Mr. Jardin. Either the murderer took down the rapier and coated its tip with his molasses-and-cyanide concoction just before the crime; or else he had coated the point some time before the crime — prepared it, as it were. But in either event he had to mix the poison with the molasses before he killed Solly, which certainly rules out a crime of impulse.”
The tips of Inspector Glücke’s ears were burning by this time. “I’m not in the habit of running a forum,” he said in a strangled voice, “on a case I’m investigating. So you’ll all be good enough—”
“You smell from herring,” said Pink, who had formed a violent dislike for Glücke.
“And then,” said Ellery hastily, as if he might not be able to get it out before the catastrophe, “there’s my second question. Which is: Why did he smear the sword with poison at all?”
“Why?” shouted Glücke, throwing up his arms. “What the hell is this — Quiz Night? To make sure he died, that’s why!”
“Isn’t that a little like the man who wears not only suspenders but a belt, too?” asked Ellery earnestly. “Don’t you think you could kill a man very efficiently with merely a naked blade?”
Inspector Glücke had long since regretted his weakness in allowing the bearded young man to linger on the scene. The man was clearly one of those smart-aleck, theorizing amateurs whom Glücke had always despised. Moreover, he asked embarrassing questions before subordinates. Also, by sheer luck he might stumble on a solution and thus rob a hard-working professional of the prey, the publicity, and the departmental rewards of sensational success. All in all, a nuisance.
So the Inspector blew up. “I’m not going to have my investigation disrupted by a guy who writes detective stories!” he bellowed. “Your old man has taken it because he’s got to live with you. But you’re three thousand miles away from Centre Street, and I don’t give a hoot in hell what you think about my case!”
Ellery stiffened. “Am I to understand that you’d like me better at a distance?”
“Understand your left tonsil! Scram!”
“I never thought I’d live to see the day,” murmured Ellery, nettled but trying to preserve an Emily Postian savoir faire. “That’s Hollywood hospitality for you!”
“Mac, get this nosey lunatic out of here!”
“Desist, Mac. I’ll go quietly.” Ellery went over to the Jardins and said in a loud voice: “The man’s an idiot. And he’s quite capable of having you in the clink before you’re an hour older, Mr. Jardin.”
“Sorry you’re leaving us,” sighed Rhys. “I must say I prefer your company to his.”
“Thanks for the first kind word Hollywood has bestowed. Miss Jardin, goodbye... I’d advise both of you to talk as economically as possible. In fact, get a lawyer.”
Inspector Glücke glared at him. Ellery went sedately to the door.
“Not, however,” he added with a grimace, “Mr. Ruhig.”
“Will you get out, you pest?” roared the Inspector.
“Oh, yes, Inspector,” said Ellery. “I almost forgot to mention my third point. You remember I said there were three bothersome questions?” Mac approached grimly. “Now, now, Mac, I must warn you that I’ve just taken up ju-jitsu. The point is this, Inspector: Granting that your eccentric criminal stood on a chair to get a sword for which he had a much handier substitute, granting that he smeared the sword with poison when a good jab by a child could have dispatched Mr. Spaeth just as efficiently — granting all that, why in heaven’s name did he take the sword away with him after the crime?”
Inspector Glücke was speechless.
“There,” said Mr. Queen, waving adieu to the Jardins, “is something for that ossified organ you call your brain to wrestle with.” And he went away.
VII
The Camel That Walked Like a Man
Val could scarcely drag one foot after the other by the time they got back to the La Salle. Even the yearning for sherry frappés had dissipated. It was agony just to think.
“I’ll tuck pop in, flop onto my bed, and sleep,” she thought. “Maybe when I wake up tomorrow morning I’ll find it never really happened at all.”
After that strange Mr. Queen’s departure Inspector Glücke had cleared the study and gone to work on Rhys with a grim enthusiasm that made Val vibrant with pure loathing. Pink became rebellious at the tone of the man’s questions and was ejected by two of the larger detectives. They found him later, sitting on the sidewalk near the gate in the midst of a large section of the Los Angeles press, chewing his fingernails and growling at their pleas like a bear.