The doctor fondled Eva’s tumbled hair. He saw on her writing-table the diamond ring, lying on a sealed envelope.
He left a vague message for Inspector Queen, should he call, with Venetia, and took the elevator down to the lobby. The three men did not shake hands, did not speak. Terry had a taxicab waiting and they all got in, the driver saying: “Was that Penn Station?”
They missed the eight o”clock by ten minutes and had to wait another fifty for the next train. They dawdled away the interval by having breakfast in the terminal restaurant. There was no conversation. The doctor ate stolidly, without looking up from his plate.
On the train Dr. MacClure sat looking out the window. Ellery leaned back beside him and closed his eyes. And Terry Ring, in front of them, divided his time between three morning newspapers and the smoking car behind.
At ten forty-five, as the train pulled out of the North Philadelphia station, Terry Ring reached for his hat and said: “Come on.” The doctor rose, Ellery opened his eyes, and they went single-file to the platform. At the West Philadelphia station they disembarked and made for the Broad Street shuttle, which was waiting. But as they were about to enter Ellery stopped.
“Where has she been staying, Terry?”
Terry said reluctantly: “West Philly.”
Dr. MacClure’s lids came down. “You knew!”
“Sure, Doc. I knew all the time,” said Terry in a low voice. “But what the hell? What could I do?”
After that, Dr. MacClure kept glancing at the brown man — while they went down into the street, while they got into a taxicab, while Terry gave the driver an address.
“Why go there first?” demanded Terry, leaning back.
“There’s plenty of time,” muttered Ellery.
The cab pulled up before a black-red brick house in a narrow, meandering, dilapidated street. A sign outside said: Rooms. They got out and, as Dr. MacClure stared hungrily up at the cheaply curtained windows, Ellery said to the chauffeur: “Wait.” They then mounted the high, dowdy stoop.
An old woman with wispy gray hair and a disagreeable expression opened the door. “I declare respectable people haven’t any rights any more! Well, come in and get over with it.”
Panting, she led them upstairs to a tan-varnished door very like four others on the floor. She opened it with a long steel key and stood back, hands on her drooping hips. “They told me,” she said venomously, “to keep it just the way it was — why, I don’t know. There it is. I lost a good chance to rent it yesterday, too!”
It was a dingy, dirty chamber with a bed whose spring sagged in the middle and a dresser with one leg broken, so that the thing leaned forward tiredly. The bed was unmade, its blankets tumbled about. A pair of black pumps lay on the floor, one of them with a grotesquely built-up heel and sole; there was a gray woollen dress over the bony rocking-chair, a pair of silk stockings, a slip.
Dr. MacClure went to the dresser and fingered a bottle of ink and a pen which lay there; then he turned around and looked at the bed, at the rocker, at the shoes, at the gilt-bracketed gas-jet over the bed, at the torn streaked blind on the window.
“The detective just stepped out for a minute,” said the old woman less truculently, struck by the silence. “If you want to wait—”
“I think not,” said Ellery abruptly. “Come, Doctor. We can’t learn anything here.”
He had to take the doctor’s arm and lead him like a blind man.
The taxicab took them to Police Headquarters and, after a half-hour of annoying and fruitless inquiry, they finally found the official Ellery was seeking.
“We want to see Esther Leith MacClure,” said Ellery.
“Who are you?” The official, a broad-nosed individual with blackening teeth, inspected them suspiciously in turn.
Ellery handed him a card.
“One of you Sergeant Velie of the New York police?”
“No, but it’s perfectly all right. I’m Queen’s son—”
“I don’t care if you’re Queen himself! I got my orders not to give any information to anyone but this Velie. He’s coming down with a man from the Missing Persons Bureau.”
“I know, but we’ve come from New York just to find out—”
“No information,” said the broad-nosed man shortly. “I got my orders.”
“Look,” said Terry. “I know Jimmie O”Dell down here. I’ll look him up, Queen, and we’ll find out—”
”Say, I remember you,” said the man, starting. “You’re the private dick from New York. Well, it won’t do you any good, see? O”Dell’s got his orders, too.”
Dr. MacClure said stiffly: “For God’s sake, let’s get out of here. This haggling over—”
“But surely we can see her,” protested Ellery. “This is a case of identification. This man is Dr. John MacClure, of New York. He’s the only one who can make a positive identification.”
The man scratched his head. “Well, I guess you can see her, all right. They didn’t say anything about that.”
He took up his pen and scratched out a pass to the Philadelphia city morgue.
They stood around the stone slab in the mortuary, silent. The attendant lounged by indifferently. Dr. MacClure, that man of death, did not seem affected by the sight of death. Ellery could see that the swollen, bluish features, the rigid neck muscles, the distended nostrils were invisible to the big man. It was the regularity of feature he was seeing, the long blonde lashes, the still-beautiful hair, the curve of cheek, the tiny ears. He looked and looked, with a marvelling expression on his gaunt face, as if a miracle had happened and he was witnessing a resurrection.
“Doctor,” said Ellery gently. “Is that Esther MacClure?”
“Yes. Yes. That’s my darling.”
Terry turned aside, and Ellery coughed. The big man had said the last words in a murmur that Ellery knew he did not realize was audible. It was disturbing to Ellery’s sense of decorum. Not indecent, exactly, but too — well, naked. He realized suddenly that he had never really seen the man before.
He caught Terry’s embarrassed eye and gestured with his head towards the distant door.
To Ellery’s amazement, when they emerged from the iron gates into the lower-level waiting-room at the Pennsylvania Station, there was Eva sitting on a bench and staring at the clock, which stood at two. From the fact that she was not waiting at the gate Ellery knew that she was not seeing the clock at all. They had to go up to her and shake her.
“Oh, dear,” she said, and sat there with folded hands.
Dr. MacClure kissed her, sat down beside her, took one of her black-gloved hands. Neither of the younger men said anything; but Terry winced and lit a cigaret. She was dressed in black — a black suit, a black hat, black gloves.
She knew.
“Inspector Queen told me,” she said simply. The area about her eyes, although powdered, was puffy.
“She’s dead, Eva,” said the doctor. “Dead.”
“I know, daddy. You poor, poor thing.”
Ellery strolled over to the nearby news-stand and said to a spruce little gray old man: “What’s the idea?”
“You didn’t think,” said Inspector Queen calmly, “that you were going to get away with anything? I’ve had the MacClure girl and Terry trailed since Monday. I knew you were going to Philly this morning before you even got on the train.”
Ellery flushed. “We didn’t find out anything, if that’s any balm to your dignity.”
“I knew that, too. Come over here.”
Ellery followed his father in a helpless, angry mood. He disliked mysteries. He had always disliked mysteries; they annoyed his sense of intellectual balance. That was why he had always been so interested in the solution of crimes... There were too many mysteries now altogether. Instead of simplifying, everything had massed up. Little things were clear: That Dr. MacClure had expected to find Esther Leith MacClure alive and that a last secret hope had died in him with the news of her death. And that Terry Ring had expected nothing but what they had found — that Esther Leith MacClure had died by her own hand. He had known of her suicide all along. And Ellery could even invent a reason for Terry’s long silence. But that was not enough. Not enough...