“If you can save Eva, go to it. I’ll back you to the limit.”
Ellery nodded, went over to his father, and said: “You’re determined to arrest this girl for the murder of Karen Leith?”
“And neither you nor all the devils in hell,” snapped the Inspector, “are going to stop me!”
“I think,” murmured Ellery, “we’ll manage without help from his satanic majesty. Well, you can spare Miss MacClure and yourself a lot of grief by tearing up that warrant.”
“She’ll defend herself in court!”
“You were saved once before from making a mistake. Don’t make another, dad.”
Inspector Queen rasped his jaw, irritated beyond measure. “She didn’t kill Karen Leith, eh? Despite all the evidence?”
“She didn’t kill Karen Leith.”
“I suppose,” said the Inspector derisively, “you know who did!”
And Ellery said: “Yes.”
Part Five
22
“It’s premature,” said Ellery, “but your insistence on immediate action forces my hand. Logically this case has only one proper solution. In view of your haste, we’ll have to resort to intellectual proof and defer the legal proof for a while.”
“If you know the right answer to this jigsaw,” said Terry Ring grimly, “I’ll hang up my license and go back to baseball. Eva, sit down here with me. This bird has me groggy.”
The Inspector eyed Sergeant Velie and made a little futile signal. Then he, too, sat down; and Sergeant Velie came in to lean against the foyer jamb and listen.
“I won’t deny it,” began Ellery, lighting another cigaret, “that I’ve harbored my full quota of fantastic theories. This has been the damnedest case. A number of grainy little facts, interesting, puzzling, and apparently incompatible. Studding a central situation that, on the face of it, is frankly impossible.”
They sat very still.
“Here’s a case in which a room has two exits — the door to the attic and the door to the sitting-room. There is no possible exit through the iron-barred windows, and the room is structurally without hidden passages. Yet the attic door after the crime was found bolted from inside the room itself, making it impossible for anyone to have left by that route; and the other door led to the sitting-room, where during the entire period of the crime Miss MacClure sat. And Miss MacClure has maintained stubbornly that no one passed through that sitting-room. Impossible situation, as I say. Yet Karen Leith was alive when Miss MacClure seated herself there, and was dead by violence when Miss MacClure burst into the bedroom.”
Ellery made a face. “There were so many oblique theories possible. One was that the attic door wasn’t bolted at all, and that Terry Ring only pretended it was. I ragged him about that yesterday. But it really didn’t make sense; and besides Kinumé did testify that the wood was warped and the bolt stuck. Another was, despite all your insistence, Eva, that someone did pass through that sitting-room while you occupied it.”
“But that can’t be,” cried Eva. “I tell you no one did. I know I didn’t fall asleep!”
“But suppose,” murmured Ellery, “you were hypnotized?”
He paused a moment, enjoying their stupefaction. Then he laughed and said: “Don’t blame me for thinking of hypnosis. There had to be some rational explanation if you were innocent, Eva. Hypnosis explains the phenomenon. The only trouble with the theory is that it’s far-fetched, absolutely incapable of proof, and — quite untrue.”
Dr. MacClure sank back, sighing with relief. I’m glad that’s not your explanation.”
Ellery squinted at his cigaret. “For it struck me, if I proceeded on the assumption that Eva didn’t kill her aunt, that there was one sane, reasonable, and provocative theory that explained everything, that made it unnecessary to resort to fantasy, that was really so simple it’s surprising no one thought of it before.
“Look at the facts. Eva MacClure is the only one who could have murdered Karen Leith — the only physical possibility. That’s what the facts seem to say. But suppose — let’s just suppose — that Eva MacClure didn’t murder Karen Leith. Is it still true that she’s the only physical possibility — is it still true if she’s innocent the crime couldn’t have happened? No. There is one other person who could have stabbed Karen Leith and caused her death.”
They stared at him. Then Terry Ring said gruffly, and with a disappointment hardly concealed: “You’re crazy.”
“Oh, come,” said Ellery. “Couldn’t Karen Leith have stabbed herself?”
An automobile horn honked impatiently in West Eighty-seventh Street. But in the Queens” living-room time stopped, arrested by pure astonishment.
Then the Inspector was on his feet, red-faced and protesting. “But that’s not murder — that’s suicide!”
“Perfectly true,” admitted Ellery.
“But the weapon,” cried the old man. “What happened to that missing half-scissors with the broken point? With the suicide weapon gone from that room, it can’t have been suicide!”
“Why must we always resent the truths we haven’t thought of ourselves? You say that the missing weapon wasn’t in that room, that therefore the crime was not suicide but murder. I say the facts point indisputably to suicide — facts all of you have overlooked. And I suggest we worry about the phenomenon of the missing weapon when we come to it.”
The Inspector sank back into his chair; and for a space he tugged at his mustache. Then he demanded in a calm voice: “What facts?”
“That’s better,” smiled Ellery. “What facts? Now we’re launched. What facts point to suicide as the answer? I say there are five — three minor, two major, with little participles of fact hanging from the last like fruit from a tree.”
Terry Ring was gaping at Ellery; he put his arm about Eva and shook his head as if he could not believe his ears. Dr. MacClure sat forward a little, listening intently.
“The minor ones are relatively weak — but only relatively. They gather strength from the major ones. Let me begin with the weak sisters.”
“First. What was the last thing, as far as we know, that Karen Leith did of her own volition before the actual events of her death? She began a letter to Morel. Who is Morel? Her lawyer and literary representative. What was the letter about? It was a demand that Morel check over her royalty moneys due to her from abroad — ‘at once, thoroughly and completely... to effect immediate payments.’ There was a definite note there, finality of demand, as if she had said: ‘Morel, the time has come to clean up my affairs.’ Foreign royalties are notoriously slow; they come in, but at their sweet time. Why this sudden insistence on immediacy? Did she need money? No, we learn she had more than enough. Why this sudden insistence,” demanded Ellery, “unless she was thinking of cleaning up her affairs — then, Monday afternoon, in her room, a few minutes before she died! Isn’t that what many suicides do just before taking their lives? It isn’t conclusive by any means, and logically it might have a simple, unaccented meaning. But... it’s a point. It’s a point that gathers strength, as I said, from the other things.”
He sighed. “The next paragraph in her letter to Morel — the paragraph she didn’t finish — we’ll never be able to evaluate beyond question, now that she’s dead. But it can’t have referred to anything but her sister Esther. Probably she intended to place the whole matter of Esther’s secret disposition, when she should be found — remember Karen died still thinking Esther was alive — in Morel’s hands. But then she crumpled the letter unfinished... as if she had changed her mind, as if she didn’t care what happened... about her money, about her sister, about secrecy, about anything. It fits. It fits with the suicide theory.”