Beau was preoccupied when he left the two executors. At the hospital he told Ellery, who was in a fever of impatience, exactly what had happened, and all about De Carlos.
“He looks like a pirate. Just off the Spanish Main, too!”
“Yes, yes. But how about the case?”
“Oh, the case.” Beau stared out the window. “That mysterious case we were all hopped up about. Well, prepare for a shock. Either old man Cole was as nutty as a chocolate bar, or we’re up against a real baffler.”
“What’s the assignment, you aggravating sea-lawyer?”
“Merely to find a couple of missing heirs!”
“Oh, no,” groaned Ellery. “That’s too much. It can’t be. How about the will itself? Did you see it?”
“Yes, and it has its screwy angles.” Beau explained Cole’s will to Ellery.
“But how is it that Cole didn’t know where his heirs were?” demanded Ellery when Beau had finished.
Beau shrugged. Cadmus Cole’s unfortunate marital experience in Windsor at the turn of the century had embittered him against the whole institution of marriage. He had had a younger brother, Huntley, whom he had sent to New York to study art. In 1906, in New York, Huntley Cole secretly married his model, a woman named Nadine Malloy. In 1907 a child, Margo, was born; and Cadmus, for the first time learning of his younger brother’s marriage, became enraged at what he considered Huntley’s ingratitude.
Cadmus stopped sending Huntley money and swore he should never speak to his brother again. Huntley took his wife and infant daughter to Paris, where he painted futilely for two years, living in poverty, his only means of support his wife’s meager earnings as a model.
“This Huntley,” Beau explained, “was too proud to write to his rich brother. But his wife wasn’t, because her brat was starving, and so she wrote to Cadmus pleading for help. Cadmus replied — that’s how we know about the Parisian episode of the Huntley branch — saying that his brother had made his bed, and so on — the usual sanctimonious tripe.
“Anyway, Cadmus turned his sister-in-law down cold. Huntley found out about it, apparently, because right after Cadmus’s letter arrived he committed suicide. There’s absolutely no record of what happened to Nadine and little Margo. So one of our jobs is to pick up that thirty-year-old trail.”
“That makes Margo Cole one heiress — if she’s found and if she qualifies under the will. How about the other?”
“Well, Cadmus and Huntley had a younger sister, Monica. Reading between the lines it seems that, hearing about Huntley’s suicide in Paris, Monica blamed Cadmus for it and just upped and quit her sourpuss brother cold. Walked out on Cadmus and the Windsor ancestral mansion and disappeared. That was not long after Huntley’s death in 1909.
“We know sketchily what happened to her, too, after leaving Vermont. She had a lot of tough luck supporting herself until 1911, when she met a man named Shawn, an accountant or something, in Chicago. Shawn married her. A daughter, Kerrie, was born to Monica in 1918 — just about the time her husband died of spinal meningitis in a Chicago hospital.
“Monica was left without a cent. Desperate, she wrote to her brother Cadmus, explaining what had happened and asking for help, just as Huntley’s wife had written nine years before. Well, Monica received practically the same answer: she’d put herself outside the reservation by marrying, and she could go take a flying jump at the moon. That’s the last record Cadmus had of his sister’s — and little Kerrie’s — whereabouts. Monica’s letter was postmarked Chicago, September eighth, 1918.”
“Nothing for Monica, eh?” mused Mr. Queen.
“Not a jit. Of course, she may be dead. Cole left the bulk of his estate, as I said, to his two nieces, Margo Cole and Kerrie Shawn... when, as, and if.”
“How about insanity?” asked Mr. Queen hopefully.
“No dice. Goossens has already consulted psychiatrists. From the picture, they agree Cole was medically sane. Legally, of course, he had a right to put any cockeyed conditions he pleased on the passing of his estate. De Carlos, who’s in the best position to know, pooh-poohs the whole idea, of course. He ought to, since Cole’s left him a million bucks in cash and a home for life if he wants it in the Tarrytown mansion!”
“Did you question De Carlos about the circumstances of Cole’s death?”
Beau nodded. “But he’s a cool customer, and he stuck to his yarn. I bawled him out for not holding on to Captain Angus and the radio operator when he scattered the crew of the yacht all over creation.”
“What’s the point?”
“The witnesses who attested the validity of Cole’s signature at the bottom of the will were Angus, the radio operator, and De Carlos.”
“What of that?”
“Before a will may be probated, two of the subscribing witnesses must be produced and examined, if they’re within the State and are competent and able to testify. In the absence of any witness, the Surrogate at his discretion may dispense with his testimony and admit the will to probate on the testimony of the other. So that in the absence of Captain Angus and the radio operator, we’ll have to rely completely on the testimony of De Carlos.”
Mr. Queen frowned. “I don’t care for that.”
“Well, we’ll have a check-up, because the Surrogate undoubtedly will insist on better proof of signature than the mere word of a single witness. He’ll want proof of the testator’s handwriting, and of Angus’s, and so on. There must be hundreds of Cole’s autographs extant, and they’ll all be examined.”
“And I have to go to the mountains!” groaned Mr. Queen. “Blast my vermiform appendix!”
Beau armed two operatives with the names and descriptions of Captain Angus and the Argonaut’s crew and sent them down to Santiago de Cuba to begin a discreet inquiry. He also set a reliable French agency on the trail of Nadine and Margo Cole, advertised extensively in the French and American papers, and then set off on the Kerrie Shawn trail.
Wrathfully, Mr. Queen departed for the Adirondacks. From this Elba he followed the fortunes of Mr. Edmund De Carlos through the New York gossip columnists and society tattlers. De Carlos, as co-executor of the Cole estate and co-trustee-to-be, had granted permission to himself, as beneficiary, to take up residence at the Tarrytown mansion even before probate of the will.
The house and grounds had been under the supervision of a caretaker until the man died early in 1937. Apparently Cole had never quite got round to hiring another, for the place had been left boarded up and untended. Now De Carlos moved in, hired decorators and servants, and established himself in lone grandeur as lord of the manor.
He promptly set off on a fierce hunt for pleasure. The man’s bearded face, menacing teeth, and bushy hair began to appear in newspaper photographs with regularity. Overnight he became New York’s premier bon vivant, leading benefactor of various lonely ladies of the chorus, lavish spender and frequenter of notorious night clubs and gambling rooms.
“If he keeps up this pace,” thought Mr. Queen grimly, “that million-dollar legacy will collapse under the weight of its own mortgages!”
Edmund De Carlos was the son of a Brazilian father and an English mother, born in the Brazilian interior on a coffee plantation in the year 1889. That made him fifty years old, ruminated Mr. Queen from his lofty exile; in his pictures the pirate seemed younger.
Mr. Queen decided suddenly that Mr. De Carlos would bear watching.
Meanwhile, Beau was scampering along a cold spoor.
Beginning with a clue twenty-one years old — the knowledge that Monica Cole Shawn’s husband had died in a Chicago hospital — Beau followed a trail that led to a Chicago tenement, then to a secretarial school, where, apparently, the young widow had enrolled to learn a practical means of sustaining her life and her daughter’s when Cadmus Cole refused financial assistance.