Goossens shook himself. “Do you believe this nonsense, Inspector Queen? Or you, Mr. Sampson? I hope you both realize what a beautiful suit for slander you’re setting up!”
“Not to mention,” drawled Mr. Queen, “one for false arrest. Oh, quite beautiful—”
There was an altercation in the corridor. Sergeant Velie hurried to the door and opened it.
“Oh, there you are!” said Beau Rummell cheerfully. “Velie, tell this floogie I’m one of the best people.”
“Come in, Beau, come in!” called Mr. Queen. “You couldn’t have timed your entrance more dramatically.”
Beau ran in and stopped short when he saw Goossens, on his feet and pale with anger, in the center of the room. “Oh,” he said. “The third act, hey? Well, here’s curtains!”
And, with a yearning glance towards Kerrie, Beau drew Ellery aside, handing him a large manila envelope. Ellery quickly extracted from the envelope what looked like a photostat, while Beau whispered in his ear for some time. And as Mr. Queen both looked and listened, an expression of beatitude overspread his lean countenance.
He advanced towards Goossens, waving the photostat.
Goossens frowned. “It’s all very dramatic, as you say, but is it legal?” He laughed shortly. “Don’t forget, Mr. Queen, I’m a lawyer. If you’re foolish enough to take this before a court, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born — any of you! Your so-called evidence can be blown to bits — teeth-marks. Pen and pencil. An old pipe... Why, no jury in the world would swallow that sort of stuff!”
“Possibly not,” murmured Mr. Queen, “but we’re now in possession of a third item of evidence that a jury will swallow.
“So far I’ve shown that you own the pencil found on the scene of the crime — proving opportunity; and that you could have tipped off the police about the faked marriage — your second error, by the way. Now I’ll prove you had motive — that you, and you alone, fulfill the third requirement of Ann Bloomer’s murderer!
“This third proof will implicate you directly, Mr. Goossens. It will indicate that you were Ann Bloomer’s silent partner. It will indicate that the plot, from the beginning, was your brain-child — the plot to palm off an impostor as Margo Cole. In fact, I think I know when you conceived and executed that part of the plot, Mr. Goossens!”
“Indeed?” sneered the lawyer.
“You got your first flash of inspiration when De Carlos, pretending to be Cole, delivered Cole’s sealed will. You opened that will, Goossens, and you had a reason for opening it — a reason that will be clear to these people when I reveal the nature of my last proof.
“You opened the will, digested its conditions, and saw your opportunity. You left very suddenly on what purported to be a ‘business trip’ — and where did you go? To Europe, Goossens! Your own secretary gave me that information when I telephoned your office a few days after De Carlos’s visit as Cole... in fact, I remember it especially well because just as I set down the telephone my appendix burst. A pathological commemoration of an important event, Goossens! The only trouble was that I didn’t appreciate its significance at the time.
“And why did you go to Europe suddenly? Because you knew that Margo Cole had lived in France. Because you knew so much about Margo Cole’s history that it was evident to your quick, clever, and harried intelligence that an impostor would have to come from France, too. Somehow during that business trip you ran across Ann Bloomer, exactly the type of woman your plan required. And she agreed to go in with you.”
Goossens bit his lip. His cheeks were chalky now.
“You had the proofs of Margo Cole’s identity in your possession. You didn’t give them to the Bloomer woman in France. You probably coached her in Margo Cole’s history then, but you held back the proofs until the last moment — fearing, very justly, a possible doublecross. You handed Ann Bloomer those proofs as she was leaving the Normandie in Quarantine! For it was you, and you alone, brief-case in hand, who boarded the Normandie ostensibly to greet ‘Margo Cole’ and escort her to the cutter in which the rest of us were waiting. Those proofs of Margo Cole’s identity were in YOUR brief-case when you boarded the Normandie. But they were in Ann Bloomer’s bag when you escorted her to the cutter a few minutes later.
“But Ann Bloomer doublecrossed you after all. Entrenched here as Margo Cole, she backed out of her bargain with you. Also, she had probably investigated you undercover, in her canny way, and discovered that you were in a stew of trouble, Mr. Goossens — oh, a veritable salmagundi! You’ve been quite a rounder in your time — you live with your azure-blooded wife for polite reasons only; your real life is replete with women, champagne, gambling parlors, and the like. Your father left you a respectable practise in the administration of estates, but you went through his money quickly... and then you began to race through the moneys entrusted to your stewardship as trustee of estates.
“And so now you had started a vicious circle — constantly stealing from one estate to cover a shortage in another, and you had reached a point where you could conceal your peculations no longer without fresh sources of funds. You were desperate, and that was your motive for leaping at the chance to make a fortune quickly when fate dropped the Cole estate into your lap.
“Somehow Ann Bloomer, I believe, found all this out, and knew she had a powerful weapon against you. One word from her to arouse suspicion that you were fraudulently administering the estate in your trusteeship, and you were ruined. That was the weapon she held over you as she wriggled out of her pact to split the Margo Cole income with you.
“You were probably clever enough not to show your rage. You saw another way: to remove the menace you yourself, a modern Frankenstein, had created — this female monster — and at the same time — your third and last and most important motive — to gain absolute control over the Cole millions!
“Because it was in line with your new goal, you even fell in with Ann’s pleasant little scheme to murder Kerrie. She may have forced you to become her accomplice, using her threat of exposure as a lever; I don’t know; it would be the logical thing for her to do, because as an accomplice you wouldn’t be able to expose her as a murderess.
“At any rate, when the attacks failed, and Ann visited this hotel-room to taunt Kerrie, you shot the woman dead. By doing this you accomplished at one swoop a number of purposes: to revenge yourself on her, to prevent her from revealing your identity as her partner, to be rid of her permanently, to frame Kerrie Shawn for the murder and be rid of her; and the ultimate goal of all — to be free then to administer the Cole estate for charity, since the will provided that if the heirs died, you were still to administer the estate for charitable purposes! In that capacity, you would have a peculative field-day lasting years. And you reasoned — accurately, I think — that you could easily persuade Mr. Edmund De Carlos, your co-trustee, to swing in with you.
“While I may be slightly off in some of the details, I fancy I’ve roughly covered the subject, Goossens?”
Goossens stammered: “You... you talked about a proof of motive.” Then he got a grip on his nerves and deliberately smiled. “And I’ve listened and heard nothing but the ravings of a fantastic imagination. Where’s this wonderful proof of yours?”
“Admirable, Goossens, admirable,” applauded Mr. Queen. “You could have been a great trial lawyer; quite the dramatic flair. Do you deny,” he snapped, “that you put Ann Bloomer up to posing as Margo Cole?”