“Where is the baggage check, Mr. McKell?”
“Probably still in the suit I wore the night I got home.”
Dane said slowly, “Then how is it the police didn’t find it when they searched your things?”
“Never mind that now, Dane,” Ellery said briskly. “Get on this phone and call your mother. Have her look for it at once.”
It was the senior maid, old Margaret, who answered.
“But I can’t call Mrs. McKell,” Margaret protested. “Herself says I’m not to disturb her for no reason, Mr. Dane, not a single one.” It seemed that his mother had locked the door in the corridor leading to her separate apartment — bedroom, bath, sitting room — with the strictest instructions. Meals were to be left on a wagon at the door. She would not see anyone, and she would not answer the telephone.
“Maggie, listen to me. Did you find anything in my father’s rooms the morning we got the news about Miss Grey? Or afterward? Did you find...?”
He was about to say “a tan suit,” but old Margaret interrupted him. “The phone, Mr. Dane,” came her Irish whisper. “Maybe it’s tapped.” Dane was dumfounded. The possibility had not occurred to him. Could it be that Margaret knew about the suit, had found the baggage check?
To his further surprise, Margaret uttered three more words and hung up on him. He put the receiver down foolishly.
“Mother won’t talk on the phone and Margaret’s afraid it may be tapped. But I think she knows. She said to me, ‘Go to Bridey,’ and hung up. Dad, who the deuce is Bridey?”
“It’s her younger sister, Bridget Donnelly. Her husband used to work for me.”
“But I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to understand, Dane,” said Judy. “You go and do as old Maggie says. Find Bridey.”
“Miss Walsh is right,” said Ellery. “And do it fast, Dane. I don’t know how long I can bluff that pair out there into letting me keep custody of your father.”
Ramon drove him over to Chelsea in the Bentley. Mrs. Donnelly lived in a crumble-edged brownstone, in a musty but spotless apartment. She was a stouter version of her sister Margaret. “You say you’ll be Mister Dane McKell?” she demanded as she showed him into a parlor decorated with litho-chromes of St. Lawrence O’Toole and the Sacred Heart. “And how would I be knowing that?”
It had not occurred to him that he would require identification. “Look, Mrs. Donnelly, I’m in an awful hurry.” He explained his mission.
But Bridey Donnelly was not to be rushed.
“You called up me sister Margaret,” she said, “and you asked her about something important for your father, may the saints deliver him from harm; ain’t I been praying for him night and day? — and Maggie said, ‘Go to Bridey,’ and you think that means she give it to me. Well, and what might it be you think she give to me, Mr. Dane McKell-Maybe-You-Are-and-Maybe-You-Ain’t?”
Her concern over his father was plainly not going to get in the way of her Irish caution. “Tan suit?” Dane said.
She shook her head. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Claim check? Baggage? Grand Central?”
“Still don’t. Keep talking.”
By this time he could have throttled her. “A black bag, then!”
The words were no sooner out of his mouth than she waddled off, beckoning him to follow. Down past the dark chain of bedrooms in the railroad flat she plodded, and stopped in the last but one, where she switched on the light. The little bedroom mirror was still decorated with desiccated fronds from Palm Sunday seven months before.
“You’re younger than me, and a lot skinnier,” Bridget Donnelly said. “You get it. ’Tis under the bed.”
The only thing he could find under the bed was an ancient horsehair trunk with an Ould Sod look. He dragged it out. “But it’s locked.”
She rapped him on the forehead with her knuckles as he turned his head. “You look the other way a minute now,” directed Mrs. Donnelly, “for all you’re a boy and I’m an old widow woman.” Petticoats rustled. “Here.” She thrust a trunk key, fastened to a safety pin, over his shoulder. He got the trunk open, flung back the lid. “Leave me do it,” the widow said, taking out a Douay Bible that must have weighed twenty pounds. Under the Bible lay a tightly packed wad of clothing. And under the clothing there was a black leather bag.
He got to his feet, stammering his thanks.
“And you can save your thanks, young man. We know whose bread and salt we’ve et these thirty years, Maggie and me and me dead Tom. And now go on about your business, and let me hear over the radio that your blessed father’s okay.”
Dane kissed her. She boxed his ear, grinning. It rang halfway back to the hospital.
He had been gone less than forty minutes. The detectives in the corridor glanced at the bag he was carrying, but neither of them said anything, and he went into Ellery’s room with a sigh of relief.
Ellery’s silvery eyes lighted up at sight of the bag. “Good for you, Dane! All right, Mr. McKell.”
Dane’s father opened the bag and quickly set its contents on Ellery’s dresser. He began to apply grease paint and spirit gum to his face.
“What the devil?”
Ellery chuckled at Dane’s cry. He glanced at Judy, but that young lady was busy with a small camera, adjusting a flash bulb.
“Let me sum it up for you, Dane,” said Ellery. “You, Judy and the police have been searching for the wrong man. Of course no one in any of those bars recognized Ashton McKell. He wasn’t Ashton McKell that night. He was Dr. Stone.”
Ashton began to pluck at a bundle of gray fibers. He arranged them on his chin in Vandyke fashion, working with the sureness of long practice.
“What a chump I’ve been,” Dane groaned. “That’s what comes of trying to play detective. Dad, where did you make the change that night?”
“In one of the men’s rooms at the airport when I got off the plane,” replied his father. “Then after I left Sheila’s and wandered off, eventually winding up at Grand Central, I removed the make-up in the Grand Central men’s room, although I didn’t bother to change out of the tan suit. Then I checked the black bag and went home. It’s all come back. Mr. Queen’s acted as a sort of oxygen tent. The fresh air’s cleared the cobwebs out of my head.”
When he turned from the mirror Ashton McKell was no longer Ashton McKell but gray-haired, gray-bearded Dr. Stone. It was remarkable how the false hair and the really skillful touches he had applied to his eyes and face transformed his appearance.
Judy sat him down and circled him with her camera, searching for the best angle. The bulb flashed, Judy said, “One or two more, just to be sure,” she took a second shot, then a profile, and then said, “Come back, Mr. McKell — I feel funny looking at you,” and Ashton McKell even laughed as he removed the false hair and make-up and became himself again. But then they heard him mutter, “How did I ever get mixed up in this foolishness?”
“The classic question, Mr. McKell,” Ellery remarked dryly. “‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’ and so on. Are we ready? Call them in, Dane.”
When the detectives had departed with their prisoner, Ellery waved cheerfully. “Now, you two. The pubs await you. Start crawling. Meanwhile, I’ll phone Bob O’Brien and see if I can get him to talk Judge Suarez and the D.A. into agreeing to a forty-eight-hour recess — even a twenty-four-hour stay may do it. I think we can get it. O’Brien can do more things with his tongue than the head chef at the Waldorf.”
When they were gone, Ellery leaned over and rang for the nurse. He seemed pleased with himself.