“What will have to come out?”
Dane rose. “I’ll tell you, Dad. But first I’ve got to make a phone call.”
Automatically he went to his old room, sat down at his old desk. For a moment he buried his face in his hands. Then he got a grip on himself and dialed a number.
“Judy?”
“Dane.” She sounded remote.
“Judy, I can tell you now what I wasn’t able to tell you before.” The words came tumbling out. “About what’s been worrying me — making me act toward you the way I... Please. Would you — can you — meet me right away in Ellery Queen’s room at the hospital?”
Judy said uncertainly, “All right.” She hung up.
“Dane,” Ashton McKell said from the doorway; Lutetia was peering anxiously from behind him. “You said you’d tell me.”
“Come with me to see Ellery Queen, Dad. Mother, not you.”
“Your mother will stay here.”
“Whatever you think best, dear.”
Left alone, Lutetia frowned out her picture window. The world outside was hurrying so. Trouble, always trouble. Ever since... But Lutetia shut her mind down very firmly. That way lay unpleasantness. There was always one’s duty, no matter how trifling, for relief. She rang for her maid. “Margaret, I shall want my needlework. Tell Helen she may begin clearing off the breakfast things.”
Ellery greeted them with ebullience. “It’s official,” he chortled. “I’ll be out of this Bastille in a few days.” Then he said, in a different tone, “What’s up now?”
Dane handed him the kraft envelope. He peered in. Inside lay a smaller envelope, which he took out; pasted to the smaller envelope was a photograph of three written words: For the Police. Inside the smaller envelope, as in a Chinese puzzle box, there was an envelope smaller still, and on it was pasted a photo of a complete handwritten sentence: To be opened only in the event I die of unnatural causes. And inside the innermost envelope he found the photograph of a holograph statement about three-quarters of an ordinary page long.
Ellery’s head shot up.
“Sheila Grey,” he said sharply. “Is this her handwriting?”
Dane nodded bitterly. Ashton said, “I’ve examined it, compared it with, well, some letters I have. It’s her handwriting without a doubt.” There was nothing in his expression at all, nothing. Only his voice betrayed him.
Ellery glanced over the letter. Every jot of the photographed handscript stood out starkly.
“Miss Walsh.” He held the photo out to her. “Read this aloud. I want to hear it in a woman’s voice.”
“Mr. Queen.”
“Please.”
Judy took it from him as if it were smeared with filth. She began to read; twice she had to pause to swallow.
“‘Dane McKell tonight asked if he could come up to my apartment for a nightcap,’” Judy read. “‘I told him I had work to do, but he insisted. In the apartment he refused to leave and nothing I could say made him do so. I lost my temper and slapped him. He then tried to...’”
Here Judy’s voice faltered altogether. Ellery said harshly, “Go on, please.”
“‘He then tried to strangle me,’” Judy whispered. “‘This is not hysteria on my part — he actually tried to strangle me. He took my throat... in his hands and... squeezed and seemed to be out of his mind with an... with an insane rage.’ I can’t, Mr. Queen, I just can’t go on!”
Ellery read the rest of it himself, rapidly. “‘As he choked me he screamed that he was going to kill me and he called me many obscene names. Then he dropped me to the floor and ran out of the apartment. In another minute I would have been dead of strangulation. I am convinced that he is a dangerous person and I repeat his name, Dane McKell. He definitely tried to kill me. Signed, Sheila Grey.’”
“And I thought the McKell tribe was out of the woods,” Dane said hollowly. He laughed.
No one laughed with him. Judy was blinking back tears as she stared out the hospital window; Ashton was frowning at Ellery, but not as if he could see him. Ellery set the letter down.
“First,” he said. “Assuming Sheila Grey to have written the original of this letter — Dane, is what she wrote true?”
Dane stared at his hands. “When I was a kid at school there was a boy named Philbrick, a stupid kid, I don’t even recall any more what he looked like, only that his nose was always running. He said to me, ‘If your father’s name is Ashton, yours ought to be Ashcan.’ Just silly kid talk, nonsense. But he kept at it. ‘Ashcan.’ Every time he saw me, ‘Ashcan.’ He knew I hated it. One night we were getting ready to go to bed. As he’d said a hundred times before, he jeered, ‘Ashcan, you left your towel in the shower.’ I went wild. Jumped him, knocked him down, got my hands around his throat, began to throttle him. I’d certainly have succeeded if some of the other boys hadn’t pulled me off. You remember, Dad. I was almost kicked out.
“Yes, it’s all true, Mr. Queen, what Sheila wrote,” Dane muttered. “If sanity hadn’t returned in time...”
“Dane’s always had a terrible temper, Mr. Queen,” Ashton said. “We had considerable trouble about that when he was a boy.” He stopped as if to digest the past, made a little gesture of bewilderment. “I thought that was all over, son.”
“So did I, God damn it! Well, it isn’t.”
“I surely thought you’d conquered it. I surely thought so.”
Ellery was staring at the photographic paper. “I wonder just when that night she wrote this.”
“It must have been after I left,” Ashton said. “You remember I got there just a shade before ten o’clock, and there was no indication that she’d been writing. She was crying.”
“So she wrote it in the fifteen minutes or so between your leaving,” Ellery mused, “and her killer’s arrival.” He was poking about in the small envelope. “What’s this?”
“Read it,” growled Dane, “and weep.”
Ellery took from it a note written in anonymous block capital lettering, with an ordinary pencil, on a ragged-edged sheet apparently torn out of a cheap memorandum book.
The note read:
MR. DANE MCKELL. SHEILA GREY’S LETTER WON’T BE SENT TO POLICE IF. MAKE UP PLAIN PACKAGE 100 $20 BILLS NOT MARKED AND MAIL TO MR. I.M. ECKS CARE GENERAL DELIVERY MAIN POST OFFICE CITY. IMMEDIATE. THEN PACK OF $1000 IN $20 BILLS, NOT MARKED, TO BE SENT 15TH OF EVERY MONTH WITHOUT FAIL SAME ADDRESS. OR POLICE WILL BE INFORMED. I MEAN THIS.
“Mr. I. M. Ecks. A comedian,” Ellery commented. “I must say I don’t blame you for not finding him funny.”
“Blackmail.” Dane let out the same bitter laugh. “What do I do?”
“What I did,” his father said quietly.
“What?” Dane said.
“You paid someone blackmail, too, Mr. McKell?” Ellery turned quickly back from the etched trees he had been studying through his window.
“I got a similar letter — I’m sure the same person sent it, from the kind of note it is, the wording, the paper and so on — shortly after, well, I began visiting Miss Grey.” Ashton McKell swallowed. “It was foolish of me, I know. But I just couldn’t face a scandal. So I paid — $2,000 down, $1,000 a month. It was worth that to me to keep my name and family from being dragged through the newspapers.”
“But you kept seeing her,” Dane said slowly.
“Sheila was important to me in a way which I doubt I could make anyone understand.” His father spoke with difficulty. “Anyway, I kept sending this dirty hound, whoever he is, the thousand a month until I was arrested. Naturally, after that he had no further hold over me, and I stopped paying him. I haven’t heard a word about it since.”
“Do you have any of the notes you received?”